Strangers (13 page)

Going down in that hush for the third time, Farber was snagged by a persistent fishhook of sound. He had been hearing it without hearing it for a couple of minutes, but now it registered. Slowly, the sound drew him up and out of stagnant pools of thought. The hammering of stone on stone.
Klak klak kadak. Klak!
Unsteadily, Farber got to his feet.

It was right outside.

Feeling strangely apprehensive, Farber went to the door.

Two Cian men were struggling to erect a stone eikon in front of the house. As Farber stepped outside, one of the Cian was driving it home with a big stone hammer.
Klak! Klak! Klak!
the hammer went. The noise rang frighteningly loud in the silent street, and sparks flew at each blow. Then they were finished. The two Cian stepped aside, wiped their foreheads, rubbed their hands, and looked at the eikon with satisfaction. It was St. Andrew’s Cross, about four feet high, carved from a milky, fine-grained stone. Some small furry animal had been quartered, raggedly, and the quarters had been lashed to the arms of the cross. The animal’s head had been tied upright atop the upper right arm. It stared reproachfully out at the world with blind agate eyes. Blood had seeped into the pale stone, and stained the snow around the base of the cross.

Farber stared at the eikon in bewilderment.

The Cian men were watching him intently. Their faces were contorted into terrifying, fang-glinting snarls. Their hands were covered with blood.

Farber started toward them, repressing an urge to run away instead. This grotesque kind of rictus was, with the Cian, indicative of extreme good will and pleasure—although they were an undemonstrative enough race that it was an expression seldom seen in public. The Terran equivalent would be to leap and shout in unrestrained joy.
I have no idea what this is all about,
Farber thought, numbly. In spite of the cold, his brain had not cleared at all. He felt confused and stupid, and couldn’t imagine how he was expected to act in this situation. His feet crunched through the snow, sinking up to the ankle with every step. The brilliant sunlight dazzled his eyes, and made his head ache. He was sickened by the glassy stare of the dead animal, and by the blood, which was already beginning to freeze into tarry, glistening streaks. He came to a stop, blinking, baffled, shivering.
What do I say now?
he wondered.

“Good wishes to you,” one of the Cian said, saving Farber the strain of initiating conversation. “You are one of the People of Life, the Ones Who Rule the New Earth. May Their radiance fill you, and warm your dreams.”

He fell silent. “Thank you,” Farber said.

“You are a vessel for Their Light,” the other Cian put in. “Through you, It refracts into the Thousand Warm Colors. You help to harmonize the radiance in the Place of Turning Silence, the Motionless Unmoved Center.”

Farber searched for the correct response. “Your light illuminates my darkness,” he said at last.

“
Në
, it is of no circumstance,” the Cian replied. Then, less formally: “No obligation here. It is pleasure to inform your happiness.”

“
Sa!
” the other injected, enthusiastically, “This is a great moment for you! My soul chimes in sympathy.”

They snarled joyously at him.

“I don’t understand,” Farber did not say. He wanted to, though.

By this time, the ceremony had attracted the attention of several of Farber’s neighbors from up and down the Row. They gathered around, five or six more Cian males, and added their own polite praise and congratulations to those of the two emissaries. There was much low warbling and snapping of fingers, which was applause. Someone produced a glass flask of the potent native liqueur, and it passed from hand to hand. If their social construct had included the slapping of backs, there would have been back-slapping as well.

Farber saw the light, belatedly, at about this point.

Bemused, he stood in the alien street and drank with his well-wishers, the ancient ice-sheathed black walls rising sheer on either side, a narrow swath of sky visible at the top, like a cold blue-black river that flowed over the world.

A wind came up and ruffled the fur on the dead animal’s head, made the head appear to be nodding in a deliberate, grisly fashion. There was an inscription the eikon that Farber could not translate. He memorized it for Ferri’s semantic computer.

And, after a while, they went respectfully away, and left him alone.

Liraun came home about an hour later. She wore no paint, and her skin looked fresh and scrubbed. She was dressed in a long, bright-green frock, embroidered with designs in yellow and orange, but bordered by a heavy somber black. She was obviously naked beneath it. Her long hair had been put up, and fastened with pins of silver and obsidian. The fanatical tension that had possessed her for the past few days was gone. She seemed calm and happy. She also seemed, as he paused in the doorway to stare at him, a totally aroused and totally erotic creature, almost feral, as though she were a female animal in estrus. He could feel the heat come up out of her, and smell the hot musky scent of her body. It struck him like a wave, drying his throat and tightening his thighs.

She stared at him for a long, intent moment, as if she had never seen him before, as if she was trying to memorize every line and detail of him.

Then, slowly, she smiled.

“My husband,” she said quietly.

And she closed the door behind her.

Sexually, Liraun had always been somewhat passive, but that night she was aggressive, inexhaustible, and demanding. She wore Farber out, she used him up. She drove him to the limits of his endurance, and then somehow urged him beyond them. She was relaxed and cheerful about it, but there was no arguing with her insistence. She seemed happy enough. Her play and pillow-talk were full of excitement and gaiety. But, beneath this, there was a sadness so deep and intense that it could only be called despair. With her there in the darkness, experiencing her slow rhythmical cries, the desperate spasms of her body, her legs crushing the breath from him, the muscles in her neck cording like taut wire cables, her head beginning to lash violently from side to side—as if she was in pain so great she must seek surcease by dashing out her brains—Farber felt curiously alone and disassociated, a spectator at someone else’s bittersweet apotheosis. It was that inexplicable storm of joy and despair that fueled her, that drove her, that was, in this moment, her lover more than he.

Just before dawn, a party of Twilight People, Those Who Have Influence with Dreams, arrived for a Naming ceremony. The party was composed of a male Elder, a
twizan
—Farber couldn’t decide if this was the same Singer who had married them; if not, then he was certainly struck from the same archetype—five young Cian women in varying stages of pregnancy, one so huge that her time must certainly be almost at hand, and a
soúbrae
, or Old Woman. The Old Woman was old indeed, even more ancient, by the look of her, than the
twizan
. She gave Farber the impression that she kept herself alive only by a conscious effort of will—that if she turned her mind away from the task for even a moment she would crumble into dust and ashes. She was also, Farber realized, the only really old Cian woman he could remember seeing. She had a snow-white robe, eyes like ice, a face as hard as winter-frozen earth, and she was definitely the person in charge of the Naming. Under her taciturn direction, Liraun was specially dressed and painted, the east-facing window was opened to allow the first rays of Fire Woman’s rising to strike into the room, and a roaring, oddly pungent-smelling fire was built in the firepit. The Twilight People and Liraun gathered close around the hearth, and the ceremony began. It seemed to go on forever. There were many ritual exchanges between Liraun and the pregnant women, especially with the woman closest to term, while the Old Woman chanted responses, and the Singer sang a haunting, minor-filled song so desolate-sounding that it might have made a banshee sad. Farber sat in the far corner during all this, wrapped in a fur. He was exhausted and bedraggled, and the noise and smoke of the Naming made him irritable. Everyone ignored him. So he sat glumly by himself, watching the chanting, gesticulating figures, feeling caught up in some mechanism that he could not understand, and which was sweeping him toward a conclusion he could neither predict, forestall, nor comprehend.

The Old Woman passed around a series of unidentifiable—to Farber—objects that were touched and handled reverently by the participants, the first rays of dawn flashed from a coronet of tiny silvered mirrors that had been placed on Liraun’s head, and the ceremony was over. She was no longer Farber’s chattel. From that moment on, legally and by ancient custom, she belonged to no one save herself and her Ancestors. For the first time in her life, she was her own person.

Now her name was Liraun Jé Morrigan.

11

Liraun was now a Mother of Shasine, and her elevation from chattel to the highest caste in the society drastically changed their lives. She had discussed the subject with Farber when “they” had first decided to have children, but, as usual, much of what she said was enigmatic and couched in obscure allegory, and none of it had prepared Farber for the totality of the change.

By law, Liraun now became the head of their household for the duration of her pregnancy, representing it in its relations with the body of Cian society, and holding title to all its goods and property. This did not mean that Farber had been reduced to a chattel; his status had not been diminished—Liraun’s had been tremendously enhanced. In theory, Liraun now had some authority over Farber, but, in practice, it was the custom to let the husband and wife work that problem out domestically, and most of them came to an equitable compromise. But while Farber was married to Liraun, and while Liraun was a Mother of Shasine, none of his actions were binding on the household. They carried no legal weight. He was not allowed to negotiate contracts that affected the entire household, nor could he dispose of or transfer any of their property, or rent a house without Liraun’s consent—just as, before her pregnancy, Liraun herself had been forbidden to do any of these things. In fact, Farber was still better off than Liraun had been. Before her elevation, she had enjoyed almost no legal rights at all, being considered a minor and under Farber’s absolute rule. Farber, at least, maintained his rights as an adult citizen, but was expected to defer to Liraun’s judgment in communal matters, as she was now a superior creature, “One Who Has Been Translated to Harmony.”

This was disconcerting.

Also, Liraun was no longer allowed to work to support herself. As a Mother of Shasine, she was part of the Council that, in conjunction with the Elder’s Lodge, ruled Shasine. One of the first things she was required to do, after her Naming, was to quit her job. She was on call to the Council at any hour of the day or night, and could have no other duty that might interfere with that single overriding concern. Her husband, therefore, was required to support her, and was subject to severe penalties if he did not. And Farber’s regular stipend from the Terran Co-operative was not enough to keep them both, even added to the small amount Ferri was able to pay him for “research assistance.”

That was alarming.

Surprising even himself, Farber rose to the challenge. He put away the bottle, and he put away the pills. He pulled himself together with an almost audible click. And he went out and got a job.

It was down at the River-Docks, a manual job unloading ice-skimmers.

The Cold People had settled in to stay—the Fertile Earth was locked in ice, and shrouded in snow and silence. At night, Winter Man blazed high in the sky, His full terrible length above the horizon now. The River Aome had finally frozen over. Every morning on his way to work—cold and still as death, a pink flush of dawn just beginning to dilute the jet-black night sky, the last of the tiny moons rolling down toward the far horizon like thumb-flicked marbles—Farber could see it gleam in a long, dull gunmetal line, a soldered seam that held the invisible world together. By the time the cablecar had brought him down from Old City, he could look through the growing blue light and see the first of the big black iceboats skimming up out of the west, up on four long legs, like water beetles from a Terran river grown mechanical and great. When the Aome froze it froze all the way to the bottom, and remained that way until the Thaw. River traffic thereafter went on the ice. That ice was as solid as stone, and mirror-smooth in most places, save where the wind had dusted the surface with snow. No better road to the West could be asked. The Aome skirted the foot of Aei New City for twenty miles, and every mile of that twenty bristled with docks, and every dock in every mile buzzed with commerce, deep winter or high summer.

By midmorning, with the sun as high as it ever got in that season, the ice would look green-gray, instead of the blue it had been in the dawnlight, and intricate hieroglyphic patterns would have been scored into its surface by the runnerblades of the iceboats. Sometimes, if Fire Woman was particularly intense that day, the top half-inch of ice would melt, and the fast-skimming iceboats would throw a wake of water and half-frozen slush high into the air on either side.

Once, Farber saw a skimmer hit a freak irregularity in the ice, a jagged, tilted block that protruded three feet above the surface. The impact jarred two of the runners into the air—the iceboat skidded along precariously on the remaining two for an endless moment, but the task of keeping it upright was too much for the boat’s gyrostabilizers, and it went over. The boat rolled twice, very fast, snapping its runners, making a noise like a million tin cans tail-dragged by a multitude of dogs, bounced into the air and came down hard, skidded, and rolled again. Then it exploded. The burning wreck melted a hole in the ice, and settled into the slush to a depth of six feet. When the fire guttered and the ice refroze, the boat’s bow was left protruding from the surface at a forty-five-degree angle, and flags and torches marked the wreck for two days until Cian work crews could remove it.