Northshore (23 page)

Pamra turned to Thrasne, smiling. He had not seen her
like this before, though the novices of Baris Tower would have recognized her radiant face, her eyes lighted as though from within by rapture. Her arms went out, out, as though she would encompass the world. ‘We will go, yes,’ she breathed to him. ‘But we must take the people with us, all of them, to the Protector of Man.’

And he, lost in her eyes from which the dark shadows had suddenly gone, stared at her in terror, seeing her flee away from him down a long corridor toward a blinding glow into which he could not see and would not dare to go.

From the shore, Medoor Babji saw them there, saw their faces, both, seemed to see an effulgency of wings hovering at Pamra’s side, put her hands to her eyes and drew them away again to see only the sun glow and two people silhouetted against it.

Soon the Melancholics would be leaving the
Gift
to begin the trip to the steppes. It had been disturbing to travel aboard the
Gift,
disturbing and strange. Now she found herself glad that they would be leaving in a short time. She could not bear the expression on Thrasne’s face.

The lady Kesseret, Superior of the Baris Tower, former prisoner in the Accusatory of Highland Lees, now convalescent, her injuries received under the question slowly healing, leaned in the window of the library wing looking out upon an evening of early summer. Beneath the window on a narrow ledge was a flame-bird’s nest, a tidily woven basket of straw and wild-pamet fiber, holding three spherical golden eggs. An additional pile of pamet fiber lay to one side, weighted down by several small stones. In a flash of orange and gold, the flame-bird itself came swooping down the wall to perch on the ledge and move restively between this pile of tinder and the nest, fluttering its wings as though in indecision whether to stay or go.

The window was in the lady’s bedroom, hers at least by guest right. She had occupied this room since the laggard sun had broken winter’s hold upon Highland Lees and let them all come up from the caverns. Cozy though the caverns had been, she preferred this room, windowed to the air. Through the open door she could hear Tharius Don’s flat-harp virtuoso, Martien, as he flicked his hammers over throbbing strings. Behind her on the porcelain stove a kettle sang an antiphon to itself. She was warm, well wrapped in a thick robe and in Tharius Don’s arms, for the moment forgetful of her pain.

‘You comfort me,’ she said drowsily. ‘I am wondering why.’

‘Because we remember really comforting each other,’ he said. ‘When it was more than this.’ For a moment there was
something virile and intemperate in his voice, as though for that instant his passion had been more than merely memory. His arms tightened about her, strong arms still, capable of stirring her own recollection so that her mind lusted briefly over old visions while her body lay aside, like some discarded garment.

‘It isn’t fair,’ she complained. ‘Why can we still feel pain so very well when all the other feelings are gone?’

‘All the other feelings aren’t gone,’ he said patiently, knowing she knew, knowing she needed to hear him say it. ‘Only lust. And lust is gone because the Payment is a Talker gift.’ He did not need to explain that. They both understood it. The Talkers died if they bred. Therefore they did not breed or value breeding. They did not lust. They had no experience of passion. Though they perceived it intellectually, their bodies rejected it, and the elixir made of their blood rejected it as well. ‘We could have refused the elixir, Kessie.’

Refused it. She thought of having refused it, of having grown old with Tharius Don. There were old lovers in Baristown whom she had watched over the years. She had seen them, too, aged past passion, walking hand in hand in the market square. She imagined them snuggled side by side in their beds, complaining to one another like old barnyard fowl, full of clucks and chirrs, grinding the day’s events in their leathery gizzards to make each one reasonable and useful to them. ‘My, my,’ they would say. ‘Did you see? Did you ever? What’s the world coming to?’

How was it different for them, those old people? Remembering the loves and lusts of youth? Little different, perhaps, except that their twilight was brief, the memories strong enough to last that little time between age and the end, their flavor and fragrance scarcely dimmed by the years, death coming at last while the perfume lingered, making their old lives redolent of youth. They breathed the scents of childhood, a potpourri of their green years.

But for Kesseret? And Tharius? What remained?

‘Dust,’ she whimpered. ‘All our love, dust.’

‘Not while I hold you,’ he told her urgently. ‘Not while I grieve for your pain.’

The memory of pain made her fleetingly angry. Tain and anger,’ she said. ‘Those we keep.’

‘And curiosity. And laughter. And determination. So you see, it isn’t all hopeless.’

‘It seems so sometimes,’ she said, remembering the pincers at her fingers, the wedges driven beneath her toenails. ‘Ah, gods, Tharius, but it seems so.’

He buried his face in her hair so she would not see his tears, thinking to himself, ‘Pity. We haven’t lost pity. Which is why we go on plotting, always plotting. Oh, gods, when will the plots be thick enough to clot into action!’

She moved in his arms, as though aware of her pain. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she said.

‘Because of Martien? He wouldn’t say a word to anyone.’

‘No, not because of your musician friend, love. Because you shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be showing any interest in me at all. Someone may be watching the corridor to this suite, to see if you come arid go – or come and stay.’

‘You are thinking in township terms, Kessie. Those of us here at the Chancery no longer have the habit of thinking in terms of sexual misconduct. We are beyond scandal.’

She hid her face in his shoulder, very white at his words. ‘I know. Stupid of me.’

‘Yes, my dear. Stupid of you.’

‘Do you ever … are you ever sorry?’

‘Sorry to have outlived my passions? Yes. Sorry to have time, still, to do what we are trying to do? No.’

She shuddered, trembling at his words, fearful of what they were trying to do. In the past, the cause had seemed the only righteous way to live, and it had not brought her pain. Now it had brought her more than she was ready to bear. ‘Still, love, they may wonder at your interest in me. What am I, after all? Superior of a Tower. There are thousands of those.’

‘I made my interest very clear,’ he said, folding her more closely in the robe. ‘I said before the questioning started that
it was shameful treatment of a loyal member of the service. I’ve said it in the interim, several times, and I’ve capped it by demanding they recognize your courage by providing you with care and attention until you can be restored to duty.’

‘Which I could have been yesterday, or last week.’

‘Not true, Kessie. You may have come here the direct route, by flying. The road back is not so easy.’

‘Easy! By the true God, Tharius, I hope you didn’t think that was easy!’

‘You lived through it,’ he said, caressing her. ‘That’s the important thing. You lived.’

‘I lived because I dragged the most ambitious and viciously self-serving Awakener in my Tower into my problem and linked his future to mine. He’s one I should have rid the Tower of early on. I didn’t. I saved him, for just such a need. As a stratagem it worked, but I’m not proud of it, Tharius.’ She trembled again, and the slow tears gathered at the curve of her eyes. She blinked, driving them back, willing that he would not see her so weakened. ‘Now he is loose out there, a Laugher. And I am among those who sent him.’

‘You lived,’ he said again. ‘That’s all that matters.’

She had begun to feel real pain again, but it was too soon to take more of the waters of surcease that Tharius had provided. ‘Tell me,’ she whispered in an attempt to distract herself from her pain. ‘Tell me how far we have come?’

He looked around carefully, being sure they were not watched or overheard, a movement made habitual through a hundred years of conspiratorial conversations. ‘The cause has members in over five thousand Towers,’ he murmured at last, like a litany, well learned, often rehearsed. ‘One-fifth of all Towers. Over half of them include the Superiors of those Towers. We have strong lay groups in ninety percent of all the towns. Over half the signal routes are ours, at least on some shifts. I am now informed within a day or two of things happening anywhere on Northshore.’

She concentrated, remembering conversations held long ago. ‘The cause is about where we planned it would be, then. Somehow I had thought it lagged.’

‘No. It has not lagged. The suspicions of Mitiar and Bossit were planned for. The only thing we had not foreseen was this untimely suspicion on the part of the fliers. Now there must be some kind of diversion, something to draw them away. At the moment, they are too much focused upon the Chancery.’

‘What are you planning?’

‘I’ve sent an actor friend to the tents of the Noor, to visit Queen Fibji.’

‘Oh, Tharius, haven’t those poor devils suffered enough?’ Her own pain was forgotten for the moment in the pain she felt for the Noor, constant victims of the Jondarites. ‘Can’t we leave them out of it?’

He shook his head sadly. ‘It will mean nothing worse for them than they already suffer, Kessie. I’ve sent someone to talk of Southshore, that’s all. I’ve had him say nothing which wasn’t in the palace library. There’s every possibility Southshore really exists, just as I’ve had it described to her. If I know Queen Fibji, she’ll send an expedition within the year. General Jondrigar would try to stop them, of course, if he heard of it. He would not let all those possible slaves go. He enjoys his expeditions among the Noor too much to let them escape. We must make sure he does not hear of it. The fliers will be much confused if
they
hear of it. So, we must make sure they do.’

‘And it will turn eyes away from us. When do you think, Tharius? Soon?’

‘I think soon. If nothing else happens to upset our plans. If no other junior Awakener goes off with a pitful of workers. If no eager Riverman starts the uprising ahead of time. If there is no spontaneous religious uprising of one kind or another.’ He brooded over this while Kessie moved restlessly in his arms.

So much to keep track of; so much to control.

Many years ago there had been two factions within their movement. One for immediate war; one for the hope of peace. The war faction had plotted to kill the fliers, all of them. They had planned to pick a time when the Talkers
would be out of the Talons and simply murder them all.

Tharius had been a leader of the peace party. He recalled impassioned speeches he had made, phrases he had used. ‘We would be forever guilty of the murder of an intelligent species.’ He believed it. Much though he detested the fliers, including the Talkers, still he believed it. Moral men did not do such things. Not to another species with intelligence, with speech, with a culture of its own.

Some years of covert exploration into the actual attitudes of Talkers had followed. He laughed bitterly sometimes when he recalled that time. His thesis had been so simple. What the fliers were doing was immoral, unethical. They were eating intelligent beings. They were raising the dead, who were possibly aware of that fact. If they ate fish, they could continue to live, but in a moral way. Wouldn’t that be preferable? Wouldn’t it be a better arrangement? He had asked this of Talker after Talker during convocations. ‘Wouldn’t it be better?’

To which they had cawed hideous laughter or turned to deposit blobs of shit at his toes, showing what they thought of the idea. Eventually he had been forced to understand. Morality was not an absolute. Theirs was not his. His was not shared even by all humans, much less by this nonhuman species.

He had quit trying to sell the idea after a time. He had been warned it wouldn’t work, and it was becoming difficult to disguise his stubborn efforts as anything but what they were. He had called it research, but research was not Tharius’s affair, after all. Council member Koma Nepor was Chief of Research. Questioning the fliers was not Tharius’s responsibility, either. Ezasper Jorn was Ambassador to the Thraish. When it became evident Tharius’s efforts were drawing unpleasant attention from both the Talons and the Chancery, what had been confidential attempts at negotiation became deeply covert. There were to be no more attempts at persuasive conversion of fliers.

Which left, he was convinced at last, only conversion by
necessity. If there were no bodies to eat, then the fliers would eat fish or nothing.

And in that belief, the cause had been born. From that statement all else had followed. Agents moving among the towns, increasing the fisheries against the day when fliers would need fish to eat. Superiors of Towers sending worker crews to build more jetties. Rivermen holding themselves ready for the day when every worker pit would be emptied in the deep of the night. Even now agents moved across Northshore seeking patches of Tears to spray with fungicide, reducing the number of locations where they were found. When the day came, there would be no human bodies available, at least none treated with Tears. And when the morning of the revolution came, fliers would eat fish or die.

His arms tightened around his burden once more. The fliers would eat fish or die. And the humans in the Chancery? Those in the Towers? Well, they would eat fish or whatever else they liked, but in a little time they would die as well. When the cause struck, there would be no more elixir to keep their superannuated bodies alive. On some days, Tharius actually looked forward to that time. It was not so much that he tired of life as that he tired of the lives of others. His mouth quirked, thinking of this. Oh, to see the end of Gendra Mitiar!

‘Why are you smiling?’ asked the lady Kesseret, amused at his expression despite herself.

‘Because what we are doing is right,’ he said. ‘Because it is right.’

The flame-bird left its nest to swing out across the courtyard, the vivid circle of its flight seeming to linger on the air. Then it returned to the ledge and began to dance, wings out, legs lifted alternately as it hopped to and fro on the narrow stone, bowing, stretching, stopping occasionally to shift the little stones, sharp-edged with red in the ruddy evening light, as though bloodstained.