THE REVENANTS.

Sheri S. Tepper.

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INTRODUCTION.

This is the story of the Seven Who Presumed those called the Remnant in Orena-and of Thewson, proud warrior of the southland, driven by gods; and of Leona, Queen of Beasts, whose reign among the animals was stranger than even she knew; and of Jasmine, who loved her child; and of Medlo, prince and outcast, pro-heritor of a kingdom yet unfounded.

And it is the story of a million anonymous sufferers under the whip of Gahl.

And of Nathan and Ephraim, whose only frailty was age. And of Terascouros, whose only indiscretion was curiosity.

And it is the story of Jaer, innocent bearer of a terrible burden.

But to come to Jaer, we must begin with Jaera.

BOOK I.

The Quest.

CHAPTER ONE.

JAERA.

Years 1137-1153.

The girl, Jaera, should have been smothered within hours of her birth, but she was not. If the family Widdek had been a little poorer, the birthers might have paid more attention; for it was well known that the poor were capable of anything. If there had been any prior rumour of deviation, any gossip or questions, the child might have lived no longer than her first breath; but the family Widdek was so middling, so ordinary, so meeching in its virtues and so mincing in its faults, as to provoke unconcern amounting almost to boredom. Besides which there were already three Widdek daughters and four Widdek sons. Who looks for deviation among such a herd?

The Keepers of the Seals of Separation had last visited the village a decade before, and it was thought likely they would not return for a decade more. The cringing old man whom they had appointed as Deputy Observer was now half blind and spent most of his days before his own hearthfire sipping warmed wine and muttering imprecations against old friends long dead.

So it was that Jaera came into the firelight of a late evening in the month of wings returning, squalled promptly, always a good sign, and suckled strongly when put to the nipple. If she was a bit pale, it was not remarked upon by the birthers. Of course the room was dark. She had a head of good black hair, too, and was as wrinkled as any newborn. The birthers took their silver cheerfully, did not go by the house of the Deputy Observer to report, and were not heard to speak of the baby thereafter in any but ordinary terms. The Deputy Observer neglected to call upon mother and babe, his duty demanding no more in this case than it had done in a half hundred others, equally neglected.

The black hair must have fallen out very soon for it was recalled later that Jaera had always worn a cap tied over her head. That was not, in itself, unusual. There were always mothers who put caps on the babes to protect their soft little heads from chill. It was recalled later, also, that soon after Jaera's birth, the Wanderer had returned to the woods surrounding the village, this time, it seemed, to stay. At least she built a small house in a glade not far away and seemed to be there whenever someone went to buy a cure for a fever or a balm for a sprain, not that anyone from the village would approach too closely to her house or do anything to break the Seal. This was the woman they came to call 'The Woman Who Talks With Birds' because of the feathered creatures that flocked there in answer to her whistles and in appreciation of her scattered grain.

It might have been recalled, but was not, that when Jaera was about five her mother bought from a neighbour a quantity of black dye, saying that the wool from her one black sheep was insufficient for a certain striped cloak she planned to weave. No such cloak was ever woven, but after that time, Jaera was seen without the cap.

These later recollections, however, were not to be part of the village tittle-tattle for some years. Jaera grew as did the other children. With them she learned to scratch a few message words, to card and to spin, dye and weave, plant, harvest, preserve and cook. It might have been noticed, from time to time, that Jaera's sisters seemed to show her little affection. It could have been determined that man Widdek never spoke of her or to her. Still, there are families and families. Indeed, there were those who argued that since the Separation love was always risky and unwise. Others claimed that in such places as the village, pure since earliest memory, tender sentiment might be indulged if carefully.

The seasons circled uneventfully. The Deputy Observer died and was put to the flame with stingy ceremony. There was no precedent for appointing another to take his place, so the office remained unfilled. There was a brief flurry of concern over a stranger who appeared one evening at the riverward end of the village, leaned awhile on a gate, then passed around the settled area and away up the Eastern Mountain. He was seen climbing the trail to the place the wizard lived. The gate he had leaned upon was burned and a new one built. The farmwife in the nearest house was whipped on general principles, and the matter was allowed to end there.

The Widdek daughters grew, came to the time of Passage, and put on the maiden bells which advertised them for sale into families as middling as their own. Daughters of those same families were bought in turn for the Widdek sons. Both daughters and sons' wives paraded big bellies through the square, and only Jaera was left in the house.

A festival of Passage was held in the fall of the year in which Jaera was twelve. Wife Widdek let it be known that Jaera was not yet a woman. The same the following year. Such delay was not really rare, but still the tongues began to wag. The girl had no breasts yet. She did not bathe with the other girls at the village bath house but went instead to the river with her mother. There was no festival of Passage in the following year, but a great one was planned for the year after. The daughter of the village Speaker was to come to Passage then. One old wife, her tongue sharpened by a lifetime of inconsequent malice, told the Speaker's daughter that her companion in Passage might well be that Widdek daughter of whom such interesting things were said. The girl cried to her mother. The mother spoke to her man.

He was not Speaker out of political accident. He was one to move swiftly, decisively though tactfully, in all things. He called to him another old woman, one who had lived in his house in good care for some years, and spoke quietly with her. The woman went out of the house in the evening, to the river, and there for three evenings concealed herself among the reeds until, on the third night, Jaera came to bathe. The old one was somewhat crippled by her years, but her eyes were as keen as in youth. She returned to the Speaker with the information which he sought.

'Speaker, her hands and face are the good colour of our people, and the hair is the colour of our people, but her breast and belly and legs are white, and the hair on her body is not coloured like the hair on her head'

The Speaker drew in his breath and cautioned himself to go carefully. There had been whispers about others from time to time. The Speaker's own mother had been lighter than average. 'Go among the women and the birthers,' he said. 'Find if there is cause to believe the laws of Separation broken. The year of that girl's birth was the year of the great rock fall. Ask if there were strangers here who might have caused the rock fall....' Even as he spoke, he knew he spoke foolishness. How would any stranger have come and he not known of it?

Still, the old woman spent a hand of days wandering about the village, helping with weaving here, taking a pot of soup to a Gram there. At the end of that time she returned to say that no stranger had come to the village before the girl was born. 'The people do not believe that strangers were here. There was the man who came through and leaned on the Blinnet woman's gate; that was the only stranger. Those last Sealed are in their twenty-fifth year, and no other stranger has been seen in all that time.'

'The wizard?' hazarded the Speaker. 'The Woman Who Talks With Birds?'

'The wizard has not been seen in years. His fires only are seen, or his smoke sometimes. The Woman Who Talks With Birds is watched by the young men, Speaker, your own sons among them. Some of the women go there, sometimes, to buy medicine for fevers or the itch. But they do not go near her house. She does not come here.'

'Then, if the laws have not been broken, there is an atavist among us. Go to the wife Widdek and bring her here.'

The village learned what had happened when the wife Widdek returned from the house of the Speaker. She returned weeping. The man went that night into the fields, and when morning came there was a new hut at the far edge of the fields under the shadows of the forest. There was a goat tethered there, and an old water bucket hung on the doorpost. The gathering drum was sounded for the people, and at that gathering the wife Widdek was whipped for having birthed an atavist, and her man was whipped for having fathered and hidden one, and the Speaker told the people in a calm and reasonable voice that the last daughter Widdek was outcast from the people, probably an atavist, and would live apart from the people until the coming of the Keepers who would judge her to Seal her, which was unlikely, or to let her live her life outcast, or to put her to death.

Thereafter it was noted that the man Widdek and the wife Widdek never spoke to one another again, and that the men of the daughters Widdek stayed apart from them and that the daughters who had been sold to the Widdek sons wept often. Still, they had already borne children, and the children were as brown and ruddy as any in the village. After a time, the Speaker gathered the people again and showed these children to them so that they could see there was no fault. The children stood naked and shivering in the centre of the square. One of the boys began to bawl and make puddles, and at that the people began to laugh. The sons and daughters Widdek bore more children thereafter, and the taint was forgotten. As for Jaera, alone in the hut at the edge of the forest, the people did not speak of her at all.

She lived as outcasts must live, from the leavings of the people. She collected the wool and hair which the sheep and goats left on thorns and fences. She skinned the animals which died or were killed by other animals, if she could get to them before the owners did. She crept into the orchards in the deep night, and took seed from gardens to make a garden of her own. She milked the goat which wife Widdek had insisted she be given and took it at night to the edge of the herd for mating. No villager would venture out in the light of the moon, which was known to bring madness and death, so it was in the moonlight that Jaera moved about her world of shadow, bathing in the river, setting her fishtraps, stealing what was left for her to steal. She went little into the sunlight, and the skin of her face and arms grew as pale as the creamy pearl of her breast. Her hair grew out, a strange, deep copper, and fell wildly about her shoulders. She wove clothes of mixed white and grey wool and then steeped the cloth in a brew of leaves and roots which turned it the grey-green of lichen. She began to go, by moonlight, to the house of the Woman Who Talks with Birds.

Some thought the Woman was mute. It was certain that she did not speak, though none knew whether it was that she could not or chose not. She did not speak to Jaera. Still, she was company of a sort, and it was a change to sit before the Woman's fire in the Woman's house, listening to the shifting of feathered bodies in the rafters, smelling die dark smells which came from the little pots on the fire, hearing the Woman whistling or calling to her tenants, going always with some small gift, a feather, a flute cut from willow, a ring carved from bone.

She came to womanhood alone. It happened at midsummer, a night when she stayed close to the hut, for the valley was filled with roaming maidens and youths playing midsummer pranks and running screaming through the dusk. They would avoid the hut through habit, she knew, but she did not know what they might chance to do if they found her alone in the night. Moonrise came at midnight, and long before the light sifted over the Eastern Mountain and the wizard's tower, the young of the valley were safe inside their homes. Then, with the light swelling upward in the east, she became filled with a devil of mockery and went running through the village with the willow flute at her lips sending her music up through barred shutters. She paused longest outside the Speakerhouse, making the lost sound of the stranger bird, but then fled away panting and half sobbing on the forest path which led to the Woman's house to fall at last on the Woman's doorstep.

When the door was opened to let the firelight out, Jaera saw the bloodstains on her clothes. The Woman saw them, too, and brought her inside and held her fast in her arms a long time before the fire, brooding soundlessly over her until Jaera's sobbing stilled. Then she gave Jaera a soft leather garment and some of the soft moss which the women of that valley use for cleanliness' sake. Before dawn the Woman sent her away, and Jaera saw on the Woman's face an expression of great sadness.

The devil of mockery had been a devil of error, as well. The song of the stranger bird had not gone unheard. The next day but one, after a day of council, the Speaker came to the Woman's house with several men and burned the house to the ground. It may be that the Woman was warned, or it may be that she was away in the forest, but her body was not found among the ashes. That night, after moonrise, when Jaera came to the place she found only ashes and charred wood except that on the stone which had been the doorstep there lay three green feathers and a flute carved from stone or, perhaps, ancient wood. Upon the shaft of the flute were scratched the symbols of Jaera's name, the three feathers which are jae, the symbol for the third month, that of wings returning, and die water jug, raha, which is a symbol for life. The jug scratched on the flute was drawn as broken, but Jaera did not notice that. She took up the feathers and the flute and returned to her I hut, silent as the moonlight itself.

Thereafter the stranger bird haunted the village. It sang only in the moonlight, when none might hunt or follow. It may be that none thought of Jaera; it was the habit not to think of her. It may be that all were sure that the Woman Who Talks With Birds came now to express her anger to the people. For whatever reason, Jaera was left alone. The song she made upon the flute was such a song as spirits might sing if trapped forever away from others of their kind, such a song as prisoners might make if prisoners had the voices of birds. It was a song to keep the villagers wakeful and weeping, and it was a song to waken other things and summon them to heal loneliness. It sang during all the moontime of midsummer month, during the moon-time of the month of shearing, during the moontime of leafturn. In the moontime of the month of harvest, the song was answered.

The Speaker heard the answer, huddled close to his wife under the feather-stuffed quilts. Man and wife Widdek heard it, in their separate places, unspeaking. The children heard it and were for once silenced. The Widdek sons and daughters heard it in fear. He whom they called Wizard heard it from his Tower on the Eastern Mountain and ran to his ancient instruments, his mind full of shock and amazement. The Woman Who Talks With Birds heard it, from her hiding place in the still glades, and took up her staff to begin a long deferred and dangerous journey. She, perhaps only she, could have known what creature it was who answered.

Jaera heard it. She went into the night with a gladness which had no words to express it. She was half mad with hunger and loneliness, but her feet did not stumble nor her breath fail as she sped into the moon-shadowed forest. Her music called and was answered, sought and was found. There were in that night certain eyes which found her and certain hands which held her and a certain glory which surrounded her, that night, and for two nights more. On the fourth night there was no music and she lay alone in the hut at the edge of the forest, sleeping in a stillness that was like death.

When the dark of the moon came, the Speaker waited for any sound which he and his men might follow, but there was none. Nor was that song of the stranger bird heard in the month of first snow. Now, at long last, the Speaker reminded himself of Jaera and told some of the boys to watch her as once they had watched the house of the Woman Who Talks With Birds. They went, and watched, and returned to say that she went about her daily work, gathered wood, milked her goat, spun yarn, sat at the loom. They said that she had made a strange garment for herself which wrapped her and hooded her. The Speaker asked if it was true that her hair was the colour of copper. The boys said they had not seen her hair.

Winter came. If wife Widdek noted from time to time that some hay was missing from the stack, or that some meat which had been hung on the doorpost was gone, well she said nothing. At midwinter festival there was much making and giving of gifts, and if some warm cloth and wool-lined boots should happen to have been left in a fence corner by accident, it may have been that a dog dragged them away.

Wolf month passed, and the month of thaw (though it did not thaw) and the month of wings returning came. The thaw and the wild geese came together, and with these messengers of spring came a messenger over the pass through the Western Mountains which none but the Keepers ever used. He obeyed to a nicety all the laws of Separation, sounding his wooden clapper to attract attention, placing his message box on a stone, retreating up the pass. The Speaker came to the message point, read the document in the box, signed it with his name. As the Speaker returned to the village, the messenger took up his box and went away as he had come. The message was not complex. During die summer, the Keepers of the Seals of Separation would come to the valley to Seal the new generation.

The Speaker was not Speaker by accident. He thought first of Jaera and then dismissed that thought. The Deputy Observer was dead. The Widdeks would say and do as he bid them say and do. That matter would be a thing unto itself, but all else must be pure to the thousandth part if that matter were to be kept a thing unto itself. The Speaker set about putting the village in order.

All men, women and children born since the Keepers had last come to the valley were summoned to the house of the Speaker two or three at a time. The birthers came, also, and several twice Sealed old men who were trustworthy. The young men and women were stripped and their bodies carefully scrutinized for deviation. The roots of their hair and their teeth were examined. One baby with a large pale birthmark on its buttocks was ordered smothered. The mother wept, and the Speaker was forced to give her the choice of silence or a whipping in the square. She chose to be silent.

The Gate of Separation at the edge of the village on the Western path was taken down, rebuilt and painted. The Signs of Separation were renewed over every doorway. The guard tower at the eastern edge of the valley, from which the trail to the Wizard's Tower could be seen, was strengthened and a new privy dug nearby.

There were long hours of council. Was it true, as had been said, that die Keepers would also examine the animals? A man said that in the time of his grandfather it had been done. A dog in the village was thought to be part wolf. The Speaker ordered it killed. What of the crops and the gardens? The widow Klig had a flower in her garden which was larger than others were able to grow it. The Speaker ordered it uprooted and burned.

The drum was sounded for gathering, and all assembled were told to search their houses. There must be no garment in which the wool of sheep was mixed with the hair of goats. He quoted from the Great Article, 'That which is to be eaten may be mixed, for it would mix in the body. That which is Separated by nature may be mixed, for nature will keep it Separated. That which nature does not Separate, man must Separate or he is no better than a weed which sheds its pollen or an animal which regards not its purity.' Goats and sheep were said to be able to cross, though no one had ever seen it happen.

'It means,' said the Speaker, 'that you can have wool and linen mixed, or you can have a stew, because your body will make everything in the stew into body or dung, anyhow. Animals and vegetables can't cross, so you can mix them. You've got to get rid of any mixtures of things that can cross! Remember what the Keepers did to the man with the mule!' This was an old and bawdy story, and there was general laughter. The Speaker was satisfied. The Keepers would find the village pure except for Jaera.

She could, of course, simply be killed and burned. The old men said, however, that it would be better to have something for the Keepers to root out, something properly abhorred and outcast. This would be taken as additional proof of purity and would further satisfy the Keepers. If they were satisfied, they would even take some of the younger men and women away with them to study the great way of Separation and become acolytes, Keepers, or even members of the fabled Lords Protector. This would be a great honour for the village.

The month of flowers was almost past, and the Speaker turned his attention to Jaera once again. She was being watched. The nights were warm once more, but they could not watch during the time of the moon. That way would lie madness. He sent once more for the keen-eyed old woman.

'Now that the coming of the Keepers is nigh, she must be watched even during moontime. I cannot ask it of any who may still bear or father children, for horror would come of it. You, old one, have had soft years in my care. Now comes the time of repayment.'

The old woman cried, but the Speaker would not bend. Her fear of the moonlight and its madness and death was great, but her fear of being put out of his house was greater. She let herself be taken to a place in the forest from which Jaera's hut could be seen, and she made herself stay there as the moon rose, bathing the world in madness. She saw nothing. Her fear was so great that she could have seen nothing, but the nights of moontime passed and she was unchanged. She began to preen herself a little, until the Speaker told her that she was so old the moon could find no juices in her to set steaming. So passed the month of flowers and the month of sowing, and midsummer month was come once again.

It was in the first moonlight of midsummer month that Jaera came out of her hut and went to the river to bathe, and it was in that uncertain light that the old woman followed her. Even in that dim light what the old woman saw was unmistakable. She fled through the trees like a thing moon-maddened indeed to throw herself down on the Speaker's doorstep to wait moonset.

'She is big, big with child, Speaker. She is within days of her time. What will you do?'

The Speaker's face was ashen, and he placed his hand across her mouth. The Keepers might arrive at any time. They could not find the outcast pregnant or with a babe as this would be clear evidence that someone in the village had no, it was unthinkable. Someone else? Who? There had been no strangers. Perhaps during the moontime? That as it, the moontime. If she bathed during moon-time, might she not also have climbed the Eastern Moun-tain? But then, why return? Would the Keepers believe it? They would not believe that she would go out in moon-time. They would not believe the old woman, for her own presence there would damn her as madwoman and liar. They would not believe him. No, they would believe that it was someone in the village....

The old woman was counting on her fingers. 'That time, Speaker. That time of the strange music. It was then '

The Speaker shook his head impatiently. The Keepers would not believe that, either, though the whole village had heard it. He did not want that time talked of. No. Jaera must be taken and burned before she gave birth to some monster. Now, and silently, before the village wakened. He went to wake his sons. There would be fire before sunrise. The hut would be gone.

But Jaera was not in the hut. She had heard the startled gasp of the old woman, seen the bent figure stumble through the trees, followed to see it crumple on the Speaker's doorstep. Even as she followed, she felt the first pains. She had gone on past the village, past the empty watchtower, pausing when the pains came to pant, holding her hand across her mouth to stifle any sound. She did not know what the villagers would do, but she feared what they might do. Her robe and hood covered her. The pouch at her belt held the flute with her name and the ring carved from bone, and the three green feathers.

She put her feet on the mountain path, and there was a great gush of water from her body. She rested, climbed a little, rested once again. Far in die west the moon was sinking toward the broken line of mountains.

She climbed again, turning as the pathway turned itself slowly across the face of the sheering hill. She grasped needles from a tree and chewed them, concentrating upon the bitterness. She rested again, climbed again. The moon fell, and below her in the valley she heard the clamour of men and dogs, not loud, almost as though they were trying to be silent. She could see the flare of torches moving south from the village toward the forest's edge where die hut stood. She sobbed and climbed once more. The pains were close together now, and she had to stop more frequently.

Fire blossomed in the valley, and the sound of dogs belled out as it did when they hunted by scent. She still climbed upward, stumbling at last between two strange, squared pillars of ancient stone, feeling an odd tingle through her body as she did so. Then the pains were so great that she could not move. Her body would not obey. Above her the stars began to swing in long arcs of fire, singing, and the music she had heard in the month of harvest was around her once again.

The men found her body there, almost between the squared pillars, or at least they found what the dogs had left of it. There was no sign of whatever it was she had carried in her belly. They took the body in the cloak and carried it to the place where the frame of the hut still blazed. By morning there was only a pall of smoke and the smell of burnt flesh around the place. Someone whispered that wife Widdek wept.

When the Keepers came, in their flapping black robes with their strange hairless faces and high, shrill voices, they were Well satisfied. They listened as the Speaker told them of two 'questionables,' both women, who had been burned. All in the village were examined and Sealed. The Keepers took six young people away with them. No one mentioned the strange music they had heard in die valley the year before.

CHAPTER TWO.

JAER.

Years 1153-1158 'What will you name the child?' asked the old man. The villagers would have found him horrifying, with his yellow skin and unfolded eyelids. When he had come through the village six years before, he had worn a mask and gloves.

'Ah well,' the other replied, rubbing his black hand fretfully across the white wool of his head. 'How does one know? How does one know, even, that it was wise to save him? Poor little bird, lying there all bloody between his dead mother's legs.'

'You needn't have gone scrambling down the hill like a goat.'

'I know. I know. But there was such anguish in the signal, such pain...'

'Ephraim. Ephraim.' He smiled, affectionately.

'I know.'

They sat for a time silent, watching the fire as it leaped and played, throwing shadows across the bundle beside the hearth. The bundle stirred, whimpered, was quiet once more.

'So. What will you name him?'

'Oh, something after his mother, poor child. She was, I think, about sixteen. Outcast these last two years.'

'What was her name, then?'

'They called her Jaera. What they meant by it was something else again.'

'I haven't studied the language.'

'Why should you? It's only spoken here and in one other valley. At one time there were thousands of them, but they get fewer every year. Look across the valley. You can see outlines of fields that haven't been tilled in generations. A few hundred years of killing everything that looks or acts a little different '

'What do you think they meant by "Jaera"?' he interrupted.

'Well, jae is three. When it's written as a pictograph, the three feathers, it means the third month. The third month is called the month of wings returning, which is "ovil v'nor." But, wings returning is also a metaphor for spring. Then there's raha, which is written as a water jug which, when spoken, means either that or "life," but it can be a metaphor for "joy" or even "fulfillment." Her sad little mother could have meant "Springtime life" or "Third month baby" or "Spring joy." The rain that falls after the snow is called "ra'a v'nor," which could mean either "rain returning," or "life returning." In my mind I called her "Renewal." She had hair like flame.'