The gates were gone now. People went east if they felt like it, though some felt very uncomfortable about it. And sure as sure, some oldsters couldn’t stand the changes and had to carry their dead west for the Holy Sorters, even though everyone knew there weren’t any such things. The Rivermen kept watch, though. There weren’t any bodies left lying around to attract fliers, even though no one had seen any fliers for weeks. Sooner or later, everyone ended up in the River.
Or across it. For there was word of a new land there, a far land, a land where the Noor were going—and smart of ‘em, too, if the Peasimites were coming. Now and then someone might stop a moment and look in that direction, saying the word over as though it had some magical meaning.
Southshore.
They were somewhere near the Island of the Dead when the two old people died. First Tharius Don, all at once, with one deep, heaving breath; then Kessie, calling his name once and then not breathing again, as though there were no reason to breathe once the other was gone. Thrasne found Medoor Babji crying over them, the tears lying on her cheeks like jewels, and he kissed them away, comforting her.
“Aiee, Medoor Babji, but those were old, old folk. Tharius Don told me he’d lived hundreds of years. More than you and me put together ever will.”
“I know,” she wept. “It’s just they loved each other, Thrasne.”
She would not be comforted, but she did stop crying. The late evening mist hid the waters, and he couldn’t see whether the island was really near or not, though he smelled it, or another one like it, and had been doing so all day. There was a peculiar odor about the Island of the Dead, a tree fragrance unlike any other, and he could detect it now, faintly borne on the light wind. The two old people lay on the deck, side by side, and the Noor Queen came out of the owner-house to say some words over them in a high, singsong voice before Obors-rom slid their bodies into the River.
They sank down, out of sight, quickly, as though eager to depart. Medoor Babji clung to Thrasne almost fearfully, and he held her close beside him, bringing her into his bed that night, big belly and all, feeling the babe kicking inside her with a kind of quiet joy and fear all at once. There had still been no words, no real words, between them. They had not talked of Pamra Don or of Thrasne’s feelings. He did not know how she felt about him, really, or how a queen’s daughter would be allowed to feel. He was afraid to ask. And yet she lay there beside him, deeply asleep, and he took it to mean something.
In the night he dreamed of Lila.
She had become a creature wholly strange, not human at all and yet, one could have said, not totally unlike. There was something one thought of as a head, with organs of sight and smell and perhaps taste and hearing, this part already fringed at the edges. There were parts that could have been arms and legs on their way to being something else, not flippers or fins, precisely, and yet fulfilling those functions as well as other, unimaginable ones. Her voice, when she spoke, was Lila’s voice, a child’s chuckling voice using words that set up unfamiliar chains of association in his mind as he heard her demanding to know why Medoor Babji was grieving.
“Medoor Babji was crying because they died, and they loved one another,” he explained to her.
“My people tell me humans are maddened by death,” she said. “It comes too quickly, severing love. People need time to become accustomed to it. Either they dwell on it all the time, worrying their lives away to make monuments to themselves, or they refuse to think of it at all, like Queen Fibji’s young warriors. It becomes an obsession with men, one way or the other, so they forget to live. Like you, Thrasne.”
“I don’t understand,” Thrasne said in his dream. “What has that to do with me?”