Singer From The Sea
Singer From The Sea by Sheri S. Tepper part two
SINGER FROM THE SEA
by Sheri S. Tepper
CONTENTS
0: Prologue – Dreamtime
1: Blessingham House
2: The Library
3: The Planet
4:Mahahm
5: An Unexpected Invitation
6: One’s Place in Havenor
7: Aufors Leys
8: A Proposal and What Followed
9: The Planet Ares
10: The Lord Paramount’s Elevator
11: Various Visitations
12: A Short Trip to an Unexpected Destination
13: The Duchess Alicia’s Daughter
14: Gentlemen of the Court
15: Bessany Blodden
16: Absences of Women
17: Merdune Lagoon
18: Nocturne
19: Mission to Mahahm
20: The Malghaste
21: The Mahahmbi
22: Machiniations
23: The Marae Morehu
24: People from the Sea
25: The Empty City
26: The Lord Paramount
27: Shah Mahtt
28: The Assembly
29: The Covenants of Haven
30: The Singer from the Sea
0: Prologue – Dreamtime
In Genevieve’s dream, the old woman lunged up the stairs, hands clutching like claws from beneath her ragtag robe. “Lady. They’re coming to kill you, now!”
She dreamed herself responding, too slowly at first, for she was startled and confused by the old woman’s agitation. “Who? Awhero, what are you talking about.”
“Your father’s taken. The Shah has him. Now his men come for your blood! Yours and the child’s. They’re coming.”
The smell of blood was all around her, choking her. So much blood. Her husband, gone, now her father, taken! Dovidi, only a baby, and never outside these walls!
Genevieve dreamed herself crying, “They’re coming after Dovidi? How did the Shah know about the baby?”
“Your father tell him.”
Endanger his grandson in that way? Surely not. Oh, surely, surely not. “I’ll get him. We’ll go . . .”
“If you take baby, you both be killed.” The old woman reached forward and shook her by the shoulders, so vehement as to forget the prohibitions of caste. “I take him. I smutch his face and say he one of us. They scared to look and they never doubt . . .”
“Take me, too …”
“No. You too tall. Too strange looking. They know you!”
“Where? Where shall I go?”
“I sing you Tenopia. Go like Tenopia. By door, your man’s cloak with his sunhelmet, with his needfuls still there, in pockets.” She pulled at the rags that hung from her shoulders, shreds tied together to make a tattered wrapping. “Take this! You tall for woman, so you walk past like man. Malghaste man. Go now!”
In her dream, she babbled something about getting word to the ship, then she went, thrust hard by Awhero’s arms, strong for a woman her age. She fled to the courtyard, to the door through the city wall, a door that stood ajar! She could see directly into the guardpost outside—empty. Never empty except now! It smelled of a trap!
Beside the door hung the outer robe with its sunhelmet hood lining, behind the door half a dozen staves stood below a pendant cluster of water bottles, like flaccid grapes. She shut and bolted the inviting door, snatched the cloak, a staff, a waterbottle, and fled back through the house to the kitchen wing, calling to someone as she went past the kitchens to the twisting stairs that only the malghaste used. Awhero had shown her the hatchway below, and she went directly to it, struggling into the robe as she fled, draping the rags around her shoulders to make it look as if she were clad only in tatters. As she slipped through the hatchway she heard voices shouting and fists thundering at the door she had barred.
She came out in a deep stairwell where coiled stairs led up to the narrow alley. The alley led to the street. She went up, and out, head down, a little bent, the staff softly thumping as she moved slowly, like any other passerby. Ahead of her was the narrow malghaste gate through the city wall, never guarded, never even watched, for this was where the untouchables carried out the city’s filth. The stained and tattered rags marked her as one of them. Outside that gate a small malghaste boy guarded a flock of juvenile harpya, their fin-wings flattened against the heat, and beyond the flock was a well with a stone coping. The area around it was sodden, and she felt the mud ooze over her toes as she filled the bottle, slung it over her shoulder and walked away on the northern road, still slowly, as any malghaste might go. She did not run until she was out of sight of the town.