‘They are not,’ said Norema, stirring faster. ‘Don’t fill the child’s head with nonsense.’ Then she asked Juni: ‘Did your mother weep and curse over you?’
‘I don’t have a mother,’ Juni said patly. ‘I told you, I live with my aunt. But she has two girls of her own. That’s what she says,’ and then back to Raven: ‘How do you keep from having children?’
Raven laughed. ‘When do you pass your blood? At the full moon, like me?’ She glanced up (Norema noticed the ivory orb was gibbous): ‘Well, then, you count off from the eleventh to the sixteenth day after that: and during those five days you refrain from tackling little boys in the fields and bringing them down in the furrows. Besides, despite what we are always saying in the women’s barracks, little boys actually appreciate being left alone from time to time.’
‘What about,’ said Norema, prying up something from the bottom of the pan that had started to stick, ‘the big boys here who tackle you?’
‘Well, yes, this part of the world has some very strange men in it who do things like that. I suppose a quick—’ and here Raven rose in a single motion and brought her knee sharply up. ‘If you do that to them, right to the tender scars of Eif’h, they’ll think twice, believe me, before tackling again. Really, this strange and terrible land is quite unbelievable to me.’ Once more she sat.
‘Why do women pass blood?’ the little girl asked.
Norema pushed the pan to a slightly cooler spot and wondered if they would get a recounting of Jevim’s perils. But Raven said:
‘The three or four days you pass blood are to get rid of the nonsense one picks up in the five days of heavy responsibility between moons.’
Norema, at the fire, laughed. ‘There are times, Raven, you make me wonder if the women in this country don’t have an awful lot of nonsense to get rid of.’
‘We always used to say, in the barracks,’ said Raven, a perfectly incomprehensible leer beneath her mask: ‘Save that blood for the boys. They can only take it in. They can never give it out. And that’s why ’men have so much more nonsense about them than women.’
Which made Norema open her mouth, nearly drop her knife into her stew, then close it again. ‘And do you have to repeat your … barrack-room talk in front of a child! Really …’ She took a breath; and then found herself smiling behind and through the frown. ‘I’ve noticed something about you, Raven. Whenever you talk and there aren’t men around, you get down to the body very quickly. I think that’s because you are a kind of barbarian.’
‘But you are the barbarian. Besides, in your country here, barbarians come from even further south than we are. At any rate, there is no civilization where the men cannot grow their nails. I am the civilized one.’ And brought her hand up to her mouth to bite at one of hers.
‘I don’t …’ Juni paused, blinked—‘… pass blood … yet.’
Raven (and Norema at the fire) grinned. Raven lifted her bloody fingers from her thigh and laid two against the girl’s cheek. ‘Well, you will.’
Norema said from the fire: ‘If you were from my part of the world, when you were old enough to bear children, your parents would go down to the beach and have a big party. You’d get presents, people would make speeches, and then you’d have to take a big shell full of water and throw it over your head—then you and all the other children who had reached their majority, boys and girls, for we give parties for both, would run and hide and the younger children would all have to go and find them.’
‘Humph,’ said Raven or something like it. ‘Both? I bet, knowing your part of the world, the boy’s presents were bigger.’
Which was true. Norema pushed the pot back to the hotter part of the fire.
‘What do they do where you come from?’ Juni asked. ‘I mean, when a girl first passes blood.’
Raven said: ‘Your mother’s men cut their nails and put them in a special bag that you have sewn with specially painted pieces of bark; you take the bag and a new sword deep in the jungle under the half moon. You bury the bag. You sing certain songs, and you eat certain plants that can only be picked with the left hand. And you kill something.’
‘Is that all?’ Juni asked.
‘No,’ said Raven.
‘Then what?’
‘You go to sleep on the forest floor with your face looking into the dead eyes of your kill, and in the morning you go back and tell your mother’s oldest sister what it was you dreamed. She arranges stones and bones and dried flowers into an appropriate pattern and together you work out your future life by seeing what the dream and the stones say about each other. Then there is a party.’ And with a great grin over her small teeth, Raven stood up and walked through the weeds to the stream where she squatted to wash her hands.
Juni watched a moment and then came over to the fire by Norema. ‘My aunt says that a woman can only wait for a man to take her—and no one will ever take me, because I am an orphan. She says that if a girl goes out from under her father’s roof for more than a week, you can just bet slavers will take her.’
‘Well, I have been out from under my father’s roof quite a bit more than a week. Several years more. And certainly one must look out for oneself. But I think that’s just more nonsense to get rid of.’
Juni looked suddenly to her right. A flash had deviled the edge of vision. Raven, walking back from the stream, had removed her sword from its hairy sheath and was examining it again. Juni said: ‘Why is your sword like that? It’s split in two and it looks funny.’
‘Does it now?’ asked the masked woman as she turned the blade around: moonlight ran down one side, firelight slid up the other. ‘Usually, in this strange and terrible land, all you see are single blades. But that’s a puny, man’s weapon. This—look, I’ll show you.’ Raven squatted beside the girl. ‘It’s sharp on the outside here and sharp on the outside there. That means it can cut either left or right.’ The blade swung one way, then the other. ‘And it also has this slit down the center—just like the line between the folds of your vagina. And the inside edges are just as sharp as the outside edges, all the way down and around the fork. So, if something gets between them that you don’t like, you can—’ Here Raven jammed the blade straight up in the moonlight—‘cut it off!’
At the fire Norema again felt chills about her. She started to open her mouth, then clamped it very tight. As she looked about the clearing, she had the distinct feeling that something inside her, even as she stirred the stew, had gotten up, turned completely around, and then settled back down inside so that she did not quite feel she was the same person.
‘I’ve seen slaves—women, and men—brought up from the jungles in the south. I think if I were taken by slavers I’d—’
Norema, at the fire, thought: This little girl and I were born hundreds of miles apart and I can complete her sentence just as easily as if she were my little sister: I think I’d kill myself. Norema ran the knife through the bubbling juices in the copper pan. ‘If I were taken by slavers,’ Norema said, ‘I think I would kill them. Now why don’t you both come around here and eat your supper.’
‘A very good thought that is,’ said Raven.
‘Go get those knives where I found this one, Juni, if you want something to eat with. Oh, you already have one. And Raven, while we eat, while we all eat, why don’t you tell us the story of how your god made the world and men and—women and men. I think I want to hear it again. And I’m sure Juni would like it.’
‘Is it an exciting story?’ Juni asked, squatting down by the fire. ‘That smells very good.’
‘Listen, little Heathen Woman, and decide yourself,’ said Raven, reaching with her sword point into the stew to spear the smallest piece of rabbit and raising it, still bubbling, through firelight, toward her stained teeth. ‘In the beginning was the act …’
5
BLUE AND THE CHIME of metal jewelry filled the sun-shot door. Blue and green swished in by the jambs. Madame Keyne ducked her head beneath the slanted lintel. ‘Anyone in? Say,
is anyone in? I want to buy a pot.’
‘A moment! A moment, gracious lady! Just a moment!’ Old Zwon, who was slapping a flank of clay against a slate slab again and again to get the bubbles out so that, when molded and fired, it would not explode in the kiln, took a dripping rag from the jar on the ground and laid it over the moist chunk, then stepped around the bench, wiping his stone-colored fingers on his smirched tunic. ‘Now, what kind of pot would you like? If you’ll step through here, I have on display some of my finer—’
‘I want a pot that you do not have. I … excuse me, but this, well, dim and smelly shop. It’s such a fine day outside, sunny and mild. And it won’t be for long. Let’s step into the sun and talk.’
‘Madame, for a single pot—?’
‘I want a single kind of pot. If you can make it for me, I will want you to make a hundred of them.’
‘A hundred pots? By all means, madame, let us step outside into the sun where we can take a breath of air. Please, this way,’ and Old Zwon moved to the side of the door to follow the blue veils and jingling bangles outside.
‘… for all my lady’s warning!’ shouted a child, somewhere off in the sun, while a ball popped against a salt-stained wall; children ran shrieking down an alley.
‘Now, my good friend,’ and Madame Keyne took the potter’s wrinkled arm with a natural friendliness that, while warming, was just as disconcerting as her former disparagement of his close little place of business. ‘You know that for generations now, the people of Kolhari and the surrounding suburbs have cooked their meals in three-legged pots. You can put coals under them, move the heat about with a stick, move them about the heat—’
‘Ah, yes! My mother made a boiled cherry pudding in those pots that I never remember without closing my eyes and tasting in the corner of my mouth for some remnant of—’
‘So did mine. But that’s—’
‘Three-legged pots? Gracious lady, I can supply you with twenty-five of them right this day from my store. And decorated with the finest glazes in designs appropriate for common use or more refined—’
‘I don’t want three-legged pots.’ Madame Keyne pressed her beringed and bony hand to the back of Old Zwon’s clay-ey knuckles. ‘You see I have recently walked through the Spur and seen the wives of the barbarians, newly moved to our city, cooking on their open fires in their little street camps, at the doors of their shacks. A dozen of their husbands work for me as the cheapest of loaders in my warehouses when they deign to work at all. And I have seen pots overturned by careless-handed barbarian girls and women, by screaming barbarian children running at their games, by drunken barbarian men staggering in the street. And once, shame to say, when I was pursuing a lout who had stolen some coins from my warehouse, in a rage I knocked his woman’s supper out on the ground when the man dared lie to me but such are the shames that come with power. The point is, I have heard women curse the three-legged pot as an invention of a malicious god, made by no true craftsman—for these women were not brought up to use them and have not been instructed in their workings since childhood as our women have. No, they are not easy with them in the least.’
‘Brutish women, most of them,’ Old Zwon agreed. ‘No grace about them at all. Uncivilized and nasty-tongued to boot—those you can understand for the accent. Really, I don’t know which are worse, the men or the—’
‘I want you to make me a four-legged pot. And when you have made it, I shall examine it and see if it suits the conditions I think it shall likely have to endure. And if it endures them, I shall have you make me ninety-nine others like it.’
‘A four-legged pot?’ Old Zwon’s bushy eyebrows lowered in the sun to drop ragged shadows across his high, thin cheekbones. ‘Who ever heard of a four-legged pot?’
‘A four-legged pot will be sturdier, potter, less likely to tip over. You do not have to be so careful in the cooking. Believe me, it fills a need and will sell—first to the barbarians. And who knows, the adventurous among our own women will find a spot for it in their kitchens.’
‘I went out to Babàra’s Pit
‘At the crescent moon’s first dawning—[bounce!]—
‘But the Thanes of Garth had co—Oh!’
‘You missed! You missed! My turn! You missed!’
‘Now with a three-legged pot,’ Old Zwon continued, as children’s running shadows mingled with the two strolling oldsters’ on the bright film of a puddle, then pulled away to merge with the whole shadowed side of the street, ‘you don’t have to worry about getting leg-lengths exact: any three legs will always touch the ground. With a four-legged pot, however, if one leg is shorter than the others … of course, there are ways to get around that with molds, especially if you’re making a hundred. Still—’
‘You will be making a hundred and no doubt another hundred. And you will be making money! These women need four-legged pots, believe me. And it will only be a matter of months, if not weeks, before our own women have taken them over. We need them as well. Or are you one of these men who has no sense of women’s condition in our society?’
‘Ah, yes. Money, madame. Well, I can certainly to what you ask, gracious lady. But, frankly speaking, I don’t know that I am so well disposed toward money-making schemes this autumn as I was at the beginning of spring. Or, indeed, how well set up I am to undertake the making of a hundred pots. You do not know the sad tale of my assistant, madame—he was a fine young man, of whom I was as fond as if he were my own son.’
‘What has he got to do with the pots you make for me?’
‘Oh, he was a fine young man, madame. Friendly, hard-working, eager to do well—responsible as they come. I took him from his family into my shop here and I would even say I loved him as much as they. More than they, perhaps. For he was a good boy, madame. A truly fine boy.’
‘Pots are what we’re discussing, potter. Pots and money.’
‘And money is precisely what I am discussing, madame. At the beginning of this past spring, a messenger—a giant of a man with a scar down his face—came from a southern lord for whom I had done work—oh, years ago, from before the reign of our gracious Child Empress (whose reign is righteous and rich)—and he requested I send him someone I could trust in order that we might set up a franchise, from his orchards, to import—’
‘For all my lady’s warning—Oh, look! It’s gone into the cistern! We’ve lost another one!’ Juvenile exclamations and groans chorused from the alley’s end.
‘—those pesky little balls, made from the southern saps, that, even now as we move into autumn, are disappearing from our streets and avenues. Madame, I sent my assistant, on a boat, to the south—with very little money, madame; certainly not what anyone would call a great deal. And certainly—I thought—nowhere near enough to tempt such a good-hearted and responsible lad to the sort of act for which you had to discipline your barbarian worker. But madame, he was tempted. He was to be away for a week. And I have not seen him now for three months. And that, madame, is money for you!’ The old man gave a bitter chuckle. ‘Oh, first I feared that something had happened. I sent a message, finally, to the south, asking my Lord Aldamir if my boy Bayle had ever reached him; I was blunt. I told him in my message I was afraid the youth had absconded with my meager funds. I sent it by the captain of the very boat on which the boy had traveled south. I received a very kind and considerate answer from some priests at a monastery where, apparently, Bayle had briefly stopped off. It was written elegantly, and feelingly, in three languages—in case my reading skills were better in one than another, though I had to comb the waterfront bars for two nights before I found a prostitute who could read the third … only to find what I had suspected all along: it said the same as the first two. They said, in three languages, that my worst fears were realized; that, indeed, a Kolhari youth named Bayle had stayed with them at their monastery, the Vygernangx, for a day on his way to Lord Aldamir’s castle, and that during his stay he talked of nothing but running away with his master’s funds, of how easy it
would be, there in the barbaric south, with no supervision and no constraints. And then, they said, the next morning he was gone from his room, they knew not where. But they sent a man to the castle to see if he had arrived. He had not. Peasants, they said, had seen him walking along a southern road, early that morning.’ Old Zwon’s hand moved and knotted and released under the woman’s. ‘Madame, I have come seriously to question the whole concept of money, and the system of profit and wages by which it works. After all, under the old system, when we paid in kind, if you took a poor apprentice into your house and rewarded him with a meal from your table, a bed in your store, the shelter of your own roof, and the tutelage of your craft, then your apprentice was essentially as rich as you were, having his share of all that supplied the quality of your life. But if you take the same poor apprentice and pay him with money—pay him with the pittance of money one pays an apprentice—all you do is emphasize his poverty by your riches. How can one expect even a good boy to remain honest under such abuse and insult?’
But Madame Keyne’s brow knit, and her hand left Old Zwon’s to tickle her bony chin. ‘Feyers of the Vygernangx Monastery in the Garth peninsula, you say?’
‘The very ones, madame.’
‘Because I too have received a missive from them recently, old man. About a secretary of mine who also stopped there—also on a mission to Lord Aldamir. Also—may I tell you?—she was inquiring about those … but the what and why of my petition is not important. Suffice it to say that I too had sent her to petition his Lordship for an import franchise—’
‘Had you, now?’
‘I had. I dispatched my secretary—like you, at the beginning of spring—to the south. Like you, I waited for word, expecting it within the week. When, after three weeks, my fears began to grow, I can honestly say it was not toward absconsion that my thoughts turned. Though I had sent her with a goodly sum and gifts and presents to boot. I suppose I just assumed that I had provided for her so well that for her to escape that provision would be for her to doom herself—especially in the south—to a condition that no one could reasonably desire. You must understand that my secretary was a woman—I felt then and still feel—of privileged intelligence and uncommon sensibility. My thoughts ran rather to brigands or disease—for the south can be as pestilential as the alleys of the Spur. I too dispatched a message to that southern lord, outlining my fears. And by return boat I received a message—written only in one language, but perhaps they perceived that, as a merchant, I would have greater access to a translator than you would should their language prove to be not my most facile—from one Feyer Senth of the Vygernangx. It said that things had gone exactly as I feared: upon Norema’s debarking from the boat at Garth, she was set upon by bandits. These evil men, sensing the weakness of a woman, had endeavored to rob her of all her possessions, but at last they were repelled by the good and loyal workmen on the dock. Norema sustained only a wound on her leg. She was taken to the monastery of these most hospitable southern feyers—no doubt the very ones that housed your knavish lout—where her wound became septic, her condition feverish. Three days later, they said, she was dead.’ Madame Keyne shook her head. ‘Those kind priests, by the same boat, returned me all the crates and bags which Norema had taken with her—by their account, everything save the clothes in which her body was buried. Even the bag of coins I had sent with her came back to me apparently untouched. Ah, I cannot tell you how I have smarted since over my stupidity for sending such a fine and fearless woman into such barbarous dangers.’