Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

“There’s a baby, isn’t there?”

“Baby? There’s been no wife there for six, seven years now. No. There was a baby when the wife killed herself, little girl, about four. But she’s tennis, now. Half-grown. Lives with old Saint Delia the gardener on Outskirt Row.”

“Saint Delia?”

The barber laughed, amused at himself. “Well, that’s what they call her. Anybody needs something, anybody hungry or sick, they can go to old Delia and get taken care of. More of a saint than I ever thought Thoulia was, that’s for sure.” He laughed, somewhat uncomfortably, making the ware-eyes gesture to keep Laughers away.

Thrasne went to Outskirt Row to find Delia’s house. It was the one with the greatest profusion of flowers, the most sweetly scented with herbs. He stood in a redolence of fragrance and color, peering over the low wall. The little girl was there, crouched over a book as though to protect it from thieves, twiddling one long lock of hair with her fingers, winding and unwinding. The book was licit from the looks of it. It had the Tower seal on the cover.

“Pamra,” came a voice from inside. “Come have your supper.”

The girl rose, half sighing, closing the book unwillingly. As she turned, she caught sight of Thrasne standing there and hesitated for a moment, puzzled, almost as though she might have remembered seeing him before. Then she shook her head and went into the house, leaving him as shaken as he had been by the first sight of the drowned woman. For it was she again, line for line, in a smaller frame and compass, a younger face. There was the same passion, the same willful disbelief, the same stubborn intensity turned within. He knew, having seen her face, that she lived inside herself, seeing her own visions, making her own world, and not seeing half of what went on around her.

Seriously shaken, he made his way back to the Gift. What message could he give the drowned woman? How could he pierce the isolation of her blight to tell her her child was well? The child who was like her, line for line.

At last he printed a message large and put it upon the wall before the drowned woman’s eyes. “PAMRA IS WELL. DELIA CARES FOR HER.” He could think of nothing briefer, nothing more reassuring. He did not really know whether she would see it or not. Perhaps time was slower for her. Perhaps it would take her a year to see it. He was careful not to move her so that her view of it would be undisturbed.

They still talked.

“Blint is getting older,” he confided to her. “He talks to me all the time about not being as young as he once was and needing someone to be a son to him.”

“If he says that, he hopes you will be such a son.”

“That’s what I thought. Almost as though he needs reassuring about something. When he talks so, Blint-wife makes a kind of face, as though she had tasted something bitter.”

“It is bitter for women not to have the fruit of their bodies when they are denied the world’s fruits. Bitter to have her man seek for a son in his old age. Men, who harvest the world’s fruits, care less for their own.”

“It’s true she gets little of the world’s fruit,” Thrasne agreed. “The River is a man’s world.”

The thought stayed with him as he moved among the boatmen in the following years, proving its truth to himself again and again. Those who had little enough of the world’s fruits were most needy of their own. He thought often of the old woman, Fulder Don’s mother. What had she had, after all, but Fulder Don himself? Had him, and had been disinclined to share him. Had she driven his first wife to her death, too? As she had his Suspirra? If she were dead, which he was not at all certain of.

Blint came to him one day with a bulky document, wrapped about with tape and sealed with wax. “My boy, I want you to keep this. I want you to swear oath to me you’ll see I go into the River when my time comes and not into any town workers’ pit.” He looked deep into Thrasne’s face, gray lines around his eyes, loose jowls betraying a loss of flesh. His hands trembled, too, and Thrasne was moved to such a sympathy of feeling, it was a time before he could bring himself to speak.