“That’s what Grandma told me. She said the woman-stealing myth was a kind of safety valve for the village. Every ten or fifteen years, if there got to be too many postpubertal males to feed, they’d go through what she called the ‘woman-stealing rite,’ but once they were away from the villages, they’d pick up whatever pack they’d hid somewhere and wander off in any direction that looked interesting. She knew that because whenever it happened, the women left behind in Tuckwhip always looked for the men’s clothes—nobody has much more than one spare shirt or so, not in Tuckwhip—so the women would want to find any that might go to waste. They never found any at all.”
“Which meant they’d hidden their clothes and packs in the woods somewhere?”
“Yes. The fire and the dance and all was just . . . kind of a lie they all told each other.”
Abasio mused, “I think the behavior is fairly common. People have certain acceptable rites or observances. At this new moon we eat apples. At midwinter, we build bonfires at the old sun’s death and pray for the new baby sun to be born. People grow up: they learn the words; they memorize the story; it gets to be habit. They don’t believe that the observance is really necessary, but they go through the motions. Where I grew up, we enjoyed the festivals mostly for the food! There was almost always special food!”
“It’s not just Hench Valley, then,” said Needly, with a sigh. “Grandma said if we peeled away all the stories, the real reason the men went and didn’t come back was there was nothing to stay for and nothing to return to. What is there in the valley? A few sheep. Not enough anymore for spinning much thread, weaving much cloth. Grandma used the loom a few times; sometimes the women gave her thread as payment for her help, and I have one shirt made from homespun. Cloth was something the men traded for up at the pass. There were a few small fields of wheat; some oats; some barley. A few vegetables in the house gardens, but the women do that. There are a few fruit trees, but no good apple trees anymore. The people who knew how to graft the good apple trees died long and long ago . . .” She stared into nothing. “Grandma had one little tree, off in the woods. She’d grafted it herself, long ago, off an old one in the village that she knew wouldn’t last much longer. It had tiny, bright red apples; four would fit in my hand. They were so sweet, they tasted of heaven . . .”
Xulai put some honey in a cup of tea and offered it to Needly. “Have some sweetness here, too. So the men really don’t do anything but drink?”
Needly took the cup gratefully. “Oh, they’re not totally idle. They can raise barley and make beer, but they need to buy the barrels to put it in and to buy other kinds of drink. To make money they spend all their winters digging in the buried city that extends under the whole valley. They dig for parts of machines, for glass, for a metal that runs like water—live-silver, they call it. Gralf had a hoard of gold—we found it one time, an amazing amount of it. They hoard it. Grandma said many of the men had hoards. Old Digger did. They may use a little of it to trade for cloth and things they need, like knives and scythes. Some of the things they find, they keep. Things they can use.”
“Or things women can use?”
“Only if it’s something the women use for the men. Like cooking. The men don’t cook because that’s women’s work, but a man might buy a pan or bring one he’s dug out, because he knows it takes a pan to cook what he likes to eat. The men without women mostly end up chewing parched grain or eating half-burned bits of whatever they can kill. A man won’t buy cloth for women, but he’ll buy it for himself. Maybe he’ll ask her how much he needs for a shirt. She’ll tell him twice as much as it really takes. She makes the shirt and hides all the leftover and scraps. She cuts up the big pieces and sews them back together so they’ll look like scraps. She makes her clothes, the children’s clothes, out of that. And she hides what she manages to spin and weave and uses it for herself or her children.”
“I should think the men would see . . .”
Needly shook her head impatiently. “Xulai, you have to look at something to see it! A man wants hot tea in the morning. That’s what he looks for. If it’s there, good; if not, he hits the woman. He never watches her making it. He never watches her do anything. What she does is unimportant.” She stood at the edge of the road, looking out over the far prairies, wiping at her cheeks with the back of her hands.
Xulai sat next to Abasio, who whispered to her. “I think you probably sound a good deal like the child’s grandmother, love. It’s part of what’s troubling her. She talks to you as she would have talked to her grandmother, and when you get imperious, it’s as though Granny slapped her face.”
“Oh, Abasio! I don’t mean to.”
“I know, but when you become the Princess Xulai, none of your adoring courtiers are quite sure what you mean to be.”
“Well, no more inquisition. If you see me doing it, scratch your nose. Or shake me. Or something.” She stood up and went to empty the dishpan at the side of the clearing where they’d camped, stopping to put her arms around Needly, which she had not done until now, and giving her a close hug. She was a child. Willum’s age. A child. No matter she spoke like a professor and acted like a judge, she was a child!
Willum, seeing this, went to Needly’s side and gave her a slice of apple, neatly peeled and only very slightly grubby. “I think it’d be more comf’tuble to jus’ sort of not think about those old myth things.”
Needly gave him her best excuse for a smile and went to help Xulai clean the campsite and stow things ready for departure. Let them get on their way and think about something absolutely . . . different. External, like . . . ah, Lom! Lying on their straw mattresses under the wagon, they talked about all sorts of things, and last night Willum had told her about that distant world where the two Earth ships had gone all that long time ago. Did they have myths in that world? They spoke of how wonderful it would be to have a clean, new world without any of the old myths in it.
Once they were under way, they all tried to throw off the morning’s preoccupation, but their early-morning thoughts had set the mood for the day. Willum was wondering if there might have been myths back in Gravysuck that he had not known were myths. Needly had been thrown back into grieving for Grandma. Xulai was seriously considering using ul xaolat to jump to Hench Valley and obliterate it. Except . . . Needly’s grandma had told Needly the place was . . . necessary. Abasio was reviewing the dreams he’d been having, dreams, often repeated, and varying from the pertinent to the ridiculous, each with its own internal inconsistencies. When he had been Feblia, Feblia had known what shlubbing was. Feblia, the character, had known! And Abasio had known that Feblia had known. BUT he, Abasio, did not know. How could he be aware of knowing something in a dream that he knew nothing about when he was awake? And the creature he had bumped into, Fixit. He . . . or she or it . . . made no sense. Too many things made no sense. He wanted not to think at all, simply to let the time pass until supper, until the warmth of the fire, the aroma and taste of food, the bedtime comfort of Xulai’s arms. Or—if she was still feeling snappishly regal—he would simply regard her simmering warmth as a hearth fire to sleep beside—not too closely.
Xulai said, “We should be seeing Kim soon, shouldn’t we?” she asked. “It’s getting dark.”
Abasio started out of his self-absorption. “No, not really. The plain below is still sunlit. The sun’s directly behind the peak, and we’re in the shadow of the mountain. We’ll see him soon.”
Xulai murmured, “I’ve been wondering how we could get the babies safely around the Catlanders, if we have to.”
“I think the Lady Animal would help you,” offered Needly. “If she thought it would help us help her . . .”
“No!” Abasio growled. “I don’t know what weapons those gangers have, Needly! The Griffin isn’t immortal. When she came down on us yesterday, Xulai could easily have killed the great creature. Some of those same weapons could ha
ve ended up in ganger hands. It’s not likely, but it is possible! I don’t want to put the great creature at risk: not she, not her child, not their kindred. I know . . . I know how she feels.” He, too, had felt the loss of marvelous creatures. Marvelous people. He felt that one more such loss might . . . break him in two. There had been too many losses.
“Abasio is right,” Xulai agreed, having given him an analytical glance. “When the Griffin appeared, I was startled into action without any thought at all. Evil things happen when people are badly surprised. Let’s not borrow trouble. We hoped to come out of the mountains into Artemisia, and we still may do that that. Just because that group over the mountain was made up of gangers doesn’t mean we’ll find them at the end of this road. Maybe Abasio, as ‘Vahso,’ should leave us somewhere and reconnoiter down below. I don’t want Kim encountering gangers while he’s driving horses that may have been stolen.”
Blue threw up his head, jingling the harness he wore. “They weren’t stolen. That fat ganger, back there when we got Kim loose, he said they’d bought those horses before they started up the mountain.”
“Bought?” asked Xulai. “Not thieved? That surprises me!”
Blue nodded. “The men talked and talked. They said that Sybbis doesn’t want any trouble from the Artemisians, so she gave her men money to buy horses so nobody’ll claim they’re stolen. That is, not originally stolen. I ’spose we stole ’em, though.” He whinnied laughter.
“Considering how they intended to use the horses, my conscience is clear,” Abasio snarled.
Needly, hearing him, was pleased. Evidently her grandma’s definition of morality was shared by other people, some of them, at least. “So long as unnecessary pain is avoided, don’t worry what happens to the guilty. Just be dead sure they’re guilty before they’re surely dead!”
The sun sank behind the hills. Abasio yawned, blinked, came around a slight curve, and saw Kim’s encampment at the end of the stretch they were on. Good. They were weary and needed rest. He looked again. Kim was not alone. “Whoa, Blue,” he said. “Xulai, I’m going to get off and check a wheel, take a look down the road. Do you see any threat?” He jumped from the wagon seat, stretched, bent, twisted to get the kinks out, then knelt beside the left front wheel.
“Don’t think so, Abasio,” she said. “Kim has met up with a pair of travelers. They have two saddle horses, one packhorse. All the men are drinking tea by the fire.”
“Remember? From now on my name is Vahso,” he reminded her. “Needly? Willum? You listening?”
“We got it, Vahso,” said Willum. “Who are we ’sposed to be?”
Xulai murmured, “Willum, Needly, Vahso is your uncle Vahso and I’m your aunt Shooey. Your mother . . . What’s your ma’s name, Willum?”
“Bess.”
“Bess sent you two children with us on this trip so you could see something of the world. Uncle Vahso is her brother.”
“Needly and me, we’ll both call her Ma.” He and Needly put their heads together and agreed upon what they would say about Da and Ma and what was going on back home. “You and me, Needly, we live on a farm between Gravysuck and Saltgosh, and ever’body there says you’re a throwback to some gran-cestor back a ways ’cause you’re so white. Tonight, I can tell you what crops we farm and what animals we have so’s you can tell people ’f they ask.”
“And everything else is simple truth,” said Abasio, making an ostentatious examination of a front wagon wheel. “We are traveling to tell everyone the waters are rising. I have acquaintances in Artemisia because I’m a traveler and I’ve been there before. The only name we have to avoid is my real one, and it’s simpler if people think we’re a family group.” He stretched again and climbed back onto the wagon seat. “All right? Wife Shooey, nephew Willum, niece Needly, let’s go meet whoever it is camping with Kim.”
“Who’s Kim supposed to be?” whispered Needly. “Is he related to us?”
“Oh, yes,” said Abasio. “Since they’re both Tingawan, he’ll have said he’s a cousin of Shooey’s. Remember to call him Cousin Kim. He’ll expect you to.” He had intended to spend a few days practicing this slight deception before they reached the bottom of the road, and he prayed attempting it now, without adequate rehearsal, would not prove a disaster. He climbed onto the wagon seat and picked up the reins, saying softly, “Hup, Blue, my faithful, nonspeaking equine, let’s get on down the road.”
“Yes, O profoundly wonderful master,” muttered Blue, leaning into the harness. Needly, reassured by the talk on the way down the road, giggled. Xulai looked up in astonished delight. It was the first time she had heard the child laugh.
The men sharing Kim’s fire seemed harmless, which immediately put Abasio on guard. They were too smiley. Too welcoming. Too “My-oh-my, let me help you step down, ma’am, and what’s this lovely lady doing out here in the wilderness”-y. Xulai greeted them without smiling.
“Good evening, gentlemen. Kim, is the water hot?”
“Yes, cousin! I knew you’d want to wash the dust off first thing.”
Abasio indicated a place. Blue and Rags, silent, maneuvered the wagon into the place, the door on the side away from the fire. Abasio and Willum removed the harness. Xulai took a bowl of warm water behind the wagon and washed the dust from all her available surfaces. Abasio had told her the Artemisians had real baths, baths near hot springs that one could submerge in, and she was looking forward to hot water in volume. She had not had an all-over warm bath since leaving Saltgosh, in the women’s bathhouse. Before that, she’d had several dips in Bertram’s pool, after dark, and had taken advantage of his hot shower. While she was at it, she cleaned the babies’ bottoms and used the last of the water to wash out their wool-lined trousers. They were, at the moment, contentedly full, scarcely waking as she unclothed and reclothed them in the shelter the wagon provided.
Kim knocked on the wagon corner and whispered, “Ma’am?”
“Yes, Kim?”
“There’s a pool a little way off. It’s getting a little late to use now, but I thought maybe you’d like to know about it in the morning. It’ll be chilly, but—”
“Kim, you are a very thoughtful man. Do the men with you have their own stores?”
“Yes’m. They’ve had their supper. I waited to eat with you all.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Didn’t want to be . . . in their debt at all.”
She nodded, understanding, dried her face and arms, and went into the wagon to gather foodstuffs, returning to the fire with a stew already assembled, needing only to be heated. “Gentlemen,” she said again.
Abasio spoke: “My wife. My dear, the dark-haired young man is Clume,” he advised her, nodding in Clume’s direction. “The other is Walkin. Traveling to see the world, they tell me.” Clume’s hair was dark, as was his skin, a rich tan, all in all a good-looking young man, in his late twenties perhaps. Strong, from the looks of him, though not as bulky as Walkin, whose muscles bulged alarmingly whenever he extended an arm.
“Ah,” she said, maneuvering the grill across the fire and setting the pot firmly upon it. “What have you seen of it so far?”
Clume set himself to be charming, and Xulai responded nicely to his charm, smiling, nodding. They had seen the ruins of the city to the north, he said. Fantis. Almost covered with tiny trees of various kinds that were still being planted by the Sisters of the Trees. There were many birds. They had gone north of there, even, into the deep forests, but had hesitated to continue where there were no roads.
Abasio nodded. “I’ve been up there. Got lost one time for the better part of a season before I found my way out. Got down into a valley somehow and could not find a way out of it again.”
“You couldn’t backtrack yourself?” asked Walkin.
“Got in there in the midst of a blizzard,” Abasio explained. “Then the weather turned warm, everything was slipping an
d sliding, avalanches here and there, water dripping. By the time it dried out enough to travel, the landscape had changed to the extent that I had no idea where I was. Could have come out easy if I’d left the wagon, but I didn’t want to do that.”
“Family wasn’t with you then?”
“Oh, no. That was years ago. When I was still a young man seeing the world, just as you are. How far east have you traveled?”
Well, it seemed Clume and Walkin had started from the south. Now they were going over the mountain and west to the sea. “We’ve been on our way up two days,” they said. “We stopped at a village a day or so away from the climb: Artemisian village. You know the people there?”
Abasio swallowed a huge sigh of relief. Wonderful! It meant they would come out of the mountains into Artemisian territory! He need not leave the group and go inspecting the countryside. “I do know the people of Artemisia, yes; very good people.”
Xulai saw his relief and grinned at him. “You’ll have roads, such as they are, most all the way,” she told the visitors, tasting the stew and deciding it was hot enough. The meat was left over from a roasted leg of venison, the last of the fresh meat they’d bartered for in Saltgosh. From here on, they would have only salted and smoked meat, but it was only two more days down!
Abasio took over the conversation, telling them how the road went from here over the mountain. A baby cried from inside the wagon. Xulai excused herself and went to tend to the twins. She would avoid their being seen, if possible. It was too late in the evening for explanations.
Needly and Willum, meanwhile, ate their supper nicely, without argument, being polite to Uncle Vahso, Aunty Shooey, and Cousin Kim, as though they had never behaved in any other way.
The men rose, said they would go a bit farther up road before dark, thanked Kim for sharing his fire. They rode away. Sometime later, Xulai and Abasio heard their horses on the road above them, the clop of hooves and the inevitable slide and splat of gravel that always seemed to rattle down whenever there was traffic on the next switchback up.
Fish Tails Page 33
