Singer from the Sea (2 page)

Color! At the shadow’s end, a flicker of green, seen out of the corner of her right eye. There, and again. She veered to the left, across the buried walls, and followed her own attenuated silhouette up the dune, gray granules flowing as she slipped, plunged, wallowed the last few meters, struggling to the top on hands and knees.

Below was the valley described in Tenopia’s song, skullstones and dry bones, a dry streambed littered with round white rocks. On the south and east, black-streaked cliffs made a barricade against the sands, underlining bald and wrinkled mountains. Across the dried streambed the walled refuge squatted ugly as a toad, built of the same stone as the cliffs and topped by one stubby tower that flew the long triangle of the banner: a licking flame of green bearing a single gold leaf.

“In desert, hope is small,” Awhero had said. “Leaf is sign of hope, small, almost unnoticed. Yet it holds infinite promise, does it not?” There were no leaves in Mahahm-qum. The banners of Mahahm were black, with a blazing yellow sun, and there was sun enough in Mahahm-qum to make ashes of anything living.

Light flashed in her eyes, reflected from the highest window of the tower, only a glint. Lenses. Someone knew she was here. She paused, wondering if the gate would open to emit an attacking horde. Or perhaps just one strong man. Either way, she could do nothing about it. Almost three days of. walking in the sand had taken her strength. Too little sleep and water had taken her resolve. Fear had taken her will. She floundered downward in another scrambled avalanche and staggered onto the flinty soil of the riverbed. From there it was only a short distance up the equally hard packed slope to the walls.

The gate was of heavy, sun-grayed planks, rough hewn from huge trees, fastened with spikes of iron. The wood had come from somewhere else. Somewhere behind the far black line of cliffs? From some chasm among those dun-colored mountains? Or maybe from Galul itself, where water ran and things grew green? Not from hereabout, certainly, for nothing grew in this desolation except black thorn, bonebush, and blood lichen.

She leaned against the door for a moment, staring at the wall, built of the same ashy stone as the cliffs, equally cheerless and forbidding. A protruding beam high above her head ended in a carved skull between whose wooden teeth a bell rope emerged like a tongue, an oily strand with a loop in the end, slightly above the level of her eyes. Almost too late she saw the stem of thorn woven through the loop. Unwary or desperate visitors would pay with agony for interrupting the labors of those within.

Genevieve thrust the crook of her staff through the loop and hauled it down, hard. After a long pause, she heard a sonorous clang so remote in both space and time as to seem unconnected to any action she had taken. She tugged again, and again. Two more long delayed and measured tolls of the distant bell. She said to herself, “We will wait to see what happens. We will not lick our lips. We will not have hysterics. We will simply wait to see what happens …”

Not much. A cessation of some background murmur that had been unnoticeable until it ended. A unison of treading feet, which would have been worrisome had they been approaching rather than retreating. Since the place was not eager to welcome her, she turned her back on it and stood facing outward, searching the sky and the horizons for her pursuers. She couldn’t see them, which didn’t mean they weren’t there. What she could see was the everlasting monotone of the desert: gray sand, gray earth, creeping dikes of gray stone among hard gray dunes dotted with the ash white of bonebush, the bleeding scarlet of lichen, the angular thickets of thorn made impenetrable by hundreds of needle-sharp daggers that seeped glistening beads of toxin. The thorn meant more than mere pain. A puncture could fester for weeks before healing. Delganor
had told them that, or one of the trade representatives. Everything anyone could find out about Mahahm had been dissected and discussed, and she had listened to all of it, to everything any of them knew about Mahahm. It had not been enough.

The skeletal lines of bonebushes were less forbidding than the thorn, but more eerie, each branch an arm or thigh bone, each twig a finger bone, always growing four or five together in a patch of blood lichen. The thorn grew only where there were many bonebushes, and the bonebushes grew only where lichen had established a hold. Now, in the slanting sun, the lichen glowed crimson, as though it were freshly bled onto the soil. She did not want to think of blood. Had Delganor bled? Was the Marshal dead or dying? Cut down by a hundred seabone daggers. Left lying in all that red for someone to find, or not. If she went back to the house, would any of their party be there, lying in their blood?

She turned back to the gate and rang again. Clang, then again clang, and clang. Three, as before. Temperate, she told herself in a mood of weary fatalism. Not hasty. Not importunate. Merely a measured reminder that someone waited, whenever they got around to seeing who it was, or wasn’t.

“Who are you?” a voice asked, near her ear.

She swung around, eyes darting, finally locating the tiny sliding hatch in the door. It had opened without a whisper and the person within was invisible in the shadow. The voice was as anonymous as wind; man, woman, child, devil or angel, it could be any.

She cleared her throat, but the words rasped nonetheless: “My name is Genevieve.” She bowed her head and took a deep breath. “In Mahahm-qum, an old woman named Awhero told me to seek Tenopia’s haven beneath the green banner.”

“Who are you running from?”

“Those who were coming to kill me and my baby, men who have already probably killed my husband and father …

“Et al,” she whispered hysterically to herself. “Et al …”

She raised her head to find the hatch closed once more. She waited. After a time she thrust the staff through the loop and clanged again, another measured three.

This time she saw the hatch slide open. “Don’t be impatient. You may enter. The small opening to your left.”

It was a considerable distance to her left, a narrow slot around and behind a great wallowing buttress, like the buttocks of some huge animal that had stood forever, pushing up the wall. The passage did not extend through the wall but only into the buttress itself, a slot that only a slender person might traverse, a child, a woman, a young man without arms or armor. She took two steps and a metal grille moved behind her, closing the entrance and leaving her standing in a iron caged space so tight she could not spread her arms. Stone circled her except for the grille at her back and another at her left where a lantern was held by an invisible hand. A woman’s voice, perhaps the same voice, said, “Take off your clothing. All of it.”

“This is not hospitable,” she said, suddenly furious. “This is what
they
no doubt wanted of me, that I be naked and helpless.”

A laugh, without humor. “Woman, you do not know them if you believe that, and as for us, we have no designs on your body. We do need to assure that you carry nothing to our hurt, but you may choose. If you like, we will open the grille and you may go out the way you came.”

Fighting tears, she leaned her staff against the stone and took off the hooded robe with its porous, insulated helmet that kept the sun from frying the brain, then the under-robe Awhero had given her. Finally, with some struggle, she removed the silken bodysuit that covered her from throat to below her elbows and knees, laminated to her belly and thighs by the dried breast milk.

“How old is your child?” someone asked. A softer voice. Not so crisp.

“Almost a month,” she said, gulping tears. “His name is Dovidi.”

“Sandals, too,” said the first voice. “And stockings. Put everything through that hole by your foot.”

The lantern wagged, showing her the gap in the grille, large enough to put shoes or wadded clothing through.

“Turn around, slowly.”

She turned, holding her hands out, away from her body. She heard whispers.

“… one of the intended …”

“… all nonsense, look at that unmistakable nose …”

“… rather as we had been told?”

After a long pause, her outer robe came back, and she wrapped it around herself.

“Where did you get these sandals?” someone asked.

Where had she got them? “I was told they were a gift,” she said. “From the wives of the Shah. So that I could walk with them in their garden. My own shoes were … what do they say?” For a moment she couldn’t remember the caste word and substituted another. “Befouled?”

“Arghaste. That is the Mahahmbi word. It means ‘soiled by being foreign,’ that is, from originating elsewhere than Mahahm. You yourself are arghaste, while the untouchables are malghaste, soiled by birth. In addition, you are c, soiled by being a woman. Even wearing Mahahmbi shoes, you would not have been allowed to walk in their garden. It was a ruse, a ploy. Something, perhaps, to gain time.”

“But I had walked in their garden,” she cried. “I’d been there before!”

Silence. Ominous. Gathering.

Then another voice. “Describe the occasion. Where? Who did you meet?”

“I don’t know where. A walled place, not too far from the house we rented. There were three of them, the Shah’s wives they said. They were all new mothers, and one of them said & they’d earned the right to go … to paradise. To Galul.”

A long silence, then very softly: “What did they look like?”

“They wore veils, heavy ones. I saw one face, only for a moment. They said … no! She said, the only one who made sense, she said they had earned this … candidacy, whatever it was.”

A long pause, then a weary sigh. “Perhaps, under those
circumstances you would have been allowed to walk with them.”

“Except that we didn’t walk,” said Genevieve. “We sat. I said something, and they would say nonsense. At least one of them could talk as well as I, but all but one spoke only nonsense aloud. They gave me some tea. I didn’t drink it. I didn’t like the smell.”

Another silence, less ominous. “Perceptive of you. What did you do with it if you did not drink it?”

“Dripped it into my robe, under my veil. You can see, the stain is still there. I had no time to wash it before I left.”

“Did the wives sound young? Or old?”

“The one who spoke said she was thirty-three years old. She said she was old for the trip, but her husband hadn’t wanted her to go until now. I assumed the others were younger.”

A pause. Then, “Why did you pick these clothes for this journey?”

Despite herself, the tears came. “I didn’t pick anything. Awhero gave me the robe and told me to wear it when I went out. I had the under-robe and the sandals on because I was summoned to visit the women again. And Father had gone to find out the details from the Shah’s people. Then Awhero came running in to tell me assassins had taken him and were coming for me and Dovidi. I didn’t doubt her. Others of our party were away, my father was missing, there was fighting where my husband had gone! My husband’s spare sunhelmet and cloak were still hanging by the side door. Awhero said take them, so I threw them on and ran.”

“Where is your son?”

“Awhero said if I took him, he was as good as dead. She said she could hide him, pretend he was one of them. I trust her, but I honestly don’t know if he’s … if he’s still alive.”

“She’s malghaste?”

“Yes.”

“You took no food or water?”

“My husband had left a little sack of way-food in the pocket. I took a water bottle and this staff from the door
nearest the guard post. I filled the bottle at the untouchables well, then I started north.” She rubbed her head, trying to make the pain go away. “The guards weren’t at their post, and it made me uneasy, so I went out the malghaste door.”

“Guards wouldn’t have been there,” said the softer voice. “Not if men were coming to abduct you. The guards would have been invited to be elsewhere, so they could later say they had seen nothing, that perhaps you had been stolen. Women are stolen. It’s always believable. Where is the bottle you carried?”

“Wherever I stopped to sleep this morning. I heard the birds screaming, so I rolled away from under a bonebush, and then I ran. When I found it was gone, I didn’t dare go back and look for it. It can’t be far from here, for I only walked an hour or so before seeing the banner.”

“What is this device in the pocket?”

“A locator. It’s just … it focuses on the navigational beacon in orbit above Haven and it can tell you where you are. It’s more useful in Haven than here …”

“An off-world device!” The pitch went up, the sharpness slashed. “You’re from Havenor? From the Lord Paramount?”

“I’m not, no, though the leader of our party is. I suppose he is. We did come in an airship. I’m sorry. I thought you knew. Though, why would you know? We’ve been here for some time. I guess I thought everyone knew …”

“Was this device brought with you?” The words were sharp, demanding. “Did anyone in Mahahm-qum see it?”

Why did they care? Then, wearily, she understood. “No, the people in Mahahm-qum don’t know I have this device. They probably have no idea I can keep to a direction in the desert, which would explain why they kept finding my trail and losing it. They don’t know that I had talked to Awhero or that I knew anything about Tenopia or this place. Awhero called it
wahi oranga
, or
marae morehu.
That is what the name means, isn’t it? Place of refuge?”

A long silence. Evidently they had closed a door across the grille, for she heard nothing. The lantern had gone with the voices. She pulled the cloak around her and
slumped against the grille, head on bent knees, simply waiting. At least nothing from outside could get at her here. When the voice came again, it actually wakened her from a doze.

“We’ll open the door. There’s a small room here, where you can be comfortable for a while. You’ll stay here while we check what you’ve told us.”

“What about my other clothes?”

“We’d like to know what they gave you in that tea, so we’ll keep that robe for a time. Here’s your bodysuit, and we’ll find you some other clothing. We’re keeping the sandals. Someone will carry them away from here, a good distance away from here. The soles have tracking devices in them.”