Ilze’s voice came from behind her, formally cool, yet with a slight tone of anger. ‘Pamra, you’re white as pamet. Have you just been bled? Who did it?’
Pamra kept her face forward. While talking at morning meal was not forbidden, it was considered indicative of a lack of seriousness. Still, he was a senior and her mentor. He had a perfect right to come into women’s quarters, a perfect
right to question her. She whispered, ‘It was Betchery.’
‘Betchery indeed. I should have known without asking.’ He was lean and brown with a bony, handsome face and hungry eyes. Despite his evident concern, Pamra felt a sense of danger whenever he was near, as though she might burn if he focused on her more closely. She shifted uncomfortably beneath his unsmiling regard, keeping her eyes down where they belonged, uneasy under his stare.
‘You’re in no condition to be on labor roster. Take it easy today, and I’ll see what I can do.’ He touched her, almost a caress, lingering longer than necessary. Beneath his hand, her skin quivered, not welcoming the touch, not daring to reject it. He turned, saying, ‘Well, enough of this rejoicing. I have yesterday’s plowed fields to inspect.’
‘Rejoice!’
Pamra responded formally.
‘The Awakening is at hand.’
He left her with an amused smile, shaking his head very slightly. Ilze frequently seemed to find her amusing, and this slight, half-concealed mockery often puzzled her. This morning, however, she was too weary to be puzzled by anything.
In the open corridor between men’s and women’s quarters, she waited at the bleeders’ hatch for someone to bring whatever supplements the Superior had ordered. Betchery brought them out, fat Betchery, sneering and popping candies into her mouth as Pamra tried to choke the pills down dry. It was Betchery’s habit of gluttony that Pamra had commented on to Jelane. Unfortunately, Betchery had overheard the conversation.
‘Rejoice, Awakener,’ said Betchery, handing over the two daily flasks of blood and Tears. ‘Lookin’ a trifle pale, there.’
‘Rejoice and amen.’ Pamra would not give her the satisfaction of anything but ritual. Rejoice and amen, and amen to you, Betchery, bitch. If you come dead under my hands, you’ll not be Sorted. She went out into the morning, no longer trembling, merely angry-sad as bleeding usually made her. It brought a brooding melancholy that made the
world seem colorless – a painting done in shades of brown and tan with none of the usual life and vitality.
The water in the trough on the high steps riffled in the light wind of the year’s second summer, warmer and less rainy than the autumn that had just passed. Thin, early-morning clouds streamed north in the onshore winds; later they would puff like pamet pods to hang their heavy veils over the fields. A flight of young flame-birds fled across the sky, their orangey feathers spark bright in the sun. Down in the Baristown plaza, a line of swaying Melancholics moved across the pave, chanting to awaken the people. Only they or the Awakeners would be up this early. The parkland that separated the Tower from Outskirt Road at the edge of Baristown lay green in this early light, quiet, silvered with dew.
Beyond the park and the plaza, the avenue stretched south to the bank of the World River. There the tidal bulge pulsed westward as it followed the god-moons Viranel and Abricor, hanging like pale, round lanterns in the western sky. Potipur brooded beneath the horizon. Conjunction would come at midwinter this year, more than a season from now. Conjunction, when all the Servants of Abricor disappeared for a time and the workers were allowed to lie quiet.
Along the pulsing waters of the Riverside a worker crew was dumping loads of rock to extend one of the fishing jetties, the workers crawling like gray maggots on the clumsy structure. Beyond them on the brown-dun flow a boat passed, pushed onward by the tide, and the striding form of a Laugher moved on the River path at the same speed, as though boat and man were tied together. Pamra made the sign of Aversion, turning her eyes from the Laugher. Always better not to see them. Against a hillside to the west another worker crew was plowing, the shapeless forms oozing among the occasional copses of broad-leafed puncon trees left standing both for their shade and their fruit. Beside each crew an Awakener leaned on a tall mirrored staff, blood flasks hanging from the shoulder. Pamra was usually first to the day’s labors. Seeing these others before her reaffirmed
her weakness, her tardiness. She must move, get the day’s work under way.
But first she could receive her own Payment, that moment of her day blessed by Potipur. No matter what else happened, the early-morning rapture made it all worthwhile.
She took a deep breath, and raised both arms in the ritual gesture toward the west, the direction of the World River, of the moons, of the sun, toward which all things moved. Her breathing slowed, her skin began to tingle. Eastward then, holding her hands before her face in the gesture of negation, the unworld direction, the way no one could go, from which all things came but into which nothing could return. She bowed north, to the forests that carpeted all the lands to the edge of the Great Steppes and beyond the steppes to the Chancery, where the Protector lived, mighty and omniscient, behind the Teeth of the North; bowed south to the River, World-Girdler.
Then she held her breath, waiting for it.
A welling joy that had no focus in this world, a transcendent glory in her flesh, a dizzying beat of her blood, a rush of pure pleasure throughout her body, a bath of ecstatic fire.
‘It’s the pills they give you,’ Jelane had said to her. ‘It’s the pills that give you that feeling.’ Jelane was a junior who had come into the Tower shortly after Pamra.
‘No,’ Pamra had told her. ‘It couldn’t be just pills. That wouldn’t be fair.’
‘Well, it is, Pamra. By all the three gods but you’re dumb. Why do you think you get that rush every day right after they give you your supplements! It’s kind of a little Payment, for being a good girl when they bleed you.’
‘No,’ Pamra had said, choking down her resentment and anger. Why should anyone listen to Jelane – Jelane, who spent every third day being restricted or getting two lashes for infractions? Jelane was a selfish, heretical little fool. If it was the pills, then how explain that the rapture came at other times, too? She said this, defiantly, not expecting Jelane to believe it and not caring whether she did or not.
‘Well, maybe you get other times,’ Jelane had sniffed. ‘None of the rest of us do.’
How could one live in the Tower without the rapture? How could one do recruitment without the rapture? How could one get through the day? The rapture came from Potipur as Payment to His, servants; nothing else made sense.
When the glory faded, she went to Awaken the workers.
Of the twenty or so fresh bodies brought every week from Wilforn, the next town to the east, several still lay in the Baristown pit, their canvas wraps virtually unstained, the masking hoods whole and untattered. Only the swollen blue feet emerging from the wrap showed the first signs of corruption. These were the Wilforn dead who had not been Sorted Out, who had instead been left in the workers’ pit to fulfill their obligation.
Pamra bowed her head and gave the invocation in a calm, beckoning voice, then raised the first hood just above the purple-lipped mouth to pour the mixed Tears and blood from her flask between the dead lips.
‘Drink and rise,’ she intoned. ‘For work awaits you.’
One never raised the hood high enough to see the faces – though every Awakener had probably done it once. Having done it once, no one would do it again. A few years before, she might have waited to verify that each worker did indeed rise up. Now she merely dropped the hood and moved on. Other Awakeners would arrive soon, and she wanted as many of these fresh workers in her own crew as she could get. Too many times lately she had had to take shambling forms directly from the worker pits to the bone pits because some other Awakener hadn’t bothered to put them where they belonged the night before. Of course it was unpleasant to get something barely able to hold itself together to walk the extra few hundred yards, and of course they had to be moved in a barrow sometimes, but that was part of the job. Though, thank Potipur, not a part she would need to do today.
‘Thanks be to Viranel,’ she intoned, meditating upon the Tears that were mixed with the blood.
Long ago, said Scripture, Viranel had revealed the power of Her Tears, shed for the sins of mankind, to the Holy Sorter Thoulia, and in furtherance of that revelation all the Towers and Awakeners had come to be. In class, Pamra had been told that the fungus, brought into a spate of growth by fresh blood and sunlight, grew rapidly throughout the dead bodies, duplicating nerve and muscle cells with tissues of its own, copying and revivifying the structures that were there. Pamra thought there were other things the Tears did as well, but it was better not to ask questions. Undoubtedly, she would be told whatever was important for her to know, in time.
‘Anything you do badly reflects on me,’ Ilze had said to her that first day.
Pamra, half-terrified, had trembled. ‘Yes, Mentor,’ she had murmured.
‘Anything you do badly, I have to answer to the Superior. You understand?’
She had bowed, hands folded, eyes down, only to start at the lash of something around her ankles, a stinging on her bare feet. She was staring down at a whip, coiled serpentlike around her feet, and the shock brought her eyes up to confront the snakelike stare in Ilze’s eyes, covetous and cold.
‘And if I have to answer,’ he had whispered, ‘so will you.’
Pamra had never forgotten. Ilze had never had to answer for anything she had done. She had kept the rules, not asked questions, done what she was told. As she was doing now.
‘Drink and rise,’ she said again and again until she had the full hand of workers on their feet. Five was about all one could manage while plowing, though up to ten could be used in carrying stone. She twirled her staff as she led them northwest to the pamet fields, the mirrored facets throwing sparks of light before them. The harnesses and plow lay where the last crew had left them. Driven by the mirrored lights and her murmured chants of command, the workers shambled into the harness and began to plow, slowly, soundlessly, the
blind hoods faced in the direction Pamra faced, seeing, if at all, through her eyes.
When evening came, she led them back, judging the distance carefully so that the power of the last blood she gave them would just last until the workers reached the pits. None of them were ready to be dropped into the bone pits, thank Potipur. A good fresh crew. She would rise early the next few days and attempt to keep them for herself. The thought frayed away, lost in weariness at the thought of any next few days, fatigue wrapping her with an aching sigh. She could not consider tomorrow. She could not even consider the night. Though she felt stronger than in the morning, the mindless evening hours in the Tower seemed more than she could bear.
She’d been neglecting Delia lately. It was a good time to visit her.
The gardens of Outskirt Row spilled over their walls, shedding perfume into the evening, fragrant with herbs and warm from the day’s sun, as welcoming a place as it had always been. Delia’s house was at the end of the row.
Despite the welcoming appearance of the place, Pamra delayed as she went down through the parklands, heavy with nostalgia, last night’s dream and the morning’s resentments all mixed together. Skittering sparks of light fled from her mirrored staff to scramble across the path and the stones. The lights attracted Delia’s attention, and she came to the gate of her garden, waving her cane as though it were a wand held by some good witch to make a welcoming enchantment.
‘Pamra! Something told me you would come, so I baked spice cakes …’ No reproach for all the days she had been forgotten. Reproach was not Delia’s way, and Pamra warmed to Delia’s way, as she always had.
‘I haven’t had a spice cake in … oh, a thousand years.’ She could not help smiling. This was good Saint Delia, who always remembered things, all of them warm and happy, even when there were few enough of those to choose among. ‘Not since I was a child. A long time ago, Delia.’
‘Not all that long. No. Scarcely yesterday. Only a
conjunction of the moons or two, nothing to mention.’ Delia laughed, but the cough turned into a hacking convulsion that left her weak, wiping her eyes and shaking her head. ‘Oh, me, me. My days are surely few before I am carried to the west and put into the Sorters’ hands. Tsk.’
Pamra made a gesture, her revulsion scarcely concealed. ‘You mustn’t say things like that.’
‘Oh, Pamra, child! All us ordinary people talk like that. You know it. Only you Awakeners never talk of going into the west. Do you worry so that we have no faith? That we will not be taken into Potipur’s arms?’
‘It isn’t … it isn’t that, Delia. I have no doubt about your being Sorted Out and received by Potipur. Among us it’s just accounted bad manners to talk of it with … people close to us.’
‘But, child, we’re not among you Awakeners. There’s just you and me, and haven’t we always said honest things to one another?’
‘Of course we have,’ Pamra took the old woman’s hand in her own, feeling the fragile flesh give way between the slender bones. Delia’s wrists were like a flame-bird’s legs, like a reed stem. ‘And when all the family turned away from me because I decided to be an Awakener, only Delia stayed my friend.’
She smiled into the old face, reaching out to touch the tiny, leaf-shaped blue birthmark on Delia’s chin as she had when she was a little one. ‘Wiggle the leaf, Deely. Make it move!’ She had been only two or three, but she could remember saying that.
‘Well, I hope more than any friend, child. You were more like my own child, and you stayed my child, stubborn though you were. And
angry,
sometimes. I remember how excited you were about the Candy Tree. And how furious you got when Prender told you it didn’t really exist. You were seven. Lots older than the others were when they found out. Ah, you flew at her with your little fists, hitting and screaming at her that she lied, she lied. You cried for hours.’