Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

He had intended it as a rhetorical question, but it had caught Fibji’s attention. What good indeed? The mud tombs were scattered everywhere on the endless plains, thinly in most places, thickly around much used campsites. Inside them the bones of the dead, rolled in their robes, sat inside thick mud shells sculptured into the shapes of them as they had been in life. Children played among the clayed-over bones, thinking nothing of it. Death had no reality to children. Fibji herself had played among the tombs, knowing what they were well enough. They had no more reality for her than for other children.

Until that moment. Her father stood at her left hand, staring off across the steppe where the sparse grass moved in a small wind, the half-dried blades making a gentle susurrus, barely audible. To her right was a cluster of mud graves, three almost alike, as though of one family, two men and a woman, their faces staring toward her from the clay. She fancied they would speak in a moment, greeting the King, and in that instant her mind saw into the clay to the place the bones rested and beyond the bones to the people who had once lived. It happened all at once, like a vision. Almost she could have called the names of those who rested in the shells, gone now. They stared out at her with eager eyes, those young men, eyes anxious for battle, hungry for death. And in that instant she knew mortality, all at once, entirely. Even she, Fibji, would stop! She, Fibji, would cease to be!

“Of what good are dead warriors?” her father had repeated, and she had screamed, cowering against him in a sudden spasm of fear so palpable it was like a presence, as though death itself had touched her.

“Fibji?” he had said, looking her full in the face with total understanding. “Daughter?” And then he had held her tightly, waiting for the fear to pass. “I know,” he said. “I know.”

She had been about seven when she’d realized death. When she had taken up the scepter, she had tried to explain why they must not wage war. And yet there were always the young men who rebelled against her. Young bloods, always, in love with their concept of justice, eager to prove themselves, making it easier for the Jondarites, plunging into battle with a scream of defiance and naked chests.

Now she was fifty-five with perhaps a decade or two left before understanding became reality. For the Chancery there was the elixir and an almost immortality. For the people of Northshore, the Promise of Potipur. For the steppe dwellers, the Moor, nothing. Seven tens of years and then the mud grave and the cold wind. Now, though she was closer to that end she had perceived when she was seven, she did not fear it as much for herself as she had feared it then. She feared it more, however, for her people and knew what her father had tried to tell her.

“Think well,” she said now, speaking earnestly to the near-kin, an interruption of their wrangles. “I remember the words of my father. We walked upon the steppe, and he told me the Noor would not have peace until they could answer the question, ‘Of what good are dead warriors?’ Think well, kinfolk. Let us consider the possibility of South shore. But whatever we do, let us save every Noor we can in the doing of it.”

Then she turned away from them, went into the small tent where she slept, where Strenge waited for her now. “Old friend,” she said, “when Medoor Babji, our daughter, begged to be allowed to accompany a troop of Melancholies to the cities of the River, we thought it well she should see the world in which the Noor must live.”

He nodded. “Those she is with do not know who she is or what she is to be.”

“True, but she carries sufficient proof to command them to her service. Here, in her tent, is a cage of seeker birds kept by her servants. Send the birds south. Tell our daughter what we have heard of South shore.”