Starwater Strains

by Gene Wolfe

  It stung, but he ran the sharp blade down the cut again.

  She drank now. Her lips were frigid when they pressed his hand, but grew warmer—as she herself grew more real, an actual and even ordinary girl, far too thin but very much alive, just entering womanhood.

  At length she straightened up. “It’s stopped,” she said. “I’d ask you to do it again, but I know you wouldn’t. Would you?”

  He shook his head.

  “But you’ll bury me? Please?”

  “Those are your bones?”

  “Of course. I—we—it’s hard to explain,”

  He knelt to dig again. “Try.”

  “It’s like not being able to sleep. Well, it’s really not like that. It’s not being able to rest. If you could dig, and walk around and talk to people, and maybe plow, or hoe the garden. But you could never just sit in the shade and fan yourself, or shut your eyes.”

  He looked up. “You’re her ghost? This was you?”

  “Of course.”

  “You live here?”

  “I lived here,” the ghost said. “It got to be nearly night, and the Night People started. Night comes really soon to this valley. Everybody left when the sun did except me. I had to bury Mama and get the roots in before they rotted. I never did get them all in.”

  “You’re a Sun Person,” he said, still digging. “Like me.”

  “No,” the ghost told him, “I’m a Dead Person.”

  He hesitated. “You look real.”

  “Because of your blood. If it was sunshine here like it used to be, you’d see. I think I’ll fade pretty fast anyway. But I’m grateful. It feels really good, even if it won’t last.”

  He judged the hole deep enough, picked up her head and bones and lowered them into it, then began to replace the earth, mostly by pushing it back into the hole with his hand and the broad blade of the coarse knife. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “It was Mej.”

  “That’s short. Maybe I could put up a marker.”

  The ghost shook her head. “That’s just so somebody can find them and dig them up again. I was born here and I died here, and this is where I stay.”

  “Will you disappear when I finish filling the hole?” Within himself he added, “Will I?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then I’ll stay awhile, but pretty soon I’ll want to go someplace warmer. I don’t think you will either. Why should you?”

  “I used to be a psychiatrist.” He stopped shoving dirt into the hole to think. “Do you know what that is?”

  “Someone like you.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, that’s it exactly. May I tell you?”

  She nodded.

  “I treated people who had sick minds. I tried to make them well. Or if I couldn’t make them well, I tried to get them better, help them just a little. It was hard, very hard, but I tried hard, too, and sometimes I could make a real difference. People who had hardly been able to function at all were able to function normally sometimes. Oh, they had quirks, moments of intense fear and so on. But they functioned better than many others, and were happy now and then. That’s the most any of us can hope for, to be happy now and then.”

  “I was happy here,” the ghost said.

  He had finished filling the hole. He piled the rest of the earth on it, forming a mound that he would later tamp down. “Before your mother died, you mean.”

  “No, after. While I was burying her and getting in the roots. I wasn’t happy when she was so sick. I couldn’t be. But afterward it was just me. I could do anything I wanted. I went to bed and listened to the owls, when I woke up I lay in bed and listened to the wren and the song sparrow.” She laughed, a strange but almost a living sound. “Once I put bread beside the bed, so I could eat before I got up. When I got it in the morning the mice had nibbled out a place.” She laughed again.

  “I went to prison,” he told her, “because I helped a patient too much, and my records were very important to me. My notes. I had to know what my patients had told me, so I could review it. I couldn’t remember everything, so I had to write it down. My patients had to know those records would never be made public.” He tried to remember what those patients had called him, Dr. Something, and finished weakly by saying, “I’m Tuck, by the way.” His mother had called him Tuck.

  “I’m Mej. Are you going to step on that, Tuck?”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t believe that would be right. I’m going to pat it down with my hands.”

  “Thank you. I think I’ll get a little sleep.”

  When he looked around for her again, she was no longer there. He shrugged, selected a likely vegetable from the small garden, and walked on, eating as he walked. “There are no such things as ghosts,” he told himself, “yet I’m nearly sure patients see ghosts frequently. From those two facts, two more emerge readily. The first is that things which do not exist are frequently visible. The second: I myself am a patient.

  “If I am a patient, I must assist in my own cure; but how can I, if I do not understand the nature of my disease? Answer: by examining the symptoms, I can deduce the nature of my disease.

  “First symptom: I frequently mutter to myself when my mouth is full.” He chewed vigorously and swallowed, grinning.

  “That symptom is disposed of. My disease remains, of course. Second symptom: I have lost all contact with reality. Presumably I am in the prison hospital in a vegetative state. To return to reality, I must comprehend the nature of my delusions. This darkness presumably represents the ethical desert of the penitentiary. It is less now than it was because I have been taken to the hospital where things are somewhat better. The vertical trees reflect the vertical bars on windows and doors. Take that one.” He directed his own attention toward an inoffensive sapling. “It’s even the right thickness.”

  Seizing it with both hands, he shook it until its dying leaves rattled. “Just so, Dr. Tuck. I cannot effect my escape by shaking the bars. I am still in prison. What if I take my sword to it?”

  He drew his sword and slashed halfheartedly at the sapling, scarring the bark. “No result. But what about a serious attack?” He cut, right and left and right again. Chips flew, and soon the sapling fell.

  “Listen!” said a familiar voice at his elbow.

  Tuck spun around. “Nerys?”

  “Here I am.” She stepped out of the shadows. “Did you believe I had left you?”

  He nodded.

  “I was with you. Where else should I be? Weeping among the living while I watched my husband’s body rot?” She pointed to the sword he held. “There is my man.”

  “This?” He held the sword up.

  “There.” Her finger slipped between his to touch the wooden grip he had made. “Your hand warmed that. Thus you see me.”

  “When I carried the club …” He let the sentence trail away.

  “Again! Listen!”

  Screams, he thought.

  Silence succeeded the screams; he visualized another Tree Woman like Nerys in the grip of a second beast, and dashed away.

  Before he had run far he struck another road, the first real road he had seen, a road of pounded red clay wide enough for horsemen to ride four abreast. The man thundering toward him rode alone, and if he had ever had three companions it seemed likely they were dead—his clothing was bright with blood, which streamed from his head and shoulders.

  Tuck stood aside panting and let him pass, receiving two drops of blood on his face for his trouble, and three on his shirt.

  Jogging now, he topped a rise. Dead men lay in the road; not far from one lay a horse too badly wounded to rise, with blood pulsing from its nostrils. A second horse shied as soon as it caught sight of him, its reins dragging, its head up, and its eyes wide.

  He stopped, careful not to meet its gaze. “You are mistaken,” he said. “I don’t hate horses or want to hurt them. I love horses.” It was not true, and he felt obliged to amend it. “I li
ke horses. Before Sally left me, we had three horses, two geldings and a beautiful little Arabian mare. You’re a stallion, right? You would have loved her.” He edged closer, careful not to look directly at the brown stallion with the trailing reins. “Sally loved her a lot more than she ever loved me, but I liked her anyway. She was as affectionate and gentle as any animal could ever be.”

  At the word, he had gotten a foot on the trailing reins. He picked them up, still careful not to look directly at the brown stallion. “You’re a fighting horse,” he said. “I’m not a fighting man, but I’m a man who’ll fight when he has to. For the present that may be good enough. It may have to be.”

  Mounted, he wheeled the stallion and trotted up the slope.

  They were nearer than he would have guessed, one covering the woman while six more watched. Those six turned at the drumroll of the stallion’s hooves, and one managed to raise a javelin before he was ridden down. The sword with the wooden grip split the skull of another. Frantic with victory Tuck dropped the reins and threw the coarse knife at the man separating himself from the woman. The pommel struck his eye, and in a moment more he was ridden down as well.

  The woman was naked and weeping, and for an hour or more unwilling to rise. Tuck found the ruin of a silk gown, covered her with it, and sat beside her stroking her hand. “It was terrible,” he said. “I know how bad it was. Believe me, I know. Now it’s over, and it won’t happen anymore. For the rest of your life you’ll know that nothing you face will be as terrible as what happened here today, and that you lived through this and came out of it better and stronger.” He said this and much more again and again, perhaps a score of times.

  At last she said, “Will they come back?”

  He shrugged. “You would know better than I.”

  After that he lifted her onto the brown stallion’s saddle and mounted behind her. “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Wherever you want to.”

  “It will be more dangerous if we go back,” she told him, “but I would like to go back.”

  She had pointed as she spoke. He turned the brown stallion, holding it to a rapid walk. “Where are we?”

  “This is the Valley of Coomb. You must be a stranger here. Are you from the west?”

  “From a far country,” he said, and to himself added, “I think.”

  “You are a brave man, if you are rushing to meet the night, O my husband. But I knew you for a brave man when you slew those who had slain my guards.”

  “I’m not your husband,” he said.

  “You have seen my nakedness. Do you not know the law?”

  “More than I want to now,” he told her, “but I don’t think I’ve come across this one.”

  “If a man beholds the nakedness of a maid, he must restore her honor by wedding her, if he himself is unwed. That is the law for common women. But if a man beholds the nakedness of a royal maiden, he must put away his wife, and he has one, to wed the royal maiden and restore her honor, O my husband. Had you a wife?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Indeed. Indeed.” She looked over her shoulder, smiling. “You that saved me are harmed the worse. Though I am most grateful for the hand which braces my waist in your saddle, might it not perhaps be some trifle higher?”

  The light failed as they followed the road into the Valley of Coomb. “Here our poor folk left a hundred-eatings gone,” she told him, “for this valley is the very Herald of Night.”

  “I’m surprised you wanted to come back here.”

  She wiggled closer, although they were already very close. “I have you to protect me. Besides, we met their group as we were about to leave the eastern side, thus they had only entered. Had there been others in deeper night, they would have attacked us sooner.”

  “I met bandits deeper in,” he told her.

  “Our own people?” She turned to look at him over her shoulder.

  “Not my people,” he said, “but Night People, which I suppose must be what you mean.”

  “My people are the Sun People,” she said, “and because they are mine, yours as well, O my husband. Do you not know me?”

  “No, but I should introduce myself first.”

  She nodded.

  “I’m Tuck, at your service.”

  “You are Prince Tuck, my consort. My own name is Estar.” She coughed apologetically. “Princess Estar. Please do not grovel.”

  “I’ll avoid it if at all possible.”

  The smile she directed at him was almost a grin. “Thank you. I have met others, now and then, who did not know me. They groveled, and I hate that. That is a poor man’s sword you wield so well. You are not rich?”

  “I have nothing,” Tuck said.

  She dimpled. “Except me.”

  “No, you have me. You’re the loveliest woman I’ve ever seen. I’m afraid that I’ll wake up any minute and you’ll be gone.”

  “You,” she said, “are going to make a most satisfactory husband.”

  There was a farm at the western edge of the valley. He left her some distance from it and explained to the farm wife that she must sell a gown.

  “Sacking,” Estar said as she pulled it down, “at least you will no longer see that my hips and legs are fat.”

  “I’ve seen your hips, and your legs, and they are perfect. Both of them.”

  “Both legs you mean, and you are looking very far down. You have no money?”

  “Nope. I paid the woman for your dress with what I had.”

  “You could have become rich by searching the bodies of those you killed back there. They took my jewels.”

  Tuck shrugged.

  “You are right. Swords, not jewels, make a king. It was a saying of my father’s.”

  “He’s passed away? I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “Died?” Estar shook her head. “He seldom speaks. He is old, and … Sometimes he will not eat.”

  “I see.”

  “If he were dead, I would be queen. You, my husband, would be our king until I bore an heir and he reached the age of maturity. But I do not want my father to die. Does that surprise you?”

  “No. Certainly not.”

  “That is well. Look above those trees.”

  She pointed, and he discovered an unexpected pleasure in the slenderness and whiteness of her arm. His lips brushed the shoulder that held it in the lightest and swiftest of kisses.

  “Do you see—” For an instant she seemed to choke, and coughed. “The flag? It is green and yellow, and so not easily seen above the trees.”

  “I think so.”

  “It flies from Strongdoor Tower. There is yellow stone beneath it. Perhaps you cannot see it.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” he said.

  “The baron’s name is Blaan. He is my most loyal vassal, or says loudly that he is, and would wed me if you would step aside for him. Will you?”

  “No.” A woman—this woman—was much too precious.

  She dimpled. “You have not seen how large and strong he is. You will shake with fear, O my husband.”

  He smiled back. “I doubt it.”

  “We must see. I cannot ride back to Cikili in this gown. Thus we must ask his aid. He has, I should think, three hundred men, if not more. Will you kill them all for me?”

  “I doubt that it’ll prove necessary.”

  The guard at the portcullis looked incredulous when Tuck said that the woman who shared his saddle was Princess Estar, and gawked when he recognized her. Baron Blaan welcomed her, ignored Tuck, and turned her over to a housekeeper and a bevy of maids. He was, as she had said, a tall, beefy, and quite muscular man.

  Tuck seated himself in the best chair in the Great Hall and stared at the fire, which was larger than any summer evening could have required.

  He had refused to turn over someone’s records. Who had she been? Records showing he had helped with what? Bit by bit he pictured a dozen patients and former patients. A woman accused of killing a child—accused on slender e
vidence, presumably, since they would not have wanted her psychiatrist’s notes if they had a strong case. He himself had been psychoanalyzed ten years ago, as all analysts were at the beginning of their careers. Could it have been those notes they wanted?

  Could he have murdered a child?

  He decided that he could not, but that he could certainly have been accused of having done it and worse. Anyone these days—any man, particularly—could be accused of anything by anyone.

  “That’s my chair you’re sitting in,” Blaan said.

  “Sorry.” Tuck rose and moved to another.

  “That’s my chair, too.”

  Tuck sighed. “No doubt it is. This is your castle and you own all its furniture. I thank you for allowing me, a mere prince and your guest, to use it. But if you want me to vacate it, you need stronger arguments.”

  “A prince? You don’t look it. Of what nation?”

  “Yours.”

  The word hung there for perhaps half a minute. At last Blaan said, “You’re a dreamer. I can tell that—a dreamer with a torn cheek! What do you dream of as you peer into my fire, dreamer?”

  He had been thinking of the prison wood shop to which he had initially been assigned, his practice in the prison hospital, and his fill-in work in the library. “Stevenson,” he said. “Blinking embers, tell me true, where are those armies marching to, and what the burning city is, that crumbles in your furnaces?”

  Blaan blinked too; he was saved by Estar, who swept into the room, resplendent in cloth-of-gold, with two maids to carry her train.

  Blaan rose, and Tuck with him.

  “My husband is not obliged to bow save on the most ceremonial occasions.” Estar’s voice would have frozen seawater. “You, Baron, are not thus exempt.”

  “You have married this—this …” For a moment Blaan could only stare, at a loss for words. “This vagabond!”

  Tuck laid a friendly hand on Blaan’s shoulder. “Bow.”

  Blaan spun to face him. His sword was in his hand so quickly it seemed impossible that he had actually drawn it. “Guards!”

  Estar screamed.