Shadow's End (24 page)

There were food stores, too, that she could shift, leaving everything looking much as before. When she returned to the cave, she did so heavily laden. Everything had to be swung into the cave at the end of a rope and then tucked away in crannies before she, herself, had room to stretch out. It was late afternoon before she was finished. Too late, that day, to plant the seedlings. Tomorrow she would get them in. Not in rows or patches, but one by one, among the native plants they much resembled. And tomorrow, if the darknesses did not return, she would take more food, carefully, just as she'd learned as a child. Leaving no trail. Making everything look just as it had before.

F
rom my room in the hive, I heard Lutha and Leelson and Trompe talking. It was early morning. They thought I was still asleep, I suppose, for they were talking about me.

“The emotion was shame,” said Trompe in an argumentative tone.

“Also anger,” Leelson insisted. “She was ashamed, but also angry.”

“Wouldn't you be?” demanded Lutha. “My God, gentlemen.
Wouldn't you be? The anger part I can certainly understand.”

“So can we,” said Leelson in a tone even I thought to be patronizing. “It's the shame part we're finding intriguing.”

“What they did to her was a rape,” said Lutha furiously. “Our persons are in our faces. When we show ourselves to the public, we show our faces. That's what we recognize about one another, those of us who see, at any rate. Our faces portray our personas. Her persona was violated, just as in rape. Rape evokes emotions of shame and anger because of the violation.”

“Why was it done?” Trompe asked.

She replied, “We won't understand it until we find out a lot more about this society.” She paused, breathing furiously, enraged on my behalf. Even from where I lay on my bed, I could hear her fuming.

“And I
will
find out,” she said firmly.

I thought she might indeed, for she seemed a very determined woman. I would have told her what she wanted to know if I could. But could I say, yes, it was my own fault, for sometimes I have doubts, and my sisters in sorrow tell me they, too, have doubts. But, so my sisters say, we are not alone in this! Our mothers, siblings, cousins, our dearest friends, they have doubts. Most of those who emerge unscathed from the House Without a Name, they, too, have doubts. Doubts are not peculiar to those who have been maimed, so why … why we? Was our doubt of a particular kind?

More had been maimed lately, so the sisters said. In our great-grandmothers' time, almost no one was maimed, but now it is more than half! Why? What was happening? The sisterhood argued over this again and again, finding no answer. What does one say? I was guilty of doubting. I did not doubt more than others, or differently from others, but I was selected for punishment. My punishment
was particularly horrid because … because of who did it to me….

Lutha was right. There is no rape on Dinadh, but I can imagine it would be as shaming, as cruel as this. In a way, it was like what the two Fastigats were doing to me, questioning me, searching at me, examining me, bending their Fastigat sense upon me. That, too, was rape. They increased my shame and sorrow for no good reason, for they could not learn something I did not know.

It is better to do as the sisters recommend, to say nothing at all, to admit nothing. Let them seek elsewhere, among others for answers. And if they find answers, let them tell me.

A voice from the door.

“Saluez? Are you awake?”

Lutha.

I sat up, pulling my veil into place. “I was up earlier,” I confessed.

“Leelson and Trompe and I've been talking,” she said. “We have an offer we wish to make you, in return for your help.”

I had heard nothing of an offer. What offer?

She said, “It's possible … your face can be fixed. Restored …”

“No,” I cried, thrusting away with both hands. “No. Do not say that!”

She looked shocked, horrified. “But surely …”

“I would have to leave Dinadh,” I cried hysterically. “I would have to go away from my people. They would not let me live here if you healed me.”

“But … but I thought …”

“It was my fault,” I cried. I who had decided to say nothing! I, who knew it was not my fault! “My face is evidence of my sin. Do you think you can erase my sin by healing me? Do you think my people will let me live among them if I am healed!”

She backed away from me in confusion. Leelson came
from the study and put his hand on her shoulder. “What?” he demanded.

She turned and led him into the room, shutting the door firmly behind them. And I sat on the edge of my bed and cried. Oh, if I were healed, Shalumn might be mine again. Oh, if I were healed, I would have to go away. Oh, if I were healed, it would change nothing, it would change everything!

After a time I dried my face, straightened my veil, and went to knock upon the closed door.

“I will help you,” I said when they opened it. “But you must not talk of …what you said earlier. Not at all. Not ever!” I could not bear it. It set all my hard-won peace at nothing.

They stared at me, all three of them. The boy was curled on a bench beneath the window, playing with his fingers. They cared, but he did not.

“Why?” asked Leelson. “Why will you help us?”

“You say there is great danger for everyone, perhaps for Dinadh too. Perhaps the outlander ghost found something to avert this danger, so I will help you search for the outlander ghost or for what it was he knew.”

Leelson ran his hands through his hair. He was a handsome man, Leelson. Tall, bright-haired, with one of those rugged, rocky outlander faces that always seem strange to us Dinadhi, who are round-faced and smoother looking. The boy looked something like him. More like him than Lutha. But he had a big-eyed strangeness to him, something I thought I should recognize.

“Where could Bernesohn Famber have gone, Saluez?”

It was a foolish question. He knew as well as I. “You heard his own voice,” I replied. “He spoke of the southern canyon, of the omphalos. You yourself said he must have walked. That is where he walked.”

Leelson frowned as he seated himself. “All right, let's take it point by point. Last night you told us certain gods were abandoned on your former world.”

I nodded. Unwisely, I had said it.

“And these gods were abandoned for”—he gestured toward the window—“the beautiful people.”

“We chose the Kachis instead,” I said. “Our songfathers chose them.”

“Why?” asked Lutha.

“It is not something we speak of,” I told them. “I have already said more than is proper. We chose them, that is all. We abandoned certain of our gods, and chose these instead, and came here to this world.”

“Through the omphalos?”

“Through the omphalos.”

They looked at one another in that way they have, like grown-ups amused by the fanciful tales of children.

“She believes it,” said Trompe, staring at me.

Why would I not believe it? It was true.

“If you'll allow a non-Fastigat a comment,” said Lutha in a dry voice. “As a linguist, I've become aware that there are many kinds of truth—factual truths, scientific truths, spiritual truths, psychological truths. It is no doubt spiritually true that the people of Dinadh emerged from the omphalos. That being so, it doesn't matter whether it's factually true or not.” She smiled at me, saying I might believe as I liked, she would not question it.

“Why do you say that?” Trompe demanded.

She turned to him, gesturing. “I say it because we can only deal with so many variables at a time! Bernesohn didn't mention emergence stories, he spoke of a place! A geographical location. We need not concern ourselves with what's true or false
about
the place, at least not until we get there.”

I bowed my head. Exactly. What was true or false did not concern them. Only their duty concerned them, as only my duty now concerned me. My duty and my child to come. The future, to which life itself owes a duty. “To fit into the pattern,” say the songfathers. “Each life owes a duty to fit in.”

Even men who know many lies occasionally tell the truth.

“We must go there, then,” said Leelson. “To the place.”

“It is forbidden,” I told them. “No outlanders are allowed at the omphalos. Only Dinadhi without stain may attend Tahs-uppi, and the ceremony will be very soon.”

They simply stared at me, knowing what I was feeling. How strange to have people know as these men knew. They knew what I had said was not all I meant.

“But you're going to take us there,” said Leelson at last, prompting me.

“I will guide you,” I whispered. “If you want to go.”

“But I have a map,” he said, holding it up for me to see. “Do I need a guide?”

“You don't have a way to travel,” Lutha said. “That's what she means.”

“You would not last an hour after dark,” I said quietly. “There are ways and ways. You need someone who knows the ways.”

Not that I knew the ways. I'd never been out after dark, but I'd spoken with herders who had. Leelson moved to the desk, Trompe to the bench, Lutha to her child, all thinking, all deciding, as though this wandering motion helped them think. Perhaps it did.

“They'd know we were gone,” said Lutha, pulling Leely into her lap. “They'd come after us.”

“How would they know?” I asked. “I am your servitor. I take care of your needs. If I do not report that you are gone, who is to know?”

“They would see we aren't here, see we aren't moving around.”

“They don't look at you anyhow,” I said. “That's what I am assigned to do. I look at you so the others don't have to. We do not look at outlanders, we of Dinadh!”

“They would know
you
aren't here,” said Trompe.

Lutha said softly, “They don't look at her, either.”

Behind my veil, my mouth twisted. It was true. If
Chahdzi or songfather did not see me for a number of days, they would think I was staying out of sight. The sisters below would know they had not seen me there, in our place, but they would not search for me. They knew I served these outlanders. They would wait until my duty was done and I came to them.

“So they wouldn't know we were gone,” said Trompe.

“No,” I said. “They would not know. Not for some time. Songfather may not know until he himself arrives at the omphalos and finds you there.”

“The ceremony is soon?” Lutha demanded.

“Very soon,” I told them. “Within days.”

“Can we get there first?”

“Not by much,” I admitted. “A few days, at most.”

“How do we get there at all?”

“There are wains here in the canyon, wains that make a safe enclosure for people, with woven panels to make a safe pen for the gaufers that pull them. When the songfathers attend Tahs-uppi, that is how they go. We must take a wain and six gaufers to pull it.”

“Gaufers?” asked Lutha.

“Woolbeasts. The young are gaufs. Gaufers are the neutered ones.”

I could see her tucking these words away against later need.

“How do we get these gaufers down from the heights?” asked Leelson.

“We don't. There are still some here, because all the flocks have not been moved up the trail yet. We must steal them before the flocks are taken up.”

“Food stores?” murmured Trompe.

“There is much food here in the dispenser,” I told them. “Though it is outlander food, I imagine I can figure out how to cook it over a fire.”

They thought about this for some time. Lutha went on cuddling the child. Trompe stared out across the floor of the cave to the canyon. Leelson fiddled with things on the
desk, moving them about, here and there. When Leelson turned to me at last, it was not to ask how, but why.

“If this journey is forbidden,” he said, “you may be putting yourself at grave risk.”

Behind my veil I smiled. “What can they do to me that has not already been done? Perhaps they will kill me! They will not do it until after the child is born, and I do not care if they do it then.”

Perhaps it was only what Lutha calls bravado, but I think I was telling the truth.

I
am not much practiced at stealing. We Dinadhi do not steal, not much. Oh, children, sometimes, a little dried fruit more than our share. A handful of nuts. A finger dipped surreptitiously into the honey pot. What else? What is there? Only what we make with our own hands.

So, considering how to steal a wain and gaufers was a novel thing for me. It had a certain stomach-churning excitement to it. Leaving the outlanders to mutter and worry behind me, I went out onto the lip of the cave and sat with my legs dangling over the edge. Below me, behind screened openings in the canyon wall, the herds have their winter caves. There before the time of First Grass the females bear their young. When all the gaufs have been born and are steady on their legs, the herds are driven up one of the trails onto the grassy forested lands above. Wains are not taken back and forth. They are too bulky and heavy to drag up and down the trails. So there are wains on the heights for the herders to live in, and there are wains in the canyons for the songfathers to travel to and from the little ceremonies at each other's hives and the big ceremonies like Tahs-uppi.

At the Coming of Cold, the herds come down again, into the caves, where they eat the dried remnants of our gardens, the vines and stalks and even the weeds we have pulled and set aside for them. When they have eaten it all, they eat fungus, as we do, growing as tired of it as we do
and becoming eager for the fresh green of the heights. Most of the herds had gone up already, but a few small flocks were left.

Getting six gaufers away from the herders would be possible. Harnessing them would probably be difficult, though I thought I could figure it out. Harnessing them, hitching them, driving them, all that to be figured out and accomplished without being observed. Which meant at night.