The Revenants (7 page)
Authors: Sheri S. Tepper
There was a mirror there, blotched and leprous, throwing back a diseased reflection of truth. Medlo found himself staring at the image, remembering the night past. He had told Alan that he was from – where? Zales? Why? Why not Rhees? Rhees. Well, why not Rhees? Because he had not wanted the boy to know he was from Rhees, or anyone to know, or himself to remember.
He looked upon himself with loathing. He was a kernel of hating fury locked inside an iron box, that box in a shut room in a stone house, and that house walled around with unthink and unfeel. A shrubbery of habit shrouded those walls until he, himself, Medlo, forgot there was anything there. Motherhate was there, but he did not want to look at that. He knew well enough what loathsome things were there, not to be looked at, or thought of, or to come into the light of day. Unthink and unfeel were easy among the wagoneers. Drunkenness was easy, too, and the slow death easier than the quick, for it needed no decision. Why then, at this moment, did something of the old Medlo, Rhees scion, prideful and aching, leak out of his bleary eyes to see himself and sicken at what it saw?
He was filthy, and hairy, and he stank like the midden below him. He was caught up in half-drunken melancholy and began to weep, then to vomit, then to curse, then to weep once more. When he had done enough of that, he began to wash himself.
When he woke the young hostler some hours later, he was shaking, but clean. Throughout that day, he spoke often to himself, saying that he must eat and mend clothing and get new boots. Such was the way he spoke that he might have been speaking to Alan, and so Alan thought he did. If Alan thought it odd that Medlo never asked what Alan thought, or what Alan wanted, he did not say so. Instead, almost gratefully, he ate, and mended clothing, and saw to his own boots. Medlo was so concentrated upon his own salvation that he did not note this strangeness.
That first day set the pattern of their life together. Medlo said, to Medlo, what Medlo needed to hear, Alan heard, and attended as though he had been Medlo’s shadow. So, Medlo told himself to take up his jangle and play, and Alan watched, learned, played a little. So Medlo told himself, sternly, not to drink the poisonous wine which the train carried as trade goods, and Alan listened and did not drink. So Medlo grew sad at certain dusk hours when the sun fell through light haze which smelt like the lawns and meadows of Rhees, and Alan grew sad with him, reminded of – what? Medlo never asked.
So they travelled, sometimes as hostlers, sometimes as musicians, sometimes as unnamed supernumeraries hired to swell the apparent fighting strength of caravans. If Medlo had been asked when it was that they became lovers, he would not have known what to say. It was not as though he loved someone
else
, but only as though he, himself, had been replicated in order to comfort himself. Usually he did not even refer to Alan by name, did not say ‘you,’ said only ‘we.’ ‘We leave for the coast tomorrow,’ or ‘They paid us not too badly for the trip.’
If anyone had known him well enough to do so, that person might have pointed out to Medlo that he felt no onger lonely, no longer violated, no longer alone. And Alan? He went where Medlo went, a companion almost without identity of his own, growing to look more like Medlo with each day in walk and wince and moue and cock of the head, spying little, smiling much.
And yet, Alan said, once, ‘See how the skirts of the sky are stained with wine’ Thereafter, each time that Medlo looked at the evening sky, he thought of the wine-stained skirts but forgot it was Alan who had said it. Alan said once, ‘The skin of a woman is cool, like a forest leaf. The skin of a man is hot, like a desert leaf.’ And Medlo thought of that, forgetting why.
In time they, who had been two shoddy manikins selling themselves for a few coins to caravan masters, became two persons, strong and wiry, taller than average, slim, with air and beard trimmed neatly, clean and alert, wise to the ways of the trail and the town, needing only – themselves. Many thought them brothers. What they thought, what Medlo thought, he himself did not know.
Year 1165
It was said in the Lion Courts that he who sat in the Chair of the Chieftains of the People was crowned with wisdom and armed with the strength of hundreds. The Chair was padded with the skins of great spotted cats and surrounded with the tusks of jungle pigs to show the strength that was the Chieftain’s right. To the sides of the Chair stood warriors who had Killed-The-Great-Beast holding fans made of the feathers of hawks and the hides of spotted dogs, symbols of far-seeing and tenacity. Snake-skins bound the legs of the Chair to bring to mind that which strikes without warning, and the horns of antelopes reminded the warriors of the value of swiftness. The hide of a sphinx lay before the Chieftain, the delicate skin of the breast worn into tatters where it had been scuffed by the knees and elbows of crawling petitioners. The Chieftain had said more than once that it might be time to go into the far deserts on a sphinx hunt, into those places where the basilisks hid in the twisted stone of the hotlands. Such a hunt had not been held since his grandfather’s time, and the skin was wearing away, no longer occasioning the awe it onetime had.
The Chieftain never made up his mind to have the hunt, however, and he died peacefully one night still considering the matter. There were three possible candidates for the Chieftain’s Chair, and there was the mandatory Year-Without-A-Leader to come, during which the candidates would be considered. One was a warrior so great that his like had not been known for generations, one who had taken the heads of enemies before he was twenty, Killed-The-Great-Beast at the age of fifteen, who had brought the Chieftain the shields and cattle of countless successful raids upon neighbouring peoples. One was the younger brother of the Chieftain-Not-Yet-Buried, a man of great skill in the making of things, whose arrows were straighter than those made by others, whose shields and fetishes glowed with life and spirit, whose boats skimmed the water with a life and will of their own. The third candidate was the son of the Chieftain-Not-Yet-Buried, that is, the only son who was left. All the others had so demonstrated their courage and competed in dangerous games of skill that they had come to early and lamented ends. The surviving son had been begotten by the Chieftain in the Chieftain’s eightieth year and had been named ‘Son of my Strength,’ that is, ‘Thewson.’ He was tall enough and well built enough that the Chieftain-Not-Yet-Buried need have had no shame about him, but he was young and callow enough that none of the members of the Council of Elders considered him seriously as a candidate for the Chair of Chieftains once the Year-Without-A-Leader was past.
Why Thewson should have supposed himself a true contender for the Chair was not generally understood. It may have been that he had been weaned on the vaunting ambition of his mother, who had little enough pleasure in life and wished to believe that she might be remembered as a Womb-of-Chieftains though no female could be given that title until after her death. It may have been simply that he lived in dreams, that the violent endings to which all his brothers had come might have seemed ordained in order that Thewson might rise as they fell. Whatever the reason, when he learned that the Council did not consider him a true contender, he raged silently in his hide tent for some days. He was not a stupid young man. He knew that he could not challenge either the warrior or the craftsman. He went, therefore, to the house of the shaman and begged the shaman to tell him of the history of the Chair of Chieftains and of those who had occupied the Chair over the years and of how they had come there.
The shaman sat crouched over his fire, fingering the bones of fortune, casting herbs into the fire and inhaling the pungent smoke, muttering occasionally as he chanted the stories of thirty generations of Chieftains. All of the histories were taught by shaman to pupil – there was no writing. Thewson found that his memory was as quick and accurate as the strike of a great viper. He had only to hear the histories once to remember them.
Time on time, it was sung, once every ten generations or so, the Chieftain of the People came to power through the Crown of Wisdom. Thewson brewed a large pot of beer, strained it and flavoured it with berries to pour it generously for the shaman. Tell me, Old and Wise, what is the Crown of Wisdom?’ The shaman muttered and rolled his watery eyes, bleared from one hundred years of smoky fires.
‘In the sacred place,’ he chanted, ‘where the river Wal Thai spills from the high lake over the great cliffs, where the coloured ribbon of the light of Ulum Auwa spins across the great gulf, where there is speaking thunder of waters, there is the cavern of the Knowledge of All Things. There in that cavern is the image of Ulum Auwa, carved from the Rock That Lives, and on the carven head of He Auwamol was the Crown of Wisdom. It was to this place that the Killers of Great Beasts came, and it was to this place that they set themselves to pass the great gulf and the speaking thunder and to climb die Wall Which Cannot Be Climbed to come to the Cavern of Ulum Auwa.’
There was much detail. All of the Killers of the Great Beast failed to reach the cavern, all but one. That one was Chieftain-Climbs-The-Wall who was the many times great-grandfather of the Chieftain-Not-Yet-Buried. Chieftain-Climbs-The-Wall had returned to the Lion Courts with the Crown.
‘What happened to the Crown? asked Thewson, softly, as he poured more beer.
‘In the days that the Chieftain-Climbs-The-Wall became the Chieftain-Not-Yet-Buried and lay in his bones in his house, there came a stranger with many strangers in a great boat to the place of Crossing the Waters, where Wal Thal flows into the sea. There was much fighting and much glory with the stranger, and he went away scatheless though he and many of the other strangers left their weapons and their armour and many wet the earth with their blood and many left their bones as well. And when the stranger had gone, it was found that the Crown of Wisdom was gone as well, for there had been fighting in the place where that Chieftain lay in his bones. No Chieftain since that time has had the crown, and it is said that the Cavern of Ulum Auwa is empty of it.’
‘Is it sung that the stranger took it?’
‘It is sung that when the stranger went, the crown went, though whether Auwamol stretched out his hand to take it or the stranger took it is not sung.’ The shaman belched deeply and lovingly. ‘By the Tree of Forever, Thewson, you make good beer.’
There was still almost all the Year-Without-A-Leader before any decision about the Chair of Chieftains would be made. Thewson decided that there was a remote chance he could find the Crown of Wisdom in that time, or kill himself trying, or find somewhere else in the world which would be more appealing than the Lion Courts would be if ruled by someone else. He decided to have a try at the great falls first, and if he survived that but did not find the Crown he would go to the place of Crossing the Waters and take the first ship heading anywhere. He had carved ivory and gold beads to pay his way. Custom dictated that he go empty-handed except for the tall spear bearing his own basilisk-skin banner and a money pouch and a cloak of skins. That is the way that he went.
Year 1165
The tower stood at the edge of the plateau, fronted by a paved courtyard and surrounded by a wall with battlements. It needed no battlements, for it was protected by devices both wonderful and terrible; still the battlements were there, grey in the heat of the southern winds. Behind the tower, the land sloped away gently through open pastures of high grass and scattered groves of gnarled grey trees which annually burst into fountains of crimson blossom. The rest of the time they looked like bundles of dusty feathers and smelled little better. Tree ferns grew there, and the ubiquitous ow grew among them, up, down, sidewise through every possible opening until the whole became a single tangle through which few beasts could go. Birds liked the ow thickets, and Jaer hunted along the thicket edge with nocked arrow.
Beyond this rolling, open land, the plateau dropped eastward into canyons and rough land, heavily wooded and shrouded in cloud. To the north the plateau cupped a sizeable lake which drained away over the cliff in a thousand feet of plunging rainbows. To the south the land went up into the high peaks and marshes of the Falling Water Mountain where it rained forever and the traveller walked through bogs and giant mosses and, chances were, never came out. Westward was the valley with the huddle of village houses and the river which flowed further westward through the steep canyons to the seas. Beyond that, Nathan said, the ocean surrounded all the land, and northeast was another land, and beyond that another, the same south-west, a whole chain of them slanting across the Outer Sea and called, for that reason, the Outer Islands. Though, Nathan said, the sea was not really Outer at all, merely less inner than the Sea of Thienezh which was called the Inner Sea. As for the island they were on, it had no name now. With the Separation, names for places were falling into disuse except among traders. The island had been called Taniela at one time. It still had one port town, called Candor.
Nathan said, also, that past the islands and the sea was another land so huge that it surrounded the sea. On a clear day Jaer had seen from the top of the tower the vast plane of water stretching in all directions and the low cloud far to the northeast which Nathan said hung over the great land. He traced the way to it on the map, asking about this and that and accepting that someday he would go there. For the time being, however, Jaer, at age twelve, was content to do what needed to be done each day. Hunting was one of those things, if they wanted meat for the pot, and it was while hunting that Jaer met the Serpent.
He had penetrated into an ow thicket by winding over, under, and around the network of trunks in pursuit of a wingshot bird with Jaer’s arrow still in it. He would have given up, but it was his favourite arrow. A curtain wall of leaves gave way, and he fell through onto soft turf in a clearing improbably bright with sun. The Serpent was reclining on a rock outcropping in the centre of the clearing. Inasmuch as the Serpent had arms and a not-too-snaky face, Jaer thought at first it was a person. His education, though both broad and deep, had not covered what one does when one meets a person. Jaer’s usually raccoony mind went into a frantic pattern of freeze/flee/ faint while his eyes froze onto the being. It, in turn, looked Jaer over from head to heel and flickered a tongue remarkable for both its length and sinuosity before remarking, ‘You don’t have to be frightened. I’m not hungry, and I wouldn’t eat anything your size anyhow.’