Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

“We must have festival,” exclaimed Joy. “We must have a celebration of our own! I haven’t made a festival dinner for twenty years. With Pamra and Lila here, we must! With wine! We’ll open up the big front room we used to use!”

Pamra found herself drawn in, involved, sent scurrying here and there for everything imaginable, pulled in to help with long, detailed recipes. There was something a little frantic in the way Joy set herself to this task, as though she wanted terribly to remember, or to forget. Or perhaps it was only to make a festival for Lila. Festivals were for children, after all. The Candy Tree. That was for children.

On conjugation evening, Pamra went to the lookout rocks, watching for Neff, seeing no sign of him. Well, she told herself, he couldn’t come. Not until after Conjunction. With the water this high, it was sure that Thrasne wasn’t going to be signaling, either. Still, she climbed the rocks one more time.

There were flowers on the stone. She went on to the mossy place, holding her breath, to find him there, already there, moving like a windblown cloud in a tiny circle. “Pamra,” he sang to her in a voice unlike his own. His eyes were so bright she thought he might be drugged. “Pamra, tell me about the River.”

He wouldn’t wait for her to tell him anything, wouldn’t let her sit down. “Tell me about the Towers. Tell me about fishing.” He wanted to know everything, couldn’t sit still to listen to anything. “I have to go back.”

“Come again tomorrow, Neff. I’ll wait for you tomorrow.”

“Come again tomorrow,” he cried. “Oh, Pamra, tell me of my children … “

Her mouth fell open in surprise, but he did not wait to be told. He fled, leaving the smell of himself behind, a rich fragrance that made her breathe as though she had been running. When she returned to the house, her trousers were wet between her legs. She washed herself at the spring, hanging the clothes out to dry, drying herself in the wind. Her nipples were hard, like little stones. She had never felt them like that, so painful. She put her hands over them, trying to soften them, but it only made them worse. She should have been cold in the wintery wind, but she was warm, fiery, alive with the dance. It was the drums, she knew, the hectic batter of the drums, like her own heartbeat gone mad.

The oldsters made their festival dinner, scattered the seeds of the Candy Tree upon Lila’s cot, sang festival songs in quavering old voices, unsure of the words. There was wine, more of it than was good for any of them, Pamra felt, repeatedly emptying her own glass out the window, only to have it refilled solicitously by Joy. Then it was over. They had exhausted themselves as if purposely, worn themselves fine and dry so they could only fall into their beds.

“You’ll sleep, won’t you?” asked Joy, nodding with weariness, half-drunk. “You will sleep.”

Pamra yawned. Of course. Even without the wine, she would sleep.

In the deep dark she woke, sitting straight up in the bed, hearing Lila stir beside her, where she, too, had heard the sound. Pamra had not heard it before but knew in the instant what it was. Neff’s voice calling in the night, bell-like, insistent, reverberating with an inexpressible vitality. “Come. Come. I’m waiting for you.” Farther off were other such sounds, other such calls. Come, come. She heard only Neff, disregarding the others as so much noise.

She threw a cape over her nightdress, sandals on her feet, went out into the night, three moons from the top of the sky casting diffused shadows under every tree. “Come,” he called. “Come.” The voice came from the woods, from the meadows deep in the woods. She began to run, wondering what wonderful thing he had found to be calling so, her breath eager in her throat and her skin burning. She had never run so before, never so long and tirelessly, never run before without pain or effort.

Trunks of trees going by, dark and light, masses of moon and shade, splashing of stream shallows, silver fountains beneath her feet, meadow grass dotted with pale faces of winter-blooming flowers. “Come.” A hillside of moss velvet. “Come.”