Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

“Where did he hear mat?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.” Blint seemed vague, clutching his arm as though it hurt him, disinclined to discuss it further.

They came through the straits without incident and tied up at Shfortown. Blint started to move a bale of pamet, gave a startled exclamation, and fell down. He breathed hard for a moment, cast a frightened look at Thrasne, and lost consciousness.

“Plank aboard,” called Thrasne in a calm voice.

“We just got here,” grumbled a boatman.

Thrasne whispered to him imperatively, nodding at the pier where several Awakeners walked, and the man moved to pull the plank aboard. Two other boatmen carried Blint below as Blint-wife lamented. They moved quickly out onto the tide.

“Sorry, Thrasne,” mumbled the boatman. “Wasn’t thinking. You think he’s took bad?”

“I don’t know,” Thrasne murmured. “Just I’ve been watching him. He keeps clutching his heart as though it hurts him … “

Blint regained consciousness only for a few moments, learned they were well out in the River, gripped Thrasne’s hand gratefully, and died. They put him into a small net with ballast stones and dropped him in the deepest part of the current while Blint-wife sobbed.

When she had had time to steady down, Thrasne went to the owner-house with Blint’s document.

“Blint asked me to look after you,” he said, seeing the fear leave her face a little as he said this. He and Suspirra had thought it out, this approach, after Suspirra told him Blint-wife was afraid.

“I agreed to do it, Blint-wife. He wanted me to take over as owner.”

“You!” she screamed. “You, boy! You nothing boy we picked up from the rocks! Why not me, who was his wife these thirty years? Hah? Tell me that?”

He let her rage, saying nothing, until his silence weighted her down and she quieted, lips trembling.

“Because the men won’t obey you, Blint-wife, and you’ll not be able to find others who will. If you take the Gift, soon she’ll be against a rock in quick-River with none to fend her off. And if you sell her, you’ll not get enough to keep you for your life. But if I’m owner, I promised Blint I’d set you safe ashore and bring payment to you each time the Gift comes round. Enough to live on and be well cared for. So, that’s what Blint planned, and I promised. Unless you have some better plan.”

Which she didn’t. The only thing she cried about then was the possibility of falling into the hands of the Awakeners, but Blint had thought even of that.

He had written: “There’s secret groups in most towns call themselves River men, not boatmen, they’ve had nothing to do with the boats, who see that their people end in the River and not with the Awakeners. See Blint-wife is set near some such group, and gives them what gifts they require to see to her.” So Blint had written. Boatmen wrote a good deal more than other folk, it being the kind of business it was. Thrasne wasn’t the only one aboard with hidden books, either. Blint had some secreted in the owner-house, Awakeners or no Awakeners.

Thrasne, when he went looking, was surprised to find many groups such as Blint had described. They were secretive and careful, but open enough once they knew who he was and what his life had been. Boatmen in general were known to be rebels against the laws of the Awakeners, Thrasne no less than others. He set Blint-wife down in a pretty town called Zephyr, about midway between Shfortown and Bans, full of ponds where lily flowers grew, in a stout little house all her own near a quiet cluster of River men and women.

“You’ll need to hold your tongue, Blint-wife,” he said to her, carrying the last of her goods into the new place to the accompaniment of her incessant clacking. “Else you’ll betray those who would want to help you.”

She quieted, turning a weeping face on him at the last. “I know, Thrasne. Believe me, I hear myself and I know. It’s only I was so lonely there on the River among all those men and not a woman, not a child to talk to. So lonely. I’d have come ashore long since had I not loved him so. Blint. Don’t judge so harsh, Thrasne. There’s more pain in us clacking old women than you’ll ever know, most likely.”