by Meg Elison
“Shuck all that off, dearie,” said a red-haired woman on Max’s right. “And if your hair color happens the same way mine does, you’ll want to pin it up and keep it out of the water. You have pins?”
“I have ties,” Flora said, already tucking up her braids into each other and getting her hair off her neck. “Thank you for the warning.”
“This water will suck the color right out,” the woman said. She had a strange accent that Flora had never heard before. “Also, if you’re wearing any jewelry, take it off and stow it. The water will ruin that, too.”
Flora didn’t wear any metal, but thanked the woman anyway. “I’m Flora,” she said, smiling shyly.
“Greta,” the other redhead said. “And this is my sister, Ann. We’re both visiting from Niagra.”
“Where’s that?”
“North,” said the woman with the strange accent.
“Land of frags,” Max said in her teasing voice.
“We are not,” Ann said, a little too forcefully for a tease.
“Oh, don’t be like that,” Max said, pouting. “There’s no such thing. I just like making you angry. You’re so pretty when you’re mad.”
Flora looked around, bewildered. She’d been about to ask about frags, but another conversation had already begun. She wanted to undress without being watched, so she took the opportunity and began to slowly unwrap her silks.
“How can you stand to wear all that when it’s so sticky out?” Ann was watching her disrobe.
Flora froze. Not distracted enough. “I’m just used to it. Also, I’m a bit shy, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Flora heard them fall into conversation behind her. She pulled off layer after layer, carefully bundling her clothes and putting them up on a bench where they wouldn’t get wet. She came down to her smallclothes—the layers that rarely left her skin. She took a deep breath.
“Come along now, love.” Max’s voice boomed again. “I want to hear more of your story. Get in already.”
Flora peeled off her inner layers, noting that they’d need a wash soon. She laid her hand modestly over her pudenda, arm crossing her nipples, and stepped nimbly into the water. She didn’t exhale until she had sunk in nearly to her chin.
The water was very hot and stung the bare flesh of her back. The smell seemed to have faded, however, and it was pleasantly milky when she looked down. She couldn’t see anyone’s body below the waterline.
No one said anything about her body, not even so much as a raised eyebrow.
“What part of my story can I tell you?” Flora asked Max after a few breaths to acclimate herself to the heat.
“Well, hold on,” Max said, her full lips dimpling her cheeks and chin. “Greta was in the middle of hers, I think. I just got excited when I saw you come in.”
Flora felt sweat begin to bead on her forehead and upper lip. She dipped her face to rid herself of the tickle.
Greta smiled, showing bad teeth. “I was long in the trade, as I was saying, Madam Mayor. I’m not as young as I look.”
Max grinned at her, reaching out to rub one slick finger under her chin. “Never tell anyone your real age, sweet Greta.”
“What trade was that?” Flora asked politely.
“Sugarcane,” Greta said blithely. “There are islands to the south where it grows easily. You’ve never tasted anything so sweet in your life. Sweeter than honey by far.”
“I’ve eaten raw sugarcane,” Flora said, smiling and feeling the muscles in her back relax. “I came from Florda. Not those islands, but close. Everyone trades it. It grows there, too.”
“You’re from Florda!” Ann was the first to exclaim and reach out across the water, not quite touching Flora. “How did you end up here?”
“Oh, adventures. Misadventures. You know.”
“No, we don’t know,” Max said demurely. “That’s the point.”
An attendant came by with small, delicate old-world glasses of some amber liquid. Each woman took one, but only Flora thanked the person who had brought them.
The liquid was sticky-sweet, but quite alcoholic.
“What is that?” she asked.
“Honeysuckle cordial,” Ann said dismissively. “And not a great one. Do go on.”
Flora drank the rest of hers, thinking it was delicious and not worth complaint.
“I was the apprentice of a slaver for a long time. A man named Archie. I would help train new slaves when he picked them up, get them trained and ready to be sold. He bought me in Florda, but we traveled a great deal in the trade.”
“You were a slaver?” Ann was aghast.
“She was a child,” Greta said immediately. “She didn’t choose that life.” She turned to Flora. “You’re not still in the trade?”
“No, of course not,” Flora said quickly. “I told you my story about the Lion. I’ve seen awful things, and I’ve helped end them where I could.”
The women nodded as they settled down.
Greta resumed her story when the mood had shifted. “I’ve grown very rich with the help of people like Mayor Max, here, who run an orderly city and make trade safe. I can come to Shy with goods of worth any time of year and never worry I will find the city wiped out, burned down, or in chaos. The places I know like that, I can count on one hand.”
She held up her left hand and Flora saw that the last knuckle of her smallest finger had been cut off with some clean, sharp instrument.
Max reached out and laced her fingers through Greta’s. She sighed and looked toward Flora.
“What happened to Archie?”
Flora swallowed. “He bought me from the king of Florda when he was already an old man. He kept me for a number of years, then sold me to my father in Jeff City. He couldn’t have lived long after that.”
Greta clucked her tongue. “The king of Florda! That’s something I haven’t heard in a long time.”
“No?”
Greta shook her head and Ann laughed a little. Ann’s hair was so pale it was nearly white, and when she tucked a loose strand behind her ear, the water made it seem translucent. “There were four or five people calling themselves king down there. Each of them in a pink palace surrounded by oranges and caimans. Each of them with a harem and some weapons, some kind of claim. Then they all started building armies to outdo one another, to be the only king of Florda. Naturally, they’re all dead. Because the only thing that sort of life buys is death.”
She smiled smugly. “There’s only a handful of villages along the coast down there now. They didn’t build. They got the sweats and the flux and died off where war didn’t do it. They didn’t learn to be women.”
Flora felt a small, strange loss. It had been her home, though she hadn’t really known it. It was good to think of kings losing their harems and people getting free, but not of everyone dying of sickness and never building anything that could last. It was like loneliness, combined with a wound to a half-felt hometown pride. Flora felt it sink through her. She had to concentrate hard to rejoin the conversation in the pool.
“. . . wouldn’t live there if I were king of it,” Max was saying, rubbing her nose against her shoulder to scratch it. “Too hot, too humid. Too easy to get sick. The snows save us every year.”
Everyone nodded as if this were a very wise thing to say and not an obvious truth.
“So, what are you doing in our neck of the woods?” Max asked Flora.
“Can found me in Demons. I’ve been raiding libraries for some specific stuff, and that library is almost untouched. If you’re interested. Good books on drugmaking, and I couldn’t take them all.”
Max laughed a little. “Shy has one of the finest libraries in existence, that I can promise you. You should see it before you go. But I warn you: no raiding.”
Flora smiled. “Of course not. Never steal from the living. And I’ve seen your library.”
“Smart woman,” Max said, draining her tiny glass. “Let’s get some breakfast.”
Dried off and dressed, the
women made an unhurried party toward Max’s garden. It was laid beneath sheltering trees before an imposing, well-kept house. Max sat at the head of the table. Flora settled on her left.
Breakfast was another astonishing spread. Flora stared in amazement at the beautiful table laid under the shade of a low, spreading tree. Breads of all kinds, cheese and jam, meats she couldn’t identify mixed with partridges and late-summer fruits. She was hungry, so she ate well.
I could get used to this, she thought. They ate well in Ommun but simply. It seemed that the Leaf prepared food in a utilitarian manner, rather than one meant to increase anyone’s enjoyment. Flora often found the food bland and underspiced or undersalted. She had overheard a few people from Nowhere grumbling about what their raiders used to bring in. How they missed it.
The thought of those grumbling voices brought her the memory of Alice, first and most sharply. Then Eddy and Kelda.
Home.
Ommun was not home, any more than Jeff City had been. But she knew where her heart was, while she was here.
Flora made her excuses about staying for dinner. About staying another minute.
Max just wants to be entertained, she thought, watching yet another knot of beautiful women wind in around the mayor and vie for her attention. She doesn’t need me for that. When does she ever work?
Flora, with her bag in hand, hair dry and braided tight, found Can. They walked together to Can’s car.
“Can you take me back to my truck?” she asked, biting her lip. “I really must be getting home.”
Can nodded, a small smile on her face. “Not tempted to stay in the city of women?”
Flora smiled back, her face broadening as she thought of an answer. “Every woman in the world isn’t enough to make up for the ones you really want.”
“You’ve got that right,” Can said, adjusting the pikes on her car and settling in the low bucket seat behind the wheel. “Give us a crank?”
Flora started the engine. They got on the road before midday. Flora saw the gates of the city in full daylight for the first time. She saw hanged bodies displayed there, flyblown and jaws agape. She didn’t look long. Some of them were hardly more than boys.
Executed for being men. Was that really their only crime?
Flora knew better than to start the conversation while Can could still see Shy in the mirror that pointed out through the rear slits. She waited until she knew she could run if Can pulled over, or at least until Can couldn’t get reinforcements immediately. They crawled away from the city on the crumbling road, more like gravel than the smooth asphalt it had been laid to be. Grass and yellow flowers grew up and impeded their wooden wheels as they made their way back toward Demons.
The sun had begun to set before Flora cleared her throat to say what she had been rehearsing in her head for hours now.
“So why is everyone in Shy a woman?”
Can grinned and shot a thin stream of brown juice neatly through a knothole in her door. “You finally just coming around to talking to me about this?”
Flora settled deeper into her seat. The humor in Can’s voice put her somewhat at ease.
“I try to work things out on my own first. It saves me a lot of embarrassment. And worse.”
Can nodded and tucked her wad of tobacco deeper into her lip. “You were there, in the theater. You heard the story. Even if you didn’t hear it there, you gotta know it. Men killed the world. And now, they’re the most dangerous thing in it.”
Flora nodded. “Sure. Sure. But most of the people in Shy were born men, right?”
“Nobody is born a man,” Can said, tucking her face to her shoulder as if to look at her, but keeping her eyes on the road. “You’re born a baby. You’re born naked. Everything after that is something that you learn to do.”
“I guess,” Flora said. “But women and men can do different things.”
“Can they? Or is that just something we decide?”
Flora scoffed. “Well, I mean have babies. Make babies.”
“Except that lots of people can’t do either. What are they?”
Flora sat silent. “But their bodies.”
Can shrugged. “Every body is different. What does it matter who has a cock?”
Flora had nothing to say to that.
“Anybody can hurt you,” Can said, her voice softer and slightly gentler. “There was a woman in Shy, years ago, who raped other women with a cock made of wood. Nobody could stop her. She’d catch them on the upper floors of the farm towers, where nobody could hear them calling for help. She would wait by the well and get someone all alone at night. She had become a man.”
Flora sat with that, feeling the weight of another story sink into her.
“And we kill men in Shy. That’s all there is to it. You choose to be a woman, or you choose not to be.”
“So she was hanged at the gates? With those other men?”
“Sure.” Can’s whole body was relaxed, almost negligent. She radiated a lack of concern.
“What if someone was just a man, but didn’t do any harm?” Flora was trying not to be too keen, looking at a swirling bit of dust instead of at Can’s face. “Could they live?”
“Not in Shy. Eventually, it would come to that. It always does.”
“So some you just send away?”
Can shifted her posture. “Mostly they leave on their own. If it’s that important to you to be a man, you can do that anywhere. Just not in Shy. It’s not worth it, with the world full of slavers like it is.”
“Some of those slavers are women,” Flora said mildly.
“What’s your point?” Can fixed her with a hard look.
“Nowhere was like that. Executions to keep things safe.”
“Nowhere?” Can spat again.
Flora shook her head. “A village. A town. The place where my Eddy came from. They didn’t kill all men, and they weren’t all women. But they killed slavers and rapists, always.”
“Eddy? Didn’t you say ‘Etta’ when you were on the stage? Was that the one in your story? With the Lion?”
“Yes,” Flora said. “But he’s a man. He chooses to be a man. Lots of men do, you know. And they’re safe and they can live in cities with women and not hurt them.”
“I’ve seen places like that,” Can admitted. “But they’re just delaying what’s inevitable. You’re a raider; you must have seen it everywhere. Men eventually get the idea that they should be in charge. Then they back each other up. Then you get problems like the Lion.”
“What about the woman with the wooden cock?”
“Nobody followed her. No woman saw that happening and thought it seemed like a good idea and wanted to join in. Because women don’t do shit like that. Women don’t keep slaves. A woman here and there, but not women as a kind.”
Flora sat in silence and digested that. You do. You just don’t call it that.
The sun sank lower and the light began to blind them on the westward road. Can slit her eyes and dipped her head a little. The orange light made a band across the bridge of her nose.
“I thought you were scared. You looked scared most of the time that you were there. I should have told you it was alright sooner, but I kind of like seeing the look on an outsider’s face when they realize what we are.”
Flora huffed a little air to blow a hair off her face before turning sideways to look at Can while she spoke. “My town was full of horsewomen like me. I’ve seen places like that, but no place where everyone just called themselves women as if there was no difference.”
“What’s a horsewoman?”
“What I am. What you are. A woman who was born with a cock. Where I’m from, we take horse medicine to help us look more womanly. I don’t need it as much, since I was cut as a baby. Some need it far more.”
“Horse medicine?”
“It sounds confusing,” Flora said. “But it makes shaving easier. Some horsewomen say their voices get higher, or their chests a little softer. I don’t know if it’s medic
ine or magic, but it has always helped me.”
Can was nodding. “Shaving is awful,” she said. “For a while in Shy there were some women with beards, but it made it really hard for them to make friends. Nobody wants to be seen with that.”
“Why does it matter?” Flora asked. “When everybody’s a woman and a cock doesn’t matter, why does a beard matter? Or hair on your chest?”
“I don’t know,” Can said. “Just not what women prefer, I guess.”
Flora thought of the men of Ommun with their carefully groomed beards and the coarse hair on their arms. She didn’t like it, but the women of Ommun sure seemed to.
Do we decide what we like? Is it born in us, or is it different if you have seen different things? Do we like what we saw growing up? What our mothers liked? Is there a day that comes and goes when we decide what we like, now and forever?
Flora thought back to the work she did for Archie, for the things she had pretended to like and had eventually learned to enjoy.
I always knew what I wanted. But I taught myself to like things I didn’t want. Am I the only one? Are harems all over full of women who learn to like what they’ve got, because they’ve never had anything else?
She thought of Sheba, and the thought died cold and alone in her head. Sheba had never learned to like anything.
And the men who had her, what they liked was to take everything from her and those other girls. Everything. Even their names.
“You alright? You’re shrinking.”
Flora realized she was tight all over, turning herself into something small and very guarded. “I’m fine,” she said, making the effort to expand and relax a little. “Just thinking about old times.”
“So, where you’re from, it’s not safe to be a woman. Is it?”
Flora sighed. “It’s complicated. It’s safe to be a woman if you were born to be one. I was safer in Jeff City, where horsewomen were normal. The Lion ignored us to search for breeders. We were better off. It’s not safe where it’s not understood, or part of everyday life. People sometimes feel tricked . . . or think you’re trying to upset the order of life.”
She thought of Eddy, when he had first felt her body in that strange, deep, salty cave. The terrible betrayal in his voice. Tears pricked her eyes as she tried to forget how cruel he had been.
