Northshore (16 page)

Had to be content. Though he wooed her with his eyes and his gifts and his constant, calm solicitude, she showed no sign of perceiving what was in his mind. He kissed her cheek, and she accepted it as a child might a kiss from an uncle, not unwillingly, but as though it did not matter. Nothing moved her. Nothing stirred her. At certain times, when she was drowsy, perhaps, she would answer his questions about life in the Tower, though never at length or in any great detail. From these infrequent comments he formed a picture of her existence there and on the basis of that troublesome image forgave her much. She could not feel attraction toward him, he told himself. She did not know what it was. She was like a child, innocent of sexual
feeling. She was sometimes angry, but it seemed an anger unformed and unfocused, and if she had any feelings toward Thrasne at all, she did not recognize what they were.

Still, she began to keep house for him, at first absent-mindedly, and then with a small show of concern for his comfort. She learned to cook in the same way, at first from hunger, and then with a kind of dim pleasure, remembering the aromas of comfort found in Delia’s house without having to remember Delia herself. She could not remember Delia. Would not. The fall of rock in the lonely place was shut away inside her. The faceless regard of the canvas hood was shut away. Herself as Awakener with the flasks at her belt was shut away. There, inside, where love might have lived, was a stone house into which all such things were put. There was no room for love. The house was so large it took up most of the room there was. It had to hold too much.

Thrasne, looking deep into her eyes, knew it was there, for he could see the shape and shadow of it and the feral glow of eyes that peered out of its windows now and again. A ghost house. Tenanted by her mother and Delia and who knew how many more. He hoped the hard prison space inside her might grow smaller in time. He had time.

She never went ashore. He showed her his watching place in the high cubby by the owner-house, and she sat there for hours watching the Riverbanks flow by. Long months went by. He brought the shore to her, little gifts, bits of foliage and flower, fruit and confections. And toys. And carvings he made for her, which said all the things his mouth left unsaid. And she did not much notice.

Meantime the child of the drowned woman grew like a little tree, slowly yet observably, and moved like a reed blown gently by the wind. They had tried feeding her everything, softly stewed grain, vegetables, bits of fish. She took only the brackish River water and sunlight. On days of cloud, she lay quiet in her basket, scarcely moving. On sunny days she learned gradually to crawl about the deck with the
deliberation of a tortoise and the curiosity of any infant confronted with a new world to experience.

She seemed to love best to be held on Suspirra’s – Pamra’s – lap facing the sun, being shown things – a fish, a bit of rope, a frond of flowers from a tree they floated under when early first summer came. The boatmen stopped to talk with her, never touching her, regarding her half with affection, half with superstitious awe. So far as they knew, Suspirra had brought the child with her when she came, her arrival as mysterious as anything else about the matter. The carved woman in the owner-house was gone. A live woman who looked like the carved woman was there, except that the live woman had a child that could have been carved. Except that it lived, of course. A wonder. A living wonder.

Thrasne and Suspirra had agreed to name the child Lila. It had been Thrasne’s mother’s name. He liked the sound of it. The crewmen accepted this as well but did not use the name. Instead, they were inclined to hint to Thrasne that they suspected a story that might be told, at which he shrugged and smiled, unresentful. Suspirra made the matter no less complicated when she referred to Lila as her sister.

‘They’ll talk ashore, you know, Thrasne,’ said Obers-rom. ‘Seems to me you aren’t sayin’ much about this and would rather the matter was kept quiet. But they will talk, Thrasne. You know that. Best you give them something to say, or they’ll say something you won’t like.’

Thrasne thought on this. It was true. The men would talk ashore, and the more mystery they made, the more likelihood of curiosity seekers trying to sneak aboard to catch a glimpse.

Something close to the truth would be best. ‘Tell them the baby’s mother was pregnant. She drowned in the River and was blighted. So the baby was born different from you and me. She has a different sense of time, that’s all. Perhaps all creatures which are blighted have that sense of time. Maybe blighted fishes live their whole lives out but do it a bit slower than we do. Now, my old friend Suspirra – her I had the
statue of until she herself came aboard – Suspirra calls the baby her sister because the drowned woman was her … her friend, and she cares for her friend’s child as she would for a baby sister. It wouldn’t be fitting for her to call Lila her own child, her being an unmarried woman. And Suspirra came to stay with us because the Awakeners wouldn’t leave the child alone, not if they knew. You know that. She had to come to the River to be safe. That’s all there is to it.’

This won their sympathy and went a way to shutting their mouths. Boatmen were accustomed to avoiding Awakener attention and keeping shut about River business. It began to seem to all of them that Lila and Suspirra were River business right enough.

Obers-rom gave it considerable thought. Next time he stopped to speak to Lila he stroked her face, at which she made an indeterminate sound of pleasure, almost a word. ‘She’s not different, really,’ he said to Pamra. ‘She just moves real slow, that’s all. Real slow. I’ll call her slow-baby.’ He turned away, smiling, the smile vanishing as he thought of the watchful, perceptive expression in the child’s eyes. ‘Not so different,’ he repeated to himself, ‘except for that.’ He still determined to call her slow-baby.

Which, thereafter, Lila heard more often than she heard her name.

Where the great log came from, Thrasne could not say. It had the look of something prehistoric about it, like some ancient monster heaving up from the depths to wreak havoc upon the works of man. As it did. The
Gift of Potipur
ran upon the log – or the log came up beneath her – with such force as to stave a man-sized hole in her bow planks, through which the water alternately poured and gurgled as the
Gift
rocked from the shock. There were several hours of panicky struggle, after which the
Gift
gurgled rather less, though still dangerously, and the most threatening part of the damage had been controlled for the moment.

‘What will you do now?’ asked Pamra. She had stayed out of the way during the worst of it, trying not to show how frightened she was, clinging to Lila as though to some raft on which she might have expected to float to safety. Later, when they had patched the hole, she had gone below to see the black oozing around the patch and had realized it could be only temporary. ‘You’ll have to fix it ashore, won’t you?’

Thrasne nodded, still numb. It was the first real injury the
Gift
had received, and he felt it himself, looking at his ribs from time to time as though expecting to see great bruises and rents there, surprised to find himself whole. ‘It’ll take a while. That third rib back is sprung all out of line. All the planks are loose along there. They’re not leaking now, but they will be. Next town’s hopeless, no piers, no shipwrights. Next one on down’s some better, but I’ll have to do most of it myself, most likely.’

‘How long?’

‘A long time. Thirty, forty days, at least. Probably more. They won’t have the planking we need. It’s almost impossible they’d have seasoned wood available. Chances are if they have any, it’ll be green. Or, more likely, still standing. Over a month.’ A month was fifty-one days. ‘Sixty days, maybe. Seventy.’ Still in shock, he wasn’t thinking of her at all. Then he turned to see her look of fear and apprehension, understanding it in the instant. ‘That’d be too long for you to be in one place, wouldn’t it? Dangerous for you. Those hunting you would likely find you. I should have thought of that right off.’

‘I can stay here in the owner-house.’ She tried to smile. ‘If the men won’t talk about it.’

They would talk, of course. No way he could prevent it. ‘You can’t stay cooped up that long. You’d turn all pale, like a mushroom.’ He tried a not-very-successful smile. ‘No. We’ll think of something else.’

When he came back to the owner-house some hours later, he brought the local chart-of-towns with him, laying it on the table under the lantern where she could see it. ‘I’ve found something,’ a tired smile telling her it was the only thing he’d been able to find. ‘I’d forgotten all about it. Strinder’s Isle.’

He pointed to the chart, the ragged edge of the River at one side, with its endless list of places, products, local idiosyncrasies, religious taboos. There to the south, a good day’s sail out into the World River, lay a long, wide, inky interruption among the careful notes and the River flow. The eastern end of it was behind them, two towns back. The western end was three towns yet ahead. ‘The only people there are the Strinders,’ he said. ‘And only a few of them left. No guards. No gates. They have a pier here, a little east of Chantry. Chantry’s where we’ll have to get the boat fixed.’

‘An island? I never heard of an island in the River.’

‘There’s many of them. Most of the ones close to shore are so small they’re only rocks on the charts, dots, places to steer clear of. But Strinder’s Isle, well, it’s a good way out.
Out of sight of the shore. Blint used to call there every time he came around. Used to bring in flour and cloth and sweetening. Take out dye shells. The thing is, we can run down along the island, drop you off, then pick you up again at the western end after the ship is fixed. All we’ll need is some kind of signal so you can come down to the west end of the island when it’s time. That way we’ll be with the current, taking you in and getting you off.’

He misinterpreted her doubtful look. ‘It’s safe enough, Pamra. We’ve got time to drop you off. The
Gift
isn’t going to sink under us.’

‘No, no, no,’ she said, hating herself for seeming to question his provision for her when that very provision might delay and endanger him. ‘It just seemed – is it an empty island? I mean,
are
there still any people there?’

Now he was doubtful himself. ‘There used to be. Right along here. A bunch of little houses, some of them scattered back in the trees. Of course, the island mostly belongs to the Treeci. They’re a little like the fliers.’

‘Servants of Abricor!’

‘Not carrion eaters. No. Not the Servants of Abricor. A different kind of creature. I’ve never seen them anywhere but there, on the island. Bigger legs than the Servants. They have beautiful plumage, but they don’t fly. Flat kind of beaks on them, almost like lips only harder, not those hard, hooked beaks the Servants have. From a distance, they look almost human. I’ve only seen them at a distance, of course, but the Strinders got on well with them.’ He ran a hand across his face, as though trying to wipe away the tiredness. ‘If there’s any way to let you stay there, Pam, it’s best. Truly. Even if you had to stay alone in one of the old houses. The people looking for you won’t find you there. I can guarantee. And we can make it safe and reasonably comfortable for you, even if you have to stay alone.’

It sounded like abandonment, and he knew it. She could not help but know it, and it made a slow, burning anger in her that there could not be some other way. There was no other way. The alternatives were worse. The Awakeners
would send Laughers after her, they weren’t going to stop looking for her, and even death alone on an island would be far preferable to their finding her. She shook herself, made herself sound cheerful about it.

‘I’ll go there, Thrasne. Even if there’s no one there. I’ll take Lila, she’ll be company for me. However long it takes, I’ll wait for your signal.’

When they came to the island, however, she was less sure.

There were little houses along the shore, most tumbled into piles of gray fragments, log and plank silvered by the sun and the River wind. At last they saw a vague line of smoke ascending, and this led them to a rickety pier and a ramshackle dwelling showing light among the trees.

The woman who answered their calls had aged like the house. She was rust and dust held together by a net of wrinkles with gray hair wisping around her like smoke. ‘Strinder? Me? Well, of course I’m Strinder, and damn near the last. Did you say you were old Blint’s boy? I seem to remember he had a boy. Think of that, and come in.’

There were two others on the island, as old as she; an old curmudgeon named Stodder and her own cousin, Bethne. ‘Joy,’ she said to Pamra with a keen glance from under bushy brows. ‘That’s my name. You wouldn’t think it, would you? Not exactly a joyful object, am I? Often wished I’d had a name that aged better. Sophronia. Eugenia. Something with some dignity to it.’

She looked them over, Pamra and the slow baby. She did not remark then or ever upon the baby’s strangeness, and Pamra came to believe for a time it was because human babies were so far in her past she had forgotten what the usual ones were like. Lila might have fitted her memories of babyness as well as any other.

When Thrasne left her, it was with a goodly supply of food and with a large supply of wood cut for the old woman’s fires. Though it was warmer on the island than on the shore, the evenings would still be cold for the next three months. Thirty days was the minimum time the repairs would take, but it could be three times that. After thirty days she was to
watch the northern shore each evening, a little before dusk, to see three pillars of smoke. When she saw them, she was to make the two- or three-day hike along the flat shore to the western end of the island and camp there until he came for her. ‘If it takes us longer than that, we may be delayed by the Conjunction tides,’ he told her. ‘So don’t be impatient. You can get down to the west end all right?’

‘Oh, yes, yes,’ said the old woman. ‘She can get there easy enough. There’s no more wilderness on Strinder’s Island. No more wildness at all. Except for … well, except for what there is, of course.’ If this had been meant to convey something, it failed. Pamra was too agitated at being left behind to pay much attention.