Northshore (31 page)

Authors: Sheri S. Tepper

Tags: #Fiction

Her face cleared then. The tears dried. The rapture came into her eyes once more, and she nodded, hearing something he could not hear.

He stood up unsteadily and left her, feeling a deeper loneliness than he had felt since long, long ago in Xoxxy-Do.

Medoor Babji saw him leave the cabin, saw the unsteady walk, the drunken demeanor. He leaned over the rail as though he might be sick or readying himself to leap into the water, and she moved up beside him to lay a hard, small hand upon his back.

‘Thrasne owner,’ she said, risking everything for his pain. ‘It doesn’t take a Jarb Mendicant to tell us the woman is mad.’ Jarb Mendicants had a reputation, not often undeserved, for treating mental troubles of one kind or another, and it was in the Jarb Houses that the truly mad found refuge.

For a time he seemed not to have heard her. ‘Mad?’ he asked at last, as though he did not know the meaning of the word.

‘Mad, Thrasne. Though she had not tasted jarb to see visions, still she has visions of her own. She is not your Suspirra because the Suspirra you dreamed of was not mad and this woman is. Your Suspirra is an ideal, Thrasne
owner. Not a real creature of this world. This woman, Pamra, she is only a semblance of your ideal, and she is real. Of this world. Therefore, imperfect.’

‘No, not of this world,’ he disagreed simply. ‘But I love her with all my heart.’

She shook her head, tears forming at the corners of her eyes. She, Babji, hardened by the marketplaces of a half hundred towns, to cry so for this man. She shook her head angrily, letting the tears fly away. ‘Then love her if you must, Thrasne. But you must look somewhere else for the things you dream of.’ She left him and went to her bedding where it lay upon the deck. Long into the night she lay there, alternately angry and sorrowful, picturing herself and Thrasne, together, without realizing she was doing it. He was not Noor. Given only that, he was not her equal, for the Noor were what they were only to others of their kind. To mate with one outside the Noor was to diminish oneself. She had no right to consider him at all, but consider him she did. Finally, just before dawn, she said to herself in an ironic voice, ‘Well, love him if you must, Babji; but look elsewhere for the things you dream of.’

The morning brought them to a mountainous region, a place of towering peaks and precipitous cliffs; a Talons. Upon the stony peaks they could see the clustered forms of fliers, and high above were their spread wings, floating in great circles. Thrasne kept the
Gift
well offshore, away from the cliffs and the treacherous currents that swirled around the tumbled stone at their feet. Pamra stood at the rail, peering forward, shifting from foot to foot, speaking aloud, as though to a company of friends, pointing to the fliers far above in increasing agitation. Thrasne watched her, telling himself he did not care what she was doing. He had not spoken to her since the night before except in passing, as he might speak to any member of the crew. Now she acted as though she had been told to go or do something she was uncertain of, for she asked something again and again, almost plaintively. Whatever answer she received was eventually enough, for when night came she went to her bed with
a calm face. They would come into Thou-ne on the morning tide.

When they tied up at the jetty and edged out the plank, he was not really surprised to see her leaving the boat. He wrestled with himself for a moment, deciding not to follow her, then deciding that he must. He had promised to keep her safe. He had made no conditions then; it would not be fair or proper to set conditions now. Still, he was hard put to it to follow her as she went through the town, one foot in front of the other, as sure as the wind. She had a cloak drawn over her head, but when she reached the public square she drew it back, hair floating wildly free as the drowned Suspirra’s had used to do. She mounted to the steps of the public fountain and turned, arm outstretched, face glowing like a little moon. ‘People,’ she cried in a voice like a flute, softly insinuating. ‘Is it not better when the people know?’ Those in the marketplace turned to see her, astonished, drawing close and staring as she stood there, gathering them in with her hands.

And from some little fellow at the edge of the square came a scream, almost hysterical, a treble cry as from a child but with the force of a trumpet blown, announcing war. ‘She has come, in flesh, the Bearer of Truth!’ It was Peasimy Flot, alert to the coming of light as he had always been, always remembering the dark, the lies.

(Peasimy, remembering following the Awakeners when they took his father to the next town east and then just threw him in the worker pits in the dark, as though they didn’t care; Peasimy remembering when the body fixer told him it wouldn’t hurt, what they were going to do to him that time he broke his arm, and it did hurt, a lot; Peasimy remembering the shining face from beneath the water, and it was this face.)

‘She has come,’ he cried again, like a call to battle.

A shout went up then. It was half surprise, half recognition, from a hundred throats. Thrasne had lingered at the edge of the square and was suddenly at the back of a crowd, all watching her. Pamra’s eyes opened very wide, as though
to take this in. Then she nodded, answering their shout as a sigh went through those gathered by.

‘I have come,’ she agreed, beckoning to the thin, hectic-looking young fellow who had called out. ‘I have come bringing the truth. You have been expecting me, and I have come.’

Thrasne turned back to the docks, sick at heart.

He went to a tavern, where he drank among a crowd of doubters and nay sayers, then returned to the
Gift.
Medoor Babji stood on the deck, reading something while stroking the feathers of a large, dun-colored bird. When she saw him coming, she tossed the bird into the air, then put the missive in her pocket as she came toward him. She was the only one there. She had stayed behind when her fellows had left the boat to buy stores for their journey. Perhaps she had known he would return.

‘Medoor Babji,’ he croaked. ‘You were right. She is mad. Mad or possessed. Or something else I have never heard of. What shall I do?’

His agony was manifest. She held out her arms, and he fell into them as into a well. She held him, kissing his sun-browned face where the hair grew back, tasting the sweat of his forehead along with his tears. What could he do?

‘I have kept her hidden, but she is in the square now, where anyone can see her. The Laughers will find her! Or the fliers. I think she will preach revolt against the fliers.’ So much he had inferred from her soliloquies over the past days.

‘If she is surrounded by people?’ Medoor asked abstractedly. She was still thinking of the message the bird had brought, a letter from her mother, Queen Fibji. A letter commanding her to a great exploration, a voyage. How could she think of something else just now? Yet she did, seeing in the agonized face before her all agonized faces, Noor and shore-fish alike. ‘How can the Laughers take her if she is surrounded by a multitude?’

‘If the Laughers cannot take her, they will send Jondarites. Jondarites to put down a rebellion.’ Thrasne
had seen this happen once or twice in the past. He was sure of it, hopelessly sure.

Jondarites.

Holding him in her arms, close against her girl’s breasts, Medoor felt the chill of the word. Jondarites. Now, now she began to realize what was really happening here. It was not a matter merely of a madwoman and a man. There was more to it than that.

Jondarites.

Jondarites and the Noor.

Queen Fibji, far to the north, bearing greater burdens than anyone should have to bear. The endless depredations of the Jondarites. The great plan. And now this word of an even greater possibility, which the seeker bird had brought. If the Jondarites were sent in great numbers to Northshore, to put down a rebellion, there would be fewer to prey upon the Noor. And if there were fewer depredations among the Noor, then the Noor might better do what was best for them.

‘Come,’ she whispered at last. ‘Let us go see what Pamra is really doing.’

Pamra had gone to the Temple, together with half the town. Thrasne and Medoor Babji pushed their way into a corner of the crowded sanctuary, where they could kneel with the others before the image of the glowing woman. At first Thrasne did not recognize his carving of Suspirra, for it shone with a light he had never seen. Only when Pamra stood before it and claimed it as a precursor, divinely meant, sent to announce her coming, did he become truly aware of what it was. He wanted to laugh. He would have laughed except for the ominous stillness in the place. Precursor? Yes, but from his knife and a lump of fragwood, nothing more than that.

Afterward he scarcely remembered what she had said. There had been something in it of love and something of righteousness. She had spoken of being misled. Of a conspiracy to keep the Protector of Man unmindful of the evil that flew upon the winds of the world. She spoke of the
worker pits and of the great lie of Sorting Out. She told them truth, that the true Sorting took place in another realm, beyond the world, and what happened in this world was a blasphemy. She called the fliers Servants, not of Abricor, but of their own pride. She said all that, over and over, in different words, making them laugh and weep and cry out. Someone called to her, asking how she knew these things, and she said her voices had told her to stand before them and tell the truth, at which many had shouted out they would follow her in the telling.

‘Crusade,’ she cried. ‘Let all who can, join me in crusade. We will carry the word of this injustice around the world. And when we go to free the Protector of Man from those who hold him in ignorance, we will be many, a multitude, a great tide to sweep away the evil of the world.’ Lila lay in her arms as she said this, looking out at the crowd with great, wide eyes, reaching out her baby arms toward them all.

The strange little man who had first hailed her called out again, ‘The Mother of Truth,’ and others echoed these words. His face and theirs were shining with devotion.

Thrasne thrilled to her voice, as did everyone within sound of it. He could not stop himself. His flesh responded even when he told himself it was all foolishness. There were others there, Awakeners among them. They, too, looking at her with an expression of alert surprise and wonderment, nodding their heads as though she had been Viranel herself.

Not Viranel. No. Viranel’s face carved on the wall behind Pamra was only an image, crude and somehow horribly inhuman. One could not worship a god that was a stranger. Not Viranel. Something finer than that. Holier than that.

And even then, he wanted her still. The impossibility of that wanting struck him like a blow, and he leaned forward on his knees and wept as Medoor Babji regarded him thoughtfully, fingering in her deep pocket the message she had received.

And Peasimy crouched at Pamra’s feet as she went on
teaching, lit from within as though by flame. He crouched there, cheeks red with the fire of her talk, eyes burning also, all of him lit up as if from within by that hot, plasmic vapor, as though he were liquid, without form except as her words gave him form and meaning, shaped by her with that shape crystallizing in every instant to something more refined, simpler, with keener edges and corners to it. ‘Light comes,’ he murmured to himself, a litany, an obligato to her speech. ‘Light comes, light comes.’

But then, his eyes lighting upon the tall, dark-cloaked Jondarites, who made a shadowy enclosure about the sanctuary, unable in their uncommanded state either to attend to what Pamra was saying or prevent her from speaking, held in abeyance as the dammed River holds itself, full of force and power that is for the moment unused, not out of conviction but out of simple inability to act – seeing these, their high-plumed helmets nodding as they craned their necks to observe all who came into that throng, Peasimy spoke again.

‘But first, night comes. Night comes.’

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