Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

“How long before we leave?” she asked for the tenth time.

“Three hours,” answered Medoor Babji. “Perhaps four.”

“And how many boats?”

“A dozen have gone that we know of. Fifteen are readying to go. There will be more. There are Noor in every town, buying boats, hiring boats. There will be hundreds, thousands.”

“If we get away before they kill us all.”

“We will. The battles are all on the steppes, behind us where the Jondarites are fighting the crusaders. The towns are not involved.”

“Not yet!”

“Oh, I agree, great Queen. They will be. But they are not, yet.”

“How will we find one another, when we get there?” “Those who leave from towns west of Vobil-dil-go are to march east when they arrive at Southshore. Those who leave from towns east of Vobil-dil-go are to march west. When we arrive on Southshore, we will build a great tower upon the shore. We will light beacons on the top of it at night. We will leave messages in cairns upon the beaches. We will send runners. We will find one another, great Queen.”

“And the islands of the River …”

“Are full of friendly folk, human and Treeci. And the strangeys of the depths are not to be feared.”

“And Southshore waits.”

What they said to one another was a litany. A ritual. They had repeated it a hundred times. Perhaps the Queen would say it a hundred times more on the boat, convincing herself.

“Does that man know you’re pregnant?” Medoor Babji looked at her swollen belly and laughed.

“It would be very hard for him not to know.”

“What does he say about that?”

“Thrasne says very little about anything. I have told him it is his. He got a strangely bemused expression on his face. It seems to me he smiles a great deal more recently, though he still goes into those odd abstractions and stares at the water. I know then that he is thinking of Pamra Don.”

The Queen had resolved not to remonstrate, and now she shut her teeth firmly upon her tongue. Her whole self writhed at this self-imposed silence, and she sought a subject that was not—or would not seem to be—related. She would talk about. . . about something global.

“Medoor Babji, since you are my heir, let me share my mind with you as my father once shared his mind with me. Since I received your message, I have spent much time in thought. Perhaps my thoughts will interest you.

“When I was very young, I often wondered what I was for. The boys, most of them, seemed to know. They were to be warriors. The girls were to bear children. But my father told me I was to be Queen, and we did not have a queen then, so I could not see what one was. Whatever it might be, I was quite sure it was something wonderful and eternal. Then, when I was about seven or eight—with some it happens earlier, I suppose; there may be some with whom it never happens—the understanding came all at once, in one hot burst, that Queen or no, I would not always be, that someday I would die and stop being. I screamed and wept. I thought I knew something no one else knew, but my father comforted me. He told me it was the first accomplishment of mankind, to know our own mortality, a thing the beasts and fishes never know.

“So, it seemed my father knew all about it. At that age, grown people seem to know everything about everything—you accused me of that once, I remember.

“Well, when it was time to sleep, back then when I was a child, I would lie on my blankets and go drifting into a certain world. I remember little of it now, except that there was music everywhere, and fountains of pearl, and beasts one could ride, and funny little furry things that talked. …

“So, one day I said to my father that I wished he would get me a—what was it I called them? a foozil or some such—get me a foozil. And he asked me what a foozil was, and I explained that it was one of the furry, talking animals, and he told me I had made it all up. Imaginary, he said.