The Shore of Women (52 page)

“Enough,” he said as he pulled it from my hands. “We must find what we can and leave this place.”

“I didn’t want my life at this price.”

“It doesn’t matter how you have it. It is yours, and mine as well. We must go to the camp and salvage what we can.”

He pulled me up. Too weak to protest, I followed him down to the boat. The hull was charred, but it was still sturdy enough to carry us across the bay. We climbed in and paddled toward the camp.

The lifeless bodies of men littered the banks, the open space, the top of the dirt wall. The dwellings had burned to the ground. Mud sucked at our feet as we left the boat. Arvil stopped near one body, then covered his face; he was weeping. I looked down and recognized the charred body of Tulan.

Arvil wiped the tears from his face. “We must search now. There may be some food, some spear points—other things we can use. I may find some of Wirlan’s roots and herbs.”

I shook my head. “I can’t…”

He gripped my arm. “Don’t be useless to me now. We must search. Try not to touch the bodies.” He turned away and walked toward what was left of Wirlan’s old dwelling.

He was right, of course. We had to search, and quickly. A ship could return to make certain the entire camp had been destroyed. Wings fluttered nearby; I looked up. Already, black birds were settling amid the rubble, pecking at the dead. Dagelan’s body lay in front of the burned logs that had been Yerlan’s dwelling. Wirlan lay across a boy, as though he had tried to shield the young one from the ships. Other men lay along the path leading through the gardens, caught by the rays before they could escape.

I searched listlessly, able to find little. The birds flew from me, then alighted behind me as I passed. In that place of death, we salvaged what we could for our own lives.

Only one undamaged boat remained on the bank. We dropped our packs into the boat and paddled away from the camp. I knew that we would have to go east; we paddled on, keeping near the shore, not speaking.

At last Arvil said, “We must stop now to rest. Others may see us from shore. We can go on at night.”

We were near a small inlet. On the shore, green trees and some foliage remained, a small untouched spot surrounded by burned trees. We pulled the boat up and concealed it among the ferns, then stretched out on the ground.

I had been dreaming for seasons, for years. The dream had suddenly become a nightmare during the past days, and now I was finally waking from my reverie. All of the past months and seasons had been dominated by my need for Arvil; I had thought of little else, it seemed. The men in the camp had been figments of my dream, unable to affect me; I had believed myself safe and had grown careless.

The dream was over. I looked at Arvil, wondering how my need for him had grown so great. He stared back at me with lifeless, gray eyes. I did not want him now; I might never want him again. I thought of all the times we could have left Yerlan’s camp, of how we might have persuaded Nallei to come with us, while she was still strong, and thus saved the camp from its fate. Our bodies and our dream had kept us from acting.

During our time with the lake band, we had learned of what lay on the eastern side of the lake. Three days later, we came to the gorge where a river fed the lake. The water cascaded over the rocks, spilling into the lake with such force that we had to paddle around the falls before landing on the eastern shore. To the north, invisible to us, lay the easternmost camp of the lake bands, and beyond that, unknown territory.

The fire had not spread here; the land was renewing itself after the recent rain. Flowers poked above the ground; tiny green leaves opened to the rising sun.

I studied the gorge and saw immediately that we could not paddle against the river’s strong currents. Arvil handed me a little dried fish. “We must decide what to do,” he said.

“We can carry the boat farther up the river,” I said, “and find out what’s along the banks. We’d have water and may come to a place where we can use the boat again.”

“We are also likely to come to a place where there are men.”

“There’s a camp not far from here.”

Arvil shook his head. “There may be no place for us there. They will learn of what happened to Yerlan’s men and perhaps blame us for it.”

They would be right to blame us, I thought. “You see what I’ve brought you,” I said then. “You can leave me and go west. Another band would take you in; you could forget all of this.”

His mouth twitched. The stubble of his beard was beginning to grow; his face was haggard, the face of a man who had endured too much. I expected him to pick up one of the packs, to walk away from me.

He lifted a hand to my shoulder. “We’ll leave the boat. Our way lies to the east now. We may find that refuge you once sought.”

“There is no refuge.”

“Then we will make our own. I won’t leave you now. I have suffered too much for you, as you have for me. It seems I am bound to you.”

“You don’t want to be bound any more, do you?”

His smile was bitter. “I am, nonetheless.”

We tied our packs to our backs, picked up the weapons we had salvaged, and began to walk east. I believed that we would find only the refuge of death, that this summer or the coming fall would be our last season.

We found water and fish; I gathered plants and roots while Arvil found us a hare or a bird. We came to a wide river we could not cross and went north until it grew narrow enough for us to reach the other side. We found berries one day and gorged ourselves until we were nearly sick. We left the forests behind and came to grassland, and saw no signs of men. Always, we continued east.

I grew more skilled at catching small game, and Arvil found herbs and roots like the ones Wirlan had gathered, but our walking tired us both. We did not speak of the past, or of what might come to us, but only of the route we would travel and of what food we might find. From time to time, we stopped for two or three days to make camp and to rest.

A night came when I felt Arvil’s hand on my arm. We were lying at the top of a hill under a shelter of hide and wood he had set up for us. By then, I was used to lying at his side and feeling him turn away from me, keeping to himself as he had when we first wandered together.

He held me for a moment and then embraced me, pressing his lips against my neck. He did not love me in the passionate way he had before, but as if he were seeking solace; his moans were filled with sadness and pain. He withdrew from me before his seed came from him and rested his head on my chest.

Our love had not died after all. We could not let it die. We had paid for it too dearly.

The days were growing shorter; the nights colder. The tracks of a herd led us south, and we found a fawn being devoured by two wolves; we killed one wolf with our arrows and frightened the other away. We would have to find a place to spend the winter, begin to think of shelter and provisions; yet, after we had dried what was left of the carcass, we were traveling east again. As long as we kept moving, there was still some hope of finding a safe place.

We came to hills where few trees grew, and here I saw the marks of the Destruction. Boulders and bits of rubble were the only signs of what had once been roadways; a bit of glass, lumps of fused metal, and piles of stone were all that was left of what might have been a dwelling or a town. We forded a stream and stumbled up a bank to another hill.

Arvil gestured at the slope. “We could stop here,” he said. “We would have water. We could make a shelter here—begin to set food by. We must think of these things now.”

I sighed. “We’ll find no one on this land.”

“Then at least we’ll be safe. Perhaps later, in the spring…” His voice trailed off.

I searched through the brush on the hillside. A piece of shapeless metal, another sign of ancient times, lay under a bush; I picked it up, wondering what it might have been, as I circled the hill. At the bottom of the slope, nearly covered by trailing vines and branches, was an opening. I approached and swept back a few vines, then gazed into the black space of a small cave.

“Arvil,” I called out. As he hastened toward me, I entered the cave and thrust out my hand. My fingers touched a metal wall. I pulled back more branches to allow light to enter.

I was looking into a small room. Overhead, a light panel had been set into the ceiling, but no light shone from it now. I walked inside and crossed to the far wall, where stones and dirt lay against a door, then pressed my hand to the wall. The door did not open; I had not expected it to move. I suddenly knew where I was.

“What is this place?” Arvil asked behind me.

“It’s the entrance to a shelter.” My voice sounded hollow. “These shelters were where our world began. Men and women lived below, raised their children, tried to stay alive. Men were sent out first when the earth had started to heal. After a while, women saw that life might be better if they lived apart from men.”

“And there are no men and women here now?”

I shook my head. “They left long ago.” I waved a hand at the door. “There’s probably a lift on the other side of that door, but there’s no power to feed it now or to open the door so that we could go below. We would find very little anyway.”

He sat down next to me. I thought of the corridors underneath, the rooms where men and women had once lived, clinging to life together until the next struggle came, the one that had separated my kind from men forever. Ghosts seemed to haunt the room, and I thought of the bones that lay under the ground, the dust of men and women mingled in death.

I said, “We might be able to make a shelter here.”

“Something has led us here, Birana.” He stood up. “Perhaps it’s a sign, this place where life had to begin again, where men and women were once together.”

We searched the hills during the next few days but found no other entrances that might lead us to the corridors underneath. We returned to the room, dug a space for a fire just outside the entrance, and set rocks around it. We had seen no signs of men in that deserted land; there was no need to hide our dwelling from other eyes. A ship was unlikely to pass overhead; the cities had abandoned this land centuries before.

We went out hunting and had luck once more. A herd of wild cattle had begun to move south through the hills. We tracked them, searching for a weak one or a slow beast who could not keep up with the rest. We found a straggler, hurled our spears, and tracked it until we were able to bring it down.

We dragged it back to our shelter, knowing that now we would have enough to eat for some time. We swept out the room with branches, then laid out our smoked meat, herbs, plant foods, roots, some apples Arvil had found in a grove near the stream, and dried fish. Our weapons were laid neatly against the walls, along with two coats of fur, two cups we had carried from the camp, and Arvil’s healing herbs and roots. Our bed was made with the hides of the fawn and the wild cow, while our packs were our pillows.

In that dark room, safe from the autumn winds that often raged outside and from the cold rain lashing the land, I could forget what lay outside, could almost imagine that I had gone back into the past to a time when another man and another woman might have clung together.

We continued to forage and to hunt small game until winter dominated the land and a blanket of snow covered the hills. During that season, we kept near our shelter, leaving it only to gather wood or collect snow to melt for water. Arvil found a large rock shaped like a bowl and insisted on dragging it back to our room; into the bowl, we could pour water, wait for it to warm, and then bathe.

“You are my true friend,” Arvil often said to me. “You are more to me than anyone else has been.” For the first time, we could share our love without desperation, without the fear of being discovered. I had thought we knew all the ways we could give each other pleasure; now we found ways to prolong and heighten it.

We were at peace, and yet as the winter wore on, some of our contentment started to fade. Arvil was often silent; at other times, he would speak of those he had known, as if wishing for new companions. He grew more insistent during the time he lay with me, as though this pleasure had to make up for all he had lost. Sometimes I could not respond, and Arvil would withdraw from me for a few days, refusing to touch me until I came to him. I was all he had and worried that I might not be enough for him. When the weather allowed, I found excuses to leave the shelter—to look for mint, to search out small game—refusing to admit the true reason to myself, that I needed time away from him.

Spring came late that year. I knew it was upon us not just because of the warmer days, or the tiny green leaves that showed where carrots and other roots were growing, or the sound of birds, but also because of Arvil’s restlessness. We roamed farther from the shelter to look for food; we strengthened our bodies and practiced with our spears, arrows, and slings. Arvil’s eyes were often on the horizon, searching; I knew he longed for companions, for men to hunt with and boys to teach. Often, I felt in the evening that our room was closing around us, imprisoning us.

Nallei occupied my thoughts as well. I missed her even more than I had earlier and wondered if I would ever hear a woman’s voice again.

I had expected to welcome the spring, to feel myself awaken as if from a long sleep, to grow more alert. Instead, as the weather warmed, my head ached when I awoke and there were days I had to force myself to rise. Foods I had eaten easily before grew distasteful; my efforts at cheerfulness grew increasingly false. Arvil noticed this but said nothing; he too seemed to be fighting a darker mood in himself.

I awoke. The air seemed oppressively warm; I had thrown off the hide covering me in the night. I sat up and pulled on the soft boots Arvil had made for me that winter.

He was awake, sitting by our rock, splashing water on his face as he cut at the beard he had grown during the winter with the sharp edge of his knife. “You’ve cut yourself,” I said.

He glanced at me. He had shaved nearly all of his beard away, but tiny cuts marked his face. “They will heal,” he muttered.