Singer from the Sea

Title Page

Prologue Dreamtime

ONE
Blessingham School

TWO
The Library

THREE
The Planet Haven

FOUR
Mahahm

FIVE
An Unexpected Invitation

SIX
One’s Place in Havenor

SEVEN
Aufors Leys

EIGHT
A Proposal and What Followed

NINE
The Planet Ares

TEN
The Lord Paramount’s Elevator

ELEVEN
Various Visitations

TWELVE
A Short Trip to an Unexpected Destination

THIRTEEN
The Duchess Alicia’s Daughter

FOURTEEN
Gentlemen of the Court

FIFTEEN
Bessany Blodden

SIXTEEN
Absences of Women

SEVENTEEN
Merdune Lagoon

EIGHTEEN
Nocturne

NINETEEN
Mission to Mahahm

TWENTY
The Malghaste

TWENTY-ONE
The Mahahmbi

TWENTY-TWO
Machinations

TWENTY-THREE
The Marae Morehu

TWENTY-FOUR
People from the Sea

TWENTY-FIVE
The Empty City

TWENTY-SIX
The Lord Paramount

TWENTY-SEVEN
Shah Mahtt

TWENTY-EIGHT
The Assembly

TWENTY-NINE
The Covenants of Haven

THIRTY
The Singer From the Sea

Glossary

END OF DAYS by Dennis Danuer

LORD DEMON by Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold

SINGER FROM THE SEA

EUROPA STRIKE: Book Three of the Heritage Trilogy

FAR HORIZONS: All New Tales from the Greatest Worlds of Science Fiction

Eos Books by Sheri S. Tepper

Copyright

About the Publisher

I
N
G
ENEVIEVE
’
S DREAM
,
THE OLD WOMAN LUNGED UP THE
stairs, hands clutching like claws from beneath her ragtag robe. “Lady. They’re coming to kill you, now!”

She dreamed herself responding, too slowly at first, for she was startled and confused by the old woman’s agitation. “Who? Awhero, what are you talking about.”

“Your father’s taken. The Shah has him. Now his men come for your blood! Yours and the child’s. They’re coming.”

The smell of blood was all around her, choking her. So much blood. Her husband, gone; now her father, taken! Dovidi, only a baby, and never outside these walls!

Genevieve dreamed herself crying, “They’re coming after Dovidi? How did the Shah know about the baby?”

“Your father tell him.”

Endanger his grandson in that way? Surely not. Oh, surely, surely not. “I’ll get him. We’ll go …”

“If you take baby, you both be killed.” The old woman reached forward and shook her by the shoulders, so vehement as to forget the prohibitions of caste. “I take him. I smutch his face and say he one of us. They scared to look and they never doubt …”

“Take me, too …”

“No. You too tall. Too strange looking. They know you!”

“Where? Where shall I go?”

“I sing you Tenopia. Go like Tenopia. By door, your man’s cloak with his sunhelmet, with his needfuls still there, in pockets.” She pulled at the rags that hung from her shoulders, shreds tied together to make a tattered wrapping. “Take this! You tall for woman, so you walk past like man. Malghaste man. Go now!”

In her dream, she babbled something about getting word to the ship, then she went, thrust hard by Awhero’s arms, strong for a woman her age. She fled to the courtyard, to the door through the city wall, a door that stood ajar! She could see directly into the guardpost outside—empty. Never empty except now! It smelled of a trap!

Beside the door hung the outer robe with its sunhelmet hood lining, behind the door half a dozen staves stood below a pendant cluster of water bottles, like flaccid grapes. She shut and bolted the inviting door, snatched the cloak, a staff, a waterbottle, and fled back through the house to the kitchen wing, calling to someone as she went past the kitchens to the twisting stairs that only the malghaste used. Awhero had shown her the hatchway below, and she went directly to it, struggling into the robe as she fled, draping the rags around her shoulders to make it look as if she were clad only in tatters. As she slipped through the hatchway she heard voices shouting and fists thundering at the door she had barred.

She came out in a deep stairwell where coiled stairs led up to the narrow alley. The alley led to the street. She went up, and out, head down, a little bent, the staff softly thumping as she moved slowly, like any other passerby. Ahead of her was the narrow malghaste gate through the city wall, never guarded, never even watched, for this was where the untouchables carried out the city’s filth. The stained and tattered rags marked her as one of them. Outside that gate a small malghaste boy guarded a flock of juvenile harpya, their fin-wings flattened against the heat, and beyond the flock was a well with a stone coping. The area around it was sodden, and she felt the mud ooze over her toes as she filled the bottle, slung it over her shoulder and walked away on the northern road, still slowly, as any
malghaste might go. She did not run until she was out of sight of the town.

In her dream she was being hunted by dogs.

She woke to hear them baying, closer than before.

No. No, not dogs. Arghad’s hunters came on wings, not feet, and they had pursued her for two days, now. The Mahahmbi had no dogs, but their birds-of-prey had dogs’ loyalty to their masters, dogs’ ability to track by scent, and they could scream a signal from the sky when they detected their quarry. She had left her smell behind, on towels, on clothing, on all the baby’s things. There had been much of her to give the hunters!

Two nights she had moved over the desert, sometimes running, sometimes staggering; almost three days she had hidden on the desert sleeping when she could. Through last night, the wind had been from the south, and she had fled into it, blinking its grit from her eyes. This morning, the third morning, it had swung around, coming from the west, and she had lain down on the lee side of a dune, in the shade cast by a line of bone bushes, her head to the north, her feet to the south as Tenopia had done, aware, even through her exhaustion, of the symbolism of the act. Tenopia-songs paid much attention to the interior meanings of simple things. Tenopia: the heroine of women’s songs sung by the malghaste in Mahahm-qum.

Lying with her feet away from the city signified that though matters of her mind were in the city behind her, her survival lay in moving away. Dovidi was behind her, and pray heaven he was safe. The menfolk were there, perhaps, if they were not dead. She could do nothing about any of them, but she might save herself. Any hope of doing so lay south, toward the refuge of the malghaste. If her mind struggled with this, her feet did not, for they staggered southward while she was only half awake, into the long shadows east of the stone dike that belted the base of the dune.

Long ago, when this world had been volcanic, the edge of a huge surface block had been thrust upright to make a mighty rampart running north and south. Within the block, layers of igneous rock had been separated by thicker layers of softer, sedimentary stuff, now much worn away
to leave paths sheltered from the wind by parallel walls, stone lanes she could use now as Tenopia had used them long ago.

North was the sea, where the shepherds pastured their flocks on the seaweed washed ashore by the sea winds. East or west was desert scattered with hidden oases, already occupied by Mahahmbi. When Tenopia had gone southward, however, toward the pole, she had found refuges along the way. If one went far enough, the malghaste said, one might find Galul, mountainous Galul, with forests, shade, flowers, running water. Perhaps it was true. Or, perhaps it was only a prisoner’s myth, the Mahahmbi idea of heaven, achieved as a reward for some unthinkable virtue.

Though the rag-tatters over her sand-colored robe were the best camouflage she could have; though her feet left no lasting tracks in the wind-blown sand; still she stank of fear, of stale sweat, and of the breastmilk down the front of her bodysuit that had soured before drying. Now the stiffened fabric chafed her with every step, and the odor floated on the still air for the winged hunters to sniff out. When Tenopia had come this way, she had sung to nga tahunga makutu matangi, the wizards of the winds, asking their help in confusing her trail. She knew no invocation to bring the tahunga makutu to her aid. She would have to rely on her own two feet.

The dunes rose higher on her left, the sand ascended in the path she followed; eventually it rose to the top of the walls, burying the stone lanes. She took a sighting south, on a distant outcropping, and held to that direction, swerving only briefly between two thorny mounds, around another, hearing the shrieks from the heavens fade behind her. The hunters were going off at a northeasterly tangent, getting farther away. When the stone dike reemerged it was only a shallow ridge, rooted in the ribbon of shadow along its eastern side. She slipped into the shade, her feet plopping into it as fish into water, feeling the coolness rise to her knees, hips, to her waist as the wall loomed higher, topping her head at last and continuing to rise in erase scallops and notches. A few yards to her left a parallel wall emerged from the sand, and before long she moved
in a blessed corridor of shade and calm air, away from the forge of the sun, the huffing bellows of the wind.

Both the shadowed lane and the hunters’ misdirection were blessings. Perhaps the wind wizards had decided to help her without being asked. Or perhaps Awhero had sent someone into the desert with a sack of the baby’s diapers, to draw the hunters away. Several times Genevieve had heard either men or birds frighteningly close, but they had always turned aside. She caught her breath at the memory of panic, yesterday’s fear adding to this moment’s weariness. She bent to ease a sudden pain in her side, aware of an overwhelming thirst. She reached for her waterbottle …

Gone. Left where she’d been sleeping!

She collapsed against the stone, head falling onto her knees, arms wrapped around her head, holding herself together, denying the terror that threatened to erupt in hysterical screaming or laughter or shouts of nonsense. Think, Genevieve, she told herself. Think. The bottle had only a swallow or two left in it, not worth going back for. Besides, if the men gave up on their current line of search and backtracked into the wind, they could still come across her trail before dark. Also, when Tenopia had escaped from the Shah of Mahahm-qum, she had reached a sanctuary on the third evening. This was Genevieve’s third evening, and she might already be within sight of the place the old woman called te marae, he wahi oranga. Water or no, better go on than back.

She stood up again, putting one foot in front of the other, fighting the urge to lick her lips. They were already split and bleeding. Licking them only made them worse. The Mahahmbi wore veils across their faces when in the desert, and they carried unguents for their lips and eyelids. That is, the men did. Women had no need of such stuff, for women did not go into the desert. Except for Tenopia. And, come to think of it, she didn’t know what time of day Tenopia had run from Mahahm-qum. Genevieve herself had fled at noon, or thereabout. She might have another half day to go.

She climbed drifting sand as the walls on either side of her were covered once more. Beyond the dune was an area of gravelly hills, spotted with thorn. She stopped to
take her husband’s locator from the pocket of his robe and check her direction, following the line into the distance to find a landmark on the horizon’. She had come this far from landmark to landmark, south on south, and thank God for the locator, though now, with the sun almost on the horizon, she could almost set a track at right angles to the shadows of the thorn, streaming away to her left, shadows that went down the dune and all the way to the top of another …