Read Online Northshore by Sheri S. Tepper - Free Book Online

clumsy structure. Beyond them on the brown-dun flow a boat passed, pushed onward by the tide, and the striding form of a Laugher moved on the River path at the same speed, as though boat and man were tied together. Pamra made the sign of Aversion, turning her eyes from the Laugher. Always better not to see them. Against a hillside to the west another worker crew was plowing, the shapeless forms oozing among the occasional copses of broad-leafed puncon trees left standing both for their shade and their fruit. Beside each crew an Awakener leaned on a tall mirrored staff, blood flasks hanging from the shoulder. Pamra was usually first to the day’s labors. Seeing these others before her reaffirmedher weakness, her tardiness. She must move, get the day’s work under way.
    But first she could receive her own Payment, that moment of her day blessed by Potipur. No matter what else happened, the early-morning rapture made it all worthwhile.
    She took a deep breath, and raised both arms in the ritual gesture toward the west, the direction of the World River, of the moons, of the sun, toward which all things moved. Her breathing slowed, her skin began to tingle. Eastward then, holding her hands before her face in the gesture of negation, the unworld direction, the way no one could go, from which all things came but into which nothing could return. She bowed north, to the forests that carpeted all the lands to the edge of the Great Steppes and beyond the steppes to the Chancery, where the Protector lived, mighty and omniscient, behind the Teeth of the North; bowed south to the River, World-Girdler.
    Then she held her breath, waiting for it.
    A welling joy that had no focus in this world, a transcendent glory in her flesh, a dizzying beat of her blood, a rush of pure pleasure throughout her body, a bath of ecstatic fire.
    ‘It’s the pills they give you,’ Jelane had said to her. ‘It’s the pills that give you that feeling.’ Jelane was a junior who had come into the Tower shortly after Pamra.
    ‘No,’ Pamra had told her. ‘It couldn’t be just pills. That wouldn’t be fair.’
    ‘Well, it is, Pamra. By all the three gods but you’re dumb. Why do you think you get that rush every day right after they give you your supplements! It’s kind of a little Payment, for being a good girl when they bleed you.’
    ‘No,’ Pamra had said, choking down her resentment and anger. Why should anyone listen to Jelane – Jelane, who spent every third day being restricted or getting two lashes for infractions? Jelane was a selfish, heretical little fool. If it was the pills, then how explain that the rapture came at other times, too? She said this, defiantly, not expecting Jelane to believe it and not caring whether she did or not.
    ‘Well, maybe you get other times,’ Jelane had sniffed. ‘None of the rest of us do.’
    How could one live in the Tower without the rapture? How could one do recruitment without the rapture? How could one get through the day? The rapture came from Potipur as Payment to His, servants; nothing else made sense.
    When the glory faded, she went to Awaken the workers.
    Of the twenty or so fresh bodies brought every week from Wilforn, the next town to the east, several still lay in the Baristown pit, their canvas wraps virtually unstained, the masking hoods whole and untattered. Only the swollen blue feet emerging from the wrap showed the first signs of corruption. These were the Wilforn dead who had not been Sorted Out, who had instead been left in the workers’ pit to fulfill their obligation.
    Pamra bowed her head and gave the invocation in a calm, beckoning voice, then raised the first hood just above the purple-lipped mouth to pour the mixed Tears and blood from her flask between the dead lips.
    ‘Drink and rise,’ she intoned. ‘For work awaits you.’
    One never raised the hood high enough to see the faces – though every Awakener had probably done it once. Having done it once, no one would do it