Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

When they came to the island, however, she was less sure.

There were little houses along the shore, most tumbled into piles of gray fragments, log and plank silvered by the sun and the River wind. At last they saw a vague line of smoke ascending, and this led them to a rickety pier and a ramshackle dwelling showing light among the trees.

The woman who answered their calls had aged like the house. She was rust and dust held together by a net of wrinkles with gray hair wisping around her like smoke. “Strinder? Me? Well, of course I’m Strinder, and damn near the last. Did you say you were old Blint’s boy? I seem to remember he had a boy. Think of that, and come in.”

There were two others on the island, as old as she; an old curmudgeon named Stodder and her own cousin, Bethne. “Joy,” she said to Pamra with a keen glance from under bushy brows. “That’s my name. You wouldn’t think it, would you? Not exactly a joyful object, am I? Often wished I’d had a name that aged better. Sophronia. Eugenia. Something with some dignity to it.”

She looked them over, Pamra and the slow baby. She did not remark then or ever upon the baby’s strangeness and Pamra came to believe for a time it was because human babies were so far in her past she had forgotten what the usual ones were like. Lila might have fitted her memories of babyness as well as any other.

When Thrasne left her, it was with a goodly supply of food and with a large supply of wood cut for the old woman’s fires. Though it was warmer on the island than on the shore, the evenings would still be cold for the next three months. Thirty days was the minimum time the repairs would take, but it could be three times that. After thirty days she was to watch the northern shore each evening, a little before dusk, to see three pillars of smoke. When she saw them, she was to make the two or three day hike along the flat shore to the western end of the island and camp there until he came for her. “If it takes us longer than that, we may be delayed by the Conjunction tides,” he told her. “So don’t be impatient. You can get down to the west end all right?”

“Oh, yes, yes,” said the old woman. “She can get there easy enough. There’s no more wilderness on Strinder’s Island. No more wildness at all. Except for … well, except for what there is, of course.” If this had been meant to convey something, it failed. Pamra was too agitated at being left behind to pay much attention.

The Gift pulled away from the isle, Thrasne turning from the high rudder deck to wave to her. When sight of him had faded into the River haze, down and cross stream toward the distant shore, she turned back to the house, the old woman meeting her halfway there.

“Oh, girl, I saw he left you puncon jam. Couldn’t help but see it. I haven’t had puncon jam since my youngest daughter was born, she that’s gone now and left only the memory. Would it be ugly of me to beg puncon jam on our fry cakes tonight? I do have a light hand with fry cakes.” For a time it was as though Joy had returned, so young she sounded, and Pamra was ashamed not to greet this enthusiasm with more spirit of her own. Though she kept counseling herself to be calm, not to consider herself injured, still she felt bereft, grieved, and abandoned, senseless though that was. She found herself blaming Thrasne, senseless though that was as well, ashamed of it and yet unable to stop. Still, faced with the old woman’s delight in having company, she assented to the scheme of puncon jam, assented to having Stodder and Bethne as guests. These three were the entire remnant of the Strinders. There had been some younger who had gone away on the River, there had been many younger and older who had died. And now these three remained, not one among them who had ever seen the northern shore or an Awakener or a Servant of Abricor. They knew only the island and the waters around it and the Treeci, who shared both with them.