Neverness (40 page)

   "Is it possible I don't know?"

   "But you're a scryer; scryers know these things, don't they? What is the first training of a scryer? - to 'think like DNA,' isn't that it?"

   "You're a pilot, you should know," she mocked. Her laughter bubbled out of her in a clear stream. "Mallory, Mallory, sweet Mallory."

   "Listen to me," I said. "It's a humiliating thing for a child to be called a bastard." (I should mention that although on many planets the word "bastard" simply means one who is born out of wedlock, I use the word in its broader sense to identify those unfortunates who do not know who their parents or grandparents are. What does it matter if the mother and father are married or not? What matters is knowing one's genetic endowment, the heritage of fine chromosomes, the tracing of one's abilities - and liabilities - back through the generations.)

   I think she smiled at me, then. "The child won't be a bastard. I promise you."

   Because I thought of myself as a bastard, I took this to mean that I was not the child's father. I was disappointed and my head suddenly seemed as heavy as stone. Next to me the stream ran darkly through a white pipe of ice. In places the pipe had cracked and fallen inward. I stared down through feathery layers of ice to the rushing black water below. "If I'm not the father, then who is?"

   "Did I say you weren't the father of the ... ?"

   "Don't play games with me, Katharine."

   "I'm not playing; it's just that if I told you, oh, the possibilities, the ... the
pain
, ... do you see?"

   The wind rose and she drew her hood tightly around her face and crossed her arms over her chest. She began to shudder so I put my arms around her and touched my head to hers. I realized a thing about the scryers then: They do not play games for the love of play; they play to distract themselves and others from the terrible truths they have seen.

   "Who is the father?" I whispered in her ear. "Tell me."

   "If I told you, it would kill you, don't you see?"

   "He's Liam's son, then?"

   She began to speak but her voice cracked, revealing an inner core of fear. Her blue eyes were cold with terror. I was aware of this core only for an instant. Then her scryer training took hold and her eyes closed, and her face was as smooth and white as a scryer's robes. She laughed for a little while as she touched her belly. "He's your son, Mallory.
Our
son. He'll be a beautiful boy; he is a beautiful, compassionate ... a dreamer like his father."

   A son! Katharine had told me we would have a son, and true to her words, the news had killed me; I was dying with pride and happiness. I was so happy that I threw my head back and shouted out: "My son! A goddamned son!"

   Katharine was dead quiet, staring into the gray, morning woods. I paid her little attention. I listened to the wind sighing through the trees, carrying in from the hills the howl of a wolf. It was a long, low sound full of loneliness and yearning. The wind blew across the snowy white ridges and valleys, and an absurd notion came to me: The wolf's howl was Shanidar's other-soul calling to me, whispering that I should be kind to my son. The wolf howled for a long time. Then Katharine began to cry, and I remembered that Shanidar's doffel had been the seal, not the wolf. I listened to the howling, and I knew the sound for what it really was: just a rush of breath through the throat of a cold, lonely beast. I held Katharine and she sobbed in my arms. With my fingers I touched her wet cheeks. I kissed her eyelids. I asked her why she was so sad, but she could not tell me what was wrong. "A son," she said, and her voice was raw and burning. That was all she could say. "A son, a beautiful boy, do you see?"

To tell of the ruin of our expedition, to give a proper account of the plots and murders leading to the great crisis of our Order and the war that followed, I must here relate events which I did not directly witness. There are those who would doubt such a second-tongue knowledge - I am thinking of the epistemologists - but I myself am sure that Justine's testimony of that day is a close approximation of the truth. After all, what is truth? I can, of course, offer no episteme, for in the affairs of our race, no intellectually certain knowledge can exist. If what I say here sometimes seems illogical, sometimes tainted with chaos and a touch of madness, that is because human life is so tainted and touched.

   Two days after Shanidar's burial, on eighty-fifth day in winter, all of the men and most of the boys left the cave early in the morning to hunt shagshay in one of Kweitkel's western valleys. It was a cold day; it dawned blue cold and became colder throughout the day. The air was like a steel mask covering the island. It was so cold that the trees cracked and thundered, spraying splinters into the blue air. Because of the cold, the women and children kept to the cave, gathering around the fires and oilstones wherever they could. Everyone was cold, shivering cold, miserably cold, everyone except my mother. My mother was burning with a fever. But she was not sick. Or rather, she was not sick with disease; she was sick with jealousy and hatred because two days before she had followed Katharine and me down to the stream. She was a good spy, my mother was. She had hidden behind a yu tree and heard me shout with joy. The knowledge of my fatherhood had wounded her, and for two days she kept to herself, and her hatred rankled and festered.

   When she could stand the burning no longer, on the afternoon of the hunt, she found Katharine alone in our hut. There was a fight, spitting words of poison from my mother and Katharine's infuriating (to my mother) near-silence. I will never know everything that was said, but Justine and the other women overheard bad things, terrible things. My mother called Katharine a witch. "What have you done?" my mother accused. "You've bewitched my son. With your secret ways. Trapped him with sympathy and sex."

   These were serious words, so Anala, Sanya and Muliya forced their way into the hut. Justine was out helping one of the dogs deliver her puppies, and when she heard the commotion she ran to join the others inside. In the tight, round space, the four women crowded around my mother and Katharine, keeping them apart.

   "Why did you call Katharine a witch?" Anala asked my mother.

   At the sound of the word "witch," cross-eyed Muliya mumbled a hasty prayer. Her fat arms jiggled as she rubbed ashes over her eyelids so that the other-soul of the witch would have difficulty seeing her. (I have forgotten to mention that Muliya was an extremely ugly woman. As Justine reminded me, she had a broken nose, and she looked something like a muskox. It is curious that women are often more sensitive to a woman's beauty - or lack of beauty - than are men.)

   Sanya nervously rubbed her skinny hands together while she looked from Anala to Muliya. She was a small, intelligent woman with a narrow face like a fox. She licked her stumpy, yellow teeth and said, "We have all wondered why Mallory acts so strange. But witchcraft? Why would Katharine bewitch him?" She smiled at Katharine because she liked her. She clearly did not believe Katharine could be a witch.

   "Some women like the shape of their brother's arms," Muliya said. "And they like the touch of their spears even more. Everyone knows Katharine and Mallory were alone together grinding snow."

   My mother was aghast at what had happened. She said, "I spoke hastily. Because I was angry. Of course Katharine is not a witch."

   All this time, Justine stood between Muliya and the calm, silent Katharine.

   To my mother, Muliya said, "I've made blood-tea with you for almost a year. When have you ever spoken hastily? You called Katharine a witch, I heard you."

   Anala stood in the center of the hut, looking at the other women. She pulled back her hair, which was as gray as steel. She was the tallest of the women, the strongest, and possibly the most clear-headed. She looked at my mother. "You call her a witch, and those are the worst words a woman can fling at another. If she is a witch, where is the craft of her witchery?"

   An argument erupted, then, about the many ways a woman might bewitch a man. (Or, more, rarely, another woman.) Muliya's eyes crossed as she said, "It is well known that the Patwin tribe went hungry because a woman bewitched her near-brother and sucked out his seed. It is a bad thing to bewitch a man."

   "But who hasn't thought of doing it?" Sanya pointed out, and she laughed nervously again.

   Muliya told of an Oluran woman cursed with a brutal husband who beat her whenever he returned home from the hunt with no meat. One day in late midwinter spring, the woman - her name was Galya - had made a doll of sticks and fur, and had cast it into a pool of snowmelt. The following day her doomed husband stepped on a thin crust of ice and broke through to the sea where he drowned. "And what of Takeko of the Nodin tribe? Everyone knows she fed her lover seeds purple with the araglo mold, and everyone knows how she aroused her lover's rage with her cunning, witch's words. And didn't her lover then kill her husband?"

   Anala seemed to grow angry when she heard this. With her hide-scraper she shaved a layer of callus from the palm of her hand. She held the yellowed, half-moon wafer of skin between her fingers and said, "How does a woman capture the soul of a man? She must have a part of him so her other-soul can see the other-soul of the man through this part - is this not well known? If Katharine were a witch, she would have gathered tufts of hair or nail parings and the like to work her craft. Where is this craftwork? Who has seen it?"

   And Muliya slyly said, "A witch would hide such things, wouldn't she?" She appeared to be staring through Katharine's legs at the bed behind her. Even though her eyes were crossed and weak, they were Alaloi eyes, and they did not miss very much, especially concerning the shape and texture of snow, for which the Alaloi have a hundred words. "Why is there
soreesh
, fresh powder, packed beneath Katharine's bed?"

   Sanya shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. "Perhaps one of the dogs yellowed the hardpack and burned a hole with his piss?"

   "Who would let a dog piss on her bed?" Muliya asked. "No, I think we should see what is buried beneath the bed."

   Neither my mother nor Justine wanted Muliya digging beneath the bed, so they tried to distract her with arguments and denials, and when that didn't work they asked her to leave the hut. "If Katharine is a witch," Justine said, "of course, I'm sure she's not, but if she is, we can discover the witchcraft for ourselves, and since she's my daughter, shouldn't I be the one to punish her?"

   And Anala shook her handsome head and told her, "That would be too much to ask of any mother."

   Muliya approached the bed, and my mother stopped her. There was another fight. While Katharine sat on the bed watching, my mother and Justine tried to force the Devaki women from the hut. Justine pushed Muliya, and she tripped and fell through the wall of the hut. There was a crunching and a cloud of snow. Other Devaki women were waiting outside. They picked Muliya up. They kicked in the rest of the hut. They demolished it, crushed the snow blocks beneath their feet, and they swarmed around Katharine's bed. Irisha and Liluye and six others held my mother and Justine from behind.

   Anala said, "You see, the mother of the witch always protects the daughter. This is a sad day, but Muliya is right. We must see what is beneath the bed." She squatted, and like a dog digging for a bone, she began hacking at the snow with her hide-scraper. Showers of chiseled snow flew out behind her, covering the furred boots of the other women who were craning their necks, anxious to see what she might find. There was a dull "chink" as of stone against obsidian. "Here it is," Anala said, and she held up a snow-encrusted sphere of krydda.

   "What is it?" Sanya asked. "It is so beautiful!"

   After Anala had picked off the clinging granules of wet snow, Muliya said, "It looks like a shell, but I've never seen a shell so beautiful or so round." She turned to my mother and asked, "Are there many shells like these on the beaches of the Southern Islands?"

   My mother struggled to break away from Marya, Lusa and Liluye. "There are many such shells," she lied.

   Anala managed to open one of the spheres. She turned it upside down, letting its bluish-white contents dribble into her open hand. She held the sticky puddle to her nose and sniffed. "Manseed," she announced, and all the women made a sour face.

   Muliya dipped her fingers into Anala's outstretched hand. She licked her fingers and gagged and said, "Manseed - but it is sweetened with a juice I have never tasted before. Witchcraft, and here it is: Katharine mixes Mallory's seed with the juice of strange plants to bewitch him."

   It was a serious thing they had discovered. Sanya approached Muliya and said, "I have always liked Katharine. She always smiles, even when things are bad. Is it such a terrible thing to have bewitched Mallory? What a wild man he is! If ever a man needed taming, surely he does?" And then she asked the question on all the women's tongues: "Must we send her out onto the ice of the sea?"

   "We should smash her fingers off," Muliya said. "Then she could work no more witchcraft."

   Justine stood very still, wondering how she could break away from Liluye and the others. She was afraid for Katharine, but she had the coolness of mind to realize that it would be better for her daughter to lose her fingers than her life. Fingers, as she told me later, can always be regrown.

   While the women argued over Katharine's fate, Muliya began digging beneath the bed. "Look at this!" she cried as she uncovered two more krydda spheres. "And this! And look, four more, and here, so many of these shells!"

   All at once the women fell into silence. One by one, they opened the krydda spheres, sampling what was inside them. "Look, a lock of hair," Irisha said. "Who has hair so yellow? Liam? Seif?"

   Muliya emptied sphere after sphere and called out, "More manseed! And in this one, manseed that smells like tangleroot! Whosever seed this is must have eaten a great mess of tangleroot." A few of the women laughed because it was well known that the bitter tangleroot makes a man's seed stink. "And in this shell, the seed is thin and watery like a boy's. So many, I did not think she had swived so many!"