The Revenants

by Tepper, Sheri S

  ‘Well, there was still a need for trade. Food had to be transported from one place to another. Fuel had to be moved, and metals. None of the enclaves or villages were completely self-sufficient. In order that no person “offend” another person by appearing different or strange, it became the custom to wear orbansin. There’s one in the wardrobe. In a sense, an orbansa is a wardrobe, a robe that wards others away. It covers everything, head to heel. They are worn by anyone moving among enclaves or villages – traders, sailors, any travellers at all.’

  Ephraim interrupted, obviously thinking about something else. ‘Gahlism might be called a political system, Jaer, of a very ancient kind. Or a secret society of some kind, since they do not tell outsiders what it is they believe, or intend, or allow others in those so-called Temples….’

  Nathan went on doggedly. ‘There were some people who thought that Separation was a dangerous, wicked teaching. The Sisterhoods felt so, and the people in Orena. In Orena we have always had many differences, of color, of ideas, of languages. We were all alike in one way, however! We all thought Gahlism would pass. We said it couldn’t go on. For hundreds of years we said that. But, it does. Now there are “Temples of Separation” from Obnor Gahl to M‘Wandi, all the way up the coast of Dantland, into Jowr and Sorgen, in Howbin and Tharsh.’

  ‘Up much of the River Rochagor. Into the old cities of Labat Ochor and Gombator – let me see, they call them Tiles and Tanner now.’ Ephraim ticked them off on his fingers. ‘There is one here on this island, in Candor, and ships of the black robes have been seen headed toward Cholder and Folazh.’

  ‘Everywhere,’ said Jaer dispiritedly.

  ‘No. Not in the high north, yet. The Laklands may well be free of them still, and the peninsula of Methyl-Drossy. Also, they had not gone far south.’

  ‘Almost everywhere,’ amended Jaer. ‘Almost everywhere I will have to wear those robes.’

  ‘Orbansin, yes. Though an orbansa is not always protection. The more minions of Gahl there are, the more difficult it is to travel anywhere. There are “Temples” everywhere, monitoring the “Separation” to see it is correct They keep making the rules more strict, more detailed. They order certain people cast out or given to them.’ Ephraim stumbled over the words as though he had something foul in his mouth. ‘And we from Orena go on collecting languages and cultures which are disappearing. The smaller the group, the less chance it has of survival, and those who carry the Seals of Separation seem always to work toward smaller and smaller groups, taking more and more of the people away.’ There was a long, sad silence and then Nathan changed the subject abruptly.

  Jaer accepted it all with a patient puzzlement. Jaer was unique. There was no other child, so far as Jaer was concerned, in the universe. The moving flecks at the bottom of the cliff were not truly people, not creatures identifiably similar to himself/herself. Ephraim and Nathan were not like Jaer, either. They had told him that he/she was alone, but there are no degrees of aloneness. Not that Jaer said that to himself, merely that it did not seem to matter as much to Jaer as it did to the men.

  Ephraim to Nathan: ‘There’s another thing. The child is not always the same person, whichever sex he/she is. She was a little slender thing last week, with dark hair and a kind of hazy look, a way of fluttering her hands. Then yesterday the girl was stouter, did you notice? With a habit of plunking her feet down.’,

  ‘You would have thought them sisters.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Perhaps. I don’t mean they seemed unrelated. But one would think she would be at least the same person each time.’

  ‘Why would one think that?’

  ‘Because it’s reasonable. Logical.’

  ‘And what in the name of devils has reason or logic to do with it?’

  The old men did not neglect Jaer’s education. They taught him/her to swim in the pool above the falls; to sew; to shoot with a bow; to speak five languages rather well and several more a little; to read and write; to walk silently; to use an axe; to tie knots; to draw a map and read one; to count and calculate; to play the jangle; to kill game and skin it and tan the hide; to tell directions by the stars; to build a fire with nothing but wood, a knife, and a shoelace; to keep clean; and that there were no answers to some questions.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t tell me once more you don’t know,’ Jaer grumbled.

  ‘But I don’t know,’ said Nathan. ‘What’s more, probably no one knows. I wish you’d quit asking questions that have no answers.’

  ‘What are women like?’ asked Jaer impishly.

  ‘What do you mean, what are women like? I’ve shown you pictures and explained the anatomy….’

  ‘I mean, what are they like?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Or, on the sun-warmed stone in the early morning, as Ephraim smoked a pipe after breakfast: ‘Why do you live here, Ephraim? Why did you leave Orena?’

  ‘We thought it was important to record things.’

  ‘What kinds of things?’

  ‘Knowledge. Books. Languages. Whatever we can find that’s left from the Second Cycle or early Third Cycle. Maybe even something from the First Cycle, though that’s only a collector’s dream. We collect whatever we observe.’

  ‘But why do you do that?’

  ‘Because otherwise it would all be lost. The people down in the valley have lost a lot in the last twenty years. They’ve lost songs and weaving patterns. They’ve forgotten most of their history. They have forgotten how to rotate crops and use fertilizer.’

  ‘Are you going to teach them what they’ve fogotten?’

  ‘No. I’m not going to teach them anything! Go do something. Go read your history. Stop asking questions for a while.’

  Jaer read the history for a while. First Cycle: a time of mystery and prehistory, full of wizards that some called devils with great powers that no one understood. Destruction. Cataclysm. AH the wizards departing except a few left in the great city beside the Eastern Sea. ‘Tharliezalor,’ chapter Jaer, ‘Tharly-ay-za-lor, beside the Eastern Sea.’ Boom, boom, a punctuation of heels against the wall over his bed. Jaer often read upside down. ‘Then everything went to pot? he said, quoting Nathan. ‘To pot.’ After the wizards left, the rest of the world seemed to fall into disorder and darkness.

  Then the Thiene, the Thousand, came out of Tharliezalor to pick up the pieces. It was they who had brought the archivists out of Tchent, they who had taught the people how to read, they who had started numbering the years again, they who had started the Sisterhoods. Reading about the Thiene always made Jaer feel itchy behind the eyes, as though there were something he/she should know which was not in the books anywhere. Jaer rubbed at the itch fretfully, rolled over to rearrange the book.

  Second Cycle: the Thiene roaming around, putting things in order, then disappearing. Maybe. Ephraim had said once there was a Remnant in Orena, but Nathan had said ‘Hush’ in an odd voice. Something itchy there. Maybe the Remnant wasn’t the Thiene at all. Maybe it was wizards. Not likely. Jaer sighed. Nothing much after that in the Second Cycle except the Akwithian kings and their dull battles. Pride, Nathan had said. Pride and folly. Well, old Sud-Akwith had tried to enter the Thiene’s city of Tharliezalor even though the archivists at Tchent told him he mustn’t, but he found nothing there but horror and awfulness. ‘He was very fortunate to have come out of it with a whole skin,’ Jaer commented primly, quoting Ephraim. The book had a picture of serim, bloody fangs dripping beneath stony eyes. ‘Very fortunate,’ Jaer said again, turning the page in some haste.

  Then all the people who lived near Tharliezalor came running out of the East, running away from something they couldn’t se£ or talk about. People tried to go there, to see what was Wrong – but couldn’t get there. All the east was behind the Concealment. It didn’t do any good at all to ask Nathan or Ephraim about the Concealment. They said they didn’t know. Maybe someone in the Sisterhood might know, they said, but no one in Orena did. (‘No one?’ Ephraim had asked, in that odd voice. Nathan hadn
’t answered.) Then Sud-Akwith threw his sword away. Widon the Golden went into the north. Then everything went to pot again. Until the Third Cycle. The Axe King. More battles, altogether meaner and nastier, and then Gahl. Jaer put the book away in disgust. The things he really wanted to know weren’t in the book, weren’t in any of the books.

  Later: ‘Nathan, why won’t Ephraim teach the people what they’ve forgotten?’

  ‘Sometimes when Ephraim is taking his bath, you take a good look at his back and legs. That’s what happened to him the last time he tried to teach people what they’d forgotten.’

  Jaer did so. The scars were old, but deep and close together as though the flesh had been repeatedly cut to the bone.

  And again, later: ‘Nathan, are you and Ephraim going back to Orena? Are you going to take all the things you’ve written down?’

  ‘The records will go into the vault here, Jaer. This tower was built by the wizards – at least / think so. It is protected more powerfully than even Ephraim or I can understand, and we’ve made a bit of a study of the matter. The people of Orena know where this place is, this place and others like it, places older than our histories but seemingly made for this purpose. As for us, well, we would have gone away on a journey of our own long since if we hadn’t had a child full of questions to look after. We were going to leave the summer we found you.’

  ‘Why didn’t you just take me and go?’

  ‘If we had gone alone, just the two of us, likely only one of us would have survived the trip. With a baby, it’s likely none of us would have made it. It’s hard to hide a baby, even under an orbansa. Babies cry, you know. They get hungry at inconvenient times. Certain people out there, certain creatures out there, seem to have an appetite for babies and young ones.’

  ‘They’d have killed me, huh?’

  ‘They’d have done that, yes. Or worse. Now Ephraim says he’s too fragile to go.’

  ‘I know. He says the wind plays in his bones.’

  ‘His bones remember pain. That doesn’t make things easier.’

  Jaer thought long on this, unsure whether to be glad that the old men had thought enough of the baby to give up their journey or sad that they had given up so much. It was a thought which came back at intervals as Jaer learned and experienced what the place afforded. In the forests there were many birds and beasts, some of them belonging to that group of beings which the old men called ‘mythical.’ They were always amused when Jaer said he had seen some of that kind, rather as though they thought he was creating stories for them. Jaer was not sure how to react to this attitude, nor was he sure about the difference between the ‘mythical’ creatures and the others. He treated them all with the same polite caution. He did note one seeming difference. Mythical creatures were not generally considered edible by the other kind.

  And then, too, there were the strange happenings. Once in a great while Jaer could tell what it was the old men were thinking. They called this ‘being psychic,’ and they explained that it was an unreliable talent which people had had, more or less, always. Starting a fire without using his hands was something Jaer could do now and then, when he felt like it, when no one else was around. He never mentioned this to either Nathan or Ephraim, somehow knowing it would upset them.

  One thing he did mention to Nathan from time to time was the strange dreams he had, she had, often – though not always – at the time the body changed. She saw herself in a place of towering stone which seemed to breathe with ominous life. Beside her strode a man, black, his hair flowing behind him in wild tails, carrying a shaft of silver fire. There was a woman with them, dancing. Jaer dreamed, sometimes, of another woman, one who walked among huge beasts with her hands on their heads, calm with contained fury and crowned with gemmed light. Jaer dreamed of an old woman, too, who in some strange fashion was dreatning of Jaer. When told all this, Nathan laughed and told Jaer to forget the dreams, that they were only sleep visions, the endlessly active mind sorting through the day’s memories to store them away.

  Jaer did not believe this, knowing that nothing in the visions could be found in his day’s doings or readings, but in time he did forget it. Nathan forgot it, too, or did not know he had not. The images Jaer had spoken of, though haltingly, were compelling and could not have been altogether forgotten.

  So life went on, and sometimes he/she was happy, bubbling with the joy of being healthy and alive in a world full of wonders. Always, however, something hovered just at the edge of that world, staining it, threatening it. Ephraim did not name it. Neither did Nathan. Only once in a great while, one of them would say, ‘I think it stems from … that,’ with the word ‘that’ said in a whispering spit as though it meant something unutterably foul. Jaer puzzled over this. ‘We dare not go,’ Ephraim said. ‘Because of that!’ His tone was such that Jaer could not ask about that. It was something which included the Keepers and the Separation and the Temples, the far off fields, no longer tended, going back to thistle and thorn. It was a shadow beyond the things one could see or define, something to the east, he thought, beyond the Concealment, beyond the ruins of Tchent. The Thiene were in it somehow, and the ancient times, and the name Taniel.’ Jaer learned not to think that as he had learned not to cry in that certain way, for to think it seemed to invite the shadow’s attention.

  So, Jaer grew, and learned, and waited, and pondered, and was not more impatient for life than was bearable. The years passed, and Jaer was ten.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  LEONA

  Year 1163

  Deep within the sullen moors of Anisfale lay the lands and leaseholds of the family Fathra, and deep within that family lay the fate and future of lean-limbed Leona, third daughter of a third daughter, fifth child of a fifth child on the father’s side, doubly unlucky, therefore utterly without honorable position. The family was so disgusted at her birth that they did not even have new-made the traditional birth-gift of maidens, the circlet with which her hair would be bound until marriage. Instead they found one in some ancient storage room of the fastness and dusted it off, out of fashion though it had surely been for generations. Though the error had been her father’s (he might, after all, have restricted his attentions to one of his other wives, getting his unlucky fifth upon Oroneen, fourth daughter, for whom it would have been only a second birth, or upon Panaba, who had already born nine and was, herself, twelfth daughter) it was Leona who would suffer for it. She was consigned at birth to a long spinsterhood, a withering away in the caring for other children and other households than her own. She would never need to give her maiden circlet to a husband, therefore she did not need one suitable for giving.

  Leona could not recall when she first became aware of being a child unwanted who had arrived untimely. It was simply something that was known by everyone, herself no less than they. She was not mocked for it, nor taunted. It was as though she had some kind of deformity which disqualified her for life but did not, unfortunately, seem likely to kill her. Slender she was, as lovely as a sapling in spring, lithe as a reed and as graceful as blown grass. Still, she would never marry, never bear children. Out of politeness no one mentioned it, but no one would have been fool enough to say that it didn’t matter.

  Whether she sensed this early or not, she never looked at any boy or man with favour, preferring instead the lonely muted swell of the moors, or her own company, or the love and companionship of certain of the women of the family. She loved first a sister, then a young aunt, and finally a cousin whose lineaments were much like her own, Fabla. When with Fabla, Leona could forget or simply not think of her maimed life, which she carried day to day as she might have carried a twisted spine or a withered limb. With Fabla, or sometimes when alone on the moors, she could feel as though she had been born anew, translated into another life, another body, a being not her own. Once in a while, alone on the moors with the sun riding low in the west to look under the edge of the cloud blanket and the green of every herb and tree shattering, jewel-like, in that light, with the high
call of a hawk creasing the last light with a knife edge of sound—why, then she would feel suddenly born into that new life with every thump of her heart pumping light into her veins until she glowed.

  Or, with Fabla, at planting and harvest, lamb-fall or shearing, carding and weaving, in all things done by the women of Anisfale in which they two were together, when they sat alone by the fire with their spinning wheels echoing the fire voice and all the other voices of the world silent, with amber light falling on the stones of the floor and moving in dusty corners to make shy, mysterious shapes, then sometimes she would fill with comfort as a glass is filled with wine, the clear gleaming substance of it shading with ruby and rose and amber, until it stands too full to hold more. Or, in the bed with Fabla, curled like a leaf against her, with the sound of Fabla’s heart brushing her ear and the feather comforter soft at the side of her face, she might feel the quiet and the warm filling her and flooding her until the pain of being herself washed away on a tide of sleep.

  In a way, she knew without ever thinking about it that there was another world of light and warmth and joy to which she might have been born. It never occurred to her that the world of light was one to which she might aspire; her daily sorrow was the reality and her joy was the dream. She never thought that it might be the other way around.

  When the family talked of marriage and children and families, it was understood that Leona was not a part of that. When they spoke of wife barter and courting feasts, it was with the shared knowledge that Leona could be interested only as an inconspicuous observer. She was that one born to double numbers for whom no provision could be made.