Sheri Tepper - Grass

“Is he speaking?” asked Sylvan.

Rillibee nodded. “It’s somewhat like speech. Pictures. Some words.” He rose to his feet, utterly immune to further wonder. The trees were wonder enough for one man. He needed nothing else. He did not want to talk to foxen. He, like Marjorie, wanted to find Stella. “What does he say about your daughter?” Sylvan asked. “That others of his kind are looking for her,” Marjorie replied. “That they will tell us when they find her.”

“There are many things they want to tell us, to ask us,” Brother Mainoa said wearily, longing for and yet dreading that converse. “Many things.”

“I’ll go back down and unsaddle the horses,” said Rillibee. If they weren’t going to hunt for Stella, then he wanted to be by himself, to cling to the trunk of a huge tree and let the feel and smell of it sink into him. In the darkness, they had looked like the spirits of trees. In the light, they looked like themselves. Joshua would have given his soul for trees like these. On all of Terra there were no trees like these. Trees, all around him, like a blessing. He turned to go back the way they had come.

Sylvan followed him. “I’ll help you,” he said. “I’m no good here.” Ungraciously, Rillibee nodded. The others did not even see them go.

In his suite high in the bon Damfels estancia, Shevlok bon Damfels reclined on a window seat and sipped at a half-empty glass of wine. Dawn stood at the edge of the world. Through the open window he could see the huddled houses of the village, tied to the sky by the smoke rising from their chimneys. Dead calm. The morning had not yet been broken by sound. Even the peepers were silent at this hour.

A case of bottles stood open beside him, half of them empty. On the tumbled bed the Goosegirl slept. She had not left the bed for days. She had slept sometimes. Sometimes she had lain unmoving beneath him while he stroked her, whispered to her, made love to her. Her body had reacted to his manipulations. Her skin had flushed, her nipples had hardened, her crotch had grown moist and welcoming. Beyond that, she had given no evidence that she felt anything at all. Her eyes had stayed open, fixed somewhere in the middle distance, watching something Shevlok could not see.

Once, only once in the midst of his lovemaking, he thought he had seen a spark in her eye, the tiniest spark, as though some notion had fled across her mind too swiftly to be caught. Now she slept while Shevlok drank. He had been drinking since he had first brought her there.

She was to have been his Obermum. She was to have ruled the family with him, when Stavenger died. She was fitting. More than that, he had loved her passionately, Janetta had been everything he had wanted.

But the thing on the bed was not Janetta, not anymore.

He was trying to decide whether he should keep her or not.

Someone rapped at the door, and then, without waiting for an invitation, came in.

“You did do it!” It was Amethyste, peering across the dim room at the girl sprawled on the bed. “Shevlok, what were you thinking of?”

“Thought she’d know me,” Shevlok mumbled, the words sounding sticky and ill-defined coming from lips numbed by the wine. “She didn’t. Didn’t know me.”

“How long has she—”

He shook his head. “Awhile.”

“What are you going to do with her?”

“Dunno.”

“Everyone says someone took her. From her mother’s servant. You did that?”

Shevlok gestured, hand tipping one way then the other, conveying that yes, he had, probably.

“Then you’d better give her back. Take her back to bon Maukerden village. Send word so they’ll be looking for her.”

“Better dead,” Shevlok said with surprising clarity. “She’d be better dead.”

“No,” Amy cried. “No, Shevlok! Suppose it was Dimity. Pretend it’s Dimity.”

“Better dead,” Shevlok persisted. “If it was Dimity, she’d be better dead.”

“How can you say that!”

He rose, took his sister’s arm roughly, and dragged her to the bed. “Look at her, Amy! Look at her.” He stripped the blanket away to show the girl who lay there naked, face up. With a hard thumb he pulled back the girl’s eyelid, “Janetta’s eyes were like water over stones. They sparkled with sun. Look at this one! This one’s eyes are like the pools that collect in the cellars in spring when the snow melts. No sun in them. Nothing normal swims there. Nothing good lives there.”

Amy jerked her arm away. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“When I look in these eyes, all I see is dark going down and down into bottomless muck where there’s something squirming that’s maimed and horrid. She’s been short-circuited. They’ve done something inside her She can’t feel anything anymore. She doesn’t know anyone anymore.”

“Give her back, Shevlok. I know there’s nothing there anymore—”

“Oh, there’s still something there. Something dreadful and perverse. Something they could use…” He gasped with sudden pain. “Damn them.”

His sister laughed bitterly, rubbing her bruised arm. “Damn them. Shevlok? Damn them? You’re one of them. You agreed. You all went along. You and Father and Uncle Figor all knew what the Hippae did to girls, but you still made me ride, me and Emmy and Dimity.”

He shook his head like a baffled bull. “I didn’t know what the Hippae did.”

“My God, Shevlok, what did you think happened when girls disappeared? When they vanished? What did you think!”

“I never thought they did that,” he insisted. “Never thought they did that.”

“You never thought!” she shrieked at him. “Right! You never thought. It wasn’t you, so you never thought. Oh, damn you, Shevlok. Don’t go blaming the Hippae for getting her like that. You did it. You and Father and Figor and all you damn riders…”

“Not… not my fault.”

“If this hadn’t happened, you’d have married Janetta and had children and made them go hunting, too,” she accused him. “You’d have seen your daughters vanish and your sons get their arms bitten off, but you wouldn’t have stopped!”

“I don’t know. I might have. I don’t know.”

“Are you going to bon Laupmon’s to the Hunt today?”

He shrugged. “Probably.”

“You see! You know what happens, but you’ll still go. And some bon Laupmon girl or some bon Haunser girl will disappear, but that won’t matter because you’re not in love with them.” She wiped her face with her fingers, then pointed to the sleeping girl “What will happen to her?”

“I’ve got a woman from the village to come feed her, wash her, play with her, like a kitten.”

“If you’re going to Hunt, and Father goes…”

He shook himself, looking at her for the first time, trying to smile. He was fond of her, and of Emeraude. He kept trying to remember that. He was fond of her and Emeraude and Sylvan, and of his mother. “I heard about Emmy. You want an aircar, don’t you. To take Emmy in to Commons. Is she bad?”

“She’s as bad as Father could do before we pulled him off her. She won’t die, if that’s what you mean. Not if I can get her away from here. Her, and me.”

“Take her. then.”

“Father told the servants not to obey me. He didn’t tell them not to obey you.”

“I’ll tell old Murfon. After Father’s gone to bon Laupmon’s, Murfon will take you. I’ll tell him to pick you up from the village. Don’t let anyone see you.”

“Shall I take her, too?” Amy gestured toward the sprawled girl on the disordered bed.

Shevlok staggered to his feet and went to look down at the sleeping figure. He sobbed once, a sound that held more anger than grief. “You might as well. If you leave her here, I’ll kill her.”