Authors: Finder
"Yes," I said, "but she
left
."
He stared at me with a bleak, arrested look that reminded me of the way I'd felt when, the day before, I'd called out to ask her if she had any twine and she hadn't answered.
I set the tea to steeping, and put out the good cups and saucers. By the time I brought everything to the table he had his face under control again. He would have been within his rights to remind me that he hadn't wanted anything, thank you, but he didn't do that. I poured, and he lifted his cup and drank as if his mind wasn't on it. I sipped at mine and kept my mouth shut. I'd just played what I considered an ace, and it was up to him to respond.
Finally he set the cup down with a little click. "I am sorry if it gives you pain," he said, in his measured, rather formal way, "but I must carry her body back. That is all."
Not an ace, after all. But he'd sure looked as if it was. "Why?"
"It is the duty I owe to the memory of… of the ones who have gone before us. To our family."
I had less sympathy with that argument than some people would, but it seemed to weigh a lot with him.
"You have a duty to her, too, don't you? To her memory. Because if you came here at all, you must not have disowned her."
China rang softly as his hand bumped the saucer. He jumped a little and put both hands in his lap. "It cannot be discussed. Please, please, do not press me, but be assured that it is of the greatest importance to me."
It was unsatisfying; it was unsatisfactory; it did, in fact, give me pain; but I didn't know what else to say.
Tick-Tick's last four years meant more to me than anything that could happen to what was left of her now. Vissa hadn't had those four years. Maybe he needed her funeral more than I did. I didn't look forward to explaining to anyone who showed up for it tomorrow why there wasn't going to be a
ceremony after all, but I could do it.
And what if he was right? She had been my best friend, but there had been things we didn't talk about, boundaries we didn't cross, questions we didn't ask. If I knew more about her than I had actually been told by her, I didn't mention it, and she did the same. It had something to do with pride, with recognizing its requirements in each other and respecting them. I'd shared the last four years of her life, but he'd shared the ones before that. He might know things I had been too respectful to ask.
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"It mus
t be important to you," I said at last, "or you wouldn't have come. All right. You can take her
body back." I rose and walked
up those three platforms to the front windows
. Why my crazy partner had
wanted it to be so much work to look out at the street was beyond me. I supposed a few other things might have been beyond me, as well. I braced my hands on the window frame and looked, at the empty street sunk in twilight, at the trumpet-fanfare sunset in orange and rose and azure, at the rooftops, at nothing.
A little noise behind me made me turn. I'd left the cupboard door open when I got out the tea things.
Vissa stood in front of it, cradling something in his arms, his head bent. It was a moment before I could tell that what he held was a bottle with a brittle brown label. The liqueur, the one Tick-Tick had said was from over the Border, that she'd poured on strawberries and set fire to. Vissa clutched it as if it were a child, and on his face I could see tears standing.
"What is it?" I asked, coming toward him.
He whispered, "This… is from our vines, our cellars. The work of our family, for centuries, is in this liquor."
My heart gave a little sinking lurch. She'd talked defiance toward her family while she poured it, but still, she owned some, and that seemed to mean something to her brother. He was right, and I didn't know as much about her as I'd thought.
Then he raised his head. It was the wrong kind of sadness. It was as if she had died long ago, and still hadn't quite died until now. "I was mistaken," he said slowly. "I should not have come. Ah, blessed Mab, she
did
leave, and a curse on us that we hardly knew it!"
"I don't understand," I told him.
"No. This," he nodded at the bottle, "is an unintended message, and only I have the reading of it."
"Well, can you tell me what it is?"
He smiled, just barely. "She did not decant it."
I stared, and at last, in desperation, added, "Huh?"
"To use this from the bottle is—oh, our father would have raged to see it done so! It is against all custom, allùyou may trust me, it is not thought of, and in my house, had the thought been made a deed, what would have come of it would make you think no storm terrible, no raised hand to be dreaded. But if anyone would scorn the custom, it would be she.
"That was ever her way. I was the elder; I would bid her show respect for her father and mother, for our line, for tradition. I bid her do as I did, for I showed respect always. But what I showed always was not… She told me that I feared more than I honored. She never feared. Our father hated her skill at devising and constructing, and forbade her to use it. She would flout him, and he would play the tyrant, and she would defy him even to laughter." He dashed the tears away with one hand and lifted his chin. "I thought I would find that, in her heart, her home and mine had been ever the same. I thought, when she left, that she had left only him, and not the land, not the past, not—" He brought himself up short. "But if that was so, you see, she would have decanted the liquor."
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He set it back
in the cupboard, like someone setting a memory away.
For a moment, we stayed like that, hanging between old beliefs and new ones. I said, "The funeral's tomorrow. Would you like to come?"
His brows drew together. Then his face cleared and became almost serene. "Yes, that would please me, if it can be done."
We finished the contents of the teapot, and eventually switched to beer. There wasn't any trouble finding something
to talk about
: we talked about her. He told me about her as a child, about the tree fort that she'd designed and bullied her brother and his friends into assembling, with an elevator made of a wooden platform, a rope, and two pulleys, complete with a friction brake which, he assured me,
laughing, worked most of the time. She'd gotten hold of some eyeglass lenses from out in the World and tried to build a telescope.
Children and even much older kids brought her broken things to fix, and she'd do it in secret, in trade for whatever bits of mechanical or electrical things they could find for her. The electrical things were almost impossible to get, but they were her favorites. One night, when the whole house was asleep, she'd crept to her brother's room and woken him, and insisted he come to hers. Then she made him climb into the wardrobe with her, to show him what she'd hidden there in the dark: an electric clock working off an improvised battery, its lighted face glowing greenish-silver like the moon behind a cloud, its second hand making its steady way around the dial, its motor running with a faint, buzzing whisper.
She'd been clever as an adolescent, too, he told me, as well as wild and lonely. There were fewer stories that he could tell me from that time, though; an adolescent lives in a larger part of the world than a child, and the prohibitions that keep elves from talking freely about the land they come from applied more often. But from what he said, added to what Tick-Tick herself had let fall now and then, I thought her reasons for running away hadn't been very different from mine.
In turn, I told him about her adventures in Bordertown, trying to give him some of the aspects of his sister that he'd missed out on. Sometimes he shook his head; sometimes he frowned; but more often he smiled, and I wished, for his sake and hers, that he'd set family tradition aside and shown up on the doorstep a year earlier.
"I did not—stand by her," Vissa said once, when it was very late and the beer was getting low. "I might have defended her against my father's anger, against the little cruelties of others. If I had, perhaps…"
I could fill in the end of the sentence as well as he could. Even though one of the endings was, "… she would be alive now," I couldn't wish him a different past. If it had been different, she might not have been herself, Tick-Tick, and I might never have known her. But I reached out my hand and laid it lightly over his, and said one of those inadequate things about it being all right.
He turned his palm up and clasped my fingers, hard. "No, it is not. But it is done, and now we must seek our happiness in what we have made, and set aside these phantom joys."
Back in the World, I had never really sat
shivah
, when for seven days after the funeral the family gathers to remember and talk about the dead. By the time I was old enough to pay attention, my branch of the family was estranged from the rest, and that we didn't participate had less to do with lack of respect for the dead than lack of willingness to speak to the living. But Vissa and I remembered Tick-Tick to each other until the sky began to pale, and I understood the custom at last.
I'm sure there are funeral traditions in the Elflands, and heaven knows, there are thousands in the World.
But the Borderlands haven't been around long enough for what could be called traditions. Weddings, funerals, births, namings, whatever: either you bring old practices with you and use those, or you take a handful of what you remember, another of what you've heard of, a dash of invention, stir until blended, and call it custom. When this works, it does so because the participants come prepared to take their part in an act of creation.
Tick-Tick's funeral was one of the second sort. There was some of the Elflands in it, and some American plains nomad, some ancient Roman, some traditional Japanese—the sort of result you'd expect from
putting the ceremony in the charge of two people who ran a bookstore. It was held in a meadow on the southern edge of the city, under a bright blue cloudless sky and the occasional outraged diving attacks of red-winged blackbirds, like little fighter planes. A space had been cleared away in the middle for the scaffold. Its uprights were sections of young pine trunks, the scaly bark intact; the bier they supported was made of laced pine boughs. There were dried herbs and fragrant plants heaped on it, sage, artemisia, sweet woodruff, rosemary; and on that mattress lay the body, cocooned in scarlet silk and strewn with yellow summer flowers. The fire was laid and ready to light under the scaffold: apple wood, cherry, rowan, and oak. A lot of the people who came wore white, though not by any apparent prearrangement.
No, not everyone in town showed up. Not even all the people who had known Tick-Tick showed up;
some of those were down with the virus, others were afraid of catching it and were staying home, and a few, I was afraid, had died as she had. But the staff of the Hard Luck had closed the place and come, as had Mingus from Taco Hell. Most of the people who worked at Snappin' Wizard's and Magic Freddy's
had come, as had Sunny, and Wolfboy and Sparks, of course, Ms. Wu, Milo Chevrolet, Yoshi,
Camphire, Weegee, Kathy Hong and Cascade from Chrystoble Street copshop. Dancer and Val from
Danceland, a contingent of the all-elven Bloods, at least as many members of the all-human Pack (after all, you couldn't afford much anti-elf prejudice if you wanted to get your motorcycle repaired by the best mechanic in town), a lot of the Horn Dance folks, and a whole great crowd of people whose faces I did and did not recognize, whose names I did and didn't remember, to whom she had meant something. You don't take a head count at a funeral. Let it suffice to say that there were a lot of people there.