At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories (13 page)

The light blinded her at first. Hungry as she was, she couldn’t go out into the world until night fell. At first she thought everything was absolutely gone. All she saw was ashes and broken charred trees. Eventually she saw that there was still some life, animals that looked as stunned and shock-struck as she, stumbling across the wasteland. She caught one and ate it alive, blood sweet as rain on her tongue.

Then nothing happened for a time in Dia’s world. She didn’t know that a hundred million Empire Shipmen had landed. They established what they called a One-Generation Punitive Governorship, killed most of the remaining men, and enslaved the rest. During this time they buried their stored dead in elaborate stone tombs carved from living rock by the slaves, took on fresh water and food plants, and mined nuclear materials for their onboard power supply. They recruited from the few surviving men to renew their numbers. The men were grateful: at least they would live this way. Shipmen were always looking for men to replenish their losses. They were not kind, even to themselves.

And they took the women of Delmoni, the strong women who had survived the twenty years of destruction and the Bombing, for breeding stock to strengthen the Shipmen of the future. A group of Shipmen happened upon Dia hiding with a stone knife. She gutted one and slashed another across the face before, laughing, they disarmed her and told her she would be taken to the Ship. She was raped fifteen times in the first two days, though that word was meaningless aboard Ship. She memorized the faces of the men who raped her, swearing to kill each of them, but she did not. Few do.

Dia was one of the last Delmoni women to be pulled onto the Ship. Shortly after the arrival of her group, the Punitive Governorship was recalled and the Ship crammed itself and its horde of surviving bots back through the wormhole.

Dia’s story ends here. Many of our tales end that way, with the sight of our planet dwindling in the aft screens. After that we were Shipwomen. We learned to survive in the Ships, raised children. A few of us grew to love the fierce Ship’s men and the sharp edge of Ship life; some of us rebelled in secret ways. Most of us hunkered down, numb when we needed to be, and passed to our daughters these tales.

I do not know what happened to Delmoni. There were people still alive there, and perhaps they interbred with the Shipmen left behind as permanent occupation forces and became ardent supporters of the Empire. This is what the men of Blood Ship Delta told us. Perhaps only a handful still live. Perhaps more. Perhaps none.

But I am the twenty-seven-times granddaughter of Dia Chjerman, and I know many other tales about Dia and Delmoni, and of others: of Jennhl and her home, the satellite half lost in Parucek Tertia’s rings, and her poems, written by pressing thorns into her skin to save their words; of Constanzia Allameda, who dared the Ship’s captain to single combat under the red skies of Li Po; of Meg Backus of Archimedes 6, who had twelve children when the drones began and kept them all alive; of Trian HBjorhus of Uth 67-b, who cursed Empire Ship Iota, and it died ninety-nine days later. There are a thousand tales: a million.

And all our stories end thus: when the Empire Ship at last died, we the women of Delmoni and all the other conquered places walked free from the ruins and felt sunlight on our faces again. They still exist, Parucek and Li Po and all the others. And Delmoni exists still, in Dia Chjermen’s tale and now in your memories.

—for Chris McKitterick

My Wife Reincarnated as a Solitaire—Exposition on the Flaws in My Wife’s Character—The Nature of the Bird—The Possible Causes—Her Final Disposition.

My wife seems returned to me as a solitaire: a great ugly mean-spirited bird, feathered and stubby of physique; with a great bulging beak, a surly mien, and an omnipresent squawk. To deny so unnatural a fact would be a comfort; but a sensible man faces difficult truths.

Having accepted so extra-ordinary a change, her new form is unsurprising. She was ever a squat, awkward woman; resentful in nature; recalcitrant as to a wife’s right duties of acknowledging her husband’s sovereignty and holding household to his general betterment; and importunate in her demands regarding that amative act that leads to the wife’s other great labour, the bearing of progeny.

While her new physical form is unappealing, even by those standards which one must apply to fat wingless fowl, they are at least collected into a form that scarce reaches my thigh:—and in three things at least she is considerably improved by the change: firstly, that such sounds as fall from her, one can no longer say
lips
but must now say
beak
, may the more readily be ignored without unfavorable judgement, when even the most assiduous listener—such as our vicar Mr. White, who has, perhaps to a fault, exhibited a most accommodating charity with regard to my wife; proof that a man of the cloth indeed suffers much in his duties—can find no meaning to them; secondly, that she no longer makes unreasonable demands upon my pocket for house-keeping, clothing, or other extravagant purposes; and thirdly, that her transmutation into a bird has brought completely to an end those impositions of an intimate nature which she hitherto had made with such frequency as might nearly constitute harassment—though in truth, they had abated somewhat in her last months and final illness.

It was Mr. White who recognized her species, when first we returned to my wife’s room after she had breathed, for so we imagined it, her last; and found there, instead of the relict—the cast-off shell—, this large gray bird, its inutile wings a-flail as it sought to hop from the bed. At this sight he grew most excited, and even, as one might say, exalted.

—She is become
Pezohaps solitaria
! said he.

—Indeed! said I;—How do you know what bird she is become? ’Tis most specific, sir.

—’Tis a lucky guess, says he, and picks her up with somewhat of a grunt (for even as a bird she remained plump) and feeling over her limbs with curiosity,—there are plates in the
Transactions
—’tis the Rodrigues solitaire, as you might call it; ’tis related closely to the dodo; and ’tis said to be extinct, these twenty years and more.

—If ’tis my wife, in some fashion changed, said I:—then, extinct indeed, and yet not extinct enough. Perhaps for the salvation of her soul, we would be wiser to dispatch it immediately.

—’Tis your wife, sir! said Mr. White:—You can say this?

—’Tis a bird now, sir, said I;—a great homely one, too.

—Well, if you feel thus, said Mr. White,—perhaps you shall not think so ill of remanding her: it, I should say: to my care, so that I might demonstrate it to the members of the Royal Society upon my next visit to town.

Mr. White is, as apparently are all vicars, a natural philosopher and member of the Royal Society;—which honour I might myself have claimed, for, while I do not like to boast, my intelligence is such that I have been flattered many times by the deference shown my opinions when I have found occasion to bring them forth at the Crossroads, at the Shoes & Keys, or even at Eeles’s coffee-house in Town; which respect all auditors have each time demonstrated by falling silent as I spoke; and by a certain fixity of expression about the eyes, as they struggled to keep pace with the rapidity of my processes.

Since his arrival at the parish, some months ago, after Lord C_____ gave him the preferment, Mr. White has been often at my house. ’Tis my wife’s doing, for, while Mr. White is not of such acuity as might make him an ideal companion for a rational man—yet he was peer enough for my wife; who, I am sorry to say, reading and but imperfectly absorbing such books as fall to her hand, sets herself up as a wit, the unhappy result of a father’s overindulgence in his senescence; and she often suggested that the vicar join us to dine or for tea.

—Poor man, said she;—He has few enough good meals, eating whatever that slattern thinks to give him; he’ll never have had tarts like ours: for my wife disliked Mr. White’s cook, calling her slovenly, lazy, and ill-mannered; which slur, which might with equal accuracy be directed in a more immediate direction, caused me more than once to bite my lips.

—Wife, I had several occasions to remark:—’Tis an act of charity to feed Mr. White at our board, but to do so thus often becomes an affront, implying as it does that he has not the good sense to keep his own house, but instead must rely upon the generosity and kindness of others.

Said she, most contentious:—’Tis not about him but about your own cheeseparing nature; ’twill not kill you to feed your betters once and a while.

Said I,—’Tis not
once and a while
that bothers me: ’tis his almost constant attendance; but she paid little attention to my reasonable and—despite her unkind and inaccurate words—selfless concerns. He thus dined often with us; and he managed to put away his bottle a night.

Mr. White was quite a favourite of my wife’s. In his courtesy, he allowed her to draw him away from our own more rational discourses, and they thus spent hours in close converse: I asked her of what they spoke and she said, matters of doctrine and faith; and indeed, though I was often barred from their conversations by Mr. White’s over-developed sense of the sanctity of confession: a belief so extreme in his case that it seemed quite Roman—their conversations did have a beneficent effect in one matter at least; for, though their colloquy sometimes distracted her from her household labours to the extent that I came home more than once from the Shoes & Keys to find dinner burnt, the kitchen maid flirting at the back gate with the carrier, and even my wife’s attire in some disarray, as though she neglected even that spousal duty to keep herself presentable and pleasant-appearing to her husband:—still their discussions brought decrease in her
attentions vitale
, as Mr. White led her with his counsel to understand the
proportionateness
to be sought in this, as in all other, behaviours.

Her illness came upon her some weeks after Mr. White’s arrival; and it proved most difficult, indeed impossible, to diagnose: our Dr. Thrale confessed himself at a loss and proposed that he send for a physician from Town; but, for once in her life my wife refused to spend money upon herself, even saying that, should the London doctor be summoned, she would go so far as to lock her door and deny him entrance: even the suggestion by Dr. Thrale so offending her that she barred her door even to him, preferring, as she said, to die attending most carefully to Mr. White’s good counsel regarding her immortal soul, even excluding me from her chamber as he answered her questions and brought her to, as I hoped, a gentle acceptance and remorse for her many failings.

Then came the day, when Mr. White walked into my library uninvited—his constant attendance in my house made him sometimes unrespecting of the little proprieties that make our Civilisation so shining an example to the World at large—and said: Sir, it is nearly done: she shall pass on this very evening.

—Then I shall speak with her, said I.

—I do not think that will be wise, sir, said he:—she should instead devote her final energies to contemplation of the Divine.

—I am not an unreasonable man, said I:—if she apologize for her contumacity, for subverting all my plans and desires, and for her importunate demands on my pocketbook, time, and person, I shall most willingly forgive her, and she may pass from this world with her conscience cleared of these sins.

—Well, sir, said he after some coughing:—in that case I only request that you be brief.

When I came to see her upon her death-bed, she indeed did seem at peace, calm, and even content: surprisingly pink (as Mr. White assured me she would seem, giving as cause the fever that scorched her very body; though I felt little enough of it when I took her hand): yet much exhausted.

—Well, she said: or rather croaked, for she was quite hoarse from crying out in recent nights, her pain spurring her to such great volume that at last I had taken to sleeping in the library, in an elbow-chair; waking up each morning with a great pain in my neck that left me quite weak;—You’ll be rid of me soon enough.

—Wife, said I:—What is this! I want only your happiness and well-being; and a few tears dript from my face and nose.—A moment later, I realized it would have been a delicate sentiment to have said,—and your health; but the time was past.

—B*******, said she: employing a word I did not know she knew and which made me despair of her future bliss:—Well, it hardly matters now: You are rid of me; and I escape to a better place.

—I hope, said I,—that this is true, though I must confess as your loving husband—, at which point she made a noise that has no orthographic equivalent,—that I have some slight doubts about your welcome in Paradise; for, forgive me, but you have shown but little understanding of your duties as a Christian, a woman, and a wife.

This was an unfortunate statement and, had I not been in considerable pain from my sleepless night, I would not have demonstrated so great a failure of judgement, which opened me to her subsequent calumny; for my benignant counsel brought forth from her an unreasonable fervid tirade about my flaws as Christian, man, and husband, decaying into such libelous peroration that there is no point to recording it.

—’Twas my own fault, said she when her spleen was spent:—Father wanted me to wait to wed, but I was too eager:—as indeed she was, demonstrating in our early months of matrimony so high a level of ardour that my health suffered as under unsavoury siege: though after a time I had often been able to divert her attentions into argument.