Shadow's End (51 page)

Saluez shifted and groaned.

“What shall we tell her?” Lutha demanded.

“How about telling her the truth. That she had scourges inside her. That we've got 'em in a box. That her baby died.”

“That her baby never developed. That's true, too, and it'll be easier for her.”

Snark shook her head, mimicking Lutha viciously, “Oh, yeah, by all means, make it easier.”

“Snark! Why not?”

“I was just thinking of my flippin' life,” she growled.
“That nobody was much concerned about making easier.”

“Your mother was! Whatever else happened, she saved you from this!” Lutha waved at the shrieking box, the supine form, the bloody rags. “You didn't have to experience this!”

Snark flushed, then her eyes filled and she sobbed, once only. “Yeah,” she whispered. “Yeah.” She sounded so sad that Lutha reached for her, but Snark evaded the embrace, ducking her head and stepping away.

They bathed Saluez again and wrapped her warmly. She began to breathe more easily.

Snark said, “She'll wake up anytime now. Once the scourges have time to get dry and fly away, then the mother can wake up.”

Saluez's eyelids fluttered.

Lutha said, “You're all right, Saluez.”

Saluez murmured something, about a baby.

“Rest,” said Lutha, helplessly.

Snark shook her head disapprovingly, saying in a firm voice, “You didn't have a baby, Saluez. It never developed. You had scourge … Kachis eggs in you and they kept the baby from growing.”

Saluez made a lost, lonely sound. She was not truly there, had not truly heard.

Lutha held her, whispering, “They're gone, Saluez. The things are gone. Snark knew what to do.”

“Sad,” murmured Saluez. “No baby. So sad.”

“No baby, but a miracle,” said Snark. “Feel your face, Saluez. Feel your face!” She took Saluez's hand and thrust it almost roughly against her cheek, the one that had been riven so the teeth showed through. “It's healed, Saluez.”

“It's a miracle,” said Lutha. “Weaving Woman did it.”

“… not,” breathed Saluez. “Leely….”

“He's safe,” said Lutha. “He's fine.”

“Has to be fine,” Saluez whispered. “Nothing else for him….”

Then she shuddered and was gone again, her breast moving gently, her face calm.

“Now that's normal sleep,” said Snark, wiping her face again. There were bloody streaks on both cheeks. “And she needs it.”

Behind them the lashed box rocked and rustled.

“What do we do with them?” Lutha asked.

“Drown 'em,” said Snark. “I'll do it.”

“Drown what?” asked Jiacare from among the stones. He came into the entrance, water still beaded on his skin, his hair streaming down his back.

Snark went to him and they muttered together, his voice rising angrily. Lutha went to the stove to heat more water. She was filthy. She smelled to herself like a tidal flat. She resolved to wash her hair, at least, while she kept an eye on Saluez.

The ex-king came to fetch the lashed box, his face hard and furious. He started to speak to Lutha, then merely shook his head, making a gesture of frustration. Lutha gulped, getting hold of herself. Jiacare felt as she herself did. As Snark did. Angry at …what? The songfathers? Much good would that do Saluez. At the Kachis, the Ularians, the whatevers? Much good would that do anybody!

She poured water over her head, surprised that it didn't go up in steam, then set about soaping and rinsing, interrupting the task whenever Saluez made a sound or changed position. She was stripping the water from her hair when Leelson arrived.

“Leelson …”

“Snark told me,” he muttered as he knelt beside Saluez and closed his eyes. After a long moment he said, “She's not grieving.”

“I think she knew,” Lutha replied, combing her wet hair with her fingers. “A secret like that can't be kept. No doubt there were whispers, even on Dinadh. I think she
knew, but she didn't admit it to herself. I'm so thankful Snark was here.”

“She says you were bitten.”

“It's really only a scratch.” A scratch that burned like fire. She rummaged among the odds and ends, looking for a comb, finding one at the bottom of a personal kit.

“Jiacare and Snark went to drown the things.”

She grunted angrily. Good for them!

He drummed his fingers, a little rat-a-tat to accompany thought. “Do you have any explanation for what happened?”

“To Saluez?”

“No. Snark explained that. I mean with Leely. How he is capable of …doing what he's done?”

So here they were at last, at the subject of her revelation, at the answer that had come to her, finally, when it was too late to solve anything between her and Leelson!

She put down the comb, folded her hands in her lap, took a deep breath, found a knob of stone over Leelson's left shoulder, and fixed her eyes on it intently. She would not be bellicose. She would be calm.

“You used to talk to me about your great-great-grand-pop. You told me he was the biochemist to end all bio-chemists, a genius, a savant, a polymath. We both know he went off to investigate the Ularians and ended up on Dinadh. We can assume he saw Kachis on Dinadh, and they raised certain questions in his mind. There was an analyzer among his equipment at Cochim-Mahn. Just as Snark has fed pieces of the shaggies into her analyzer, Bernesohn no doubt fed pieces of Kachis into his. Then Tospia visited him. She went home pregnant. One hundred years later, precisely when he is needed, a boy of Bernesohn's lineage,
your son Leely
, turns up with this trait deadly to the Ularians….”

She paused, shifting her eyes to his face. He had gone rigid, eyes staring at nothing, in that moment resembling Limia, feature for feature, his expression of rejection and
repudiation exactly like hers. Limia and her damned Fastigat lineage! Limia grieving over Leelson's posterity! Oh, by the Great Gauphin, Lutha prayed, let me live long enough to tell her!

She couldn't keep the anger from her voice. “What part of that do you find hard to understand?”

“Impossible!” he growled, very red in the face. “That's impossible. Ridiculous!”

Well, well. In all the time they had been together, she had never seen Leelson truly dismayed until now. How marvelous!

“How would you know?” she cried, boiling with five years' fury. “You're only an ordinary Fastigat. Bernesohn was out of your class, or so you've told me.”

“But none of the family … not my father, not his father, and not me, certainly …”

“So? Somehow Bernesohn arranged this talent to lie low for a few generations. Until it was needed!”

“I don't know how he'd do that.”

A new speaker heard from! Snark, leaning against a pillar at the entrance of the chamber, where she'd obviously been listening for some time. “They force-fed me a pretty fair technical education, and I don't know a way this could happen all at once, out of nothing.”

“Maybe the trait emerges only if the taste of Rottens is in the air,” Lutha muttered.

“Then I'd have it,” said Leelson. “I've tasted Rottens.”

These were mere quibbles. “I don't
know
how Bernesohn did it, but I'm damned sure it's not coincidence. It happened because he's your son!”

“Dananana,” caroled Leely, waving his hands and plucking at his trousers. “Dananana.”

Oh, marvelous anticlimax! “I need to take him out,” Lutha said furiously. “Is it safe to go out?”

Snark shrugged, her go-to-hell shrug, but her eyes were wary. “Safe as it ever is, but don't get careless, Lutha. I've
had a bath at the edge of the water, and you look like you could use one, but keep an eye out.”

Lutha did not reply. She stalked out past Leelson, Leely trotting along at her side, sometimes moistly kissing Lutha's wounded wrist, sometimes petting her arm. They passed Jiacare Lostre as he returned empty-handed from the sea, and Mitigan, who sat quietly on a rock, his face flushed with sunset, both of them looking like shiny new people. Lutha lusted for water, much water, and for clean air after all those hours of tasting rottenness in the claustrophobic stone chamber. She wanted to wash it away! She wanted to wash Leelson away!

Leely tugged at her hand, leading her over the ridge and down toward the scarlet shine of water and sky. The first line of shaggies seemed a safe distance away. At the shore, Leely peeled his trousers off and waded into the water to do his business. He liked to do that, whenever water was available. He'd been born able to swim. She watched him paddle, sometimes diving, feet in air, taking mouthfuls of water and spurting them like the legendary whale, he all silver and rose like the waters, like the sky. She took off her filthy clothes and waded in far enough that she could dunk all of herself. The water was cleansing, not very salty, but chill. She scrubbed at her body with handfuls of the powdery bottom sand, then waded out and sat like a monument on a pedestal of stone, letting the soft wind dry her while her filthy clothing soaked in the nearest pool.

Leely came up a good way out, clutching a fish, laughing. Not far beyond him, a shaggy lowered its tentacles. Leely took a bite out of the flapping fish, then threw the remainder into the lowered tentacles. Lutha shuddered, again aware of her son's surpassing strangeness. For years this uncanny presence had shared her days, clear as noon, while she denied and refused to see that he wasn't just a little boy, not just a child, not just her beloved son. She had been like Saluez, facing the unbearable, rejecting it.

“You're very beautiful.”

Leelson was standing behind her, staring at her, looking wistful. Leelson never looked wistful!

“You used to say so,” she said, swallowing deeply as she grabbed up the sodden robes and draped them around her shoulders, trying to put revelation and seduction both aside. She didn't want to talk, not about the two of them, not about Leely, not about anything.

Fastigats paid no attention to that! With them, nothing could remain unsaid, undefined, unfulfilled. “You really think Bernesohn Famber designed … that?” He gestured toward the splashing child. “Why isn't he intelligent?”

His expression was very much like Limia's had been. Stubborn. Dismissive. Lutha swallowed again and said stubbornly, “We don't know that he isn't.”

It rang false, even to her. Why not say it? Why not get it over with?

“It's because Bernesohn had the same expectations as your mother, Leelson! He expected you to beget with a woman from Fastiga, not some … outsider! If you'd had a Fastigat woman, Leely would have been all right.” The bitterness boiled to the surface, shaming her. She couldn't control it. It wasn't fair. None of it.

He ignored her tone. “I wonder if Tospia knew? When she left here, when she had the twins, Tospiann and Paniwar, I wonder if she knew one or both of them had been
designed
by Bernesohn.”

“If they were, he forgot to plan on redundancy. Twin children, one of whom—was it your great-grandmama?—had only one child. And your grandpa, and your father.”

He nodded. “It's true Great-grandmother Tospiann had only one child, but Paniwar had an acknowledged son and a number of daughters, in addition to at least one … escapade.”

“Improper fathering,” she said, quoting the two dowagers in Fastiga.

He made a rueful face. “An early dalliance with a member of a traveling troupe. On one of the Nantask planets. He was little more than a boy at the time, and she was twice his age.” He was watching Lutha closely, digging at her.

Déjàvu. She herself had told this story, as Leelson had told it to her before. She wanted to change the subject, but he wouldn't let her.

“Her name was Dasalum,” he said. “She was a celebrity, a superb actress. It was her fault Paniwar committed improper fathering. She went off in a temper and the Fambers never did find out what happened to the child.” He watched me, waiting.

A long silence. She could feel him, probing, probing. He'd brought this up for a reason. She resisted, resisted, then cracked, letting in the light. Her revelation hadn't gone far enough. And she couldn't lie to him. He'd know if she did.

She said, “In Nantaskan, her name was D'ahslum T'bir, which means bonetree. Skeleton.” She looked at her hand, surprised. All on its own it was drawing a lineage chart in the sand.

“And?” asked Leelson.

“She bore a daughter whose name was Nitha Bone-tree.”

“How do you know?”

“I didn't until just now. But it's the only thing that makes sense.” Lutha looked away, willing him to let it alone, willing him to stop!

He wouldn't stop. “And why is that?”

“Because Nitha Bonetree was my great-grandmother.”

He didn't change expressions. She had told him all about her family when they were together. In the last little while he'd figured everything out, everything she hadn't
put together until now. She looked down at the chart she'd drawn: