Fish or Swords: The Parieur's Tale

I am as old as the River.

Always and never changing, ancient as the hills and born with each rain.

I am as young as the River, rushing from spring to sea in a short half-handful of days.

There have been times when I didn't remember how old I was, or remembered only in dreams, the dim sense of having been a mother, a father, a soldier girl, a farmer's son.

A coin falling through air, through water, though fire.

Fortune's coin, landing one side up or the other, fish or swords.

Sometimes, spinning on the edge.

Fortune's coin, Fortune's choice.

Only we never called her Fortune, then.

Long past, those. This time, last time, so many times, the dreams started early, came clearer, became waking knowledge and living memory.

I am as old as the River.

Not like the strangers, the incomers, born with their selves as hard and changeless as a stone. Drop a stone in the River and it falls. The water cannot enter it. Eventually, the River eats it.

No more stone.

We are not like that. We come from the River and go back to it. Dip a bucket from the spring, from the flood, from the delta, and see the difference. Tip them back and try to find them.

I am not who I was. I will not be who I am.

I will always be of the River.

I am not who I was when I met her last.

I was old, then. I was old when I took her mother's hand and placed it in her father's and said the words to make them husband and wife. I was older when they brought their first child, squirming, squalling bundle of a thing that she was, to Fortune of the Waters to have her feet dipped in the river so the River would know her.

I was older still when she was one of the children sitting in the rows in church, not fidgeting like the others, watching the parieurs as if she could watch hard enough to understand.

You know that game children play? They hop and skip and try to avoid putting their feet on the gaps between the cobbles.  Toss a coin and chase after it, fish or swords on the cobbles, dancing from stone to stone.

When she was a child, it was as if her whole life was that game. A world of cracks, and every step a careful effort to avoid them.

And then I was young again, too young to remember, too young to care, for a while.

When I began to dream, and to remember, she was already gone.

Gone to the stars, gone to live forever, gone from the River the parieurs said.

You cannot leave the River. I could have told them.

Did, once or twice.

So when her sister came, and stood beside my grave and told me - told me that solemn-eyed child had grown to stand on the threshold, but not to cross it, told me she was wasting and pale and soon to die, and asked me to do something I had never done in all the years I'd lived, asked me to leave the world and the sky and go with her ...

I remember, what it was like, the Stranger's Curse leeching the strength from me, through the short dark days of winter as my birthday approached, sleep that brought no rest, and no air, no air, never enough air.

Feeling the child kicking beneath my heart and knowing it was a race for that child, to be born before his mother died.

So I thought that was why I should go, for that serious child, nearly and never to be a woman, dying as I had died and would die again.

And then I saw her.

Heredity runs strong in that family, our family.

I see faces all the time in the street that I think I know, until I realize, the ones I know are long, long mouldering in the grave.

And I saw her there, pale as I remembered, trying to breathe, and trying to breathe, and trying again to breathe.

Shiovana de Grace, who everyone called 'the doctor's elder daughter' just as they called me the younger one.

I saw her sicken and I nursed her as she gasped, and bled, and wept. And when they carried her for the last time to Fortune of the Waters it was only the knowledge of the child I already carried that kept me from lying down beside her and never getting up.

I am as old as the River, and I have died many times, and done many things.

Once, I cursed a people, and their children. I said I spoke for the River, but I did it for myself.

I was old, and I was proud, and I was afraid to see strangers coming to our world, strangers with their own ways and their own faith.  I looked at them and I saw our own faith - our belief, but to me, more important, our churches and the power of us in the church - I saw that it would fade.

And I remembered stories even older than I was, of a plant that they said no pregnant woman should touch, because it would steal the soul of the child within her, so it could never grow to be old. Old old stories from times long past, perhaps.

We did not have the spaceships and the weapons they had, the strangers, but we were not stupid, or ignorant. You don't raise your children and breed your livestock and plant your crops at the mercy of the River without understanding hereditary weaknesses, and cross-breeding, and recessive traits.

I went into the forest and I found that plant and I brought back the seeds and I said that the incomers were cursed, that we would be saved from them, if only we showed our faith. Showed our faith by planting a seed of this plant, that would be the breath of faith to us, the tyndedhanah, at every house, every cross road, every garden.

And they did.  And just as I said would happen, the strangers were cursed.

And how they praised me then, the other parieurs!

They say that each time you go down the River you're given the lessons to learn that you failed the last time.

I have fought for breath and not been able to get it, bled and ached and wished for one more year, or month, or day, of life, time and time and time over since I took it on myself to say that children who hadn't even been born should die, simply because I was afraid they wouldn't bow to me.

And changed nothing.

I thought the reason I came here was for her.  To see her through the last days of her short life, give her what comfort I could, as someone who had gone down the River the same way.

But I did not see myself in that bed. Not the doctor's younger daughter, no.

I saw Shiovana.

I am as old as the River. I thought there was nothing in this world I hadn't seen.

And perhaps there isn't. It was a woman from another world, after all, arms as grey as the river's cold autumn waters, a woman who calls a child of my city 'sister', who spoke Fortune's words back to me and said they'd come from my mouth.

Perhaps the medics are right, and I am ... sick. With something that should be treated, should be stopped. But I don't think there'd be much chance for me to smell Caldari tobacco if she hadn't come looking for an answer for her sister, for the answer I couldn't find for mine. An answer that could work for all the stranger's children on our world.

She swore to me, leaning against a headstone that bore my name, that she would not lose her sister. And I left my world and my sky.

We have sat by the same sickbed, she and I, a hundred years apart, watched the same face with the same hope, and fear, and grief.

Waited for the coin to fall.

Fish or swords.

There was nothing I could give her, Shiovana, not life, not hope, not a moment's ease. Not the last thing she asked of me, to live long enough to bear the child she had so hoped for herself.

I am as old as the River, and I have seen the coin fall a thousand times.  And never once have I been able to take it up again and hope to do better.

Until now.

Fish or swords.