Sheri Tepper - Necromancer Nine

He passed me on to another guardsman who gazed me in the eye with equal intensity, seeming unafraid of the death’s-head. “Who are you now, sir?”

“I am … nobody?” I said, wondering what fools’ game they played and whether I was the fool for playing it with them.

“Surely, surely,” said the second guardsman. “Go through this gate, sir. Leave your horse in the stables there. The matron will meet you.”

He had no sooner spoken, directing me to a little postern gate in the rough wall, when there came a howling out of the night as though a chase pack of fustigars was lost in a lonely place and crying for their kind and kindred. He blanched, made the sign of evil-ward, thrust his hands over his ears. I, too, sought to block my ears, for the cry went up in a keening scream, up and up into an excruciating silence. “Quickly.” He pushed me. “Go!”

I went. The woman who met me on the other side was plump and motherly, hands thrust beneath her apron, chivvying me along as though I had been her pet goose.

“Well sir,” she said. “What kind of woman would you prefer? There are several in the waiting house tonight. Three I would call a bit matronly for you, for you walk like a lad no matter the horrid face on you. Necromancer or no, boy you are, or I’ll eat my muffin pan. Well, not them, then. I’ve one virgin girl scared out of her wits. You’d do me a favor, you would, to take that one. Nice enough she is, but as unschooled as any nit and vocal along of it.”

I had no idea what she was speaking of. “I would be glad to do you any service, madam.”

“Good enough, then,” she said, stopping at the first door and opening it only long enough to call within. “Sylbie, come out here, lass. Nobody is here.”

A small time passed before the girl came out, a pale girl with soft brown hair and eyes swollen with crying. She gave me one glance and shrieked as though ghost bit.

“Oh, stuff and foolishness,” said the Matron. “Sylbie, it is only a guise. Come now, you’ve seen Gamesmen all your life. Must you scritch at the lad, and him only a boy (as I can tell by his walk) to make him sorry he said he’d favor you? You could go back and wait for one of those drovers to quit drinking in the Devil’s Uncle would you rather?”

“N-n-no, Madam Wilderly,” she stuttered. “It’s only that it was very unexpected.”

At that the howling began again, and we all leaned against the stone as it rushed on us out of the empty streets, shrieking and moaning, then dwindling away down the throbbing alleys once more. It was a horrid sound.

“The unborn,” said the Matron in explanation. “We are haunted, sir, as you must have heard.”

“I had heard,” I said weakly. I had, too, but the reality made the stories dim. I would have gone mad if I had had to listen to that howling for more than a short time. These thoughts were halted by the matron’s instructions.

“Just in there, sir, Sylbie. You’ll find a nice room to the left at the top of the stairs. Wine all warm by the fire and a bit of supper to help you get acquainted. The Midwife will be around in the morning, just to check has the law been complied with.” And with that she was off down the street in the direction we had come.

The girl led me up the stairs, I still wondering what went on. The girl seemed to know, and I assumed she would tell me. Besides, once within a room I could take off the death’s-head mask and wash my face, thus showing her a face which would not frighten her. I did so, and when I took the towel away, she handed me a cup of wine. She was no longer crying, but she looked frightened still.

“Well,” I said. “Suppose you tell me what all this Game is, Sylbie. I will not harm you, so you need not make dove’s eyes at me.”

“Don’t you know?” she asked. “About Betand? I thought everyone for a thousand leagues around must know about Betand.”

“I did not. Even the man I was traveling with, who had heard of Betand, was not sure of the cause of its fame. You are referred to in our part of the world as ‘The City Which Fears The Unborn’. Not very explanatory.”

“Oh, but very descriptive, sir. It is the unborn you heard howling in the streets. It has driven some mad and others into despair. My own mother tried to drown herself from the constant horror of it. We cannot sleep by night because of the howling, and we cannot sleep by day or we will all starve. I, myself, think it might be better to starve. My father said he would rather starve than have me raped, but my mother said nonsense, the girl must be raped because it is the law.”

I dropped the cup and heard it echo hollowly from under the bed where it rocked to and fro making clanking sounds. “Raped! By whom?”

“By you, sir. Or, rather, by nobody.”

I sat upon the side of the bed and reached for the cup with my foot. “Sylbie, pour more wine. Then sit here beside me and tell me what you have just said. I am quite young, and I do not understand anything you have said.”

“Oh, sir,” she said, falling to her knees to fetch the cup, “truly you are very stupid. I have already told you. But I will tell you again.”

“It was two years ago last Festival that the Necromancer came to Betand. He was an old man, and he amused the crowd at the Festival by raising small spirits (some said it was forbidden for him to do so during Festival, and was the cause of all our woe) which danced and sang like little windy shadows. Well, one night he was drinking at the Dirty Girdle, a tavern which, my mother says, has a well deserved reputation, and he got into an argument with the tavern keeper, a man as foul of mouth as his kitchen floor, so says my mother. Doryon, the Necromancer, would not take besting in any battle of words, so my father says, and so decided to place a haunting upon the tavern. He was very drunk, sir, very drunk.

“So he rose to his feet and made some gestures, speaking some certain words, at which, so my father says, the whole company within the place trembled, for he had summoned up a monstrous spirit which fulminated and gorbled in the middle of the air, spinning. Then, so my father says, did the old Necromancer clutch at his chest and fall like an axed tree down, straight, stiff as a dried fish and dead as one, too.

“But the haunting he had raised up went on boiling and fetching, sir, growing darker and mere roily until at last it began to howl, and it howled its way out of the tavern and into the streets of Betand where it has howled and howled until this night.”

“But,” I said, “why was not some other Necromancer brought to settle the revenant? What one can raise, surely another can put down. Or so I have always been taught.”

“Sir, it was thought so. But Doryon was very drunk, and the Necromancers who came after said he had raised no dead spirit from the past but had, instead, raised up some spirit yet unborn, twisted in time and brought untimely to Betand. None of them knew how to twist it out of being and into the future again.”

“So. And so. And so what is the what of that?” I was baffled, mystified. “What has that to do with being raped because it is the law?”

She shook her head at me as though I should have seen the whole matter clearly by this time. “If it is the spirit of one unborn, then it is in the interest of the city that it become born as soon as possible. Which means that every woman of Betand able to bear must bear at every opportunity.”

“But rape,” I protested feebly. “Why?”

“Because all sexual congress except between married persons is defined as rape in the laws of Betand. Marriages cannot be entered into lightly for mere convenience. There are matters of property, of family, of alliance. It takes years, sometimes, to work out the agreements and settlements and the contracts.”