The Gate to Women's Country (24 page)

“The war's over, Chernon.”

“It would seem cowardly to go back now.” This was rote. This was what he had said before. It was what warriors said, and no one could fault him for saying it.

“They'll always find a way to make it seem cowardly. No matter when you do it.” Habby was looking at him oddly, rubbing his forehead as though it hurt.

“It's a matter of honor,” he said stiffly. “Doing what's honorable.” Though he had fantasized leaving the garrison a thousand times, he had never seen himself going through the Gate to Women's Country. His departure had always been different from that. A stroke of fate. Some occurrence that was totally unavoidable. Something that just happened, like storm, like winter. Something he couldn't be blamed for. “A matter of honor,” he repeated.

Habby shrugged. “That's only what the garrison calls it, Chernon. I don't call it that, so I can't argue with you.”

Chernon turned away, trying to hide his anger. Stavia had said the same thing. And Beneda.

And his mother. “Honor is only a label they use for what they want you to do, Chernon. They want you to stay, so they call staying honorable.”

“You want me to come back?! You call that honorable?”

“No,” his mother, Sylvia, had said. “We try very hard not to call it anything, Chernon. We just tell you that we love you and would be glad of your return.”

And Stavia had been the same. No books. “You have to make your own choices, Chernon. I can't go on breaking the rules and expect you to make proper choices. I must choose now to confess and be punished for what I did. You have to choose one way of life or the other. Not both.”

He had cried then, mostly out of anger. He had regretted those tears since. When you cried, you gave them power over you. You couldn't ever cry. He had tried to
see Stavia again, tried to tell her the tears hadn't meant anything, but she had gone. Gone away. For a long time. Years.

He got up and started to dress himself, not speaking to Habby again. There was no point in complicating his own life. Wills didn't care who he beat on, and if Wills couldn't get Habby, he'd be happy to settle for Chernon. Wills was a little like Barten had been. A trumpet-mouthed bully. Always blaring “Attack,” even when there was no reason for it. Always calling someone a servitor-lover, or a tit-sucker, or a weird. Now, Corrig was really a weird, a wild man. Corrig was going to go back through the gate, too, and nobody would care. Him and his strange eyes that saw things no one else saw; him and his knowing things you didn't want him to know. Everyone would be more comfortable without Corrig.

It was a cold morning, a wet, mawky morning, with the wind blowing from the sea. Chernon put on his long cloak and drew on his thigh-length wool socks before stamping his feet into his boots. The socks tied to his cincture, and he struggled with the laces. Around him everyone else was doing the same except for Habby, and Corrig and the other three. They'd clumped themselves together at the end of the room, waiting for assembly to blow, barefooted, nothing on but their tunics. Habby was smart. Habby must have planned that. A tunic came off fast. Nothing to untie or unbutton. No excuse to knock a man down to take his boots if he was already barefooted. The closer to naked you were when you made the choice, the quicker you could strip. The less excuse for somebody to beat on you while they ripped off your clothes.

“Naked you came from your mother's womb, and naked you shall return to Women's Country!” The officers would say that when they got them into the ceremonial room under the wall. “Bloody you came, and bloody you shall go!” some others might say, enforcing the saying with flung stones.

Then the hissing from the century.

Chernon considered the hissing. In a way, it was what Vinsas had tried to do to Sylvia, a kind of hissing. To hurt. To wound. Something in the thought was teasingly distasteful, like a food one couldn't decide if one liked or not, and he set it aside, pulling his cloak tight against the
wind. Habby and the others didn't seem to notice the cold. They stood quietly, ready for anything. Outside in the hall Wills was trying to agitate some of his cronies, getting no commitment from them. Habby was a very good fighter, and of course Corrig was insane. Corrig could damn near kill you. Even Wills, stupid as he was, knew that.

Assembly! The time in which Wills might have done his worst was lost. Outside the barracks door they formed up the square, ten by ten. The fifteen century. All of them in it were fifteen years old, more or less. A full century of one hundred boys. Not to be full for long. An hour from now they'd be five short.

“There was a time,” Casimur had cried in one of his lucid intervals, “there was a time when a century might not have a single vacant space. Less than five men in a hundred went back, you know that? Less than five! And now—now, it's all come to rot and dishonor. Twenty in a hundred. That's how many go these days. Twenty in a hundred….”

“When was that,” Chernon had asked, “when was it only five in a hundred?”

“In my grandfather's time,” Casimur had said. “He told me himself. In my grandfather's time.”

When they formed up on the parade ground, the wind slashing at their long cloaks, turning their noses red, and bringing tears to their eyes, Chernon thought of what Casimur had said, as he waited for the twenty-four century to march around, keeping his eyes front, away from Habby at his side. When the twenty-fours went by, he blinked back the wind-whipped tears and counted. Twenty-one spaces in the ranks. Seventy-nine men. Casimur had been right. Say that five left at age fifteen, then another one or two each year thereafter until the century came of fighting age. It would be century twenty-five next year, and there would be fewer than eighty of them left.

“But it will be the best men who stay,” Chernon assured himself, repeating what the centurion had told him. “The best warriors. Better have eighty good men than a hundred where twenty are cowards….”

“STAND FORWARD,” cried the centurion. “THOSE WHO CHOOSE HONOR, STAND FORWARD!”

“Good-bye,” whispered Habby from his place beside Chernon.

Together with ninety-four other fifteen-year-olds, Chernon marched forward, leaving the five to strip off their tunics and stand naked in the chill wind. By the time the century had marched once around, eyes front, the five naked boys were gone, escorted into the gatehouse by the ceremonial company.

No one took any notice. No one would ever mention their names again. The fifteen century wheeled and marched, coming up before the reviewing stand where the Commander stood, his bearers on either side of him holding tall poles streaming with honors.

“Century Fifteen,” the Commander roared, his voice cutting through the wind like a knife through soft cheese. “Honorable warriors of the garrison of Marthatown. We welcome you to the ranks of duty, discipline, and danger. We welcome you to the company of glory. We welcome you as companions in honor, and to you we award the first honor of many, the blue knots of honorable choice!”

Then all the centuries drawn up around the parade ground were cheering and the bearers were coming down the ranks, pinning the blue knots onto every man of the fifteen, holding the cup of honeyed wine to their lips. Chernon felt tears on his cheeks and was ashamed until he saw that both the men on either side of him were crying, too. Poor Habby. Poor Habby, not to have realized what he was giving up. And for what?

Then they wheeled to one side. The drums began the funeral beat. Casimur had died yesterday, and they paraded Casimur's century, the thirty-one. Forty-five men missing: twenty holes left by tit-suckers, and twenty-four honorable deaths filled by boys carrying the honor ribbons of the slain.

“The honorable Chernon,” the Commander bellowed. “Chernon to parade the honors of Casimur!”

And there it was, thrust into Chernon's hands, Casimur's tall staff with the carved crossbar, bright ribbons dangling from it, so many they were like a fringe, lashing like cats' tails in the wind, and Chernon himself filling that empty place in the thirty-one like a reserve warrior into a hole left by a man fallen. Trumpets then, and drums, and the thirty-one parading before the army,
up to strength again, those alive and those dead marching along together, the only holes in it the ones the tit-sucking Women's Gaters had left.

The assembled centuries cheered, their voices rising in a cyclone of sound. Bells rang. Trumpeters cried to the heavens. The ribbons whipped in Chernon's face like little hands, slapping him, saying, “Pay attention.” Blood boiled out from the center of him to simmer in his
veins.
The music of the trumpets filled him. The hammer of the drums became the hammer of his own heart. The feet of the men falling in unison, the whip and snap of the banners, the ribbons, the plumes, and the drums, the drums. Honor, the trumpets cried. Honor, the drums beat home. Power, the garrison cried. And it was Casimur's honor that was evident at last as Casimur marched with honor, his place honorably filled. He had not sought the Women's Cup or the Women's Gate!

It was as though Chernon's veins had been filled with fire. This was the reason he was still here! He was here to learn of this, this mighty fabric of motion and sound, this tapestry with Chernon moving as a thread within it, bright as gold, the threads of all the garrison around him, the centurions, the fifteens, the twenty-fours, the thirty-ones, all of them up to the seventies, one old man by himself and all the rest living in bright ribbons which would never fade….

It was a thundering glory and he was part of it. Now he was suddenly part of it.

If he could have been in the ceremonial room at that moment, he would have stripped Habby and spit on him and hissed him and then helped to beat him, too, and he would not have cared what stories were carried back to Women's Country.

I
N HIS SIXTY-SOMETHINGTH YEAR
, S
EPTEMIUS
B
IRD
had entered Marthatown through the itinerants' gate, showing his passbook, which was stamped and countersigned by the gate guards of a dozen cities. He had no idea at the time that he had come to stay.

“Septemius Bird?” The guardswoman had been only slightly incredulous.

“The late Septemius Bird,” he said with a quirk, finger laid along his nose as though to stop a sneeze, eyebrows tilted up and outward in a Mephistophelian mask, showing his dark side, the one he favored for usages like these.

“Late?”

“Always, inevitably!” He had sighed. “Looking upon your beauty, I should have been here a week ago, a month, perhaps I should have been here always.”

“Not on an intinerant's pass,” the guardswoman had grinned, showing herself unimpressed by these theatrics. “Here for carnival, I suppose?”

“Also inevitably,” he laughed, showing teeth white and pointed as fangs at the corners of his smile, like a vampire, licking them quickly as though to get the last taste of blood off. Not really fangs, no, merely teeth that were longer and narrower than most, the guardswoman had told herself with a half pleasurable shiver. “Magician?”

“Say showman. Bits of this and bits of that,” he admitted. “It is my profession.”

“Alone?”

“Who would be alone?” he said with a dramatic gesture. “Lonely, yes, madam, as are we all in these latter
days when the desolation gathers around us like so many clustered pockmarks on the face of nature, but alone, no. I have some pretense of a troupe. An assistant, as it were, or two.”

“Your first stop…,” the guardswoman began.

“Must be at the quarantine house,” interrupted Septemius. “We quite understand. Believe me, madam, we have no wish to distribute infection in these altogether admirable purlieus. Without Women's Country, we would have no custom, therefore we attend to your custom, do we not?” A quirk again, as though an announcement of laughter which was only assumed, not heard.

From the brightly painted wagon a touseled head emerged. “Bird, are we here, have we arrived?” A gray-headed oldster, face scruffily obscured behind a ten-day beard, coughing as he spoke.

Two other heads above and below, identical to one another, down to the copper locks falling in studied disarray before the ears. Women's voices from these girls' faces, two blended into one, like a voice holding its own echo close to its heart. “Septemius?” A vibration, like that of a tuning fork, dwindling into silence. From the cage atop the wagon came a muffled “whuff,” as one of the dancing dogs turned over in his sleep.

“The elderly gentleman is Bowough Bird. The young women are my nieces.” He presented their books and she took her time leafing through them, tracing back their travels. They had covered Women's Country. Bird's passbook was numbered eighteen, and it was almost full. Eighteen books he had filled! The old man had filled twenty-seven!

“Well, madam?” Bird bowed extravagantly, one foot well back, an arm bent across his chest, holding a broad-brimmed and plume-decked hat, his other arm sweeping the red-lined cloak into a wide wing at his side. “Well?”