Feeling as if new eyes had been given him, the boy strained to use them, to stretch sight farther and farther, out through the walls, past the town, farther than he had ever traveled.
He thought of the sea and it was there, the waves pushing up a sandy beach, almost touching his toes, then sliding down, back into the surf.
He raised a hand slowly to touch the folded rock of a mountain, stooped to marvel at a pale, delicate flower growing out of a crevice, a crack at the edge of a cliff.
Suddenly he had wings, and he leaned forward onto the wind. Soaring over a landscape a hundred miles wide, he looked down and saw rabbits, weasels, wrens, thrushes, quail. Each one spoke its own language, but each one’s mind was open to him, understood.
Finally, he pulled himself back into his own body, still standing on the worn linoleum of the old house, still watching rain drip down the windows. He shook his head and leaned against the table, trying to understand what had happened.
The door opened. Chuckling with excitement, the old man strode into the room, then stopped as if struck by knowledge himself.
“You got it. All of it.” His voice was flat, final.
The boy turned and met his eyes, unable to speak, to explain.
But he saw more than an old man; he saw the man there had been at twenty, at thirty, full of hope and driven by a dream of power. He felt an intolerable loneliness, a hopeless yearning focused into one desire.
Disappointment after disappointment came into his mind; the weight of years of longing for knowledge and finding nothing bowed his shoulders. His gift became burden as well as joy.
Pity burned through him.
“I’m sorry. The steam hurt my finger. All I did was put it in my mouth. It was only the steam. I’m sorry.”
The old man looked at him a few seconds, then grabbed the pot and slammed it against the wall. Hot broth and what remained of the snake spilled across the floor, almost touching the boy’s shoes.
“Get out, get out!” His hoarse voice cracked at the edge of a scream. “Get out before I kill you!”
The boy just looked at him with eyes already older than the old man’s own and stooped down to put the meat and bones of the snake into the burlap bag.
Then he said, “This is mine. I’ll bury it under the tree. I can’t give you anything but this: If you go to the next town, you’ll find a job, something small to help you start over again.”
“Damn you, get out. I don’t want your help. Just get out.”
The boy closed the door, turned toward the rainbow gently touching the fields, and started walking. Inside, the old man picked up the pot and threw it at the wall again. Then he started sobbing.
About eluld bes shahar and “Queeneyes”
This story, which took second place in the Cauldron vote for issue 11, is about heroism, which can sometimes take most unexpected forms.
eluki bes shahar lives in upstate New York with six cats and “almost enough books.” She writes both science fiction/fantasy as well as Regency romances, under both her own name and the pen name Rosemary Edghill.
Queeneyes
eluki bes shahar
Everyone knew you had to be virgin for the Sight. Avarach knew it better than most; for her it wasn’t just a singer’s tale but a real true way out of the Choirdip barrio.
Avarach was twelve. And the Choosers were coming this year.
She would go with them. She knew it. She had to. The Sight was a part of her earliest memories, a bright-winged numen that warmed her when there was no fire and fed her on futures when food was scant.
Queeneyes, the gift was called in the barrio, though it came to boys as often as girls. But the boys must be gelded to keep it past youth, and many lost it then in spite of the surgeon’s knife.
Far better to be a girl, Avarach thought, and hoarded each sample of her specialness like hot autumnal gold.
Sometimes the visions were jumbled, other times they were just plain wrong. Avarach had taught herself by slow trial and error to understand their grammarie, but true knowledge would only come when the Choosers took her, placed their imprimatur upon her gift, and taught her the ways of it. Now it strained, bewilderingly, at the limits of her understanding, demanding as some new-caught wild thing, avid and importunate.
Meanwhile she had to survive. In the Choirdip barrio survival meant work, no matter what your age.
Avarach found work—and learning of a sort—in a tumbledown shop at the edge of Choirdip’s barrio where she cleaned and fetched and counted and was paid in food and castoffs too poor to sell. Avarach had come to this service through a small dispute as to the ownership of a loaf of bread. Her hand still bore the scar of the knife, but instead of slow murder or slavery at the hands of the thieftakers, Avarach had been taken in and taught. Quick enough for a Harkady scribe, her mistress said—and laughed, though Avarach never knew why.
Her mistress’s name was Cheyne, and Cheyne wore two pieces of green turquoise in her left ear and a dangly gold moon in her right. Her little shop was filled with books, and perhaps she was right in what she said about Avarach, but only the Chapterhouse in Harkady possessed the arcanum of reading and writing, and Avarach had no wish to give up mother and family and home for the dubious benefits of literacy. So she laughed with Mistress Cheyne and took her pay.
This day Avarach stood counting—matching pairs of dice in one of the windowless rooms that made up Mistress Cheyne’s establishment. Each set must match in size and weight and color, and young eyes were sharpest. Outside the sky was the phoenix-blue of early spring, but Avarach’s mind and stomach and perhaps her heart were fixed on the two loaves of brown bread Mistress Cheyne had promised her when the day was over. Nimbly she sorted the dice: the shaved with the shaved, the weighted with the weighted, and the true and honest matched by size. In a fortnight the Choosers would come and then all of this would be over: only a dream, a bitter prelude to her real life.
“When you’re done there, sweep the front room all the way to the street,” said Mistress Cheyne, grading loose gemstones in the strong light of candles and mirrors. Nearly as good as direct sun, and a deal safer to use in the Choirdip barrio.
“Soon I won’t be coming back here.”
The news was too good to keep, and something almost-Sighted in her heart urged Avarach to tell. Mistress Cheyne raised her eyes from her work, regarding Avarach with a bland disbelief that made words come hot and easy.
“The Choosers are coming in two weeks. There’ll be a fair, and the magistrate swears holiday. Anyone who wants can go to the Crownpriests—it’s a fine if they stop you—they test for the Sight—they’ll choose me—”
“Have you Seen it?” Mistress Cheyne asked. Avarach stopped. In all her gaudy scraps of vision it was the one thing she had never seen: the moment when she became a legend.
“I know they’ll choose me. And then we’ll all go away, Mama and Granddam and baby Egland and even the twins, and—”
The still look on Cheyne’s face stopped her. That look meant danger, and Avarach froze in response. They stared at each other for a long moment, and then Cheyne spoke.
“The Choosers will take only you.”
Only her? But that couldn’t be. She was young yet, a child, surely they would know that and see, and take her mother with them—mother and grandmother and of course they could not leave the children behind.…
“The College will be your mother and father,” Cheyne said as if she too had the Sight, could look and see each frantic turning, each evasion of Avarach’s willingness to know. “The Crownpriests test any who come to them claiming the Sight, for only so can the Starharp be reclaimed by the world. Those who have it they will take. That is the law. But queen’s eyes have their price. From that moment all ties of blood and family are—”
“No!” Avarach started up and away, thudding into a table as she retreated. It rocked to the floor with a breaking sound and spilled a tray of spices.
Cheyne didn’t move.
“—severed,” she finished inexorably.
Avarach ran.
Liar, liar, liar, the words she wanted to say rose stranglingly in Avarach’s throat. She ran through the twisting alleyways, trying to outrun her humiliation. Stupid, she’d been so stupid, prattling on about how special she was, and now Cheyne would laugh, and tell.…
But Cheyne would neither laugh nor tell, and Cheyne knew everything, and always told the truth. Avarach slowed down, pulled to a walk by the burning stitch in her side and the bleak pain in her chest.
The Crownpriests would not care for her mother, her brothers, or her family. And the gift she had counted on to save all of them could only save her.
She tried to summon her gift, to grab its bright wings and force it to show her happy futures. But her Sight was erratic, untrained. Surety in the Sight was the gift the Crownpriests gave, the heritage Avarach had always been certain would be hers. Above the canted rooftops she could see the gleaming gold of the palace towers, beautiful and far in a clean bright world that only the brightness in Avarach would let her reach. She yearned for that greatness, the world of certainty and honor a universe away from her own. The world she could reach.
She could still have it. They would still take her. They would.
But only her.
Her footsteps took Avarach in the direction of the Bazaar. She passed the fine house, near the Trade Gate and the caravans, where Mother Dace’s wares lounged and lingered and fanned themselves in the sun. Pomegranate lips and beetle-wing eyelids, glittering with glass and false gold and scented ripe as a festival garden. Their skin had the sheen of bathing and oiling, the ripeness of plentiful food and often. Dace took care of her wares and took care to keep them fresh—just last year when Avarach had begun to bleed, Dace had come and offered Avarach’s mother a whole gold coin for a year of Avarach’s time. A year could lead to another year, to more, to a villa in the cool hills north of Choirdip and a protector who would weight her wrists and ankles with gauds that were not glass and gilded tin.
But there were other ways. The ways of heroes to bend and stretch the world to their design. Of warrior-priestesses, cloaked in white and sheathed in glittering mail, riding at the right hand of judges and priests, dispensing truth and justice and law in the bright sun.
Virgin for the Sight.
It was late when Avarach reached home—lateness caused in part by remembering she had not taken—or earned—the bread that Cheyne had promised her. The early spring day had turned to bone-cold winter when the sun set, and the little lane was blue with dusk. Oil that could be eaten was too precious to burn.
Avarach came to her front door and lifted the latch. The room beyond was as blue and cold as the street behind. No fire in the grate. Not even a stoup of hot water to warm her.
The baby lay swaddled near the ashes of the fire. The twins were nowhere to be seen.
“Mother?” said Avarach.
Her grandmother entered at the sound, letting the drape that concealed the doorway to the interior room fall behind her. Ignoring Avarach, she shuffled past her to the door and barred it for night.
“Granddam?”
Avarach’s grandmother looked at her. Her eyes were hard and bright, her hair—if any—concealed beneath a threadbare scarf.
“Your mother’s sick.”
Avarach shrugged, one-shouldered. Her mother had been sick as long as she could remember—since the twins were born, and they were nearly eight. Five children born only to die had not helped. The baby—not yet a year old—was the last fruit of her parents’ marriage, and Avarach’s father had not lived to see him.
“Very sick this time,” Granddam said. “She’s going to die.”
Now Avarach registered the too-stillness of the house. The twins must be with a neighbor. She listened hard, and imagination painted her mother’s labored breathing. Winterkill, the barrio called it. An affliction of the weak, the cold, and the hungry.
“We have to get her a doctor, Granddam.”
Her grandmother laughed and spat into the cold hearth.
“And do you think a doctor is going to come here, my fine lady? Doctors want coin.” Slowly she began laying a new fire in the grate. Sticks and scavengings. Hoarded chips of coal.
The baby began to cry. He was hungry—Avarach’s mother was still suckling him.
“There’s some—there is!”
“And did I spend it on her and not the taxman, my Marram wouldn’t forgive me—not and see the lot of you taken to pay the rate.”
Avarach picked up her small brother, wet and cold and furious with neglect.
“What there was to spare went to the apothecary. There’s nothing more.”
The old woman took a carefully curled spill and lit it from the firepot on the mantel. The yellow light cast the room into sharp relief: the walls, whitewashed and painted with flowers before Avarach was born, now grey except for the pale silhouettes of furniture sold; grey with the dirt there was not strength or resource to remove.
Poverty.
There had never been money, even while her soldier-father had been alive. Avarach had grown up doing without, living for the day she would ride out on a fine horse wearing silk and vair and armor of silver and gold. Crownpriestess. Hero.
But while she had dreamed, the elegancies of cleanliness, warmth, and comfort had been surrendered, battles lost, until all that was left was the naked struggle to live.
And they were going to lose it.
Avarach lay on her hard bed, twelve years old and filled with glory. A few feet away her mother tossed and coughed and muttered. The poppy-head tea that Granddam had bought helped only a little, and had to be saved for the worst.
The Sight stretched Avarach like an old wineskin, creaking and dangerous and filled with prophecy, but this time it turned her vision outward, not in.
Without Marram there would be no family. The baby would die, the twins would disappear into one of the roving bands of child-thieves that plagued Choirdip—if they were lucky. And Granddam… Who would care for a quarrelsome old woman, or offer her a seat by their fire?
But Avarach would be safe. Feted by the Crownpriests, cherished for her Sight, fed on wine and white bread, and dressed in clean new wool.
Climbing to heroism over the bodies of her family.
But there’s nothing I can do! Avarach pleaded with the darkness. It’s the future—I can’t change it! There’s nothing I can do—nothing!
Just out of reach, the power and the promise. She would be chosen by the Crownpriests and rise high in the councils of the Crown of Alarra. Her voice would shape the law. Pensions would be paid and almshouses founded. The widows of heroes would not starve in the street.
Someday.
In the morning Marram was worse. Avarach spent a fruitless hour trying to feed the baby warm gruel from a wooden spoon. She wasted more than he ate and wept for the loss.
Granddam went to beg and borrow from the neighbors. The twins came home and left again as quickly, frightened in the presence of disaster, going to the marketplace to scavenge and steal and hasten the day when ill luck caught them and fastened iron collars about their necks until their bond was paid.
And what Avarach must do waited, standing so heavy and dark in the road to her future that if she looked up she must surely see it.
Granddam came home with a basket over which the cloth lay flaccid. Egland had cried himself to sleep again. He lay by the fire in a basket too poor to sell.
Avarach met her grandmother’s eyes.
“It’s good you’re back. I’m going out.” Avarach pushed the door wide and stepped into the street.
She knew where she was going but pretended she did not. She went instead to Mistress Cheyne’s house, hoping for some upstart miracle that would let her bargain with the future.
But the shutters and door were barred, even at this late hour, and no one came for all Avarach’s knocking. At last she gave up and went where she must.
The fine
house near the Trade Gate had a servant’s entrance. Avarach knew enough to go there instead of to the front door with its ornaments of gryphons and phoenixes.
“Go away, beggar brat!” said the cook who opened it.
“I want to see Mother Dace!” said Avarach desperately. “She wants to see me. She said so.”
The room where Avarach was brought to wait was grand beyond imagining. There were carpets on the colored tile floors and painted walls of wood and stone. A silver bowl so big that the profits from its sale would feed everyone who lived on her street for a year sat on a table with a top that was a picture made of colored glass.
Avarach’s new future reached for her, black and suffocating. An end to all magic. She fought an urge to run, and the knowledge of failure.
I do this myself! Avarach said in fierce silence. By myself and for myself, and for no one’s will but mine!
Mother Dace would pay. A gold coin for a year of her time—enough to buy life and honesty for her mother and grandmother and brothers. There might be more—at least silver. Her family needed it to live. There was no one but her to earn it.
Avarach had always wanted to save the world. Now she knew where she had to start.
A week later a girl called Queeneyes stood in that room and waited for Mother Dace to come. She had left her home and given up her name to come here. Mother Dace had chosen the new one, not knowing how it hurt.
Avarach would never tell her. In a handful of days she had learned to answer to it, had learned the taste of fat capon and the feel of scented oils on her skin. The Sight that still burned within her cast shattered sparks of might-be futures across her vision; all doomed now.
She could still run. There was still time. The man was not here yet. She was not watched. But if she broke her word Dace would want her gold back, and the gold had been spent already, on bread and oil and brandy and medicine from the doctor—strong poppy sirup that let her mother sleep and heal.
The only repayment there could be was in kind—if not Avarach, then her brothers; gelded and sold (if they survived it), they would earn back the money Dace had spent on Avarach’s virginity.
Best of Marion Zimmer Bradley Fantasy Magazine, Volume 2 Page 17