Emma Bull (47 page)
Authors: Finder
Some of them had brought offerings, of objects they'd made, poems they'd written, things they'd grown, or food or drink or perfume or incense. A band, composed of a fiddle player, a drummer, a guitarist, and a woman with Uilleann pipes, played while the offerings were left, on the bier or beside it, as the givers saw fit.
A few people brought things to read aloud. The last was Sparks, who raised her unassuming little voice with surprising strength to recite one of Shakespeare's sonnets, in an artless, easy way that made my throat ache.
Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain
Full charactered with lasting memory.
Which shall above that idle rank remain
Beyond all date, even to eternity;
A B B YY.c
Or, at the le
ast, so long as brain and heart
Have faculty by nature to subsist,
Till each to rased oblivion yield his part
Of thee, thy record never can be missed.
That poor retention could not so much hold.
Nor need I tallies thy dear love to score.
Therefore to give them from me was I bold.
To trust those tables that receive thee more.
To keep an adjunct to remember thee
Were to import forgetfulness in me.
Silence fell, just for a moment. Then a sweet voice, Camphire's, began a song in the language of the Elflands, and one by one the people there who knew it joined in. I've never been good at translating words of songs on the fly, but the tune was beautiful, and not at all sad.
Vissa had been beside me the whole time. I'd wondered what he was making of the business, whether he thought it was appropriate, or shocking, or tasteful, or gauche. I didn't worry about it, but I did wonder.
But when Camphire began her song he moved suddenly at the edge of my vision, and I heard him draw an unsteady breath. Halfway into the second verse he added his voice to the rest, and it trembled with tears. Eventually the fiddle player caught it up, and the guitarist. Wolfboy beckoned me up to the scaffold, lit the torch, and handed it to me. For just a moment I thought about the symbolism of it; then I turned back to Vissa and held out the torch. He accepted it. Still crying, still singing, he sent his sister's spirit forth.
Other people would stay to make sure the pyre burned down safely; that wasn't my job. Sunny started to give me a brisk handshake when she left, but it transformed itself halfway through into a fierce hug, and she walked away quickly across the grass. I sent Vissa back across the Border with assurances that he would be welcome in Bordertown whenever he liked. I didn't think he'd avail himself of the opportunity, but that was up to him. Eventually I went home, not to Tick-Tick's apartment (it wasn't hers anymore; I would have to get used to that) but to mine (my old one; I had two now, and I would have to decide between them soon). I had an hour to kill before dinner.
On the one hand, nothing had changed. Over there on the other, everything had.
I could go back to the World. There wasn't a very good reason to, but I could. I could probably even face my mother and father, now that I knew who and what I was, and didn't have to believe in what
they
thought I was. I could survive out there now. But what could I do? What did I have to give back, that the
A B B YY.c
World would a
ccept?
If I stayed, it would be like having lost the use of one eye, at least for a while. And it would hurt. At least, in the World, there were no reminders of Tick-Tick. That was as much a disadvantage as a
recommendation, though.
I could become a cop. Could I go to Sunny and say, "Dinner in six weeks aside, would you teach me the trade?" Or maybe I only wanted to ask her to make me part of something. I had been part of something, before the other part died. I would hate being a cop, but at least I would share it with someone, and that person would appreciate what I was and what I could do.
I wanted to
do
something, to renounce or embrace something, to make a sacrifice, to make a gesture. It was a dangerous moment. Heaven knows what I might have done if there hadn't been a knock at the
door.
I opened it to a halfie boy with light blue hair and mismatched eyes. I remembered him, a little, from the funeral, and from months before in the street in front of Tick-Tick's, with a bicycle.
"Sorry to bother you," he blurted out, "today, you know. I mean—" He gave up and changed direction.
"My little sister's missing," he said in a rush. "My stupid wiener brother was supposed to look after her, but he went out back to roll dice with his friends and Lumi wandered off. I'm scared—"
I stopped him with one finger, held up. He looked at me past it the way I used to see people look at Tick-Tick when they'd described the sound the engine made before it died. Maybe they'd always looked at me that way, the people who'd asked me to find something. A little awe, a little doubt, and a whole lot of hope.
"We have to find her in half an hour," I told him, checking my pocket for my keys. "I have a date with some hard-boiled eggs."
He looked baffled; then he realized that I'd said I'd do it.
"Thataway," I announced, and led the way.
About the Author
Emma Bull (P. J. F.) was born in 1954 in Torrance, California. Many other significant events occurred worldwide in the same year, but she can never remember any of them when she sits down to write an About the Author. She first visited the Twin Cities in 1976. When, bleary-eyed in the very small hours of the morning, she looked out the window of the car she was riding in and saw the large green sign announcing that the Cretin Avenue exit was a mile away, she knew she'd found a home.
She likes road trips ("Look! It's Carhenge!"), coffee, didgeridoos, fabric stores, the Aubrey-Maturin books by Patrick O'Brian, the films of John Woo, her husband Will Shetterly, and her idiot cats Chaos and Brain Damage. She doesn't like liver, heights, waiting in line, or any sentence in which "impact" is used as a verb.
