Northshore (27 page)

‘They have Glizzee spice, Your Highness.’ His eyes were down, his posture dignified. If they were alone, he would call her Fibby. They had been children together. And lovers later. And lovers still.

‘And we have no spice, is that it? And our people have few enough pleasures, they should not have to do without this one. And the boatmen won’t deal without seeing me?’

‘Your Highness sees the invisible and hears the inaudible.’ He gave her a secret glance, one she knew as well as she knew the feel of her own skin.

‘My Highness is dying of the agony of my people, Strenge. Of inanition and frustration. Of the duplicity of the Chancery and an unapproachable creature that calls itself the Protector of Man. Put them off.’

‘Ma’am, one of them is the man called Fatterday. He claims to have seen Southshore.’

Fatterday! Was Fatterday a real person, then? Not a mere story hero, favorite protagonist of the Jarb Mendicants’ tales? Was he here, now? Bringing word of a larger world out there than this circumscribed one, squeezed between the Teeth of the North and all the little, biddable towns of Northshore, and chewed to death by Jondarites? Fatterday, who had perhaps seen what Fibji had only dared hope for, a homeland beyond the reach of the general’s troops? She gasped, holding Strenge with the fire of her eyes. ‘Do you think he tells the truth?’

‘Who could know, ma’am? However, I knew you would want to see him.’

‘In the small tent, then. I’ve a cramp in my butt from sitting on this damn thing, and I must be able to question him.’

Strenge affected not to have heard her, his face impassive as he turned to bellow at the courtiers and warriors hanging about. ‘You have Her Highness’s leave to go. The boatmen may await her pleasure outside.’

They left quickly. Protocol prevented her rising until they were gone, and they knew her displeasure at being kept waiting. When the heavy tent flaps dropped behind them, she stood up, rubbing her rump, kicking off the jeweled boots and harness, handing over the holy scepter to be put in its case. Strenge was ready with a soft robe and shoes of quilted pamet embroidered with flowers. Against the white fiber her skin glowed dark, like oiled fragwood, and when she pulled off the high, feathered crown, her hair tumbled across the fabric like a thousand twining little vines, twisty and moving as though each lock had its own life. Her hawk-nosed face relaxed somewhat from its audience expression, the lines around her mouth and eyes smoothing out, dropping decades from her appearance. I’m an old woman, she thought to herself, knowing she wasn’t, yet, but needing to get used to the idea. Too old for all this sitting.

The small tent adjacent was her own living space, the
piled carpets dotted with soft pillows and small tables. ‘Let them come in here,’ she said, taking one of the huge pillows for her own. ‘Have someone bring us some wine. I ache all over.’ –

They came in, three of them, one lean, two stocky, brown men all, though none so dark as she. Their darkness was merely of the sun, while hers was of an ancient race, so it was said among the Northlings.

‘Your Highness.’ Three voices, all of them muffled from being spoken into the carpet, three backs bent impossibly to prevent their eyes meeting hers.

‘Oh, stand up,’ she said impatiently. ‘I have to have all that out there where people are watching, but I haven’t time for it here. Which one of you is Fatterday?’

He stood forward, the leanest one of the bunch, burned almost as dark as she by the sun and with deep white lines radiating from his eyes where the sun had not reached down into squint lines, smiling irrepressibly. ‘Your Highness. I’m Fatterday.’

‘And you’ve truly seen Southshore?’

He bowed again, nodding assent, not speaking.

‘Well, tell me! What is it like? Are there people there? Are there fliers?’

‘Your Highness, we were cast ashore on a rocky coast among high mountains. From the top of a mountain I saw an endless plain under the sun.’ His eyes were alight, his fingers twitching as they described the outlines and dimensions of the lands, the rivers. ‘I saw no fliers, no people. After many days, we managed to repair the boat enough to sail northward once more. Only we three survived to bring you the tale.’

‘A great land.’ She regarded him thoughtfully, wondering if he told the truth. ‘For the taking, boatman?’

‘From all I could see, free for the taking, Your Highness. If one could come to it. I saw no fliers.’

And that was it, of course. No fliers. No Jondarites. She lusted for it. The dream required lands. Lands for the people of the north, free from fliers, free from attacks by the
Jondarite tax collectors, free from the constant pressures of the Chancery. Lands to hold without taxation. And lands with beasts. In her mind she saw wagons pulled as they were in the Chancery lands, by beasts instead of by her people. Oh, with beasts one could move, move, out of reach of pursuing armies. Oh, why not have lands, Northlings? Why not have beasts?

‘How did you come there?’

‘We were prospecting among the islands for Glizzee, Your Highness. We followed a great school of strangeys. Came a strong, wild current in World River, and we were driven south. Came storm and great wind driving us, days and days, until we lost track of them. Many died. Most. Only seven of us came to that shore, and only we three returned.’ He did not say how they had lived or what they had eaten. They could not have eaten the local animals and survived, not without human grains to go with them. They could have eaten fish. It was better, perhaps, not to know how they had survived.

‘So, how would we come there, if we chose to go?’

‘If you chose to go, Highness, you should go well provisioned. It is a long voyage. Still, I would not hesitate to make it again. There are wonders there.’

She waved him away. That was the question, wasn’t it? How could one get better provisioned with the Chancery taking all but a bare sufficiency. They were lucky if the scavengers from the Chancery left them grain enough for the cold season and a spare bit more should the warm come late. When that was all they were allowed to assemble, how could they put together a store for a long voyage? And how put together the boats, come to that? Fibji’s people numbered some hundreds of thousands, not many compared to the population of Northshore, but a great horde when one considered the size of most boats. Fifty at a time, perhaps. Hundreds of thousands of Noor, and only fifty at a time. If they took one boat from every town …

She shook herself, shedding the vision of lands beyond the River. Fatterday was still standing there, as though he had
not seen her excuse him. The man was still to be dealt with.

‘You came north across the World River to Thou-ne?’

‘We did, ma’am. With Glizzee spice as the whole of our property, all that was left us after the storm save the shell of our boat.’

‘And you brought it here because the price is better so far from the World River?’

‘As Your Highness says.’ He grinned knowingly.

‘And it would help you, now, if we bought your spice from you?’

He bowed, unspeaking. It was probably the only thing that would help him, she thought. He had likely been impoverished by his adventure. He must have had everything he owned lost on the voyage. She beckoned to Strenge, signaling him to send for the coffer keeper. They had little enough in stores of food or obvious possessions, the Noor, but the Melancholies did keep the Queen’s coffers filled. So let Fatterday be paid, and let him think it was for the spice. Actually, the payment was for the news he brought her. News she could use.

When the boatmen were gone, she summoned her near-kin, not forgetting the lonely survivor most recently adopted. They drank sammath wine as they talked of Southshore, of the goddess, of themselves and the Jondarites.

‘But what of the plan?’ they asked, uncomfortable at the thought of giving up the thing they had been working on for so very long.

‘We are not yet changing the plan,’ she replied. ‘It was too long in the making to change it unless for something far better. So far, we have only the word of an explorer. He could be lying. He could be mistaken. No, we are not yet talking of changing the plan. But let us investigate the dream. If Southshore is within reach …’

She did not need to complete the thought. The old plan had been fifty years in the making, thirty in implementation. Here and there across the steppes were great complexes of tunnels dug secretly by the Noor. There
beneath the steppes were towns, cities. There beneath the scattered grainfields were dormitories and meeting halls and storehouses now beginning to hold some grain and roots hidden from the tax collectors. Timbers supported the corridors beneath the earth, timbers bought from the Queen’s coffers, moved at night, hidden by day. Clever mechanisms brought air into the depths, mechanisms paid for from the Queen’s funds. Melancholies went south into the cities and returned with goods and coin, and both went into the underground cities Queen Fibji was building. Fifty thousand of the Queen’s people dwelt beneath the moors already, and more were descending every day. In twenty years more, or thirty, all would have made themselves a redoubt within the earth. Then, the scouts would watch for Jondarite balloons, would signal the approach of armies, but those armies would find no one on the open steppes, no one to enslave, no one to tax. Or if they did, they would fight tunnel by tunnel, room by room, against strong defenses.

And across the breadth of the steppes hundreds of thousands of mud graves stood mute evidence of the soil dug out in the dark hours. If any had had sense to see it. How could so sparse a people have had so many dead? But the Jondarites had not asked that question.

‘And yet,’ she whispered to herself, ‘and yet, in that thirty years or fifty years, how many more will really die?’ The young men grew belligerent in the underground places. If they could not fight the Jondarites, they fought one another. Queen Fibji had made a rule that boys could dwell below only until they had fathered two children; then they must return to the nomad tribes above. Which made it more peaceful below but left the children without fathers to learn from. She sighed. Thinking again of Fatterday, she wondered how many of her people might be saved if there were truly a Southshore and she could find some way to come to it.

Now her near-kin were saying the same things over and over, worrying the subject to rags. Her mind wandered, remembering.

On one particular day long ago she had walked with her father across a stretch of the arid lands, away from the tribe, free for the moment from servitors or petitioners. He had taken her on these walks sometimes, talking and talking, as though to gift her with the essence of his thought to store for some future time. She was his only child.

‘The young always want to go to war,’ he had said. ‘And the old are too often eager to send them. The young revel in thoughts of battle. They think blood is wine, that it can be spilt without consequence and a new vintage bought for tomorrow’s feast. And the old are sometimes willing to have young men gone, to have their exasperating numbers thinned to a biddable fraction, for they, the young men, are the source of dissent and confusion. It is among them that revolution Breeds, often to no point. But what good are dead warriors, Fibji?’

He stopped, as though taken by a sudden memory. ‘Long ago, when I was only a youth and my father was yet King, I came upon a Jarb Mendicant sitting on a stone here on the steppe, wreathed in the smoke of his pipe. I was joyful and sanguine then. I said to him, “Mendicant, give me a prognostication for our people.” He looked at me through the smoke, as they do, and said at last, “I see peace and prosperity for the Noor, Prince, but only when the ruler of the Noor can answer the question, ‘Of what good are dead warriors?’ ” ’

He brooded again. ‘I have never answered the question, Fibji. See the mud graves of the dead as we pass. Is our way not marked with the bones of our people? And what good do the dead do themselves or us?’

He had intended it as a rhetorical question, but it had caught Fibji’s attention. What good indeed? The mud tombs were scattered everywhere on the endless plains, thinly in most places, thickly around much used campsites. Inside them the bones of the dead, rolled in their robes, sat inside thick mud shells sculptured into the shapes of them as they had been in life. Children played among the clayed-over bones, thinking nothing of it. Death had no reality to
children. Fibji herself had played among the tombs, knowing what they were well enough. They had no more reality for her than for other children.

Until that moment. Her father stood at her left hand, staring off across the steppe where the sparse grass moved in a small wind, the half-dried blades making a gentle susurrus, barely audible. To her right was a cluster of mud graves, three almost alike, as though of one family, two men and a woman, their faces staring toward her from the clay. She fancied they would speak in a moment, greeting the King, and in that instant her mind saw into the clay to the place the bones rested and beyond the bones to the people who had once lived. It happened all at once, like a vision. Almost she could have called the names of those who rested in the shells, gone now. They stared out at her with eager eyes, those young men, eyes anxious for battle, hungry for death. And in that instant she knew mortality, all at once, entirely. Even she, Fibji, would stop! She, Fibji, would cease to be!

‘Of what good are dead warriors?’ her father had repeated, and she had screamed, cowering against him in a sudden spasm of fear so palpable it was like a presence, as though death itself had touched her.

‘Fibji?’ he had said, looking her full in the face with total understanding. ‘Daughter?’ And then he had held her tightly, waiting for the fear to pass. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know.’

She had been about seven when she’d realized death. When she had taken up the scepter, she had tried to explain why they must not wage war. And yet there were always the young men who rebelled against her. Young bloods, always, in love with their concept of justice, eager to prove themselves, making it easier for the Jondarites, plunging into battle with a scream of defiance and naked chests.