Northshore (3 page)

They spent three days in Baris. The merchants wanted
spice, but they insisted on trading bulk pamet for it. Blint would take no more pamet. ‘Silly blight-heads,’ he complained as still another delegation left the boat unsatisfied. ‘Can’t seem to understand every town in this section has more pamet than they can use. We’ll have to go all the way to Vobil-dil-go before anyone will want pamet. I told them we’d take toys, or those dried puncon candies, or woven pamet cloth, provided it was something out of the ordinary. They’ll come to it eventually. Just takes them two or three days to make up their minds.’

On the third day they did make up their minds, and Blint did a brisk business. By dusk all the trading was done, and the crew of the
Gift
went into Baristown for some jollifications. Thrasne offered to guard the ship. He wanted to finish the carvings and brought them on deck to do so, working in the lantern light from the owner-house windows. He had caught Fulder Don to his own satisfaction, the sorrow, the loss. Now he was finishing the carving of the woman, Delia, and the child.

There were no sounds except the soft push of the water along the sides, an occasional burst of laughter or song from the taverns. The soft bumping had gone on for some time before he even heard it.

Once alerted to the sound, it still took him a while to find it. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. At last he leaned over the side and heard it clearly. Something in the River, knocking against the side of the boat.

He lowered a lantern on a line to see only the oily shifting of the water. Then she came from under the wavelets to look up at him for an instant, turning in the ripples to glance sideways at him from half-closed eyes.

‘Suspirra!’ He set the lantern down, shaking, rubbing his eyes with his hands. The face was Suspirra’s face. The bumping went on. He lowered the light again, and again she shifted to look upward at him, the water flowing across her face, the line in which she was tangled making a silver streak across her breast.

Sick cold in his belly, he could no more have left her there
than he could have burned his own Suspirra for firewood. It took long moments to realize the bumping made a wooden clattering rather than the soft sound of flesh. He thought of a carving, first, and only then of the blight. This was the woman they had been dragging for. The woman who had been so beautiful, who was so beautiful. Blighted now. Wooden. And deadly. Still, he could not leave her there.

He brought up one of the small nets, safe enough after its frag powder soak. He rigged a line to the boom. Working silently, cursing the amount of time it took, he pushed the net under her with poles, then heaved the boom all alone against her weight, heavier than he’d thought, to lift her dripping body to the deck.

She turned in the lantern light, toward him and away in a silent dance, eyes half-open in invitation, lips curved as though about to speak. ‘So beautiful,’ he murmured, wanting to touch her, holding himself from doing so only with difficulty. ‘So beautiful.’

A burst of laughter as some Riverfront tavern opened a door and spat revelers into the street. Blint would be bringing the crew back shortly. If Blint saw her, he would sell her to the family, or to the Awakeners, though what good she would be to either, Thrasne could not imagine. No. He wouldn’t do that. She had fled from them, family and Awakeners both. The woman who had fled was gone. This was his own Suspirra now. He plotted furiously, discarding one notion after another.

Then he thought of the ventilation shaft beneath his own watching post. Up went the net once more as he guided it from the owner-house roof, down into the shaft, suspended there in its netting bag from the pole grating upon which he so often sat, where none could see it, wonder at it, touch it – save Thrasne himself.

When Blint and crew returned, he was crouched beneath the owner-house window, finishing the carving of Delia and the child. That night, for the first time since he had made her, he did not even look at the small carving of Suspirra.

Night on the River in the township of Thou-ne. Lanterns gleaming along the River walk, on the quays and jetties, where the oily water throws back slippery reflections, fish-belly lights, momentary glimmers. Rain misting the cobbles into fishscale paths, River sucking at the piers with fish-mouth kisses, all watery and dim, silver and gray, evasive as dark bodies turning beneath dark water. Lantern man strolling along beside his wagon, wagon boy tugging, head down, sliding a little on the slick stones. Fish-oil cans in the wagon; fill the lanterns; trim the wicks; light the lanterns; then move on. Behind these two the lantern light lies in liquid puddles on the stones, pools of light, wetter than water as the crier follows after, ‘Dusk falls, night comes, let all abroad take themselves to home and hearth.’ The call so well known over lifetimes it comes out in drawn vowels, ‘Uhhhs aaaahs, aiiit uhmmms, aaaad ohhhhm arrrrh.’

Peasimy Flot trots along the River path, behind the crier, stepping carefully into each puddle of light to splash it onto the path. Slap, slap, slap with the soft soles of his boots, slap, slap. Light has to be distributed. Nobody sees to it but Peasimy. What good are these puddles with all the dark in between? Have to splash the light around. He does not look behind him to see the pools of light still separate and rimmed with black. He has splashed them; now the walk is lighted. Never mind what the eyes see. Never mind. It is what the soul sees that’s important.

‘Uhhhs aaaahs,’ the crier calls. ‘Aiiit uhmmms.’

Night is already here. Potipur glares in the eastern sky,
full and ominous, his face half-veiled in River mist. Viranel is half herself at the zenith, skittish behind clouds, as she becomes at these slender times; Abricor has whetted his scythe on the western horizon and goes now to harvest the crops of night. Peasimy stops in midsplash to contemplate the scythe-moon. ‘Harvest,’ he calls in a whispery fishvoice, full of bubbles and liquid gurgling. ‘Cut down the lies, Moon of Abricor. Foul weeds of untruth. Cut them down, down, down.’ Then back to the splashing once more. Pitty-pat, pitty-pat, slap slap slap.

Twelve years old, Peasimy is a neat one in his high-collared coat with the shiny buttons, his tight dark trousers fitting down into the soft boots, his perky little hat perched high on his tight, shiny hair. Daytimes he sleeps, like a strangey, lost in the depths of his sleep as in a cavern. Nighttimes he comes up for air and to look at the moon and splash lantern light. Peasimy knows Thou-ne would wither away if he didn’t splash the light around. It doesn’t matter no one else knows it. All night long he will continue this perambulation, spreading the light. Dawn will mean a bite of breakfast, then pulling the shades down, hiding in the dark. No one knows why, but he’s been that way since childhood. No trouble to anyone. Just see him decent dressed and let him go. So says Peasimy’s mama, the widow Flot. So says her kin and kith. Let him alone. He doesn’t hurt anything. Poor little fellow. Lucky when he can remember his name.

Peasimy … well, Peasimy remembers a lot of things. Peasimy remembers catching his mama putting Candy Seeds on his bed when it was supposed to be the Candy Tree growing there that did it. Peasimy remembers things Haranjus Pandel said in Temple. Peasimy remembers every lie ever told and some he only suspects. Peasimy can recognize true things when he sees them.

Lanterns, now, they are true things. Water is true, and the widow Flot. The lantern man is true, and the crier. Daylight is so true he needn’t even stay awake to watch it. All light is true. Dark is a false thing, full of lies, making you
think a thing is one way when it’s actually another. That’s why Peasimy splashes the light. Have to fight the dark. Can’t just let it overcome.

There’s an image Peasimy sees sometimes in the dusk, maybe only in the dusk, maybe only in his head, he’s not sure always where things are. But the image is there, somewhere, shining. A glowing thing. Looking at him. Looking at him and shining with its own light. Truth. Shining. He doesn’t know what it is, but he expects to find it. Somewhere. Along this alley, perhaps, between splashes of his boots. Along that street.

And until then, he goes along.

‘Aiiiih uhmmmms,’ calls the crier.

‘Night comes,’ whispers Peasimy. ‘Light comes.’

It was six days before Thrasne was left alone and could look at the drowned woman again. Under a grove of enormous frag trees, tied up at the Riverside past Shabber, he was able to lift the net once more. He stood on the owner-house roof, staring at her in lantern light where she swayed in the net. She was dry now. Her hair had fluffed out like fine pamet fiber, a warm, lovely brown. Though he had thought her eyes open when he brought her aboard, they were closed now, the lashes lying softly upon her cheeks as she seemed to sleep. His eyes marked her, measured her, trembled over every part of her, fascinated and aroused. He had to hold his hands behind him to keep from touching her. At last he could stand it no longer. He went below and took a live fish from the cook’s cage where it hung over the side. Carrying this squirming burden, he went back to her to thrust the wriggling thing against her, careful not to touch the part of it that touched her. He laid it on the roof, watching closely, and within moments the front part of it stopped thrashing and began to bump against the roof, moved by the tail, which was still alive. The blight lived in her still. He brought the sprayer up and covered her with a powdery, golden shower before lowering her into the shaft once more. The fish was still bumping, and he shoved it overside with a pole.

‘Suspirra,’ he whispered down to her. ‘It’s all right, Suspirra. A few more days’ drying, the good powder will do its work, then you can come out of there …’ Except, he told himself, she could not. Where would he put her? How would he explain?

‘Blint, sir, would you mind making me a small payment on my wages?’

‘How small, Thrasne? And what do you suddenly find yourself so needy of? Isn’t wife Blint seeing well enough to your food and clothing?’

‘It isn’t that, sir. I have a mind to make a large carving, and I’d like to purchase a block of wood from a frag merchant…’

Which block of wood was not easily come by. Some were too crooked and others too straight. Some had harsh graining that would spoil the features, others were too dark. Thrasne found one eventually, at the bottom of the pile, and paid for it with good coin. He put it in one corner of his little room aboard the
Gift,
knives and chisels ostentatiously by. When he began to carve it, the wood opened up to reveal the Suspirra within. Still, it was a largish thing, life size, and it was longer than he liked before it resembled her, longer yet before it was her, line for line. Then was a long time between towns, during which he was never left alone, so that when he finally came to take the drowned woman from the net, replacing her with the carving – in case he might ever need to hide the real woman again – it seemed a season had gone

The drowned woman came gladly to his place, standing in one corner of it as though invited there for dalliance. She looked at him through barely opened eyes, lips not quite curved, as though she were thinking of smiling but had not yet accomplished it.

‘Well,’ said Blint when he saw her first. ‘I still say you should be artist caste, Thrasne. Not that I’d like doing without you. Still, that’s a beauty, that is. Pure fragwood, is it? Surely not the hair? That doesn’t look carved.’

‘Well, no sir,’ he lied without a change of expression. ‘That’s a wig I bought in Tsillis. Somehow the carved hair didn’t look … well, it didn’t look soft.’ Her hair had not looked soft, either, when he had raised her that last time, matted and filthy as it was from the frag leaf and sulphur. He had rinsed her time and again with buckets of clean water,
brushed her hair, and run soap through it. Now it lay gleaming on her shoulders, not unlike the color of frag, yet more silken. The rest of her gleamed in nut-brown colors, also, with a hint of rose at nipples and lips.

‘What do you call her?’ asked Blint.

‘Her name is Suspirra. It was the name of a girl I knew once back in Xoxxy-Do, where you found me.’

‘And where you’ll be again in a year or so. What will she think of this, your having a life-size doll of her to keep you company?’ Blint was roguish, twinkling.

‘She wouldn’t mind.’ Since Thrasne had invented such a girl on the spot, he was not concerned about what she might think. What Blint would think had concerned him, but evidendy Blint thought nothing untoward. If a boatman wished to have a life-sized carving of a beautiful woman in his cabin, well, so be it. It took all kinds, as Blint would say, to do all the things needing doing.

At first Thrasne merely looked at her in the lantern light before he slept or in the early morning before he rose. He touched her face sometimes, almost reverently. He did not presume to touch her breasts, though once he laid his cheek against them, almost sobbing as the promise of softness was betrayed. After a time he stopped touching her at all and began talking to her instead. At a short distance he could forget the blight, forget her petrification, believe that she was living flesh. He still called her Suspirra. He told her all the things he had never been able to tell anyone, not even Blint.

‘Blint saved my life,’ Thrasne told her.

‘I lived in Xoxxy-Do. Halfway round Northshore from anywhere. A mountainous place, where the falls come over the cliffs into World River, and the ships have to tie up behind great shattered rocks along the sheer walls and the boatmen climb steep, twisty stairs to reach the towns above. My father was a builder there, a builder in stone. My mother was an artist – though there was not so much of the caste system there in Xoxxy-Do as I have seen elsewhere. It was she who taught me to carve – or let me learn it, I suppose. She gave me a knife when I was only five. She was a wonderful
carver. When Father finished a place, it was she who ornamented it. They had a great success together. They were very happy. So was I.’

He was silent then, waiting for Suspirra to say something, to comment. He heard her saying, ‘I was not happy. I envy your happy family, Thrasne. My own was not like that.’