Unconquered Countries-Four Novellas

by Geoff Ryman

  It was an old song, one Third could almost remember, one she thought everyone had forgotten. The woman next to her reached across and took her left hand. All the People linked hands, as if they were flowers at feast. Crow took her hand too. Oh, she thought, we are not defeated, we are not broken. We are still the Unconquered People. A beautiful young girl of the People ran onto the stage, her face crumpled with the effort of not laughing, and kissed the Prince, and the People cheered. Many good things are real, thought Third. I am going to have a husband. I am going to have a life. The balloons dwindled until they looked like a host of daytime stars. They would rise so high, and then rupture, but their souls would go on.

  The Prince looked up and waved. “Bye-bye,” he called to them, like a child. Crow, faithful with his broken smile, was looking steadily at Third.

  Three months later, the wars began again.

  PART THREE

  A BIRD, SINGING

  The big men changed their minds. Who could say why the Big People did things? They gave weapons to the rebels this time, who were still in the hills like an unhealed sore. These weapons could do something new. Blowing Kisses, it was called.

  A nurse led Third through the corridors of the hospital. The way the sounds and whispering reverberated made Third feel ill. Lined up on pallets all along the halls were the new wounded, muttering, often to themselves. They looked very calm, without a mark, except for strange bruises, as if someone had brushed them with ashes.

  Crow was on a bed, in a ward. There was nothing wrong with him that Third could see, except for a patch of skin on his forehead like the skin of a rotten apple. Wanly, he smiled when he saw her, and held out his hand. It was a monk’s hand, with slender, flute-playing fingers. Third looked about her in dazed confusion. The nurse had to help her step over people to get to his bed.

  “They found you,” murmured Crow.

  “A lady came and told me you were here, and led me.”

  “Blessed lady.” His hands still reached out for her, but she did not approach.

  “What is wrong with you?” Third demanded. She could see no wounds.

  “There is a hot little egg in the middle of my head, and it is hatching. I can hardly see you. Come closer. Sit on the bed.”

  Third, who had hardly known what to do or say before, was now overwhelmed with mortification. There were people about them everywhere. It was bad enough having to talk in front of them. Nevertheless, she jumped up onto the very foot of the bed, her legs dangling so far from the floor. She coughed to clear her throat, and began to talk of innocent things. “I saw your aunt as you asked me. She is very well. She gave me tea. She has bought herself a dog. One of those small nasty ones with a face like a China dragon. Stupid thing, to have a dog, you have to feed it.”

  “I hope you will be friends,” said Crow.

  “She treated me well enough,” Third said, with a shrug. “My wedding coat is nearly finished.” She had become a seamstress, working in the night, and she was saving scraps of cloth for it. “It is all white. It has a white dove on it, and it has a white portrait of the Prince.”

  Crow settled back and let his hand fall. “Tell me about it,” he asked.

  “That is all there is to tell, just that,” she replied, embarrassed.

  “It has a high white starched collar and the winged shoulders,” he said. His eyes were dim and loving, looking through all the hospital, at the coat, seeing it clearly, or perhaps another coat that he remembered.

  “Yes, that’s it,” said Third in a thin voice, though it wasn’t.

  “That is good. That is a very country coat. But you must not let anyone see it. Not with the Prince’s portrait on it. The rebels hate him. They will hate you. Promise me you will hide the coat.”

  Third was not pleased. Hide her coat. What was he talking about? “The rebels are People too.”

  “They have changed. When they ask, do not say you almost married a soldier. When they ask, say you married a fighter for the People, and that the foreigners killed him. It will be true.”

  “What nonsense!” said Third. “What is wrong with you? I can see nothing wrong with you.” She looked about her at the other wounded. There seemed to be nothing wrong with any of them. “When will you be out of that bed?”

  “Soon,” said Crow.

  “There!” said Third. Her legs ached from hanging over the floor. Angrily, she moved farther onto the bed.

  When she looked back, Crow was holding his hand over his head, watching his fingers wave, like wind chimes in a light breeze. He began to talk even worse nonsense.

  “Hearts go up like balloons,” he said. “Hearts ring like voices, echo like clouds. Cobbles underfoot. Always stumble. Drains. When looking upward. There is a bird singing.”

  “What are you saying?” Third whispered, looking around her. She wriggled farther up the bed and finally took his hand. He grabbed it fiercely.

  “There is a bird singing,” he insisted, his face shuddering as he began to cry. “They are pulling off its legs and wings, but it is still singing.”

  “Ssssh! There is no bird.”

  “There is! But no one can see it!”

  “It is this place,” said Third, miserably. “All this noise. It is confusing.” Badly frightened now, she squeezed his hand, and covered it with her other hand.

  “When I was a boy,” he began. “Strange cities. Always there. Always there. Never left me.”

  Was he trying to tell a story? You had to listen when someone finally spoke. Third peered at him anxiously. He stared ahead, as if moving at high speed. Then he began to chant.

  It was a priestly mantra. The words meant nothing, they were deliberate nonsense. Meaning would distract. “I ing a na. I ing a na. I ing a na,” over and over very softly.

  “That’s better. That’s better,” Third told him. His voice faded away altogether, and he went very still, his wet eyes still on her.

  She had never realized before that he was beautiful. She had never seen his body. His legs were hot under the white sheet, and his chest was bare down to the waist, smooth and brown and surprisingly fleshy. His lips were only slightly parted over his crowded, crooked mouth, and a tear still crept down his face. She looked at his hand, and played with his long supple fingers. Even the hand looked more substantial now, veined and broad and masculine.

  She coughed to clear her throat. “I have been thinking,” she said. “This city is no good for us. It is a bad place, with all these Desperate Flies crowding in because of the war. We could go back to my village. There is much orderly planting there. It is in the west, away from where the war is now. There is a lot of land there, because all the men have been killed. We could get married there. All the girls will be in a chain of flowers. They will sing the song of the true knight who climbed the mountain. They will steam fish with ginger.” It seemed to her that Crow nodded, slightly, yes.

  “We could look for my old house,” she said. “They don’t die, the old houses, they are like oaks. I’m sure it will know me. It is stupid to keep a dog when you can have a house. A house is a shelter.” For some reason she felt tears suddenly sting her eyes. That was foolish.

  “Ah, well,” she said, and let go of his hand, patting it. She pulled around her work bag, and took out her quilting. “We can talk about it later. I will stay here.”

  A lady came toward her, in white, big breasted, in the squeaking white shoes of the Big People, and suddenly she looked to Third like one of the other White Ladies, a giant hen.

  “You had better go now,” the hen said, warily.

  Third could not help but grin. She had to cover her mouth.

  The woman looked very displeased, perhaps insulted, and she strode, still squeaking, briskly round the side of the bed, and felt Crow’s forehead. Crow, who had been smiling at her with Third, seemed to freeze with embarrassment at being touched by another woman in her presence.

  “I will do that for him,” said Third, shyly. She lifted up his hand, which was sti
ll warm, to pull the sheet up under it, to hide Crow’s body from this woman. Abruptly the woman snatched the hand from her, and held it by the wrist.

  Then she leaned over, so that Third had to look at her terrible face with its strained smile. “There is no point to you staying any longer,” she said.

  “Tuh,” said Third, and made a gesture of throwing the hen a bit of slug.

  “It is best that you go now, really,” said the woman, who was actually shaking from fatigue. “Come along now.” She tried to take Third’s elbow to ease her down the bed. Third pulled away.

  “We are talking about family business,” said Third, haughtily. “We do not want to be interrupted.”

  The hen put a hand on her own forehead, and closed her eyes for a moment. She sighed and said, “He will be doing no more talking.”

  “Then let him sleep,” said Third and picked up her quilting. “I will stay here.”

  “He is dead,” said the woman. “I’m sorry. We need the bed.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Third. “He was talking to me a moment ago. Go away and leave us alone.” She turned away from the woman, and took up her needle and thread.

  “All right,” said the woman, wearily. “You can have a few more minutes.” Third heard her squeaking away.

  She turned to Crow, who seemed to nod his head in approval. The tear on his face still moved. It touched the pillow and was gone, absorbed. Suddenly, even though it was daylight with people all around them, Third laid her head on his bosom. “I am like the cat, sometimes,” she told him. “When things are near me, I pretend I do not want them. I think I do not care for them, in case they are taken away. Most things get taken away. It is like that when people are hurt. When they are near, I give them no sympathy, in case they take advantage. It is only when I leave the room, that I can weep for them. Do you understand?” It seemed to her that he did. His chest was still. She sat up, and moved the sheet a little higher. “Tell me about when you were a boy,” she asked him, patting the fold of the sheet. He didn’t answer. She sat and thought nothing, only nothing, for a very long time.

  Until the hen came squeaking back. “This time you must go. This is really too bad. There are people on the floor!” Third looked at her, unblinking. The woman suddenly shouted. “There are sick people. You must leave!” Third would not move. “My dear woman, I know this is terrible, but there are others. Please go. Please.” The woman looked around her helplessly, and then left.

  Third stared at the body. It was very still, like statues of the reclining Buddha, but it was going ugly again. The teeth were sticking out farther from the mouth, and the eyes, under heavy lids, were dry and crossed. A fly picked its way across the lips. Third, distracted, waved it away. It came back.

  There was a bustle behind her, and the woman was coming with a man now, a doctor, and she was abject and pleading and servile, saying that she had asked, that she had tried everything. The doctor, aged and respectable, sat on the bed next to Third. He expressed his condolences and said that he did not know why it was that fine young men had to die, except that it could not possibly be the will of God. Could she see, though, that the bed was needed for other people’s loved ones? Would she go? “Up, up, my daughter,” he said, trying to coax her.

  Third suddenly snarled, and tried to hit him with her dogged little fist. He ducked and it missed. “First Sister was withered by Sharks! Second Sister…” she yelled, and choked and tried to hit him again. Her second sister now lived by prostitution, sitting in an airport window, arranging her hair so that the sores would not show. Their mother had starved herself to death when they were children, giving them her food so that they would have enough. One always had to say there was enough. “Go away! Go away, and leave us alone!” The doctor leapt down from the bed, slipping on his leather soles. Third flung her quilting after him as he scuttled away, and she sat and wept, not knowing why she was weeping, and hid her face.

  Suddenly it was dark. There was soft moaning, and the clatter of instruments on moving trolleys, and the sound of flies. All that Third thought was that it was late, time for her to go. She jumped down from the bed, walked down the passageway between the beds, and nodded politely to a nurse as she passed. Somehow she found her way down the stairs and through the hallways, to the large, heavy main glass doors. It was not until she saw them, swinging, saw her own reflected image like a ghost in the blackness beyond, that she realized, or else remembered, that Crow was dead.

  She gave a little yelp, and covered her mouth, and turned and ran. She had not looked at him properly, knowing he was dead, to remember his face. She had not asked the nurse what would happen next, what the funeral arrangements would be. In a panic, she ran down the corridors, which all looked the same, which all echoed, which all were crowded with dying men who looked the same. “Crow! Crow!” she called for him, though it was stupid, he couldn’t answer. She ran up steps, she remembered steps, to the room she thought he would be in, but all she found there was an empty bed among the full ones. She ran to another ward. “Oh, no. How stupid. Oh, no,” she said to herself in a breathless voice. In that room all the beds were full of different people. Wrong room, back again to the first one. But all the beds in that room, too, all of them, were full. Right room, wrong room. She saw a nurse, one she didn’t recognize, and grabbed her arm.

  “Many pardons. Many pardons. Can you tell me where my husband, Crow, Nourisher of the East, is?”

  The nurse, tired beyond endurance, simply shook her head and pointed toward a doctor in the shadows.

  “Doctor,” said Third, “Doctor, my husband is dead. He died here, and now I can’t find his body, and I have to make arrangements!”

  The doctor, one she didn’t recognize, took her arm. “You are the next of kin?”

  “Yes, yes,” she said, trembling like a bird.

  “Then don’t worry. Go home and try to sleep. We will contact you about the arrangements later. Come now, this way. I will show you the way out.”

  “Thank you, sir. Many pardons,” said Third and looked back over her shoulder, hoping by accident to catch one last glimpse of Crow.

  The main doors swung again, and this time Third seemed to catch the reflection of many ghosts. They crowded the main hall. The doctor nodded to her and light flashed on his spectacles. Light danced on the doorway as it settled shut: Third was outside on the hospital steps, and the sky overhead was full of light and a crackling sound.

  Fireworks. Why, thought Third, why are there fireworks?

  “Oh, Crow,” she whispered, as the sky was spangled. “How could you leave me? What do I do now?” Green and red opened up in the sky, flower-bursts of light, loose and shimmering. She had never known him as a man. That was what it was for, finally, the wary approach, the angry rebuff, the gradual drawing together. It was meant to end with her lying next to that beautiful body. That was what she wanted.

  She realized then that she loved him. For his beautiful body, for his broken face, and for his heart, what was inside him. Oh, Third, fool, it is too late to realize that. What good is that now? Like the cat.

  It was not enough. Was it all for nothing? Third watched the fireworks.

  Then she understood life histories. Why people told them. They wanted to save something. Suddenly, as badly as she had ever needed anything, Third needed a priest. She saw the spires of a temple, dark against ocher sky. She ran.

  Across the hospital square, past a fountain, as if the fireworks were bombs, and she were dodging them. She ran up the temple steps to the great carved doors. They flickered in the pink-white fireworks light.

  They were locked. Third tried to shake them, and felt the heavy bolts behind them. “Peace of God? Peace of God?” she called, panting, in a weak voice.

  When had the temple doors ever been barred? Suddenly angry, she slammed her fist against them, pounding, and heard how small the noise was in the rolling darkness behind them.

  “It’s closed,” said a voice behind her. An old man was sq
uatting on the steps, hunched over a bowl of rice, twisting round on his haunches to look at her. Third stared at him.

  “The temple is closed,” he repeated.

  “Are you a priest?” Third demanded, avid.

  “What? No, oh no. All the priests have fled. Haven’t you heard? They refused to join the army, and the Neighbors started putting them in jail. Where have you been hiding?”

  “Where did they go?”

  The old man laughed. “Ho! Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell. One of them set himself alight in the main square. You must know that. Where they have the Ceremony. The Neighbors will not let anyone bring flowers to that place. They will not let anyone mourn.”

  “There must be priests somewhere. Have they all gone, all the temples?”

  “Ah.” The old man shrugged. “Who can say?”

  Third ran from temple to temple, all across the city, and they were all closed. The fireworks erupted overhead. Victory, the Neighbors were claiming, in only two months’ time. The summer streets were full of laughing people. A parade of street players jostled past Third. They carried huge lights that blazed into her face. Their aloof painted faces smiled as rockets whined overhead. An old woman picking over fruit glanced at Third, blinking with heavy-lidded, reptilian eyes. No one knew who Crow was, no one knew he was dead, no one knew of the grief that Third carried within her, like a pouch of pus. “Have you seen a priest?” she asked, and people passed, pretending not to hear. There were soldiers, celebrating, waving their weapons in the air. You will die, Third thought, coldly.

  It grew late. Third saw a man bowed under a machine, carrying it on his back, delivering it. He wore scraps of cloth that had been sewn together to look like an important person’s suit of clothes. The fireworks stopped, the streets began to clear. A line of students meandered arm in arm toward Third. They wore white T-shirts splattered with rebel slogans in red paint. They wound themselves, laughing, around a fire hydrant.