The Memory of Earth (22 page)

There is murder in the city, thought Luet. Murder in this place, not holiness, and it is Gaballufix who first thought of it. If not for the vision and warning I carried for the Oversoul, good men would have died. She shuddered again at the memory of the slit throat in her vision.

At last she came to the place where the Holy Road widened out as it descended into the valley, becoming, not a road, but a canyon, with ancient stairs carved into the rock, leading directly down to the place where the lake steamed hot with a tinge of sulphur. Those who worshiped there always kept that smell about them for days. It might be holy, but Luet found it exceedingly unpleasant and never worshiped there herself. She preferred the place where the hot and cold waters mixed and the deepest fog arose, where currents swirled their varying temperatures all around her as she floated on the water. It was there that her body danced on the water with no volition of her own, where she could surrender herself utterly to the Oversoul.

Who was the holy woman speaking about? The “him” with blood on his hands, the “he” that she could take by the waters—presumably the waters of the lake.

No, it was nothing. The holy woman was one of the mad ones, making no sense.

The only man she could think of who had blood on his hands was Gaballufrx. How could the Oversoul want such a man as that to come near the holy lake? Would the time come when she would have to save Gaballufix’s life? How could such a thing possibly fit in with the purposes of the Oversoul?

She turned left onto Tower Street, then turned right onto Rain Street, which curved around until she stood before Rasa’s house. Home, unharmed. Of course. The Oversoul had protected her. The message she had delivered was
not
the whole purpose the Oversoul had for her; Luet would live to do other work. It was a great relief to her. For hadn’t her own mother told Aunt Rasa, on the day she put Luet as an infant into Rasa’s arms, “This one will live only as long as she serves the Mother of Mothers?” The Mother of Mothers had preserved her for another night.

Luet had expected to get back into Aunt Rasa’s house without waking anyone, but she hadn’t taken into account how the new climate of fear in the city had changed even the household of the leading housemistress of Basilica. The front door was locked on the inside. Still hoping to enter unobserved, she looked for a window she might climb through. Only now did she realize that all the windows facing the street were solely for the passage of light and air—many vertical slits in the wall, carved or sculpted with delicate designs, but with no gap wide enough to let even the head and shoulders of a child pass through.

This is not the first time there has been fear in Basilica, she thought. This house is designed to keep someone from entering surreptitiously in the night. Protection from burglars, of course; but perhaps such windows were
designed primarily to keep rejected suitors and lapsed mates from forcing their way back into a house that they had come to think of as their own.

The provisions that kept a man from entering also barred Luet, slight as she was. She knew, of course, that there was no way to get around the sides of the house, since the neighboring structures leaned against the massive stone walls of Rasa’s house.

Why didn’t she guess that getting back inside would be so much harder than getting out? She had left after dark, of course, but well before the house quieted down for the evening; Hushidh knew something of her errand and would keep anyone from discovering her absence. It simply hadn’t occurred to either of them to arrange how Luet would get back in. Aunt Rasa had never locked the front door before. And later, after the Oversoul had made the guard doze on the way out and had kept him away from the gate entirely on her return, Luet had assumed that the Oversoul was smoothing the way for her.

Luet thought of staying out on the porch all night. But it was cold now. As long as she had been walking, it was all right, she had stayed warm enough. Sleep, though, would be dangerous. City women, at least those of good breeding, did not own the right clothing for sleeping out of doors. What the holy women did would make her ill.

There might be another way, however. Wasn’t Aunt Rasa’s portico on the valley-side of the house completely open? There might be a way to climb up from the valley. Of course, the area just east of Rasa’s portico was the wildest, emptiest part of the Shelf—it wasn’t even part of a district, and though Sour Street ran out into it, there was no road there; women never went that way to get to the lake.

Yet she knew that this was the way she must go, if she was to return to Aunt Rasa’s house.

The Oversoul again, leading her. Leading her, but telling her nothing.

Why not? asked Luet for the thousandth time. Why can’t you tell me your purpose? If you had told me I was going to Wetchik’s house, I wouldn’t have been so fearful all the way. How did my fear and ignorance serve your purpose? And now you send me around to the wild country east of Aunt Rasa’s house—for what purpose? Do you take pleasure in toying with me? Or am I too stupid to understand your purpose? I’m your homing dove, able to carry your messages but never worth explaining them to.

And yet, despite her resentment, a few minutes she stepped from the last cobbles of Sour Street onto the grass and then plunged into the pathless woods of the Shelf.

The ground was rugged, and all the gaps and breaks in the underbrush seemed to lead downward, away from Rasa’s portico and toward the cliffs looming over the canyon of the Holy Road. No wonder that even the Shelf women built no houses here. But Luet refused to be led astray by the easy paths—she knew they would disappear the moment she started following them. Instead she forced her way through the underbrush. The zarosel thorns snagged at her, and she knew they would leave tiny welts that would sting for days even under a layer of Aunt Rasa’s balm. Worse, she was bone-weary, cold, and sleepy, so that at times she caught herself waking up, even though she had not been asleep. Still—she had set herself on this course, and she would finish.

She came into a small clearing where bright moonlight filtered through the canopy of leaves overhead. In a month all the leaves would be gone and these thickets would not be half so forbidding. Now, though, a patch of light came like a miracle, and she blinked.

In that eyeblink, the clearing changed. There was a woman standing there.

“Aunt Rasa,” whispered Luet. How did she know to come looking for me here? Has the Oversoul spoken again to someone else?

But it was not Aunt Rasa, after all. It was Hushidh. How could she have made such a mistake?

No. Not a mistake. For now Hushidh had changed again. It was Eiadh now, that beautiful girl from Hushidh’s class, the one that poor Nafai was so uselessly in love with. And again the woman was transformed, into the actress Dol, who had been so very famous as a young girl; she was one of Aunt Rasa’s nieces, and in recent years had returned to the house to teach. Once it was said that Dolltown was named after her (though it had been named such for ten thousand years at least), she was so beautiful and broke so many hearts; but she was in her twenties now, and the features that, when she was a girl, made women want to mother her and ravished the eyes of men were not so astonishing in a woman. Still, Luet would give half her life if during the other half she could be as delicately, sweetly beautiful as Dol.

Why is the Oversoul showing me these women?

From Dol the apparition changed to Shedemei, another of Aunt Rasa’s nieces. If anything, though, Shedya was the opposite of Dol and Eiadh. At twenty-six she was still in Aunt Rasa’s house, helping to teach science to the older students as her own reputation as a geneticist grew. Most nights she actually slept in her laboratory, many streets away, instead of her room in Rasa’s house, but still she was a strong, quiet presence there. Shedemei was unbeautiful; not so ugly as to startle the onlooker, but deeply plain, so that the longer one studied her face the less attractive it became. Yet her mind was like a magnet, drawn to truth: as soon as it came near enough, she
would leap to it and cling. Of all Aunt Rasa’s nieces, she was the one that Luet most admired; but Luet knew that no more had she the wit to emulate Shedemei than she had the beauty to follow Dol’s career. The Oversoul had chosen to send her visions to one who had no other use to the world.

The woman was gone. Luet was alone in the clearing, and she felt again as if she had just awakened.

Was this only a dream, the kind that comes when you don’t even know that you’re asleep?

Behind where the apparitions had stood, she saw a single light burning in the dark of earliest morning. It had to be on Aunt Rasa’s portico—in that direction there could be no other source of light. Maybe the vision had been right thus far. Aunt Rasa was awake, and waiting for her.

She pushed forward into the brush. Low twigs swiped at her, thorns snagged at her clothing and her skin, and the irregular ground deceived her, causing her to trip and stumble. Always, though, that light was her beacon, drawing her on until at last it went out of sight as she drew under the lip of Rasa’s portico.

It rose in a single sheet of weathered stone, sheer from base to balustrade, with no handholds. And it was at least four meters from the ground to the top. Even if Aunt Rasa was there waiting for her, there’d be no way to climb up, not without calling for servants. And if she was going to have to disturb the house anyway, she might as well have pulled the bellcord at the front door!

It happened that after having been forced this way and that by the rough ground of the forest, Luet had finally approached Rasa’s house almost from the south. Most of the face of the portico was hidden from her. It was possible that the house had been built with some access from the portico to the wood. Surely the builders had
planned for more than a mere
view
of the Rift Valley. And even if there was no deliberate access, there had to be a spot where she would have some hope of climbing up.

Making her way around the curved stone surface, Luet at last found what she had hoped for—a place where the broken ground rose higher in relation to the portico. Now the top of the balustrade was only an arm’s length out of her reach. And, as she reached up to try to find a handhold in the gaps of the balustrade, she saw Aunt Rasa’s face, as welcome as sunrise, and her arms reaching down for her.

If Luet had been any larger, Aunt Rasa probably could not have lifted her weight; but then, had she been larger she might have climbed up without help.

When at last she sat on the bench with Aunt Rasa half-cradling her, on the verge of weeping with relief and exhaustion, Aunt Rasa asked the obvious question. “What under the moon were you doing out there instead of coming to the front door like any other student coming back home after hours? Were you so afraid of a reprimand that you thought it would be better to risk your neck in the woods at night?”

Luet shook her head. “In the wood I saw a vision,” she said. “But I might have seen it anyway, so coming around that way was probably my own foolishness.”

Then there was nothing for Luet to do but tell Aunt Rasa about all that had happened—the vision she had told to Nafai, warning of the plot to murder Wetchik; the words of the holy woman in the dark street; and finally the vision of Rasa and a few of her nieces.

“I can’t think what such a vision might mean,” said Rasa. “If the Oversoul didn’t tell
you,
how can
I
guess?”

“I don’t want to guess anything anyway,” said Luet. “I don’t want any more visions or talk of visions or anything except I hurt all over and I want to go to bed.”

“Of course you do, of course,” said Aunt Rasa. “You can sleep, and leave it to Wetchik and me to think what course of action to take now. Unless he was stupid enough to decide that honor required him to keep that treacherous rendezvous at the coolhouse.”

A terrible thought occurred to Luet. “What if Nafai didn’t tell him?”

Aunt Rasa looked at her sharply. “Nafai, not warn his father about a plot against his life? You’re speaking of my son.”

What could that mean to Luet, who had never known her mother and whose father could be any man in the city, with the most brutish men the likeliest candidates? Mother and son—it was a connection that held no particular authority for her. In a world of faithless promises, anything was possible.

No, it was her weariness telling her to trust no one. She was doubting Aunt Rasa’s judgment here, not just Nafai’s faithfulness. Obviously her mind was not functioning clearly. She allowed Aunt Rasa to half-lead, half-carry her up the stairs to Rasa’s own room, and place Luet on the great soft bed of the mistress of the house, where she slept almost before realizing where she was.

“Out all night,” said Hushidh.

Luet opened one eye. The light coming through the window was very bright, but the air had a chill in it. Full day, and Luet was only waking now.

“And then not even the brains to come in the front door.”

“I don’t always rely on my brains,” said Luet quietly.

“That much I knew,” said Hushidh. “You should have taken me with you.”

“Two people are always more obvious than one.”

“To Wetchik’s house! Didn’t it occur to you that I might actually know the way there and back?”

“I didn’t know that was where I was going.”

“Alone at night. Anything could have happened. And you binding me with that foolish oath to tell no one. Aunt Rasa almost skinned me alive and hung me out to dry on the front porch when she realized that I must have known you were gone and didn’t tell her.”

“Don’t be cross with me, Hushidh.”

“Whole city’s in turmoil, you know.”

A sudden fear stabbed through her. “No, Hushidh—don’t tell me there was murder after all!”

“Murder? Not likely. Wetchik’s gone, though, him and his sons all, and Gaballufix is claiming that it was because he uncovered Wetchik’s plot to murder him and Roptat at a secret meeting that Wetchik arranged at his coolhouse near Music Gate.”

“That’s not true,” said Luet.