The Gate to Women's Country

  "It wasn't stopping him that mattered. I wanted something else from him, not something else from me." That wasn't the real reason. It wasn't. She tried again. "I was so surprised, I couldn't figure out what to do, and then it was all over." And still again. "This wasn't what I thought he wanted."

  "Better let me handle it."

  "All right." Certainly she couldn't handle it herself. She would kill him if she did. Let the actor Stavia do it.

  She put on her clothes, fastening them tightly, went back to the place she had met him, and kicked him sharply in the ribs.

  He woke with a whoof, staring wildly about him.

  "If you ever do that again," she told him, "it will be the last time you ever see me."

  "Do..." he mumbled, gradually focusing on her. "Do... what did you expect me to do?"

  "I expected you to act civilized. I did not expect to be attacked. Is that kind of behavior considered honorable in the garrison?"

  He couldn't answer her. Certainly it was. It wasn't acceptable in Women's Country, he knew that, but in the garrison? Of course it was. With... with... certain kinds of women. Women who came out to the camp for you....

  She saw the way he looked at her, looked away, the quick darting of those suddenly guileful eyes. "So, Chernon," the actor Stavia demanded, "is this your idea of getting even?"

  He blushed. Maybe. A little. It had been.

  "Did you expect me to like it? Accept it?"

  He shook his head, searching for an acceptable reply, remembering too late that he had been sent to woo information from her. "I didn't think at all. I've been... I've been waiting for you for weeks. I've been... I've been thinking about you. I just couldn't... I couldn't wait, that's all." He flushed again, got to his feet. "I'm sorry, Stavia. I wasn't even... I wasn't even here, I guess."

  "Shall we get some things straight?"

  He nodded, giving a crafty appearance of willingness though he was beginning to feel aggrieved. Saying it once had been quite enough. She could let it go. It wasn't anything they needed to go over and over.

  "We're supposed to be companions on this trip. I agreed to this whole thing at least partly to make up to you for having misled you when we were just kids. Well, when I was a kid, what was I, ten, eleven years old?, we agreed to make this a kind of adventure. Fulfillment of some kind of fantasy for both of us. Right so far?"

  He nodded. Of course that is what they'd said, what he'd said, mostly. Did she think he had forgotten?

  "I'm not some girl you've seduced out to a Gypsy camp for your pleasure. The pleasure is supposed to be mutual. That means we both work at it and are careful of one another's feelings."

  He couldn't think of any suitable response. Certain things about the encounter had just struck him, and he was trying to figure them out.

  After waiting for a time she said, "I'm hungry," in a neutral voice which hid a mild nausea. She got the necessary supplies out of the donkey pack and set about putting together a meal of bread and cheese, lighting a tiny, smokeless fire to heat water for tea. "I left very early," she went on, still in that neutral, impersonal voice. "Before breakfast."

  They ate together, silently on the whole, though Chernon managed one or two comments on his trip with Septemius. Stavia thought the remarks were unnecessarily carping, but said nothing. He might merely be trying to be funny.

  Finally he found a source of his discomfort and blurted, "That was the first time you ever... ? Wasn't it?"

  "Yes."

  "I thought you all started when you were real young. Beneda did."

  "Beneda may have been teasing you. She certainly had not had any assignations when I left for Abbyville."

  "You were gone nine years," he said in a hostile voice, as though she had somehow offended him by being a virgin.

  "I know."

  "Eighteen carnivals," he asserted. "I..."

  "I'm sure you took part in carnival, Chernon. I didn't expect you not to. But, except for a little drinking and singing at the one just past, I didn't. I didn't have time." She gave him a look which he did not return. What was it that bothered him? She could not find an explanation for his reasonless hostility. "Look, we were never 'lovers.' I loved you, I think. The way a kid does. Infatuation, maybe. For you, well, I was your little sister's friend and you used me to get books. Then I realized what I was doing and stopped it, and you got angry at me. And then I went away. That's all there really was between us. Let's not pretend there was something more than that."

  She said nothing about all that time in Abbyville, the carnivals there that she had avoided, always thinking of him, of Chernon, of that boy with the wheat-colored hair and the wary, hurt look in his eyes. She wanted him to listen to her, to hear her. She wanted him to say something that told her he saw her. "This adventure, this is my way of saying, 'I'm sorry I hurt you when we were young."

  My way of saying I love you, Chernon.

  "But it can't go on unless it's enjoyable for both of us...."She was not really seeing him there before her, the man's body, the man's face. She was seeing the boy, still, wanting the boy, still. The boy wasn't in there. The boy was gone. Somewhere in there, Chernon had metamorphosed into something different, not merely grown up but changed in kind. "... that wouldn't be fair to either of us," her voice went on.

  Trite. What was fair? Was anything fair? This whole thing was a cliche. He wasn't answering her at all.

  Inside, she wept. It had all been a stupid idea. Septemius had tried to tell her. Kostia had known. Tonia had known. Her own ten-year-old self would have known. What was it Stavia herself had said about Myra's infatuation for Barten? "She doesn't have any sense at all."

  "No," Morgot had yawned. "None of them do. Neither did I, when I was that age."

  "I refuse to be that age!" Stavia had asserted.

  "I wish you luck," Morgot had replied.

  Meaning, we all do it, daughter. All of us. We know what's sensible and right, and we do foolishness instead.

  And here she was. Actor Stavia, trying to make the best of it. While inside the silly, sentimental, loving part of her howled for her own lost childhood.

  And then he smiled, like the sun rising, suddenly, without warning. She saw it on his face: capitulation, a decision not to be angry. What she saw was not an emotional need to reconcile himself to her but a conscious decision that anger would do nothing for him. She could not see to the reasons behind that decision; she saw the mind at work, however. "You're right, Stavia. I behaved like... like one of those ancient peoples in Beneda's book. Like a barbarian. Let's start over." And smiled again.

  She perceived the cold-bloodedness of it, the chill manipulation of it, but decided to ignore it. They were new to one another after all. She let everything within her melt and flow and reform again in a new and softened shape.

  Actor Stavia was waved off into the wings.

  "Oh, Chernon," she said, opening her arms.

  STAVIA HAD NEVER had a lover before, so she had no one to compare their lovemaking with. She did compare him with other men she knew, however. With Joshua. With Corrig. With her surgical instructor in Abbyville.

  Chernon seemed anxious, rather than eager, to give her pleasure and sometimes succeeded, though it happened more often by accident than it did through Chernon's understanding of what he was doing. He was so engrossed in his own feelings that he wasn't able to pay much attention to her. She was soon adept at pleasing him, which was not very complicated. He needed little arousal and did not tolerate long delays. He reminded her a little of the ram lambs she had seen in the meadows around the camp, suddenly hungry, butting at their mothers' udders with fierce determination, only to become as suddenly satiated. Everything was now. Nothing was later. She remembered what Beneda had said about him, years ago: "When he comes home, he eats all the time, everything, just gulps it down and doesn't even bother to taste it...."

  Which, she reminded herself, her studies had informed her was a frequent state of sexual affairs among very young men.
Chernon was twenty-four, but that was still very young in garrison country, where a man counted for little until they had been tested in battle, even though he might have fathered sons before then. In Women's Country one was adult at sixteen or seventeen. Stavia thought about this, between times, bemused and a little sore from the unaccustomed lovemaking, though Chernon did not call it that. In Women's Country it was generally thought that the best lovers were older men who had given up being carnival cocks and who enjoyed intra-carnival wooing, letters, verses, gifts, to stir up their own passions, and their partner's affections'. Stavia thought that some between-fuck wooing might be rather nice, but she did not suggest it. She had come to the conclusion that just meeting Chernon's demands would take more of her energy than she had expected. She would have enough left over to complete the task at hand only if everything was kept as simple as possible. Sentiment, too, took energy. She had no extra energy. Sentiment would have to wait. She made this decision cold-bloodedly, almost in retaliation for what she had seen in his face, without recognizing that a large part of their emotion toward one another was hostile.

  They worked their way east, and then south, making each night's camp in late afternoon, leaving it in midmorning. The collection of herbs grew, notations on Stavia's maps became denser. Chernon was only mildly interested in what she was doing, mildly interested in the collection.

  "I should think you'd be very interested," she chided him tiredly at the end of a long day's travel. "You told me once you thought wounded warriors deserved better care. Some of these herbs may be excellent wound dressings."

  "How would I know?" he shrugged.

  "You'd test them. Surely men get minor injuries in weapons practice? You could test different herbs to see which ones had healing properties."

  "We do well enough with moldy bread poultices," he said offhandedly. "Bread is always available. Some of these herbs might not be growing when we needed them."

  She gave him a tired half-smile and dropped the subject. His desire for books had probably been more a desire for dominance than a lust for learning, so much was clear. Perhaps forcing her to bring them to him had been more important than what was in them.

  Though he still carried the book he had stolen from Beneda. What did books mean to him?

  "You once wanted to borrow my biology books," she ventured.

  "I wanted to know the secrets," he blurted. "The ones you women know, that's all." He had been wondering for several days how to approach the subject; now it popped out of his mouth like a frog into a pool.

  Leaning across their evening fire, she struggled with this. Did he think that what was in the books was somehow magical? That the same information, discovered for himself, would not have the same efficacy? Perhaps it wasn't knowledge he wanted. It was magic he coveted. Magic and the power it would bring.

  "You know," she ventured, "the books were written by people. Just people."

  "Preconvulsion people," he averred. "They knew things we don't." His tone was dogmatic, vibrating with the power of prophecy. "They knew about... about weapons. And things." He waited for her to say something, extend the conversation, make it possible for them to discuss weapons, and things.

  She said nothing. She wasn't thinking of weapons at all. She thought he was partly right, of course. Preconvulsion peoples had known things the women didn't. But he was partly wrong, too. Many books were newly written, newly printed, and they contained information that preconvulsion people hadn't known of or thought important enough to record. She wondered whether it would be wise to try to convince him of this, realized that doing so would take hours, and decided on silence. Whatever words she gave him, he changed them, as though by sorcery, into something else. She gave him assurances, and he twisted them into things to be aggrieved or angry over. The way he had done with Sylvia, all those years before, over the subject of Vinsas. No point in endless argument. Better give him the least possible material to misunderstand. Or pretend to misunderstand, observer Stavia noted. Much of the misunderstanding was willful, and she would have to have been completely besotted not to see it.

  The fire burned down and they settled into their blankets, reaching for one another like well-practiced raiders, stealing familiar treasure, grabbing it all by huge handfuls, not bothering to sort it. Nothing between them seemed to carry the implication of "later," as though this was all there ever was to be. There were lovers in Marthatown who were together every carnival for decades, as faithful as though they had been "married" to one another, but nothing in Chernon's words or behavior said that he intended them to be lovers again. She said to him once, "Next carnival," and he had turned on her angrily. "Not carnival," he had said. "Not then." Now, their assault on one another left them gasping, and she cried out, a muted howl that lost itself in the tree-waving wind.

  "You'll bring me a son, won't you!" he demanded, lying with all his weight upon her, growing flaccid within her, his teeth at her ear. "A son."

  "Perhaps, someday," she said without thinking, witlessly, hate-loving him, both at once.

  "Now!" he demanded. "Soon."

  "I can't," she murmured, still carelessly. "Not on this trip, Chernon. I've got an implant to prevent it."

  He rolled off of her, sat up. glaring at her. "What do you mean?"

  "I mean I have an implant to prevent my getting pregnant on this journey," she said, suddenly aware of what she'd said. These things were not discussed with warriors. She remembered that now. They couldn't be expected to understand.

  "And who, may I ask, did you expect to protect yourself from? Your 'servitor'?" He made the word an obscenity.

  "No," she said honestly. "Of course not. I've never even met the man. But there are bandits about, and Gypsies, and women have been captured or raped. Don't be silly, Chernon."

  "What's his name," he growled at her. "The one you were supposed to be with."

  She stared at him, at his face, reddened both by anger and firelight. "His name was Brand, I believe. He'd made quite a study of botany, up in Tabithatown, and it was thought he'd be a considerable help in collecting plant material."

  "How old is he?"

  "I haven't any idea. I never asked." She hadn't. She had assumed he would be one of the rather special servitors, someone like Joshua, with some of Joshua's strange and unspecified talents. Morgot would hardly have let her go off with him alone, otherwise.

  "And you've never seen him," he jeered at her.

  "No, I never have. And if you don't stop this behavior, Chernon, I may not see you anymore, either. What are you angry about?" Stavia felt fury beginning to boil in herself.

  "It's one of the reasons I wanted to come," he said between tight teeth. "To have a son. One I was sure was mine."

  "One you were sure was yours?" She shook her head at him incredulously.

  "Yes, damn it. One I was sure was mine. Not one you'd send to me when he was five that might be mine and might be anybody's. Oh, don't pretend you don't know what I'm saying. Everybody in the garrison knows that you women do it with everybody. Sometimes three or four different men during a carnival. How do you know who the father is?"

  She smiled, a tight-lipped smile. "You've given a blood sample to the clinic, haven't you, Chernon? Yes, you have, and so has every other warrior. That's all we need. We take blood from the baby, from its cord, as soon as it's born, and we can tell who the father is. That's why sometimes we bring boys to the garrison whose fathers have died, and we say this is the son of so-and-so, even though he's dead. By my Gracious Lady, Chernon, but you men are sometimes impossible."

  She rose, her naked skin glowing like a ghost light among the dark trees. She dressed herself and took her blankets, leaving him alone.

  "Where are you going?" he demanded in a tone of anger blended with pain. "Where!"

  "Where I can get some sleep," she replied. "I'm tired."

  He bit his tongue, so angry he could hardly speak, remembering Michael and what Michael would want to know. "I'm sorry, Stavia."

/>   "So am I," she said, thinking that he did not sound sorry enough. "But I'm still tired, and I don't care to discuss it anymore." As she moved away, Stavia realized that the movement was both actual and symbolic, that she was leaving Chernon, the Chernon she had thought she knew. In that same moment she realized she had broken the ordinances for no good reason and wondered, with a surge of deep, nauseating guilt, whether Morgot would ever forgive her for it, whether she would ever forgive herself. Only one thing was certain. She had parted from Chernon and would not return. So far as she was concerned, he was dead.

  STAVIA HAD STARTED their venture determined to stay well away from the badlands to the south and equally well away from the observers who lurked there. She had worked toward the east, following this fold of hills and that valley as the days went by, tallying those days in her notebook each evening when she wrote up the day's discoveries or lack thereof. On the morning following what she thought of as her coming to her senses, the fifteenth day of their travel, she told Chernon they had to start back. She was not sorry to say so. She would have ended their journey immediately if there had been a short route by which they could have returned.