Strange Trades

by Paul Di Filippo

  “Have you never heard that fortune favors the bold?”

  “In some endeavors, perhaps, but not all”

  “It remains my universal motto nonetheless.”

  “An intriguing steadfastness. Would you care to explain more?”

  “By all means. But let’s meander to quieter pastures.”

  “If you wish.”

  They walked away from the crowd and the torchlight, the trodden night-damp grass exuding its living breath. Spurwink attempted to press his hip to Florence’s, but she skipped away. He sighed melodramatically. She ignored him. He began to talk.

  Spurwink’s exotic speech, his foreign tones, his barely concealed insinuations, all combined to fill Florence’s head with dreamy visions, colored in all the brilliant shades of the rainbow missing from the drab black and brick-red environment of the Mill. His words seemed to pass directly from his lips into her imagination, with barely a stop to be interpreted by her conscious mind. Her familiar surroundings disappeared, to be replaced by peacock images of sprightly dances, airy pavilions, candle-lit canopied bedchambers.…

  Florence had come to a stop by a stand of jojoba shrubs. Spurwink advanced, backing her up into their prickly embrace. He clasped her face in his hands and kissed her again. Florence did not resist.

  “Floy! Floy! Game’s over! Time to head home!”

  It was her foolish little brother Charley calling, shattering the spell she had been in. Florence pushed Spurwink back, rearranging her skirts where the shrubs had rucked them up.

  “Factor’s ballocks! This damn Mill schedule makes sleepy larks of us all, willy-nilly! If we were back in Tarrytown, we’d watch the sun come up and glint off the wine bottles we’d emptied. But here, you have to be abed by nine just to rest up for the next day’s drudgery.” Spurwink’s tone became tinged with self-pity. “And I’ve got an hour’s walk ahead of me yet.”

  Hastening toward her parents, Florence called back, “Next week we play the Landfish. They’re only three mills up from you.”

  Spurwink fell back into his gallantry. “If it were three hundred damn mills, I’d still come for you.”

  The desire in the man’s voice made her stumble on nothing. She reached her parents still flustered, but they were too elated with the Blue Devils’ victory over the Stalkers to take much notice. Charley, however, recognized enough amiss to ask her if she was feeling well.

  Florence felt an immense condescending superiority toward her brother. She tousled his sweaty hair and said, “I’m fine, Charley. It’s nothing you’d understand anyway.”

  Charley regarded her quizzically. For one brief moment his eyes widened, and she was convinced he knew. Then he turned away wordlessly and mounted into the bed of the wagon for the journey home. Ridiculous, she thought, to imagine such a thing.…

  And the third time she and Spurwink had met—that time was now.

  Spurwink’s left hand still plumped her right breast. The soft fabric of her camisole felt stiff as burlap on that nipple, so sensitive was it. His mouth ringed the summit of her other breast. His right hand was on her belly, stroking it in circles that grew wider and wider, like the ripples cast from a stone thrown into one of the Mill’s many holding ponds. She felt as if her belly were filled with hot coals, like a bedwarmer on a winter’s night. Eventually Spurwink’s lower hand strayed deliberately beneath the waistband of her skirts. More cunning and experienced this time in the fashions of the Valley, it quickly found the ribbon that upheld her petticoats.

  Florence started, and laid a hand atop Spurwink’s cloth-covered one.

  “Do you really want to stop now, Pretty Puss?” he whispered, relinquishing her breast, yet with his breath still hot upon it. “Tell the truth now.”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “Well, you must realize I don’t. Not with a Factor’s Paradise so near for both of us.”

  “Then—do what you will.…”

  He tugged the knot apart. Then, with both hands beneath her clothes, he pushed her single undergarment down, his smooth hands sliding over her rump and hips. The cloth fell from beneath her skirts to lie with the generations of dry dead dusty leaves, a presage of the autumn to come, so seemingly impossible at summer’s height.

  Without being told, she stepped out of her knickers.

  Florence lost a moment then. The next thing she knew she lay on her back on the ground, her skirts pooled around her, Spurwink’s muscled weight atop her, his mass centered below her waist. It took a moment for a strange sensation to register. Spurwink had removed his wool trousers and was now bare also.

  “I think you’ll like this, my poppet.”

  Florence faltered. “I want— I want—” What did she want? In the end she could not say, and lamely concluded, “I want to.”

  “And you will, you will.…”

  When it was over Spurwink fell asleep for a minute or two on the duffy turf. Florence lay awake staring up into the branches of the dusty-miller tree. Judging by the roar of the crowd, the ball game was reaching some kind of climax. She put both hands between her legs and closed her wet thighs on them. What had she done? She could not feel sad about it, but neither did she feel ecstatic. The moment’s brief rapture had vanished, elusive as morning mist on the Swolebourne, whose waters seemed to flow now from her center.…

  Spurwink awoke with a startled grunt. “Oh my aching bones. What time is it? By the stars, girl, you were good! I’d fancy another ride if it weren’t so late. But duty calls, and I must hie homeward.” Climbing to his feet, Spurwink fumbled with his trousers in the darkness.

  Florence remained on the ground. A coldness crept into her flesh. “When shall we meet again, Samuel?”

  Spurwink replied airily. “Oh, at one game or another, I’m sure.”

  “That hardly seems such an enduring pledge as you were uttering earlier.”

  “I’m afraid it will have to do, my lass. If there’s one thing I cannot abide, it’s to be trussed up like one of the rocklambs in my father’s abattoir. You must take me as you find me.”

  Florence used the tree trunk to climb somewhat painfully to her feet. Without stopping to alter one iota of her disheveled appearance she marched out of the bower and toward the game field.

  “Wait, wait,” Spurwink called nervously, attempting to maintain a discreet tone. “Make yourself presentable first, girl.”

  Florence gave no reply, but strode steadily on.

  Spurwink lost all self-assurance. “Stop, you little idiot! What do you think you’re doing?”

  Widening the gap between them, Florence paid no heed to Spurwink’s orders. He darted a few steps after her, thought better of it, then ran off in the opposite direction.

  Florence marched toward the Blue Devil and Landfish villagers, who had as yet taken no notice of her. Half of her mind was all icy cold precision and a determination not to feel anything. That was the half that showed on her face. The other part was a mix of bewilderment, pain and confusion. That was the part that huddled and mewled deep inside like a lost unweaned tarkitten.

  Above her head the stars Spurwink had invoked to praise her shone with a frigid radiance. Were there truly men out there, humans who bought the luxcloth? Men like Spurwink? It seemed all too possible. Were they watching her now? Their powers were unknowable. The ten bright stars that formed the constellation Factor’s Ship seemed to glare with a particular accusation.

  Once she stumbled. This time, however, the cause was not excitement, but only a rodent hole hidden in the grass.

  The game had ended when Florence came up to the crowd. The players were leaving the field, victors triumphant, losers consoling each other and boasting of success in the eventual rematch. The spectators had broken up into congratulatory clusters around their various relatives. Florence crossed the perimeter of torchlight and stumbled blindly into their midst, her skirts aslant across her hips, her breasts shamelessly exposed.

  There was a moment of stunned silence. Then everyone was hovering a
bout her, the men loudly blustering with outrage and moral indignation, the women all practical earnest solicitude, various children watching wide-eyed. Everyone was trying to get her to speak. Florence opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Somehow all she could focus on was the face of a little girl hanging onto her mother’s skirts. Had she ever been that young herself?

  Someone tossed a blanket around her shoulders, covering her nakedness. Then her parents were there. Her mother held Alan, the youngest, on her hip. She rushed up to Florence and tried to hug her. But she forgot to put Alan down, and ended up awkwardly embracing both her children. Charley was somehow beside her next. To Florence, he looked inexplicably taller than earlier in the night, as if his exertions on the field had stretched and matured him. He clutched her hand and stroked her hair. “There, Floy, there,” was all he said, but somehow it was enough to start her tears flowing.

  Roger Cairncross was shouting into the night, at no one and everyone. “Who knows anything about this! Speak up! Speak up, damn you!”

  When he received no reply he turned to his daughter and gripped her by the shoulders. “Who did this, girl! Do you know? Are you protecting him?”

  Her father’s mustache was laced with spittle. His face was red as clover. Florence dropped her eyes from his. When she did this, he began to shake her back and forth with a violence that rattled her bones.

  “Trollop! Tart! Is this how you were brought up? Is this what I work for from sunup to sundown? I’ll have his name out of you if I have to beat it out!”

  Charley was pulling his father away. The older man shrugged him violently off. Then other villagers, his coworkers, were on him, separating him from Florence.

  “Can’t you see she’s in shock, man? She needs to get home and be cared for, not abused. Your daughter’s a fine lass, she’ll come round. Just give her some time.”

  Cairncross began to calm down. “And what of the bastard who touched her?”

  “He can’t leave the Valley without giving himself away. There’s no out for him. Don’t you see?”

  Cairncross nodded in agreement. “All right then, let’s get home.”

  In the homeward-bound wagon Florence sat shivering in a corner, wrapped in the borrowed blanket, her head in her mother’s lap. Every few minutes the musty-smelling wain walker pulling the vehicle would emit a plaintive bellow, as if to complain about being kept up so late. She recalled all the festive rides back to their familiar village, how she had sung and laughed with her friends. Would there ever be such days again? She began softly to sob. Why couldn’t she speak? A slow anger began to smolder in her. Why should she have to speak? Couldn’t they leave her alone until she had sorted everything out for herself? What right did they have to pester her with questions? The more she thought of this, the angrier she got. By the time they reached their village, Florence had ceased her sobbing. She now wore an expression of stony indifference.

  The wagon stopped outside the Cairncross home. Their neighbor—a middle-aged bachelor who supported a widowed father who had grown too frail to work in the Mill—emerged from his half of the house to stare and cluck his tongue with a mixture of sympathy and reproof. Averting her face, Florence let herself be helped inside.

  Once in the parlor, Florence spoke for the first time since she had left Spurwink. “I want to wash up, please.”

  “Well, by the Factor’s grace, you’ve found your tongue,” said her father somewhat sarcastically. “Maybe now well learn the cause of you bringing so much shame upon our family.”

  Florence said nothing, but merely went to her room. Her mother soon brought a white basin and a pitcher full of water heated on the wood stove, some towels and a washcloth. When she was alone, Florence used the chamber pot, then scrubbed herself free of Spurwink’s detestable scent. She dressed in gown, robe, and slippers trimmed in bluefox fur around the ankles. She knew now that she would never say anything about what had happened that night, come what may.

  Back in the parlor, Florence sat on the couch, the center of her family’s baffled looks. Gently at first, then, as she refused to answer any of his questions, more and more roughly, her father tried to elicit what had happened from her. Florence maintained her silence throughout all her father’s cajoling and threats, his attempts at logic and reason, his appeals to honor, duty and affection. Her mother’s pleas also she ignored. As the night wore on, Roger Cairncross grew more and more irrational. Several times he gestured as if to strike her. At last he did, bringing his open palm across her face.

  Florence took the blow without uttering a sound. A wild look of despair and self-disgust flashed across her father’s face. He jumped to his feet and fled the house.

  Charley had sat through this cross-examination silently, offering neither consolation nor accusation. Now he arose also and left.

  Soon her father returned. With him was Pastor Purbeck.

  Pastor Purbeck had lost an arm to the Mill’s machinery at age twelve, some fifty years ago. That same year had seen the demise of Pastor Topseed’s youthful catechumen, a boy named Hayflick who had fallen prey to a pack of dire wolves forced down from their mountain fastness by an unusually hard winter. Young Purbeck, barely recovered from his wound and the equally traumatic surgery, had been immediately compelled by his family—a disreputable group led by a drunkard father and a termagant mother—to take his devotional vows. Shortly thereafter his family left the Valley. Upon the death of Pastor Topseed some ten years later, Purbeck had become the Valley’s youngest cleric.

  Purbeck lived now in the one-room rectory attached to the Blue Devil chapel, a building on the far side of the Mill from the Cairncross home. He was tall and thin, and bore a good-sized wen at the hinge of his jaw. His eyes fairly radiated his devotion to the religion symbolized in the icon of the Factor hung on a chain around his neck. These features, combined with his empty right sleeve, formed a presence capable of frightening even grown men. More than one poor child, hurrying through the cresset-lit windowless tunnel through the Mill’s body, rushing from one square of light to another, had had the wits startled out of him by being abruptly grabbed on the shoulder by the single hand of Pastor Purbeck and questioned on elements of his catechism.

  In the homey atmosphere of the Cairncross parlor Pastor Purbeck lost none of his imposing sternness. Florence shivered upon seeing him, recalling no specific incident but only the general air the Pastor had always carried, an air of suspecting everyone of guilt and sin. Tonight, she feared, she merited his suspicions.

  Purbeck took off his wide-brimmed cleric’s hat. Then he sat on a footstool directly opposite Florence. He rested the hat on one bony knee. He flicked some luxdust from it with a contemplative slowness. He lifted the silver figure of the Factor on its chain to his lips and kissed it. Then he raised his gaze to Florence. She braced for a flood of accusations and threats of damnation.

  Purbeck’s voice was soft and flat. “Ah, young Florence, it seems only yesterday to me that you were being consecrated into the faith. Such a pretty little girl you were. But even then rather willful. I remember when you joined the choir. ‘Why must I sing with all these others?’ you asked. ‘I prefer to sing alone.’ I found it amusing at the time, and so I let you have a solo part that Lay- day. Do you remember the song, Florence? I do. It was ‘Our Hearts Shine Like Lux in the Factor’s Sight.’ A lovely piece. Written over a hundred years ago by Holsapple. And your voice was equally lovely, dear. So sweet and piercing, such a contrast to all those massed tenors and basses. You were guaranteed a solo every Layday afterwards. Such beauty, I thought, could only serve to glorify the Factor.”

  The Pastor paused a moment, turning his hard eyes ceilingward before fixing Florence with them again. “But now I reproach myself for my vanity, as well as for yours. For what good is beauty without the soul behind it? It is like putting stucco on the Mill. Underneath would still be the brick. And when the heats of summer and the chills of winter—the trials of life, if you will—had flaked all the plaster off, the br
ick would once more be exposed. Yet my analogy is imperfect. In the case of the Mill, we would not be ashamed to see the noble, homely brick, the true substance of our days. But in your case, my dear, we are all of us ashamed to see what lies beneath your lovely exterior.”

  Now the Pastor’s voice began to modulate into those tones it assumed just prior to the inevitable moment when he would bring his single fist down on the pulpit. “Your beautiful exterior, my dear, is cracking. You have let it be mishandled and mauled, and now your soul is starting to show through. And what a sorry sight it is! Its lineaments are those of greed, selfishness, impetuosity, and stubbornness. You have revealed yourself to lack a sense of gratitude to your parents, of duty to your village, of devotion to the Factor. You have revealed yourself to be a thoughtless, reckless, immature little girl. And to compound your errors, you refuse now even to make amends for your sin by disclosing the name of your partner.”

  Leaning forward, Purbeck took hold of one of Florence’s hands. She tried not to flinch, but failed to repress a slight movement. The Pastor did not comment on this, but instead launched onto a different tack.

  “Do you think, my dear, that your partner will turn himself in and save you performing what you wrongly regard as a betrayal? If so, you must disabuse yourself of such a notion immediately. Although it pains me to say it, there are few men in this Valley who would move a little finger to save a woman’s virtue. But that is the sad fact of a male’s composition. That is why a man is bound by natural law to support his family—if he is lucky enough to have one—by the sweat of his brow all his days. That is why the Factor made a disproportionate number of men. They are expendable and imperfect.

  “But a woman, dear Florence, a woman is different. They are so few and so rare, that their natures cannot help but be more refined and heavenly. It is woman who perpetuates our race on this sad world. When a girlchild is born—so rarely, only one to every two boys—we rejoice. All her youth she is cosseted and petted, perhaps made too much of. But we cannot help it, for we see in her a visible sign of the Factor’s grace, proof that although he has made life hard, he has not made it impossible. It is woman who must act as the conscience of our race, the moral light. So you see, all the burden of resolving this affair must devolve to you.”