Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

It was a daughter, not a son, selected to be Queen Fibji’s heir. Her sons were too brave, too puissant, too eager for war. They disbelieved in death. “Tell our daughter,” she said once again, “what we have heard of South shore.”

21

Shavian Bossit drank wine with General of the Armed Might of the Chancery Jondrigar and described the futile embassy of Queen Fibji.

“Honest as the day,” he sneered, reaching down with his toe to tap the floor in emphasis. All the general’s chairs were too large for Bossit, but he forced himself to sit in them, forced himself to fill whatever chair he sat in, whatever room he occupied, whatever role he chose for himself. “The Queen will not lie, General. She has not seen Jondarites herself, and she will not say she has.”

“The woman’s a fool.”

Shavian twitched his shoulders in a quick shrug. “Perhaps. A very tortured fool, General. I would not take her honesty as her only foolishness. She may be foolish enough to attack you.”

The general snorted. “Don’t be stupid, Bossit. So long as she does not see what we do, she remains comfortable. She will not disrupt herself over deaths she does not see.” He considered death in the abstract. To him the victims of his raids were not men, not women or children, not babes as he had once been a babe. They were simply steppe dwellers, Moor, tribesmen, proper targets for a military exercise. How else should troops be sharpened against the inevitable time of need, against the time when someone or something might threaten the Protector of Man? He used the steppe dwellers in various ways, sometimes working parties of young males up into a killing rage, then quelling them in a well-planned exercise; sometimes surprising whole tribes and taking the males captive-for the iron mines or the copper mines or to be given to the woodcutters as slaves-sometimes merely slaughtering them because Jondarites must become accustomed to killing.

“You may underestimate her,” nagged Bossit, staring at the other man with frank curiosity. The general wore his helm liner, its flaps covering his head and neck. Beneath it his face was gray as lava and pitted as dust after a spring shower. No disease had caused this skin coloration or texture. Jondrigar had been born with it, born with the gray, pitted skin and the wild, iron-gray hair-now kept shaved-the massive shoulders, the long arms that let his standing figure touch his knees without stooping. He was a hideous man. He had been as hideous a child. His mother, so Bossit had been told, had screamed at the sight of him and shortly thereafter had died. Bossit, though more or less accustomed to Jondrigar’s appearance, sometimes amused himself imagining what had gone through her head, that faceless woman who had given him birth. Had she thought, perhaps, of Jondrigar’s father? Whoever that might have been? Had she thought of her sins, wondering whether this monstrous baby was some old sin made manifest? What had she thought? Or had she thought at all?

Bossit had had Jondrigar’s antecedents looked into, insofar as that was possible. Jondrigar had been reared by his mother’s sister, Firrabel. Firrabel was as resolute and dutiful as her sister had been flighty and hysterical. It was Firrabel who had taken the ugly infant, reared him, fed him, and schooled him, teaching him more of letters than nine-tenths of Northshore thought necessary; it was Firrabel at last who had sent him to the Chancery to be of service, claiming the Chancery had picked him for that service when he was still a baby, as, in a sense, perhaps it had.

If that is what had happened, it had occurred during a royal Progression. The shore had been lined with people, the goldenship of the Protector moving slowly along the Riverbank with the Protector held high above the crowd in the arms of his servitors, leaning down now and then to toss a glittering token to one of the common people.

And Firrabel, taken up with the drama of it all, had held Jondrigar high above her head, waving him like a banner, him ugly as a mud grave, all wide-eyed, reaching out with his little gray paws, grab, grab at anything. The hands caught the robes of the Protector, and the Protector had laughed and turned to someone else with a remark.