The Gate to Women's Country (15 page)

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Then Joshua said he'd like your company while he does the shopping.”

“Is Joshua going with us tomorrow?”

“I think it's a good idea, yes. There have been a few Gypsy attacks on the road to Susantown within the last few months.”

“Fine lot of help he'd be,” snorted Myra. “A servitor!”

“Are you quoting Barten again?” her mother asked dangerously.

“Well, when I took the baby to the wall walk to show to his warrior father, Barten said….”

Morgot took a deep breath. “Myra. Almost a year ago I told you never to repeat to me Barten's opinions about our ways here in Women's Country. We do not assert the opinions of warriors in Women's Country, particularly opinions on matters about which they know nothing. It's not merely bad manners, it shows a fundamental lack of respect—for me, for the Council, for our ordinances. You have done it twice. Once more and it will go to the Council.”

“You wouldn't!” Myra was white with anger. “You wouldn't!”

“Because you are my daughter? It
is
precisely because you are my daughter that I would. If you cannot accept admonition from me, then it is time others tried with you. Young women often do not get along with their mothers. Adolescence is a time for establishing separations and independence. Sometimes daughters need to change houses. It
is
acceptable to do so, not in the least frowned upon, scarcely a matter for comment. But it does require Council notice.” Morgot sounded as though she were delivering a rehearsed speech, and Stavia realized with a pang that she was doing exactly that. This was something Morgot had planned to say, something she had probably lain awake in bed as she practiced saying it.

“You'd throw me out!” Myra howled.

“Oh, for heaven's sake, Myra, she didn't say anything about throwing you out!” Stavia exploded. “She just said if you won't take correcting from her, maybe you'd be happier somewhere else.”

“I'll thank you to keep out of this, you little bitch.”

Stavia started to explode once more, but her mother's
hand on her shoulder stopped her. “No, Stavia. Don't dignify that with an answer.”

The speech making had stopped. Now Morgot was herself again, a very angry self, speaking with a dangerous calm. “Myra, if you are fond of Barten, which you seem to be, think on this. You are drawing unkind attention to him by your rather consistent failure of courtesy. At some point, someone may blame him for what you are doing and saying. Do you want that?”

“I don't care! You can't discipline him the way you're trying to get at me. You can't touch him. He's a warrior, and he's out of Women's Country, and I wish to hell I was, too.”

“I see.” Morgot's face was perfectly blank, perfectly quiet. Seeing it, Stavia wanted to scream. Myra had just said something unforgivable, and Stavia didn't even know what it was. She shuddered as Morgot went on. “Well, I'll consider that, Myra. We may talk about it again when I get back.” Morgot turned and left the room.

Myra turned a furious face at Stavia, obviously trying to think of something cutting to say.

Stavia didn't
give
her a chance; she snatched up the teapot and two cups and fled. Joshua would be in his own warm room at the corner of the courtyard, and Stavia badly wanted to be there, or anywhere else, rather than in a room with Myra.

“I don't understand her,” she mumbled while Joshua shaved himself, wielding the ancient straight-edged razor with much practiced skill. Only warriors wore beards. Servitors were clean shaven. Razors, like anything else made of good steel, were treasured possessions. Most of Women's Country's tiny steel production went into things like razors and scalpels and other medical equipment. The warriors did very well with bronze manufactured by their own garrison foundry.

“I'd overlook a lot of what she says,” Joshua advised, taking a sip from the cup she had brought him. In the mirror his wide, hazel eyes gave her a kindly glare. His face had high, strong cheekbones and a wedge-shaped jaw. His long, brown hair swung from side to side in its servitor's plait as he turned his face before the mirror, searching for unshaven patches. “She's just had a baby. She's probably having postpartum depression. Then,
you've got to keep in mind what kind of person that little bastard Barten is. One of his worst qualities is that he likes to whip people around emotionally. He's jerking Myra this way and that every time he sees her. It's an expression of power for him, I think. Either that or someone's put him up to it, and that thought does keep coming into my mind. Myra's trying to nurse the baby and keep up her studies, too. She's up two and three times a night, and we both know she was never much of a scholar. Give her six months, and I think she'll level off.”

“Not if Barten keeps after her the way he is.”

Joshua got a peculiar expression on his face and began to rub his brow as though it hurt, “Is there something particular he's agitating her about?”

“He wants her to espouse warrior values. He wants her to leave Women's Country.”

“And become a whore?” Joshua put down the razor and turned to face her, two tall wrinkles between his eyes, one hand still rubbing.

“He tells her he can keep her, her and the baby. Somewhere off in the wilds.”

Joshua's mouth turned down, angrily. “You told Morgot this.”

“I promised Myra I wouldn't.”

“But you're telling me?”

“I didn't promise I wouldn't tell you.”

“You know I'll tell Morgot.”

“What you do is what you do,” she said uncertainly. Why did she feel she had laid some kind of spell on Barten? Or cursed him, like Iphigenia had cursed her father? “I kept my promise.”

“Oh, Stavia,” he laughed ruefully. “Really.” He wiped his face with a towel and then thrust his long arms into the sleeves of his long sheepskin coat with the bright yarn embroidery down the front. “Let's go see what the market has to offer.”

They left the house, Joshua with the large shopping sack over one shoulder and Stavia with a flat basket for things that shouldn't be crushed. It was late April, a sunny day chilled by small sea winds that came down from the Arctic, gusting with intermittent ice. Stavia tucked her trousers into her boottops and buttoned her padded coat tight at the neck.

“It's cold!” she complained, tucking her hair under her earflaps and tying them under her chin. “We've done nothing but burn stove wood for months, and it's supposed to be spring!”

“It's just a little delayed, is all We still have plenty of our wood allotment left.”

“For another month, maybe,” she remarked in a dismal tone.

“That'll be enough,” he said comfortingly. “Relax, Stavia.”

They strode along a street lined with house walls, broken only by high kitchen windows—whose evening candles served to light the street after dusk—and double doorways with wooden grills. There were no windows at all in the higher stories, no openings from which heat could be lost. Inside the houses, grilled openings in the upper floors let heat rise from stoves in the lower rooms. All the windows were of double glass. There were insulated shutters to close across them in the coldest weather. Each pair of houses shared a common wall between them to further reduce the heat loss, and the courtyards shared a common wall as well.

Some of the doors stood open and one could look along the sides of the houses to the courts where reflecting pools gleamed in summer, where vegetable gardens burgeoned and potted flowers glowed with fresh color. Now they looked desolate, littered with winter's windblown trash.

“I thought we'd stop at the garden-craft shop,” Joshua told her. “We haven't planned a thing for the courtyard yet this spring. We can start some things in the kitchen now. We need vegetable seeds, and flowers. Wella's shop always has flower sets….”

“I'd like some lobelia,” Stavia said. “And nasturtiums, trailing out of those baskets along the back wall.”

“Morgot said she wanted a pot of pink geraniums. She said Jemina Birdsdaughter would give us some cuttings.”

“Put that on the other side, where it won't clash,” Stavia sighed. The vegetable garden was always given over to what they could eat or preserve and it tended to be pretty much the same, year after year, but Morgot and Stavia usually planned the courtyard flowerpots to look
interesting and gay. This year Morgot had been preoccupied with Myra's baby and other things.

“Joshua, is Mother worried about something?”

“Not more than usual, why?”

“She's seemed… different.”

He paused before answering. “She's upset about Myra. Barten is the last person we would have wanted Myra to become infatuated with. However, I've told Morgot just what I've told you.
Give
the girl six months and see if she doesn't settle down. Some of her age mates have had babies; they'll all get together and share experiences, and before you know it, she'll be a dignified matron.”

“Myra?”

“It could happen,” he shrugged, then turned very pale and clutched at his head as though it hurt him. “Damn.”

“Joshua! What's the matter?”

He laughed unconvincingly. “I should never tell a lie. Tell a lie and it makes your head ache.”

“You mean Myra….”

“I think…,” he gasped. “I think that twenty years from now there's very little chance that Myra will be any different from the way she is right now,” he said, straightening up and massaging the skin over his eyes.

“Then Mother's right. Myra ought to live somewhere else.”

“Your mother is very impatient. She always wants everything to have happened yesterday.”

“Myra was too young to have a baby.”

“Women have been having babies at Myra's age for most of human history,” he said, dropping his hand and wiggling his eyebrows as though to test for pain. “You're right, though. Myra was too young, but Barten went after her like a coyote after a lamb…. I do have this feeling that someone put him up to it. He was very serious about Tally, and then suddenly…”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, Stavvy, I'm all right. Just a twinge I get sometimes when I think too much about something.”

The street curved and climbed as it followed the gentle upsweep of the city wall, made up of the back walls of houses and joined to the public thoroughfare by twisting flights of narrow stairs. Behind them, down the hill and through the western wall, the Processional Road ran out
to the shore where the fishing boats bobbed in rocking clusters along zigzagging piers. On the first day of summer the entire populace, led by the Council, paraded down from the hill to the shore to beg the kindly regard of the Lady on the honest effort of the fisherwomen and farmers and herdswomen. Shepherds led rams with ribbons on their horns and the farmers had bells on their wagons.

From the top of the hill the straight, downhill street that ran to the plaza and the garrison went off to their left. Straight ahead were the market streets, a tangle of narrow ways crowning the height, crowded with booths and shops and with awning-covered stands in summer. Through the marketplace ran the Itinerants Road, which led down past the Spinners and Weavers streets and through the eastern gate to the huddled itinerants' quarters outside the wall. There were only a few dozen people living in the intinerants' town now: a score of oldsters existing on the charity of the Lady, part of an acrobats' troupe, staying near Marthatown so the girls could attend Women's Country schools, a wagoner or two making a lengthy stop at the wheelwright's or the farrier's, and a water-witcher hired to locate a well for the billy-goat keeper who lived in an isolated valley five miles east of town. It was said that the servitor who kept the billy goats smelled as bad as his charges. In any case, the distance from Marthatown had been carefully calculated to avoid smelling either, even when the wind was from the east. Itinerants' town was always fascinating, though off limits to young girls who might, it was thought, be tempted by the romance of travel to leave the city and become mere wanderers.

To the right ran the Farm Road, winding down past grain and wood and wool warehouses to farmers' housing and the southern city wall, outside of which the goat dairy and poultry farms stood among sheep pens and barns along the lanes leading to the tannery and then to pastures and fields. Where the four roads came together at the top of the hill, the Chapel of the Lady stood with the Well of Surcease out in front, right at the center of everything.

“A fresh chicken,” Stavia said with enthusiasm, spilling some well water for the Lady and dropping a coin for the
poor into the box outside the Lady's door, as she mumbled, “Food and shelter for those who have none, amen.” Then, “With dumplings. Could we?”

“There will be fresh chickens, yes,” Joshua mused. “We need to pick up our grain allotment, too. And there are fresh leaf vegetables at Cheviot's stall. She has that protected area south of Rial's Ridge. She'll have lettuces two weeks earlier than anyone else will.”

Stavia did not ask him how he knew. Servitors, some of them, the good ones, simply knew things. They knew when visitors were coming before they arrived, knew when people were in trouble, knew when something bad was going to happen. This facility of certain servitors was never mentioned, however. Stavia had said something about it only once, and Morgot had shushed her in a way that let it be known the subject was taboo. The servitors certainly weren't ostentatious about it. Some people, Myra for instance, never even noticed, but then Myra didn't notice much outside of herself and Barten.

They wandered among the stalls and shops, stopping for the chicken at one, for the lettuces at another. The grain co-op was uncrowded, and they drew against their allotment in half the usual time. Joshua shook the sack, looking thoughtful.