Shadow's End (40 page)

“And the scourges came….”

“True. When we opened the gate, scourges of the tempter pursued us, coming through the gate with us. Almost before we knew they were here, they had killed some of us. Yet faithful we remained, for in the end, where can even these scourges bring us except to the waiting arms of Mother Darkness and Father Endless, they who were before the Consequential Egg was hatched?”

She rocked Laluzh/Snark, softly
shush shush shush
, singing in her mother voice:

“Ahau, Father Endless, Mother Darkness. Ahau, thou who wert before the stars. Ahau, eternal entropy, refuge of the sorrowful, haven of the weary, salvation of the
aged, unlit by grief or pain. Ahau, to lie upon the breast of darkness knowing only peace.”

The song was like a lullaby, a hymn to the gods left behind on Breadh, a memorial to those who entered the gate, a plea for those few left on this world: Mother and Laluzh and the four other children, silent Nanees and strong Ehrbas, weepy little Hahnaan and some other little girl whose name Snark couldn't remember. Six of them in all. And Mother herself was gone by the time the ship came.

An Alliance ship, screaming out of the sky, landing upon the moor, where the children ran back and forth like panicked animals. Twenty standard years ago, when she'd been eight or nine. Old enough to remember the questions.

“Where did you come from, little girl?”

“I live here.”

“What happened to all the grown-ups, little girl?”

“The scourges of the tempter ate them. Something killed Mother, but I put her bones away safe, in the Mother Darkness jar.”

Glances, one man to another. A finger circled beside an ear. Crazy little girl. Out of her head. Must be a survival pod somewhere nearby. Kids must have been boosted off some ship in trouble. Castaways. Couldn't actually have lived here for any length of time. Impossible. There was nothing here: no agriculture, no edible animals, no beasts of any kind. Only seabirds, fish.

“She's gone snarky from the trauma,” said one.

“What's snarky?”

“Snark's a kind of a duck thing. From Herangia Five. It goes crazy and drops eggs on people.”

The label had stuck. Laluzh became Snark the crazed, later Snark the liar, Snark the thief. Eventually, she forgot Laluzh, forgot Perdur Alas, forgot Mother. Only the cave had remained, a place of safety and comfort. She might never have remembered the other parts if she hadn't been
sent here. But now … now she recalled everything she had been told of: Breadh, the Tempter, the Choice, the Journey to Dinadh, the Faithfulness, the Persecution, the Flight, and the Scourges.

She had not seen scourges since she'd returned to Perdur Alas. Mother had said they'd died soon after arriving, screaming in the night, crying like lost children, hungry and cold. So it wasn't scourges who'd killed Mother. Something had. Something had killed her and chewed on her bones. Was it as Diagonal Red and the others had shown her? Had they done it?

She didn't know. There was no way of telling. Nothing was left of that former time. Nothing but monsters. Monsters and Mother's bones.

I
Saluez had thought to grieve a little and then to sleep, but it was not to be. There was a stir of discontent eddying among us travelers, and its name was Lutha Tallstaff. She would not settle. Trompe fell asleep. Leelson fell asleep. Even Leely was quiet, with none of his usual restless little murmurs, but Lutha moved and sighed, sighed and moved, wearing herself out with trivialities. She went out and checked the panels not once but a dozen times. She put Leely's harness upon him and fastened the end to her belt. Though Leelson had already referred to Bernesohn Famber's yellowed map when he said we would finish our journey on the following day, Lutha unrolled the map once more and sat perusing it by lamplight. When she tired of that, she wedged the door shut, leaving me gasping for air.

“I'll go outside,” I said. “There are no Kachis tonight.” It was true. There were none at all, and I desperately wanted to be by myself.

I did not escape. She came after me, to the limit of the cord that bound her to Leely at any rate. Obviously, I was
to have no privacy on this particular evening. I sighed and sat myself up within my cocoon of blankets, seeking some topic of conversation that would distract her from this hectic activity.

“How did you and Leelson ever meet?” I asked.

She sat down upon the step of the wain. “I met him while working in the Greinson Library at Prime.”

“Such places must be interesting,” I said politely.

She laughed under her breath. “Or deadly dull. I was trying to make sense of some knotty old document written long ago in a dead language, memorializing a contract between peoples who don't exist anymore.”

“Dull, but no doubt important,” I murmured.

“I suppose. It was one of those documents universally acknowledged to be ‘precedental,' so I struggled mightily, trying to extract something my client could use in a court of law, glumming, as one does, writing down and crossing out. Then I had this odd feeling, as though I was being stared at, and when I looked up, Leelson was there. I knew at once he was Fastigat.”

“How did you know?”

“Oh, they have such absolute confidence, a stunning savoir faire which puts mere poise to shame. Still, I'd dealt with Fastigats before. One does tend to get a bit short of breath when they turn on the charm, but up until then I'd considered the effect manageable.”

“Until then?”

“Until he began to speak, yes. ‘Something called me down from up there,' he said. The document niches are all up and down the towers, and the whole place was dotted with little scholars on their lift plates, zooming up, dropping down. He said, ‘Perhaps it was your perfume.'

“I wasn't wearing perfume. I made some remark about being generally in good odor, and Leelson laughed. We introduced ourselves. I thanked him for his compliments, and the whole time I was gasping for air, sort of mentally, you know?”

I said yes, I knew. I'd been doing the same all evening.

“I resolved with every fiber of my being not to return to the library and to stay away from Fastigats. My kind of people, that is, Mama Jibia's kind of people, the non-Fastigat professional class, consider Fastigat men unsuitable for women who are serious-minded.”

“You are serious-minded?” I wanted to laugh, but did not. Despite Lutha's undoubted intelligence, she was constantly exploding like fireworks, laughing or crying, passionate about every trifle. On Dinadh, we think of such behavior as typical of children, not serious adults.

“Don't you think I am?” she asked, surprised.

I told her exactly what I thought, hoping she would go away.

When I had finished, however, she only said thoughtfully, “It's the way we were reared, Yma and I. If you'd ever met my Mama Jibia, you'd understand. She was a singular person, of extremely forceful mien, a faithful follower of the Great Org Gauphin, who preached logic and good sense in all things. Mama Jibia was dead set against Yma or me getting tangled up in feelings we couldn't express or understand. Starting at puberty, she had us experiencing sex through sensurround, so we'd know about that. Then, twice a year she had us vetted by the mental health people from the Temple of the Great Org Gauphin. We had emotional and stress inventories and sessions with a behaviorist, and I'd wager we knew more about the human animal at fifteen than most of our contemporaries ever learned.”

I murmured, “It sounds quite … rigorous.”

“Well, she was trying to make us immune to romance or sentimentalism. Of course, many of our friends came from Firster families, and sentimentalism is one of their largest stocks in trade. They use it to excuse all kinds of nasty behaviors. If Papa beats you, it's because he loves you, you know the kind of thing….…”

I did. I knew more than that. Probably far more than she!

She went on, “Firsters don't approve of pragmatism, self-analysis, or sexual sensurround for anyone, much less virgin girls who should be, so they claim, innocent, by which they really mean susceptible to any self-serving lie that's going around! So, Yma and I saw our friends being romanced and falling in love and making babies they weren't at all ready for, and we thanked our stars we'd been raised differently.” She sighed. “How did this conversation start?”

“You said you were so passionate about everything because of the way you were reared.”

“Yes. Mama thought feelings should be expressed. Whatever they were, it was healthier to have them out in the open, and neither Yma nor I could do it quietly. It's our sense of drama, you see. We inherited it from a scandalous ancestress who was well-known in her day, as Yma is now. Yma made a career of it. I merely play at it.”

“You play very intently,” I said. “You and Leelson. I saw you that time, at the pool. I've watched you. Like magnets, one minute pulling at each other, then turnabout and you're pushing at each other.”

Lutha flushed and gave me a half-angry look. I had no business commenting, and I was slightly ashamed of myself for being rude to her.

“It's always been that way,” Lutha admitted. “Like some kind of shackle we didn't know existed until then, tying us to one another. The relationship was never suitable. Not at all.”

“You don't like his mother?”

“She's … contemptuous. Of me. Of Leely. Fastiga woman are that way, just like Fastigats. She wanted Leelson to have children with one of his cousins—Fastiga is quite inbred, though they deny it—and of course, I'm far from being a cousin. She used to send some of the relatives
over to look at Leely. I'm sure she did it to infuriate me and so she could say ‘I told you so,' to Leelson.”

“What about Leelson's father?” I asked, before I thought. I had opened a new floodgate!

“Leelson's father disappeared. Grebor Two, his name was. And his father disappeared, too. Grebor One. They each fathered one son and then disappeared. Leelson's mother was afraid Leelson was following in their footsteps.”

“Twice doesn't make a habit,” I said, giving up rudeness in favor of letting her talk.

“Three times,” Lutha said. “There was a granduncle, too. One of Bernesohn's twins. He did the same thing Leelson did, got some unsuitable person pregnant.”

“Who?” I asked politely, not caring who.

Lutha frowned for a moment, then came up with an answer. “Dasalum Tabir.”

I laughed, intrigued despite myself. “D'ahslum T'bir! That means
skeleton.
That's not a name you'd forget.”

Lutha said the words over to herself, this time with the Dinadhi accent. The root words were for
bones
and for
ladder
, or
tree.

“She was famous for more than her name, or infamous, depending on how you look at it. A cradle robber, according to the Fastigats. Twice Paniwar Famber's age.”

I heard disapproval in her voice. “Maybe she couldn't help it any more than you can. Try pretending you were hit by lightning. You can't feel guilty about being hit by lightning.”

“It is rather like that,” Lutha confessed with a half smile.

Without meaning to, I said, “I know about that kind of lightning.” I spoke then of Shalumn, and Lutha responded with stories of her own life, of her own family.

“Was your mother pleased with you?” Oh, such a pang I felt when I asked her that, but I wanted to know.

“Yma and I have always felt that she'd have been
pleased with us, that we had done well for her. Thank the Great Org Gauphin she was gone before …”

“Before Leelson?”

She spoke between gritted teeth. “Oh, Saluez! I swore I wouldn't get entangled with him. I swore I wouldn't, but I kept … feeling him. Smelling him, tasting—fore-tasting—his skin, seeing parts of him that I hadn't realized I'd noticed, like the lobe of an ear or the way his hair grew at the base of his neck.

“Yma said I was smitten. She laughed at me. Of course, she hadn't met Leelson. As events conspired, perhaps luckily, she never actually met him.”

Now I was really curious. “How did events conspire?”

“Leelson showed up at my door a few days after our chance meeting. He looked oddly subdued, and I felt … oh, I felt as though I were being pumped full of sunlight. He stepped inside and took me in his arms before he said a word. I don't think either of us said anything that evening. Words would have been … misleading.”

“That's how you were for each other? Made for each other?”

“That's how. He said never one like me before. For me it was never anyone before and never one since.”

“It's like your edges are dissolved, and you feel yourself spreading out….”

“Gossamer thin,” she said, giving me an astonished look. “Feeding on starlight.”

We stared at one another. “I know,” I said at last. “I know.”