Read A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire Online
Authors: Michael Bishop
Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #General
A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (19 page)
Douin was waiting for Seth with Lord Pors thrown over his shoulder like a sack. He nodded at Lijadu, now lying on her side in the dust. The foliage on the terraces above them crackled insanely in the quickening rain.
“Pick up the Pledgechild’s heir as I have Lord Pors.”
Seth knelt, struggled, and hoisted Lijadu onto his shoulders. “She’s been beaten,” he said. “Lord Pors beat her, Master Douin.”
“For your sake,” Douin said bitterly. “To recover the dascra
.
”
“In that he failed miserably,” Seth said.
Douin did not reply, but trudged northward through the lashing vegetation toward the Sh’vaij. Seth trudged in his footsteps. Rain spilled in torrents, battering the crops and running underfoot in muddy floods.
Thirty or forty state soldiers—a few of whom may have rappelled down Palija Kadi—huddled in front of the assembly building. Drenched and dispirited, they made no attempt to enter. But as if they had some vague notion who Seth and Douin were, they cleared a narrow corridor to the door. The eaves of the Sh’vaij were the color of running blood.
“I’m not going in!” Douin shouted.
“But why not?”
“I’m taking Lord Pors to the airship!”
“You’ll wake the Magistrate!”
“If the rain hasn’t already done that, Master Seth!” Lugging the dead Point Marcher, Douin set off down the muddy path to the roadway.
Seth glanced at the uniformed Tropiards huddled in the rain, swung about, and carried Lijadu into the Sh’vaij. It was instantly quieter, but another noise—an internal noise—assaulted Seth, for the Sh’gaidu were mind-keening together: a dissonant, angry, melancholy music; a choiring of cloistered but interwoven minds. He was “hearing” it. The sounds ran through his aching blood and pulsed in his heart: cerebrations from Yaji Tropei, the galleries, and the mournful Sh’gaidu.
In the short time since Seth, Douin, and Emahpre had rushed out of the Sh’vaij to check the unauthorized rappelling on the Great Wall, several more midwives had joined their sisters in front of Palija Dait. They sat in a semicircular ring facing outward, each in a modified lotus position. Seth estimated fifteen elders altogether, all ritually naked, as if in protest of the state’s heavy-handed maneuvers. Also, a number of younger adults occupied the wooden benches all about the great room. The Pledgechild wasn’t among these people, and it was she whom Seth most wanted to see.
Near collapse, he staggered into the open nave of the Sh’vaij. Two communards with muddy feet and ankles sprang from the room’s shadowy edges. They took Lijadu from his shoulders, as gracefully as drawing a scarf from his tunic pocket, and he was surprised to find himself dripping but unburdened before the midwives. As Lijadu’s rescuers bore her into the left-hand chamber behind Palija Dait, their wet bodies and muddy feet registered in Seth’s mind as telltale indictments and he pointed a shaking hand after them in accusation.
“They killed Lord Pors!” he cried. “Those two killed an official representative of Lady Turshebsel, Liege Mistress of Kier!”
This accusation impressed no one, but, echoing in the Sh’vaij, it sounded within Seth like his own feeble mind cry. “I want to talk to the Pledgechild!” he insisted. No one answered, and he started toward the door through which Pors’s assassins had just disappeared.
“Latimer!”
He turned. Deputy Emahpre was coming into the Sh’vaij with a tall, lean Tropiard in boots and siege helmet. Dripping rain water, the newcomers stamped their feet and picked gingerly at their sodden clothes.
“This is Commander Swodi,” the Deputy said. “He thought the acrobatics on the Great Wall a fine way to get his troops down from the basin’s rim.”
Swodi was plainly discomfited by Emahpre’s remarks. He looked chastened and annoyed at once. He undoubtedly had only a little Vox.
“An exercise in agility, adaptability, equipment use,” the Deputy said, berating the commander in a language that insulted him simply by being alien. “So realistic was the exercise, one rappeller fell and died.” He then shouted out the crofthouse door at the men in the rain. A moment later four Tropish soldiers entered, carrying rain-beaded laser rifles and glancing about the interior of the Sh’vaij as if it were Seitaba Mwezahbe’s tomb and they awestruck tourists.
Seth spoke up loudly: “Lord Pors is dead, too. Master Douin and I found Lijadu in the tower, but without the dascra
.
”
Deputy Emahpre stalked across the nave, stood almost on tiptoe before Seth, and, his head drawn back like that of a cobra preparing to strike a hovering assailant, hissed, “Explain!”
As Seth explained, the two Sh’gaidu who had taken Lijadu from Seth reemerged from the Pledgechild’s cells and moved along the wall to a bench. Their bodies were dry now, wiped clean of mud.
Emahpre interrupted Seth’s story: “You let your friend carry Lord Pors’s body to our airship?”
“Was that wrong?”
“No, not wrong.” The Deputy strutted about Sethe, muttering unintelligibly. Then he halted and said, “When the Magistrate learns what’s happened here, when he sees the corpse of the Kieri envoy, he’ll return to his senses. He’ll see the need for harsh measures against these people.”
“Lord Pors had beaten the Pledgechild’s heir,” Seth said. “He’d—”
“Would you recognize the murderers?” the Deputy demanded.
“They’re here in the Sh’vaij.” Seth nodded toward the eastern wall. But at least a dozen Sh’gaidu sat on benches against this wall, three or four with topaz eyes, and Seth could no longer say who was who.
Emahpre whirled and spoke in Tropish to the soldiers who had just entered. The four of them strode to the eastern wall, yanked a pair of Sh’gaidu to their feet, and then bullied them across the nave and out into the rain. Four more Tropish dragoons entered to replace those who had left.
“You may have arrested the wrong ones,” Seth said.
“They’ll do.”
“Do for what? What’s going to happen to them?” He was amazed that none of the midwives or communards along the wall had offered the soldiers any resistance. Their encephalic choiring had grown more baleful—he had a headache, a severe migraine in his frontal lobes—but that was the extent of their opposition to the state’s strong-arm tactics. Seth wasn’t sure that the Tropiards were even aware
of these people’s dissonant mind cries.
Emahpre spoke to the soldiers who had just entered. He gestured abruptly, raised his voice to a shout, and, when Commander Swodi responded, shook his head. Swodi, militarily rigid, pivoted and strolled into the rain.
The Deputy looked at Seth. “I told him to join the other sufferers. What right does he have to stand beneath a roof after sending his troops over Palija Kadi, after causing a soldier’s death?”
“Not all the sufferers in this basin are standing in the rain.”
“Maybe they should be,” Emahpre countered.
The Pledgechild came through the tall niche to the left of Palija Dait and halted near the ring of Sh’gaidu midwives. Her eyes glittered like those of a bird or a mouse: a small, brave creature in the clutches of something bigger than itself. She had shed her garment and in her shriveled nudity had the vulnerability of a newborn.
“Do you believe you’ve evened accounts, Deputy Emahpre?” she asked.
“Two of your people for the Kieri envoy?”
“A weighted ratio.”
“Not when those two are the envoy’s murderers, slut. Not when your heir has stolen the treasure of my superior.”
Seth stepped toward the old woman. “Pledgechild, I beg you to have Lijadu return the amulet, that I may give it to Magistrate Vrai before departing Trope.”
“Please don’t beg me to do what I can’t, Kahl Latimer.”
“Things have gone beyond the Magistrate’s—maybe even the Deputy’s—control, Pledgechild. If you don’t return the amulet, it’s likely—”
“It’s likely
you’ll
suffer,” the Deputy said.
The old woman’s eyes flashed at the little Tropiard. “Suffering unites us. We come to unavoidable suffering—to your crass j’gosfi persecution—just as we came into our lives.” She lifted her arms so that their loose skin hung like wattles. “Look upon this body, Deputy Emahpre, and tell me you don’t recognize yourself in it.”
He averted his eyes. “All I care to look upon, slut, is Magistrate Vrai’s dascra
.
Return it or suffer the consequences.”
Hearing a commotion at the Sh’vaij’s entrance, Seth turned. A pair of apparitions glided in from the rain: Clefrabbes Douin and Magistrate Vrai. The Magistrate had not removed his sleeping cape. So drenched was his garment that it clung to him like a sleek, black placenta. Douin led the bemused-looking Vrai toward the Pledgechild and her two anxious petitioners, Emahpre and Seth.
“Outside,” the Magistrate said, speaking to his deputy but sweeping his arm at the door, “outside, a pair of Sh’gaidu lie garroted. Why?”
“They were Lord Pors’s assassins, Magistrate.”
“But they were not!” the Pledgechild said. “Your soldiers have indiscriminately subjected two of my people to a blind retribution!”
“The community must share in the guilt of the envoy’s death,” Emahpre rejoined. “Whether the two persons who have just died actually killed him is irrelevant. We don’t intend to sort and particularize the guilt.”
Ignoring this exchange, the Magistrate approached Seth and put his hands on the young isohet’s shoulders. “Master Douin says the young Sh’gaidu stole my dascra
from you
.
Then, last night, you failed to tell me.”
“I wouldn’t let him,” Emahpre said. “You weren’t yet prepared to find your trust in these people shattered.”
“Is learning of the theft
along with
Lord Pors’s murder a revelation any less disruptive of my serenity?”
Emahpre pressed his own attack: “The treasure of your birth-parent, Magistrate Vrai, is the treasure of every Tropiard of the Thirty-three Cities. It must be recovered. We all owe allegiance to the final vision of your birth-parent because you’re the embodiment of its dictates. Figuratively, Magistrate, your amulet contains the jinalma
of Seitaba Mwezahbe.”
“Figuratively,” Vrai admitted. He glanced at the Pledgechild. His whole manner bespoke doubt and hesitancy.
“Magistrate,” Emahpre said, “you’ve gone as far as anyone may go to credit the Sh’gaidu with generous, pacific souls. They’ve betrayed your magnanimity by stealing your dascra
from Kahl Latimer and slaying a guest of the state simply for seeking to recover it.”
“For brutally assaulting my heir,” the old woman said.
Emahpre bore on: “Let me redeem their betrayal of Kahl Latimer’s faith in them, Magistrate. Let me proceed with our recovery operations. Let me redeem their flouting of your generosity.”
Vrai turned to the Pledgechild. “You know where my dascra
is?”
Her eyes glittering fiercely, she said nothing.
“She knows!” Emahpre insisted.
“Return it, Pledgechild. You know I haven’t deserved this. Since assuming this office my goal has been to achieve justice for the Sh’gaidu as well as for the Tropiards.” Vrai began to fumble with the slit-goggles that Seth had given him.
“I’m unable to do what you ask,” the Pledgechild said.
Besodden in his sleeping cape, the Magistrate stared bleakly at the old woman. Then he turned to Deputy Emahpre.
“Do what you must,” he told that j’gosfi. “Do what you must.”
SEVENTEEN
Chaos followed
. Given his head, Emahpre rigorously prosecuted the search for the dascra
.
First, he asked Magistrate Vrai to examine the amulets of the midwives sitting before Palija Dait in their prayer ring. Vrai docilely fulfilled this task while a pair of rifle-carrying dragoons circled inside the Sh’vaij collecting the amulets of the younger communards. When it was found that none of these amulets belonged to the Magistrate, they were redistributed to their rightful owners. Seth helped with the redistribution. The Sh’gaidu knew their own “treasure” as animals know their own cubs or fledglings, and the process took less time than Seth would have imagined. Afterward, the Pledgechild took up a position on the floor with the other midwives, and Magistrate Vrai, exhausted by this search and dispirited by its outcome, retired to the Pledgechild’s rooms behind the Lesser Wall.
Seth and Douin accompanied the Magistrate to a nook where the two Kieri envoys had spent the previous night. On their way in, they saw Lijadu, either sleeping or unconscious, lying on a pallet in the Pledgechild’s private cell. Seth wanted to ask her what was happening, plead with her to yield the secret of the amulet’s whereabouts—but Douin gestured him on, and he and the Kieri man-of-letters removed the Magistrate’s sleeping cape and settled him onto a bench surrounded by shelves burdened with a dismaying number of earthenware urns.
As soon as he was safely down, soldiers began marching through these rooms carrying clay vessels, wooden bowls, and ceramic amphorae, anything that might contain or conceal the Magistrate’s dascra
.
The soldiers dripped rainwater wherever they walked. When two paused beside the Magistrate’s bench to indicate that they wished to search the pottery on the shelves around him, he shooed them away, his words ringing with disdain and invective.
“It probably ought to be searched,” Seth noted, leaning over him.
“Master Douin will do that for me,” Vrai said, returning to his bench. He moved as if he had received a physical wound, and Seth wondered if the loss of the dascra
had somehow actually deprived him of both courage and will. “You don’t mind, do you, Master Douin?”
“No, Magistrate.”
“What do you want me to do?” Seth asked.
“Watch my deputy. See what he’s doing. I can’t empower you to intervene, but I want you to . . . to
watch
him.”
“He’s behaving like a tyrant.”
“At my behest, Kahl Latimer, to do what must be done.”
Seth made a moue of bewilderment at Douin, and returned to the nave of the Sh’vaij, purposely not looking into Lijadu’s cell as he passed it.
At the door, Deputy Emahpre shouted orders into the rain. Seth joined him, and a unit of Tropish soldiers, armed with canisters and corrugated tubes, disappeared around a corner of the Sh’vaij on its way to the bridges of Yaji Tropei. Heedless of the rain, Seth dashed outside and half around the assembly hall to watch the soldiers depart.
Close-order drill in a thunderstorm confounded the whole ragged lot. One glanced back toward Seth, revealing a mask atop his obligatory goggles. This mask appeared to be made of black plastic: it hooded the nostrils as well as the eyes, giving its wearer the look of a serious, upright raccoon. Seth had an unsettling glimpse of the soldier’s face. Then he ran back to the crofthouse door.
“What are they going to do?” he cried, pointing after the soldiers.
“The necessary!” It was absurdly comical the way Emahpre refused to leave the shelter of the hall. Seth ducked beneath the eaves and shook water on him like a spaniel emerging from a lake. “Get back, Latimer! Watch what you’re doing!”
“That was a gas mask, wasn’t it?”
“They’re carrying gas masks, gas dispensers, laser rifles, garrotes. If the amulet isn’t returned soon, they’ll flush the Sh’gaidu from the cliffs.”
“Is Commander Swodi in charge?”
“He’s
with
them.”
“And you can trust him to behave . . . rationally?”
The Deputy pivoted and crossed the assembly hall to the Pledgechild and the ring of praying midwives. Four dragoons, held back from Swodi’s siege force, followed him at a distance. Seth watched, weary of trekking back and forth and no longer eager to stand conspicuously in the old woman’s field of vision. Complementary kinds of nuraj
seemed to afflict both the Pledgechild and Magistrate Vrai. The mental choiring of the Sh’gaidu continued, in a bleak minor key that made the incessant rain seem, by contrast, joyous and invigorating. Pacing and gesticulating, Emahpre raged at the Pledgechild in their own tongue. She replied curtly or not at all, and the Deputy urged a pair of dragoons to lift one of the midwives to her feet. Still elsewhere, she rose unsteadily. The soldiers then escorted her past Seth into the basin.
As Seth looked on in disbelief, a slender Tropiard removed a self-constricting metal garrote from his belt, fitted it about the midwife’s neck, and let it strangle her on her feet. Then the executioner and his companion dragged the Sh’gaidu’s body into the stalks of monarchleaf west of the path to the roadway. Another stray pair of feet stuck out into the path from the field farther down: one of Lord Pors’s “assassins.” Where was the other?
When the drenched soldiers reentered the Sh’vaij, the whole episode dissolved in Seth’s imagination as if a nightmare from which he had fled by an exit marked Objective Reality. Except that he had not escaped. The episode instantly reconstituted itself in his mind, and he knew that he had seen the real.
“Deputy Emahpre!” Seth cried. “You can’t do this!”
But the Deputy had no time for Seth’s offworlder’s scruples. He harangued the Pledgechild and the remaining Sh’gaidu elders, ordered a second pair of dragoons to lay hands on a midwife, and stepped aside so that they could prod her through the Sh’vaij and into the rain. This was Huspre, who stepped as docilely to her doom as had the other three Sh’gaidu. Even the Pledgechild raised no protest on her behalf.
Without thinking Seth interposed himself between door and dragoons. “Deputy!” he cried. “Three deaths are sufficient! These people will passively resist you until not one of them remains! You won’t recover the dascra
thus!”
“Out of their way, Latimer!”
“Emahpre, be reasonable!”
“You can’t confront irrationality with reason, Latimer! Get out of their way! If the Sh’gaidu want us to exterminate them, so be it!”
Seth levered a kick at the soldier to Huspre’s left, striking him in the genitalia. This sent the Tropiard sprawling on the stony floor, screaming his pain and surprise. His laser rifle bounced free, and the tools on his belt jingled and sang like temple bells. In retaliation, the other dragoon swung his rifle butt at Seth’s belly. Seth avoided the blow, took a breath, and shouted his dismay when the follow-through caught him under the chin and knocked him into the wall. Huspre, formerly as logy as if she had been drugged, used the occasion to dart into the rain.
The dragoon who had struck Seth swung his rifle about to laser the fleeing midwife. Dazed, Seth watched Huspre zigzag down the path toward the roadway and a pencil of light burst from the soldier’s rifle, like a ruby filament sizzling through the rain in vengeful pursuit. Huspre evaded it. She leaped into a battered stand of monarchleaf and vanished. As the dragoon readied to fire again, Seth kicked the rifle out of his hands and clubbed him on the back of his head. The Tropiard pitched out the door onto his weapon. Seth jumped over his sprawled body to see if Huspre had survived and where exactly she had headed.
But even the Deputy seemed to recognize the idiocy of standing on legalities now. Screaming orders at his fallen dragoons, he ran through the Sh’vaij and reached its door before the first man whom Seth had laid out could get back on his feet. This time the Deputy did not hesitate to brave the rain. His nose tick-tocking as he scanned the blurred landscape, he darted past Seth to the top of the pathway, but Huspre was still nowhere to be seen.
“Where is she, Latimer?” the Deputy yelled. “Did she head for the galleries?”
“Why would she do that? They’re already teeming with state soldiers.”
Somewhat recovered but holding no clear grudge against Seth, the two dragoons stumbled from the Sh’vaij with their belts straightened and their rifles canted across their chests. Seth was still leery of them. As Emahpre signaled them to begin the search for Huspre, Seth sidled away along the outer wall of the assembly hall, Magistrate Vrai’s dascra
momentarily forgotten.
“Come with us, Latimer!” Emahpre cried.
Reluctantly, Seth obeyed. The Deputy, realizing that Seth did not mean to tell him anything about Huspre’s likely whereabouts, asked no questions but kept Seth beside him like a dog at heel. Meanwhile, the dragoons separated to east and west and moved down-basin through the crops. Occasionally one or the other threw a laser bolt into a sodden thicket to see if anything jumped. Seth was glad that nothing did. For twenty minutes, they combed the area north of the Sh’vaij, but without result.
“Futile! Useless!” Emahpre angrily indicted Seth for their failure. “Back to the assembly building!” he called to the dragoons, and swung about on the flooding pathway. When he slipped in the mud and nearly fell, he loftily permitted Seth to save him. Seth, for his part, had to resist the temptation to throw Emahpre back down, rip his slit-goggles from his eyes, and hold his face in the muck until he choked. All that prevented Seth was his knowledge that he would be shot and left to rot on a world that he had not made and had no desire to belong to. Trope was worse than Gla Taus, and the Gla Tausians—the Kieri—had martyred his isosire in a way that still haunted him and that ate at poor Abel Latimer’s dreams like a chronic and ultimately fatal disease. Here, however, genocide loomed.
And Earth?
Earth was an unfulfilled promise. Interstel determined its policies, but Ommundi owned its soul. . . .
A dragoon shouted something from the depths of his lungs. His counterpart took up the cry, and when Emahpre and Seth looked around to find the source of the soldiers’ excitement, they saw The Albatross—the airship in which the Magistrate’s party had flown from Huru J’beij—lifting off the roadway. Rising above a stand of monarchleaf on the basin’s northern edge, it hovered in the thinning rain like the ghost of its real self. Its bronze pilot’s bubble was a grotesque eye. It seemed that The Albatross would falter and plunge to the ground—but it steadied, tilted heavily, and swept toward the Sh’vaij with rapidly increasing speed. As it passed overhead, Emahpre, Seth, and the two soldiers involuntarily ducked. Seth feared that Huspre—assuredly it was she at the controls—would perform a spectacular kamikaze maneuver into the Sh’vaij. If her people were going to die, she must have decided, let their midwives die in a symbolic conflagration together. . . . But The Albatross lifted, as if on an updraft, and yawed toward the Great Wall. Although Huspre had probably never flown before, she had managed to get the craft airborne. Now she goaded it upward through the rain to higher altitudes. Emahpre, Seth, and the soldiers chased The Albatross as far as possible, sprinting along the western margin of the Sh’vaij, past the disheveled cypresses, to the hall’s southern end. Here—winded, soaked through, and incredulous—they halted.
Because she had not suicided into the Sh’vaij, Seth had expected to see Huspre sailing off over the wall to some ill-defined utopia of self-fulfillment and freedom. What Emahpre and the soldiers had expected was unknown to Seth, but what they all actually saw appalled them.
The Albatross struck the Great Wall three quarters of the way from its summit. Although the ship made a doomed effort to keep going, it was now a shell. Scattering odd pieces of equipment, it slid down the wall in a slow-motion parody of disaster, collided with the highest terrace, and toppled sidelong down the next several tiers before coming to rest in a bed of clotted vegetation.
“Lord Pors’s body is in the wreckage!” Seth shouted.
The Deputy resorted to his own language.
“What?”
“Unrequited kemmai
to Lord Pors!”
This impromptu curse was so silly that Seth laughed mirthlessly. “Very good! But you must recover his body and see if Huspre still lives.”
Ignoring Seth, Emahpre sent a dragoon up the terrace levels to the fallen airship, and another to Yaji Tropei to recruit reinforcements for the search through its wreckage. This second soldier would also fetch two of his comrades back to the Sh’vaij so that Emahpre could continue his harassment of the Sh’gaidu midwives. These plans, along with a warning that he would brook no more interference, the Deputy spelled out for Seth on their way back to the assembly building.
“The loss of the airship is as much your doing as was the loss of the Magistrate’s dascra
,
”
Emahpre said. “I won’t let this go on.”
“Pledgechild, this is the familistery urn of the Sh’gaidu,” the Deputy said a few minutes later, holding the huge black vessel for all those seated before Palija Dait to see. “Am I not correct?”
Seth stood helpless before Emahpre’s singlemindedness. A soldier had found the urn in the Pledgechild’s private rooms and given it into the Deputy’s hands as soon as Seth and he had returned from pursuing Huspre. Several other soldiers lined up behind Emahpre as he confronted the Pledgechild.
“This
is
your familistery urn, isn’t it?” he asked again.
The Pledgechild regarded him contemptuously. “Why would I admit such a thing to you if it were?”
“Then I assume that it is indeed the familistery urn.”
“Or why would I correct you if you were wrong?”
Emahpre looked at Seth, hefted the urn as if for his benefit, and turned back to the Pledgechild and the midwives. “Unless you return the Magistrate’s dascra
,
this vessel becomes property of the state.”
“Even if you take it, Deputy, you won’t truly own it.”
“And neither do you own the dascra
of the Magistrate of Trope, even though you’ve stolen it!”
“It belongs to us as well as to the people of the Thirty-three Cities.”
“You long ago forfeited your interest in it, Pledgechild.”