Walk to the End of the World

  ‘“It’s possible”,’ Servan mimicked. ‘But you know Kelmz better than that, right? I couldn’t put out a hand to help you last night without your calling me by his name and pestering me with nonsense meant for him.’

  ‘What nonsense?’ Bek said, not believing. But his mind floundered back, trying to remember its own delirium. What had he said? What had he dreamed? ‘I was asleep, how could I – ’

  ‘And you should have seen your face just now when I told you what the Scrappers will do with his body. I wonder if you’d look like that and change the subject if it were me, rotting in the garbage behind some screw-joint in Skidro. There, there it is again – I wish I had a mirror.’

  ‘I will not discuss this now with you,’ Bek said, shutting his eyes. The leg was throbbing insistently, the brute-beast of a body was using its hurt against him. He couldn’t fight that and Servan at the same time.

  ‘Well, never mind,’ Servan said, equably. ‘it just makes me wonder whether to turn you over to Bajerman after all, since our relationship – yours and mine – seems to be something less than it once was. But I can see you’re not fit to chat about such personal matters. I won’t hold your unfriendly attitude against you. You might think about this business of you and the captain, though. I didn’t make it up. Not that I’m going to run around blatting to everybody that Eykar Bek has leaned across the age-line. It’s hardly flattering to me; though you’re certainly not the first to succumb to the glamor of Kelmz’ reputation, his strong and silent manner, and all those romantic scars. I just never thought I’d see you crumble so easily.’

  He stood up. ‘Since you’re anxious to get moving, I’ll go put the finishing touches on our travel arrangements. Alldera’s there in the corner, if you need anything.’

  And he walked out, whistling.

  The question for Bek had never been whether he would get where he was going. His driving will (or whatever he sometimes thought he glimpsed standing behind his will – Fate?) would not be turned aside, no matter what the costs. The question was how to bear his losses.

  ALLDERA

  16

  Sometimes she wished herself back in the Rendery. This open sky, with its sweet and sweeping winds, was hers to enjoy only by the whim of the masters. The stink of the Rendery had emphatically belonged to fems and only to fems. There was something to be said for honest ownership, even of a charnel.

  On the whole, however, the journey was going well. The Rover officer had worried her at first. A good Rover-runner with experience around fem-gangs could develop an instinct for wrong notes in femmish behavior. Fortunately, his attention had been divided between his own concerns and his concern for the Endtendant. Still she felt better with him gone. The remaining two were absorbed in each other. Meanwhile they all moved toward ’Troi, as Alldera’s own plans required.

  The river would have carried them faster, but with a wounded man and a load of scrapper-loot to transport, the men had judged the easy conviviality of the river-barges too risky. The Scrappers had provided a two-man camper and a fem-gang to carry it.

  They had the southside road to themselves. With summer’s ‘forests’ of tall green hemp cut down, the dusty line of the horizon was exposed beyond the bare and broken fields. The friendly hemp camps, noisy and active all summer, were shut down now. After harvest men traveled on the river, protected by the high levees on either hand from the disquieting sight of the stripped fields, which brought the Wasting to mind.

  From the road, you could look right past the borders of the Holdfast to the scraggly trees that hemmed in the territory of men. Similar trees had been cleared from the Holdfast long ago, and the men had proud chants telling how they would cut and burn the trees from the face of the world one day and would claim all the bared land for themselves. What they would use in place of wood, the chants did not say. Nor did they mention that among the companies’ expeditions to the Wild for necessary supplies of wood, there were always some men who went rogue and did not return.

  It was the silence, they said; it was the endless series of empty tablelands stretching away north and south, and the mountains rising in the west. They said the Wild was worse than the sea, which at least had a patterned motion. On a windless day in the Wild, all a man could think of was the stillness of the void.

  When there was wind, so much the worse. It sounded like the sighing of the countless men lost in the Wasting. Or, men sometimes said in lower tones, like the whispers of the ghosts of the vanished unmen, stirred up by the intrusion of living men who chanted as they came, to drive away either sound or silence. Men were romantics, of course – they could afford to be – and they loved to magnify the significance and danger of anything that happened to them. With considerable effort, fems had gleaned from them over the years some useful information about the Wild.

  The land beyond the Holdfast appeared to support no life whatever, other than spiky trees and a mixture of useless hardstemmed grasses. The wood raiders carried provisions with them, but there was water which men could drink. Sometimes they went rogue afterward, and it was claimed that spirits fouled the springs and streams in spite of the care men took to recite the Chants Cleansing before drinking.

  As for ghosts and demons, few but the most humble and credulous fems believed these to be anything but mental creations of the men themselves. As a rule, men hated most those they had most wronged; it followed that they hated – and therefore feared – their ancestors’ victims, and imagined vengeful unmen where there was nothing but vacant desolation.

  None of this was reassuring. Fems thoughtful enough to consider the Wild at all dismissed it as of no use to them, since it seemed to offer no sustenance for fems who might try to escape into it.

  And yet the brightest fems could not help but think about the Wild sometimes, wondering what it might hold that men were blind to. Those who bolted and actually reached the edges of the Holdcast vanished among the twisted prickly trees forever. Thoughtful fems wondered, but held their ground.

  Alldera looked southward often as they traveled, squinting at the distant blur of the tree-line. She had no intention whatever of bolting, however.

  She paced along at the rear, the drover’s position, giving the carry-fems a step-song to keep them together under the weight of the camper. It was a riddle-song, half nonsense now that many of the word-meanings were gone: ‘Why is a raven like a writing-desk,’ it began. And what was a raven? The newer parts lent themselves to as whimsical and subtle a consideration of the concept of likeness as the singer could devise. She sang in femmish softspeech to obscure the words from the men’s hearing. She was not interested in entertaining them, and besides the song was not ‘clean’ – free of insults to masters in general. The pity of it was, the song was undoubtedly incomprehensible to the carry-fems as well, being too complex for them.

  They were a mixed bunch of tough worn discards and runaways whom the City Scrappers had stolen or caught wandering and kept for their own purposes. Though not matched for size like a proper crew, these fems carried the fully laden camper smoothly. Their ragged smocks showed dirty, scarred skin at the rents; their feet were pads of callous. Only Alldera’s intelligence had saved her from being beaten into just such a shape herself.

  At noon she sat with them and shared their food. She dipped her hands last in the washbowl, dedicated the meal to Moonwoman, and spilled the water out (water being sacred to the mistress of the tides). Alldera didn’t believe in Moonwoman herself, but the prayer was a bond among fems.

  The carry-fems grunted and reached to touch her hands, thanking her for speaking on their behalf. Two of them opened their mouths to show that if their tongues had not been cut out, they too might have been speakers. Muteness in fems was a fashion in demand among masters. These two fems did not look bright enough to have been speakers in any case, but after a fem had done time in the labor pools there was no telling how intelligent she might have been.

  Alldera would not have spoken of her plans to them in any
case. Fems had been known to betray their own kind for this or that paltry advantage or out of spite or simple stupidity. Even in Kendizen’s house she had said nothing beyond routine inquiries for the news-songs that carried information back to Bayo. She had had even less in common with those tattooed pets, though several of them had been speakers. The trouble with pet-fems was that they came to take pride in their disfigurement – a technique of survival practiced by most fems to some extent. But in its more blatant forms, when it extended to identification with the interests of masters rather than with the interests of fems, it sickened her.

  Besides, Alldera had a strong contempt for and distrust of the merely decorative. Her own tough body, small in breasts and hips and well muscled, predisposed her toward valuing utility. She had learned to be glad of her broad pan of a face, which served both to mask her intelligence and to repel the interests of men perverse enough to pursue fems for the gratification of sexual appetites. There were times when she wished herself beautiful, of course; her own kind took their standards of beauty from those of the masters, and Alldera had spent lonely times because of that. Generally, though, she was well pleased with the virtues of her looks, and she continued to prefer the company of hard-used labor-fems like these, battered and stupid though they were.

  On the second day there was rain, and the footing on the road was too slick for travel at any decent speed. At d Layo’s orders, Alldera ran the carry-fems in training eights in a field to keep them from stiffening up. D Layo sat in the entry to the camper and watched them splash through the muck. He hectored and shouted criticism until he grew bored with them and went inside. Alldera used the opportunity to practice some speed-running while the others were slapping along in eights. She circled them at a hard pace, welcoming the exertion.

  D Layo had her in, soaked and stinking, to cook for them that evening. He occupied himself by sitting beside the Endtendant’s cot and telling ferryman stories.

  First was ‘How Ennik Rode the Deeps’; then, a short story that Alldera had never heard called ‘Degaddo’s Trick’; and finally part of an endless cycle of myths about a hero of just-after-the-Wasting called ‘Wa’king of the Wilds.’ This character’s body was made up mostly of replacement parts carved for him by his incomparably devoted ferryman friend, Djevvid, to remedy mutilations suffered in battles with the monsters. Following this, d Layo began a long, brooding tale of a forbidden affair across the age-line, in which the younger man inevitably misjudged and betrayed the elder and then perished on the Lost Ferry. D Layo trailed off before the ending and looked at his friend from under lowered lids.

  The Endtendant said, ‘Servan – ’ He seemed to hover on the verge of a long protest and explanation, but finally said simply, ‘No.’

  D Layo put his hand on Bek’s forehead as if feeling for fever. He stroked downward into the open collar of Bek’s sleepshirt.

  Coldly, the Endtendant said, ‘Are you really reduced to forcing yourself on an injured man?’

  Withdrawing his hand, d Layo remarked sarcastically that it would certainly be embarrassing if the Endtendant should pass out under his tender attentions. Over the lean meal that Alldera served them, he began recalling the events of their stay in the City, mocking the parts played by the older men – particularly Captain Kelmz – with wicked style and verve.

  Bek ate meagerly and made no comment, as if the effort of eating exhausted him. Alldera thought he was doing fairly well, considering the seriousness of the burn on his leg. That was good; when men died, fems burned, and she couldn’t afford to be charged with witching this man into a decline.

  Later in the evening, after she had completed the washing-up and lain down with the carry-fems, d Layo came out and called her from among them. He hustled her a little distance into the fields and shoved her down in one of the gang-paths.

  She knew her part as well as any fem in the Holdfast, having been through the usual training at Bayo; but she had not had to play it often outside of the monthly stay in the breeding-rooms, thanks to her looks. In this case she was lucky; the DarkDreamer was young and vigorous and probably free of the incapacity for which men blamed and punished fems. On the other hand, if he were annoyed by his friend’s rebuff, he might be cruel. Nothing could protect her if he decided to beat her or even strangle her on the spot. If need be, she would have to bolt and take her chances as a runaway fem, to be hunted by Rovers.

  He knelt and ran his hands over her. ‘My friend has a streak of cunt-hunger, I think; he’ll get to you sooner or later. So let’s see what he’ll be getting.’

  He took endless time with strokings and touching that were plainly modeled on the gentle practices of fems among themselves. To her horror, she realized that there was not going to be the ordinary swift assault, designed to carry a man triumphantly past the dangers of a fem’s body by sheer force and speed. He seemed totally unconcerned with the possibility of being robbed of his soul by the femmish void (through the medium of her body), a risk that men spoke of running if they fucked a fem outside of the breeding-rooms. To some young men this was a danger to be dared for the thrill of it.

  This DarkDreamer was working on another level entirely. He obviously derived some special gratification from his effort to stimulate her to pleasure. What kind of a pervert was he?

  She was too stunned and disgusted to feel very much in spite of his knowledgeable manipulations; how could he have learned just where and how to touch her, if not by forcing fems to lie together in front of him? That seemed to her to be a violation far uglier than any common assault.

  Anxious to put an end to his insistent handling of her, she performed a set of moanings and writhings that she hoped would persuade him that he had forced her to a climax. He was taken in, for he mounted her briefly afterward for his own satisfaction and then withdrew to lie relaxed beside her. He began humming a femmish love-song, of all things; flat, but recognizable.

  She stared up at the cloud-dimmed stars and tried to consider calmly how this peculiarity of his might be useful. It was not entirely unknown for the news-songs to carry word of some pet fem who had gained a hold on her master by exploiting a vein of perversity in his character. But that was something that came only to those of legendary beauty and cunning, and those fems generally ended up being burned as witches anyway. How much better could she expect to do, out of her depth as she was to begin with?

  Suddenly he jerked her head up by the hair and twisted, so that she had to turn on her belly or have her neck broken. She turned. He pushed her face against the wet, hard-packed earth.

  ‘Eat,’ he said.

  She bit at the mud. She coughed. Grit got between her teeth.

  ‘What’s the lesson?’ he said.

  What he wanted was recognition of his god-like unpredictability. The trick was to furnish it without drawing attention to the fact that total arbitrariness was also an attribute of chaos and the void. It was not for a fem to point out paradoxes that men chose to ignore. The best Alldera could do at the moment was to mumble, through bruised and filthy lips, a stock response: ‘The master is always the master, and he does as he pleases according to his will.’

  Saying nothing, he let her go and got up. She followed him back to the camper, wiping mud off her mouth with the cleanest part of her hem.

  The carry-fems greeted her with murmurs of concern and light pattings over her body and limbs to assure themselves that she had not been injured. Then they sank back into sleep around her. She was grateful for their warmth. The back of her smock was wet through; the night was cool, and a fem who fell sick was likely to be abandoned. But she felt alone among them. Even if she had explained, not one of them would even have begun to comprehend the special unpleasantness of her encounter with the DarkDreamer.

  She would simply have to put up with him, and with anything else that came her way during this journey, without help. That was nothing new. Her skills had always set her apart from all but a few of her kind anyway. At least she had a mission to serve by he
r endurance these days. If she failed, fems who survived the coming holocaust would be broken by their masters to become like these sleeping brutishly around her. There would be no more fems capable of organizing even the most timid and well hidden resistance.

  That new pogroms were coming no thinking fem could doubt (though there were many who preferred to deny it). The lammin-failure and a consequently hungry winter made that inevitable. Moreover, the fems of Bayo knew something that the men had not yet realized: the lavers, too, would be coming in thinner than ever this year. The men would cry witchery and turn on the fems, as they always did when things went badly.

  This time, certain young fems had sworn to fight back. Cells of young rebels had sprung up everywhere during the past five-year, possibly triggered by an especially strict weeding-out process in Bayo which had alienated the young fems from their elders.

  The older fems, the Matris, made a secret culling of each class of young fems due to leave the Bayo kit-pits for training by the men – and by the Matris, whose teaching ran secretly alongside the men’s training. The Matris saw to it that these kits submitted first to the underground authority of their own elders to assure full acceptance of the breaking-techniques of the men. In the past one or two youngsters had responded to the standard, initiatory beating by attacking male trainers. Each time, the reaction of the men had been immediate decimation of the femmish population in Bayo. So for the safety of all, young fems who showed signs of rebelliousness had to be cured of it before they fell into the hands of the Bayo trainers. Those judged incurable were simply killed by the Matris themselves; giving rise to the legend among men of kit fems so wild-natured as to bite open their own veins and bleed to death, rather than be brought up out of the pits for breaking.

  Faced with new crop-failures on top of the old, the Matris had grown stricter than ever. They had been savage, hoping to avert the worst of the men’s unavoidable rage by permitting only the most docile young fems to live. One result had been the opposite of their intention: warning had somehow gotten round the pits, and many kits had successfully dissembled their true attitudes. Once dispersed among the labor pools and private fem holds beyond the direct reach of the ruling Matris in Bayo, these youngsters were swearing among themselves that this time there would be no slaughter without a fight. They sang songs of their own, saying that death was better than survival to no other purpose than the production of new generations of fems for a worse oppression than before.