“Gone? Away?”
“Gone. Dead. Lying on the funeral woodpile down there in the village, all dressed in his pretty feathers, all spent. All the pretty males. Dancing, dancing, all danced out, mated out. I’ve thought about it sometimes, how it would be. Knowing it would all go so fast, all in a few years, a few days. Losing friends, losing words, becoming what they are at the end. No wonder they comfort themselves by asking their sisters to tell them of their children. Remember! I told you about that. ‘Tell me of my children!’ Did Neff ever say that to you? Probably not. He was a Talker, poor little tyke. Talkers shouldn’t have to go through it. They want to know so bad. He wanted to know so much …
“No one to tell him of his children, now no children. Him gone. His seed gone. His line gone.”
The old woman was crying. “He was like a son to Joy. Like her own son.”
“I’ll go there. I’ll explain.”
“Oh, stupid girl, stay away from them. They’re singing now. They’ll sing each name, and some young Treeci girl will stand up and sing that she carries the children of that one. They’ll sing Neff s name, and there’ll be no one, no one at all, but that’s better than having it be you, you stupid human, trying to explain!”
Bethne cried herself away. Pamra crouched on the floor, unable to move, to think. Dead. Unable to move. Dead. The smell of him was still in her nostrils, the sight of him dancing.
Tell him of his children.
12
Apprentice Melancholic Medoor Babji accepted a fat copper coin from her weeping victim, gave the paunchy snop a dozen halfhearted strokes of her fish skin whip, then put a glass Sorter coin into the sweating merchant’s palm.
“May the Sorters accept the pain you have already borne as payment for your sins,” she singsonged in formula, slipping the merchant’s warm metal into her own jingling purse. Medoor’s purse was almost as stout as the merchant, full of the coin paid for whipping Northshoremen across a hundred towns this season before ending here in Chantry.
“Amen,” said the merchant, wiping his eyes. Though why he should weep, Medoor could not say. Medoor had not struck him hard enough to get through the lard to anything essential, a fact brought forcibly to Medoor’s attention by her Leader, Taj Noteen, who came up behind her and cuffed her across the back of her head.
“The man paid you, Babji! Put some muscle into it! What’s all this patty-pat, as if you were playing with a baby?”
“He was such an old fart,” Medoor responded, knowing it was the wrong thing to say.
“So much more in need of Sorter compassion!” The leader leered at her, daring her to say anything more, an invitation Medoor sensibly refused. She knew as well as Noteen did that Sorters, Sorter compassion, and Sorter coin were all equally mythological, but it was Melancholic policy to appear to believe in the myth, at least when moving among the shore-fish-so-called because the townees schooled at the edge of the River, waiting to be caught, just as song-fish did in the waters along the shore.
“The shore-fish believe, they pay because they believe,” Noteen was fond of saying. “Who are you to question their belief?”
Which was another way of telling Medoor not to bite the hand that offered her hard metal coin. Coin that would buy food, wine, woven pamet cloth. Coin to send to the Noor kindred on the steppes-some for the near-kin of each Melancholic; some for the coffers of the Queen. Thinking of Queen Fibji, Medoor made a reverent gesture and saw the leader’s glance change to one of understanding approval. He thought he understood how she felt, but he did not, not at all. Medoor Babji had more reason than most to care about Queen Fibji. It was Queen Fibji’s need for coin that made any of them willing to serve a term as Melancholies, despite the precarious life of the Noor steppe dwellers and the relative luxury the Melancholies knew. But Medoor’s feelings for the Queen were of a different kind and intensity. And private, she reminded herself. Very private.