The Revenants (8 page)
Authors: Sheri S. Tepper
Jaer didn’t move. Though ears had registered sound, mind had failed to deal with it. The Serpent looked amused. After a long, silent moment, it said, ‘What… is … your … name?’
Jaer, jerked into consciousness, closed his hanging jaw with a snap, swallowed painfully, and said, ‘Jaer. I’m Jaer.’
‘Jaer. I am not dangerous. I am not hungry. Do you understand what I am saying?’
Jaer shivered all over. ‘Yes. It’s just-you surprised me. I was looking for a bird.’
The Serpent’s coils flowed over one another in glinting ovals, wandering spirals, the upper body rearing back to display a belly and throat of pale armour, a triangular line of jaw pointed to the sky. The Serpent yawned. ‘I ate your bird. I removed your arrow first. I wasn’t hungry, but it was flapping about….’
‘It was a bad shot. A hasty shot.’
‘Now you’ll have it all to do over.’
‘I don’t think so. It’s getting late.’ He stared at the being in frank curiosity. ‘I don’t know who … what you are?’
The Serpent’s laughter was slithery, a scaly cascade of sound which raised the hairs on Jaer’s neck. ‘What do you think I am?’
‘Ephraim says answering a question with a question is a sign of either arrogance or ignorance.’
‘Which in my case?’
Jaer flushed. ‘You could be either, I guess. An ignorant person, or an arrogant one. Unless you’re mythical. In that case, you’re not a person at all.’
The Serpent’s head swayed, joyfully. ‘Could I not be an arrogant mythical person?’
‘I don’t know. Could you?’
‘Let us believe so. A male, arrogant, mythical person. Now, what are you?’
Jaer sat down and crossed his legs to consider the matter. ‘I’m not mythical – I don’t think. Really, I’m not one thing or the other.’
‘On the contrary. You are one thing or the other, but never both at once.’
‘How did you know?’ asked Jaer suspiciously. ‘I’ve never seen you before.’
‘No, but I’ve been here and there, near where you have been. I’ve looked and listened. I’ve smelled your trail. I’ve lain along the tower wall in the sun and listened to the old men jabbering away about you. I know you.’
‘Then why haven’t you let me see you before this? You scared me half to death.’
The Serpent coiled and recoiled. ‘Ephraim and Nathan wouldn’t have been eager to meet me. If you’d been younger, you might have felt you had to tell them about me. The age you are now is an age which can keep secrets.’
‘I’ve never had a secret.’
‘Oh, Jaer. Why, you
are
a secret. Wouldn’t the village Speaker go into a fit if he knew you were here? What about your mother’s mother? Wouldn’t she like to know? What about your father?’
‘I didn’t have a father.’
‘Oh, come now. You had a father.’
‘I know. I mean, I don’t know who it was, and Ephraim says it doesn’t matter who it was….’
‘Why would the old man say a thing like that?’ The Serpent sounded both amused and curious, so Jaer attempted reprise of an argument he had understood very little of.
‘Well, you see, Ephraim says if you go back a hundred years, I had sixteen ancestors, and half of them were fathers. And if you go back
five
hundred years, I had two million ancestors, and half of them were fathers. And you go back far enough, and we are all related to everyone, with little pieces of the whole world inside us, so it doesn’t matter exactly
which
human being begot us or
which
human being carried us, because we are all out of the womb of earth, fathered by time. Ephraim says.’
Something flickered in the Serpent’s eye, almost like anger, but it went on in a silky voice. ‘Well, that may be true, but it’s still important who
your
father was. If you don’t know who your father was, how do you know who
you
are?’ The Serpent caught Jaer’s eyes with his own, and Jaer felt himself floating down into the soft, black wells of those eyes. ‘It matters,’ whispered the Serpent. ‘Who you are …who are you?’
Jaer was dreaming, the place of stone and the tall, black man, a woman dancing to the sound of sticks tapping stone, a mighty, terrible figure carved of wood. The dancing woman had hair like smoke which swirled around her in the firelight. There was an old woman, many old women, smiling and kindly, fading away into a vacant coldness of stone. A woman flying, great wings, not a woman at all, and a dark city horrid with the sound of bells. Then another city. Tharliezalor, he said to himself. At last. How weary the way from Tchent to Tharliezalor.
Then he was flying, and the city below him was not High Silver House, not Tharliezalor, but Orena, glowing rose and amber in the rising sun, with the sound of trumpets rising up into a new day and people crying his name … only it was not his name at all. Jaer floated to the surface of the Serpent’s eyes, hearing the Serpent asking still, ‘Who are you?’
‘Millions of people,’ said Jaer sleepily. ‘Millions and millions of them …’
The Serpent did not seem satisfied with this, but he went on talking as Jaer wakened, talking about the habits of birds and the names of creatures and the uses of certain plants. Much of what the Serpent said seemed to make little sense, but it had a curious fascination to it.
Jaer did not intend to tell the old men about the Serpent. In fact, when he returned to the tower, he felt it would be more fun not to tell anyone. That night as he sat by Ephraim’s bed, however, listening to the old man’s wandering talk, he found himself telling all about it. Ephraim at first looked amused, then puzzled, then slightly fearful. He asked many questions: what the Serpent looked like, how it had sounded. Jaer said nothing about the strange dream he had found in the Serpent’s eyes because he did not remember it.
‘A male, mythical, arrogant person,’ mused Ephraim. ‘Jaer, while it is true, as I have often said, that anything is possible, alive, and enduring in Earthsoul, still if this creature were real – let us accept for the moment that it could be real – then it would also be likely that the Serpent is not your friend.’
‘I guess I knew that,’ confessed Jaer, a little surprised to find that he had, indeed, known that. ‘But it would still be interesting to know who my father was.’
Ephraim puckered his mouth and said nothing. After that, Nathan went with Jaer whenever Jaer went hunting.
Year 1165
Medlo and Alan had been working for a season with a wagon train which wound its way back and forth from the misty valleys of Jowr and Sorgen through the long pass beside the Palonhodh and thence up or down the Rivers, Nils or Rochagor, with whatever had needed hauling from one place to another. Most recently they had loaded grain in Tachob, in the Rochagam D’Zunabat, and had then come a slow way down the river to wind around the watery expanses of Lakland, thence to Zales, and then westward. It had been a lonely way and long, with frequent storms. Night after night they had huddled beneath the wagons while lightning forked great gobbets of cloud into the storm’s maw, gargling rain at them, spewing streams out of the livid sky. There had been no cities or towns until at last they came to a strange stretch of land which had been cleared and paved with stone. A small, fortresslike city loomed in the centre of the pave like a monolith, a giant grave-marker, black, still, and crouching. The animals had snorted at the edge of the pave, uneasily striking sparks with their hooves and tossing their heads from side to side, making the harness jingle. The place was called Murgin, and the hostlers were uneasy about it. To Medlo, at first, it was only another place.
They slept the one night in the dormitories of the city, the animals stabled nearby. It was a fitful, wary sleep. There were sounds which would have been better not to have heard and a poisonous smell to the air, no feasting or drinking, but only dull food gulped down in silence with even that silence seeming perilous. By morning they were all looking over their shoulders at nothing, eager to be out of the place. The horses were hitched with almost frantic haste.
As they lined up, just inside the gates, with the heavy gates slowly creaking open, the caravan leader rode down the line of wagons telling this one and that one to stand off and go to one side. AH the men told off were from among the new men, and Alan was one of them. They went, murmuring, casting curious glances at the black-robed inhabitants who surrounded them. Then, all at once, there was a shout, and the men were surrounded and struck down by the black robes while the drovers cracked their whips and ran the wagons out through the gates onto the echoing pave. Medlo was still on the wagon, trying frantically to get off, but he was being held and struck. Through the dizzy shock of unexpected pain he heard Alan calling, ‘Medlo, help me, ooh, Medlo and through a bloody haze he saw Alan beaten down to the ground. When he regained consciousness, the forest surrounded the wagons in looming silence, but he heard Alan’s voice still calling. His head had been bandaged, and the surly drovers evaded his eyes.
Later, the caravan master spoke off-handedly to him, saying that the contract with Murgin always included both grain and men; that the men were chosen by lot; and that it could as well have been Medlo himself. It
had
been Medlo, himself, insofar as Medlo understood it. Medlo had been attacked, borne down, hurt, killed or enslaved. At some point in this conjecture his mind always stopped short of remembering precisely what the sounds of Murgin had been. He was not grieving for someone else, he was swearing vengeance for himself.
He could not move well for some time, for they had strained his shoulders when they held him and had then tied him up until they were far into the forest. He did not complain about this, but merely kept silent, waiting, letting his fury warm him. After he could move easily once more, he waited until the caravanners were very drunk one night on newly-bartered-for wine. He killed those he felt had known in advance of the contract with Murgin, fired the wagons for good measure, and departed into the forest.
The way through the forest was lost, desperate, and suicidal. Medlo did not die. He felt that he was dying, perhaps tried to die, but did not. He felt already half dead, half missing, crippled and maimed in some way he scarcely understood. He
felt
Alan as a man feels the phantom fingers of an amputated hand, but he did not grieve, only burned with anger. He turned back toward Murgin time after time, only to be driven westward by storm and the onset of winter. Finally, he stopped feeling anything.
But he began to listen to Alan. When the skirts of the sky were stained with the wine of sunset, Medlo would comment on it to himself, nodding, saying, ‘As you once said, Alan.’ He remembered all Alan had ever said, everything. What he could not remember, he heard inside his head as though newly spoken. And, always, he searched every face he met to see whether Alan had come there before him, whether he himself had come there to find that part of himself which had been lost.
Year 1165
For some seasons, Leona wandered the broken lands between the Jaggers and Fenlees. She spent two winters time-lost in sleep in a snow-buried cave warmed by subterranean steams which boiled in the deeps. She spent a summer along the shores of the Fenlees among the reedy hummocks where stilt-legged birds piped endlessly beside grey seas which broke on the fangs of the Shambles to send icy spray far inland. With no more knowledge of the world than a blind kitten, she had searched among the ghost cities of the Jaggers and found a ruined library in a language she could spell out. She had devoured pictures and words and pages which told of the world as it was and had been and was thought to be. Always she sought for references to that Vessel of Healing which the man at Stony croft had spoken of, but she found them seldom and vaguely written. At times she came away to seek food or to rest eyes wearied by faded print on stained pages. She seemed not to feel the cold. Even the summers here were chill, for the frigid northern seas swept down from the icelands along the shores of Anisfale to strike upon the Scruff before turning at the Scut to flow westward into Vastnesse, called by some Wasnost.
She stood long hours upon the dunes, legs rasped by blades of bitter grass, watching the small ships of the Shambles tack to and fro across the swollen seas, beating against the endless winds only to fly before them once more, indomitable and detached. She began to think of herself as like them, endlessly fighting against the wind or fleeing before the wind to an unkown place. The people of the Shambles came to know her form, if not her name. From guard towers she was seen, striking westward to the sea or eastward to the mountains, sometimes carrying fish she had caught, or mussels stripped from the weed-grown rocks weighing down her bundled shirt. Several times men from the villages of the Shambles or Tharsh skulked away after her, thinking to enliven a dull time with a bit of stranger-rape and murder. Only one such group ever came close to her hiding place, and no member of it ever returned. After a time they gave it up. The woman in white was said to be surrounded by glamour and witchery. All decided it was healthier not to see her, and thenceforward they did not. Leona had read all the books and had tired of the Shambles. She had decided to explore the Jaggers and east to the Abyss of Souls and then to go on to Seathe and the eastern lands.
Thus it was that she came to the banks of the Lazentium in the spring, to the croft of a shepherd there, to find the man busy at the drowning of pups. There were three, and the man had left one for the bitch and was about to drown the others when Leona came out of the mist to his side, silent, white, and chill. She reached out her hands and the shepherd put the sack into them without a word. Something in her eyes spoke, and he answered as best he could, touching his forelock and bending his knees in a curiously ancient gesture of combined distress and honour. She laid her fingers on his forehead in a complex motion which burned him joyously and then turned away. An hour later he was standing there still, eyes unseeing yet watching the way she had gone.