Read A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire Online
Authors: Michael Bishop
Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #General
A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (12 page)
“There’ll be time to talk in the Sh’vaij,” Lijadu said. “Our assembly place, I mean. What the Tropiards call our crofthouse.”
“Sh’vaij?”
“Chapel of The Sisterhood—that’s an approximation.”
“Sh’gaidu, then, must mean The Sisterhood of Gaidu.” Seth said.
“Unless, you’re a Tropiard who is rigorously j’gosfi. In which case—almost
every
case outside Palija Kadi—it means something like The Bitches or The Harlots of Gaidu. Bitches is your word for . . . for a certain kind of female animal, isn’t it? In any event, the terms of Vox are all approximations.”
“Master Seth,” Douin shouted, “please come on! The Pledgechild has arrived, and you’re to speak with her on our behalf!”
Seth looked toward the crofthouse—the Sh’vaij—and saw that all the children had disappeared, probably into the fields. Approaching the Magistrate’s group from the circular building, tottering down the path, came the Pledgechild. Slightly behind her, a less ancient adult kept pace. Although both were partially concealed from Seth’s view by the clot of intervening bodies, he easily discerned that unlike Lijadu and the children, these Sh’gaidu were clothed.
They wore colorful sarilike garments. The old woman carried a staff. Their feet were bare, and their eyes, brilliant in the sunlight, were naked. Had they been dressed in jumpsuits and slit-goggles, however, it would have been impossible to distinguish them by gender from Vrai and Emahpre. In fact, the aged Pledgechild appeared to be the tallest figure on the path. Pronouns, and sexual distinctions, and all that went with them, seemed hopelessly muddled on Trope.
“I’d better get up there,” Seth told Lijadu, as if the moment demanded a formal leavetaking.
“Go on,” she said. Her voice was toneless.
When Seth arrived among the others, the Magistrate was making introductions. He and the Pledgechild knew each other by reputation, surely, and his public relationship with the Sh’gaidu was respectful if not friendly. Both Emahpre and Pors looked put out, the Deputy because of what the Sh’gaidu stood for, the Kieri because of the heat. Douin patiently endured.
“Welcome, Kahl Latimer,” the Pledgechild said to Seth in excellent Vox. “Let me apologize for the unruliness of the children.” She smiled. “Airships always excite and delight them.”
Her eyes, Seth noted, were neither emerald, amber, nor topaz, but a deep black, like certain rare varieties of fire opal. Her skull was a faintly brown egg, as if long hours under Anja had leached the melanin from her skin. Her sari seemed to be dyed or printed with frondlike patterns of crimsons and even darker reds. The person behind her was similarly attired, but her skin was browner and her amber eyes were shot through with an unsettling milkiness. Only she of the two wore an amulet.
“This is Huspre,” the Pledgechild said, indicating the milky-eyed woman with the dascra
.
“She’s my right hand.”
Huspre nodded, and Seth returned the nod.
“Her sojourn outside Palija Kadi occurred many years ago, for which reason she has only a limited command of Vox. Some of the young people taught me, you see, but Huspre is not quick with languages. I don’t press her to learn. Here, in any case, there’s little necessity—unless one must speak for the Sh’gaidu with outsiders who come on mysterious visits. I knew that might happen one day, and so it has.” The Pledgechild’s
fingers were drumming on her staff: laughter. “Yes, I knew in my heart that one day we would be visited.”
The Deputy nodded at Huspre. “She speaks the Ardaja dialect, doesn’t she?”
“Yes, of course. But Huspre’s not much of a talker even in our own tongue.”
“Well, when she
does
talk,” Emahpre said irritably, “either the Magistrate or I will be able to translate her words for our visitors. You needn’t apologize for her lack of proficiency in Vox.”
“Oh, I intended no apology,” said the Pledgechild.
“May we go in?” the Magistrate asked, gesturing toward the Sh’vaij, which still lay eighty or ninety meters above. He was clearly trying to head off an unpleasantness between the Sh’gaidu leader and his own chief lieutenant. Pors looked grateful for the tactic Vrai had chosen.
“Indeed, indeed,” the old woman said. “I would have waited for you there, but I feared the children were proving troublesome. Airships tickle them, as do the disembarked passengers of airships.” She made a limp-wristed motion at the grain field to her right, and Seth saw several children squatting among the stalks, peering out with weird, mischievous faces. Two or three retreated at the Pledgechild’s feeble gesture, but most held their ground. “They’re oh so fond of airships,” she informed her visitors again, then turned and limped unassisted toward the circular assembly building. Her staff, rather than Huspre, was her support.
Seth grabbed Douin’s elbow and detained him. “That girl back there,” he said, nodding at Lijadu, “speaks Vox.”
Douin, obviously surprised, glanced at her. She had not moved. Her eyes glittered intimidatingly. “You’re sure?”
“I spoke with her, Master Douin.”
“She looks little more than a child.”
“She told me that Sh’gaidu means The Sisterhood of Gaidu. The dissidents—everyone in Palija Kadi—are females. Girls and women, Master Douin.”
“
Everyone?
”
Douin was incredulous.
“So it seems. These are the female sapients Pors was certain existed on this world. Moreover, the Sh’gaidu are the only female sapients in Trope. Everyone else, every citizen of the Thirty-three Cities, is j’gosfi, male.”
Douin pointed into the waving red-gold foliage of the monarchleaf. “But there are children here, several children. How—?” He broke off. “They’re hermaphroditic,” he declared with sudden insight. “Each gosfi has the reproductive apparatus of both the male and the female.”
“The bodies of the children suggest as much.”
“Ah,” said Douin, taken aback by this discovery. “Ah.”
“What will be the response of Lady Turshebsel and the aisautseb if we take back to Gla Taus three hundred Tropish women? How will they react to a tribe of female settlers in the Feht Evashsted?”
Douin covered his eyes and considered. “Master Seth?”
“Sir?”
“The answer, I think, is that the Tropiards—the gosfi—aren’t properly either male or female. The Sh’gaidu
call
themselves female, but they’re no different anatomically from the civil servants in the J’beij or the soldiers of the surveillance force. And vice versa, of course. I’m speaking solely of their physical makeup.” He uncovered his eyes and peeked familiarly at Seth. “Do you see?”
Seth looked at Lijadu, who still had not moved. She was regarding Douin and him with such intense concentration that he felt uneasy. If reports about the telepathic abilities of the Sh’gaidu were true, perhaps she was actively tapping their minds or at least psychically amplifying their whispered conversation. No matter.
She
was lovely.
He
was lovely.
Lijadu
was lovely.
“Their physical makeup is of no consequence,” Seth snapped, surprising himself.
“That’s what I’ve just said,” Douin replied. “Since it’s of no consequence, neither Lady Turshebsel nor the aisautseb can object to the fact that we have returned to Gla Taus with three hundred gosfi.
Gosfi,
Master Seth; not men or women, but
gosfi.
Diplomacy is the art of the possible.”
“Their
psychology
is of the utmost importance, though.”
“We’d best go on, Master Seth. The others are entering the building. This accomplishes nothing.” Douin gently disengaged himself from Seth’s restraining hand and made to follow the Magistrate’s party.
Seth caught his elbow again. “My isosire used to say that we are what we pretend to be.”
“Yes?” Douin waited.
“The Sh’gaidu pretend to be female, the Tropiards male. Therefore, each
is
what it pretends. We’ll be taking the members of a single culturally and psychologically determined sex back to Gla Taus with us
,
and we’ll be taking females, only females.” Seth’s heart misgave him. The mission now struck him as a fiasco of grand proportions. Was this a misbegotten chivalry? Would he have objected to carting away three hundred self-proclaimed j’gosfi? Yes . . . no . . . he honestly didn’t know.
“Master Seth, you’re agonizing needlessly. On Trope, the terms male and female are virtually meaningless as jauddeb and humans understand them. The problem is as much linguistic as sexual, don’t you see?”
“I don’t know.”
“In any case, the Sh’gaidu won’t be compelled to do anything they don’t wish to do. If they don’t want to settle in the Feht Evashsted, why, then, we’ll simply go home without them.”
“And Abel and I? And the
Dharmakaya
?”
“Ah, Master Seth, that I can’t say. I speak neither for Aisaut Chappouib nor for our beloved Liege Mistress.” This time he succeeded in breaking Seth’s grip and in escorting the young isohet towards the Sh’vaij.
The breeze blowing through the basin was fresh if not cool, and on the intricate coral-colored bridge looming ahead of them Seth saw a gaggle of children watching their progress. When he glanced back, Lijadu was gone. He and Douin attained the clearing of the crofthouse, an apron of well-swept, brick-red rock. Whisk patterns were visible in the clearing’s fine gravel, but Douin, determined to get him inside the Sh’vaij, gave Seth no time to examine them.
“Wait a moment, strangers!” a voice cried. The language was Vox, and the voice—Seth already knew it—was Lijadu’s.
He and Douin turned. Lijadu emerged from the right-hand field below the crofthouse and pointed around the building’s curve to where the circular clearing joined the great stone bridge to the cliffs. Seth and Douin looked, but still could not see what Lijadu was trying to indicate.
“Here she comes,” Lijadu called. “Little Omwhol wants you to see her flock. —Come, then, child.”
A moment later, a very young Sh’gaidu came around the assembly building shooing eight or nine hissing beasties in front of her. To Seth, they resembled miniature dragons. They went on four legs and waved double sets of feather-scaled wings behind their small, beaked heads. Waddling and flapping, they hurried across the apron of the Sh’vaij and into the western fields. Omwhol, the child, caught one of them and carried it to Seth.
As she handed it to him, Lijadu stepped onto the apron and spoke: “They don’t bite. They’re
gocodre.
Take it. Omwhol was only recently given charge of them. She’s quite pleased with herself.”
Seth knelt and accepted the gocodre from the child. Captured, it didn’t struggle. Transferred into his hands, it didn’t try to fight free. Its skin was leathery, patterned copper and coral. What most amazed Seth about the creature was its eyes: They were tiny chrysoberyls. In the matter of physical optics, evolution on Trope had stuck to this tack and carried it through to creatures with intelligent self-awareness.
The animal flopped in Seth’s hands, unexpectedly. He caught it. Omwhol’s little fingers snapped in amusement. Douin stepped back.
“See,” Lijadu said. “This one is j’gocodre, male. It had no choice in the matter. It hatched that way.”
Seth released the beast, which scampered away after its broodmates. Omwhol skipped off, too, unperturbed that her charges seemed to be getting beyond her tiny sphere of influence.
“We had no choice in the matter, either,” said Seth, rising. “But we
weren’t
hatched.”
Lijadu regarded him peculiarly for vouchsafing this information. Then she entered the cool immensity of the Sh’vaij.
“Come with me,” she said from inside the doorway. “The Pledgechild and the others have preceded us to her cell. I’ll take you.”
TEN
Even after he had thrown back his hood
, it took a moment for Seth’s eyes to adjust. Horizontal window slits ran about the interior of the Sh’vaij, just below its ceiling, but the building’s thatched eaves blocked the passage of direct light. The place was dark and quiet. Gradually, however, both architectural and gosfi forms resolved themselves out of the dimness.
Directly opposite Seth, far across the nave, loomed an imposing, sloped wall. He recognized it immediately as a replica of the wall enclosing the basin on the south: bone white, slightly convex, smooth and blank. In the Sh’vaij, the wall served as a sacramental backdrop for what appeared to be a low altar set with unlit candles and fronted by a reed mat. Someone—an anonymous Sh’gaidu—lay supine on the mat, almost like an offering. Her stillness suggested death.
Carved wooden benches lined the walls of the assembly building. Upon these sat a number of adult Sh’gaidu, most of whom were clothed in colorful garments. They sat singly, apart from one another, either engaged in deep meditation (Seth decided) or else communing mind to mind. Their eyes were open—it seemed the gosfi had no eyelids, in any case—but the lack of fire in these organs bespoke a turning inward of the sense of vision: These people were scrutinizing their own souls. It then occurred to Seth that perhaps they were praying for the person who now lay before the replica of the basin’s wall.
The Pledgechild, Magistrate Vrai, Deputy Emahpre, Lord Pors, and Huspre were nowhere to be seen.
Lijadu said, “The Pledgechild’s rooms are behind Palija Dait, that wall you see there. You would say the Lesser Door. Palija Kadi, of course, means the Great Door.”
“You regard that wall and your entire basin as
doors
?” Douin enquired.
The young Sh’gaidu found a blue-patterned garment on a bench to her left and fastened this serenely about her torso. “We regard them by the names they bear,” she said. The pastel blue against her warm brown flesh in no way diminished Seth’s desire. He cursed his desire, and she said, “Come pay your respects to my birth-parent Ifragsli, who died four days ago.”
She set off toward the wall. Douin and Seth fell in behind, their boots scuffling obtrusively on the rock floor. At Palija Dait, Lijadu knelt beside the body of her birth-parent and swayed above it hypnotically.
The corpse was redolent of a faint perfume, like the bouquet of certain brandies. It was draped with a white cloth to the neck, and its face was concealed by a death mask of caked red clay. Most startling to Seth was the fact that the Sh’gaidu, using a moist, emerald-green pigment, had daubed eyes on the death mask. Subtly iridescent even in the gloom, these eyes looked challengingly real. Lijadu stopped swaying, leaned forward, and kissed each painted eye in turn. Then, nimbly, she rose.
“Ifragsli’s
dascra’nol
ceremony is this evening. Each of you from Huru J’beij is invited to attend.”
“This was your birth-parent?” Douin asked.
“My mother, you would say,” Lijadu told Douin.
“She scarcely appears an old woman,” the Kieri noted. “What brought about her death?”
“Thirty-seven days ago she fell ill, and swooned, and lay for many days in a coma that we were only rarely able to penetrate. The Pledgechild and I stayed with her until her death. Afterward, we prepared her for her last passage through Palija Kadi. She has only this morning come down from the kioba Najuma—the
tower—to the southeast of the Sh’vaij. Now her final vision is ripe, and her eyes will soon crumble into dust. This evening’s ceremony will reveal that vision.”
“But the death itself?” Douin asked. “What caused it?”
“The Pledgechild, who is herself heirbarren, has told me that Ifragsli died of . . . anticipation.”
“How does one die of anticipation?” Seth asked.
“I’m not sure,” Lijadu said. “The Pledgechild says that self-aware creatures neither feed on time nor allow it to feed on them. We create time out of the vigor of our beings, she says, and were our spiritual vigor perfect, we would create time infinitely. Ifragsli was a woman of great character and vigor. Time flowed in her veins rather than blood, and it seemed her heart would sustain her forever. But thirty-seven days ago this changed. She grew anxious of the future and her anticipation of it poisoned the vigor by which she lived.”
Seth felt for the dascra
that Magistrate Vrai had given him. Although it was concealed inside his tunic, he could still place a hand on it. “Will Ifragsli’s eyes now become your own?” he asked. “Will you wear her dascra gosfi’mija?”
“No, not I.”
“But she was your birth-parent, wasn’t she? Aren’t you supposed to inherit her jinalma?”
“I have the Pledgechild’s eyes.”
This statement made no empirical sense to Seth. Lijadu’s eyes were tiger green, pierced with spearlike yellow flaws, while the Pledgechild’s eyes were an opalescent black. Then Seth understood that Lijadu had framed a metaphor.
“I’m the Pledgechild’s heir,” she said, confirming his reasoning. Her voice conveyed a quiet pride.
“But not the Pledgechild’s offspring,” Douin said. “How does that happen?”
“Ifragsli offered my life to the Pledgechild because she is heirbarren. The Pledgechild accepted me, and now I’m her child.”
“And what of your birth-parent’s jinalma?”
Seth asked, pleased to be repeating this esoteric Tropish term because he knew Douin would not understand it. “Who will receive the dust of Ifragsli’s eyes?”
“All of us,” Lijadu said. “The dascra’nol
will tell.”
“All of you?”
“Because Ifragsli bequeathed me to the Pledgechild, it’s now as if my birth-parent were among the heirbarren while she lived. The jinalma of the heirbarren—if they so will it—goes into the familistery urn, a closed amphora which the Pledgechild keeps in her rooms. Once a year the Sh’gaidu partake together of the jinalma of those who lost their heirs or who died without ever having given birth.”
“How?” Seth asked. “How do you partake of this jinalma?”
“Here in the Sh’vaij, the familistery urn travels to each member of the sisterhood. As it passes, each rememberer—is that the word you would use?—puts her hand into the urn and touches a wet finger to the sacred dust. Then she does this.” Lijadu sucked the tip of her finger, her eyes grown briefly cloudy. She was back, alert, as soon as she had dropped her hand.
Cannibalistic communion, Seth thought. He looked down at Ifragsli’s corpse; the shroud and the death mask made him shudder, and the embalming fragrance was beginning to burn his nose. The bedaubed eyes haunted him. He realized that beneath the red clay of the death mask Ifragsli had no eyes at all. Either the Pledgechild or Lijadu had cut them out of her head in preparation for this ceremony called the dascra’nol
.
“Master Douin, Master Seth, we’re waiting for you.” Porchaddos Pors stood at the right end of the wall, having just emerged from a nichelike doorway there. He was neither smoking nor wiping sweat from his brow, and the surprising coolness of the Sh’vaij had restored his spirits. He sounded only modestly put out with them for their tardiness. “The Pledgechild would like to ask us about our mission, I believe, and you had best not keep her waiting longer, Master Seth.” Pors retreated into the tall, narrow passage.
“Go ahead, both of you, please,” Lijadu said. “I’ll follow shortly.” She knelt again beside her birth-parent’s corpse. “Go on, Kahl Latimer.”
Seth and Douin entered a tiny, wedge-shaped room lined from floor to ceiling with shelves. The shelves, in turn, were lined with countless clay urns, of all shapes and sizes, so that the room nearly drowned them in a smell at once clumsy and delicate—as of damp cement and wet tea leaves. Seth caught Douin’s elbow again.
“She called me Kahl Latimer, Master Douin.”
“Which, along with the Tropish honorific, happens to be your name.”
“I never told
her my name. And when the Magistrate introduced me to the Pledgechild, Lijadu wasn’t close enough to hear.”
“Lord Pors has just called you by name.”
“He called me Master Seth. He didn’t call me by my surname.”
“Well, what do you think it means?”
“It means she either picked my name from my head or learned it by way of telepathic cerebrations from the Pledgechild.”
Douin was cold-bloodedly matter-of-fact: “What do you think we should do about it, then?”
“I don’t know,” Seth admitted.
“Neither do I.” Douin led him toward a door standing slightly ajar. “So let’s just join the others.”
The Pledgechild’s audience room was cramped but well lit. A large, rec-tangular window faced out on the terraces rising to the base of Palija Kadi, the Great Wall. The Magistrate, Deputy Emahpre, and Pors sat together on a wooden bench against the wall facing this window—looking very much like naughty schoolboys dragged in for disciplining. The Pledgechild faced her visitors in a backless wooden chair resembling an elevated footstool. She sat to the right of the window, near a small amphora stand, her hands toying with an odd, carefully carved Y-shaped stick.
A scepter? A divining rod? A wand? It didn’t appear to be any of these things, really, for at the end of each prong was a kind of circular clip bespeaking a practical if arcane purpose for the instrument. Seeing Douin and Seth enter, the Pledgechild gestured them to a second bench with her Y-shaped toy, and they obeyed as if she were Lady Turshebsel herself.
“I was telling your friends,” the old woman began, aspirating her words, “that it’s unfortunate your journey to the basin has coincided with the removal of a dead sister from one of the Holy One’s lookouts. We’re preparing for her dascra’nol
ceremony. We can conduct no talks involving the welfare of the community until we’ve seen tomorrow through this sister’s eyes and laid her respectfully to earth.”
Emahpre was outraged, and only as tactful as his indignation would permit him to be: “Commander Swodi sent a soldier to you last night to inform you of our coming. You might have conveyed this message to the soldier, who would have reported to Swodi, and so on to the Magistrate. It would have been easy for us to delay our visit to the basin for a day.”
“Ah,” said the old woman. She raised her Y-shaped scepter and looked through its circular clips at the Deputy, as if through a lorgnette. “But you would have been suspicious of my motives. You would have wondered what I was plotting. Is it so bad you arrived early?”
“The Magistrate’s time is valuable,” Emahpre retorted.
The Pledgechild lowered her stick. “It may also be valuable for you to witness the dascra’nol
.
Gaidu once told me that there’s no such thing as a coincidence. And last night I dreamed of her . . . again.”
Seth now understood why the Pledgechild wore no dascra:
She was the rightful heir of the departed messiah, but that messiah had disappeared without a trace nearly a century and three quarters ago. Therefore, the Pledgechild had had no way to recover the Holy One’s eyes and commit their jinalma to the obligatory amulet. Lijadu wore no amulet because her birth-parent had only recently died, and because Ifragsli had in any case bequeathed her to the heirbarren and still living Pledgechild. If you paid attention, it wasn’t impossible to dope out these people’s relationships.
From nowhere Huspre appeared before Douin and Seth to give them each a bowl of water. A Sh’gaidu much younger than Huspre came through a door in the other side of the Pledgechild’s reception cell and presented Magistrate Vrai, Lord Pors, and Deputy Emahpre with similar gifts. She had balanced all three glazed bowls so deftly that not a drop was spilled. Both Huspre and the newcomer wore dascra
,
Seth noted, but they had tucked the amulets inside their loose garments to keep from trailing them in the water bowls.
Emahpre was the last to be served by the newcomer. As she was backing away from him, the Deputy swore viciously in Tropish and thrust his bowl away from him so that it fell to the floor and shattered. Water splashed his boots, and shards skipped across the floor in every direction.
“
Gosfithuri!
”
he cried, looking to Vrai. “
Gosfithuri!
”
Pors and the Magistrate stood, by necessity, and Seth found himself on his feet with everyone else. Only the Pledgechild remained seated, apparently unperturbed by what seemed to Seth a wholly gratuitous outburst. The Deputy gestured at the woman who had just attempted to serve him and repeated a third and fourth time the same urgent word. The young Sh’gaidu accused by this term merely stared at Emahpre, her dignity not only intact but radiant.
Meanwhile, the Pledgechild, Vrai, and Emahpre engaged in a discussion in their own tongue. While they were talking, Lijadu entered the cell through the door by which the young Sh’gaidu had also entered, and Seth’s eyes went to her like smoke seeking an upward passage. Lijadu, Huspre, and the woman at the center of this mysterious brouhaha knelt to pick up the pieces of the broken bowl.
Unmindful of his status as envoy and guest, Seth put down his own bowl and commenced to help them.
Emahpre’s voice grew louder, almost abusive, and finally the Magistrate overrode him with such authority that, briefly, no one else seemed capable of speech. The only sound was the clicking of earthenware shards as Seth and the others dropped them into a bowl that Lijadu held. Seth kept his head down. They were almost finished cleaning up, but he was not yet ready to confront the enigma of the prevailing situation. Then the Deputy pivoted and strode past the Pledgechild, heading for the musty little pantry bordering her reception cell.
“
Emahpre!
”
Magistrate Vrai barked. “
Emahpre, asul tehdegu!
”
But the Deputy didn’t return, and they all heard his boots ringing on the stones of the Sh’vaij as he departed.
The Pledgechild waved her Y-shaped dowel as if blessing the ensuing silence. “J’gosfi nuraju
,
” she said eloquently, and even Seth understood her: They had all just witnessed the departure of a crazy man.
“Please accept my apology for the behavior of Deputy Emahpre,” the Magistrate said, returning to Vox. He was trembling.
The Pledgechild graciously inclined her head—but Seth, rising from the floor with Lijadu and the others, saw that against the taut material stretched over the old woman’s knobby knee her fingers were drumming helplessly. It made him want to laugh, too.
