“Did she confide in you?”
“No. She didn’t confide in me.”
“Did you lust after her?”
He hadn’t, really, not in any way that was culpable. “No,” he said. “I didn’t lust after her.”
“Tell us about discipline. It is said you never whipped Pamra.”
“I never whipped any of them unless they deserved it. Of the five of them assigned to me, I only whipped three.”
“Why did you whip them?”
“Because they were lazy.”
“Was Pamra never lazy?”
“No. Pamra was a zealot. She was never lazy. She believed. She believed everything.”
“Didn’t such excess of belief seem at all suspicious to you?”
“Why would it? That’s how I believed when I was seven or eight years old. It seemed childlike. Endearing. I thought it was funny.”
They went away again. He pushed a shutter aside and leaned in a window, exhausted. His room was on a corner, with two windows. On this side the flat, bleak moorlands stretched to the foot of the jagged mountains, the sun rolling like a red ball on their tips. He could not see the moons.
For a moment the world whirled, shook, and there was a great darkness behind his eyes. He could not see the moons. After a time he figured it out. The moons circled this globe at its center line, above the World River. He could have seen them, low on the horizon, except for the mountains. The Teeth had bitten off the moons. Not seeing them was like an accusation. But an accusation of what? “I really haven’t done anything,” he snarled furiously into the dark. A dark anger welled up from within him, and he tried to wrap himself in it. Sleep would not come. He rose to run around and around the small room until he was panting, gasping, his heart thundering away inside him as though it would burst. His hands knotted, unknotted. He would kill the fliers. Strangle them. If he ever got out of this place, he would kill them. One at a time, lingeringly. Wherever he found them. At last, worn out, he fell once again into that sleep from which they always woke him.
“Where did Pamra take the workers?”
“I don’t know that she took them anywhere. If she took them anywhere, some of you must have seen her. How could she take a whole pitful anywhere without the Servants seeing it? I didn’t see her. I don’t know.”
One of the Talkers looked at the other, almost disconcerted, he thought. Had he told them something they didn’t know? Suggested something? They gave him no time to think about it. “Did you ever discuss the workers with her?”
“Discuss? No. Except in class. I had her for a class in hermeneutics. Scripture. The Scripture talks about workers.”
“Did she doubt the Scripture?”
“Pamra? I told you Pamra never doubted anything.”
“Did you lust after her?”
Perhaps he had. Perhaps he had. “Yes,” he said. “Sometimes. But I didn’t do anything about it.”
They went away, leaving him, returned again, went away. After an endless time they seemed to tire of it.
“Tomorrow,” they said to him. “Tomorrow you will go to the Ascertainers.”
He didn’t know what that meant; he didn’t care. It would be different from this, something to look forward to. Perhaps they would give him an opportunity to kill some of them. He went to sleep, dreaming of them tied to the stake and he with the whip in his hand.
10
Pamra, at first fearful and hostile in equal measure, became gradually accustomed to being aboard the Gift. Thrasne had given her a room in the owner-house with a comfortable bunk, a basket for the child, Lila, and a chest full of simple clothing such as the boatmen wore. He taught her to braid her hair in River fashion, high in the back, with bead-decorated locks around the face. He named her Suspirra, as he had named her mother before her and his lady of dreams before that. Relieved of the constant bleeding of the Tower, which kept the juniors both slender as saplings and free of any trace of sexual feeling, she put on a little flesh. Though she looked unlike the woman he had found in the tavern and much unlike the Awakener he had seen outside the Tower, she looked more like his Suspirra than ever, and with this Thrasne was content.