The Sheri S. Tepper eBook Collection
“Because there’s power to be had, girl. I’ll tell you a tale, now. Suppose these talkers go to the teashop and go on with their talking, fuming and blowing, saying how terrible it is what the Birders have done, maybe how terrible it is what the birdgirl has done…”
“Maybe saying she’s no messenger from the Boundless at all?”
“Words like that. The sense of it doesn’t matter much, so long as the sound is full of indignation and fire. So, they talk and talk, getting fierier and fierier, until at last some of them go to set matters right. How will they do that?”
“Bring Mercald and the Birders up before the judges.”
“Ah. But it’s Birders are your judges, girl, and Birders they claim are doing evil. So, what is it they’ll cry then?”
“They’ll cry the judges are corrupt; they’ll say they’ll have to do justice on their own…”
“Right again. And their justice will mean killing someone, maybe Mercald, maybe half a dozen other Birders or all of them, maybe the birdwoman…”
“Which you won’t … you can’t let happen,” whispered Beedie, beginning to understand for the first time what a tricksy person sat beside her.
“Which I won’t let happen. Meantime, there’s confusion and threats and maybe a few little riots. You’ve got no kind of strong arms in this chasm except the Bridgers themselves, perhaps, and you’ll have to forgive my saying it, girl, but they seem half asleep to what’s going on”
“They’ve never – had to…”
“That’s obvious. Well then, with all the confusion, this one and that one could get killed. And wouldn’t it be strange if among those killed were a number of elderly Bridgers? And at the end of it strange that Slysaw Bridger would happen to be eldest Bridger in the chasm and thus head of council. And in the meantime, of course, everyone too upset and confused to wonder who fired the mainroot you almost died on.”
“How could any Bridger do such a thing?” she demanded, white around her eyes, mouth drawn up into an expression of horror and distaste. “Even a Bander shouldn’t be able to think of such things. I wouldn’t have thought that, ever.”
“Which is what he counts upon, sausage girl. He counts on no one believing ill of a fellow caste member. He counts on being able to sow distrust without being suspected of it or blamed for it. He cares nothing for the religion, so does not fear to meddle with it. He’s no believer, that one. Else he wouldn’t have trifled with a messenger of the Boundless.”
“I thought she wasn’t – that she was just your sister, Mavin. I’m all confused…”
“She’s my sister right enough. But who’s to say what messengers the Boundless sends? Why not my sister?”
“Why not you?” asked Beedie, whispering.
“Ah. Why not me, indeed. Well, then, this messenger needs a word with your lady Rootweaver, and it’s up to you to arrange it, Beedie. Arrange it quietly, and in a way no one will wonder at, for I’ve things to tell her and her fellows, things to ask of her as well, and I want no prying ears while I’m doing it.”
“You’re not going to tell them that you…”
“I’m not going to tell them anything except what any Harvester might have overheard, in a teashop, say. Or at a procession. And if you’re asked, girl, you know nothing about anything at all except that I saved your skin on the mainroot one day as I came climbing up from Nextdown. That way, whatever I say, you know nothing about it.”
“I could help you,” Beedie pleaded.
“Not yet. Come necessary time, then yes, but not now. Just go along to Rootweaver, child, and give me the space of a few minutes to think what I’m going to say to her.” She turned to lean on the railing of the bridge, leaning out a little to let the updraft bathe her face in its damp, cool movement, full of the scent of strange growths and pungent herbs. Behind her, Beedie dithered from foot to foot for a moment before moving off purposefully toward the Bridgers House. Mavin put her face in her hands, letting herself feel doubt and dismay she would not show before the girl. She felt disaster stirring in every breath of air and was not completely sure she could save Handbright, either her life or the life she carried.
Far out on a Fishing bridge, which jutted from the mainbridge like a broken branch, she saw a Fisher blowing into his flopper call, making a low honking that echoed back from some distant protrusion of the wall. He put the call away to stand quiet, flicking his line above his head in long, curled figures as a chorus of honks came from inside the root wall. Too quickly for the eyes to follow, a flopper dropped from the root wall, planing across the chasm on the skin stretched from forelegs to backlegs, folding up from time to time to drop like a plummet in the intermittent flops which gave the creatures their name, then opening the stretched skin to glide over the chasm depths once more. The Fisher’s line snapped out, the weighted hooks at the end of it gleaming in the evening light, missing the flopper by only an arm’s breadth. Another flopper fell from the root wall, and this time the hook caught it firmly through the skin of its glider planes. The flopper honked, a long, dismal hoot into the dusk, and the Fisher began hauling in against the struggling weight.
“Caught,” breathed Mavin. “Handbright, you dropped out of Danderbat keep on wings, on wings, girl, and you’ve been hooked here in this chasm, the hook set so deep I may never get you loose.” She fell silent, thinking about the technique she had used in diverting the mob of boys, the one she had used on the men. When had she learned to do that? And how? It seemed a long time past, a great distance gone.
There had been a town, she remembered, along the coast north of Schlaizy Noithn, separated from the world of the True Game by high cliffs and from the sea by a curving wall of stone around a placid harbor, such a wall as might have resulted from the inundation of some ancient fire mountain. The people of that town had called it Landizot. She came there seeking Handbright and the company of humankind but found a people hesitant and wary, uneasy with strangers and as uneasy among themselves. Yes, they said, there had been a white bird high upon the cliffs – those they called the dawn wall – earlier in the year. The young people had pursued it there, setting nets for it, mimicking its call in an effort to entice it down, but the bird had avoided them easily, circling high above the cliffs in the light of early morning or at dusk, when it gleamed like silver against the mute purple of the sky.
When had it last been seen, Mavin asked, only to be confronted with shrugs and disclaimers. The children had not been allowed to play outside lately, she was told. Not for some time. So they had not seen it. No one went outside much, certainly not alone at dusk, and the bird had always avoided groups. Perhaps it was still there. Perhaps not.
Mavin decided to stay a while and look around for herself. When she asked why people no longer ventured from their locked houses with the barred windows and doors, she did so in that flat, incurious voice she had learned to use in her travels, one which evinced a polite interest but without sufficient avidity to stir concern among casual talkers.
“Because,” she was told, “they have released the Wolf.” The person who told her this glanced about with frightened eyes and would say nothing else. Stepping away from this encounter, Mavin looked into the faces of others to find both fear and anger there.
When she inquired, they said they were not Gamesmen, that they repudiated Gaming as a wicked thing, if indeed even a tenth of what was said about it was true. They did not want to be thought of as pawns, however. They were an ancient people, they said, with their own ways of doing things. Mavin smiled her traveler’s smile, said nothing about herself at all, but made a habit of sitting about in the commons room of her inn at night, listening.
At first there was little conversation. The people who came there at the supper hour were the lone men and women of the town, those without family. They ate silently, drank silently, and many of them left once they had eaten so that the room was almost empty by dusk. As the evenings wore on, however, a few truculent men and a leathery woman or two found their
way to the inn to drink wine or beer and huddle in the warmth of the fire. Mavin, with a laconic utterance, offered to buy drink for those present. Later in each evening that courtesy was returned. On the third or fourth night she sat near one old couple who, when the wine had bubbled its way through to their tongues, began to talk, not much, but some.
“Stranger woman, you’ll stay here in the place after dark at night, won’t you?”
“I’d planned on it,” said Mavin.
“Don’t go out at night. You’re not young as most of the girls or children who’ve been et, but you’re female, and the good Guardians witness the Wolf has eaten older.”
Mavin thought about this for a while, not wanting to seem too interested. “Is that the same Wolf I’m told was let out?”
“There is no other,” said the old woman. “And thanks be to all the Guardians for that.”
“What had he done, to be locked up?” She kept her voice calm, almost uninterested, so the woman would not feel it would be troublesome to tell her.
“Killed a woman. Drank her blood. And after crying remorse and swearing he would not do such a thing again.”
“Oh,” said Mavin. ”Then the Wolf had been locked up before.”
“Aye,” responded the oldster. “Twice, now. First time he was young, the Wolf. There were those said young ones find society troublesome and strange, so it wouldn’t do to set him down too hard for it. So, that time they locked him up for a season, no time at all.”
“And the second time?” Mavin prompted.
“Well second time they locked him for a full year. A full year. That’s a weary long time, they said. A full year. Tssh. Seems years go past like autumn birds to me, all in a flock, so fast you can’t see them clear. But then, I’m old.”
“So they’ve let him out?” Mavin prompted again.
“Well, the time they set for him was done. Since it’s done, they let him out.”
“The time seems very short. For one who ate a young woman and drank her blood.”
The oldsters shifted uncomfortably on their chairs, and Mavin changed the subject. Still, she thought a year seemed a very short time indeed.
When all had gone save the innkeeper himself, she yawned her way past him on the stairs, remarking as she did so that the two oldsters had seemed upset at the short confinement of the Wolf.
“Those two,” snorted the innkeeper, wiping his hands on his protruding, apron-covered belly. “They’re among those howling loudest at the cost of it. Wolf isn’t eating them, they say, so why should they want to pay for it?”
“Pay for what?” asked Mavin, unable to keep the curiosity out of her voice.
“Pay to keep him locked up, woman! You think it comes free?” And he snorted his way to his rest, shaking his head up all three flights of stairs, calling back down to her, “Tell truth, though. They’ve got nothing. It’s all they can do to keep their own hovel warm without buying firewood for the Wolf.”
Next day Mavin had strolled about the town, seeking among the children for any who might have seen the white bird. In her walk she passed the prison lately vacated by the Wolf. Though it looked like a dreary place, it had every comfort in it of warmth and food and drink and soft mattresses and a shelf of amusements and a place to run in for exercise. Seeing it, Mavin well knew it had cost treasure to keep it, for the wood to burn to warm for it for a winter alone would have cost many days’ labor, and the food many days’ labor more, to say nothing of the guards who would have been needed night and day.
A number of children claimed to have seen the bird. One lovely girl of about ten years believed it had flown away south. Her name was Janine, called Janny, and she tagged after Mavin for the better part of five days, talking of the bird, the dawn cliffs, of life and the ways of the world while begging for stories of that world in return. The child was artless and delightful, full of ready laughter. Though Mavin had learned all there was to learn about the white bird, she put off her travels for a time out of simple joy in the girl’s company.
One night there was a new face at the inn, a local preacher of Landizot, one Pastor Kyndle, whose house had been burned down by someone or something and would live at the inn while it was being rebuilt. Seeing Mavin was a stranger to the place, he set about making himself pleasant with the intent of converting her to the faith of Landizot and the Guardians. Talk turned, as it often did, to the Wolf.
“Why didn’t they kill the Wolf when they caught him?” she asked. “Or, if they won’t do that, why don’t they lock the Wolf in a cage of iron here in the village square and let him shiver when the nights are cold. Surely he would be no colder than the corpses of the young women and children who lie in your burying ground?”
The pastor was much disturbed at this. “It would be cruel.” he said. “Cruel to treat a person so. We are good people. Not cruel people.”
Mavin shook her head, but withheld any judgment. If there was anything she had learned in long travels here and there, it was that to most people in the world, every unfamiliar thing was considered unacceptably strange. She told herself she was undoubtedly as odd to them as they were to her, and let the matter go. She determined to continue her search for Handbright as soon as the weather warmed only a little. She stopped asking questions and settled into the place, merely waiting for the snows to melt.
But before the thaw came a wicked murder of a young girl child of the town. Her body was found at the edge of the woods, dragged there by something. There was blood on the snow, and tracks of someone who had struck her down and drunk her blood. The tracks disappeared in the hard-packed ice of the road, however, and could lead them nowhere. The little girl was Janny, and Mavin learned of it with a cold horror which turned to fury.
That night in the inn were only murmurings and sideways glances, and more than once Mavin heard this one or that one speaking the Wolf’s name. She expected before the night was over to hear he had been taken into confinement once more, but such was not to be.
He had not left the tavern, they said. He had been in his room drinking with his friends. All night. Never alone, not for a minute. His friends swore to it – Hog Boarfast, and Huggle, the brick-maker’s son, and Hot Haialy, the son of Widow Haialy who had beggared herself trying to help him out of one scrape after the other.
“With them all night, was he?” murmured Mavin, controlling her voice with some difficulty.
“So they say.”
“Trustworthy men, these? Those who say the Wolf was with them?”
“Well … there’s no proof not. I mean, who’s to say not?”
“Where did they get to know one another? The Wolf and these friends of his?”
“By the Hundred Devils, traveler, how would I know? All of ’em were born and raised here. Wolf, now, he came more lately, but I don’t keep track of him. Most likely they got to know one another while they were locked up – all of ’em have been at one time or another. Or over the wine jugs at the Spotted Fustigar.”
Mavin smiled a narrow smile and bought the man a drink. As days wore on, her fury did not abate. In a few days was another killing, and once more the three friends of the Wolf swore he had been with them in the tavern. Mavin had known this child, too – one like Janine, trusting, joyous, kind. The next day Mavin left town with some noise about it, saying she would return in a few days time. Instead, she returned that evening in the guise of a wastrel youth who took a room at the Spotted Fustigar and bought drinks for all and sundry in the tavern. It took no time at all to be introduced to Hog, Huggle, and Hot, and when one met them, one met the Wolf.
He had yellow eyes, and a slanted smile. His eyebrows met over his nose, and he had a feral, soft-voiced charm which had the new young barmaid, who was scarcely more than a child herself, bemused and troubled before the evening was half done. Hog, Huggle, and Hot were youths of a type; one fat, one meaty, one lean, but all as ignorant of the world as day-old bunwits and covering that ignorance with noise. Mavin set herself to be agreeable – which
no others in that place did – and before much had been drunk or more than a dozen disgusting stories told, Mavin too, was among the Wolf’s close friends. During the fits of lewd laughter, Mavin had looked deep into the faces of the other friends of the Wolf to see the mindless excitements stirring there, gleaming in their eyes like rotten fish on tide flats.
Each day that passed there were fewer people on the streets, each night was closer locked and tighter fastened. The childlike barmaid seemed to stop breathing when the Wolf came near, yet she could not stay far from him. She was always within reach of his hands, always seeking his eyes with an open-lipped fascination. Mavin, watching, made angry, silent comments to herself.
Came an evening the Wolf said, “I’ll be here all night tomorrow, won’t I, Huddle?” He giggled, a high-pitched whine of excitement. “It’s time for a good boozer, eh, Hog, all us good friends together, up in my rooms. Time for hooraw till the cock tries to get up and can’t!”
There was a shifting, eager laughter among the three, in which Mavin joined beneath Wolf’s speculative eyes. “I’ll be back for it,” she gasped from her wastrel’s face, pretending drunken amusement. “Got to go to Fanthooly in the morning, but I’ll be back before dark.”
“What’s of such interest in Fanthooly?” drawled the Wolf, his suspicious eyes burning in his face so that they seemed to whirl like little wheels of fire. The others hung on his words, ready to laugh or strike, as he bid.
“Old aunty with money, Wolf. Every year, money left me by dead daddy. She has it ready for me, same time, every year in Fanthooly.” Mavin appeared too drunk to have invented this, and the four had been drinking at Mavin’s expense for some days, so they laughed and believed, saying they would save a drink for him. Mavin, in her wastrel guise, set off in the direction of Fanthooly the following morning.
Only to return, under cover of the forest, entering Landizot once more at the first fall of dark.
She went to the alleyway behind the Spotted Fustigar. There was a door into an areaway in which the trash could be dumped, and if Mavin had read the signs aright, it was there the young barmaid would come, charmed as a bird is said to be charmed by a serpent. And she came, sneaking out without a lantern, wrapped tight in a thick shawl, face both eager and apprehensive. Mavin took hold of her from behind in a hard, unpleasant way which would leave her with a headache but do no other damage, then dragged her unconscious form into the stables. Shortly, the same shawl was in the areaway once more, wrapped around someone else.