The Gate to Women's Country

"Not right away, ma'am. But be careful."

  STAVIA WAS THE WINTER PRINCESS. She had a sheaf of grain in one hand and a knife in the other. The Council was sending her out to find the deer, "Cow," they had said, pointing to the picture in the book. "This is a cow deer." It had antlers which curved like the new moon, one point conning forward over the animal's brow and the other extending back in an enormous, weighty curve laden with branches and juttings of horn. "About this big," they said, indicating something which would be about the height of a donkey. The cows had white fur down their chests, muzzles spattered with foam and long, grasping tongues. Perhaps they told her this or perhaps she had read it somewhere else.

  She did not know why they were sending her. Surely one of the others would be better fitted for the job. They already knew what cows were and how they should be handled. Why pick on her, a stranger? She asked them this.

  "Your dowry," they said. "The cows will be your dowry." Why she needed a dowry, or even what one was, she couldn't remember. There was a sense of urgency about it all, however, something she could not merely ignore. Urgency and inevitability. It had to be done.

  Somehow, she had lost her own clothes. They lent her boots and a heavy, quilted coat and a cap with earflaps which tied under her chin. She was naked under the coat. She could feel the cold at her crotch, a wind blowing there. It wouldn't be so cold if she could only get her legs together, but something prevented that.

  It was better simply to ignore the cold at her crotch and go out into the snow. Someone had pointed out the way she should go, over there, where the fold in the hills opened up and the trees showed dark against the snowfield. Someone else had pointed out the tracks the cows had left, a cloven, vaguely triangular mark....

  "She may die," a woman said.

  Whoever it was who was speaking tied the bandage more securely on her head and wiped blood from her face. Stavia ignored it.

  "You shouldn't have hit her." The same woman's voice.

  "She was tryin' to get away!" A boy's voice, a young man, uncertain but defiant.

  "What good is she to you with her head bashed in?" The woman asked. "What were you going to do, kill her and then do your duty on her dead body? Cover her up for decency's sake!"

  The sound of a slap, a cry.

  "Mind your words, woman. That was disrespectful of your son." A man's voice, heavy, ponderous with something lubricious and inflexible about it.

  Stavia decided she had listened long enough. It was time to go search for the reindeer cows. The trail led into the darkness, into the trees, the forest, where the wind soughed in the branches and all voices were stilled. Even in the dark she could see the footprints. They shone like little fiery hearts in the shadows. She followed them.

  "You'll heal her, Susannah," the man's heavy voice demanded.

  "I'll do what I can." A kind of stubborn dignity there.

  "You'll heal her."

  "Husband, I'll do what I can. I've got no magic to heal wounds like this. Maybe if you'd of given her time to teach me the things she knew, I could do something. There's things in her medical bag, but I don't know what they are. Capable chops wood real good. He does skulls real good, too. You got to face it, Resolution Brome. He maybe killed this girl."

  "This devil."

  "Doesn't look like a devil to me," she retorted with that same perverse integrity, tears bubbling through it. Stavia wanted to laugh, but she couldn't. "Looks like any woman's been abused bad. Looks like any wife. Beat and shaved and left hungry."

  Slap again. Cry again. Not a surprised sound, more a ritual one. Slap; ahh. Slap; ahh. The one following the other like an acknowledgment.

  "You'll heal her." It was a command. There was a promise of pain in it.

  Silence. Then, "I done all I can do with what I have here. I got to get some things from my wife-house." Some new emotion in that statement. More than the words. An ultimate sadness. A finality. Whoever the woman was, she went away, into a distance too far to follow.

  It was not Stavia's concern. Stavia went back to tracking the footprints. They led down a long, winding pathway among the trees. Ahead of her was moonlight, come from somewhere. Not the sky. The earth, perhaps. Light from the snow itself. And there were the cows, their antlers curved twigs against the trunks of huge trees, standing like gray statues, as still as though carved from stone. Only their breath told her they were alive, little puffs of steam coming from their black muzzles, now, and again, and again. All she had to do was offer them the grain she carried in her left hand and drive them back.

  The bellow came from behind her. She turned, seeing it all at once, the source of the light, the reason that the reindeer cows were here. They hadn't run off. They had been stolen away and brought here, by him. His antlers swept back and upward like the edge of a breaking wave, foaming forward into a dozen lesser points of white bone. Over his forehead other points protruded, bright fringes of ivory. His muzzle pointed up as he called to her, telling her why he was here. The cows belonged to him. Now that she had come, she belonged to him, too. There would be no rounding up, no taking back. The white mane around his shoulders and down his chest was a royal robe, his kingship made manifest.

  "Go find that fool woman," the man's heavy voice said. "She's been gone long enough to cook a meal. Chastity, go find your maw."

  "Yes, Papa." A girl. There was a girl there, somewhere.

  It wasn't important.

  The bull deer bellowed once more. "Mine," he said. "Mine."

  "I need them," she said in a reasonable tone. "Don't you see, I need them."

  "Mine." He lowered his antlers. They pointed at her head, her chest. He scraped with his feet, finding solidity from which an attack could be launched. "They are mine."

  "You don't even use them for anything," she said. "You just own them. If they have bull calves, you fight them and kill them. You say they're yours, but they aren't useful to you at all!"

  "Mine," he said again.

  The girl's voice came back, frightened. "Papa, Papa, she's dead. Ma's dead!"

  "What do you mean dead?"

  "She's hanging from the ridgebeam, Papa. On a rope. I can't reach her to get her down...."

  There was confusion. Stavia ignored it. The knife was in her right hand. Over her shoulder was a rope. "Will you let me have them?" she asked the bull deer. "I need them. More important than that, they need themselves. They have names, you know. Names of their own!"

  "Mine," he trumpeted. "Mine the power! Mine the glory! Mine the females! Mine the young!"

  She threw the rope. It moved as though it could think its way through the air, a serpent which knew how to go where it had to go, looping around the mighty antlers and around the tree, a great slithering of purpose. She made it fast while the bull struggled and screamed. Then, miraculously, there was another rope in her hand to hold the bull's back legs and another tree to tie them to. She had a knife. It was ready in her hand and she moved close against that hot, musk-smelling, muscle-throbbing beast, thrusting herself against it, her blade out to cut, cut, letting the parts fall on the snow where they steamed hotly while the great deer screamed and screamed and she said... something. What was it she said? A line from a play. Something about crying....

  When she had done, she drove the cows back the way she had come. Behind her, the magical rope loosened and the animal went away. She could not hear it anymore. There was no bellowing but only the soft breath of the cows around her, the light reflecting from their eyes as they stared at her, the steam from their muzzles rising. "I did it for you, too," she said.

  "I brought them," she said when she came where people were again. "See, here they are. All of them."

  "You'll need them," they told her. "If you live, they will be your dowry."

  She heard a man's heavy voice, full of baffled fury. "Put her in that little back room and lock her in."

  Chernon objecting to this. "She's dying. She can't move. There must be someone else with some healing skill...."

&n
bsp; "Susannah was the only one here. Not goin' to waste time an' trouble goin' over the mountain for anybody else. Let her die if she dies. It's All Father's will, either way."

  Chernon's voice again, and the sound of a blow, and then nothing but quiet and jostling dark with the cows all around her, their rank, animal smelling filling her nostrils.

  "If you live," the cows told her, "you'll need us." They stayed with her, leading her through the dank darkness which went on and on until she supposed it would simply go on forever.

  DILIGENCE, the twenty-eight-year-old son of Rejoice Brome, had been rounding up a recalcitrant sheep that had seemed possessed of a demon. It was one of the ram lambs lately captured from the devil women, which probably explained the animal's orneriness, but it also made the animal valuable, which meant Diligence couldn't just consign it to the netherworld and leave it to be eaten by coyotes, though he fervently hoped that's what would happen someday, when he wasn't the one responsible. He didn't dare cross Papa at the moment. Nobody dared cross Papa right now, not even a little. It was only yesterday Susannah had hung herself up on that old rope, only yesterday that the demon woman got shut up in the back room of Papa's house to live or die. Not even a day yet since that fella from outside had that set-to with Papa and got himself knocked down. No time to be causin' trouble was the way Diligence had it figured out, so he'd kept after that ram lamb until he found it even though it had taken all day.

  He had just shut the sheep in the fold in the falling dark, fighting it every step of the way, and was about to go up the path to the bachelor house when something stepped out of the trees in his path.

  It had teeth, and the teeth glowed. He saw that much. It had a face that was way too big for anything he knew of. His mind shut down in panic and he tried to dodge it by jumping into the trees along the path, but something invisible caught hold of him and the next thing he knew he was lying on his belly with his head pulled up by the hair by the invisible thing sitting on him while the glowing teeth and the glowing eyes moved around like there was maybe one and maybe three or four things coming at him in the night.

  "Chernon?" asked a horrible, echoing voice. "Where is our friend Chernon?"

  Diligence couldn't think. He didn't know what a Chernon was. He gargled, spit filling up his throat as the thing on his back did something cruel to one of his hands. "Arghhah," he gurgled around a half scream. "Don't know. What is it?"

  The thing let up on him a little. "You people brought a man and a woman from out there. The man's name is Chernon. He's not really a man. He's a demon. He's a friend of ours, and we want to know where he is."

  "Up t'Papa's house," Diligence howled. "He was up t'Papa's house with the woman. Gappy hit her with the shovel and she ain't been able to talk since then...."

  "Ahh," said the deep voice, who had already known that Stavia had been badly hurt. "There's an angel coming to get that woman. You shouldn't have hurt her. That's something you shouldn't have done!" Later on, remembering, Diligence had the strange idea that the voice had had pain in it, but at the moment he didn't think anything because something hit him behind the ear with a kind of lightning flash and he didn't know anything else.

  "Gappy," said one of the invisible creatures. "That would be one of the young ones up at their barracks. I'll take care of that one."

  "We'll take the masks and go create a little more demonology," the deep voice said. "Papa's house would be the one up the hill there?"

  "Take you about an hour?"

  "About that."

  "Who's got the feathers?"

  "I have. I'll bring them."

  As luck would have it, Gappy Brome was leaving the bachelor house for the privy when the invisible thing caught him, threw him down with his face in the dirt, and then pounced on him.

  "Gappy?" a voice whispered to him. "You're Gappy?"

  Though almost paralyzed with fright, Gappy managed to nod. The thing that was sitting on him seemed satisfied with this. "That woman you hit with the shovel, that was a holy woman," the voice said. "She's a healer."

  Gappy convulsed as he tried to throw off his attacker. "She was a whore," he cried. "Walkin' around with her hair hangin' and her body showin'. She was no better than a whore of Babylon. She was tryin' to get away...."

  "Umm," said the voice. "Well, it's obvious that disputation is not going to change your mind. I will, therefore, simply make my point in blood." And with that Gappy felt his shirt ripped away and a knife moving on his back. "An angel is coming to rescue her," the voice said, punctuating the remark with a whole series of jabs and slices of the blade. "Remember that!" Then something hit Gappy on the head and the thing went away.

  From up the valley came confused sounds of people yelling. Fire bloomed from the location of Elder Jepson's barn.

  "Good idea," said the invisible thing, moving toward the bachelor house. After a brief interval, fire glimmered at the base of the bachelor house and was fed into rampageous life with handfuls of straw.

  INSIDE THE TINY, STUFFY ROOM in Elder Brome's house, Stavia lay in stupefied darkness. From time to time, the darkness wavered and broke, leaving a gray space at its center in which there was sometimes a sound. This time there was a tapping at the window, a soft, almost random knocking, as a twig might tap in a light wind. Even through her pain, through the gray blanket of mist which wrapped her around, stifling her, she told herself there was no wind, there was no tree, there could be no twig tapping. In her mind the twig wavered, becoming a tree, a forest, blackness once more, full of great, horned beasts which bellowed at the sky. "Come, Stavia," they cried.

  "Stavia," someone whispered, evoking the grayness again.

  She could only moan. It was what was needed, an imperative moan, voiced so that the twig, the forest, the darkness would know where she was. Still, she did it softly. Then again. There was no shout from the other rooms of the place, no threat. She moaned again. Worth the risk of more pain to be able to express pain. Hurt something. Hurt somewhere. She was in the middle of a seeking whirlpool of pain, like a chip in an eddy, whipped around and around by it.

  Perhaps there was a whisper outside the window. She couldn't be sure. It didn't matter. The moaning had taken too much energy. She had no more to wonder with. The bellowing blackness came again.

  Far away, outside, over a hill, perhaps, or across some unmeasured gulf of shadowed night, there was a great deal of unshaped noise. A blot of noise, running off in all directions, with clangor in it and voices and jagged edges of agony.

  Above her in the house someone stirred, cursed, shouted. Heavy feet stamped their way downstairs. Voices banged together. Doors uttered. A confusion of noise here; another one there; and then the two moving toward one another, mixing, like ugly colors in water, swirling. Dark yellow and sullied wine, in saw-toothed patterns.

  Near the head of her bed something snapped.

  Cold air on her face. Hurting air.

  "Ahhhh," she said, not aware she'd said anything.

  "Here," said someone. "She's tied up. By all that's holy those bastards...." There was light on her face, very dim, as from a dark lantern. Even the light hurt. When the pressure on her shoulders stopped and someone's arms raised her, it hurt even more and she began to scream, began only. There were soft things in her mouth keeping her from screaming. Fingers. She bit the fingers and someone cursed.

  "Stavia!" voice in her ear. "It's Joshua. Be still, love. We're getting you out." She felt a prick in her arm, something sharp to hold against the wall-wide agony of all the other hurt. "For the pain," Joshua's voice said. "Be still."

  "Out," her mind said. "Be quiet or they can't get you out." She stopped fighting the hurt and let it be. The blackness came back as she thought, "That's good. I won't be around to care."

  "Get every piece of rope," Joshua's voice said. "Spread the bed back up neatly. Put the feathers around the bed. Remember to make those footprints down the wall under the window...." They were carrying her out through the door, through the house,
out the front door, then away into the trees. She was cradled in Joshua's arms. There was someone else, whispering. She knew that voice.

  "It's Corrig, Stavia," someone whispered. "It's all right. Be still."

  Then there wasn't anything else at all as the pain went somewhere else and left her alone with the loving, comfortable darkness.

  ELDER JEPSON'S BARN burned to the ground. Elder Brome's bachelor house was only partly burned, though the whole front of it would need to be replaced whenever people could get to it. That much they could see by lantern light. By that same light they could see the words carved on Capable's back as well. "She is a holy woman." It was not until Capable came around that they were able to ask him who "she" was, and it was only then that they went looking for Stavia.

  The room was untouched, as though no one had ever been in it. There was no sign of the woman, or of the ropes which had bound her to the bed. There were footprints leading vertically down the wall from the high window. There were several great white feathers lying by the bed, feathers larger than any they had ever seen.