The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (6 page)

Sadry: On that day, or one soon after, I saw above the birches a line of pack Lori winding their way down the mountainside. Their flags had the device of a bee: Westron, our nearest neighbours. And that proved to be the first of many visits from the local and not so local Houses.

Me: Including the Celats?

Sadry: [
nods
] The message
would be always be the same: Erewhon has been decimated, and you need an alliance. That meant, me + whoever was the highest bidder. But my father said to all and sundry that they had made such offers before, when he was the sole survivor of Erewhon House. And had he not responded by a second marriage with a lowland woman, outside the Rule? I, as his only child and heiress of Erewhon, also should
have the opportunity of making a choice, when I was old enough.

Me: They agreed to that?

Sadry: With grumbling, yes.

Ever since contact was re-established between North and Suff, nearly a century after the Crash, anthropologists had been fascinated by the Rule. Much of their interest was prurient, with accounts of giant beds for the Queen and her consorts (a lurid fantasy, given the Intrigue
configuration). I had in my pack a report positing the mechanisms by which Highland men could apparently switch from het monogamy, albeit with a brother or brothers involved in the marriage; to bisex, when an additional unrelated male entered the House, a partner for both husbands and wife; to homosex, with the Queen relationship purely platonic. It was not exactly light reading, but I persisted
with it, lying on the pallet, the hum of bees filling my ears. In the end the graphs and diagrams were too much for me, and I simply stared at the wall and thought.

On, for instance, how easily the complex relationships in a Rule marriage could turn nasty, Nissa of Erewhon being merely an extreme example. Yet divorce, with people “walking out and down”, i.e. to the Lowlands or to join the itinerant
traders, was uncommon. Highlanders had a vested interest in conciliation, in preserving the group marriages: that was why many houses
contained Mediators, skilled negotiators. The ideal was embodied in a toy I had bought at the market that little girls wore dangling from their belts: a lady-doll on a string, with a dependent number of men-dolls.

Why, I wondered, dandling the puppets, did sexual
options not exist for women as well as men, with, say, linked girl-dolls? Were the Queens simply too busy with their men? Feeling frustrated I wandered outside and found Bel attending to the hives.

“Come see!” she said, and so I donned over my Highland robes the spare veil and gloves hanging behind the hut door. Bel had lifted the roof off a hive, and I stared over her black shoulder at the teeming
mass of insects.

“I think I understand,” I finally said, “why a hive is unlike a Rule House.”

She nodded, invisible behind her veil. “Ever see a Hive where the drones bossed the show? Or without any other female bees? It would be impossible …”

“As a House with two Queens?” I finished.

She straightened, holding a comb-frame in her gloved hand, staring across the valley at the Courthouse roof.

“You’re learning, story-eater.”

Sadry: Highlanders say, when you die, you go downriver and that is what happened to me. My life at Erewhon with my parents, then my father only (after my mother went, as the Lowlanders say, underground) that is upriver to me. Everything since is the next life.

[She spoke with such intensity that I almost reached out and touched her, to belie the words.]

I went
out alone after a stray Lori, the best yearling we had. Our herders had given up searching and my father was ill in bed, but I stubbornly kept looking. Most likely the animal had drowned, so I followed the Lori paths along a stream raging with snowmelt. Almost at its junction with the great river that runs from Erewhon to the lowlands, I saw a patch of colour in a large thornbush overhanging the
torrent: a drowned bird, swept downstream until it had caught in the thorns. But though it was shaped like the black finches of the Highlands, the feathers were white-gold-red: a throwback to the days before the hole in the sky opened. I wanted
the feathers for ornament, so leant on the thornbush, to better reach out – but the bank collapsed beneath me.

The water wasn’t deep and the bush cartwheeled
in its flow, taking me, my robes entangled in the branches, into the great river. Up and down I was ducked, alternately breathing and drowning, torn by thorns, or dashed against riverstones. All I could do was grab at air when I could …

[She paused and I again noted the fine white lines on her exposed skin, a tracery of thornmarks. Worst was the scar tissue in the palm of one hand, where she
must have clutched at the bush despite the pain, in the process defacing and almost obscuring her birth marker, the Erewhon tattoo.]

I think miles went by, hours – for the next thing I recall was the evening moon. I gazed up at it, slowly comprehending that I lay still, out of the helter-skelter race of the river, and that something wet and sluggish held me fast. From the taste of silt in my
mouth I knew that the bush had stuck in the mudflats where the river widens. In the moonlight I saw solid land, shoreline, but when I tried to struggle towards it I found I had no strength left. But I lived! And surely my father’s herders would soon find me.

Idris:You’d forgotten …

Sadry: On whose land the mudflats were. So I shivered through that night, until the morning sun warmed me. I had
no protection against it, so covered my face with all I had, which was mud. Then I waited for help.

Idris: The next bit is my story …

Sadry:
[laughing]
Tell it, then.

Idris: The river had lately brought we Celats a fine young Lori, fresh-drowned. So in hopes of further luck, I scavenged in the mudflats again. The bush sticking up like a cage, I noticed that first. Next I saw a faint movement
like a crab, a human hand, then eyes looking at me out of the mud. I had to use the pack Lori to drag her out, she was stuck so fast, half-dead as she was. And the bird too, the one that had brought her to me; I found that when I washed the mud from her robes.

[She pulled from beneath her underobe a thong, pendant from it a love-charm fashioned from tiny feathers, white-gold-red. Sadry almost
simultaneously revealed a duplicate charm. I wondered again at the mixture of toughness and sentimentality of the Highlanders,
then at the strength of this pair, one to survive near death from drowning and then exposure, the other to save her … In my cosy north, teenage girls are babies, but these two had a life’s hard experience.]

In the courtroom, they looked tiny, my quarry, against the black-clad
might of the Highland Rule. The tribunal hearing this case consisted of a Judge from Chuch, the Suff capitol, a Northern Government representative, and the only empowered woman in sight, Conye of Westron. This Queen had been the subject of a classic study, so I knew her story well – but still boggled at the fact that this dignified old lady with the multiple tattooes had seven husbands.

I bent
towards Bel, sitting beside me in the public gallery. “Now
she
is like the Queen of a Hive!” I murmured.

“Only because she outlived all her drones!” Bel replied.

Around us, Suffeners commented too, court etiquette permitting this background buzz, along with eating and the nursing of babies or pets.

“—I ain’t disrespecting new dead, but old Erewhon was mad to say no to Westron—”

“—had a bellyful
of the Rule, hadn’t he—”

“—but risking all that House lore being lost—”

“Excuse me,” said a male voice, from behind me. “You’re the anthropologist?”

I turned to see a fellow Northerner, nervously holding out an ID. It read: Fowlds, journalist.

“I’m normally posted in Chuch, so I can’t make head or tail of this mountain law,” he said.

“And you’d like an interpreter? Meet Bel!”

The Innkeeper
grinned, speaking slowly and precisely:

“The two girls in that dock are one party; the two men another. They tell their stories, and the judges decide who are to be believed.”

“Ah,” he said. “And who is likely to be credible?”

Around us Suffeners sucked sweets and eavesdropped happily.

“Well,” said Bel, “on the one hand we have a House wealthy and respected, but eccentric – maybe to the point
of having gone just too far. That’s Sadry of Erewhon, second generation Rule-breaker. On the other hand, Idye and Mors of Celat, a lesser
House. Now they are Scavengers, but once Celat were mercenaries, hired trouble, before your North outlawed feuding.”

It had been a condition of autonomy, I recalled, which had incidentally obviated the need to have a concentration of fighting men in the fortified
Houses. And thus the need to create bonds between them, a prime function of the Rule?

“But the other girl is Idris of Celat? What is she doing with Erewhon?”

“That’s what the tribunal is trying to establish,” said Bel, as thunderous drumrolls sounded through the court, signalling the formal start of proceedings.

Sadry: I knew that somebody found me, but merely thought I had crossed into downriver,
this life revisited, with a ghost Lori carrying me on its back to a ghost House. Somebody washed me and bandaged my cuts – I asked her if she was an angel spirit, but she only laughed. I slept, ate buckwheat mush when it was spooned into my mouth, slept again. The next time I woke, the room seemed full of men, all staring at me.

“Idris, do you know who she is?” said one, in a voice soft and smooth
as a stroked cat.

“How could I?” said the angel.

“She looks like rotting bait,” said another, so big and hairy I thought him an ogre.

“Idris, has she been instructing you how to treat her wounds?” asked the first.

Mutinous silence. Of course I had, for sick as I was, I was still an Erewhon healer.

“Only one way to find out!” said the third, twin of the second, but clearly the leader. He unwrapped
the bandage on my right hand, to reveal the palm, which he inspected closely, picking at the scab with his nails.

“Blue! The missing heir of Erewhon!”

Big hands lifted the pallet, carrying it and me out the door and along the Intrigue space. Somewhere along the way my raw hand struck rough stonewall, and a red haze of pain washed over me. Even the jolt as the pallet met floor again, in a larger
room, I barely noticed.

“Where’s that girl? Idris?”

“Here!” – but spoken as if through clenched teeth.

“Get her good and better, and soon, okay?”

And with that they left. The pain had cleared my head: now I could see that the angel crying as she re-bandaged my hand was only a girl my age, in a room too stuffed with Scavengers’ rubbish to be ghostly.

“Which House is this?” I asked, after a
while.

“Celat.”

“Oh,” I said. “Trouble.”

“The thugs were Idye and Iain, my brothers; the smoothie Mors, Mediator of this House, and their lover.”

“No Queen?” I asked, trying to recall what I knew of Celat.

“This is her room.”

Idris stared into my face, as if expecting a reaction. Something was wrong, I could tell that.

She sighed, and added: “Our mother is years downriver.” Her words and
tone were like a trail, down which I chased a hunting beast.

“We’ve been too poor and disreputable for any marrying since.”

The trail was warm now, and I guessed what I would find at the end of it would be unpleasant.

“Until you came along,” Idris finished. “That’s why they moved the bed. Don’t you understand? They want you for Queen of Celat
and
Erewhon.”

Indeed, an ogre with three male heads,
ferocious game. I knew I had to fight it, or marry it, but how? More thinking aloud than anything else, I said:

“I’d sooner marry you!”

Idris:
[triumphantly]
And I said: Do you mean that? Do you really mean that?

The hearing began with a reading of the various charges and counter-charges, then a series of witnesses appeared. I began to get a sense of Suff law, as the bare bones of the case,
what was not disputed by either side, was established. But the mix of ritual and informality in the proceedings disconcerted me, as when Bel waved wildly at some witnesses, a married trio from Greym House. They waved back, before resuming their evidence: that
they, being river fishers, had found a hat with blue ties in their net.

“At least there’s no argument she fell in the water,” Fowlds commented.

Mors of Celat rose and bowed at the judges. I thought him a personable young buck, not as loutish as Idye beside him, with a feline, glossy look – if you liked that sort of thing. An answer to a virgin’s prayers? Not from the look of black hatred that passed between him and the two girls.

“Can he address the court? I mean, he’s an accused,” Fowlds murmured.

Bel had gone rushing out of the gallery,
leaving me to interpret as best I could.

“As a Mediator Mors is privileged to argue points of law.”

“They’re marriage counsellors, right?”

“Among other things,” I said. “Things get fraught, you need someone like that. Otherwise you might end up like Nissa’s Erewhon.”

“Oh, the case people keep on mentioning,” he said.

“They’re similar, that’s why.”

“But wasn’t that a mass poisoning …” he
began, but I shushed him as Mors began to speak.

“I bring the attention of this court to the law of the Scavengers…”

“Cheeky beggar!” somebody muttered.

“Huh?” said Fowlds. I was feeling confused myself.

“Er, I believe it’s basicallly finder’s keepers.”

“But it’s not been applied to living humans since feuding days,” Bel finished, from behind my shoulder.

“But there’s a precedent?”

“Oh
yes. Oh my!”

Idris had leapt up, shouting:

“I found Sadry, so she’s mine! Not yours, not anybody else’s.”

Conye of Westron rose, and moving effortlessly despite her age, placed herself between the pair, her arms stretched out, invoking quiet.

“Another Mediator,” said Bel. “She’ll adjourn the court now, and let people cool off. It’s getting late, so I guess they’ll call it a day.”