Complete Short Fiction, page 140
Tromvi felt the vibration up her spine and into the back of her head. Something had come into her from Remu. and she had no idea what it was, or what costs she would have to pay for having it. All she knew was that Hakratt was not going to get it.
Hakratt had not seen himself in Remu’s memories. But that didn’t have anything to do with the honey, or the actions of an abandoned god. Remu had removed him herself, long before. When Remu made the choice to go with Wult she, good housekeeper that she was. repaired the damage Hakratt had done while important in her mind. She rewove the burned holes in the rug, moved a chest to cover the dent in the floorboards, and tossed out the piece of inner clothing too heavily suffused with someone else’s scent to ever be worn again. She had done this with no detectable regret or hesitation. It was a rare, and not entirely admirable, ability.
“Is it safe to take this body west?” Tromvi said.
“Take her wherever you like. There is nothing to her. Her god will not be satisfied. So go.”
Oppi tried to say something. He wouldn’t look at her.
“Both of you. All of you. Go!”
Then he turned and walked out of the storage room, leaving Tromvi and Oppi alone with a corpse that, work accomplished, already smelled again like a decaying body, bitter and close in the small space.
Oppi stood stunned. Hakratt had seemed to accept her, and now had rejected her. Now she was left here with nothing but this feeble trader.
Words would only make things worse. Once again, Tromvi found herself wrestling Remu’s loose-limbed corpse into the sack. She didn’t even bother to sew it up again. Every time she did it, Remu seemed to pop back out.
At some point Remu would just stay dead. Tromvi longed for that day.
The sun poked through the surrounding branches and woke Tromvi. For a moment, she luxuriated on the soft pine needles, remembering her dream. It was as comfortable a bed as she’d had since leaving the inn by the seashore.
In that inn she’d met Nemillo, a trading captain from the eastern lands, in Scarpland for salt fish, woolens, and copper. Like Tromvi, he was a widower, and like her also, with no inclination to change that state. Still, they had enjoyed each other’s company, and she had learned about what goods were valued in various states and kingdoms, so she knew better what to bring to the coast next trading season.
In his turn, he listened with interest to her explanation of the way people survived on Scarpland by being of value to the gods of their home places. In other places gods loved humans, sometimes desperately, but did not seem to value them.
“Is this a place, then, where traders are loved?” he said. “You keep their houses from being buried in ice.”
She smiled. He might have been a man with a high-decked cog, and a fine house somewhere, but he wouldn’t have lasted long on the trails of Scarpland. “They hate us even more,” she said. “They can’t stop us from moving from place to place. In fact, they have to help us. But they have never learned to like it.”
“To making everyone richer, including the gods.” He touched his tankard to hers. “Even if no one knows.”
“The gods do,” she said.
“We must certainly hope so.”
In her dream she had seen that short man with the precisely cropped beard, arm over the tiller of his cog as he watched the sun set behind a wooded island, thick with oaks and umbrella pines. A white temple just broke through that green cover, its columns glowing peach in the light from the clouds.
He leaned a bit to keep the ship a good distance from any possible shoals near that shore, and vanished, along with the last of the light.
Tromvi sat up. All she heard was the rush of the stream in whose loop they had camped. Oppi was gone. She had neatly rolled up her bedding before she left.
And all Tromvi felt was relief. The girl had been savagely sullen, from their departure from the west gate and their descent from Crowfoot Pass, to setting up camp and starting the fire. Her resentment of Tromvi had been clear with every movement.
Hakratt would have her back, Tromvi was sure. Without the trader, and the corpse that had given him such hope, and such disappointment, he would take this orphan in.
Tromvi put twigs on the coals of last night’s fire, and was rewarded with a crack and spit as the resinous wood caught. Hakratt had supplied them well, even she had to admit that. There were even eggs from Gatehouse chickens, and she had every intention of enjoying them for breakfast.
Oppi was fast, Tromvi told herself. Even if she was inclined to pursue the girl, there would be no way she could catch her. She would be up to the Gatehouse before noon. The night had been cold, but the sunlight was quickly heating the air.
Tromvi imagined the lessons by the tower window, books and ancient records scattered on the table, Hakratt imparting the dark secrets of the Passkeepers to the thoughtful girl. That was the way the story had to go.
Still, despite herself, she got up. There was a knoll just above the campsite where she would get a good look up the slope, to see if anyone moved on the trail. That was when she noticed that Remu’s sack was open. Startled, Tromvi knelt by it.
Remu’s arm hung out of the sack, holding a shoe. Tromvi tugged at it. Remu’s fingers were tangled in the straps, but a tug freed it. It was Oppi’s shoe.
Damn it. She stood up. Remu knew. She knew that no woman should live with Hakratt.
A dead woman understood things better than Tromvi did.
“Thank you.” Without even pausing to grab something to eat on the way. Tromvi started up the slope.
She found Oppi a couple of miles up the trail, at a spot where icy water cascaded across a stretch of bare rock. That crossing had been difficult even for the horses.
Oppi stood, bare foot in the rushing water, shod foot on dry rock, gazing up the slope.
Tromvi sat down on an outcropping above and waited.
She could see how badly Oppi had already cut up her foot on the sharp rocks. Blood swirled into the stream.
“Twice you almost woke up,” Oppi said.
“I was dreaming about someone I once met.”
“Ah.”
It was going to be a long, hard day, all the way down this long valley, then over a side spur of the mountains to some wide meadows where there were several choices of route up to Hellstor. And news. Traders from north and south tried to bend their route to those meadows, with their forage, water, and other traders, to exchange information about weather, obstacles, and good opportunities. The year would soon be frosting up, so the exchanges would be shorter and more to the point than they would have been earlier in the year. But a few words with people who weren’t crazy was what Tromvi was looking for about now.
She didn’t even consider keeping the shoe as a way of compelling Oppi to come with her. One way or another, this girl would only do what she chose. Tromvi tossed the shoe down to her and waited.
Oppi looked up the slope again. The Gatehouse itself was invisible behind at least two false summits.
Then she sat on a rock and, with a wince, pulled the shoe on. “Can I ride today?”
“If you do an extra share of the setting up tonight, sure.”
Tromvi saw a flash of warrior anger at not being granted a boon simply through respect and honor, rather than through what had been earned. Then it was gone. Or, rather, then it was suppressed. Tromvi would always have to keep that in mind.
“Yes,” Oppi said. “We should go. Is there breakfast?”
“The eggs are out, and fresh. We’ll have to eat quickly though. We have a lot of ground to cover today.”
After breakfast they slid Remu, her last duty done, back into her sack, sewed her up, and slung her across the back of the horse. Oppi got up in front of her.
They headed down the slope.
2017
How Sere Picked Up Her Laundry
Alex Jablokov tells us his latest tale “started out as a story about urbanism and weather and grew a few extra body parts in the telling. This won’t be the last time you see Sere Glagolit, the main character, or Tempest, the city in which this tale takes place. Much thanks to both the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop and Rio Hondo for being patient enough to enable it to make some sense. And speaking of works you can’t escape, the last story I had in Asimov’s, ‘The Forgotten Taste of Honey’ (October/November 2016), has itself inspired a novel. Icecliff, currently in progress.”
After quite a few tries, one of my first short story sales, ‘Beneath the Shadow of Her Smile’ (April 1985), was to Asimov’s. I was not a member of fandom, and really had no idea of how things worked. Since I lived in town, I made it to the 1989 Boston Worldcon, where I managed to run into the Asimov’s editorial staff, particularly the charming and helpful Gardner Dozois, who spent quite a while helping me understand the lay of the land. It is very much not Gardner’s fault that I still don’t really understand it.
“Gardner ended up being the editor for quite a long time, and with him and with Sheila after him, I have done my most worthwhile work. Trying to please an editor can get you into trouble, but trying to impress one is the best way to stretch.”
—Alexander Jablokov
My potential client, Mirquell, played it safe. I had to find a specific woman, who, if I seemed suitable, would then tell me how to get to Mirquell. But when I found that woman, after struggling through a maze of unfamiliar streets between two hills that made up the neighborhood of Drur, instead of telling me where to go, she tried to put me to work.
“Look, there’s another one!” A woman darted out right in front of me, almost knocking me over, squatted down over a ceramic drainage grate, and peered down into it. “Kiff! Another one.” She paused. “Did you hear me?”
“I heard you, Jaenl,” a man’s voice answered from inside the panel house that hung off the wall above us. “What do you want me to do about it?”
“I want you to care. There are more of the damn things every day. They’ll be coming out of the toilet next.”
Jaenl was an Om—human, if you prefer—female, like me, though smaller, older, and bonier. The lining hung out of her nightgown.
“Excuse me,” I said. “My name’s Sere Glagolit—”
“Well, you can help me.” Jaenl gestured for me to get down next to her.
“You’re supposed to show me how to get to Mirquell.”
She squinted up at me. Suddenly I was conscious of the fact that I was dressed more for a party rather than an interview with a potential client. That was probably because I was dressed for a party. Not one that had been as much fun as I hoped, but the dress was red, hit my curves right, and glinted in a way that made it nicely mysterious by Umberlight. No one had persuaded me to take it off. Instead I’d hit home just before Actin lit the streets, and, rather than dig around in my mess of a room for something more appropriate, I’d just brushed my hair down in a way I hoped looked more conservative and had headed over here. And I was still late.
I really should have thrown on a jacket. Of course, I would have had to find one first.
“If you really want to find Mirquell . . .” Jaenl seemed startled that anyone would actually want to do that. “But do you see it?”
I couldn’t get to my “if you can’t find me, why should I hire you to find anything else?” prospective client without this woman’s help, so I squatted down next to her and stared into the sewer.
It took a couple of seconds before I saw it: a segmented bug, maybe four inches long, with pinch-grip legs that had trouble getting a purchase on a rusty pipe. “Yes. Now what?”
“Get it out! Can you figure out how to get it out? Damn things . . . they’re making me crazy.”
It was a small-scale problem, one I could maybe solve, unlike most of the issues I had to deal with. My boyfriend had dumped me and taken our business along with him, I couldn’t make rent, I owed money, and my behavior in the wake of the breakup had pissed a lot of people off. Because there isn’t any problem that you can’t make worse, right?
But this little puzzle . . . the one thing I’d paid attention to that morning was my hair, but now I reached up and undid the dark red ribbon I’d used to tame it.
“Hold one end,” I told Jaenl. “If we lower it down, maybe we can get that thing to grab onto it.”
Jaenl grabbed the ribbon. “So you know what that thing is?”
I shook my head. “Just guessing.”
Our city, Tempest, was filled with refugee intelligent species but had an even bigger supply of the pests, vermin, and parasites that always accompanied them. There was no way to even guess what world this one had originally come from. But I could see the pincers were made to hold onto something smaller than that pipe.
We lowered the ribbon together, keeping it level.
“Come on,” I said. “Come on, you bastard!” Now that I was doing it, this was all that mattered. I wriggled the ribbon against the thing’s legs. That just made it grab onto the pipe more. I tried again. It ignored me.
Now I was irritated. Nothing was cooperating. I pulled the ribbon’s edge against it, yanked . . . and one of its pincers came loose. It flailed around and encountered the ribbon. Reflex led it to grab on.
I stopped wiggling. The bug seemed to like this new object. In short order, it surged forward and grabbed onto the ribbon, dangling underneath it in what was clearly its preferred orientation.
Without exchanging a word, we lifted the ribbon up and out.
“Put it down, put it down!” Jaenl jumped up and, balancing on one foot, pulled off a house clog.
Then she squatted back down and pounded the thing with the heel. It rolled and squirmed, but the impacts didn’t have much effect on it. At last it shot out some pale orange goo, ruining my hair ribbon and getting some on the clog, rolled, and fell back through the grate, vanishing into the darkness.
“Damn it!” Jaenl sat back and sighed. “That stupid exterminator didn’t do a thing. Hung around here for days, poking into everything. Then . . . hey, Kiff!”
“What?” Her mate was back at the window.
“Did Zinter accomplish anything, you think?”
His reply was inaudible.
“What?” Jaenl yelled.
“Got himself killed.”
“Yeah, there is that.” That reminder seemed to perk Jaenl up. “He went up there to poke around and find where those bugs came from. Then he decided to, I don’t know, block their route, destroy their nest, something. Used some focused explosive. Zinter was dedicated to his work. Just not very good at it. Roof fell in, killed him.”
“He fancied himself an Extirpator,” Kiff said. “Never finished the apprenticeship. Guess he kept some of the heavier weapons, though.”
Their house, along with a line of similar ones on the quiet street, had been built into a lower level of a vast, layered structure, hundreds of feet high, that stepped back every thirty feet or so. Whoever had built it, secreted it, or grown it was long gone, and more than one generation of other nations had moved in and altered its many cells to suit themselves. People usually called it the Drur Reef. It defined one side of the neighborhood.
Drur Reef supported itself on a massive Architon pier, sharp and incomprehensible in the clear sky. Above that was only the almost-in visible dot of Umber, our darker sun, giving good light when alone, but a useless wingman when Actin was also up.
“He did his work right about there.” Jaenl pointed to a projection that looked like a helmet, a hundred feet or so up and back. “Took him a long time to find the right spot.”
A story about a suicidally incompetent exterminator with a murky professional background was the kind of neighborhood gossip I usually lived for. But I had things to do. The suns were high, the day was well on, and I had rent to pay.
“Where’s Mirquell?” I said.
“Are you sure you want to work for her?” Jaenl examined the orange-stained bottom of her clog, then tossed it into the small garden fronting the house. The other one followed it. She regarded her now-exposed toes as if reconsidering the polish color. “No one I guide up there seems particularly happy afterward.”
A friend at a party told me she knew a woman who was looking for someone who could dig out odd bits of information and get people to talk, someone experienced with city entities and various nations. I’d done that kind of thing to grow my own business. That had left me with nothing.
“If someone else takes the business risk and pays me a negotiated rate,” I said, “I’ll be happy.”
She snorted. “Mirquell’s slipperier than that. But maybe it will work out for you. She’s up the hill on the other side, Mesklitchtown. Seems to do okay up there, I have to say. Go down this way, hundred feet, a bit more. There’s a lubricant recycler next to a boarded-up house. You’ll know you’re there when you smell it: the greaser’s a homebrew place, uses dumped waste from the neighborhood. Still, seems to fractionate pretty well. We all complain, we all go there. There’s a gap between the buildings, looks like nothing, but that’s the way.” She looked me up and down. “How far are you across?”
I was a head taller than her and more than proportionally wider. I had hips, boobs, other projections that weren’t usually regarded as liabilities. “Nothing for you to worry about. I can turn sideways.”
“Suck in your breath. The walls are greasy, you’ll get it on you otherwise. The path’ll climb after that. First a little, then a lot, but always doable. The Mesklitch are mostly sleeping this time of day.”
“I know Mesklitch.”
“Maybe. It’s a rough crowd out here. Still, get out by Actin-set, you should be okay. You got hours, and I guarantee you won’t want to talk to Mirquell for that long.” She turned her head. “Hey, Kiff! Toss some shoes out here, will you?”
“What’s wrong with the ones you already got on?” Kiff shouted from inside the house.
