Free The Revenants by Sheri S. Tepper Page A

he could not remember, he heard inside his head as though newly spoken. And, always, he searched every face he met to see whether Alan had come there before him, whether he himself had come there to find that part of himself which had been lost.

CHAPTER TEN
     
    LEONA
     
    Year 1165
    For some seasons, Leona wandered the broken lands between the Jaggers and Fenlees. She spent two winters time-lost in sleep in a snow-buried cave warmed by subterranean steams which boiled in the deeps. She spent a summer along the shores of the Fenlees among the reedy hummocks where stilt-legged birds piped endlessly beside grey seas which broke on the fangs of the Shambles to send icy spray far inland. With no more knowledge of the world than a blind kitten, she had searched among the ghost cities of the Jaggers and found a ruined library in a language she could spell out. She had devoured pictures and words and pages which told of the world as it was and had been and was thought to be. Always she sought for references to that Vessel of Healing which the man at Stony croft had spoken of, but she found them seldom and vaguely written. At times she came away to seek food or to rest eyes wearied by faded print on stained pages. She seemed not to feel the cold. Even the summers here were chill, for the frigid northern seas swept down from the icelands along the shores of Anisfale to strike upon the Scruff before turning at the Scut to flow westward into Vastnesse, called by some Wasnost.
    She stood long hours upon the dunes, legs rasped by blades of bitter grass, watching the small ships of the Shambles tack to and fro across the swollen seas, beating against the endless winds only to fly before them once more, indomitable and detached. She began to think of herself as like them, endlessly fighting against the wind or fleeing before the wind to an unkown place. The people of the Shambles came to know her form, if not her name. From guard towers she was seen, striking westward to the sea or eastward to the mountains, sometimes carrying fish she had caught, or mussels stripped from the weed-grown rocks weighing down her bundled shirt. Several times men from the villages of the Shambles or Tharsh skulked away after her, thinking to enliven a dull time with a bit of stranger-rape and murder. Only one such group ever came close to her hiding place, and no member of it ever returned. After a time they gave it up. The woman in white was said to be surrounded by glamour and witchery. All decided it was healthier not to see her, and thenceforward they did not. Leona had read all the books and had tired of the Shambles. She had decided to explore the Jaggers and east to the Abyss of Souls and then to go on to Seathe and the eastern lands.
    Thus it was that she came to the banks of the Lazentium in the spring, to the croft of a shepherd there, to find the man busy at the drowning of pups. There were three, and the man had left one for the bitch and was about to drown the others when Leona came out of the mist to his side, silent, white, and chill. She reached out her hands and the shepherd put the sack into them without a word. Something in her eyes spoke, and he answered as best he could, touching his forelock and bending his knees in a curiously ancient gesture of combined distress and honour. She laid her fingers on his forehead in a complex motion which burned him joyously and then turned away. An hour later he was standing there still, eyes unseeing yet watching the way she had gone.
    She named the male dog Silence, and the female, Sorrow. In Leona there was something which passed for amusement in calling into the icy winds of the Northlands, ‘Come, Silence; come, Sorrow’ – ‘Nai, Mimo; nai, Werem’ in the tongue of the Fales. Since both had attended her for endless days, not having been summoned, and now departed to make way for some new intention, she felt it was well to be reminded of them.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
     
    LITHOS
     
    Year 1165
    Some way