Neverness (41 page)

   At last she emptied the spheres containing the nail parings and Jinje's amputated toe. The woman moaned and looked at each other; they touched each other's faces to reassure themselves, and Anala stood up straight and pointed at Jinje's rotten toe lying on the crushed snow. "This is very bad, very, very bad. I have never known of anything so bad."

   They talked for a while and agreed that Jinje's foot had rotted because of Katharine's witchcraft. "But why would Katharine curse Jinje?" Sanya wanted to know. "To bewitch Mallory is understandable, but to maim Jinje, that is evil."

   The women agreed that Katharine was indeed a witch of the worst sort, an evil
satinka
who wreaked harm on innocents solely for sport and pleasure. And when Sanya wondered how a satinka could appear so gentle and kind, Anala said, "That is their art." Then she turned to Muliya and said, "Katharine is a satinka, and that is why this year has been so hard and hungry. We must all blame her for being a satinka, otherwise the Devaki will have no more halla. And that is why we must prepare the satinka's bed."

   For a moment Justine was confused. She could not guess why Anala would want to prepare Katharine's bed. Then she looked at my mother, who was almost crying because she knew too much about the Devaki ways. Suddenly, Justine was very afraid. In fact, she was terrified. She began screaming at Anala. She told her everything, told her that we had come from the City to find the secret of life. But no one believed her. To many of the Devaki, the City was only a myth. And even for those few who might have been willing to admit that strange, weak-faced people lived in the Unreal City, Mehtar's sculpture had fooled them too well. As Muliya put it, "Look at Katharine and Justine, are they not Devaki as we are Devaki?"

   And Anala said to Justine, "You must not invent tales to save your daughter. No one can blame a mother for loving her child, but not even a mother can suffer a satinka to live."

   So saying, she and the others grabbed Justine, my mother and Katharine, and they began dragging them toward the back of the cave. There, where the floor rose to meet the cave's dark roof, the air stank of oil and smoke and was too warm. The oilstones - there must have been twenty or more - were full of seal fat and brightly aglow. The walls writhed with shadows, and yellow fingers of light wrapped around the black stalactites hanging from ceiling to floor. At the very rear of the cave, the women had made a bed of packed snow. They staked Katharine to this cold bed as if she were a dog. Her arms and legs were splayed, tied to four stakes with leather thongs.

   Anala turned to Justine and said, "The mother of the satinka must witness the ceremony."

   "No!" Justine shouted. She wrenched an arm free and struck Liluye in the face. "Moira!" she called to my mother. "Moira!" But Marya and two others had their hands clamped around my mother, holding her like an animal in a trap.

   "A witch," Anala said, "cannot do her work without fingers." She bent low and grasped Katharine's wrist. "We'll sacrifice the fingers first."

   All this time Katharine had remained preternaturally calm. Her eyes were wide open; it seemed she was staring at the whorls and swirling rock patterns of the ceiling. But Justine did not think she was looking at rock. She was looking at her life, reviewing these last moments which she had perhaps seen many times before. How is it possible that she could have accepted her fate so willingly?
Had
she truly seen her own death? Or had she merely seen possibilities, variations on the fatal theme in which Anala decided to spare her, or where she was saved by design or chance? What a hell it must be to foresee the manner and moment of one's death! Others can fool themselves that they are immortal. Or, at least, during every instant of their lives, they can look forward to the sweetness of instants still to come. They never
know
; they never see. But a scryer, she knows and sees too much. All she has in the face of infinity is her training and her courage. Katharine had courage, great courage, but at the end her courage failed her. (Or was it her vision that failed her?) She looked at Anala as if seeing her for the first time. She struggled against the binding thongs. She began to scream: "No, no, I can't see ... please!"

   Anala began hacking at Katharine's fingers with her hide - scraper. Katharine thrashed and screamed and balled her fist tightly, and Anala said to Muliya, "This flint is too dull. Bring me my seal knife, please." When Muliya returned with the sharp knife, Anala thanked her politely and began sawing at Katharine's fingers. In a surprisingly short time - for the Devaki are quick and precise at the cutting of meat - she struck off the fingers of one hand and went to work on the other.

   When she was done, she stood back and looked at Katharine's still body. "She has fainted from the pain," she said. "Who can blame her?" She looked at Justine and told her, "It is known that a satinka cannot go over to the other side of day, carrying a child. Else she would be born a satinka, too." She motioned to Sanya and Muliya and said, "We will take the child while she sleeps." So saying, they cut away Katharine's furs and laid open her belly. As the fetus was torn away from the water sack and its cord was cut, Katharine opened her eyes suddenly. Anala handed the bloody fetus to Sanya and said, "Take care of this," and the younger woman did as she was told.

   "No!" Katharine screamed, and she began calling for her mother. She lapsed into the language of the City, calling to Justine to save her baby.

   "You see," Anala said to Justine, who had dislocated a shoulder in her struggle with the other women. "She speaks in the satinka's tongue - her witchery is proven."

   "She's not a witch!" Justine screamed. "She's a scryer!"

   "Strange words," Anala said. "The mother of the satinka has been touched with strange words, too. And that is why we must take out the satinka's tongue." She picked up her knife and continued, "But first we must take the eyes so the satinka cannot watch us from the other side and work her curses."

   As quickly as she would shell a nutmeat, she put the tip of the knife in Katharine's eye and twisted her hand with a scooping motion. The eyeball came out neatly, and she gave it into Muliya's care, Somehow, Katharine kept her silence, even when Anala took out her other eye as well. It was only when Anala called for Muliya and Liluye to hold open her jaws that she came alive and screamed, inexplicably, "Mallory, do not kill him!"

   All this Justine told me later, after the deed was done. But I was able to verify a part of her story with my own eyes. It was my luck - and Bardo's - to have killed the first of the shagshay earlier that day. It was my fate to be the first to return to the cave. I do not think that anyone except Katharine expected us to return so early. But our sleds were heaped with butchered meat, so we drove the dogs toward the cave even as Anala worked her butcheries within. I remember this clearly: It was so cold that the mass of steaming red shagshay meat had frozen hard along the trail. It was deep cold; the sky itself seemed frozen like a deep, blue ocean. And like water, the air carried sounds, building and amplifying the wind's whisper into a shriek. I heard sounds from the cave. From the distance I thought it was merely the screaming of puppies calling to their mothers. We drew closer, and I realized that the screams were the screams of a human being. Panic seized me. There was a sudden, dreadful knowledge. I grabbed my bloody shagshay spear and ran for the cave.

   Several women - I do not remember their faces - tried to stop me from going to the rear of the cave. I knocked them out of the way. (One of them, perhaps the gentle Mentina, gouged my cheek with her hide-scraper. The scar is still there.) Bardo puffed and panted close behind me. Together we fought our way through the women to find Anala trying to pry open Katharine's teeth. There was blood on her lips. There was blood everywhere, blood streaming from Katharine's open belly and from her knuckle stumps, blood burning holes in the snow bed surrounding her; there were pools of blood filling the holes where her eyes had been. My mother started to gasp out the whole incredible story. I knocked Anala away from Katharine, and Muliya and Liluye as well. Bardo freed Justine, clubbing at the women with his spear. He grunted and bellowed and shoved; he stood with his spear pointing at the women. Most of them had grabbed up knives or scrapers or other tools, and were glaring at us. No one seemed to know what to do.

   I dropped down to listen to the words Katharine was struggling to speak. But I couldn't hear anything because Bardo's voice was booming. "I hope they don't rush us," he said, "because I don't think I could kill them."

   "Be quiet!" I said. And then so softly only Katharine could hear me, I whispered, "Neither could I. I could hardly kill a damn seal."

   Katharine's lips were moving. "Oh, but you could," she murmured. "It's so easy to ... but you mustn't kill him, do you see?"

   "What did you say?" Her face was anguished; I tried not to look into the pools in her eyepits.

   "You choose," she whispered. "The choice is always ..." She was deep in her scryer's universe, freed from time by Anala's blinding knife. Perhaps she was seeing things in the clear light for the first time.

   "I don't understand you."

   "You've killed him, but you mustn't kill
him
, because he's your ... oh Mallory, stop being such a fool!"

   "Katharine, I can't -"

   "In the end we choose our futures, don't you see?"

   "No, I don't -"

   "_Yes_," she said. And then there was no time, and she was a young woman again repeating her final scryer's vows: "Give; be compassionate; restrain yourself because -" and here the words rushed out as if someone had dropped a stone on her belly, " - because you will never die." She panted for a while, then her lips stopped moving, and her chest and her legs and the pulses of blood - everything about her was silent and still. She lay staring through the black stone ceiling into the sky, eyeless in eternity as all scryers hope to be.

   That was the beginning of the nightmare. I stood up, and there was blood on my lips and in my eyes. I grabbed Anala's seal knife from the bloody snow. I should have directed my thoughts to Katharine's body - had I done so my life, and hers, might have been very different. But I did not think of her; I did not think at all because I was as full of rage as any beast. I ran towards the Manwelina huts, looking for Anala. A crazy idea had come to me: If I grabbed her by the back of the neck and shook her as a dog would a sleekit, I could make her put the pieces of Katharine's body back together again. I found her coming out of Yuri's hut. She was holding his mammoth spear, and I decided it would do no good to shake her. After all, she was not a cutter; nothing, I thought, could restore Katharine to me or redeem her from death. No, I would not shake Anala; I would cut out
her
eyes so she could see the evil of what she had done.

   Confusing things happened. Someone sliced my ear with her knife. Anala threw her husband's spear, which I knocked away with my forearm. Someone drove her knife into the back of my arm. Justine rammed her elbow into Muliya's face while Bardo groaned like a bear. A woman tripped and fell into Anala's hut. Snow crunched. In the light of the sputtering oilstones, particles of snow clogged the air. Anala was terrified - I could see the fear on her broad, yellow face. And then I let my arm fall to the side, and I quietly dropped the knife into the snow. I could no more put it into Anala's eye than I could carve out a seal's eye. I was about to turn back to Katharine when Bardo shouted, "Watch out for Liam!"

   I remembered that Liam's sled had been close behind us along the trail. When I turned, he was running at me. His shape was dark and featureless against the bright circle of the eave's mouth. He had his seal knife gripped low. He must have thought I was going to kill his mother - I realize that now. Obviously he had not seen me drop my knife. He shoved the knife toward my belly, and I caught his arm. We kicked at each other's legs, and suddenly we were down, rolling in the snow. He stabbed for my throat but I got an arm up, taking the knife through my forearm. The pain enraged me. I was full of rage and pain, so I got my other arm up in a hold that the Timekeeper had taught me. I grabbed his windpipe. "Sister swiver!" Liam shouted in my ear.

   There was a moment. His life pulsed against my fingertips. There was a moment of crushing strength, a moment of choice. Perhaps I could have let him go; perhaps we could have left the Devaki in peace. But I raged and I squeezed and I crushed his throat until his face grew red with blood and his eyes bulged from their sockets. I killed him. It was an easy thing to do, really, easier than killing a shagshay or a seal.

   "By God, he's dead!" Bardo yelled as he helped me stand. "Hurry, we've got to leave before Yuri returns."

   "No," I mumbled, "there's Katharine ... her body. We've got to take her home."

   "It's too late, Little Fellow."

   "No, never too late."

   "No!" Anala screamed. She was kneeling over Liam, feeling his throat, sobbing.

   "Oh, too bad. By God, it's too bad, but we've got to hurry!"

   We went to find Katharine's body but it was gone. The women must have dragged it outside the cave. I would have searched for it; I would have grabbed Anala by the hair and made her tell me where she was, but my mother came up to me and said, "Bardo is right. We'll leave now. Or we won't leave at all."

   I am not sure how we forced our way back to our ruined hut. I remember scrambling about on my knees and hands like a madman, scooping up unopened spheres of krydda while Justine and my mother packed our sleeping furs and other things. Somehow we threw everything onto our sleds. I think the Devaki women could have stopped us if they had wanted to. But they were stunned, and I think they did not want to even look at us. As we pointed our sleds downhill, there was wailing from the cave, the wailing of a mother praying for the ghost of a son who had gone over too soon. It was the most pitiful sound in the universe. So piercing was the sound, so insistent and catching that our dogs lifted their heads and howled and whined. We fled into the cold hills, and the dogs did not stop whining for many miles.