Northshore Read Online Free Page B

corner of his little room aboard the
Gift,
knives and chisels ostentatiously by. When he began to carve it, the wood opened up to reveal the Suspirra within. Still, it was a largish thing, life size, and it was longer than he liked before it resembled her, longer yet before it was her, line for line. Then was a long time between towns, during which he was never left alone, so that when he finally came to take the drowned woman from the net, replacing her with the carving – in case he might ever need to hide the real woman again – it seemed a season had gone
    The drowned woman came gladly to his place, standing in one corner of it as though invited there for dalliance. She looked at him through barely opened eyes, lips not quite curved, as though she were thinking of smiling but had not yet accomplished it.
    ‘Well,’ said Blint when he saw her first. ‘I still say you should be artist caste, Thrasne. Not that I’d like doing without you. Still, that’s a beauty, that is. Pure fragwood, is it? Surely not the hair? That doesn’t look carved.’
    ‘Well, no sir,’ he lied without a change of expression. ‘That’s a wig I bought in Tsillis. Somehow the carved hair didn’t look … well, it didn’t look soft.’ Her hair had not looked soft, either, when he had raised her that last time, matted and filthy as it was from the frag leaf and sulphur. He had rinsed her time and again with buckets of clean water,brushed her hair, and run soap through it. Now it lay gleaming on her shoulders, not unlike the color of frag, yet more silken. The rest of her gleamed in nut-brown colors, also, with a hint of rose at nipples and lips.
    ‘What do you call her?’ asked Blint.
    ‘Her name is Suspirra. It was the name of a girl I knew once back in Xoxxy-Do, where you found me.’
    ‘And where you’ll be again in a year or so. What will she think of this, your having a life-size doll of her to keep you company?’ Blint was roguish, twinkling.
    ‘She wouldn’t mind.’ Since Thrasne had invented such a girl on the spot, he was not concerned about what she might think. What Blint would think had concerned him, but evidendy Blint thought nothing untoward. If a boatman wished to have a life-sized carving of a beautiful woman in his cabin, well, so be it. It took all kinds, as Blint would say, to do all the things needing doing.
    At first Thrasne merely looked at her in the lantern light before he slept or in the early morning before he rose. He touched her face sometimes, almost reverently. He did not presume to touch her breasts, though once he laid his cheek against them, almost sobbing as the promise of softness was betrayed. After a time he stopped touching her at all and began talking to her instead. At a short distance he could forget the blight, forget her petrification, believe that she was living flesh. He still called her Suspirra. He told her all the things he had never been able to tell anyone, not even Blint.
    ‘Blint saved my life,’ Thrasne told her.
    ‘I lived in Xoxxy-Do. Halfway round Northshore from anywhere. A mountainous place, where the falls come over the cliffs into World River, and the ships have to tie up behind great shattered rocks along the sheer walls and the boatmen climb steep, twisty stairs to reach the towns above. My father was a builder there, a builder in stone. My mother was an artist – though there was not so much of the caste system there in Xoxxy-Do as I have seen elsewhere. It was she who taught me to carve – or let me learn it, I suppose. She gave me a knife when I was only five. She was a wonderfulcarver. When Father finished a place, it was she who ornamented it. They had a great success together. They were very happy. So was I.’
    He was silent then, waiting for Suspirra to say something, to comment. He heard her saying, ‘I was not happy. I envy your happy family, Thrasne. My own was not like that.’
    ‘I saw your husband’s mother,’ he replied. ‘My father’s sister