The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (5 page)

But in this moment I am also conscious of the Queen herself, her eyes dark with grief and yearning. Her hand, with its long fingers – a healed cut on the right index finger, the henna patterns fading – reaches up to wipe a tear. And yet in her gaze leaps a certain vitality, an interest. Her mind ranges far across the universe,
carried by my tales. In that small fire in her eyes is all my hope.

Perhaps all I’ve found is a moment of time that keeps repeating, in which, despite the predations of history, I am caught, with Isha and Sūryavati, in a loop of time distanced from the main current. Here my stories never end; I never reach the moment Sūryavati awaits, and Isha never finds out who she is. Gunādhya remains a whisper
in my mind, his relation to me as yet a secret. Here we range across the skies, Isha and I, Vidyadharas of another age, and Sūryavati’s gaze follows us. Who is the teller of the tale, and who the listener? We are caught in a web, a wheel of our own making. And if you, the listener from another time and space, upon whose cheek this story falls like spray thrown up by the ocean – you, the eavesdropper
hearing a conversation borne by the wind, if you would walk into this story, take it away with you into your world, with its sorrows and small revelations, what would become of you? Would you also enter this circle? Would you tell me your story? Would we sit together, Sūryavati, Isha, and I, with you, and feel
teso
within us – and weave meaning from the strands of the tale?

I am Somadeva. I am
a poet, a teller of tales.

THE QUEEN OF EREWHON

Lucy Sussex

“Hey you! Story-eater! Devourer of lives! Leave us alone! GET OUT!”

Those are the first sounds on the tape: Idris spitting at me, refusing to be interviewed. I wind on a little, until I hear a different voice – Sadry speaking.

Sadry: … ghosts. The house at Erewhon could have been full of them for all anyone knew, for there were only our family of three and
the hired hands rattling around the building. Erewhon had followed the Rule for generations, not that I knew that. I was only a child; I think three. Things hadn’t got explained to me yet. I had no idea how odd my upbringing was, for the High country, with only one father.

One night I thought I heard crying, so I got out of bed, curious. I wandered along the upstairs corridor which all the sleeping
rooms led off. When I got a little older, I learnt why this space was called “Intrigue” in all the Rule houses. It kinks and curves, with crannies for people to hide and overhear – hence the name.

Me: A public space?

Sadry: Or a private one. I followed the sound to the outside wall, to a window with a recessed ledge. The shutters were closed and the winter curtains drawn, but between both was
a space where someone might sit comfortably and that was from where the sound came. Now it sounded human, and female. I heard soft words, a male voice responding. Two people were hidden there! Curious, I stood and listened. But it was bitter frost weather, and rather than give myself away by teeth-chatter, I retreated until just round the corner I found a basket. It was filled with rags,
either
bought from Scavengers or our old clothes (Highlanders never throw anything away). So I climbed into it without making a sound, for it was an old Tech thing, of
perlastic
, rather than wicker. I curled up warmly in the contents and listened in comfort, not that I could understand much. Eventually I fell asleep, and woke in dawnlight to find my mother bending over me. And unthinkingly I blurted
out the last words I had heard, which were: “I only want to be married to the one I love best, not all the others.”

My mother said: “Where did you hear that?” and so I pointed at the ledge.

“The two lovers, there, last night.”

She looked at me hard, then flung the curtain back. It wasn’t me who screeched, it was her – at the sight of dust thick and undisturbed on the ledge. Then she scooped
me up in her arms and went running down Intrigue, to the room she and my father shared, a small room, his younger son’s room.

Idris: What did
he
do?

Sadry: Took us both into bed, calmed us down, for now I was hysterical too, and then very gently questioned me. What did the voices sound like? Could I imitate them? When I was as dry of information as a squeezed fruit, he said: “It could have been
any unhappy Queen of Erewhon.”

And then he told me about living under the Rule, of his first wife, his brother, and their husband-lover.

Polyandry. The first time I heard the word I thought it a girl’s name:
Polly Andree
. The misapprehension, though instantly corrected, stuck in my mind, so that I persistently thought of the woman at the centre of these group marriages as a Polly. And here I
was in Polyandry Central, as anthropologists called it, the Highlands of Suff, and I still couldn’t shake my personal terminology. It was a bad slip to make when trying to convince Bel Innkeeper to find me space, in a town already filled to bursting for the Assizes.

“We call them
Queens
,” she said.

I’d listened to tapes of Suff accents but the actuality was something else, my comprehension of
it being delayed, with embarrassing pauses at the ends of sentences. When I finally understood, I replied, too hastily: “I know. Like bees.”

All the while we had talked on the inn’s back verandah a steady stream of fat brown bees had zoomed to and from some nearby hive, so this comment was both dead obvious and instantly regrettable.

Bel snorted. “You Northerners! Think you know everything,
with your new-Tech ways! Ever seen a hive, ever seen a Rule House? No, that’s why you’re here, to find all about the funny Suffeners, isn’t it?”

I said, carefully: “Okay, I’m what you call a story-eater, an anthropologist. But I can understand you’ve had a gutful of being studied and written up. I’m not here to sensationalize you, but to observe the court case.”

Bel stopped folding the inn washing
and gave me her undivided attention. “Why?”

“Because it’s important.”

“It’s brought everyone down from the mountains and into this valley! How’m I supposed to house ’em all? And you, too.”

She rocked on the balls of her feet, thinking. “Well, since you’re here, I’d better be hospitable. And teach you about queen bees, too.” She pointed at an outbuilding. “That’s the honey-hut, and the one free
space I’ve got. Take it or leave it!”

The hut was tiny: between pallet and beekeeping equipment there was barely any room for me. Above the bed was what I at first took to be a Tech photoimage, but it proved to be a window looking onto the mountains, made of the glass and wooden surround of a picture frame. In fact the whole building was constructed of scavenged oddments from the days of affluence:
flattened tins, scraps of timber, and other usables slapped together in a crude but habitable mess. I was used to recycling, even in the neo-industrial North, but I had never seen such a higgledy-piggledy assortment before. It was to prove typical of much of the town itself.

I lay on the pallet and dozed for a while, lulled by the soporific hum from the nearby hives. When I woke, I tested my
tape recorder – a precious thing, not because it was a genuine Tech artefact, but because it was a copy, its workings painstakingly rediscovered. Of course, it wasn’t as good; nothing was, for we would never be as rich, nor as spendthrift, as our forebears. For over a century now, since the Crash, we had been adapting to an
economy of scarcity. It was the adaptations, rather than the antiques,
or the neo copies, that interested me – particularly the Rule Houses, and at their centre, the Queen Polly Andree. How would it feel, to have multiple husbands? And what would happen if you grew tired of them?

Sadry: My father said, “Nobody knows how the Rule began, just as nobody knows who bred the mountain Lori to be our herd animals. A Northerner, a story-eater, once told me the Rule was a
pragmatic evolution, practiced by other mountain peoples. He said large populations cannot be sustained in marginal highland. One wife for several men – who are linked by blood, or ties of love – limits breeding, and means the family land can be passed undivided through the generations. It made sense; more than what the Lowlanders say, which is that we Highlanders deliberately chose complicated sex
lives! Yet he spoke as if we were specimens, like a strain of Lori. That annoyed me, so I wouldn’t give him what he had come for, which was my history.

“When I was the age you are now, my brother Bryn and I were contracted to marry Nissa of Bulle, who would grow to be our wife and Queen of Erewhon. When I was twelve and Bryn fifteen – the same age as Nissa – we travelled to Bulle to ‘steal’ our
bride, as is custom. When we got back Erewhon celebrated with the biggest party I ever saw and afterwards Nissa spent the night with Bryn. I was too young to be a husband to her, though we would play knucklebones, or other children’s games. That way Nissa and I grew friends, and then, after several years, husband and wife. But we lived without passion, all three of us. So when love did strike Nissa
and Bryn, it did like a thunderbolt. And the lightning cracked through this house, destroying nearly everybody within it.”

Market day in the Highlands is a spectacle, even without the added excitement of an Assizes and a sensational lawsuit. I woke early, to the sounds of shouts, goods being trundled down the main street, the shrill cries of Lori. When I came in the meal area of the Inn was full.
Bel was cutting buckwheat bread; she handed me a slice, spread with Lori butter, at the same time jerking her head at the open door. I took the hint and went outside.

Immediately I found myself in the middle of a herd of Lori, who assessed the stranger intelligently from under their black topknots, then parted and pattered around me. The animal was a miracle of genetic engineering, combining
the best of sheep, llama and goat, but with three-toed feet causing less damage to mountain soils than hooves. Like the other Highland animals it was dark, resistant to skin cancer; a boon in an area cursed with thin ozone, even so long after the Crash. Various studies had posited that the Lori designer might have been the social architect who engineered the lives of Highlanders with the Rule. If
so, I wondered why human genes had not been manipulated as well, given that these people had insufficient protective melanin, varying as they did from pale to brown.

Suffeners met by sunlight would be shrouded in the robes of Lori homespun that served all purposes, from formal to cold-weather wear, wide flax hats and the kohl that male and female daubed around their eyes in lieu of the precious
Tech sunglasses. But inside, or under protective awnings such as those strung over the market square, hats would be doffed, robes flipped back like cloaks, displaying bare skin, gaudy underobes and the embroidered or beaded or tattooed emblems of the Highland Houses. It was a paradox: outwardly, dour puritanism; inwardly, carnival.

I stood on the fringes, observing the display of goods and people.
Nobody in sight was armed, well not visibly, but I had read too many accounts of bloodshed and the consequent blood-price not to sense the underlying menace in the marketplace. The most obvious source was the young men, who tended towards ostentatious ornament, an in-your-face statement of aggressive sexual confidence. The women were less showy, but had an air of defensibility, as if being hardbitten
was a desirable female trait in the Highlands. Small wonder, I thought, recalling the mock kidnap in the marriage ceremony, and how common real raids had been until recently.

I felt a little too conspicuously a visitor, so bought a secondhand robe, the wool soft but smelly, and draped it over my shoulders. Thus partially disguised, I wandered among the stalls. A one-eyed man watched over Scavenged
Tech rubbish, cans, wires, tires; a nursing mother examined the parchments of designs
offered by the tattooist; a group of teenage boys, herders from their staffs, noisily tried on strings of beads; and two husky young men haggled over a tiny jar proffered for sale by an elderly woman. Hungry for overheard talk, information, I lingered by the tattoos, my interest not feigned, for I was particularly
taken with one design, a serpent eating its own tail. Conversation ebbed around me, and I learnt the one-eyed Scavenger had found a new site, that the herders weren’t impressed by the selection of beads, that the mother wished to mark that she now had children by all three of her husbands with a celebratory tattoo, and that the men were buying a philtre or aphrodisiac, for use on a third party.
Now I was slipping into the flow of Suff speak, I quickly comprehended the old woman’s spiel: “If Celat had tried
my
potion on Erewhon, none of this would have happened.”

All within earshot involuntarily glanced up at the bulk of the biggest building in the town, the Courthouse/lock-up. I had, in my wanderings through the market, seen many emblems of greater or lesser Houses, a distinction the
Highlanders made by the size of the landholdings. The signs were displayed on people and also the stalls, signalling the goods that were the specialties of each House. I had been making a mental checklist, and had noted two emblems unseen: the blue swirl of Erewhon, and the red swordblade of Celat. Those entitled to bear them currently resided within the lock-up, while the merits of their respective
cases were decided. On the one hand, unlawful detention and threatened rape; on the other, abduction, arson and murder. No wonder the town was packed.

Sadry: The place of graves at Erewhon is a birch grove and as we walked through it, hand in hand, my parents named each tree: “This is Bryn’s, this Moli the trader’s, by chance at Erewhon that night and for ever after.” It was a peaceful spot,
even with the new thicket of saplings, Nissa’s work. I could believe that any ghost here would sleep and not walk – which was precisely why I had been brought there.

Idris: Nissa and her lover were buried in the snow, weren’t they? Or at Bulle?

Sadry: I don’t know …

[A clattering interruption at this point, the turnkeys bringing in
that night’s meal, the sound also coming from below, as the
Celats, housed on the ground floor, were simultaneously fed.]