The Revenants

by Tepper, Sheri S

  ‘I would not. No, Holy One, indeed not. We turn south to go down the coast. I think the disease can be cured, and until then she does well enough to carry the wood and fetch the water.’

  The acolyte turned away angrily. Medlo set off toward the crossroad, drawing Jaer into the shadow of a building as soon as they were hidden from sight.

  Jaer muttered, ‘What did they want?’

  ‘Only to make you say something, anything. Then you would have broken the law, and they could have taken you as a slave for any purpose they liked. But there is no market for women with skin diseases of the nastier kinds. There is no real market for old women, either. Could you walk like an old woman?’

  Jaer remembered Ephraim’s last days and did her best to totter along as he had done, still three paces behind Medlo. Robed figures passed them as did other guards with bare faces. Hostility and anger breathed down the narrow alleys and all eyes were suspicious. Jaer concentrated on being old, old, old. No one touched her again.

  The line of warehouses seemed endless, the constant suspicious glances needled at them. They hobbled on, and on, and then as they went through an open space among huddled buildings, Jaer heard the grating voice of someone talking to a crowd.

  ‘Still young, still useful, round and firm as a ripe melon, with good teeth and other useful parts….’

  Against the wall, on a chest-high platform a woman crouched at the feet of the speaker, half naked, her robes drawn up over her shoulders to display sweat-streaked thighs and dirty ankles below the curves of shining belly and breasts. Chains glinted in the sun, and Jaer stopped, staring, head up. Medlo looked back, followed her gaze in irritation and fear.

  ‘What? No. No. Don’t tell me.’

  Jaer’s voice trembled slightly, but she was matter-of-fact. ‘It’s a chained captive, Medlo. Will you buy her for me?’

  ‘With what? A song? I emptied my purse buying passage on that-’

  Jaer was tugging at her waist. ‘I didn’t see fit to tell you, but I have gold enough. Here. Buy the woman.’

  ‘Buy her yourself,’ he hissed. ‘I need not be party to this foolishness. Why should we add another female to our party to raise avarice among the acolytes? By the Powers, birdling, have some sense!’

  ‘I will buy her myself. But to do so, I will need to speak, which will attract attention.’

  ‘Oh, Lords,’ stormed Medlo in hushed fury. ‘I no sooner get us out of one trap than you get us in another. Give it to me.’ He went off toward the auctioneer leaving Jaer to twist her feet in the dust and pray that no guards come upon her with their sneaking hands, for she would surely kill the next one. In a few moments Medlo returned, leading a figure hastily shrouded and clutching assorted bundles to itself. ‘Walk on south as we were going,’ instructed Medlo, his voice strained. ‘Don’t stop to say anything. Walk, tum-te-tum-tum. Dead march. I think they’re coming after us….’

  Indeed, several of the Temple people were following them, but as Medlo turned away to the south, the bare faces stared after them only for a short time before turning away. They trudged away over the first long hill before Medlo handed Jaer her purse, unlocked the chains on the woman’s arms and legs to let them drop into the dust, all the while venting fury upon Jaer. ‘Stupid, idiotic, showing of gold in a place like that with no story thought up to explain it and half the town looking over my shoulder with greedy eyes.’

  The woman stood, gazing at them from her eye holes, saying nothing.

  ‘Well,’ Medlo said. ‘You wanted her. You’ve got her.’

  ‘I wanted to free her,’ Jaer said uncertainly. ‘The quest book said …’

  ‘I read it, remember? Hokum!’

  ‘What you think doesn’t matter….’ Jaer’s girlish voice broke.

  The woman turned toward her. ‘You be womankind?’

  Medlo snorted. ‘Oh, she be anything your heart desires, slave girl.’

  ‘I have a name, scornful. I am called Jasmine.’

  Medlo snorted once more, and the three stood glaring at one another, three featureless robes on a dusty road, unread and unreadable. Finally, Jaer sighed deeply. ‘Jasmine … I brought you because I have taken oath to follow a certain quest, and my guide book says that three captives must be freed. This man, Medlo, thinks I am silly, or stupid, or mad. Maybe I am. Now that you’re here, I don’t know what to do about you. You can come with us, if you choose… unless there is somewhere you would rather go.’

  ‘She was going into slavery, birdling! She was going to be some dirty old man’s bathmaid, or some nasty woman’s tiring girl. Or she would have been sold to a Hynath Town brothel. Do you know what a brothel is?’

  Jaer snarled at him: ‘I know well enough, Medlo. The old men did not neglect my education. They knew well enough what dangers I would run, and they cared enough for me to warn me against them. I know what they were selling her for, but she may still have somewhere else to go.’

  Jasmine interrupted. ‘I have somewhere else to go, but my way to it is closed for now. If I go back to Hynath Port, a woman alone, they will take me and sell me again. No. For a time I will go with you. I have no choice.’

  Even Medlo could think of nothing to say after that.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE CITY OF BYSSA

  Year 1168-Winter

  Jaer insisted, of course, that they go east. Medlo pointed to the cliffs and tumbled stone in that direction, the impassable wilderness of pinnacles and piled rock left over from some ancient lava flow. ‘Sud-Akwith might have come here to find his fabled sword,’ he snarled at them. ‘But lesser men have trouble walking there.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Jaer reasonably, ‘find us a better way.’

  ‘There is no better way,’ Medlo said. ‘In order to go east, we must first go south to the mouth of the Del, and then up the river as far as Byssa. Byssa is one of the worst places to go in a time when bad places abound. These last years there is more harrying than ever before. The black wagons are everywhere. As the weasel waits at the burrow, they wait. They scare me.’

  ‘You didn’t act scared when we met,’ Jaer said.

  ‘I wasn’t travelling toward Byssa when we met. I did not have one female with me, much less two. I had a simple trip planned, north up the River Sals through Sorgen. Not to Byssa. Never to Byssa. Not with a creature like you.’

  He stalked away, leaving Jasmine to whisper at Jaer, ‘What does he mean, a creature like you?’

  Jaer tried to explain, only to encounter questions which she could not answer, which led to more questions. At last Medlo stopped them.

  ‘If you are going to talk, talk, talk,’ he said, ‘then let us have something hot at least to wet our gullets.’ He went off to find driftwood, leaving the two behind a sheltering dune half covered by razor-edged grass. Jaer took her orbansa off, threw it upon the sand and sat upon it. When Medlo returned with an armload of wood, he stopped to stare at her. He saw a plain, rather broad face, with wide brown eyes and a large mouth. The skin was a medium tan, the nose unremarkable. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’re not particularly appealing, but you are unmistakably female. Not pretty, but girlish enough.’

  ‘I’ve been pretty sometimes.’ Jaer shrugged.

  ‘Oh. Then the change is not just from Jaer, boy, to Jaer, girl. You change more than that?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Are you a virgin?’

  Jaer flushed, aware of the meaning of the word but unsure of its application. ‘I – don’t know.’

  Medlo grimaced. ‘I’m only curious. The boy Jaer from the inn in Candor was appealing. He looked rather like someone I once knew well. Now you look like no one who interests me. Still, I remain curious.’

  Jasmine leaned forward with questions of her own. ‘When you change, do you…’ She asked an astonishingly intimate thing.

  Jaer flushed deeply. ‘I – don’t know. I suppose I do. Please, I’d rather not talk about it.’

  Jasmine cocked her head. ‘Only curious. Don�
��t worry about it, girl. For the love of the Goddess, it’s nothing to blush about.’

  Medlo, as embarrassed as Jaer, changed the subject by asking Jasmine about herself, and this led to a long monologue which both Medlo and Jaer followed with interest, though it was an ordinary enough tale. A girl, born third daughter to a poor family in Lakland, where marriage without a dowry is impossible. A dowry scraped together for one daughter. The farm left to the second. The parents dead before Jasmine could be provided for. Then work as this and that, a little dancing, a little singing, a little acting, a tall young soldier who stayed for almost a winter before he left with the troops. And then a child, Hu’ao, stolen by the Eldest Sister of a Temple of the Goddess.

  ‘And now you are here,’ said Jaer, ‘and your child is far away.’

  ‘Yes.’ Tears gathered in her eyes and dropped into the mug of tea which she held. ‘When I return from my quest, if I return, she will have forgotten me.’

  ‘Please don’t cry.’

  ‘Oh, I cry or don’t cry. It is better to walk with you than to be sold as a whore-slave in an evil town. The farmwife in Lakland would say it thus: “I come long here, mister, missus, ’thout ary tear, lone as high hawk. Now I sit cosy as mouse in winter nest. Twas cold there, warm here, so natural I thaws a little and t’runs out t’eyes.” ’

  Both Jaer and Medlo laughed, and she went on in still broader accents letting them be cheered by the nonsense. At length, Medlo asked Jaer,

  ‘You are still determined to go east?’

  ‘I told you on the ship. I showed you the map.’

  ‘And you took oath.’

  ‘I did.’

  Medlo shook his head, scratched at the dune soil with a grass stalk. ‘I was sent on a quest, too, birdling. It was supposed to be my death, though I was not expected to learn of that. Since this quest is not even yours, we may assume it is not designed for your death, but it might turn out so. Why run after danger when we might as well travel to Orena, where your old friends came from?’

  Jaer was stubbornly silent, and Jasmine took up the argument. ‘It is not as though they asked you to go.’ She stared at the quest book and its maps with troubled eyes. It had taken her a year to come from Lak Island to Hynath Town. Now the map showed the River Del winding back eastward toward Lakland, and she thought of the weary miles with loathing.

  Medlo went on. ‘Ten years I’ve walked the narrow ways, making music or being silent, speaking this tongue or that. Hiding sometimes. Running often. There were fountains in Methyl-Drossy in the town of Rhees. There were gardens and green lawns and the smell of hay. Though the gardens may have been only a face painted over shame and greed, still I long for the lawns of Rhees. Do you know what I am saying?’

  Jaer nodded, spoke past a painful lump in her throat. ‘I long for the steps of the tower, warm in the sun, where we sat early in the morning.’

  ‘But you will not seek a place of safety where there may be sun-warmed stones and the feel of peace?’

  ‘No,’ said Jaer. ‘I will not.’

  Jasmine murmured, ‘Let come as comes. Nor morn nor dark but comes as comes. ’Twilln’t hasten f’thee.’

  ‘Oh, Powers.’ Medlo heaved himself to his feel. ‘If we may not have reason, we may as well walk as talk.’ And he led them away down the coast toward the mouth of the River Del.

  Two days later they passed the Separated village of Delmoth at a safe distance, stopping only to purchase water from a guarded well where it cost them too much to fill their flasks. Jasmine carried two, a battered old one of metal and a larger skin bag, but she filled only the skin bag at the well, cursing the robed water seller as she did so.

  ‘Did you make the water? Did you put it in the earth? To charge such prices for the bounty of the Goddess is sinful. I don’t think you even dug the well.’ The water seller did not answer, merely leered at them through his eye holes and bit the coins they gave him. Jasmine tried to shake off her ill humour but could not. They were actually turning east, and the miles stretched endlessly before her. She wept beneath the orbansa.

  A night or two later, Jaer changed sex in the midst of a strange dream in which a distance voice demanded, ‘Tell me where you are.’ Jasmine shook him awake under the cold moon of autumn, and he clung to her, trembling, then aware of a strangeness between his body and hers. Jasmine grew aware of it, too, and held him not so closely. They slept the rest of the night so, and in the morning Jaer was troubled by the way they looked at him, both with a new kind of tension and forced cheer. Medlo was calling him ‘youngun’ again, instead of ‘birdling.’

  Perhaps it had been simply that Nathan and Ephraim had been quite old at the time Jaer was born, or perhaps they had simply been unable to deal with the subject, but the question of sexual feelings had never been discussed. Oh, they had talked anatomy and biology fully, rather more fully than Jaer’s interest had warranted, but never feelings. And then, too, Jaer had reached puberty in fits and starts, at one time a boy child, the next day a girl-woman, then a boy child again. Jaer was intimately aware of the physical sexual differences; of the fact that they made little difference; and of the fact that he now felt very strange.

  He had liked being cuddled next to Jasmine in the cold night, liked the softness of her breath on his neck and the firmness of her arms around him. Now, with morning, she had drawn away from him, had caught Medlo’s eyes on her and flushed, had seen Medlo flush in his turn as though he, too, was embarrassed at his own thoughts. Jaer ate his breakfast, chewed and thought, swallowed and thought, decided that his current body was possibly not unattractive to both Jasmine and Medlo, and then considered the implications of that for a while. He could imagine doing several things, all of them highly original (for Jaer), all ending in increased embarrassment. At last he dug out of his memory one more of Nathan’s aphorisms. ‘If you don’t know what to do next, consider doing nothing.’ He decided he would have to go on feeling strange, hoping it was not an illness, until something happened or someone said something which would make everything simpler.

  But it had been nice to be held in the cold night. He wondered whether it was nice for only some bodies, or for all bodies, and whether Medlo would find it pleasant also, and whether Nathan and Ephraim would have found it pleasant at one time.

  As for Jasmine and Medlo, both were acutely uncomfortable – Medlo because Jaer looked so much as Alan had sometimes looked, faintly puzzled and waiting for something to happen which would resolve the puzzlement. A host of memories came with this. And Jasmine, thinking in the night that this body she held was not unlike the body of a lover in Lak Island, woke to see that Jaer’s face was not unlike Hu’ao’s face, childlike and wondering. She felt vaguely indecent, as though she had attempted to seduce a toddler, and yet Jaer was not a toddler. Both Medlo and Jasmine struggled to identify this youth, this boy-man, this separate person as distinct from yesterday’s person – and yet this person was the same person. So that, if Jasmine were to take this person as a lover, today, that person might be, tomorrow, someone else. Or only different. The idea was confusing and unpleasant enough to make her turn away from it into a kind of forced jocularity, a cheery parentalism which matched Medlo’s manner and was equally false.

  Jaer felt the falsity, felt repulsed, felt forced into some construction or compartment he had not occupied before. ‘As though,’ he said to himself, ‘I were mythical. As though they did not believe in me.’

  He went on eating, but the day had dimmed into resentment. The night’s comfort could not be rebuilt. He could only go on doing what he had sworn to do, for they had rejected him at some level he had never understood or cared about, though he thought he might have cared about it if they had only …

  Never mind. They went on up the river, complicating their feelings by sleeping too little and eating too little, so that they came into Byssa tired, angry at nothing, and after Medlo had told them of the city, afraid.

  The city was covered with mist except during the hottest days,
and the mist covered what went on there as well. There was no law or safety in Byssa. In the mornings the wagons of the furriers went through the streets to gather up ‘Byssa meat,’ the corpses of those who had been murdered in the night. A body not quite dead when it went into the wagon would be dead when it was dumped out at the fur farms on the hills above the city. The skins would be brought down through Byssa for shipment, and so it was said of those who died in Byssa that ‘they would go through Byssa again.’

  It was a trade city, having only a few small enclaves. The Temple ran the city, meting out punishment without justice. As in all Temple cities there was much arbitrary rule making and rule enforcement, with particular regard to the persons and bodies of women. Medlo told Jaer to pray that he stayed male, and he spent hours making Jasmine up to look like an old; old woman with stringy grey hair and a hump.

  ‘The only safety near the city is in the caravansary, and we have to get through the city to get to it,’ he muttered at them. ‘Only in the caravansary will we find any group moving east, and we need to find such a group quickly.’

  ‘Can’t we just go on by ourselves?’ asked Jaer. ‘Is the road so dangerous?’

  ‘The road is very good. But the tribes who live in the canyon are known to eat human flesh whenever they can get it.’ Jaer stopped arguing.

  It was Medlo’s intention to enter the city at noon, at the hottest time of the day, because the heat made the guards and Keepers less vigilant. When they straggled in they were dust-covered and as inconspicuous as possible, Jasmine huddled like an ancient crone, Jaer loose-mouthed, a shambling carrier of baggage. Medlo led them, cringing, past the guards, up the long streets, nodding and bowing humbly, making pious gestures of Separation at the sound of each peal from the high black tower. Jaer watched him out of the corner of his eyes. This was no longer the musician, Medlo; this was a stranger, an old, cowardly peddler with nothing in his packs worth stealing.

  They were stopped only twice. Each time Jaer did as he had been instructed, slobbered and wiped his nose on his sleeves while Jasmine leaned against the nearest wall in a picture of senile collapse. Each time Medlo groveled a bit and then led them on. There were cages on the walls. Some held bones, some held things which looked like bones but which still struggled feebly in the sun. After a time, Jaer stopped looking around him and concentrated on his boots, step after step. It took over an hour to cross the city and come to the walled acre of the caravansary. There they found a corner where they could get their backs to the wall and settled into the dust.