Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

“I don’t know why the Queen needs all that coin,” Riv Lymeen had said once during a fireside argument with Medoor. “I’ve been at Queen Fibji’s encampment, and even her big audience tent isn’t that wonderful. My uncle Jiraz has one almost that big.”

The leader had intervened in that argument, too, saving Lymeen from a pounding. “None of your business why she needs it, Lymeen. It’s for some great plan of her own, for all us Noor; for us here on Northshore getting coin out of shore-fish pockets and for them on the steppes, fighting off the Jondarites. She’s planning for all of us, woman, so we don’t question what she needs it for. She needs it, and that’s enough.”

These reflections fled as the leader raised his signal bells and struck them with a flexible hammer, blindingly fast, the shrill tunes cutting through all the babble of the marketplace. “Assembly,” succeeded rapidly by “Stores,” “Wagoneers,” and then “Return to camp.”

Medoor had been on stores detail for one Viranel, with some days of the duty yet to run. She coiled her fish skin whip into its case, slinging it over her shoulder as she looked around for the others. Riv Lymeen, very white teeth in an almost black face and a voice like a whip stroke; Fez Dooraz, plump and wobbly with sad brown eyes; and old white-headed Zyneem Porabji, who could add up in his head faster than the merchants could on their beads. The three of them were already together at the head of Market Street, waiting for her.

“Come on, Babji,” Lymeen called, her fuzzy head wagging disapproval and her lips curled to show her fangs. “Step it up, Medoor. All the camp will go hungry waiting on you.”

Which was unfair, for Lymeen often scamped her whips late in the afternoon. “Match coin!” Medoor growled at her, pleased to see the other turn away without accepting the challenge. Whatever Riv might say about Medoor being distractible and absentminded, she couldn’t say Medoor was lazy-something Riv Lymeen had often heard said of herself. The amount of coin each Melancholic gained was an accurate measure of the amount of effort each Melancholic expended. “Match coin” was a way of ending argument on the matter.

“Leader says to see can we get song-fish,” remarked old Porabji. “Fillets or whole. Some to eat tonight and some to dry and smoke for the trip. I’ll see to that. You, Babji, go along to the wine merchants. Lymeen, you to Grain Alley, and Dooraz will see to the greens. If there’s fresh puncon fruit, call me. They’ll want the price of a copper bracelet for it, but maybe I can talk them down. Remember, we’re buying for tonight plus two days. We’re westering tomorrow. Three or four more towns, Taj Noteen says, and then back to the steppes.

Three or four more towns. Then the long walk northward, • through the dry, white-podded pamet fields on the arid heights I and the wet grainfieids along the little streams, blue with tasseled bloom. Many days with no markets, no one allowed to sell them food, and fliers hanging high, black dots on the pale sky, to see they ate nothing from the fields. Many days living on what they pulled in the carts. Then the line of watchtowers, marking the edge of Northshore, and beyond that the steppes. There would be roasted jarb root. Medoor would never understand why anyone would dry jarb root skins and smoke them as the Mendicants did-visions or no visions-when one could bury them in the coals in their skins and eat them, sweet and satisfying as nothing else edible could ever be. And there would be stewed grains from the traveler fields, small grain patches that were harvested, weeded, fertilized, and replanted by any Noor who traveled by. Every Noor carried seed grain in a pouch, and every Noor learned to control his or her bladder, too, so as not to waste fertilizer on empty sand.

Medoor longed for the steppes, that great sea of grass dotted with the gray-green rosettes of jarb plants and interrupted by occasional thorn trees with their tart, crimson fruit. The rivers of the steppes were full of silvery cheevle tiny toothsome fish, perfectly safe to eat and equally full of shiggles plump, ground-running birds that could not be eaten at all unless one cooked them with grain but when cooked with grain tasted of heaven. Medoor told herself she would trade all the wines and sweetmeats of Northshore for the food of the steppes.