High Couch of Silistra (27 page)

“Your bodies sing well together, yet you hear only your preconceptions,” said Kystrai to Raet in Silistran. Raet did not answer, but his hand kneading the back of my neck tensed and stopped. I leaned back in my chair and again regarded the gold-bronze girl, whose hostility came to me strong and clear. When her eyes met mine, I stuck out my tongue at her.

Almost instantaneous with her angry flush, a blast of force came roaring toward me, rocking me back. And Kystrai’s hand was before my face, the fingers spread. I was dimly aware of Raet picking himself up from the floor, but my attention was on the girl whom he had brought to the feast. Paled under her glowing skin, she staggered backward as if struck until she fell into two Mi’ysten, who supported her, or she would have fallen. Her eyes rolled in her head, and she gasped for breath.

Kystrai, his hand now on my shoulder, stood by my chair. In the sudden silence, all eyes were on him.

“Retire, Geselle, and contemplate your lamentably short temper. To strike so at one unable to defend herself is surely no act of a daughter of mine.”

The weaving girl looked up at Kystrai. For a moment I thought she would speak. The next moment, she was gone.

“I had better see to her,” Raet said from behind me, and he also was gone.

“And I, find another to help serve,” murmured Esyia as she disappeared into the crowd of bronze bodies.

“Let me apologize to you, in order, for my flesh son and daughter,” said Kystrai as he took his seat beside me. “You creatures of time and space must go beyond your natural abilities to fulfill your destiny; the Mi’ysten children must simply grow into theirs.”

“I had thought Raet to be Estrazi’s son,” I managed. “Are they full brother and sister?”

“Their mothers are not the same,” Kystrai answered me, “but all of them, as your people, are truly brother and sister.”

“What did you do to her?”

“I simply turned back her own sending upon her.”

I wondered what would have happened if the full force of that sending had struck me. I saw, at the far end of the long table, Esyia and three other women serving the Silistran meal.

“What did you mean,” I asked Kystrai, “when you said that Raet hears only his preconceptions, but our bodies sing well?”

Kystrai smiled and reached out his right hand to my arm. I saw upon the middle finger of that hand the same ring I still wore threaded through my chald.

“Raet and some of the other children have long agitated to wipe clean the time-space worlds and start anew. He argues that useless pain and turmoil are all that have come from the old experiments, most of which were long ago abandoned. You have proved him false. He has not the grace to admit his mistake. You are its symbol. And yet his flesh knows yours, and calls it equal. His passion frightens you; your awe of him sustains his position. Do not let it be so. In him, the creative surges. Never mistake him for a being of lesser appetites than yourself. Or than your fathers. In our image, complete, were you all made. The beast creates. The beast is preexisting. Drive out the beast, and you have driven out your divinity.” Kystrai’s hand on my arm caused a strange coolness to flow over my flesh, and the bruises on my body tingled. As I watched, the raised marks upon my breasts faded and were gone. What he had said echoed in my mind.

“I see,” I said. “I can understand his point of view. Upon this world, I am as the most deformed chaldless, unable to feed myself, unable to walk alone in the open, unable to perform the most basic functions without special help. By my own standards I am unfit to live among you. Once I agitated, upon Silistra, for the euthanasia of the chaldless. I cannot condemn him for doing the same. How can I expect him to desire me, if I could not desire the twisted-limbed chaldless on his wheeled cart, propelling himself through the squalid streets of Port Astrin by his callused, stumped wrists? Next to Mi’ysten, Silistra is a planet of chaldless.”

Esyia leaned down and took the plate from in front of me, and filled it with Silistran food. The smells of home assailed me.

“Surely the old legends of your people retain the primal command—that you experience creation and return it to us?” Kystrai said gently.

I nodded. My homesickness would not let me speak. Kystrai’s plate was full, and Esyia moved to take her own seat on his other side. The father leaned back in his carved chair, his eyes probing.

“At one time, I had thought Raet right, that perhaps it would be kinder to free the flawed creatures from their struggles. Your appearance here, in spite of Raet’s efforts, and your test scores and adjustments, have convinced me that I was wrong. You are the first of the time-space worlds who has managed to do so. It is a great accomplishment, greater than you presently understand. You have done your planet a service. Do not be so harsh in your reassessment of yourself and your world. If your testing has found you acceptable in my sight, surely you can be acceptable in your own.”

My shredded ego, long comatose in its cave within myself, stirred and began to lick its wounds. I watched Kystrai’s right hand as he forked sauced denter into his mouth.

“What is the significance of the ring?” I asked him. “I had thought it my father’s crest, but you wear it, and Raet, and the same sign is worked into the spread of my couch.”

“It is the sign of the Shapers, the blueprint of the projected extent of the worlds of time and space. Not all of us shape. Among the Shapers, Estrazi is surely the greatest. He would be here now, but for his work.” He waved a hand at the ceiling, and it became a star-filled evening sky.

“Look there,” he said. My eyes followed his pointing finger, to a spot empty of light. “When you see a flash, there, when the new star is born, he will return. And that star will truly be most perfect.” His voice had an odd tone, his face a look of dreamlike ecstasy.

“Perhaps it is born now, and the light has not yet reached us.” I hoped it would not be hundreds of years, or thousands, I would spend here until Estrazi returned.

“Such thinking is a constant of space-time, not Mi’ysten. You will see it when it occurs, if you look, and within the moment of flashing birth, he will be here.”

The ceiling became again opaque, and Kystrai turned to his plate. Esyia’s eyes caught mine, and the almost imperceptible shake of her head warned me to silence. I felt a hand on my back, and Raet slid into the chair on my left. The now-familiar warmth kindled in my body.

I wondered how long he had been here, what part of Kystrai’s conversation with me he had heard.

I turned to my plate and tasted the cheesed tuns. Raet’s presence beside me, and the Silistran food in my mouth, reminded me of all that he had done upon Silistra; of Sereth crill Tyris and the attacks of the chalded and chaldless, of the ebvrasea, and of the great crack that had opened to obstruct us in the very earth itself.

“Kystrai,” I said softly. He turned those molten eyes upon me. “When your daughter threatened me with a simple sending, you protected me and chastised her. And yet Raet is allowed to do as he pleases with man and beast upon Silistra. Even the earth itself obeys him. Why rebuke the one and not the other? What rules are there, and what name has this game?” My fingers in my lap were shaking. But that power within me knew no fear, not even of Raet’s stiffened body upon my left, still but for the rubbing together of forefinger and thumb.

Long moments Kystrai looked at me without speaking, and then at Raet.

“Will you not speak for yourself, created son?” said Kystrai at length.

The son, before the father, lowered his eyes. “Though it is my right,” he growled, “I will not debate matters of fitness with a time-space creature. Nor do I feel the need to justify my actions. What I do in my realm is my own affair. Unless, of course, the daughter of Estrazi chooses to contend with me… .” And with only a raised eyebrow and the most gently supercilious smile, he fell silent.

“It is a thought,” said Kystrai solemnly, taking my hand in his, which did not shake, and squeezing. “Within the broader mandate, what he says is true: we do not interfere between the Mi’ysten children and the time-space spawn, nor in the administration of such worlds by those who claim the Shaper heritage. It is that heritage which has brought you here, and which has entitled you to those exemptions you now enjoy.”

Once more he squeezed my hand, clasping it between both of his. Then he released it, and turned to Esyia, speaking with her in the sibilant language of Mi’ysten. I toyed with my food, disquieted, not daring even to raise my eyes to Raet. As I sat there, his hand traced my thigh under the table. An audible sigh came from me, as the breath I had held in expectation of his displeasure fled my lungs. My disquiet flowed after it. I wondered if somehow Raet could control my body’s reaction, as Esyia had been able to bring peace to me with a touch of her hand, if spirit and emotion were as much “his realm” as the earth that parted to serve him upon the plateau of Santha. I shook the thought away. My need was strong upon me from that simple touch, and I ate without tasting, until my plate was cleaned. When I looked up from it, Kystrai was no longer in the chair upon my right. I was sorry. I would have wished him tasa.

“The food was the best thing about Silistra,” Raet said. His tone was intimate, as if my audacious queries had never been spoken. He leaned close.

“I would be there now,” I said.

“What? And not discharge the chaldra of the mother? After all you have gone through to get here, you would leave without ever meeting your father? Is the Shapers’ heritage so paltry that you would not tarry here long enough to claim it?” He laughed.

“When will I see him? What is a star nursery? What of the others in the cubes? Kystrai said I was the first to arrive here of my own accord. How did they get here? What will happen to them? And to me?” Bereft of breath and composure, I pressed my palms to my eyes, to ease the blurring that threatened any moment to overflow into tears.

“All those things you should have asked Kystrai. I cannot tell you. But you may learn it.” His eyes made me forget my questions. His hand tracing my spine brought the blood surging to my skin. “You may learn it, though I have my doubts as to what he will accomplish by schooling you. The fathers know what they do, but the presence of the lame and halt of time and space proves them not infallible.”

“Schooling me?” I repeated dumbly.

“You did not understand him, then? Your Shapers’ heritage—they would see you claim it.”

Unable to restrain myself, I leaned my shoulder against him. The coolness of his flesh soothed my heat. Doubtless he heard my thoughts, though I tried to keep them from him, for his tone was much softened, and his arm went around my waist.

“And perhaps you will find the learning easy. It is not a thing to await with such trepidation. The rewards are bountiful for one who shapes.” His mouth was close to my ear. I did not mistake the irony, nor the sarcasm upon which his words rode.

“What do you mean?” I asked. Seemingly, he ignored my question.

“I had thought you not strong enough to have come so far with mind intact. I was mistaken in that. Perhaps I will, through you, come to look upon Silistra with different eyes.”

I remembered what Kystrai had said, reminding myself that my personal worth, and, through me, that of Silistra, were still being assessed. I began to have some sense of the reason I had felt Raet’s opinion of me to be so important. And he was intimating that he would, for the time, suspend judgment. With a shiver, I wondered what would attend that judgment, what kind of forces were being held in abeyance. I turned to him, announced ruler of the realm that included Silistra. I must please him. I recollected the power he had demonstrated over my world. I shuddered. Fear and desire admixed in me, each upstepping the other’s intensity. I felt my skin dampen and my heart begin a thudding, syncopated pound.

“Let us begin our farewells, and then I will show you my tridoe,” Raet said in my ear, and rose from the table. Gratefully, I followed after him.

He with whom I studied was called Teris. He resembled Esyia in skin tone and Kystrai in build and mind-touch. His patience seemed infinite, his insight awe-inspiring. It was he who gave me, in that first consummate instruction, the weapons I needed to break through the psychological barriers my upbringing had created. Often I have recollected Teris’ teaching, and each time I am reminded of a story I once heard concerning an infant who was raised by dorkats. The child, past puberty when discovered by the Day-Keepers, had been to all intents and purposes a dorkat. As the Day-Keepers struggled with that child, to teach him to walk erect and speak and use his hands for more than tearing meat from a fresh kill, so did Teris struggle with me, to teach me to shape.

It was Raet who delivered me to him, and he was not pleased to do so. Sullenly, he led me along the walkway through the time-fields of the tangential climes. Somehow I tripped over my own feet and fell onto the lush greenery of the rainforest’s edge. A great whirlpool sucked at me. My hands gripped the walkway, and my body was stretched so tight from the pull that I thought my arms would be torn from their sockets. Raet, legs spread wide, still holding the leash attached to my collar, looked pensively down at me. It flashed into my mind that he would rather lose his new toy than give it up to another.

“Help me,” I gasped. My fingers were numb. I could not hold on much longer.

“Climb back on the walkway,” he suggested, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

“I have not the strength,” I pleaded.

He squatted down, his feet inches from my white-knuckled, aching hands. “If I let you slip away, things would become suddenly very simple,” he said softly. His eyes stared into mine steadily.

“Raet, please!”

“Once before I gifted you with a life.”

“I beg you, do not do this,” I moaned, my arms and shoulders aflame with strain.

“You do recollect it, then? And acknowledge that with this service I do you, you stand twice in my debt?”

“Yes, oh, yes.”

He smiled, then, and languorously extended his hand. When his fingertips touched me, the pull fell away from my limbs and I was able to crawl onto the slightly raised walk. I crouched there and stared into dappled rainforest that had nearly claimed me, my arms clutched around my trembling body.