The Sheri S. Tepper eBook Collection

  ‘And you learned to do this by merely observing her?’

  Marianne shook her head, confused. ‘I’m not sure that’s exactly it. Let’s say I absorbed enough to do it once, once only, without knowing what I was really doing and without any idea how to undo it.’

  ‘Shamanism,’ said Therat in a flat, dismissive tone. ‘Trifling with the structure of the universe. Foolish! Dangerous!’

  ‘Dangerous, yes, but we’ll have to deal with it somehow,’ mused Makr Avehl.

  ‘I still think we ought to talk to the momentary gods,’ advised Marianne, turning toward the entrance of the Cave. ‘They may tell us something of value.’

  Therat came with them to the Residence, where Marianne called the momegs. Black Dog came in answer to her call, but he was most unwilling to talk. He arrived. He listened briefly, then vanished. Marianne called him again, he returned to lie on the floor, head on paws, scowling at them all.

  ‘Come on,’ Marianne said. ‘You know something. You told me the momegs give time its reality, or something like that.’

  ‘It’s true,’ he mumbled. ‘Each of us holds a chunk. Our birthright, so to speak.’

  ‘How big a chunk?’ asked Makr Avehl.

  ‘You don’t understand. It’s not like that. Not bigness or longness.’

  ‘Well tell me, what is it then?’

  ‘What it is, is duration. Or very rarely beginningness.’

  Makr Avehl was relentless. ‘Explain that.’

  Black Dog whined, pawed his nose, gnawed at some imaginary itch on his hind leg, then said, ‘Something happens. Then after that, something else happens. Let’s say, a light wave comes to my locus. It has duration there, a chunk of it, the only size there is, then it has to go somewhere, so it goes to my contiguite. Anyhow, my contiguite has a chunk of duration, too. After something happens somewhere else, something happens with him. Usually it’s light. Sometimes it’s quarks. We do a lot of durations and aftering with quarks.’

  ‘What about beforeness?’ asked Marianne, puzzled. ‘Don’t any of you have that?’

  ‘There’s no such thing,’ Black Dog barked, almost howling, putting his front paws over his ears. ‘That’s heresy. We give time its reality by duration and afterness. Everything happens after something else. Nothing happens before something else. It can’t! That’s just a human heresy, that’s all.’

  ‘Why are you so upset?’ asked Makr Avehl. ‘You’re saying time is quantized, aren’t you? I don’t see why it shouldn’t be. Does this have anything to do with where Madame gets her power?’

  ‘She twists things,’ sulked the Black Dog.

  ‘She’s evil,’ said the Foo Dog, erupting into the room from behind a chair. ‘She’ll end up destroying the universe, or at least this piece of it.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because she keeps beforing things. She takes momegs and bends them double, so that things don’t go on to after, they twist around and go back before. That’s how she,’ the momeg indicated Marianne, ‘went back in her own time that way. She learned it from Madame and she borrowed Madame’s power to do it. Not that we blame her. She didn’t know what she was doing…’

  ‘I really didn’t,’ said Marianne, aghast. ‘Do you mean when I did that, I actually destroyed something?’

  ‘A momeg is all. One of us. Not one any of us liked very much. He was from a locus way out at the edge of things. Madame keeps a stock of rural momegs around. She thinks as long as she just nibbles away at the edges of things, it won’t really affect anything. She’s wrong, of course. Everyone with any sense knows that the edges of things are really the middle. There have already been disruptions.’ The Foo Dog brooded. ‘I suppose we should have told you this be … uh, at some prior eventuality.’

  ‘It would have been helpful,’ said Makr Avehl. ‘I’m not sure I understand it yet. Let’s see if I do. The black shamans taught Madame how to evoke momegs. They taught her how to twist momegs in half – is that right? – so that things go backwards or make loops in time instead of going forward?’

  ‘Taught her how, or gave her some device to do it with, I’m not sure which. Anyhow, she does it, and that makes holes in time where she can stick her false worlds,’ the Foo Dog nodded. ‘And it allows her to fool around with people in very unpleasant ways. And it’s all wrong, of course. Nobody ought to do it, ever. Up until recently, it was only the black shamans who talked about it, but more recently there was some respected human person who taught that time doesn’t always seem to come afterward, even though we know it does.’

  ‘Are you talking about relativity?’ asked Makr Avehl. ‘Really?’

  ‘That’s what he called it,’ said Wolf Dog, melting through a wall. ‘That’s not what we call it. We call it messing about with things that ought to be left alone. Though of course so long as people just talk about it, no harm is done. It’s when people start actually messing about with it that things start to go wrong.’

  ‘Then Gojam was right,’ said Marianne.

  Makr Avehl stared at her in perplexity. It was Aghrehond who snapped his fingers in sudden memory. ‘He said something about Madame taking momegs and – what? Not sending them back at all?’

  ‘To quote him exactly,’ said Marianne, ‘Gojam said, “She has a nasty habit of summoning up momegs on the spur of the moment, without any concern for the inconvenience it may cause, and then splatting them back again whenever it suits her. If she returns them at all, which I have reason to doubt in some cases.”’

  Makr Avehl ran his fingers through his hair, then smoothed it, then rolled it again. ‘She’s using them up. Burning them up, as we would burn gasoline. Through some – some mechanism, some spell, something. We need to find how she does it. If the mechanism can be destroyed – assuming she can’t build another one – that will do. If the source can be eliminated, that will do.’

  ‘If Madame can be done away with,’ said Marianne, ‘that will do as well.’

  The others in the group looked at one another uncomfortably.

  ‘No?’ she asked, surprised.

  ‘Not except as a last resort,’ Ellat said. ‘People like Madame – often trade off vital parts of themselves in return for power. That, too, is a shamanistic tendency. Black shaman, I should say. Those vital parts are often – well, potentiated, I suppose one might say, when the person dies.’

  ‘You’re talking ghosts, here?’ Marianne challenged.

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘So? What harm can a ghost do?’

  ‘I’m talking real ghosts, not comic-book creatures,’ Ellat said patiently. ‘Concatenations of evil intention. Which, after sufficient aggregation, become what we would call demons. As to what harm, a very great deal. To you. To Makr Avehl. To nameless third parties we don’t even know of.’

  ‘Take her word for it,’ said Therat, who had listened silently to the entire conversation with the momegs and who now spoke for the first time. ‘It would be better to render Madame helpless than to kill her. Truly. If you can figure out a way to do that, you will have done all that needs doing.’

  ‘And how do we do that?’

  ‘We go to Lubovosk,’ said Makr Avehl. ‘We go to Lubovosk and talk to the same people Madame talked to when she learned all this. We start with the black shamans.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Three bodies and four people went. Two Mariannes, one Makr Avehl, one Aghrehond. Makr Avehl’s beard and hair were dyed white, he led the packhorse and walked with a cane. Marianne wore the typical peasant dress of the region; her hair was braided; her face was dirty. Dressed in leather trousers and a full-sleeved shirt under a filthy sheepskin jacket, Aghrehond drove a small flock of sheep with the help of a couple of the momegs who showed up from time to time to nip at a lagging heel or bark at a straying woolface. They climbed over a mountain by a secret trail maintained by the Alphenlicht border guards; they appeared in Lubovosk some miles inside the border with all the requisite papers tucked in one pocket or another.
br />   Before they left, certain processes had been set in motion in Alphenlicht, behind them. Functionaries at the Residence started the day by announcing that the Prime Minister would shortly be married, that even now his intended bride, an American girl of impeccable Kavi descent, was visiting the family. All attention was drawn south, to the Prime Minister’s Residence in Alphenlicht. Such had been Makr Avehl’s intention.

  When advised of this ruse, Marianne was furious. ‘I never said I’d marry you.’

  ‘Since I didn’t propose to you, that doesn’t surprise me.’

  ‘You can’t marry her unless I consent to it. It’s my body, damn it.’

  Makr Avehl considered this for a long time, looking her up and down, walking around her as though she had been a filly for auction. ‘I think I could, don’t you know. We’d simply divide up the time. Monday, Wednesdays, Fridays, and alternate Sundays would be yours. The other time would be ours. That would work out well, wouldn’t it? You’d have lots of time to yourself. Marianne and I would have time to ourselves. You could learn to sleep through our times, just as Marianne did during yours.’

  ‘I’m going back to Colorado.’

  ‘That would make what I propose very difficult.’

  ‘You’re impossible.’

  ‘Not impossible, no. Merely very unlikely. Face it, Marianne. We are all unlikely. You, me, Ellat, Aghrehond. The world is unlikely. But not impossible.’

  She had stormed at him then and did so now, clomping along the trail in her felt boots, unable to set aside her anger even for the moment.

  Aghrehond caught her by the hand. ‘Oh, beauteous lady, most glorious master, please. For the sake of my poor, outraged heart. Here are we all, in the very belly of the beast, here on the slippery slopes of Lubovosk, here in the necromantic north, in the wicked woods, in the very gut of this dreadful country, and you argue over such trifles as who shall love whom. Truly, it may be none of us will love again, and then you will be sorry to have wasted your time in this fashion.’ Aghrehond sounded much aggrieved, taking out his temper on the sheep as he boomed at them to move in the direction he wished and no other. He had a tired lamb draped around his neck, which somewhat mitigated his attempts at fierceness.

  Marianne subsided, though only a little. ‘What are we going to do when we get there? And where is there, come to that?’

  Makr Avehl answered her. ‘We’re going to the place Tabiti lives. Not a palace, or residence, I’ve been told, but something more like a villa or chateau, outside the capital city—or what passes for one in Lubovosk. Somewhere nearby, there should be an encampment where we’ll find the shamans. My spies tell me that she consults them or uses them almost daily, so they’ll have to be close by. On the other hand, she wouldn’t want their presence obvious to visitors, so I think they will not actually be part of her establishment.’

  The sun marked their progress, from morning until noon, into the late afternoon. Along about dusk they heard the city before they saw it, a dull hum, like a hive of dispirited bees. From the crest of a hill they stared down at it, squatting like a toad in a desolate valley, surrounded by an ancient and anciently ruined wall. Here and there around the perimeter of the city were gun emplacements, and fully half the persons moving about on the streets seemed to be in uniform.

  ‘Madame’s friends,’ growled Makr Avehl. ‘Invited in to help her keep order.’

  ‘I should think she would keep order by – by her own methods,’ Marianne remarked.

  ‘It would take too much of her time. Easier to do it by brute force and a little official terrorism, I should think. No, Madame’s ambition extends far beyond this pathetic excuse for a country, believe me.’

  ‘Where’s her place?’

  ‘I see half a dozen largish houses on the surrounding hills. I think that one must be it.’ He pointed to the left, where a fully walled villa crowned a forested hill. ‘It makes some pretense at looking civilized.’

  ‘And what do we do?’

  ‘We look around. We start by driving the sheep down that road past the place, into the woods, looking around in the woods, seeing what we see, and then pitching a tent.’

  ‘Do we have a tent?’

  Aghrehond burbled, ‘Oh, indeed, lovely lady, we have a tent. Would we come into this despicable wilderness without some amenities for so admirable a person? What of your privacy? Your dignity? Would we come without a tent?’

  ‘Probably,’ said Marianne. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘On the packhorse,’ said Makr Avehl.

  ‘I hope there’s something for supper there as well.’

  ‘That was the idea, yes.’

  They passed under the walls of the chateau, studiously ignoring the impersonal insults shouted down at them by lounging guards, and went toward the forest on a narrow track.

  ‘Smoke coming from up ahead,’ said Makr Avehl softly. ‘Could be anything, including what we’re looking for.’ They went on, Wolf Dog and Dingo trotting behind, an ill-assorted pair of shepherds. ‘The shamans have a style about them. They go in for feathers and hair quite a bit. Beads, too. Also they try not to bathe very often. Not more than once every two or three years, I’d say. We may smell the camp before we see it. Or we may hear it. Shamans go in for drums, too…’

  Under the eaves of the forest, monstrous firs shut out the light to leave a gray-green gloom beneath their branches. From beyond a brush-covered rise, they could hear the sounds of people moving about, a muffled shout, the crack of an axe – and a drum. Makr Avehl disappeared into the brush, returning after a time brushing twigs and leaves from his jacket.

  ‘Here, I should think,’ he said, nodding significantly toward the noise. While Marianne sat on a fallen log, watching them, the two men set up a camp, two small tents, a cookfire with a kettle suspended above it, and a line of ropes strung around several trees to make a pen for the sheep. When all was settled, Aghrehond and Makr Avehl began a loud and, so far as Marianne could see, pointless argument, with much shouting.

  The drum which had been tum-te-tumming away behind the brush fell silent. So did the voices.

  ‘You’ve forgotten it, dunderhead,’ growled Makr Avehl in an old man’s voice. ‘Forgotten it completely. How can I fry sausages without my pan?’

  ‘It was there,’ grumbled Aghrehond loudly and angrily. ‘I put it there myself.’

  ‘Greetings,’ said a strange voice from under the trees. ‘Is something wrong?’

  He was tall and very dark, with feathers and beads woven into his hair. In his hand he held a staff decorated with more feathers and bones and long hanks of hair attached to chunks of skin which looked suspiciously scalplike. His mouth was bent into an obviously unaccustomed smile that displayed a few discolored teeth and did not succeed in making him look less threatening.

  It was almost as though he had been expecting them, thought Marianne.

  ‘This dunderhead lost my frying pan,’ snarled Makr Avehl.

  ‘It’s right here,’ said Aghrehond, triumphantly, waving it. ‘I told you I put it in.’

  ‘My name is Chevooskak,’ the dark man said with a toothy grin. The remaining teeth, though yellow, were very sharp. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Shepherds,’ mumbled Makr Avehl. ‘Trying to get these fool sheep home. Name’s Dommle. He’s my son. Hondi Dommle. She’s his wife, Dummy Dommle. She’s mute. Can’t talk, thanks be. There’s too much talk, anyway, in my opinion.’

  ‘Ah,’ murmured Chevooskak, showing his teeth once more. ‘Would you be interested in selling a sheep? Our camp needs meat. You could join us, if you liked. Just through the brush there. It’s closer to the water than you are here.’

  Makr Avehl and Aghrehond discussed this while Marianne attempted to look bored and slightly half-witted. At length, Makr Avehl agreed both to sell one sheep and to move nearer to the larger camp where, on arrival, they found a dozen hide yurts arranged around a sizeable clearing with a sturdy pole coral at one side.

  ‘You can put the sheep in there,
’ Chevooskak said. ‘We won’t be using it for a day or two. The horses are all out on pasture.’

  The language was almost the same as that spoken in Alphenlicht, though the accent was harsher. Marianne understood much of what he said, and every word made her cringe, though she could not say why.

  ‘It’s obvious why,’ said Marianne, silently. ‘Because he’s lying to you. He intends to kill at least two of you and take the sheep.’

  ‘Which two?’ she asked, then flushed. It was obvious which two. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I just know. Ask Makr Avehl if I’m not right.’

  When she whispered her suspicions to Makr Avehl, he merely nodded. ‘We figured on it, Marianne. Just go on as you are. Remember, you can’t talk.’

  She was not tempted to talk aloud. Even one or two words in her unmistakably American accent would have given them away. ‘What are we going to do?’ she whispered.

  ‘Wait until dark. Then do a little worm turning if the momegs will help.’

  ‘I can’t see that we have any choice,’ said the Wolf Dog, leering at a recalcitrant sheep. ‘Not ethically.’

  Dingo merely whined and thrust her head into Marianne’s lap, tongue licking delicately between Marianne’s fingers.

  ‘Why don’t you ever talk?’ Marianne murmured. ‘So silent, Dingo Dog.’

  ‘She’s telepathic,’ said the Wolf Dog, returning the recalcitrant sheep to the corral, from which she promptly tried to escape once more. ‘These sheep have no brains.’

  ‘Shh,’ muttered Makr Avehl to the momegs. ‘You’re going to make them suspicious with all this chatter.’

  Chevooskak stood at the side of the pole corral, commenting upon the edibility of various of the animals. Aghrehond argued with him vehemently. Sheep after sheep was proposed, argued over, and discarded in favor of another. When the entire flock had been considered, agreement was reached, and the stubborn wool-head who had evaded Wolf Dog was led away to the slaughter.