Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

The Awakener was indeed very angry. He could hear her clearly as she spat at a long-faced, miserable looking man before her. “Fulder Don! It was your duty to come to us if you thought she would do this!”

“I didn’t think she would,” the long-faced man said plaintively, his voice flat, almost without expression. “I thought it was just her talk. She talked about a lot of things she never did. I didn’t think she’d ever leave the baby. She cared so for the baby.” The little girl in his arms was crying. About three or four years old, Thrasne thought. Old enough to remember what was going on, without being old enough to understand it.

An old woman with a tight, lipless mouth stood beside the depressed-looking man. “Fulder Don,” she said, “I’ve known since you married that silly fool she’d do something like this. I wouldn’t have thought heresy, but who could put it past her? She hadn’t an ounce of loyalty in her.”

“Mama,” begged the man placatingly. “Now, Mama … “

“Don’t ‘Mama’ me. You married beneath you and beneath artist’s caste, and that’s all there is to it. Take that idiot child and give her to Delia, will you. I can’t stand the sight of her. It wasn’t enough her mother had to do this dreadful thing, now you’re saddled with the child for her whole life.”

“Well, Mama, she’s my child, too.”

“I’m not even certain sure of that.” The old woman stomped off down the pier, the cane in her hand slamming down hi a furious whop, whop, whap, which sent angry echoes booming under the pier over the lick and slap of the water.

The Awakener threw up her hands, twirled her staff, and began a slow, mind-curling chant. Thrasne shut it out, humming to himself. He couldn’t stand Awakener chants. If it was to escape this, this chant-driven pretense of life, this shambling excuse for existence, he did not blame the nameless woman who had drowned herself. The band of workers turned from the River to shamble back up the pier, following the glittering staff, eyeless, faceless, only their feet and hands indicating what lay beneath the loosely woven canvas sacks and hoods they wore. “Papa,” the little girl was pleading. “Papa.” The man paid her no attention, merely stood staring at the River as though he wanted nothing more than to be deep inside it himself. The passivity of that face moved Thrasne. His hands twitched, wanting to capture that face. This was a man who had given up. He would not do anything, not ever again. He would only float, pushed by the tide of others’ lives, waiting his end under the canvas hood, deserving it. The child turned, caught by the watchfulness in Thrasne’s face, stared at him, eyes wide and accepting with something of that same passivity. “Papa,” she said again, hopelessly.

A woman came out of the crowd to take the child, a nothing much of a woman, small and plump, older than middle-aged. “There, there, my Pammy,” she said. “There, there.” The child sobbed once and laid her head on the woman’s shoulder. That, too, Thrasne coveted, that line of child against the woman’s body, limp and exhausted, giving up everything in the acceptance of this comfort.

Thrasne moved toward the man. What had the old woman called him? Fulder Don. “Fulder Don,” he asked casually, as though he were only another stand about, “why did your wife go in the River? How do you know that she did?”

The man looked at his feet, mumbling. “A fisherman saw her. She was sick. She was afraid to die. Afraid to risk Sorting Out. My mother … was always at her. Telling her how bad she was. How incapable. I guess she thought … “ His voice trailed away into nothing as he stared into the water, his long, mournful face intent upon another time.

“She was so beautiful,” he whispered at last. “So very beautiful.”

Something in the intonation made Thrasne look at him again. Yes. Under the shabby cloak the man wore the smock of the artist caste. An artist. Not a successful one, from the looks of it. For which Fulder Don’s mama probably blamed the dead woman. Thrasne turned quickly to return to the Gift of Potipur, his hands itching for his carving knife. The man, the woman and child; if he was lucky, he could get both the carvings started before Blint found something else for him to do.