Sheri Tepper: King’s Blood Four

I WOKE TO A CLICKING SOUND, a small, almost intimate sound in the vastness of that stone pillared cave. It reminded me of the death beetle we had often heard in the long nights in School House, busy in the rafters, the click, click, click timing the life of the Tower as might the ticking of a clock. I was still half asleep when I peered over the edge of the ledge we lay upon. The cavern drifted in pale light, mist strewn, and at the center of it a woman was sitting in a tall, wooden chair, knitting. She had not been there before. I had not heard her arrive. For the moment I thought it was a dream and pinched myself hard enough to bring an involuntary exclamation, half throttled. Silkhands heard it, wakened to it, sat up suddenly, saying, “What is it? Oh, what is it?” Then she, too, heard the sound and peered at the distant figure, her expression of blank astonishment mirroring my own.

Before I could answer her, if I had had any answer to give, the woman looked up toward us and called, “You may as well come down. It will make conversation easier.” Then she returned to her work, the needles in her hands flashing with a hard, metallic light. I stared away in the direction we had entered this vault. Nothing. All was silence, peace, no trumpets, no drums, no torches. Finally, I heaved myself down from the ledge and helped Silkhands as we climbed down to the uneven floor of the cave. The clicking was now interspersed with a creaking sound, the sound of the chair in which the woman sat, rocking to and fro. Once, long, long ago I had seen some such chair. I could not remember when. The yarn she used frothed between her hands as though alive, pouring from the needles in a flood which spread its loose loops over her knees and cascaded to the stone. The speed of her knitting increased to a whirling rattle, the creaking of the chair faster and faster, like a bellows breathing, until she was finished all at once. She flung the completed work onto the stone before her where it lay like a pile of woolen snow.

“What have you made?” asked Silkhands, doubtfully. I knew she was unable to think of anything else to say. I could think of nothing at all. The woman fixed us with great, inhuman eyes, yellow and bright as those of a bird.

“I have knitted a Morfus,” she said in a deep voice. “Soon it will get up and go about its work, but just now it is resting from the pain of being created.” The piled fabric before her shivered as she spoke, and I thought it moaned. “Would you care for some cabbage?” the woman asked.

Silkhands said, “I would be very grateful for anything to eat, madam. I am very hungry.” When she spoke, my mouth filled with saliva, even though I hated cabbage raw or cooked and always had. The woman found a cabbage somewhere beside herself in the chair and offered it. Silkhands tore off a handful of leaves.

The woman said, “It is better than nothing. Although I do not like it as it is.” She stared intently at the vegetable in her hand, turning it this way and that. It fuzzed before my eyes, fuzzed, misted, became a roasted fowl. The pile of fabric moaned once more, sat up, extended long, knitted tentacles and pushed itself erect. Vaguely manshaped, it swayed where it stood, featureless and without much substance. I could see through it in spots. An impatient snort from the woman brought my attention back to her. She had given the fowl to Silkhands.

“Try this instead. Tell me if it tastes right.”

Silkhands tore a leg from the fowl and took a bit of it, wiping her face on her arm, nodding. “It tastes…only a little like cabbage.”

“Ah. Well, then, it’s an improvement. Still, you could do much better, being a Healer, if that lazy youth would help you.”

“I don’t understand,” said Silkhands, remembering at last to offer me some of the fowl. “What do you mean, I could do better?”

“Have you ever Healed a chicken?” the woman asked.

“Never.”

“Ah. Well then, perhaps you could not do as well as I have done. If you had ever Healed a chicken, you would know how the flesh is made. And if that boy were to Read you as you thought about that, then he could change the cabbage far better than I have done.”

“Pardon, madam,” I said. “But I have not that Talent.”

“Nonsense. You have all the Talents there are, from Dorn to Didir, or from Didir to Dorn, as the case may be. You have the Gamesmen of Barish, I know it. Even if I had not felt the spirit of Dorn moving in the corridors of the earth like a waking thunder I would still have known. Was it not Seen? Was it not foretold? Why else am I here and are you where you are?”

“The Garnesmen of Barish?” By this time I was certain that I still slept, dreaming in the high stone wall on the little ledge. “I don’t know what you…”

“These,” she flicked a knitting needle at me, catching the loop of my pouch and rattling the Gamesmen within it. “These. You have already taken Dorn into being. Soon you must take others, or if not soon then late. By the seven hells, you’re not afraid of them are you, boy?”

“Afraid? Of them? Them…who?”

“Witless,” she commented acidly, looking me over from head to foot as though she could not believe what she saw. “Witless and spitless, no more juice than a parsnip. By the seven hells, boy, you raised up the ancient Kings of Bannerwell. How did you think you did that? Did you perhaps whittle them up out of a bit of wood and your little knife? Or whistle them up like a wind? Or brew them, perhaps, like tea? How did you do it, gormless son of an unnamed creation? Hmmm? Answer me!”

I was beginning to be very angry. As I grew wider awake and even slightly less hungry (the fowl was filling, though it did taste like cabbage), I became angrier by the moment. I was distracted, however, for at that moment the Morfus decided to do whatever it was a Morfus did. Moaning shrilly, it staggered off toward one side of the great cavern and began to climb the stone. It lurched and flapped like laundry upon a slack line, wavering and lashing itself upward.

“At this rate, it’ll never get there,” she commented as she took up the needles and the wool once more to pour out another long confusion of knitting upon her lap.

“You haven’t answered me,” she said. ‘How did you think you raised them up, boy? By what means?”

“I raised them up by using the pattern I found in one of the Gamespieces,” I said, stiffly. “By accident.”

“No more by accident than trees grow by accident. Trees grow because it is their nature to do so. The Gamespieces of Barish were designed to have a nature of their own — to lie long hidden until a time when they would fall into the hands of one who could use them.”

There was a long pause and then she said in a slightly altered tone, “No. That is not quite correct. They would fall into the hands of one who would use them well. That is tricky. Perhaps a bit of fear and confusion would not be amiss under those circumstances.” The knitting poured from her lap onto the floor and lay there, quivering. Then the knitted creature heaved itself upward to stagger toward its companion which still struggled upward against the far rock wall.

Silkhands had been observing the woman narrowly, and now she seated herself at the knitter’s feet and laid hand upon her knee. The woman started, then composed herself and smiled. “Ah, so you’d find out what goes on, would you, Healer? Well, stay out of my head and the rest of me be thy play-pen. There’s probably some work or other needs doing in there.”

“What are the Gamesmen of Barish?” I asked. “Please stop confusing me. I think you’re doing it purposely, and it doesn’t help me. Just tell me. What are the Gamesmen of Barish?”

She rose, incredibly tall and thin, like a lath, I thought, then changed that thought. Like a sword, lean and keen-edged and pointed. She laughed as though she Read that thought; “Long ago,” she chanted, “in a time forgotten by all save those who read books, were two Wizards named Barish and Vulpas. You’ve heard of them? Ah, of course. You’ve heard of them from the self-styled Historian.” She laughed, almost kindly.