Southshore Read online

  ‘How long do we carry the word before we follow the Bearer?’ one of the followers asks Peasimy. He is one of the dozen or so who have accumulated the status of leaders in the crusade, those to whom Peasimy habitually talks, those who know what is going on. His name is Joal.

  ‘Pretty soon now,’ Peasimy answers him, though somewhat doubtfully. ‘Pretty soon now I’ll take some and go after the Bearer, and you must take some and go on.’ He has dreamed this. The Bearer had gone a way, then turned north. Now Peasimy must go a way and then turn north. And so on, and on, like a chain. As he says it, he begins to like the idea. ‘A chain,’ he repeats. ‘Like a chain. One, then another one, then another one.’

  The follower to whom Peasimy speaks is an excellent speaker who has often itched to take Peasimy’s place upon the Temple stairs. He has a loud, mellifluous voice, and, since he finds both women and sex utterly repugnant, he has wholly adopted Peasimy’s doctrine. He will have sense enough not to speak of his repugnance directly to the multitudes, as he knows he must include women among his followers if he is to acquire the kind of power – and service – he desires. In his satisfaction at considering this not-so-distant future, he forgets to answer Peasimy’s suggestion.

  ‘You will do it if I tell you,’ Peasimy asserts, interpreting the man’s silence as unwillingness. ‘Yes, you will.’

  ‘If the Bearer of Light commands,’ the man says, silently exulting. ‘When you leave us, how will you know which way to go?’

  ‘North, until we see the mountains. Great tall mountains,’ Peasimy replies proudly. The Jondarites had told him that, when they had taken Pamra Don away. Now he quotes them in a singsong voice, certain of the way he will go. ‘Keep the mountains on the right.’ He pats the arm on which he wears his glove. That is his right arm, Widow Flot had told him. ‘The arm with the glove is your right arm, Peasimy. You eat with your right hand.’ So he pats it now, quite sure. ‘Keep the mountains on the right. Until we come to a big river with some high places with flat tops. That’s Split River Pass, where we go through, to the Chancery.’

  Joal makes note of it. He has no plans to lead the crusade anywhere but where he wants it to go, and at the moment that does not include going anywhere near to the Chancery.

  6

  Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing when I write these things down. I read what I wrote about what happened, and then I try to remember what happened, and sometimes I can’t remember whether I’m remembering what really happened or only what I wrote about it. The words have a way of doing things on their own. They sneak around and say things I’m not sure are real.

  I wrote something the other day about an order of food that came in from the east, and later I heard Taj Noteen talking with Medoor Babji about it as though it had been some other thing entirely. I always figured me and the men saw things pretty much the same way, but now there’s others here who seem to look at this world as though they had eyes different from mine. If I hadn’t written it down, I wouldn’t have thought again about it, figuring I’d just missed something about it at the time. But I did write it down, and what I wrote wasn’t what the Noor were saying at all.

  Of course, I’m only an ignorant boatman. Maybe priests and Awakeners are taught to do it better, but words written down seem to me could be very dangerous things.

  From Thrasne’s book

  While the Gift and the Noor waited for stores, Thrasne passed the time by doing things to the Gift. A new railing on the steering deck. A small cabin below for himself since the Melancholics would be using his house. Reinforcement between the ribs in the fore and aft holds. And, though it cost him much thought and argument with himself, a tall mast mounted on the main deck, just behind the owner-house. This was decided soon after Obers-rom hired three new men who knew about sail.

  ‘Used to run back and forth among the islands out there,’ one of them told Thrasne. ‘There’s chains of islands out there, out of sight of Northshore, farther out than the shore boats go, Owner.’

  ‘You ran up-River?’ Thrasne asked in astonishment.

  ‘Well – what I’d say about that would depend who I was talkin’ to.’

  And thus did Thrasne owner learn of whole tribes of boatmen who paid the tides no more attention than they paid the little pink clouds of sunset.

  ‘You don’t know how the tide works as far out as you plan to go, Thrasne owner,’ the man said. ‘You don’t know and I don’t know. You’ll never row this flat bottom across World River, that’s for sure, and I’m suggestin’ it would be a good idea to have another way to move it.’

  Thrasne regarded the mast with a good deal of suspicion, but he could not argue with what the man said. They surely couldn’t row the Gift across the World River.

  By the time they were ready to depart, Pamra had been gone for months. Still, word of her came to Thou-ne. The Towers evidently had a way of getting information, and Haranjus Pandel had conveyed certain information to the widow Flot, who conveyed it to half the town.

  ‘She was in Chirubel,’ Thrasne said to Medoor Babji in a carefully unemotional tone. ‘There were thousands and thousands following her when she got there. I wonder how all those people are fed?’ He wondered how Pamra herself was fed, but he did not mention it. Thoughts of her were like a wound which he knew could not heal unless he quit picking at it.

  ‘Way I hear,’ said Medoor, ‘some aren’t fed. Many dead, Thrasne. The worker pits in the towns between here and Chirubel are full. Some of the Towers are recruiting extra Awakeners, so I hear it.’

  ‘I’ll bet the old bone eaters love that,’ Thrasne said, turning his eyes to the wide wings that circled above the town.

  ‘Well,’ she said abstractedly, watching his face, ‘if there are more dead people, there could be more fliers hatched, couldn’t there? Probably the fliers like that idea.’

  ‘You’re not saying they think?’ Thrasne objected. ‘You mean more of their little ones would survive, that’s all.’

  ‘Did you ever hear of fliers who can talk?’ she asked.

  And he, driven into memory, remembered a time when old Blint had said something very much like that. Just before he died. He mentioned it to her, wondering.

  ‘Talk to the Rivermen sometime, Thrasne. They know things.’

  It was all she would say at the time, but it gave him something else to concern himself about. What was Pamra doing? Hadn’t that Neff been a flier – well, sort of? Was she doing the will of the fliers? Without even knowing it!

  These concerns were driven away in the flurry of departure.

  It was almost at the end of first summer. The mists and breezes of autumn were beginning. Alternate days were chill and windy, and it was on one such that the Gift left the docks at Thou-ne. So far as the standabouts were concerned, the boat had been hired by the Melancholics for a Glizzee-prospecting voyage among the islands. It departed properly downtide, and only when it was out of sight of the town did it turn on the sweeps and press away from Northshore. Once well away, the new boatmen – sailors they called themselves – put up the bright, unstained sails and the boat moved on its own, cross-current, the wind pushing at it from up mid-River and yet somehow moving it across. It was the way the sail was slanted, the new men said, and Thrasne paid attention as they lectured him.

  In the weeks that followed, he learned about tacking, though the new men laughed at the lumbering Gift, calling her ‘fat lady’ and ‘old barge bottom.’ When Thrasne objected, they offered to show him the kind of boat that skipped among the islands, and he gave them leave to stop at a wooded isle they were passing at the time to spend two days cutting logs for ribbing and planks. It was to be a small thing, one that could be put together on the top of the owner-house. Thereafter the voyage was livened for all of them by their interest in the new boat.

  Once they had passed the braided chains of islands, it was livened by little else.

  Except for the sailors, none of them had ever been out of sight of land. Even the sailors had experi
enced this seldom and briefly, for the islands were thickly scattered in their chains, few of them isolated enough to require long sailing without a few rocky mountaintops or rounded hills in view. Now, however, they were beyond the last of the islands.

  Each day at dusk, the winds began to blow from behind them, from Northshore. Then the sails would be set to take the wind almost full while the rudder slanted them against the tide, and all night long the watch would stand, peering ahead into nothing but water. In the mornings, the wind would reverse, blowing toward them, and the sailors would curse, setting the sail to let them move slightly forward and downtide. Thus they moved always away from Northshore, sometimes a little east, sometimes a little west, cleaving to a line that led southward – southward into what? None of them knew.

  ‘This man who saw Southshore – Fatterday? Why didn’t the Queen of the Noor hire him for this voyage?’ Thrasne asked after a particularly frustrating bout of tacking.

  ‘When they sought him, to send him to us, he was gone, Thrasne. Noor scouts looked everywhere for him. All the Melancholics were sent word to watch for him, but he has not appeared.’

  ‘Sounds like a madman. Perhaps he is in a Jarb House somewhere.’

  Medoor Babji shook her head at him. ‘Then he will never come out, except as a Mendicant.’

  ‘You won’t know him then, if he does. All dressed up the way they are, with those pipes in their mouths most of the time.’

  ‘Only when madness is about, Thrasne owner. So they say. They smoke the Jarb root only when madness is about, for they are vulnerable to visions.’

  ‘The Mendicants? Truly? I thought they were supposed to be the only certifiably sane ones.’

  Medoor Babji perched on the railing, teetering back and forth with a fine disregard for the watery depths below, setting herself to lecture, which she often enjoyed. ‘The way I have heard it is this: There are two types of people in the wide world, Thrasne owner. There are those like you, and me, and most of those we know, who see the world the same. I say there is puncon jam on the bread, and you say it, too; we both taste it. Then there will be one who says there is an angel dancing on the bread, and another who says there is no bread at all but only starshine in the likeness of food. Those are the mad ones. So, the mad ones go to a Jarb House and live in the smoke, and they become like you and me, eating puncon on their bread. But if they come out of the house, they see angels again, or lose their bread entirely. But some of them come out with pipes in their mouths which they light when madness threatens. And they go throughout the world selling their vision of reality to those who are not sure whether they are mad or not.’

  ‘And with the money they build Jarb Houses,’ concluded Thrasne, amused despite himself. It was the first time he had been amused in a very long time.

  ‘Don’t laugh! It’s all true. Moreover, those who come out as Mendicants can see the future of reality as well as the present. That’s what they are paid for. So it is said. Now, I said don’t laugh.’

  ‘I wasn’t laughing,’ he said. ‘I was wishing Pamra could come into a Jarb House, somehow.’

  ‘No.’ Babji shook her head, sending her tightly twisted strands of hair into a twirling frenzy around her back and being sure he heard what she said. ‘That is a vain hope, Thrasne. She would not stay. It is not our world she wishes to see.’

  Upon the River day succeeded day upon the Gift. At the end of the first week they had made a modest festival, and this habit continued at the end of each week that followed. On the morning after one such celebration, a hail from the watchman brought them all on deck.

  The creatures came out of the oily swell of the water like hillocks, lifting themselves onto the surface of the River to lie staring at the Gift of Potipur, a long row of eyes on a part of each one of them, that part lifted a little like a fish’s fin, large eyes down near the body of the strangey and smaller eyes out at the tip. They blinked, but not in unison, those eyes, so that the people gathered at the ship’s rail had the strange notion they were confronting a crowd, a committee rather than one creature. One of the oily hillocks swam close to the Gift, dwarfing it, and spat strangey bones onto the deck. ‘A gift,’ it sang in its terrible voice, turning onto its back and sinking into the River depths with a great sucking of water and roil of ivory underside, like a bellying sail of pale silk.

  ‘What is that?’ asked Medoor Babji, seeing how quickly the crew of the Gift moved about picking up the strangey bones.

  ‘Glizzee spice,’ said Thrasne. ‘It grows within them. They spit it into ships, sometimes, or into the water near where ships are floating. Old Blint said they mean it as a gift. Strangeys watch ships a lot. Sometimes if a man falls overboard, a strangey will come up under him and hold him up until the boat can get to him, or even carry him downtide to the boat if it’s gone on past.’

  ‘They don’t look like fish.’

  ‘Oh, they aren’t fish, Medoor Babji. Not shaped like them, not acting like them, not the size of fish. One time when old Blint was still alive, I saw one the size of an island. The whole crew could have gone onto his back and built a town there.’

  ‘I never knew Glizzee was strangey bones.’

  ‘Most people don’t. They think it grows somewhere on an island, and that’s why the boatmen have it rather than some land-bound peddler. And you know, there’s some ships a strangey will not come near. Strange in look, strange in habit, strangey by name. That’s what we say, we boatpeople.’

  ‘How marvelous,’ she breathed. ‘And probably it isn’t bones at all.’

  ‘Likely,’ he agreed. ‘But it is something they make in their insides or swallow from some deep place in the River.’

  He knew there was more to it than that. When night came, he wrote in his book, all his wonderings about it, but he said nothing of these to Medoor Babji.

  7

  Baris Tower shone in the light of first summer sun, its stones newly washed by rain. About its roof the fliers clustered, perching on the inner parapet, keeping watch as they had been commanded to do. Something about Baris had been doubtful for a considerable time now. From faroff Chancery word had come to the Talons. Baris was suspect. The one called Gendra Mitiar had sent the word. So much all the fliers knew. What was suspected, they did not know, except that it was something to do with the Superior of the Tower, with the human called Kesseret.

  And yet it was Kesseret who had told them of the expedition over the River, to Southshore. ‘It’s only the Noor who are going,’ she had said. ‘And they are of no use to you, anyway. However, it might give other people bad ideas. You had best take word to the Talkers of this …’

  This word had gone to the Talons, Black Talons and Gray, Blue and Red. In each it had led to much screaming argument on the Stones of Disputation. If a human was guilty of heresy, surely she would not have given such important information? If she had given such important information, then could she be guilty of heresy? Such nice distinctions, though they were the stuff of life to Talkers, were beyond fliers’ comprehension or interest. They had been told to watch. Unwillingly, they watched.

  Kessie, well aware of their constant surveillance, paid no more attention than was occasionally necessary. The story about the expedition of the Noor had done its planned work of distraction. She saw fliers constantly at the Riverside, spying on the boats that came and went. Reports would be going back to the Talons; speculation among the Talkers would be rife. So, their attention was where Tharius Don had wanted it. Now she had only to hang on, letting time wear by, praying he would not delay much longer, trying to figure out why he had delayed so long. Did he fear death that much? Surely not; surely not the idealist, Tharius Don. She could not answer the question that came back to her, again and again. Why had he delayed so long?

  The business of the Tower crept on at the pace of a tree’s growth, slow, unobservable. She tried to keep up appearances, with everything as it had been before. She let herself become a bit negligent in recruiting, but that could be laid to
her experiences with the traitor junior, Pamra Don. Her servant, Threnot, seemed to spend more time than ever walking around Baristown in her veils and robes, but if the Superior wished to gather information, no one would question that too strongly. The Superior herself looked unwell, old, somehow, which might be explained by the strain of the long journey that had returned her to Baris.

  Or could be explained by the fact that the elixir, sent from the Chancery through the office of Gendra Mitiar, was not efficacious. It seemed to have been adulterated. Kessie sent frantic word through secret routes. She did not mind dying, but she did not want to do it until after the strike. Her life had been given to the cause. She must see its fulfillment.

  In time, another vial of elixir arrived from Tharius Don, but the damage had been done. She looked in the mirror at the lines graven around her eyes and mouth, the fine crepe of her skin. No pretense would convince her ever again that she was young. She regretted this. When the end came, she had wanted both of them to appear, at least for a time, as they had when they loved one another so dearly. It had been a culmination, a picture in her mind. A honeymoon. Ah, well; ah, well. She offered it up to the cause, along with her twisted fingers and toes.

  ‘How long, lady?’ begged Threnot. She was an old woman, eighty at least. She wished to live long enough to see the end, to see the Thraish confounded, to see the pits emptied. She was glad to see the lines around Kessie’s eyes. They were like the lines around her own, confirming them sisters grown old in the cause.