The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (23 page)

The religion of the ki’O lacks
priests and pundits who tell the common folk what to do. The common folk have to make their own moral and spiritual choices, which is why they spend a good deal of time discussing the Discussions. As a scholar of the Discussions, Enno knew more questions than most people, but fewer answers.

She sat all the dark winter mornings wrestling with her soul. When she called Shahes, it was to tell her
that she could not come. When she heard Shahes’s voice her misery and guilt ceased to exist, were gone, as a dream is gone on waking. She said, “I’ll be there in time for the fleecing.”

In the spring, while she worked with a crew rebuilding and repainting a wing of her old school at Asta, she let her hair grow. When it was long enough, she clubbed it back, as men often did. In the summer, having
saved a little money working for the school, she bought men’s clothes. She put them on and looked at herself in the mirror in the shop. She saw Akal. Akal was a tall, thin man with a thin face, a bony nose, and a slow, brilliant smile. She liked him.

Akal got off the High Deka freighter at its last stop, Oro, went to the village center, and asked if anybody was looking for a fleecer.

“Danro.”—“The
farmer was down from Danro, twice already.”—“Wants a finefleecer.”—“Coarsefleecer, wasn’t it?”— It took a while, but the elders and gossips agreed at last: a finefleecer was wanted at Danro.

“Where’s Danro?” asked the tall man.

“Up,” said an elder succinctly. “You ever handled ariu yearlings?”

“Yes,” said the tall man. “Up west or up east?”

They told him the road to Danro, and he went off
up the zigzags, whistling a familiar praise-song.

As Akal went on he stopped whistling, and stopped being a man, and wondered how she could pretend not to know anybody in the household, and how she could imagine they wouldn’t know her. How could she deceive Shest, the child whom she had taught the water rite and the praise-songs? A pang of fear and dismay and shame shook her when she saw Shest
come running to the gate to let the stranger in.

Akal spoke little, keeping her voice down in her chest, not meeting the child’s eyes. She was sure he recognized her. But his stare was simply that of a child who saw strangers so seldom that for all he knew they all looked alike. He ran in to fetch the old people, Magel and Madu. They came out to offer Akal the customary hospitality, a religious
duty, and Akal accepted, feeling mean and low at deceiving these people, who had always been kind to her in their rusty, stingy way, and at the same time feeling a wild impulse of laughter, of triumph. They did not see Enno in her, they did not know her. That meant that she was Akal, and Akal was free.

She was sitting in the kitchen drinking a thin and sour soup of summer greens when Shahes came
in – grim, stocky, weatherbeaten, wet. A summer thunderstorm had broken over the Farren soon after Akal reached the farm. “Who’s that?” said Shahes, doffing her wet coat.

“Come up from the village.” Old Magel lowered his voice to address Shahes confidentially: “He said they said you said you wanted a hand with the yearlings.”

“Where’ve you worked?” Shahes demanded, her back turned as she ladled
herself a bowl of soup.

Akal had no life history, at least not a recent one. She groped a long time. No one took any notice, prompt answers and quick talk being unusual and suspect practices in the mountains. At last she said the name of the farm she had run away from twenty years ago. “Bredde Hold, of Abba Village, on the Oriso.”

“And you’ve finefleeced? Handled yearlings? Ariu yearlings?”

Akal nodded, dumb. Was it possible that Shahes did not recognize her? Her voice was flat and unfriendly, and the one glance she had given Akal was dismissive. She had sat down with her soupbowl and was eating hungrily.

“You can come out with me this afternoon and I’ll see how you work,” Shahes said. “What’s your name, then?”

“Akal.”

Shahes grunted and went on eating. She glanced up across the
table at Akal again, one flick of the eyes, like a stab of light.

Out on the high hills, in the mud of rain and snowmelt, in the stinging wind and the flashing sunlight, they held each other so tight neither could breathe; they laughed and wept and talked and kissed and coupled in a rock shelter, and came back so dirty and with such a sorry little sack of combings that old Magel told Madu that
he couldn’t understand why Shahes was going to hire the tall fellow from down there at all, if that’s all the work was in him, and Madu said what’s more he eats for six.

But after a month or so, when Shahes and Akal weren’t hiding the fact that they slept together, and Shahes began to talk about making a sedoretu, the old couple grudgingly approved. They had no other kind of approval to give.
Maybe Akal was ignorant, didn’t know a hassel-bit from a cold-chisel; but they were all like that down there. Remember that travelling scholar, Enno, stayed here last year; she was just the same, too tall for her own good and ignorant, but willing to learn, same as Akal. Akal was a prime hand with the beasts, or had the makings of it anyhow. Shahes could look farther and do worse. And it meant she
and Temly could be the Day marriage of a sedoretu, as they would have been long since if there’d been any kind of men around worth taking into the farmhold; what’s wrong with this generation, plenty of good men around in my day.

Shahes had spoken to the village matchmakers down in Oro. They spoke to Otorra, now a foreman at the carding sheds; he accepted a formal invitation to Danro. Such invitations
included meals and an overnight stay, necessarily, in such a remote place, but the invitation was to share worship with the farm family at the house shrine, and its significance was known to all.

So they all gathered at the house shrine, which at Danro was a low, cold, inner room walled with stone, with a floor of earth and stones that was the unlevelled ground of the mountainside. A tiny spring,
rising at the higher end of the room, trickled in a channel of cut granite. It was the reason why the house stood where it did, and had stood there for 600 years. They offered water and
accepted water, one to another, one from another, the old Evening couple, Uncle Mika, his son Shest, Asbi who had worked as a pack-trainer and handyman at Danro for thirty years, Akal the new hand, Shahes the farmholder,
and the guests: Otorra from Oro and Temly from Ked’din.

Temly smiled across the spring at Otorra, but he did not meet her eyes, or anyone else’s.

Temly was a short, stocky woman, the same type as Shahes, but fairer-skinned and a bit lighter all round, not as solid, not as hard. She had a surprising, clear singing voice that soared up in the praise-songs. Otorra was also rather short and broad-shouldered,
with good features, a competent-looking man, but just now extremely ill at ease; he looked as if he had robbed the shrine or murdered the mayor, Akal thought, studying him with interest, as well she might. He looked furtive; he looked guilty.

Akal observed him with curiosity and dispassion. She would share water with Otorra, but not guilt. As soon as she had seen Shahes, touched Shahes, all her
scruples and moral anxieties had dropped away, as if they could not breathe up here in the mountains. Akal had been born for Shahes and Shahes for Akal; that was all there was to it. Whatever made it possible for them to be together was right.

Once or twice she did ask herself, what if I’d been born into the Morning instead of the Evening moiety? – a perverse and terrible thought. But perversity
and sacrilege were not asked of her. All she had to do was change sex. And that only in appearance, in public. With Shahes she was a woman, and more truly a woman and herself than she had ever been in her life. With everybody else she was Akal, whom they took to be a man. That was no trouble at all. She was Akal; she liked being Akal. It was not like acting a part. She never had been herself with
other people, had always felt a falsity in her relationships with them; she had never known who she was at all, except sometimes for a moment in meditation, when her
I am
became
It is,
and she breathed the stars. But with Shahes she was herself utterly, in time and in the body, Akal, a soul consumed in love and blessed by intimacy.

So it was that she had agreed with Shahes that they should say
nothing to Otorra, nothing even to Temly. “Let’s see what Temly makes of you,” Shahes said, and Akal agreed.

Last year Temly had entertained the scholar Enno overnight at her farmhold for instruction and worship, and had met her two or three times at Danro. When she came to share worship today she met Akal for the first time. Did she see Enno? She gave no sign of it. She greeted Akal with a kind
of brusque goodwill, and they talked about breeding ariu. She quite evidently studied the newcomer, judging, sizing up; but that was natural enough in a woman meeting a stranger she might be going to marry. “You don’t know much about mountain farming, do you?” she said kindly after they had talked a while. “Different from down there. What did you raise? Those big flatland yama?” And Akal told
her about the farm where she grew up, and the three crops a year they got, which made Temly nod in amazement.

As for Otorra, Shahes and Akal colluded to deceive him without ever saying a word more about it to each other. Akal’s mind shied away from the subject. They would get to know each other during the engagement period, she thought vaguely. She would have to tell him, eventually, that she
did not want to have sex with him, of course, and the only way to do that without insulting and humiliating him was to say that she, that Akal, was averse to having sex with other men, and hoped he would forgive her. But Shahes had made it clear that she mustn’t tell him that till they were married. If he knew it beforehand he would refuse to enter the sedoretu. And even worse, he might talk about
it, expose Akal as a woman, in revenge. Then they would never be able to marry. When Shahes had spoken about this Akal had felt distressed and trapped, anxious, guilty again; but Shahes was serenely confident and untroubled, and somehow Akal’s guilty feelings would not stick. They dropped off. She simply hadn’t thought much about it. She watched Otorra now with sympathy and curiosity, wondering
what made him look so hangdog. He was scared of something, she thought.

After the water was poured and the blessing said, Shahes read from the Fourth Discussion; she closed the old boxbook very carefully, put it on its shelf and its cloth over it, and then, speaking to Magel and Madu as was proper, they being what was left of the First Sedoretu of Danro, she said, “My Othermother and my Otherfather,
I propose that a new sedoretu be made in this house.”

Madu nudged Magel. He fidgeted and grimaced and muttered
inaudibly. Finally Madu said in her weak, resigned voice, “Daughter of the Morning, tell us the marriages.”

“If all be well and willing, the marriage of the Morning will be Shahes and Akal, and the marriage of the Evening will be Temly and Otorra, and the marriage of the Day will be
Shahes and Temly, and the marriage of the Night will be Akal and Otorra.”

There was a long pause. Magel hunched his shoulders. Madu said at last, rather fretfully, “Well, is that all right with everybody?” – which gave the gist, if not the glory, of the formal request for consent, usually couched in antique and ornate language.

“Yes,” said Shahes, clearly.

“Yes,” said Akal, manfully.

“Yes,”
said Temly, cheerfully.

A pause.

Everybody looked at Otorra, of course. He had blushed purple and, as they watched, turned greyish.

“I am willing,” he said at last in a forced mumble, and cleared his throat. “Only—” He stuck there.

Nobody said anything.

The silence was horribly painful.

Akal finally said, “We don’t have to decide now. We can talk. And, and come back to the shrine later,
if …”

“Yes,” Otorra said, glancing at Akal with a look in which so much emotion was compressed that she could not read it at all – terror, hate, gratitude, despair? – “I want to – I need to talk – to Akal.”

“I’d like to get to know my brother of the Evening too,” said Temly in her clear voice.

“Yes, that’s it, yes, that is—” Otorra stuck again, and blushed again. He was in such an agony of
discomfort that Akal said, “Let’s go on outside for a bit, then,” and led Otorra out into the yard, while the others went to the kitchen.

Akal knew Otorra had seen through her pretense. She was dismayed, and dreaded what he might say; but he had not made a scene, he had not humiliated her before the others, and she was grateful to him for that.

“This is what it is,” Otorra said in a stiff, forced
voice, coming to a stop at the gate. “It’s the Night marriage.” He came to a stop there, too.

Akal nodded. Reluctantly, she spoke, to help Otorra do what he had to do. “You don’t have to—” she began, but he was speaking again:

“The Night marriage. Us. You and me. See, I don’t— There’s some— See, with men, I—”

The whine of delusion and the buzz of incredulity kept Akal from hearing what the
man was trying to tell her. He had to stammer on even more painfully before she began to listen. When his words came clear to her she could not trust them, but she had to. He had stopped trying to talk.

Very hesitantly, she said, “Well, I … I was going to tell you … The only man I ever had sex with, it was … It wasn’t good. He made me— He did things— I don’t know what was wrong. But I never have—
I have never had any sex with men. Since that. I can’t. I can’t make myself want to.”

“Neither can I,” Otorra said.

They stood side by side leaning on the gate, contemplating the miracle, the simple truth.

“I just only ever want women,” Otorra said in a shaking voice.

“A lot of people are like that,” Akal said.

“They are?”

She was touched and grieved by his humility. Was it men’s boastfulness
with other men, or the hardness of the mountain people, that had burdened him with this ignorance, this shame?

“Yes,” she said. “Everywhere I’ve been. There’s quite a lot of men who only want sex with women. And women who only want sex with men. And the other way round, too. Most people want both, but there’s always some who don’t. It’s like the two ends of,” she was about to say “a spectrum,”
but it wasn’t the language of Akal the fleecer or Otorra the carder, and with the adroitness of the old teacher she substituted “a sack. If you pack it right, most of the fleece is in the middle. But there’s some at both ends where you tie off, too. That’s us. There’s not as many of us. But there’s nothing wrong with us.” As she said this last bit it did not sound like what a man would say to a
man. But it was said; and Otorra did not seem to think it peculiar, though he did not look entirely convinced. He pondered. He had a pleasant face, blunt, unguarded, now that his unhappy secret was out. He was only about thirty, younger than she had expected.