Walk to the End of the World

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  Standing over her, Senior Bajerman did not draw a knife. He said that it was crowded in the camper. He had been told that this fem was speed-trained, and he was not going to let such potentially valuable property go to waste; that would be unmanly. She would ride in the camper where she could attend Eykar while she got back her strength. Perhaps a man running with this crew of hulks could make them put some decent speed on. Bajerman would go on foot outside with his men, he said, and observe the performance of Alldera’s replacement: d Layo.

  The DarkDreamer was pushed into position, and the Hemaways slung Alldera into the camper. The dim interior smelled of Bajerman’s perfume, for the ceiling-vent had been shut to keep out the blowing grit. Alldera crawled into a corner and huddled there, too cramped to move or speak, drawing painful breaths of the stale, sweet air.

  The camper was lifted and carried into the teeth of the wind. A man’s voice, hoarse and panting, struck up a stepsong concerning the foolishness of old men who insisted on showing off their dwindling physical powers to younger companions. D Layo was singing.

  Later, in the blowing dusk, the carry-crew staked down the camper into tent form for the night. The Hemaways fashioned a rough shelter for themselves of their mantles and staffs a short distance away. The fems were left within the bare area between the two structures, where Hemaway sentries could keep an eye on them.

  Alldera was thrust among the carry-crew for the night. She squatted stiffly and used her carry-cloth as they used theirs, as shelter from the wind. She had not slept; the Endtendant had not said one word to her all afternoon in the camper, but she hadn’t dared to doze off for fear of being punished for inattentiveness. Now the carry-fems took turns kneading the ache out of her shoulders, back and legs. A bald one, scalped too closely at some time by fur-weavers, offered her the moist center of a portion of curdcake, keeping the tougher skin for herself.

  In a tight circle, using their hip-packs of provisions as cushions, they settled for a night of shared warmth. The carry-fems began to hum, weaving tone and amorphous rhythm into a plaintive, wordless request for a song for the dead one.

  Every song needed one fem in the group who knew the words, and could sing them under the camouflage of gutterals and trills set up by the others to mask the sense of the song from men – most of whom could follow softspeech if they tried. Alldera was not a singer. Her work had been largely solitary and not conducive to music. But her trained memory had retained every song she had ever heard.

  She sang a mourning song for the slain carry-fem. It was an uncommon one; she had never heard all the words, for some of them had been lost. She loved the tune, however, which was unmistakably grieving: ‘Goodbye, all pain, something-something Shy Ann.’

  When that song was finished, the carry-fems kept up their vocal pattern, building on the mournful melody. Alldera wondered if some inkling of the meaning of Bajerman’s remarks had gotten through to them – that the massacre of fems had already begun. All the carry-fems and Alldera herself had come very close to dying by the bridge. They owed their lives – for however much longer they would be permitted to keep them – to Senior Bajerman’s judgment of their usefulness.

  It was unfair for her to be left with a bunch of carry-fems who could scarcely comprehend the dimensions of the disaster and of her own failure. They were not the type with whom she would have chosen to spend the last of her life. They smelled and were dim-witted, and they looked to her – foolishly, in her opinion – for leadership.

  And so? A dead bitch is a dead bitch, what difference whether she had brains or not? What use had Alldera’s brains ever been? She might as well be one of these carry-fems as not. They remembered their dead, at least, in spite of the brutality of their lives, and showed kindness when they could afford to. If these poor scarred hulks wanted songs, she would sing for them.

  She began with the traditional singing-invocation, relating how men continually brought their own houses down on their heads and then looked around for someone else to blame. With the beasts and the Dirties all gone and the idea of gods discredited as a femmish hoax, there was no one to blame these days but the fems and their young. The words asked for strength to bear the blame. Alldera sang them ironically, using the shortest form, and then swung into the jeering rhythm of songs mocking the Ancient men for the brainless greed that had perverted their inventiveness and strength.

  These songs told of rotten water, ravaged hills, air made unbreathable by noxious gases, cities uninhabitable because of the overcrowding and filth – all of it, the product of the men’s own wonderful knowledge and their obsession with breeding more sons on their fems. Dying of the men’s assault, the Ancient world had rotted, and its decay had released poisons. The first to die had not been the men whose avarice for the riches of the world caused it all; they had had wealth with which to buy protection, while there was still protection to be had. It was the beasts who died, all unknowing; and it was the Dirties. Those of the unmen who realized what was happening and rose up to fight, the Ancient men slaughtered, using flying fires and earth-smashers that only compounded the damage suffered by the world.

  At last, seeing their own kind falling to the increasingly widespread and indiscriminate destruction of wars and poisons, the leaders of men had bravely made the choice of sustaining themselves in the Refuge so that mankind would not utterly disappear.

  The carry-fems slapped their knees to make the beat for the mock-heroic songs that told of the Holdfast-making: how the descendants of the world’s murderers had stepped out into the open again to build a new life on the bones of the dead and the backs of their fems. In the time-honored manner, the descendants had become heroes in their turn by pursuing and exterminating the pitiful creatures that had survived the Wasting outside, the so-called ‘monsters’. So the river-plain had been claimed for men again, from the hills behind ’Troi to the sea.

  The descendants’ courage had been rewarded. They had found life-sustaining gifts of the sun on which to nurture the society. There were the edible seaweeds, the metal mines, the pits of coal for fuel, and the hemps for food and fiber. Not to mention the last gift, the docile compliance of fems in their own suppression.

  ‘Heroes!’ the songs mocked. ‘The unmen are not gone; you are more predictable than the thoughtless beasts, though not as beautiful. You are poorer than the Dirties, though less wise. You dream the drug visions of the Freaks, without freedom. You are more vain and jealous than the fems, and weaker.’ The formal closing of this sort of history-cycle was an admonition to all fems who heard: choose your hatreds with care, seeing how the men have become all that they hate! And then came urgings to patience, promises that the men would find their sanity and humanity again in time. Meanwhile, fems must keep themselves sane and fit to meet them again as people when the time came. The way to fight your enemy is not to become like him, they said.

  Alldera could no longer even finish the words. She broke into another song instead, one that asked how was it that the fems the leaders saved from the Wasting accepted degradation instead of swallowing their tongues and suffocating in defiance?

  Every one of the carry-fems huddled against the wind knew the answer to that, for it was the first and last lesson dinned into all fems by the Matris: for the survival of the race.

  ‘And to save their own lives,’ Alldera added, hoarse with hatred. She too had learned to snivel and whine and creep softly about in order to stay alive. She ended with a proscribed song called the Cursing Song:

  ‘Moonwitch’s daughters, enticers of men, bloody-mouthed cub-makers – if only we had the power! Ogres, man-eaters, ravening monsters, drinkers of blood and strength – if only we had the power! Bringers of evil gifts, fountains of chaos, stinking, merciless, wild-hearted haters – if only we had the power! Unchangeably ancient, corpse-crones, child-eaters, justice-blind and mad as blackness — if only we had the power!’

  The carry-fems weren’t happy with that; it made them uneasy. They let their accompaniment lapse whe
n it was over and curled up to sleep. The wind had died. From the camper came intermittent sounds of conversation, even laughter.

  Alldera lay awake a while, wondering if the femmish songs had been sung for the last time tonight.

  In the morning, there was a shadow on the plain behind them. It was Oldtown, the remains of an Ancient City. They had missed the hemp-stink and the rumble of machinery because of the previous day’s wind. Over decades, fem-gangs had been brought in to strip the site of usable materials. Scrappers had scrounged furtively after them. Nothing remained but heaps of rubble among which a complex of water-mills had been built to catch the strength of the river and to use it to help process the hemp harvested from the plains.

  Morning also revealed the distant, hurrying figure of one of the Hemaways, who was making for the town. He must have had enough of traveling that empty road toward an uncertain reception in ’Troi. The others looked after him scornfully and spat on the ground, but there were envious and speculative glances too, when Senior Bajerman wasn’t watching.

  He sat unconcernedly in the sun. D Layo knelt behind him and rubbed his back with scented oil. Occasionally, the DarkDreamer leaned forward to murmur in the Senior’s ear. Then there were smiles and laughter between them.

  So that was why the Endtendant sat apart from them both and hardly touched his food. Alldera thought his behavior absurd. What did he expect from his friend? D Layo was merely demonstrating that he knew how to make the best of a bad situation – a femmish quality, but there were plenty of men who would make fine fems, given the opportunity.

  Bek turned, extending his hand for the water-cup, and saw the contempt on her face. His eyes narrowed; but there was no shout, no blow. She blinked and looked away. He took the cup from her hand, not touching her fingers. She knew she would not get away free. She hardly cared.

  With the flaps buckled down around them for privacy and the journey resumed, Bek settled himself among the cushions at the head end of the bedding. He picked at the blanket, tracing the shape of the bandage on his leg underneath. He said, ‘I’m still thirsty. Pour me some more water.’

  Oh, these conscientious types, she thought. He needed an excuse to exercise his rage because he was ashamed of it. Instead of coming right to the point and beating her because her expression had angered him, he would give her orders and watch for the least sign of insubordination – which he would find, one way or another. Then why play the game of submission? In a convulsive gesture, she turned the pitcher upside down, and its cold contents splashed out over the bed.

  He jerked his legs back with a gasp of pain, rose onto his knees and wrenched the pitcher out of her hand. He raised the pitcher over his head, his face twisted with fury.

  Alldera fell back. She spread her legs and clawed up her smock with both hands in the last, mindless defense: when threatened, present.

  For an instant, he hung over her; then he flung himself down on her. It took all her concentration and skill to help him carry through his assault. He was clumsy and in pain, and when he entered her, she heard his groan of mortal terror. Their coupling was painfully dry for her, but brief. Almost at once a strained cry burst from his throat. He pulled away and rolled onto his stomach in the sodden bedding, his ribs pumping in and out like a blown runner’s.

  Mechanically Alldera took stock: one sleeve was half-torn from her smock; a bruise was swelling warmly under the skin of her left temple; there were other aches and abrasions, none serious. She finger-combed her hair and blotted her sweaty face on the skirt of her garment. A fem must never offend a master by appearing messy if she could help it.

  She thought what a good thing it was that she had never joined the Pledged. Let this man, not much taller or heavier than herself and wounded besides, only raise his hand to her and all her courage disappeared into the habits of survival like a rock into a swamp. A clever fem sometimes needed a reminder of her true position, and there was nothing like a good swift fuck to set firmly in her mind her relation to the masters again: the simplest relation of all, that of an object to the force of those stronger than she.

  Fern, she thought, you only think you think. The pitcher the man drinks from does not think. The camper that carries his weight does not think.

  She felt hollow in body, which was fitting in one who was merely a receptacle for the use of men; and she felt hollow in mind, for there was nothing she might imagine, feel or will that a man could not wipe out of existence by picking her up for his own purposes. Any fem drifted helplessly, awaiting their actions and desires until one of them inadvertently authenticated her by seizing her to himself — if only to run an errand or repeat a phrase — for an instant. That she could have a mission, a direction of her own — or that others like herself to whom she was in some way bound could — was an absurdity. A man’s usage conferred existence.

  But this man didn’t know his part. He should have ignored her or briskly ordered her to change the bedding, signifying that the incident had no importance for him. Instead, he surged back onto his knees, though the pain drove the blood from his face, and he took the front of her smock in his hands and shook her so that her teeth snapped together.

  ‘You haven’t made a cub off me, have you?’

  The question was unheard of. If a man intended to breed, it was assumed that he did so unless interfered with by femmish magic. Breeding was a matter entirely out of the control of fems, who came into estrus as time demanded.

  Panicked by his agitation, she stammered automatically, ‘Not if the master wills not.’

  ‘Nor stolen my soul,’ he said, giving her a shake. ‘Is that all there is to it, then?’

  He had gone rogue; he was going to kill her. Her head was full of flarings of blackness from the violence of his handling. She couldn’t speak.

  ‘Then it’s nothing!’ he cried, and flung her backward against the end-wall of the camper. One of the carriers outside staggered at the sudden shift in weight.

  Alldera lay where she had fallen. She’d bitten her tongue and tasted blood.

  Very low, the Endtendant said to her, ‘Listen, fem. I couldn’t stay in the camper last night, so I slept outside. I heard your songs. I heard how you sang them. I came closer to listen. In the Boyhouse, they taught me that ferns’ songs are nonsense. They also taught that coupling with a fem outside of the breeding-rooms is a dreadful peril, and here I am, no different than before; so maybe the songs are not nonsense.

  ‘Now you talk straight to me, bitch, or I’ll break your neck, for I’m fed to the teeth with tricks and lies!’

  19

  Exhilarated, she almost laughed. She dreaded a crippling injury too much to oppose him physically, yet here the man bade her take up words, her only weapon.

  ‘The master has heard all the songs I know,’ she said, and stopped, struck by her own daring, saying silently to herself, ‘I. I.’ She could hardly believe she had spoken the magical pronoun aloud to him, the equalizing name for the self.

  He didn’t even notice. ‘No more songs,’ he said. ‘One version of the past seems as likely as another. Tell me about now. Tell me about your own experience.’

  That meant, tell about your life. Alldera’s life was the only thing she owned, not to be had for the asking. But she saw that she could use parts of it, and parts of other femmish lives (he wouldn’t know the difference), to beat him down. He was not armored against her in the callousness that most men acquired by customary contact with her kind.

  Was he disturbed by the suspicion that he had been taught lies in the Boyhouse? Excellent. She decided to begin with what young fems were taught in the kit-pits and training-pens of Bayo and let him draw his own conclusions. She began to speak evenly and matter-of-factly, as if she were delivering a long message.

  She told about life in the pits, where young fems lived till the breaking age of nine. They scrabbled naked in filthy straw for food that the trainers threw down, and only strong and cunning fems survived. She made for him the sounds of the pits: t
he grunting signals that the young kits learned from those a little older, for no one spoke human language around the pits. The theory was that ferns’ capacity for language was generally so limited that they must not be confused by exposure to any more words than the basic command and response phrases.

  Learning to speak more than the minimum was a risky maneuver. Alldera described the care she had taken to disguise her natural aptitude, so that it would seem to the men of Bayo that her verbal achievements were entirely to the credit of her trainer. Otherwise they might suspect witchery, by means of which she would be supposed to have raised herself so far and so fast above the norm for her kind. She had made her trainer work to discover her mimetic abilities and her grasp of the structure of complex speech.

  A pity, they had said, that she wasn’t pretty enough to be trained as a pet, some of whom were taught to tell stories and jokes in an entertaining manner. The Bayo men had altered her diet to improve the quality of her hair and skin, and they had succeeded to some extent; but she would never be pretty, only presentable.

  So they had taught her how to memorize messages, how to find her way from place to place, how to identify other men than her master by clothing, mien and surroundings, and how to present a message properly. Then came the wonder of her first trip from Bayo to the City on a barge with a dozen others ripe for the bidding of the companies; the glory of the highstanding City, paved streets after mud-walled Bayo, and the majestic and terrifying peal of the company bells, which she had taken at first for the voices of monsters clanging out over the City.

  She spoke of her pride in being selected to serve an important Senior (to a fem fresh from Bayo, all Seniors were important to an equal, exalted degree): Senior Robrez of the well respected Squire Company.