Southshore Page 5

  Tharius was hooked, confirmed in rebellion. The books were real ones. Stories of people as they were. A history of Northshore. A little book about the arrival, called When We Came. Tharius had been taught certain things as true, but they had always seemed senseless. Now, suddenly they began to connect.

  Time went. Tharius became a book collector. Hidden in the attics of the Don home was a collection that would have condemned all the family to death had an Awakener got wind of it. Tharius found them in other attics, entering from the roofs, prowling dusty spaces by lantern light, old, shut-up places where no one came anymore but where books were sometimes found. In corners. Under floorboards. He found them in houses where people died, before the Awakeners or the kinfolk came to take inventory. He found them in the rag man’s yard, buried at the bottom of stacks of old clothes. Fragments more often than whole volumes, but of whole volumes, three or four a year, perhaps. By the time he was eighteen and subject to the procreation laws, he had almost thirty of them.

  Which was bad enough in itself. Worse, so far as Tharius was concerned, was the fact in these thirty books were references to hundreds of others. Somewhere on Northshore there were, or had been, more!

  Sometimes late at night, when the moons lit the alleyway, Tharius Don had a waking dream of all those books. More and more. All the answers to all the questions anyone had ever asked would be there in the books.

  And the books, he was convinced, were in the Towers. Why else would the Awakeners be so agitated about books, if it were not some kind of secret knowledge only they were supposed to have? Knowledge about how things really were. How things used to be. How they had been in some other place before humans had come here.

  Influenced by a bit too much wine, Tharius broached that subject at dinner one night, hearing the words fall into a horrified silence.

  ‘Before what?’ his father snarled. ‘Before what?’

  ‘Before humans came to Northshore,’ Tharius stuttered.

  ‘Where did you get an ugly idea like that?’

  ‘I just – I just thought we must have come from somewhere else, you know. Because there are so many things we can’t eat.’ Even in his half-drunken surprise at the words that had come from his own mouth, he was wary enough not to mention the books. ‘It seemed obvious …’

  He was sent from the table, in disgrace. Doctrine was clear on that point. Humans had always lived on Northshore and had always been governed by the gods. His bibulous remark was occasion for a loud, screaming battle among the Dons and the Stifes. Two days later when he returned home from a foray, he found a young woman named Shreeley at the table. He had seen her before. Not often. She was the daughter of a friend of his father’s, a pamet merchant from the other side of Baris.

  ‘Your wife-to-be,’ his father said in a stiff, unrelenting voice. ‘You have had entirely too much time on your hands to sit around dreaming up obscenities.’

  Tharius Don was more amused than anything else. The girl wasn’t bad looking; she had a sweet, rounded body, and Tharius Don had had some experience with sweet, rounded bodies. It would not be a bad thing to have one of his own to play with.

  What he had not foreseen was the sudden loss of privacy. No more attic room. He had only time to hide the books before all his belongings were swept up and reinstalled in a room two stories below, one he would share. And after that, he found it difficult to be alone for a moment.

  Shreeley made sure of that. She slept with him. She rose with him in the morning and walked with him to the job his grandparents Stife had obtained for him. ‘You show none of the family talent for art, Tharius Don,’ said Stife grand-father. ‘We have apprenticed you, therefore, to Shreeley’s father, the pamet merchant.’

  ‘I thought it was custom for young people to choose their own professions,’ Tharius complained.

  ‘Had you done so in your fifteenth or sixteenth year, as is also customary, we would have acceded to your choice, Tharius Don. Since you did not do so, you lost that opportunity.’

  Shreeley came to walk home with him after work. She ate with him. She sat with him or walked with him after dinner. Went to bed with him. He tried to read one of his books only once, but Shreeley caught him at it. ‘Read to me,’ she begged sweetly. ‘Read to me, Tharius Don.’ He made up something about Thoulia, and she fell asleep while he was reciting. He hid the book away, sweat standing on his brow.

  Still, for a time it was not impossible. Sex was more than merely amusing. Tharius had a great deal of imagination about sex, and Shreeley was compliant. Until she became pregnant, at which time everything stopped.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It might hurt the baby.’

  ‘It won’t hurt the baby. And you like it.’

  ‘I don’t like it. I only did it to get pregnant and comply with the laws, Tharius Don. I hope you don’t think I enjoyed all that heaving about.’

  ‘Shreeley’s father says you have been neglecting your duties,’ his father admonished. ‘With a baby on the way, you’d better start attending to business.’

  It was that night Tharius Don went to the Tower of Baris and begged admittance as a novice. When the family learned of it, they never spoke of him again. When Tharius’s son was born, they named him Birald. When Tharius heard of it he uttered a heartfelt wish for the boy’s sanity, but without much hope considering that he, Tharius, might be losing his own.

  He had sacrificed everything in hope of books, and there were no books in the Tower except those of a shameless falsity and unmitigated dullness. There were no books, and there was no leaving the Tower. For a time Tharius considered killing himself, but he could not think of any foolproof way to do it. And as time wore on, one factor of Tower existence saved him – the rigid, unvarying discipline which allowed much time for thought. Tharius was in the habit of thought. And as the months wore away, he began to find links in the behavior and beliefs of the Awakeners to things he knew from books.

  And he saw early on a thing that many in that place never saw. He saw that the seniors did not believe what the juniors were told to believe.

  It was evident, once the first piece fell into place. There was knowledge here. Not among the juniors. Not taught to the juniors. Withheld from them, rather. Given to others later on.

  With a grim persistence that would have astonished all factions among the warring Stifes and Dons, he persevered. Years went by. He achieved senior status, learned what he could, learned there was more yet that could be learned, in the Chancery!

  He was thirty-eight, a cynical member of the trusted circle that actually ran the Tower of Baris, and a personal friend of the Superior, when he was responsible, all unwitting, for bringing Kesseret to the Tower.

  One of his duties was the enforcement of the procreation laws. Women over the age of eighteen who were not readying for marriage or were not already mothers, whether married or no, came under his jurisdiction. A wealthy man – whose wealth did not exceed his age, decrepitude, or hideous ugliness – presented a petition together with a generous gift to the Tower. Tharius Don signed it as a matter of course. It ordered the nineteen-year-old woman named Kesseret to marry the merchant at once or present herself to the Tower as a novice. It was routine. Rarely did anyone come into the Tower as a result. Sometimes the one under orders made a generous gift and the petition was revoked for a time. Sometimes not. It was simply routine.

  Except in this instance. Kessie had been unable to buy herself free. She had been unwilling to submit. She came to the Tower.

  To the Tower, to Tharius Don, who asked for and received mentorship in her case. She was older than most novices, as he had been. It was harder for her than for most, as it had been for him. She rejected much of what she was taught, as he had done.

  So he told her the truth. From the beginning. Comforting her, urging her, meeting her in quiet places away from the Tower, keeping her away from worker duty as much as possible. And one day she had said, ‘You can protect me all you like, Tharius Don. That doesn’t make it right,
what we do.’

  He had agreed. And from that the cause had been born. Not right away, not all at once. They did not know enough yet.

  ‘I’m told the answers are at the Chancery,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to get there.’

  ‘How long?’

  He shrugged. ‘Twenty years, minimum, I should think. I’m in line to be Superior when Filch dies or moves up. If they don’t give him the elixir pretty soon, there’ll be no question about his moving up. Say five years there, either way. Then I have to make some kind of reputation for myself. In something.’

  ‘Something safe,’ she whispered. ‘Apologetics, Tharius. The apologetics they feed us juniors is awful. It’s dull. It’s ugly. It wouldn’t convince a swig-bug. Make your reputation in defense of the faith, Tharius. In scholarship. It takes only cleverness and a way with words. It’s all mockery, all lies, but we can do it. I’ll help you.’

  And she had helped him, and he her. They had been lovers for twenty years, sometimes impassioned, never less than fond. Kessie was forty when she took Tharius’s place as Superior of the Tower in Baris and he moved on to the Chancery. They had not known then that it was the last time they would make love to one another. Once at the Chancery, Tharius had advanced rapidly. He had been given the elixir. And after that was no passion, only the remembrance of their coupling, their ecstasy, though that remembrance had been full of nostalgic longing.

  The books he had sought were at the Chancery. The palace was full of books, very old books. No one cared except Tharius. He read his way through centuries of books. Of all those at the Chancery, only Tharius knew the truth of the Thraish-human wars in all their bloody, vicious details. He rebelled against that viciousness. Only Tharius knew of the Treeci and dreamed of that gentle race – for so he interpreted what he read – as an answer not only for the Thraish, but for man. From these books came the cause, and in that long, long remembrance the cause had grown.

  And now, now he had delayed long enough, and it must all soon come to pass. He leaned his face into his cupped hands and evoked the memory of Kessie. Kessie as he had seen her last, carried away over Split River Pass, smiling bravely back at him. Her life had been given to this thing. This secret thing. His own had been given, also.

  For the two of them there could be no future, but perhaps he could save Pamra Don for some better fate. Perhaps she could live the life he and Kessie had not been able to live. Perhaps she could find someone to love; perhaps she could bear children as he and Kessie had never been allowed to do.

  With such simple hopes he comforted himself, believing them. He would give up everything, the world itself, for this cause. But even while doing that, he would try to save Pamra Don.

  5

  Midday in the Temple on the first day of first summer, the year’s beginning. In the wide, carved sand urns, sticks of incense burn away into curling smoke, gray-white wraiths, rising into the high vaults of blackened stone. On the floor the murmuring multitude shifts from foot to foot with a susurrus of leather upon rock. All is muted, the color leached away, all sharpness of sound reduced to this soft, formless whisper which runs from side to side of the Temple, like liquid sloshing in a bowl. ‘Truth,’ it says, ‘Light,’ lapping at the walls of the place like surf, returning again and again, tireless as water.

  A pale blur of faces, staring eyes, gaped mouths, nostrils wide for the heaving, phthisic breath, indrawn by bodies that have forgotten to breathe for a time. Wonder piled on wonder as the crusaders parade with their blood-bright banners to the rumble-roar of the drums, rhythmless as thunder, rhymeless as pulse. Oh, Peasimy Flot has an eye for spectacle and an ear for the wry, discordant sound to set teeth on edge and wrench the ears away from ordinary concerns. See what drums he has manufactured from kettles and hides, what robes he has managed to scrounge from what can be begged or stolen; see what gilded crowns and jeweled scepters he has set in the followers’ hands to confound and amaze the multitudes. Glass and shoddy may glitter with the best in the dim Temple light, as they do now, among the hundreds half-drunk on fragrant smoke.

  And Peasimy himself, now mounting the steps of the Temple to stand as he always stands, as Pamra always stood, before the carved moon faces, turning in his high coronal and rich-appearing vestments to call into that breathing silence.

  ‘Thou shalt follow no creature except the Bearer of Light,’ he calls in his little piping voice, from the Temple stairs in the twentieth town west of Rabishe-thorn. ‘Thou shalt not earn merit except by crusade. Thou shalt not give to the Temple and the Tower what belongs to the Protector of Man.’

  His voice is shrill, the high treble sound of a whistle. It cuts through the crowd murmur like a knife, leaving a throbbing wound of uncertainty behind. The voice is not of a piece with the display. They had expected other than this.

  ‘Where is she?’ someone brays in a trumpet voice. ‘Where is the Light Bearer?’ They have heard of her. Every township on this quadrant of Northshore has heard of her, and though the entertainment thus far has been better than expected, some few are irritated that she has not come herself, that this pumped-up little creature has come in her stead.

  ‘Gone to the Protector of Man,’ Peasimy replies, irritated to be so interrupted. ‘Long ago. With many following after her to testify to truth.’ He pauses, trying to remember his place in the usual speech, counting the thou-shalts in his head. ‘And those who have gone will be first in her kingdom, and those who come later will be last, but even to the last will gifts be given which are greater than any gifts these devils have ever pretended to give.’ His gesture at the carved moon faces is almost like Pamra Don’s gesture, and these words are almost exactly something Pamra Don has said. Most of what Peasimy says is almost what Pamra has said. She has never referred to ‘her kingdom,’ though she has spoken of the kingdom of man. Peasimy points to the carved moon faces, flier faces, and waits until the babble dies down.

  ‘Thou shalt not revere the Awakeners,’ says Peasimy. ‘Thou shalt not walk in darkness.’

  ‘What does he mean?’ a rugged, doubtful man grumbles to one of the followers. ‘What does he mean about walking in darkness?’

  ‘It’s symbolic,’ whispers the follower. ‘At night, when the lanterns are lit, you must walk in the patches of light as though splashing them into the darkness. It’s symbolic of the Light Bearer.’

  ‘What the hell good does it do?’ the doubter persists.

  ‘It’s pious,’ snarls the other. ‘The Light Bearer does it. To concentrate her mind on the truth.’ So Peasimy has said, and they have had no reason to doubt him. Or maybe what Peasimy said was that the Bearer of Truth had been found in that way. The follower can’t remember. It doesn’t matter.

  ‘Oh.’ The other subsides, twitching. None of this sounds like good sense to him, and he wonders what all the fuss has been about.

  ‘Thou shalt love the Protector of Man with all thy heart,’ Peasimy shouts. ‘Thou shalt keep him safe from lies.’

  ‘That’s what the Light Bearer is going to the Chancery for,’ the follower instructs. ‘To advise Lees Obol of the lies which are done in his name.’ The doubter grunts, unconvinced, though in this case the follower has quoted correctly.

  ‘Thou shalt give generously to the followers of truth, in order that the world may be enlightened,’ Peasimy goes on, ticking the commandments off on his fingers. Sometimes he remembers ten, sometimes more than that. Tonight the crowd is restive, he will only give them ten. ‘Thou shalt not withhold food from those on crusade.’ He is hungry, very tired, and his throat is sore from all the shouting. Tomorrow they will go on to a new town, and his voice can rest. He takes a deep breath. ‘Thou shalt not make fuk-fuk.’

  An embarrassed titter runs through the Temple, a break of laughter like light coming suddenly through clouds to astonish those beneath with a benison of gold. ‘What the hell?’ the doubter growls, doubled with laughter. ‘Baby talk. What the hell!’

  ‘The Mother of Truth commands it,’ the follower
says through gritted teeth, embarrassed himself by the word Peasimy always uses and weary of having to explain it. ‘If you want to be really Sorted Out, you don’t do that.’

  ‘Well, if we didn’t do that, there wouldn’t be any of us to be Sorted Out.’ The man laughs in genuine amusement. ‘Where the hell does he think babies come from, pamet pods?’

  In which he is closer than he knows to Peasimy’s true belief. The widow Flot had never found it necessary to tell Peasimy other than the pleasant myths of childhood, and Peasimy, who has discovered the facts beneath other myths by following and spying through windows, has never found the facts of this one. He has never seen a baby born. He would not believe the connection between that and the other were he told. Pamra Don, Mother of Truth, has said the strange, frightening act he has so often observed through windows at night is a mistake. It is therefore a perversion. A darkness.

  The follower, elderly enough to have forgotten the urgencies of passion and much puffed up by his new position as expositor of truth, defends the revealed word. ‘There’s a lot more fucking going on than necessary for babies. That’s what the Light Bearer means. The Mother of Truth says we don’t do it, so we don’t do it. Not and be a follower of hers.’

  The questioner laughs himself out of the Temple, his healthily libidinous nature rejecting all of it. But in the vast echoing hall, there are others to whom the ideal of abstinence appeals. There are disenchanted wives who can do well without a duty that seems to consist mostly of discomfort, grunting, and sweat. There are husbands who consider it an onerous and sometimes almost impossible performance which seems to be demanded – in pursuance of the procreation laws – too frequently and at inconvenient times. There are young ones, drawn to a life of holiness like moths to a flame, easily willing to give up something they know nothing of. There are spinsters being forced into marriage or pregnancy by the procreation laws, and men being forced into unwanted associations by the same. There are those who resent the Tower saying yes and therefore choose to follow the Bearer saying no. For every lustful lover there is at least one juiceless stick, anxious to have his lack made into virtue. Thus, in the departing footprints of each mocker, a follower rises up, and Peasimy Flot leads them on to the next city west while a trickle of the formerly recruited ones move northward, then west, where Pamra Don has gone. The crusade has steadily been approaching Vobil-dil-go, the township through which Split River runs, the most direct route from Northshore to the Chancery.