The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (7 page)

“See you
in court tomorrow, then,” said Fowlds. He bent
towards me. “You’re an anthropologist, so is it true that these mountain guys are hot trots?”

“Why don’t you find out?” I said.

“Oh I will!” – and he wandered away.

Bel said: “Come and meet a non-bee Queen.”

Sadry: Idris’s brothers left us alone, but Mors would bring some small comfort, like fresh milk, sit on the end of the pallet, and talk,
playing mediator.

Idris: The thin part of the wedge.

Sadry: The thick part being your brothers. I put no trust in him, but he was too engaging for me to keep sulking. It became a game, to talk and parry his flirtation. That way courtship lay, I knew.

I asked: “What brought you to Celat?” and he looked rueful: “Love. Or a potion. Or perhaps both.”

Idris:
[sarcastic]
“Men are such romantics.”

Sadry: I said: “And you’ve stayed here?” – looking pointedly around the Scavengers’ mess.

He said: “I mediate when Idye and Iain get into trouble.”

“Like now?” I said.

He sighed. “This wasn’t my idea. But as a challenge, I find it – seductive.”

“As opposed to rape?”

He said, lightly: “You know that is the last resort.”

I must have gone white, for he added: “But that would mean I’d failed.
And I’d hate that.”

When he had gone, I said to Idris: “I suppose he’s not too bad.”

On the wall hung the one precious thing I had seen in Celat, a Tech mirror. Idris abruptly lifted it down and set it on my chest, holding it with both hands, so all I could see was my scratched face.

“You think, you really think pretty Mors courts you for love, when you look, as Idye charmingly said, like rotten
bait!”

“No,” I said, sobered. She touched my cheekbones.

“I can see under the surface, but
they
can’t. That protects you for the moment. But when you heal …”

I said: “Get word to my father!”

She hesitated, before replying: “Mors came from the market with the news your father’s dead. Of sickness or worry, they say. And so Erewhon is vacant and everyone’s looking for you.”

I cried at that,
and she kissed away my tears. After a while I said: “Then we must get out of here all by ourselves.”

The Queen proved to be the fisher-girl from Greym, whom we found, together with her husbands, in Bel’s private attic rooms. The trio were replete with honeycake and a keg of the weak Highland beer. Close to they seemed painfully young, in their mid-teens at most, the two obvious brothers and the
girl touchingly in love with each other. Bel introduced them as Milas and Meren and Jossy, saying of the latter: “Pregnant, she tells me, but she won’t say by whom …”

Jossy grinned with gap-toothed embarrassment. The boys were more forthcoming: “Aw, she’s just kiddin’ you, Cos.”

Indeed, I thought, the Rule was strict regarding sexual access, precisely to prevent squabbles over paternity. Then
I did a delayed doubletake at the last word spoken. Cos meant
cousin …

I stared at Bel. “I thought you were a Lowlander.”

“Not always,” she said. “Once I could have been a Queen.”

Milas coughed. “Aw, that’s old history now.”

I was starting to catch on. “You walked out and down from Greym? Why?”

Bel replied with a question. “You like men?” she said, looking at Jossy. “You like lots of sex
with men?”

Jossy giggled; the boys exchanged glances, tolerant of their eccentric relative.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Bel said. Then, more to me: “But if you don’t, then there’s no sense living in misery. I had a pretty young cousin, who would never question the Rule. So I gave my husbands to her.”

“Our mam,” said the boys proudly.

“These are her twins. I had no children, so I walked free.”

She smiled at them, on her face the lines of a hard life, lived good-naturedly and without regret.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Came down to the village and this Inn, where I asked for work as a kitchenhand, anything. And here I stayed, with Bel, who
owned the Inn. When she went underground, I took her name and carried on the business.”

She poured out more beer, and sliced the remaining cake.
As she did, I noticed a tattoo extending from the palm of her hand to the wrist: an oval enclosing two stylized bees, under a gabled roof.

“Two Queens in a House?” I asked softly, as she passed me the cake.

“No,” she replied, “Two worker bees in their Inn.”

I took her hand, to better examine the device, and then noticed the pigment of one bee was faded, and that it was drawn differently from
the other. It also looked vaguely familiar – and I whistled softly as I recognized a birth marker, the bee of Westron modified into an emblem that was all Bel’s own.

“With your bee-skills, I should have guessed you were born at Westron.”

I released her hand.

“As you’re a relative, I wonder if you might get me an interview with Queen Conye. She’s an interesting woman.”

A guarded nod. Press
on, I thought.

“I’d like that,” I said. “Almost as much as I’d like to talk to Sadry and Idris.”

“Easier said than done,” she said.

“Well, yes.”

“Conye’s cranky on me, for letting the House down.” She paused, and what she said next nearly floored me. “But I can get you into the lock-up.” She turned to the Greym three: “And you didn’t hear that, did you?”

“No, Cos,” muttered one of the boys,
and I began to realize the powers of this extraordinary woman.

Sadry: “Erewhon’s symbol is a blue swirl, the river of life, for it is knowledge of illness that is the strength of our House, just as Dusse has botany, herbalism, and Westron the secret of mead.

[I nodded, thinking that it was as if when setting up the Rule someone had determined that the precious Tech knowledge and goods be apportioned
equally between Houses.]

Sadry: In our cellars, cut deep into the mountainside, we hoard the artefacts of Tech medicine.

Me: I heard you had a pharmacopeia.

Sadry: Yes, a book of the coloured beads that the Tech people didn’t wear but ate, to keep themselves well. That we salvaged ourselves, other books the Scavengers bring us. Our oldest book, though, isn’t medical – it’s called Erewhon, but
it’s not about my House, but a dream, a nowhere place. In this book things are reversed: the sick are criminals, and the criminals regarded as ill.

Idris: Are we criminal, or ill?

Bel: Both, probably, in the eyes of the men.

Sadry: The book-Erewhon seemed strange, but not much stranger than the Rule. Or the way I would live in my home, with Idris, if the court permits us.

[I thought, but did
not say, that while Bel could live in the Lowlands, a happy impossibility in Highland terms, two Queens in the same mountain House was probably intolerable for the Rule-followers. Sadry was Queen of Erewhon by inheritance, but if this case went against her she could end up Queen of Nowhere.]

The Greym three had had a big, exciting day and they drooped like flowers with the dusk. Bel brought them
blankets, letting them doze on her private floorspace. After she blew out the candles (Highland style, of rush and tallow), we two retired to the downstairs bar, where she ejected the last drinkers. Now we had the place to ourselves I wanted to interview this runaway Queen, but instead Bel went out. Alone, I stretched out on the hearthrug and watched the fire, thinking of the Houses and their
troubles. As I lay there, unbidden came to mind the memory of an interview tape I had once heard, with an anonymous woman of Bulle.

Bulle woman: The Rule is, share and share body alike in marriage. That’s why Queens seldom have a night to themselves once they wed. It’s best if you’re stolen by brothers, because they’re like beans in the pod, so you treat them the same. But if you’ve got one you
like less, or one you love most … that means trouble. Poor silly Nissa!

Interviewer: It was the lover that was the problem, wasn’t it?

Bulle woman: His name was Yeny. I met him once, and wasn’t surprised that Bryn Erewhon was head over heels, why he brought him into the marriage. The trouble was Nissa fell for Yeny too, and she wanted him all for herself, like a Lowlander. The sensible
thing
would have been to let those two walk out and down, but Bryn was stubborn, I guess, like Erewhoners are. He called in a Mediator, but that didn’t work. So Nissa took the matters into her own hands.

Slowly, imperceptibly, I slipped into dream-sleep, images appearing and disappearing before my slitted eyes. First I saw the blue sign of Erewhon, the river twisting into a figure of eight, an infinity
symbol, then the self-devouring serpent I had admired at the tattooist’s. A log collapsed in the fireplace, and I opened and closed one eye, importing the flamescape into my dream, for now I flew above red mountains. Below my eagle-I were Houses, and I zoomed in and somehow through the thatch roof of Erewhon, to see Nissa (who looked amazingly like Sadry) zig-zagging through Intrigue. She went
down a flight of stone steps to the courtyard where a Scavenger waited with goods for identification and sale: sheets of dirty foil, on one side covered with symmetrical white studs. The dream-watcher followed Nissa into the cellars, where she consulted a tattered book. When she came out again, she paid the Scavenger, and tucked the drugs into her underrobes.

I felt her cold hand – then realized
it was Bel, shaking me awake.

“Come on! I’ve bribed you an hour’s talk!”

“Wh … ?” I started to say, then received a spare robe full in the face, and with it the realization of where we were going.

“Hurry! Wrap yourself up!” she said.

Doubly shrouded we slipped into the darkness of the street, the mountain air chill even in summer. The village at first seemed asleep, with the mountains looming
over it as if over a cradle, the gleam of snow at their peaks like watchful eyes. But as we moved swift and silent as Loris, I noticed cracks of light under shutters, heard babies’ cries or soft talk, and saw distantly, in the gap between two buildings, a group of men carousing around a bonfire, among them Fowlds.

“He’ll get slipped a philtre and good and proper fucked,” Bel commented.

“That’s
what he wants,” I said.

After what seemed an age Bel finally led me into a dark doorway I slowly realized was a back entrance to the Courthouse. Inside, someone waited for us, their robe thrown completely over
their head, almost like Bel beekeeping. The apparition led us up stairs of scavenged Tech concrete to the second floor, where a door was unlocked for us, then locked behind us.

Sadry was
awake, spinning Lori wool on a spindle, the Highland cure for fidgets, or using up time. I could see for the first time her scars, and her composed, indeed, queenly mien. Idris slept, her head on Sadry’s knee; she stirred as we approached, knuckling her eyes. For a long moment there was silence, before Bel fumbled under her robe and produced delicacies: fresh Lori cheese, fruit, cured meat.

“Greetings Bel Innkeeper, greetings Northerner,” Sadry said, her voice neutral as she accepted the gifts.

I had nothing to offer, but nonetheless pulled out my tape recorder from under my robes. Idris goggled at the device, then said to Sadry: “What, our words to be set down and used against us?”

“For an interview,” I said, alarmed, “It’s standard practice.”

“I didn’t agree to a Tech toy,” Sadry
said. She looked at Bel. “Your intermediary never mentioned it …”

Idris reached forward, as if to snatch away the device, and I clutched it, inadvertently activating Record. She spoke, her voice a snarl, rising … until Bel clapped a hand over her mouth.

“Hush,” she said. “Would you wake the guards? When the Northerner is like me, and like you!”

Idris’s eyes rolled.

I said, my voice trembling,
now I was so near to my goal, and yet not there yet: “I … we … my friends … we monitor … looking for … breakers of the rules … even in such a male-dominated society … you see, it’s so important that you exist, we need a record … of women loving women … that’s why I want your story!”

The gaze of these two girl lovers met, considering my plea.

I started the interview story-eater style, using the
polite Highland opener of recounting my latest dream. One dream demands another, and so Sadry responded with her ghost story, continuing the theme of Nissa, which recurred as if haunting the conversation:

Sadry: My father said he got sick of it, Bryn moping, Nissa
storming, and Yeny in the middle (who was not
his
lover) unable to make up his mind. So he went off herding …

Idris: It saved him
from a dose of worm-cure!

[I thought of my dream again. If Bel had not shaken me awake, I possibly might have continued the dream, with Nissa–Sadry one snowy night serving her in-laws a Bulle herbal remedy, but combined with what from the pharmacopeic texts in the library she knew to be sleeping pills. Presumably she wanted everyone in the House to sleep long enough for her and her lover to elope.
Murder meant feuding, and mass murder surely a civil war. Her bad luck then, or her curse, as the Highlanders said, that the pills were contaminated, or when combined with the herbs, toxic. Ten people died at Erewhon, two more when Nissa’s flight ended in an avalanche – incidentally saving, as the Bulle woman had noted, that House from a ruinous bloodprice.]

Me: What saved Mors?

[They eyed me.
This I knew was the nub of the case, whether the story of Nissa had repeated with Sadry.]

Idris: He was called away to Mediate, in a dispute over some Lori.

Me: And with only two men left in the house, you acted.

Idris: They got drunk as pigs.

Me: On pissweak Highland beer?

Idris
[defensively]
: Maybe they had mead.

Me: That’s a luxury. You said Celat was poor.

Sadry: What is this? An interview
or an interrogation?

Bel: It will help you! And you need help.

[Long pause]

Me: What happened?

Idris: I cooked for my brothers that night, and then went upstairs with sop for Sadry. We could hear roistering below, and I barred the door of the Queen’s room with what I could find and move … without Mors to Mediate, Sadry wasn’t safe.