“Let me help you off with that wrap, Mother,” said the helper Quietstream.
“I can take it off myself.”
I could have folded it myself as well, but she took it from me.
“Would you like to wash now, Mother?”
“In a moment.”
I stood there naked, looking round at the cave I’d been given to sleep in. I’d been rushed through so many places that waking, crossed so many times from somewhere that was strange to me into somewhere even stranger, that most of it was just a muddle of shapes in my head: a picture on a rock, an animal with a hundred legs, faces looking down at me from far above . . . But, Jeff’s eyes, I was going to look properly at this place, at least. I was going to take the time to really see it.
My wallcave was about twenty foot long, its roof made of wood and its walls of blocks of stone that were covered over with a deep blue skin of rocklantern. (I walked over to touch it: It was smooth and quite firm, like the skin of fatbuck, and just a little bit moist.) At one end of the cave, a small whitelantern tree gave out its pure white light. In front of the tree there was a little pool, with a tiny stream trickling into it along a groove in the stone floor, and another stream trickling out of it on the other side, to leave the cave through a small hole at the bottom of the wall.
Hmmmph hmmmph hmmmph whispered the little tree.
At the far end of the cave, there was a bed: a pile of skins raised up above the cold floor on a kind of big low table made of wood. On the wall above the bed the rocklantern skin had been cut away, and there yet again was a circle with a little Gela inside, surrounded by three little fathers.
“You guys seem to like that picture.”
Quietstream bowed her head, but not before I’d seen her smile.
“What’s funny?”
“Oh, Mother, forgive me,” she said. “I’ve never heard anyone speak as you do.”
“Why do you keep calling me ‘Mother’? You’re old enough to be my mum! My mum’s mum, even!”
She hesitated. “I’m a helper, Mother. We call all the big people Mother or Father. I’m sure you use different words where you come from, but I don’t know what they are.”
“Where I come from we just call people by their names. You can call me Starlight.”
She didn’t answer that. “Why not get in the pool, Mother?” she suggested.
I stepped into the water. The roots of the tree had made it warm.
“It will relax you, Mother. You’ve had a long journey from Brightrest. And across the Pool before that. You must be tired tired.”
“We just call people by their names,” I repeated as I settled down into the water, “and there are no big people or small people.”
“I’m sorry, Mother. Sometimes I can’t follow how you speak. I’ll get used to it soon, I’m sure.”
She knelt by the pool and began to rub my back with a piece of soft fakeskin.
“I said there are no big people or small people where I come from.”
I looked round at her face. It was a kind face, but it looked . . . well, not exactly dumb—she didn’t strike me as a stupid person—but like someone who felt she had to pretend to be dumb. You’d have thought she’d have found it interesting to hear about a ground she’d never been to that was so different from her own, but she said nothing, asked nothing, just waited for me to speak.
“We don’t have helpers, either,” I told her. “The only people who get help with taking their wraps off are little kids and old old people who can’t see.”
“Different from here, then, Mother,” Quietstream said in a way that gave no clue as to whether she approved or not, and she continued to gently rub my shoulders and the back of my neck.
“Greenstone said you were an old friend of his.”
She laughed at that. “Oh, yes, Mother. I’ve known the Headmanson since the waking he was born. It was me who looked after him when he was little. He was a good, kind boy.”
“When did his mother die, then?”
“It was four five hundredwakes past, Mother.”
“Oh, so she was still alive when he was a kid. Why didn’t she look after him herself?”
Quietstream poured warm water over my hair. “She was the Ringwearer, Mother. She was often away and busy.”
I closed my eyes. No one had washed me like this since I was a little girl, and it felt so soothing that I was beginning to slip down into sleep when I was suddenly woken by a strange sound from the direction of the door. It was almost like a voice.
“Dries,” it seemed to creak.
I sat straight up. “Tom’s dick, what’s—”
Standing in the door that joined my cave to the next was a little blue man. He was about the height of a child of fifteen wombs and had big, flat eyes like a buck or a fish. The skin on his face was all wrinkled, without a proper nose, and his thin arms—they were holding some folded fakeskin—came out of him at a funny angle, just below his shoulders.
“It’s just a bat, Mother,” Quietstream said with a puzzled smile. “Don’t you have bats where you come from?”
“Where are its wings?”
“They’ve been cut off, Mother. It’s a cutbat. It’s just a cutbat, here to help the helpers.”
Now that she’d told me I could see it for myself. The creature’s face was folded and wrinkled like all bats’ faces, and when it opened its mouth there were those little black thorns that bats have for teeth. I could even see the wing stumps, squirming and wriggling like they still hoped somehow to fly.
“Dries,” it said again.
“It can speak words!”
“They can say a few words, Mother, but I wouldn’t call it speaking.”
“Make it leave.”
Quietstream turned toward the creature. “Give me the dries and go,” she told it.
Her voice lost its gentleness and took on a coldness and harshness that didn’t fit at all with what I’d seen of her. The bat left with an odd, stiff, jerky walk, and Quietstream wrapped the dry fakeskin gently round me as I climbed out of the pool, and rubbed me all over.
“Now we’ll get you a clean longwrap, Mother, and some nice soft footwraps. Then you’ll be ready.”