Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

“Haranjus,” she breathes in the grip of discovery. “Potipur’s face! That’s a flier’s face!”

And he, casting his eyes upward, sees the faces of the gods for the first time. Really seeing. Peering down at him with a hooded-eyed cynicism, beaks gaped a little as though hungry. Fliers’ faces. He has never questioned them before, never before even noticed the expressions they wear. How long, he wondered in sudden panic, how long had he been worshiping the fliers without even knowing it?

In the Awakeners’ Tower in Bans, Pamra Don lay sleeping. The Candy Tree filled all the space above her, glitter and shimmer of leaf behind leaf, blossoms squirming open in a sensuous dance of hue and scent, explosions of amber and gold, bursts of gemmy reds, all rustling, flushing, burgeoning into every empty space, thrusting its light and color upon her, drawing her up into itself, weightlessly … toward glory …

Something rasped, scraped. A hard sound. Nothing alive in it. Metal on stone. The Candy Tree shivered. Pamra ignored the sound, hating it, clinging to the tree …

“The new drainage ditches along the Tower wall,” a voice in her mind said clearly. “A worker crew digging drainage ditches.”

With that recognition the Candy Tree dream slipped away like smoke, and she woke thinking of Delia.

Tangled warmth of bedcovers; a ghostly reflection staring back at her from the glass across the cubicle. Last evening, the bleeding. This morning, heavy sleep and slow waking. A longing for comforting arms. That was why she was thinking of Delia today, when she had not thought of her for a season.

Groaning, Pamra rolled herself half upright, huddled at the edge of the bed, hugging herself as the weak tears runneled her face. Oh, it was hard enough to waken oneself after bleeding without thinking of Awakening the workers. She should have known better than to have angered Betchery with her comment about the woman’s appetite. Betchery was well known as a glutton, but she hated being reminded of it. Bleeders had ways to retaliate; unconscionable, but predictable. She mouthed the furred, foggy taste of sick depression; only the result of weakness, true, but enough to make one doubt one’s strength. For a moment, predictably, she regretted being an Awakener. Why keep on when it meant submitting to Betchery and all the other necessary unpleasantness? She responded to both regret and question as she always had. “Because of what my mother did.” Muttering, the words coming out in a single connected string, as though they were all one word, an incantation uttered from habit.

It was years since she had actually heard herself saying those words. At one time they had stirred her anger, renewed her resolution. Now they were only part of the morning litany, the childhood humiliation buried beneath ten years of ritual and acceptance. She slumped away from the bed, aching, sagging, knowing her face must be pale as ice. What a lot to go through. And yet she was so close to senior grade. Senior grade. Senior retreat first, learning the mysteries that juniors were not privy to. Danger there, carefully avoided in thought. Not all those who went on senior retreat returned afterward. Skip over that. Senior retreat, then senior vows, then a luxurious room of her own on the upper floors. Meals cooked to order, not ladled out of the common pot. Respected by everyone, without exception. Even Papa wouldn’t be able to think of her as a failure when she was senior grade.

She leaned against the window, letting the glass cool her skin, remembering Grandma Don’s sarcastic voice: “Pamra’s mother was a coward and a heretic. Pamra herself shows no sign of expiating that sin. She will never make an artist.”

And her own words in response, unplanned, unintended, raggedly defiant in the subdued gathering. “I can be an Awakener. That’s better than artist anytime.”

Silence had opened to receive that statement, an embarrassed silence that grew into coolness, into distaste, into disaffection. There had been no way to back down, no way to change her mind. They had rejected her when the words were said; she could only go on after that.