Free The Revenants by Sheri S. Tepper Page B

south of the Fenlees, among the scarps above Owbel Bay, the hamlets of the Thanys lay like beads scattered from a broken wristlet. The Thanys were a tight-knit people, suspicious of strangers, made so by the proximity of the Bay and those who held their rites there. The Thanys considered all of themselves, and only themselves, close kin; not outsiders. All children, they said, were savages at birth, but all could be won by love and firmness to an understanding of the duties owed by kin to kin. All, they whispered, except perhaps for the son of the widow at Bald Knob.
    Him they regarded with disquiet. He had a face brown and closed as a nut. He had odd, light eyes of so steely a grey as to be almost no colour at all. It says much for the people that they never gave him harsh words. The children avoided him, true, believing him to be responsible for certain injuries to themselves. There was Jerym, once loud and mocking, who spoke only in stuttering whispers. And Willum, whose strong right arm had withered. And Verila, who sat staring endlessly at nothing. These young ones thought the widow’s son had been fathered by a ghost. Indeed, he had been born in a night of howling storm, ten long months after the widow’s husband had died, and none had known her to be generous with her favours. The young ones said the widow’s man had risen from the grave to couple with her; summoned by a spell she wove, some said. Sent by the devil, said others.
    When they tried to explain their suspicions to the adults, they met with no belief. The oldsters were unable to believe ill of any Tanyan. All their fears were reserved for those who dwelt below, those who anointed the stones near Owbel Bay.
    The boy at Bald Knob was nearly grown. His name was Lithos, and he well knew he was suspected of much ill. He could feel in his own body every cramp and twist in others, could reach into their heads to twist thoughts into an endless, nauseating tangle from which the thinker might emerge hours later, sweating and sick. He had not done this often. Only enough to know that he could.
    The widow loved him, helplessly and too well. She never thought of his begetting or his birth, only of his being, her only child, her only company. She forgave him everything, and herself everything in the getting of him. She ignored every insolence, every pang – until the day he told her he intended to leave the scarp.
    ‘There are things I want to know,’ Lithos said, gesturing indolently at the huddled village beside the fair meadows. ‘You people here are boring.’
    ‘Where will you go?’ The words came like nuggets of iron, heavy, choking and her heart seemed to stop.
    ‘Down there. I want to see what they do there, at the Bay.’
    ‘Oh, my son, my love, no. No, you don’t want to see what it is they do there.
    Lithos shrugged her words away indifferently. ‘So you all say. But none of you say why.’ His voice filled the room with a horrid chill which she did not feel, which she had spent his young life learning not to feel.
    Instead she struggled to breathe, afraid for him, for herself, tried to put into words what had only been whispered, hinted at of the horrors of Owbel Bay. ‘You could not do that,’ she said. ‘You would be sickened by it. You could not bear it!’
    ‘What is it again that they do?’ Head cocked, he listened and questioned as she told him again, bile burning in her throat.
    ‘I think I could do that.’ Lithos smiled. The smile was terrible, lit by gleaming metallic eyes. She fell into that smile as into a maelstrom. He whispered, ‘Let me try…
    A neighbour found her later. Those who were summoned buried the remains quickly, surreptitiously. Men of the villages took weapons and went to search for the boy. They did not find him. He had gone to learn what he could at Owbel Bay before going on … to other things.

CHAPTER TWELVE
     
    JASMINE
     
    Year 1167
    Jasmine, a woman of a certain reputation, had borne a daughter in the