Singer from the Sea (3 page)

“Tracking devices?”

“Scent emitters. Sometimes women escape, but their shoes are made to lead hunters directly to them. You’re lucky. The devices were blocked with mud …”

“The well,” she cried. “When I filled my bottle at the well. It was muddy.”

“Was your ship here, on Mahahm?”

“Outside the city. As I went out, I yelled at the communications man to tell them what was happening.” Or had she? She remembered doing it. But then, she might have imagined doing it.

“The people of Mahahm-qum would expect you to go toward your ship. They would not expect you to have listened to a malghaste woman’s tales. So, because they are creatures of their preconceptions, it is unlikely they have any idea where you are. If we are lucky, they will assume you are dead. One of us may backtrack to the place you left the bottle, however, as we would prefer that it and the sandals be found somewhere else, a long way from here. On the way to some oasis.”

A breath of air came from her left as the grille slipped into a wall pocket and a door opened upon a white plastered room where the day’s last light pooled around the high, barred window and seeped a melancholy dimness onto the narrow bed and stone floor below. Beside the bed a small table held a glass carafe of water topped with an
inverted cup. She almost fell over herself in her scramble toward it.

“Slowly,” said the voice from somewhere across the room. “Take it slowly. A few sips, then a few more. Otherwise you may vomit it up, and that would be a waste. Don’t eat anything until you’ve bathed and settled down and are no longer thirsty. Bring your staff, and also the lantern. It will soon be dark.”

The lantern stood in its own circle of light on the floor by the grille. She fetched it and set it upon the table where a bowl covered a plate of fruit, sliced meat and a loaf of brown, crusty bread. Though she ached with hunger, she obeyed the voice. She sat on the bed with the cup in her hand, drinking little by little, refilling the cup twice. The dryness of her throat and nose slowly eased. For the first time she noticed the little jars near the plate, one of them half-filled with something waxy, herbal, perhaps an unguent.

“Can I use this on my lips?” she asked the walls, turning the jar in her hands, seeing the label too late to forestall the question. “For desert-burned skin.”

“Never mind,” she said, swallowing hysterical laughter that caught in her throat when she read the label on the other jar. “To dry your milk. Take one with each meal.”

To dry her milk. She choked on tears, swallowed them. Well then. Whatever help they might offer, it wouldn’t run to getting Dovidi back, not soon. She had best plan on staying here for some time and be thankful for what it offered: drink, food, and a place to wash herself. Someone had definitely mentioned bathing.

She picked up the lantern and walked the perimeter of the room, three meters by five, the entry door now closed off by a sliding panel. Through a pointed arch opposite the entry she found a boxlike hall with three more of the sliding panel doors: left, right, and straight ahead. Two of the panels were immovable, but the one to her right slid easily, opening on a stone-floored alcove furnished with a large, shallow copper pan, an ewer of tepid water, cloths, a low stool, and in the corner, a privy hole like those in the house they had used in Mahahm-qum.

Shutting the panel behind her, she set the lantern on the
floor, threw off the dusty robe and ladled water into the pan. Sitting on the stool she washed her feet and legs before standing in the pan to wash the rest of her. The water had a sharp, resinous smell, some cleansing agent that rinsed away without residue and took the grime with it. Even the sweaty stiffness of her hair dissolved when she poured water through it. When she had finished washing herself she fetched her bodysuit and sloshed it about in the pan until the dried milk was gone. She wrung it out and spread it across the stool. The dirty water went down the privy hole and the folded cloths went over the edge of the pan. One dry cloth was long enough to wrap around her body, covering her aching, swollen breasts. She wasn’t expecting company, and it covered her almost decently. Certainly it would do to eat in.

When she returned to the table she found a comb lying atop a folded shift, a perfectly simple white garment woven of the same fiber as the robe Awhero had given her. Plant fiber of some kind. Less harsh than wool. Well then. Someone was watching her, someone who could come in and out without her hearing. Not precisely a comforting thought, though the items spoke of concern for her welfare. Give them, her, whoever, credit for trying. The shift covered her from neck to elbows and ankles. The comb pulled the snarls from her hair. She left the wet strands loose down her back while she rubbed unguent onto her hands and feet and face. Later, when she had rested, she would braid her hair out of the way.

Then the food. The bread was chewy and full of crunchy inclusions, nuts and seeds and shreds of the same rich, peppery pod Awhero had once given her in the rooms below the kitchen. The meat and slices of melon were delicious, the one partially dried and salty, the other juicy and sweet. After a brief spasm of rejection which was almost anger, she took one of the pills from the jar and swallowed it. Emotionally, she hated the idea, but she would need all her strength. If Dovidi couldn’t use her milk, it would be stupid to stress her body to produce it.

When she had eaten less than half the food, she caught herself drowsing, head on chest, breathing deeply, lips half opened around a partly chewed mouthful, a bit of bread
still in hand. She roused enough to cover the food remnants and drink a last half cup of water before setting the cup over the neck of the carafe. If she was being observed, let them give her a good rating for neatness and parsimony. Who knew how long this ration was intended to last?

Her last thought before sleep was of Awhero. She wished the old woman knew she had come this far safely … well, seemingly safely. At least there were no hunters, no voices from the sky. At least she was away from the thorn and the sun. She did not think of the Marshal or Delganor or Dovidi. She did not think of anything but this moment, well fed, comfortably warm, and without thirst. As Tenopia had said, she could afford neither grief nor anger. She could not afford anything but the day, each day from waking to sleep, each such day to be set down after all other such days, a long journey which one must not think of as even having a direction. If one went on, steadily, perhaps at the end there would be explanations, even justification.

The end was the only possible destination. One could not, ever, go back to the beginning.

G
ENEVIEVE
’
S TOWER WAS SLENDER AND TALL, AN ARCHI
tectural conceit added at the last moment to the otherwise undistinguished structure of Blessingham School. Gaining access to this afterthought could not be accomplished on the way to or from anywhere in particular. Climbing the hundred steps to the single room at the top was both inconvenient and arduous. Despite the nuisance, Genevieve had chosen the tower room. For the quiet, she said. For the view. For the brightness of the stars at night.

Though these were at best only half reasons, they satisfied Mrs. Blessingham better than the real reason would have done—a reason which had to do with the billowing foliage of the surrounding forest, the isolation of the star-splashed night, the silence of the sky. On stormy nights the boughs surged and heaved darkly as a midnight sea, and on such nights Genevieve would throw the casements wide and lean into the wind, the white curtains blowing like flung spray as she imagined herself carried jubilantly through enormous silken waves toward an unknown shore.

The imagined sea, the waves, the inexorable movement of the waters were implicit in the instructions her mother had given her. The jubilance, an emotion she had touched rarely, and only at the edges, was an interpolation of her own which, she feared, might be shaming if anyone knew of it but herself.

As Mrs. Blessingham would have observed: the tower was nowhere near the sea; Genevieve had never seen the sea since she had been no farther from Langmarsh House than a single trip to Evermire; Genevieve, like other noble daughters, would not have been allowed to swim. As Genevieve did not wish to explain:
her
sea was not a planetary wetness, exactly. It was inside her as much as it was out there in the night, and though she wasn’t quite sure what her instructions amounted to vis-à-vis swimming or sailing or floating, they meant more than simply disporting herself in the water.

Every evening Genevieve submitted patiently as her hair was braided by the lady’s maid trainee—who took twice the time Genevieve would have taken to do it herself. Each evening she was courteous as she was helped into her nightgown, though she was perfectly capable of getting into a nightgown without assistance. She waited calmly, without fidgeting, as the bed was turned down, and she smiled her thanks when the trainee departed with a curtsey, shutting the door behind her. The moment the latch clicked, however, Genevieve slipped from her chair and put her ear to the door, hearing the retreating clatter of hard soled shoes down steep stone stairs. Only when that sound had faded did she open the window and lean out into the night to evoke the ocean feeling, the inner quiet that dissolved daytime stiffness and propriety in a fluidity of water and wind, a thrust and swell of restless power.

Though by now, her twentieth year, she did this habitually, even earnestly, it had begun as a requirement. The ritual was among those her mother had taught her, and every night, whether in storm or calm, Genevieve did as she had been taught to do. Standing in the window with closed eyes, she focused outward, cataloging and shutting out all ordinary sounds: rustle of the trees, shut out; murmur of voices from the kitchen wing, shut out; clack of the watchman’s heels on the paving of the cloisters, out; whisper of song from the siren-lizards on the roof-tiles, out; bleat of goat in the dairy, out; each day-to-day distraction removed to leave the inner silence that allowed her to listen.

The listening could not be merely passive. Practitioners,
so Genevieve’s mother had emphasized, must visualize themselves as spiders spinning lines of sticky hearkening outward in the night, past time, past distance or direction, toward something that floated in the far, waiting to be heard. Sometimes she spun and spun, remaining in the window for an hour or more, and nothing happened. Sometimes she heard a murmur, as though some immense far-off thing had swiveled an ear and asked, “Where?” or “Who?” or even, once or twice, frighteningly, “Genevieve?”

And once in a great while the web trembled as though the roots of the mountains and the chasms of the sea were resounding with song. At such times, her body reverberated to the harmonics as she retreated to her bed, and sometimes the singing continued during the night, or so she assumed, for her body still ached with it when she woke in the morning.

Senior girls had their pick of rooms in order of their achievement scores in DDR: discipline, dedication, and religion. Genevieve, ranking first, had chosen the tower room.

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” her friend Glorieta teased, quoting from a yore-lore fairy tale.

“Let down your hair,” whooped her twin, Carlotta.

“Better let down her nose,” said snide Barbara, a resentful and distant runner-up. “It’s longer.”

Silence, then a spate of talk to cover embarrassment.

“Your nose is your misfortune,” Mrs. Blessingham had said on more than one occasion. “But your talents make up for it.”

It was a hawkish nose, one that ran, so said the wags, in Genevieve’s family. As for the talents, no one knew of them but Genevieve—and Mrs. Blessingham, who was one too many.

“The nose would look better on the Marshal than it does on you,” Glorieta had admitted, referring to Genevieve’s father. “Pity it had to be on the female side, though even on you it has distinction.”

Genevieve often daydreamed herself away from Haven, to a place where her nose was quite normal, even beautiful. In her dream world, the singing she listened for with
such effort was simply part of the environment, a song she herself could produce without anyone telling her to hush. The fantasy was pervasive. On occasion Genevieve would come to herself in the middle of a meal, unable for a moment to remember where she was because she had been in a place more vivid than reality. Even when awake and alert, she often longed for that other world, though hopelessly, for even if it were real, she couldn’t go there. No one emigrated from Haven. Haven had cut the umbilicus that had tied it to the rest of humanity.

Shortly after settlement the Lord Paramount of Haven had announced to the settled worlds that he and his people were resolved to keep to themselves, eschewing all outsiders or outside things—except, that is, for the Lord Para-mount’s short list of essential imports. If something was wanted that wasn’t on the Lord Paramount’s list, if the people of Haven couldn’t produce it by traditional methods, approved by God as stated in the covenants, then they had to do without. Thus, even if Genevieve’s nose might be normal elsewhere, elsewhere was eliminated as an option. Her nose was her nose, this world was this world, and for noblewomen to sing was counter-covenantal. Genevieve, Marchioness of Wantresse and future Duchess of Langmarsh, would simply have to live with her nose and her silence.

“If mother were alive, she’d let me get it fixed,” Genevieve whispered to Glorieta, during afternoon recreation, walking through the gardens on their way to the badminton court, their skirts swishing around their ankles, the long sleeves of their high-necked blouses daringly turned up to expose delicate wrists.

“She would not!” said Glorieta. “Surgery is very dangerous, and that same nose is in your mother’s family portraits. I’ve seen them.”

And she had, of course, when she and Carlotta had visited Genevieve over the seasonal holidays. There they hung in the great hall of Langmarsh House: Genevieve’s mother, Marnia, Duchess nose of Langmarsh; Genevieve’s grandmother, Lydia, Countess nose of Wantresse; Genevieve’s great-grandmother, Mercia, Duchess nose of Sealand, and so on and so on. And, in the place of high
honor, many times great-great-grandmother; dark skinned, dark haired and mysterious, Stephanie, who had become Queen of Haven by virtue of marrying the Lord Paramount.