She took a deep breath and went on, “Other castes denigrate us, it is true, calling us names and making jokes about our caste. When I was a child I thought this was because of something atrocious or dirty about Awakeners. I came to know that it is simple fear. The other castes know they will come into our hands, and they are afraid. That is all.” She looked firmly into the eyes of the gigglers, of the sneerer, and found there the fear she sought. “Just as you are fearful now. Perhaps you worry that the Awakeners somehow can decide whether one is Sorted Out or not. I tell you we cannot control it, but without us it would not happen. Your fear, however, is a key which may open the door of our Tower. If you fear us, join us and conquer your fear. Learn the truth of what we say.” The rapture was seething within her now, as it did on the steps of the Tower at morning dedication, or sometimes during prayer, or when she had gone long without food, or during these sessions of preaching to the youth of Bans.
She felt herself smiling, felt the radiance of it, knew that her face was glowing as she did it. This was her heritage from pretty Mama, this smile, and her gift from Potipur. The gigglers had stopped their fidgeting, the sneerer his facial contortions. She might not have them as applicants, but they would not mock for a time. The other one, the pale-faced youth who had fastened himself upon her words as a baby upon the breast-him she had.
“Will you show me?” he begged. “Show me the Tower?”
She took his hand, letting the others go with an expression of tender regret. They would remember what she had said. “Remember the Tower with your gifts,” she whispered to them as she turned away. They would make gifts in the future, certainly they would when they were old. None of her effort was wasted. She sighed, feeling the rapture fade. Until next time.
She took the youth to the Tower, as she had taken others. So precious they were. Young, full of idealism and wonder. She could not resist them, nor they her. From a great distance, the lookout had seen her coming, and when the door opened the Superior stood there in all her robes with the entourage around her. “Come,” said Pamra, giving the youth her hand once more. “Come into the Tower.” Then he was welcomed with wine and praise and flattery and a very late night, as she had been in her time.
She hadn’t known what it really meant then, no more than he did now: the bloodletting, the endless hours in chapel without sleep during those first years, the constant repetition of litany. She had only seen the robes and the glittering staffs, the solemn figures at the forefront of any procession* only heard the whispers concerning the Payment of Life. The rest-the rest hadn’t been mentioned. She had been only twelve when she’d said, “I can be an Awakener … “ Said it out of bravado and hurt and in ignorance, only to have the rapture become her reason for living.
She woke late. An officious senior caught her lingering at her ceremony upon the steps and sent her with two or three others onto the wastelands north of the Tower to gather Tears of Viranel. So, she had lost the second day’s recruiting by her own inattention to duty. “My own sin,” she’d told the Three in a whisper. “My own sin. Forgive.”
The Tears were so small as to be almost invisible against the stones, transparent, drop-shaped, attached to the soil from which they grew by a glassy, hair like root. They grew thickly but in widely scattered patches, each patch marked by a tall, skull-topped pole. Impossible to transplant, fruiting only during second summer, Tears grew throughout the lands of Northshore, when and where they would, and the skull poles warned away the unwary. Of late, the patches of fungus had been even more scattered, more difficult to find, almost as though something had been rooting them out. This was an unholy thought, and Pamra made a religious gesture, ashamed of herself.