The Revenants

by Tepper, Sheri S

  ‘A girl,’ said Medlo. ‘There have been several strange things connected with girls … or with becoming a girl.’ He thrust the hood away from Jaer’s head and tilted her chin up toward the stars. ‘As you have done.’

  The others drew close to see Jaer’s face, girlish and fair, framed by a tangle of golden hair. Even as Leona and Thewson stared, Jaer thought it odd that they did not seem incredulous as Medlo had been, not as curious as Jasmine. Instead, they simply glanced at one another, and Thewson rumbled, ‘Wa’osa, wa’os, wa’osu.’

  ‘You believe this?’ demanded Medlo. ‘Just like that?’

  Leona stared at him, or through him, her nostrils flaring in some emotion he could not identify. ‘It is written,’ she said, ‘that the Northlord, Sud-Akwith, sought to rebuild Tharliezalor beside the far sea, and that demons came from beneath the city to his ruin. I cannot say it is so, yet it is written. It is written that the ruins of the City of the Mists lie beyond the Concealment, empty now, for the Lady’s priestesses have fled long ago in the Second Age. I have not seen it. Both of these things are riddles and mysteries. Shall I believe them and not this? Or this and not them? Am I credulous? Or do I merely wait to see what thing comes from dreams to threaten this person as the demons came from beneath Tharliezalor to threaten the Northking-dom?’

  Thewson rumbled, ‘Fanuluzh lorn nunuluzh. As it is said among my people, “Of the gods, or of newness.” Both are strange.’

  The two looked at one another, Leona ghost pale, Thewson night dark, as though they shared deep thoughts. Medlo could not imagine what they shared to ally them in this fashion.

  Leona turned away at last. ‘It is at least a different thing from the little towns with their hating gates and the harsh cities with their forbidding walls, a different thing from little people all alike in their tiny differences.

  ‘Well, we have taken your coin in return for guarding you through the canyon of the Del.

  ‘The journey is before us. Let us go.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE RIVER DEL

  Year 1168-Winter

  The dawn showed them riven land heaped from the banks of the river, piled away on either side to the base of the shadowy cliffs, blue and hazy in the early light. As they went east the cliffs marched inward, ever darker and more ominous, until at last they became a looming wall broken only by the dark doorway of the canyon, scarcely wider than the River Del which rushed from it in an ebon flow. They slept that night in a scanty copse of starved-looking trees which held the last of the day’s light near the entrance to the canyon. During the day Jaer had felt the carefully incurious glances from Thewson and Leona, the blandly quiet stares, nothing offensive, nothing she could resent. And yet there was a pressure in those looks unlike the swift kin-longing, skin-longing looks from Medlo and Jasmine. Jaer felt it as a subtle disquiet and welcomed sleep as a relief from the tension of it.

  In the night Jaer changed, this time without remembering a dream or searching voice. His form might almost have been a twin to the girl of yesterday, still fair and slender but with a stronger chin and more breadth across the shoulders. Leona examined him as they ate, eyes still bland but slightly puzzled, as though she discarded one thought and sought another.

  Medlo was a little less forcedly jocular, again calling him ‘youngun.’ Jasmine merely looked at him and sighed.

  They started early, plunging into the narrow way between rock walls echoing with the river’s murmur. At either side the walls stepped upward, pillar upon pillar, all peering down rocky noses under shaggy brows of juniper, frowning over the stony sockets of the cliff. Something watched them. Small slides of gravel whispered down the walls to speak of hidden movement high along the cliffs. Leona and Thewson studied every shadow, their faces grim, and the shaggy hounds quirked brindle foreheads to glare upward with watchful amber eyes. The road turned again and again, into the sun and out of it, down long halls of shade and into sunlit passages once more. Crooked side canyons clambered back into the broken land, narrowing as they went, winding behind spires of stone and low, black clumps of needled growth. Moisture sneaked down some of these side ways, oozing from stone to stone, leaving a fleeting smell of wet and moss. The wind snarled continuously, and the feel of eyes upon them never left them.

  After noon the road fell into slow curves behind them and they walked more often in shade, half asleep except for the four guardians, man, woman, and hounds. A sudden horror of sound woke them, and Jaer found Thewson’s hand clamped firmly across his mouth as he tried to say ‘What…’ A frantic ululation screamed along the canyon walls, bounding in echo upon echo in a seemingly endless tumult of agony.

  Thewson and Leona hurried them toward the walls, thrust them into the nearest crack like naked crabs thrust into a borrowed shell. Thewson’s body stoppered the entrance, spear before him. They waited, half suffocated, until the sounds died and the canyon was quiet before Thewson crept silently down the road to crouch at the curve and peer around it, face close to the sheltering stone. When he beckoned them to come, they found signs of struggle and death. An iron wagon lay like an overturned tortoise at the river’s edge, wheels upward, harness empty. There was no sign of the horses. In the dust lay a naked figure, half covered by a black robe. Jaer’s startled gaze fixed there and then turned away, sickened.

  ‘Why would they do that to him? Why would anyone …?’

  Medlo replied bleakly, ‘Look again, Jaer. Much of that was not done just now. See, there, and there. Healed. Or as healed as it will ever be. I have seen this before. It is what they do to themselves, these acolytes. Or have done to them.’

  ‘Why?’ Jaer repeated. ‘Why would they …?’

  Leona drew the robes to cover the Body. ‘With this they are said to purchase a strange gift,’ she said harshly, and moved down the road to lead them away. As they went forward, a dull thumping came from the wagon. It came again, and still again.

  Thewson was already studying the thick chain which held the doors of the cage shut. He thrust the shaft of his spear between two links and twisted it, the muscles bulging on his shoulders. The chain broke with a screeching twang, the doors falling open. Stench poured out at them, and an apparition crawled into the light, an old woman in a filthy gown, hair in grey tangles. Without looking at them, she struggled over the edge of the cage and into the river, beating their hands away.

  The trembling old woman wakened a quick memory of Ephraim in Jaer, and he moved forward to help, colliding with Jasmine at the river’s edge. The crone solved the problem for them by tumbling into the water and submerging, only to reappear spouting water like a whale and scrubbing at herself with both hands. ‘For the love of Our Lady, girl, do you have a clean bit of cloth? Soap? Young fellow, go with your companions there and show me your back. The time is long past when Terascouros would flaunt her body….’ Then she began crying, all at once, and Jaer left her to Jasmine’s ministrations, so overcome by nostalgia he could not speak for a time.

  Leona and Thewson were facing the rock wall of the canyon, alert for any movement on the cliffs. Thewson rumbled to himself about the possible identity of those who had taken the horses. ‘They go with those horses up into those rocks, and they eat the animals. They are hungry people, it may be, but they do not eat that one which is dead. He is r’muova – a dead thing, is it?’

  ‘Carrion,’ offered Medlo absently.

  ‘Yes. That is so. That one is carrion, and they do not eat it. They would eat the old woman, or us.’

  ‘Let us hope they have enough horse to fill their bellies and will leave us alone,’ Medlo answered. Dust shifting from the canyon rim held their attention while Jasmine helped the old woman with soap and clothes, a form of assistance which had stopped the weeping, or at least the louder expressions of it. When the old one stumbled from the water she was clad in Jasmine’s orbansa. She gazed at them, and as each returned the gaze each wondered what they would do with her or for her. Medlo, as was his habit, became irritable and de
fensive at his own pitying thoughts.

  ‘I suppose we should welcome you with trust, old woman, if for no other reason than that you were the captive of those who would probably have made captives of us. Still, forgive my discourtesy in asking who you are and where they were taking you?’

  The old woman answered him in a dry, cracked voice which trembled with exhaustion. ‘My name is Terascouros. Those black-robed beasts of Gahl learned I am able to see visions. Those who have such skills are taken by them to the city of Murgin. There they are given drugs to dream on, until in the end they see no more – only death.’

  ‘That tells us little,’ Medlo complained.

  ‘It answers the questions you asked,’ the old woman answered with some asperity.

  Jasmine snapped at him. ‘Medlo, what would you do? Leave her here for the cannibals to eat? Wait and argue until they come to feast on all of us? There is death enough here already, and evil. Leave it!’ She stalked away down the road, Thewson following her with a half-hidden smile, the old woman staggering after. The others fell in behind, Jaer and Leona last in the file.

  After a time of silence, Leona began to tell Jaer of Anisfale, of the Aresfales and Norfale, of a woman who had lived there, a young woman, one Leona had known well. She spoke of shearing, and of weaving. To Jaer it sounded not unlike caring for the goats of the Outer Island, and he drowsed in the circle of her voice, hearing it and yet not hearing it. Leona talked of Fabla, and Jaer plodded beside her as she talked, seeing the purple mists of the moorland and feeling the damp on his skin. ‘You are like her,’ said Leona, and Jaer considered that. To Jasmine, Jaer was like Hu’ao. To Medlo, Jaer was like someone else – some fellow Medlo had once known. ‘I am not me to them,’ he thought. ‘I am always someone else.’

  Deep within himself, he could find the person Leona thought he was if he only let go, drifted, let the moors come in. Reflexively he pushed the idea away, but he let Leona’s voice go on without interruption. There was something soothing in it. Something kind. After a time, he forgot to listen, but she went on talking as the sky darkened and the rock walls moved away on either side of the canyon’s end.

  It was well into the night hours under a high cold moon when they found a hollow softly bristled with dry grasses into which they curled closely for shared warmth. As Jaer drifted into sleep he heard Leona’s voice still going on and on about Anisfale. He slept before she had finished.

  They did not wake until the sun was half high in the morning. As they sat sleepily over tea and stewed grain, Medlo teetered nervously on the bank at the roadside, peering back the way they had come and muttering about possible pursuit.

  Leona tapped the last of her grain onto the earth and wiped the wooden bowl with a twist of grass. ‘Perhaps pursuit can be led away. For many hours yesterday I talked to Jaer of Anisfale, of herders and shearers, of the names of families. Jaer tried to pretend to listen, but soon grew bored. No matter. When he slept, I told him he was in Anisfale, among the sheep.’

  Jaer scratched his thigh. ‘I… I remember. The bracken was all scratchy. I wore an itchy hat.’

  Leona smiled her animal grin. ‘It is true the hats itch, and so do the woollen drawers.’

  ‘I’m still scratching,’ said Jaer crossly.

  ‘How would that stop them finding Jaer?’ asked Medlo. To have him dream of Anisfale?’

  ‘If there are searchers, they may have gone to Anisfale.’

  The old woman interrupted them in a voice as dry as a winter’s branch. ‘Someone searches for the lad?’

  There was an uneasy silence. Jaer finally mumbled, ‘It’s true that something seems to come after me. I do dream about something … looking for me.’

  Terascouros went on eating, casting puzzled glances from face to face. At last she broke the silence. ‘Where is it that you go?’

  Jaer began to speak, choked, tried again. ‘Eastward. I am going eastward.’

  Medlo snorted and remarked that Murgin lay eastward, not a good place to go. The old woman concurred. ‘I have seen it in visions,’ she said. ‘Barren, hard, acid, tortured. I would not go there willingly.’

  ‘Nor I, again,’ said Medlo.

  Thewson said, ‘Whether east or west or here, I do not like this grain and salt meat. It is time to hunt for fresh meat, time to be paid and go. We have come as was agreed. Here the canyon ends. I would be paid and go hunting.’

  ‘That is true,’ said Leona. ‘We were offered payment to come through the canyon with you. Unless you desire that we accompany you further.’

  All of them were looking at Jaer, Medlo with mounting irritation, Jasmine with despair. Jaer said nothing, only stared moodily at his feet.

  The old woman sighed, then stood in the sun stretching like an old cat, slowly blinking in the light from behind disordered locks of hair. ‘If you are in doubt, I would willingly give you of my gift, for I have the gift of prophecy – much good has it done me – and am able to see past things and future things.’

  Medlo smiled mockingly. Terascouros glared at him and made a hissing noise through her teeth. She picked a stick out of the fire to draw with it a circle in the dust of the road and signs and words on and around the circle. From the river she gathered five stones, selecting them with care, each different in colour and shape, marking these too with the sooty stick. Then, over their mild protests and visible amusement, she chivvied them into the circle and thrust a stone into the hands of each. As they stood uncertainly, she began a breathy chant, a sound of dead reeds in a shallow lake, a language older than spoken words.

  For a moment they stood there, embarrassed, wondering whether to stay or move away, and then the world dropped away from them slowly, leaving an aching darkness behind and they in it, moored to a circlet of flame. They bloomed upon the circle, orbs of fire, one red as a heart of embers rimmed with black, breathing a slow pulse of fire; one green as new meadows under rising suns, dancing with the light of spring leaves; one amber as the weight of noon, lit with copper and bronze, burning with the topaz glow of deserts; one pale blue and glittering as steel blades, sharp with a deadly whispering; one white and featureless, a sphere of dew or snow or light of summer moon. Out of the void around them a demand fell upon them, a question to which their spirits went out in answer, ‘Where is the thing you seek?’ Within each of them, the question was breathed in with a smell of bitter frost, accepted, answered, and let go. From each of them fell a meteor of flame, red and amber, green and blue, featureless white, drifting and spiraling away into the void below them all. For a time they burned in their orbs, each bleeding light away along the shining arc, red bleeding into green, green into blue, the colours mixing, muting, becoming more subtle, fading, fading….

  And they came to themselves standing upon the dusty road, the marked stones lying within the circle at their feet. Beside them was Terascouros, hunched to the ground, still as the stones, barely breathing. Jaer tried to look at Leona, seeing instead a fiery light, red as blood, glittering like claws. His eyes fell away to Jasmine and were blinded by light reflected from leaves. He closed his eyes, swaying. The others stared at the old woman in awe.

  She shuddered, drew herself up. ‘So, mockers. You thought the old woman a mad one, eh? So. Learn from this not to judge the soul from the look of the skin. Wrinkled I am, oh yes. But mad I am not.’ She waved them away from the circle to stand beside it tracing the paths which the stones had made in the dust as though they were the letters and words of a language she knew well.

  ‘I trace the stone of Leona,’ she said. ‘It moves to the north, then turns and goes east. And the stone of Thewson goes east also. And here they are, all, lying where the Jaer-stone lies, at the place on the circle Jaer stood. If you find what you seek, you will find it where Jaer is.’

  ‘I will truly find it?’ begged Jasmine joyously.

  The old woman shook her head. ‘I didn’t say that. I said if you find it, you will find it there. You may not find it together, but you will not find it separ
ately. Also, the stones lie not to the east, but to the north of east.’

  ‘You draw a strange map, vision maker,’ rumbled Thewson.

  ‘Then follow your own,’ she snapped.

  Medlo coughed. ‘Old woman, the fact is simply that we do not know whether to trust you. Is this a true vision? Or a wickedness you have created for us to lure us toward Murgin? We may be weak and vacillating, but we think we know what moves us. What moves you? We do not know.’

  Unaccountably, she grinned at them. ‘Well, I don’t blame you. Here you are, going along full of your own troubles, and you pause to rescue an old hag from chained captivity’ – at this, Jaer started – ‘who thrusts you into a vision with the Seekers chant. Well then. What am I? A member of the Sisterhood. Gone from it these fifteen years. Tired. Weary. Going home once again. A simple thing.’

  There was an uncomfortable silence. Leona said, ‘I know of the Sisterhood. There is no evil in them that I have heard. Which Choir is yours?’

  ‘The Choir of Gerenhodh-south. At least it was. Who knows whether they will welcome me.’

  ‘I suppose it is only coincidence,’ drawled Medlo, ‘that from here, Gerenhodh Mountain lies north of east? It would not be that you simply wanted company?’

  The old woman choked down laughter. ‘You are very bright, young man. No. I had not thought of that until now. But it is true. The vision I called for you lies along my path. And if the things you seek lie anywhere, they lie there.’

  ‘Well, I will go,’ said Thewson. ‘I have been not far to the east, and if the Crown of Wisdom is there, it is worth the journey. Two years I have asked of this Crown, and no one in these lands knows of it. Faxo voa luxuf; a mockery this journey. They say the one who took the Crown from my land was called the Axe King, so let us go east and ask about him. Why not? Wa’osu.’