Source

Sylvia Kelso

Chapter 2

3^rd Spring Moon.

Upriver from Amberlight.

Postscript to the Ruand’s Letter—for the Lord Tanekhet.

My lord Tanekhet,

It will probably gall you that I retain the title, but this may never reach your eyes at all. It is simply that—there are things I cannot put in the House report, things for which my journal is not enough. I need to set them out, however provisionally, for another’s eyes; and I can find no better eyes to imagine reading them than yours.

That is not a reflection on Alkhes; far less on Sarth. The Mother knows, Alkhes understood me in the truest way of all; he has staked his life on understanding me. And the questions my other husband has begun to ask are as far beyond my ken as, once, they would have been beyond his.

It is simply, I think, that of all those around me, those who follow me, who trust me, as wife and lover, fellow-crafter, Head, you alone have shared the vision’s birth. You alone have paralleled my conception; my gropings toward what you, coming from such an old one, described to me, who had not yet truly envisaged it, as a “new world.”

I wonder how you progress, back in Iskarda. Have they yet given you pneumonia, however unintentionally, from chopping our firewood in the rain? How do you go on with Iatha, with my Craft-heads and House-folk, and their compatriots in Iskarda?

I must admit, I have whiled myself to sleep not a few nights, picturing your encounters with Darthis.

Hopefully there will be letters, somewhere upRiver; after all this delay, your freighters should overtake us comfortably. Most likely our letters will cross, and I shall not hear your reaction to the news for months ahead. What I would give to watch you read; to see your face.

#

The House Report has all the sober news, prices, weather, River gossip; leaving Marbleport, we have sailed comfortably upRiver with your freighter for pretext and company, and not a few merry shared moorings on the way. The spring winds have been good. The crew is shaking down, even such arrant lubbers as Quiran and Keraz. I must admit, that Darthis let us reive her second daughter, and betroth her to a boy just founded as a medical apprentice, is still almost more than I can believe.

I must also admit that the rest of us are hardly better on the water, even the troublecrew, Azo and Zuri herself. Or Ahio, who has spent her life in a shaper’s shop, or Esrafal, a musician from birth, or young Dhanissa, nearly as feckless as Keraz. As well that Tez did gift us Sunya and Deor, and their men, who are as waterwise as they. But even I, now, can tell a sheet from a halyard five times of seven.

I had to stop and laugh there. I can picture you, reading this blithe tale of nautical bumbling, your world’s core hazarded like a bale of Verrain cotton and you unable so much as to interfere. You will raise your brows, fine-plucked and elegantly arched as Sarth’s own, and cast those forest-light eyes to heaven, and with hardly a motion the rest of those exquisitely cut lord’s features will convey the most martyred disgust. 

But we have managed our way past the Iskan shallows, and two—no, three weeks ago, on a hazy spring mid-morning, with the Sahandan rice dense emerald green and the Kora grass silver with seed on the opposite bank, the languid breeze bore us round the last bend where we used to watch the ships disappear, and there it was.

Amberlight.

#

I could not make reports convey that moment; oh, I have told them everything looks different: the skyline, where Arcis fell, now sinks like a navel rather than rising to a nipple at the city’s heart, and the slopes are empty on High and Dragon Spurs. Not that I ever knew, from downstream, how they looked. It is the most disconcerting thing about coming back, that in truth, I am seeing my city for the very first time.

But not my House. Because Telluir is gone.

All the Houses are gone. Between High and Dragon Spurs, there is nothing left above Hillfoot road; just one tumbled, riven, rock and rubble mess. Above that the whole hill is gone, not simply the spurs where Hafas blew itself away, or the ridge-back that supported Jerish and Khuss. As Diaman is gone, and Keranshah, and Vannish, whose Head was too proud to fall into the enemy’s hands. Averion did the same with Keranshah. My lovely general, throwing herself and her folk headlong upon the Mother’s grace.

I had to stop there a while. One can blot a journal with easy or not so easy tears, but this is for another’s eyes.

Below Hillfoot, the business and River quarters are in better order than you would expect; to be sure, there are patched roofs and broken unbuilt spaces, but there is trade, and traffic, and the sign of healthy human habitation, a goodly cloud of smoke.

And the one thing they have retained, would you believe, is Amberlight’s excise rights.

Backed, in the old days, with Navy muscle, one or another of our little qherrique-powered stingers idling behind the customs craft as they bustled officiously out, flying the Customs pennant and the River signal for, “Heave to.” Exacting tolls before the ship could so much as dock.

Apparently the charges now include clean water and store supply, as well as market fee for any trade you take ashore. Certainly they are officious. If any of my House-officials had so addressed shippers, I would have kicked them off the Hill. Admittedly, it did make our part easier; at least, in some ways.

Because the cutter was barely alongside, with the bustle of setting sails precisely to counter the River’s thrust, and tossing lines and fenders, and noises about a jump-board, if you please; the customs officer, I suppose you have to call her, had barely touched our deck when she reared back and squeaked, “Ruand!”

“Kamya,” I said. The Mother’s chance that I remember her. A ship-Second in the old days; I have no idea of her manners then, but I knew she was Jerish House.

“Ruand—you’ve come back!”

A talent for the obvious. But what better way to break the news? Customs crews used to sell it once, right off the quays.

“Not back, actually. Just passing through.” And while her eyes were still popping, “We’re escorting her,” I can remember a Head’s lordliness, I discover, in small gestures, “to Cataract.”

Her eyes followed my hand. Give her this, she knows her trade. She knew your freighter at a glance.

“But Ruand! That’s a Dhasdeini ship! That’s—!”

Then she saw the men behind me, and I thought her eyes really would fall clean out.

Evidently Amberlight, or for Amberlight read Prathax and Jerish and Terraqa, the three Houses left intact, has heard, but not credited, the scandal from Iskarda. When Kamya regained her wits, the first thing she asked was Customs’ reflex, if not Customs’ right.

“Ruand? Your purpose in Cataract?”

If they have four cutters for a trade that once busied ten ships day-long, they retain the caution; whatever goes to Cataract may recoil straightly on Amberlight. And when I answered, “Trade,” I saw the next move in her eyes.

A House-head, a  renegade House-head, whose dissension, perhaps her assent, had led in Amberlight’s ruin. Who had certainly apostasized, to scuttle off with her men to Iskarda. I cannot say I blame her. Had I been running Customs, and one of my underlings let such a prodigy through unreported, I, like Damas, would have had her head.

“Ah—Ruand—I’m sure you’ll pardon me—but the House . . .”

Given a snip of Uphill manners she would have found some courtly way to say it. I was lucky, or it is due to my reputation, that she made an apology first. What she meant, of course, was that I would have to explain us. To the authorities.

Which came down to Eutharie and Damas.

“This wind’s not for wasting,” I said. “If I come ashore, I trust the Head can see me at once.”

I had them in an eye-corner; all my trouble crew’s faces, Zuri, Azo, Alkhes, Sarth. All wearing the same expression; a mouthful of vinegar and a bad belly cramp.

Oh, I can see your face too, Tanekhet. But what choice had the Mother left? Send Zuri, and risk the mother-lode of our defense? There was no one else who would not affront Damas. And at the least, if she did play the fool, I had some hope that troublecrew could get me out.

And no, I did not act the complete idiot,  and yes, I did anticipate the worst. Which was why, before we ever came on deck to await the view of Amberlight, I had told my husband in what passes for our cabin, “Ask Quiran to come here.”

As foolish to trust it to my own men as to carry it myself. If they did not know our goal, they would know about Alkhes using my cutter. If he was sib to my blade, then he could carry my treasure; and if any word had spread about Iskarda, they would know the dreams had come to us all.

I have no idea what thing, if anything, might damage it. In panels, cutters, light-guns, the question never seemed to arise. In anything else, you worried about it damaging you. But to do otherwise seems blasphemous, so I carry it now in wrapped in silk in a soft inner pouch. When Quiran stuck his head round the curtain, I thought he would drop in his tracks at the sight.

Pass over the splutterings and stutterings. No doubt from centuries of inbreeding, Quiran, short, stocky, darker than most men in Amberlight, has the broad face and the slightly hooked nose that say, unmistakably, Iskarda. And then, inevitably; Darthis.

The Mother knows what she would say. You can imagine my own men’s faces. Although by the time we were on deck, Sarth, at least, had begun to understand.

So those were the expressions I carried with me over the side.  Zuri, glowering like a Verrain tomb monument, and Sarth in full tower inscrutability, and Alkhes ready to confront a firing squad. And the rest, thank the Mother, had work to keep them somewhere else.

I recall thinking, as the cutter cast off, that I should have told my husbands my thought. That if it wanted us to succeed, in the final pinch, the qherrique will have to look out for itself.

I have been requited, at least, for that.

#

To be candid, Tanekhet, I expected going ashore to be much worse. It was my city, after all; and I had helped destroy it, and had last seen it firsthand in the shambles of military defeat, before the qherrique turned a shambles to a charnel house.

It was a wrench, I will freely confess it, to work our way up through River Quarter, amid the meanness that follows a losing war. I never realized before, that, even in a slum, a city shows its wealth. The candles and the silver votives were gone from the little phallus shrines, the shutters were cracking out of their paint, the gutters held refuse instead of wilting flowers. And the gangs’ graffiti have vanished from the walls in business quarter. Nowadays, there is so little up there to raid.

That made it hardly less strange to follow the escort between the decrepit coffee houses and out across the buckled flagstones of Exchange Square, to look back where the Downhill money-workers still take their morning coffee, under the umbrellas, in the clear light of a late spring day. Before we passed under the somewhat battered facade into Engravers’ House.

Damas always did do well for herself. Apparently the three House-heads are the Council now, and their home, divided into House wings, is Engravers’ House.

So sad, to think that there will never again be an Engravers’ Guild; if the qherrique ever does make some sort of bond with us, there will never be such honor, such opulence, ever again.

Damas is relatively unchanged. Still solid as a House wall, iron-and-tawny hair, flood-brown eyes under those bristling bars of brow. Still that damnable air of consequence that announces, I am the Head of Jerish House. Still, unfortunately, that astuteness that is less wits than razor-edged self-interest. And I knew, oh, yes, I knew the first thing she would say.

“Tellurith! Is it true?”

The qherrique;  no stopping that word, it would have flown up from Marbleport faster than anything on wings. So I also knew that she would pitchfork me in at the one point I wanted least to be.

I said, “It’s true.”

She sat back in her chair with one of those long, soundless Damas sighs that seem to deflate her like a luffed sail. A big chair, behind a desk that tried hard to be a table where the Thirteen might have met. But I will give Damas this: whatever her pretensions, she had sound intelligencers.

“We’ve heard the most damnable tales!”

Waving me to the visitor’s chair, comfortable, leather-seated, a Head’s condescension to underline a Head’s resources, a Head’s rank. How many folk in River Quarter are sitting on leather seats? The room, too, reflected good scavenging. Solid public furniture, however meager after Riversend extravagance, tapestries, a sideboard with wine and silver cups. Proclaiming, this is still Amberlight.

“I can imagine.” I sat down, and waited to see her hospitality’s scope.

“And it’s true?”

The eyes devouring me. Oh, Tanekhet . . . but maybe you can imagine, you who spent a lifetime fencing with emperors, what it is to dance a bout with an opponent you have contested all your life. To know, just as you read that quick V-shaped knit of brows over her nose which means she will hide her bluff, that she too is reading every nuance of your mouth, the clothes you wear, the very way you choose to sit.

“As the Mother sees me, there’s so much to say!”

She got up then. Found the jug, set the wine cups out. I rose too. Standing by the window, we toasted each other, with the mended breadth of Exchange Square outside, the new spring leaves dancing in a gust of River wind, to remind us that the city too might live afresh.

And she was going to take the affable tack. Always an effort, for Damas.

“Eutharie and Ciruil will be beside themselves. We never thought to see you again.”

Harder still, to avoid mention of those hill-folk perversions, that gossip, so utterly sensational. I beamed and lifted my cup.

“I can’t wait to hear what you’ve been doing here; first-hand.”

At the last, we were Thirteen, both of us. Who should tread the double-tongued innuendoes’ dance better than we?

“Ah, it has been difficult.” She tossed back half the cup in a swig. But there is nothing of the wine-sop about her eyes. “But we’re on the River. We pick up tolls. And there’s the Kora. Always a rice-market in Verrain.”

Do you need my deciphering, Tanekhet? We know you have kept your holdings in the Kora,  that you draw on them for grain. And you have not offered us a share of the marble from Iskarda. But we are doing quite well downRiver ourselves.

“Of course.” I took a good swallow, too. If it was no Wave Island red, it was probably something out of Shirran. Those little bony hills can surprise you with their flavor sometimes.

“You’ll stay to dinner? We’ve given up most of the festivals, but the first cedar raft should be through in the next couple of days.”

“I would imagine so.” She was pushing the affability, I had to respond. “All the same, Damas, I don’t think we’ll wait that long. There’s some cargo to off-load, and we’ll provision, yes, but this wind is too good to waste.”

“You’re going on?”

The sharpness, the speed, said more than enough. They knew the Marbleport talk, yes, about the qherrique’s return. They knew the next story as well, whether from Iskarda or not.

I took another good swallow and tilted the cup foot up. “Oh,” I said coolly, “I think, yes.”

We know each other, ploy and riposte, tactic and stratagem, down to the bone. My lifted chin would have told her, Yes, it is true, and yes, however incredible it may seem, it’s happening. I have qherrique, and I’m taking it upRiver with me. Into legend. Into lunacy. Out of the remnants of your little world.

And her eyes’ slitting answered, clear as that indrawn breath: Tellurith, this is madness. You’ve been handed the foundations for a new Amberlight. You can’t, for the sake of some dangle-hugging imbecility, throw it away.

I put the cup down. Once I know the odds, I have never been one to wait.

“I’ll be delighted to have dinner with you all. First-watch tonight? The usual time? Meanwhile, it’s only a patrol boat, but there’s certainly business I should see to today.”

She let me bow to her, the old Moon-meet courtesy, given only between Heads, palms joined on my breast. She let me nod, a personal extra, and turn away. She let me get my fingers on the door-handle, and I have no doubt she did that deliberately, before she pursed her lips; I had no need to see that she pursed her lips; her voice carried easily, affably across the room.

“Tellurith, the city’s not precisely safe.”

I let the door-latch go, without trying anything so unmannerly as a lunge out into the foyer and a brawl with her troublecrew, who would certainly have been poised for any bandit escape. I turned about and answered as easily, “Really? I don’t think I’ve forgotten that much.”

While we disembarked she had probably been apprised of my personnel; I certainly would have sent messengers ahead, and Kamya had to pass our destination to the Customs’ post. Damas knew Zuri’s worth. She knew I was testing hers. She picked up the bluff.

“To be quite truthful, Tellurith, I could not in all conscience let you risk yourself out there—not in River Quarter, certainly—alone.”

#

So detainment, yes, with the best softening available. A room of my own, on the upper floors of the House. Under triune guard. She made quite clear that she was loyal to her Council-mates; it was share and share alike. I had flowers on the table, a bath-room, attendants at call, and troublecrew discreetly out of sight. Damas’ own Steward offered to shop for me: clothes, anything I fancied, the city would see to it, I was the city’s guest.

I did wonder if Damas would take solidarity so far as having me to eat with Eutharie and Ciruil. Who would have far less chance of maintaining aplomb, and retaining indirection, than she herself. I need not lie to say, I awaited dinner with interest that night.

And I did work hard, damnably hard, not to think what would be happening out on the River; not to imagine their waiting, and their comprehension, and what would come next. I prayed to the Mother with my entire heart that Zuri and her cohorts had not flown to panic-stations already and were planning a raid, premature, inevitably scanted of intelligence, thinking that the only strategy was to pre-empt the risk and get me out.

Damas was thinking that too, naturally. And if she began on the affable tack, she scored me shrewdly enough. No Eutharie or Ciruil that night. Ciruil had a quinsy throat, some “civil upsets Downhill,” had kept Eutharie late to exhaustion point. A perfect underline of Amberlight’s risk.

We ate in the Head’s private dining room in the Jerish block; good food without the grace-notes Shia would have added once. We chatted about the season, the River, the latest word from Cataract, and the wonders emanating from Dhasdein. Which led us, sure as a well-launched ship, to you, Tanekhet.

“So the Suzeraine of Riversend really did run off to clean Iskarda’s pots?” she asked it lightly enough, a passable imitation of urbanity for Damas. “You’ll excuse me if I say, that took some crediting, Tellurith.”

I did not betray you, Tanekhet; I will say this here, for it will be mentioned nowhere else. I did not laugh and make some hoary Amberlight jest about male flibbertigibbets whose loyalties spun like weathercocks; I did not re-accept complicity in that old, that cruelly comfortable woman’s fellowship. I looked across the table and answered levelly, “I have never, yet, refused an honest suppliant.”

So I did not betray you the other way either. I did not unveil the dream that brought you, or the key that you used to open my door. In that, I suppose, I kept faith with us both.

But having invoked sanctuary and supplication, the Mother’s holiest claim, I had cut Damas’ probings off at the hilt. So it is no wonder she made me pay in my own right.

“Oh,” she said, lazing back, half on an elbow, lifting her cup. However travestied, the gesture of appeasement to the Mother’s will. “I daresay it repaid you, after all.”

I do not know why I had not expected it. But I felt my muscles seize, as Alkhes’ would, back in those days when he had not regained his memory, and my probes came too near the quick.

“We heard this story,” Damas gazed into her cup. “I’m not sure if it wasn’t the most incredible of them all. That in Dhasdein—you were carrying again. And that you lost it—in the wreck.”

We were still dancing Thirteen style; the brutal style, when affability comes off and you cut to bare the bone. She knew the tale of my lost children and the daughters Sarth gave someone else, she dragged the blade clear across what she knew were the most precious of hopes. But I have danced my life’s length that way too.

“It’s true, the Mother did touch me with both hands that day. I lost the child . . . it was a little difficult to tell just whose it was. But Tanekhet was the only one who knew what to do when I hemorrhaged. So he did save my life.”

You too know how it feels to make a sword-blade of your tenderest flesh. I think the tone cut me to every finger’s quick. I know I felt the words come, in blood all the way from my heart.

Nor was it mercy that made Damas turn her winecup and murmur, “Ah.”

I sipped from my own. There was a momentary insurgence of noise from the distant streets. I said, “Is there a festival after all?”

Her head had to turn, to identify it, before she spoke. “Nothing unusual. It’s restless Downhill, nowadays. Especially at night.”

The room she sat in fronted Engravers’ Square, the business quarter’s heart. How far Uphill is that?

“Restless? I would have called a Clan patrol.” Meaning that it sounded like full-scale riot. Aspersion on her government, a most grateful tangent; but she did not let me follow up.

“Tellurith, answer me this.” And it had all gone, steel and affability both. “On the Mother’s name—was the rest truth?”

She was looking full at me. A woman with whom I had shared a lifetime of governance. A woman with whom I had shared Head-ship. A woman who, like me, had heard the qherrique.

I said, “Yes.”

She set the cup down. Her muscles undid, as after a heart-bursting fight. She leant forward and said it rapidly, urgently, no longer maneuvering but a plea.

“You know what it means, then. You’re its emissary. It chose you, it came back to you. How can you mistake that? You’ve got the whole thing, the city, the future, everything, right there in your hands.”

I lifted my hands and looked at them. I had worn the Head’s ring, for occasion and rank. It quivered like living pearl in the light, and Damas actually put her own hand on my wrist.

“Do what it wants, Tellurith. Take it up and plant it here. Wherever you choose, I—we don’t care, you can claim the first outcrop for Telluir, you can head the Council, it doesn’t matter. Just bring it back.”

I looked at her in that too revealing candlelight, and I saw clear to the bottom of her soul, Tanekhet; and there was greed in it, and calculation, and ingrained, irreducible stupidity, that had never understood what we did with the qherrique, or how it might have been wrong, or why it caused the City’s fall, and there was desperate determination to have that ascendancy again, and herself in her old place. And of the future I—we see—of the future that waits, unimaginably, in the visions of the qherrique, there was no inkling at all.

But there was longing. There was hunger, close to ravening. Hunger I knew as well as I know Sarth’s heartbeat, because it was my own.

“Damas,” I said. “If I could, believe me, I would.”

I tried to tell her then. The Mother help me, I told her everything about the wreck and going home, all our questions and our hurt. For an hour, Tanekhet, I belabored her with all the reasoning of politics, that we could not keep the qherrique, not in Iskarda and far less in Amberlight, I beat the River’s dangers over her ears until they should have rung from the cuffs. I even told her about the dreams.

The questions, she heard. She too has wondered a long time, I think, exactly how we stood with it. Were we puppets, or servants, or confederates, or friends? We knew what we had from it, but what, all those years, did it have from us? Her mind too has opened in the City’s fall. But, may the Mother help her, it has not opened far enough.

Because when I finished—when I had told her that vision of the River-source, the day-fount, the impossible, inconceivable target of our quest—she looked at me sadly, and spoke as to a ranting girl.

 “You’ll never get there, Tellurith.”

She rehearsed the dangers then; all the stuff that you have heard before, Cataract, the cataracts, the Heartland, the absolute impossibility of it all, and not least the presence of the men. “It’s lunacy, Tellurith. It’s absolute, unutterable lunacy. Men have nothing to do with qherrique.”

I understood then. Not only did she want the city back, she wanted the city back entire. With women in the seats of power, and men back in the River Quarter; or the Craftless tasks.

Or the towers.

I picked up my cup and drained it and said, “I’ve no wish to be unmannerly, Jerish. But it’s been a long day, and I’m beginning to need my bed.”

Her eyes narrowed. Signal too clear from too many skirmishes. I knew now how she could touch me. I confess, my guts cringed.

But her mannerliness was more frightening than a strike. She said, “Yes, of course. I trust you sleep well, Tellurith.”

#

As she knew very well when she launched that poisoned wish, I did not. Not least from trying to guess the logistics of an immediate escape, pre-empting even my troublecrew, with no oracle at all to say if the onus of initiative should be on me. Would she ever listen? How far would she take persuasion? How far could I resist? Which hazard would be the worse?

In the end I decided an immediate break was far too dangerous. If I did reach the wharf, I had no idea where to find a boatman, to hail our folk would be as crazy as to carry money on the chance of finding a bribable rogue. I would only help the River Quarter cut my throat.

And who, then, would head the Quest?

I am not an idiot, Tanekhet. I know quite well it is I who holds this crew together, as it is I who holds the House. I am the one who could hear Alkhes in Amberlight. I am the one who could envision Iskarda, the one to whom your entreaty spoke. I am—at whatever the price—the chosen of the qherrique. I am the rod where the Mother’s fire strikes.

So I was waiting in the morning for Damas to come back. Or to be conducted to the Council’s chamber instead.

They chose the Council. Compress the general arguments and pleas, Ciruil quavering in what has suddenly become old age, Eutharie whining about gratitude and fellowship, Damas scowling like a brewed thunderhead. Until I rose and said politely, “I think we’ve spent enough time here. Ruands, I wish to return to my ship.”

No harm, after all, in trying.

Damas moved then. Smiled; it must have hurt her mouth. Said, “Of course, Telluir. You’re free to go. As soon as you give us the qherrique.”

When I looked at her, she brought out all the spurious claims; they were the Houses, they were Amberlight, it was the qherrique’s place. I had travestied the City at Iskarda, no-one could doubt the qherrique wanted to be back where it belonged, no doubt that was why I had lost the child. “The Mother,” oh, so sanctimoniously! “sets her own balance-weights.”

I did not try to rip out her eyes. I did, somehow, keep quiet, and mannerly, and say, “Is that all, Ruands?”

Damas looked at the door, then. At the waiting troublecrew. And said, “Tellurith, you bring this on yourself.”

I let them search me. In earnest, in ways your intelligencers have never imagined, as Tez told me once, gruffly amused. When they gave me my clothes back, I put them on. Then I looked at Damas and said, “Do you think it can’t shield its own?”

Eutharie blenched. She was always superstitious to squeaking point. I felt the troublecrew’s hands falter. Ciruil bleated something. But Damas’ jaw went really hard. When she spoke it was through her teeth.

“Quizo. Search the rooms.”

And when the troublecrew came back, Damas turned from that one brief head-shake, and the thunderhead burst.

“You didn’t,” she said.

I raised my brows.

“Mother’s eyes,” she said. Gurgled. I was never more surprised. Damas, whom I thought wholly pragmatic, was rabid. Incoherent with righteous wrath.

“You gave qherrique to one of them!”

It was nearly time to embroil the others. I raised my brows again and said, “Really, Damas.”

She came within a hairsbreadth of throwing the gavel at me. I thought she might have a seizure, before she recovered aplomb and threat at once.

“I could have you tried for heresy.”

“Really, Damas!” I did not have to counterfeit that. “Look outside that window, will you? Just who, do you imagine, would countenance such a farce?”

She nearly lost it all then. I really did look to have my throat cut on the spot. But she was one of the Thirteen, after all. She got her breath, and looked away to the other two, and said, “Telluir House has gone beyond scandal. Its Head has entrusted the qherrique—the new qherrique, the City’s hope—to a man.”

“This,” Damas proclaimed through the yammerings, “is blasphemy. If we do not remedy such abomination the Mother will blast us as well.”

I said, “That boat is a registered escort from Marbleport. The Mother may blast you. The River assuredly will.”

Ciruil wavered. Damas waved it away with something about religion outweighing any politics. I said, “They’ll cut the anchor rope the minute you put out.”

Damas laughed aloud at me. She had lost so much composure. “And leave you here! Their,” pass over the words she used about my sexual habits. “You’ve got the lot of them by the balls!”

“I,” I said, “am not the qherrique.”

That did give them pause. Including Damas.

“Give it over,” I said, “Ruands. If you have a grain of sense about the River, you know anything else is suicide. If you claim piety, accept that this is from the Mother, and honor Her will. If you ever truly loved the qherrique—then give us a chance, this one and only chance—that somehow, it will come back.”

It silenced them all. In the pause, I heard the street rumor, far too prominent. Loud enough to carry through the Council chamber’s walls.

I said, “The City hears.”

It was what, following the qherrique, we would always say. And it bit Damas like a stinging fly.

“Shick the City! And shick you, Tellurith!”

She stopped then; and still, she got control of herself.

“Ruands, excuse me. It’s Jerish’s quarter for street patrol, and there is, undoubtedly, work to do outside. I vote that this—person—who has defied the council, and upset the City, and profaned the Mother, should be herewith detained. Quizo, escort her upstairs. Ciruil, lend me those people of yours. And Quizo, put a guard on the door!”

Their hands shut on me. I did manage one last shaft.

“You can take the boat apart, and take the crew, and torture every one of them, Damas! The qherrique will be in the River first, and nothing will bring it back!”

#

I do not think there was a harder time than those next few hours in that elegant little prison, with nothing to do but dismantle azalea flowers, and pace, and stare out the window—Uphill—and sweat. Waiting to see if Damas would dare my final bluff. Praying that now, even now, Zuri and Alkhes would wait. Would not try the wildest, most frantically urgent foolishness and come to break me out.

Just after noon Damas came back. She stalked in without heraldry, glowered at the shredded azalea petals. Glared at me and said rigidly, “You can’t go to Cataract.”

I had control enough, through the beating of my heart, to be polite.

“Is there some reason why not?”

I got the budget emptied then. Whatever the dangers in Amberlight, Cataract would never let us pass. We would be captured, tortured, murdered, and calamity of calamities, the qherrique would be in Wonsa’s hands.

The new tyrant, bloodier than any for years. All perfectly reasonable, perfectly justifiable. Arguments I would have made myself.

And all I could say in return was, “Damas—there’s nothing else we can do.”

She swelled as if to burst. Then she said quite quietly, “A lot of those ships come through here.”

Your ships. We both knew what she meant.

“I hear he’s gifted you his revenues.”

The blood? The lifeblood of Iskarda.

“It’s quite dangerous, upstream.”

She did not have to touch the patrol boat. Or me. Or any of us. Or even contravene River-law. She need only turn back your ships, Tanekhet, and watch Iskarda strangle in my stubbornness.

She turned to the door. “I understand your arguments, Tellurith,” she said. “But you see ours too. I’m sure there is no need for bloodshed. On either side. But the Council—the Houses of Amberlight—feel it would be both pointless, and dangerous, for you to continue your journey at present. For us both.”

You understand, yes. Castle-block. The Mother knows, playing Castles on the River, you brought me to it often enough. They would not touch my men, and they would not let me loose. But they would quarantine the ships; and that meant no stores, and no shore contact, and that meant no intelligence. And without that, Zuri would never mount a successful raid, and if she tried, her blood would be on my head. And the blood of my men as well.

But if, by some unimaginable chance that Alkhes and Zuri just might manage, they lifted me and we ran, Damas would take her vengeance for it.

On Iskarda.

#

You may imagine that I did not sleep, and that I did my brains’ best to find any ridiculous, cloud-leaper’s chance of a way out. But I was in the keeping of Jerish troublecrew, old House, forewarned. Even with some ruse like a midnight seizure or a fever-bout, physical mastery was beyond me.

I could try to suborn someone, but I knew Damas. Narrow-minded and self-interested, but never less than criminally astute.

I could throw something from the window or try to chip myself out. Except that the window looked into the upper courtyard of the Engravers’ House, and the bars had been designed, I should think, for something like a treasury.

Or I could pray, with all my heart and mind and soul, for some chance to intervene, for my troublecrew to manage intelligence, for something to happen in Amberlight, for the Mother to look on me.

Or the qherrique.

Damas came with the breakfast tray. Asked how I slept. Established what I knew would be a ritual, asking, “Have you changed your mind?”

When I shook my head, knowing she wanted me to ask what she had done, what had happened to my folk, she went quietly away.

I passed the day listening. To the House around me, for the trails of workers and guards, to the court outside, with the window open and maledictions on the fine upRiver wind that skirled about its jambs, for the sound of the streets beyond. At the last, for the feet that would bring my tray.

But it was troublecrew, her stance and motion unmistakable. No hope at all of suborning that.

So I had to take the next step. When Damas came next morning, I said, “I want a meeting. With the Ruands.”

Standing in the council chamber, I harangued the three of them. But though my eyes moved among them equally, it was to Ciruil, and above all, to Eutharie I spoke.

About the qherrique’s message, and its tie to the Mother’s will, and the blasphemy of hindering the Mother’s messengers, and the certainty that the Mother would take care for them, however imbecilic Her commands might appear. About the curse that such profanation would bring on the City, whose turbulence already presaged it; and the weight of condemnation, if that curse fell, that would lie upon their heads.

I knew that stroke about the City was good when I saw Ciruil flinch. River Quarter might have been stunned, at first, into docility, but it was three years since the fall, and the bonds would be wearing thin. If only, I thought, I could get some word outside.

So I spoke loudly, in the further hope that some troublecrew might listen, just might waver, just might seek counsel or consolation and pass the whisper, gossip, rumor on.

When they sent me back to my room, despite all Eutharie’s mumbling and rolling her eyes at Damas, it was the sole hope that remained.

That was the fourth day of my imprisonment, and I will freely tell you that hope was dying fast. My one plan was to sit them out somehow, convince Damas, somehow, that I was obdurate, and look, however fatuously, for a change of heart. The hopes of my crew? There I was less sanguine.

And what terrified me most was that each passing day brought closer the moment when Zuri would decide they could no longer wait.

#

But it was Damas who walked in that afternoon and told me quite conversationally, “You have the night to consider, Tellurith. But if you haven’t seen reason by morning, the Houses will impound that boat.” She paused, and gave me a look like a dagger point. “At whatever cost.”

Impound; meaning challenge, and fence in, and board, and I knew what would be the end of that.

I sat looking at the wall. Seeing women’s faces, familiar women’s faces, seeing men’s, my beloveds’ faces, laid out on a burning deck, with their bodies smashed, their throats cut, lying in their blood.

And there I was, alone with half a chicken and a wine-glass in the closed end of evening; the last aery rose fading from a tall cumulus above the House wall, the rumor of the city dwindling into the lull before night. With a pair of troublecrew inside my door, the lamp set very firmly between them. And if I had broken the wineglass, or smashed a bottle of unguent in the bathroom, what help would Zuri find in that?

I will make you a confession, Tanekhet, that I do not think I could make even to Sarth. I quail, writing it; but his mind, I am nearly sure, has delved into such questionings as make the Mother’s reality almost irrelevant. He thinks I, on the other hand, am solid in my faith. And I think, in the wildernesses he must traverse now, that the idea comforts him.

But you, though you swear by the River-god and his Adversary, and even that shadowy old Mother-goddess of Verrain, for I heard you, that night by the River; somehow, I think you have entered the fastnesses of extremity when you know, in your inmost soul, that whatever deity you call upon, they will not heed.

I can say to you, then, that I did not behave like a true daughter of Amberlight that evening. Because when I had washed and changed into the charmingly embroidered night-shift, I knelt down by the bed, right under their approving or uncaring eyes, I did not care which, and prayed as if I was a child again.

But it was not to the Mother I prayed.

Address the qherrique, yes; that I have done so often, oftener than I woke it in gun or cutter-panel or mother-face or in the shaper’s shop, working the new-cut block. But that was always with the substance of it under my fingers, or in my consciousness, or threaded round me through the supporting earth. In that room, there was nothing of substance at all. I was throwing my words into emptiness, a spider spinning vainly at the heart of an unanchored web.

And though I knelt there till my bones ached, for all I could tell, it behaved like a true god. For it did not reply.

#

I do not expect, without evidence, that you would credit this. I did not credit it. But as the Mother sees me, I ought to have . . . not known, perhaps, not even expected, but at the least, had in mind the possibility. Because after all, it had happened before.

But in that case I would not have been posted, so futilely and stupidly, behind the door with the azalea vase when Damas and her substitute troublecrew tramped in behind the collector of the breakfast tray. And I would not have almost broken my wrist in that very undignified struggle with Quizo’s second that left her with a scratched nose and Damas with a faceful of vase. Before they disarmed and pinioned me. And panting in their grasp and my degradingly, fatally lost control, I saw through a tangle of plait the expression on Damas’ face.

She set the vase away. I had expected anger, or gloating, or complacent triumph. But she never even remarked on the assault. Just looked at me, so solemnly, with such dazed, such aweful disbelief. As if she were, in all truth, the messenger of a god.

“Tellurith,” she said.

And stopped. Waved the troublecrew away. I had taken in that much already; when they released my wrists I stood there, the witness to a revelation, and waited for her to go on.

“Tellurith,” she said again. And then, “I had a dream.”

You will have heard by now, I do not doubt. This word will run the River faster than the wind. You will be past the stage of capering and hallooing and probably of offering thanksgivings. And if you do not know firsthand what she tried to convey to me, the mind-leveling conviction and more appalling urgency, you have heard them described often enough not to mistake.

It was quite a short dream; the last, as so often with us, of the night. It had lifted her out of the bed, running and stumbling with its impetus, and the image was branded clearer than the most violent real-life memory on her brain.

The patrol boat on the River, Amberlight in the background. Me with my crew on the deck. Waving, smiling, sailing Upstream. For Cataract.

You may not believe this either, but in the core of the shared vision, Damas and I actually embraced. Not at the solution, nor in reconciliation over defeat and victory. It was elation, it was a madness of grievous longing lost.

Because our hope still existed, and now we both had proof of it. The City had fallen, but the heart of the City had returned. No matter if it was a seed in a man’s hand out on the River, being taken from debate into peril’s heart. No matter that both of us might be losing it forever. We had heard the words of the true, the only oracle. And now neither of us doubted the way to take.

#

They broke the quarantine that morning and brought the crew ashore. All the crew. I was waiting at the House door as they were escorted up. At sight of Zuri’s face, as she processed amid a howling cavorting squall of River Quarter raff, with beggar brats tugging her trouser pockets and whores importuning her and business clerks packing garlands chin-deep round her neck, I would have had ado, had my heart been made entirely of lead, not to burst out in a laugh.

Oh, Tanekhet, you cannot conceive how they feted us! They danced and feasted and toured us round the city, they even took the men off—if you could have seen Alkhes! For some kind of thanks-offering down at the main shrine of the Phallus god. Yes, if you can believe it, in the heart’s quarter of the whores. But that joy, that freely given assent, that was the most delirious of all.

Not that Damas did not do her best. In between trying to load us with stores to the gunwales, she harangued me an hour together about the perils of Cataract. She told me every grandpa’s tale about the rapids and the Jump-up cliffs and lamented because I would not take a hundred fathoms of extra rope. She tried to argue that simply because she had dreamt us sailing upstream did not mean we had to go right to Cataract, made me swear that if there was no hope of passing we would come back, would seek Amberlight’s help.

Meanwhile she tried to give the men light-guns and she did load Zuri with the best contrivances Amberlight troublecrew retained. Quizo gifted us all her latest Cataract intelligence. And the city treated us like heroes going out to certain death, offering us all they had, everything that was Amberlight’s best.

I should have known that in their benevolence also, gods extract a price.

Gods? The Mother? The qherrique?

That, above all, I do not know, Tanekhet. There are so many questions that lie unanswered, from that birth-death on the Riverbank to the nature of the qherrique itself. No words, no categories we use will fit around it. Mineral, animal, vegetable, alive, conscious, sentient? None of them works, any more than the divisions that Antastes’ earth-scribes tried to push on me. Was it rock or pearl? Was it growing or made? Did it conduct lightning or store it? Did it conduct lightning or light? Or was it heat? And did I really imagine it could influence minds?

To which my only answer, then as now, has been, Your questions are irrelevant. The words you give me do not work, do not work, do not work.

But the mechanisms of gift and recompense, those I have understood all my life.

So it was shock, and unbelief, but not unthinkable, when Dhanissa found me under the garlanded pergola they had erected in the centre of the old Main Quay, the day the entire City assembled to see us off.

I was about to assume my chair among my flower-laden crew, to hear the first speeches, before the great choir came out, to sing the hymn to Water’s Rise and ceremonially wish us farewell. I remember, under the choker of spring flowers and a most unbecoming diadem, I had on Damas’ gift of a double-wool gold-brocaded festival coat, untimely warm on that balmy spring day. And I recall how the garlands bit, when Dhanissa flew up to me, face wreathed in smiles, towing the other, a pair of wood-nymphs running, at the length of her arm.

“Ruand!” she cried. “This is Ferrias!”

As if the world explained itself in that one name.

I must have said something. I assume this, because she beamed, and both of them made me a bow.

Ferrias was Dhanissa’s age; brandy-brown eyes, crinkly hair, the face and features of Amberlight. Heavier-built than Dhanissa, who even before her sickness two winters past had been built like a summer waterfly, but armored in the same star-struck, impregnable delight.

“Ferrias is my cousin’s kin. I thought they were all dead, but I’ve a cousin and her husband and a partner and two other children and a guild-circle and they’ve rebuilt quarters behind the wood-carver’s shop, just over there,” gesturing with a queen’s lordliness to the fringes of River Quarter. “And Ferrias . . .!”

Their hands told the rest, louder than their faces, with that dazzle beyond the things of earth. The fingers twined, tighter than the tendrils of the climbing vine whose little cerise blossoms laced their wrists together, the blossom they still call Maiden’s Blush.

That Amberlight women have used, time out of mind, to plight their troth.

#

They were still waving when we had climbed up out of the Customs’ cutter, and shed our floral carapaces, and begun to make sail on the boat. Past the freighter, with the brisk sound of the flute as they settled the capstan bars, I could see the quayside, a great bar of variegated color, faces, festival clothes, brandished flowers. I could hear the choir singing as at some great City event. I could almost make out, for I remembered the spot, the smile, visionary, ecstatic, on Dhanissa’s face.

It was midday by the time we won past Dead Dyke’s northern mouth, making the great round of the city as the River turns about its foot. The wind was with us again then. We shook out the lateen-rigged mainsail and forged ahead of the freighter, with Ahio calling insults past Sunya at the tiller-bar. And presently somebody joined me at the rail.

Sarth took the last garland before it frayed apart. Clematis and sweetflower, that men preparing for night used to twine into their hair. He nursed it in his hands, leaning beside me, the dear, familiar weight and warmth of him filling the wind’s turbulent space.

On my other side, Zuri stared back southward, and all but inaudibly growled.

“I couldn’t have kept her,” I said.

Zuri’s only reply was a snort.

“Whatever luck it meant.”

Zuri’s growl had words in it somewhere. I caught, “broken . . . numbers . . . fellowship.”

“We were all chosen. If that wasn’t chosen; shouldn’t we have had word?”

Zuri grumbled again. But Sarth put his arm around me. And as his forearm touched the bulge of the silken pouch under my ribs, he said very softly, “Isn’t it supposed to be—a seed?”

Seed, said my mind, restoring the image of it, small as a pearl in my palm, the texture, silken but not silk, pearl and yet not pearl, warm, always warm, as I have never thought before, whether or not it has lain against human flesh. Seed, said my mind again, recalling what we had left on that River bank, the wreckage of hopes, my hopes, his hopes, in the blood and ruin of a dying birth.

I said, “Uh—”

He gave me that mountain king profile, with the wind walking ruffles down the bronze cable of his hair. I have never understood how someone who looks so much like a temple statue can have such a mind beneath.

“Seed?” grunted Zuri, a dozen shiplengths behind.

“Seed,” I said. Staring out across the River too, where the Kora hayfields were silver-beige with grass nearing the cut.

He looked from one to the other of us. Then he said, at last sounding hesitant, “Aren’t seeds—meant to sow?”

I put out my hand. A finger-length of thistledown swirled into it, the flying seeds of spider-grass, that rides the wind to some far random earth.

“Yes,” I said. “You have to sow them. You have to throw them away, before they’ll shoot.”

© 2010 Sylvia Kelso

  Jupiter Gardens Press

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