A Plague of Angels

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Weeping adults went to their knees beside the bodies.

  The men battering the walker stood up and backed away from the wreckage that still twitched, jerked, twitched, black fingers scrabbling against the gravel. The men were themselves battered and bruised and splotched with the walker’s body fluids. One attacker held his arm protectively in the other hand, the injured wrist dangling at an unnatural angle.

  “Tom, Tom,” Qualary whispered, clutching at him.

  He put his arms around her. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, wanting desperately to get back to Gaddi House and tell. His Wisdom what had happened. His Wisdom wouldn’t be surprised, he told himself, anymore than he himself had been. Appalled, but not surprised.

  He led her back to the wall. They had just cleared the gate when he saw a column of black-helmeted walkers approaching, Quince Ellel’s robed form in their midst. Tom darted to one side and through an open door, pulling Qualary after him and holding her there until the last of the procession had passed by. Ellel had not seen them.

  “Why?” she cried, seemingly unaware of Ellel’s passage. “Why did it kill them?”

  He shook his head. If His Wisdom was right, the walker had killed the children for no reason at all, but he’d rather not tell her that. It wasn’t something he wanted her worrying over. Or talking about.

  He took her with him into Gaddi House, left her weeping in his quarters while he went to His Wisdom, then returned to lie down beside her and hold her close. She wept for a long time before falling asleep with her head on his shoulder.

  Some time passed. Outside the window, darkness filled the garden, which turned on the lights. The fountain played softly, peaceably, quietly glimmering. Tom stretched his arm, relieving a cramp in his shoulder, and the motion brought her half-awake.

  “I’m too heavy,” she murmured, moving away from him.

  “Shh,” he said, pulling her back where she had been. “You’re not too heavy. We just haven’t moved for hours.”

  She wiped at her tear-smeared face. “I have to go home.”

  “Why? What do you have to do?”

  “Tonight—tonight I have to get ready, get my things together. Tomorrow I do Ellel’s quarters.”

  “Does she know you have a Gaddir friend?”

  Qualary pulled herself up and considered this question. “I don’t think so. I think she stopped being interested in me a long time ago. Once she has things under control, she pretty well loses interest.”

  “Have you thought what you’d say if she ever found out?”

  Qualary shifted uncomfortably. “She’d kill me.”

  Tom smiled at her. “I wouldn’t like that I wouldn’t like that at all. I’d rather you protected yourself.”

  “Against Ellel? Oh, my. She’s—she’s hard to protect against. She comes at you when you don’t expect it.”

  “But we know what she’s like. We know what she’s afraid of. And if you offered to find out things for her, things about Gaddi House.…”

  “Oh, Tom, I’d never ask you to—”

  He smiled again. “I have no intention of telling you anything that would be troublesome, either for you or for me or for anyone else. But there are things we can tell Ellel that aren’t troublesome. Ordinary things, but still, things she doesn’t know.”

  “It would give me an excuse for seeing you?” she asked. “Oh, do you think it would?”

  “She might even give you time off to do more of it.”

  Qualary Finch surprised herself by smiling. Then, ashamed of herself for smiling so soon after what she had witnessed that day, she broke into tears again.

  The next morning, when she had cleaned Ellel’s quarters thoroughly, she dallied over the last few chores, waiting to be noticed.

  “What’s keeping you?”

  The voice was more toneless than usual. Qualary swallowed deeply, fixing her eyes on her feet.

  “Ma’am, there’s a Gaddir man been attentive to me lately, and I wondered if you’d like me to see what I can find out from him.” She had rehearsed that sentence a hundred times this morning. Now she glanced up through her lashes to see mask and robe standing petrified, like stone.

  “He tells me things,” she went on. “I don’t know if they’re important or not. Probably not, but still I thought I should ask.”

  The robe sagged only a little. The mask tilted.

  “Tells you things? Not asks you things?”

  “Oh, no, ma’am, he never asks me anything.”

  “What kinds of things does he tell you?”

  “Oh, history, mostly Like how many people there were before men went to the stars. And—”

  “How many?”

  “Five hundred million on this continent, he says. He says there were eleven billion in the whole world.”

  Long pause. Metallic laugh. “There weren’t that many. There couldn’t have been.”

  Qualary swallowed. Fuelry had covered the possibility of contradiction. “Oh, ma’am,” she said, “he may not know what he’s talking about. He’s just a worker over there. But he does go in and out all the time.”

  “Yes. Go on seeing him. Get friendly with him. Really friendly, you understand me!”

  Flushing, Qualary nodded.

  “Ask him about Seoca! Ask him about the old man. Ask him if there are any children in Gaddi House. Ask him what they do in there.”

  “He may not know.”

  “Well, whatever he knows. He likes history? Ask him when Gaddi House was built. And why, why was it built.”

  Greatly daring, Qualary murmured, “But, ma’am, don’t you and the other Domers know why?”

  The answer was only murmured, as though from someone distracted. “It was here when our people got here. But we had no records of its being here. So we don’t know who built it. Or why.” The robe quivered.

  Qualary turned, ready to leave, only to be stopped.

  “Qualary.”

  “Ma’am.”

  “Did you hear what happened in the market yesterday?”

  Frantic thoughts chased one another. Say yes. Say no. Say nothing.

  “I heard … something,” she said unwillingly. “Someone was hurt, was it?”

  “Some children teased a walker.” That dead, metallic tone again. “That’s a dangerous thing to do, Qualary.”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am. That would be dangerous.”

  Silence. Then, “If anyone asks, you tell them about the children teasing the walker. Won’t you?”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am.”

  She fled.

  “And now you’re safe,” said Fuelry, when she told him how the conversation had gone. “You’re only doing what she’s told you to do.”

  “She wants to know all sorts of things.”

  “Like?”

  Qualary repeated what she remembered: Seoca, children, the purpose of Gaddi House, when and why built.

  “Well, let’s see. Seoca is old, but he’s alive and well. Yes, there are children in Gaddi House, but they’re all the children of the workers. They have a school here, just as the. Domers have a school for Domer children. As for Gaddi House, it was built so long ago that no one knows when. Tell her that.”

  His Wisdom insisted that was true, at least for the lower parts of the great building, though the upper and outer shell had probably been built more recently.

  “She wants to know what is done in here.”

  He ticked a fingernail against his front teeth. “You could tell her Gaddi House was set up to preserve the earth and the place of all life upon it.”

  “That has a nice sound to it,” said Qualary. “Is it true?”

  “Oh, I’m sure it is,” he said, sliding his arm around her. “Haven’t you noticed how I’m preserving you and your place in it, for example?”

  She made a little sound, as though she tried to laugh but found it hurt too much. “Ellel says the children teased the walker. That’s why it killed them.”

  He looked at her in disbelief. �
��She expects you to believe that?”

  “She doesn’t care what I believe. She only cares what we say. We … Domers. She wants us to say it was the children’s fault.”

  “Does she know you saw it?”

  She shook her head.

  “Don’t tell her,” said Fuelry. “You’ll be safer if she doesn’t know.”

  After Black Owl showed Abasio the town, which extended through a series of plazas with homes and offices of various sorts grouped around them and nothing anywhere that Abasio thought of as the least citified, they went down the slope toward the stream, Black Owl pointing up the opposite slope as he said, “Wide Mountain Mother thought you might enjoy feast night at the men’s house.”

  “Men’s house?” Abasio asked.

  “On the ridge. Those large buildings are men’s houses.”

  “The men don’t live down here?” Abasio asked, turning to look over his shoulder. He was looking for the clearing where he’d parked the wagon, and he saw it through the trees. Olly and Arakny were there, sitting beside a small fire with their heads together.

  “Off and on, now and then,” Black Owl said. “But living among men suits men best Women are peripheral to our lives. The women say they are occasionally adored, but mostly ignored.” He laughed. “If that’s true—and who am. I to contradict the women—it suits both of us best when we are allowed to live in accordance with it.”

  Abasio looked where he was going just in time to avoid tripping over a large stump above the stream bed. “How do you mean?”

  Black Owl sat upon the stump and assumed an attitude of oratory. “We are happiest when our men and women relate to one another naturally, unconstrained by contrary custom. I will tell you how the women say it. They say this: In past times, men never gave up having mommies. When they grew up, they merely took a sexual mommy and went on being boys at home. To keep the women from escaping being mommies, the men made certain rules about what women could do and how women could behave.”

  This did not seem totally unreasonable to Abasio, though he was glad Olly was not there to hear it.

  “When a mommy got old and fat, sometimes a man would throw her out and get a younger mommy. But,” said Black Owl, striking a pose, “our women say being a mommy for anyone is damned hard work, and being a mommy for grown men is boring, so came a time—it was shortly before men went to the stars—that women fought a great battle and refused to be men’s mommies anymore.”

  “I’ve never heard that,” said Abasio, openmouthed.

  “Oh, yes. It was called the Old Folks’ War, and the women were called feminists. They were greatly revered by our foremothers.” Black Owl rose to his feet and led the way across the stream bed, leaping over the silver threads of water and winding his way through the white hulks of dead trees that lay along the far side.

  “What happened?” asked Abasio, when he had caught up to him. “In the war?”

  “When the feminists first rose up, they were cursed by certain groups of old men who knew God personally, so the women declared war on the old men and on their God. The oldest women among the feminists, some who had been thrown away by their menfolk and many who had little time to live anyhow, took secret weapons and poisons and began killing the old men. Their battle cries were. ‘Tit for tat,’ and ‘Sauce for the gander.’ ”

  “Did they kill all the old men?” Abasio was aghast, thinking of his grandpa.

  “No, just judges and priests and those who made the rules and spoke for the men’s God. The old women were imprisoned or put to death, but other old women took their place, and in time many more old men died.”

  “So what happened!”

  “So many old men were dying that they decided it was time to reexamine the rules and perhaps even get a new god. Finally, after much shouting, everyone agreed that men were at their best among men, women at their best among women, that their problems arose when one sex made rules for the other, and that they enjoyed one another most when they were least constrained to endure one another’s company. So here in Artemisia, each sex makes rules only for itself, and we live mostly apart, but with no walls between. When we want one another, we are here, and when we do not want one another, we go apart.”

  Abasio shut his mouth abruptly. He had never considered such a way of doing things. “Who cooks for the men?” he demanded. “Who mends their clothes?”

  “Why should anyone cook for us but ourselves?” Black Owl asked, astonished. “And if men can make costumes for the dances, can they not sew up a shirt? We do both things very well, as you will see tonight. It is the first dance of the season. The Owl Society has made a feast and invited everyone to enjoy the food, the dancing, and the company. We are having roast lamb.”

  “Artemisia has a pastoral culture, then?”

  “Some of us graze sheep on the desert in winter and early spring and in the mountains in summer. Some of us farm the lands along the river and cut hay from the pastures there. Some of us keep sun-pit greenhouses for winter food. Our main trade crops are wool and leather, vegetables and meat. We keep goats for milk and cheese. We have different sorts of horses for the patrols and the shepherds.

  “Since men are stronger and our chemistry inclines us more to battle, we provide most of the patrols and most of the sheepguards who take the flocks to pasture. We also fight off the occasional troll or ogre that comes too far south.”

  “It doesn’t sound like the kind of society that would have a huge library and need librarians,” said Abasio. “I expected it to be more—more citified.”

  Black Owl shook his head firmly. “Cities are not good for this world! Wherever a city is, there also the land dies and the creatures of the land die. Look at the nests of ants, how around them the land is barren. So it is with people when they live like ants.”

  They had climbed the far bank onto a sandy road that led to the ridge above the town. The buildings there gleamed orange and salmon and copper in the evening light. Drum sounds filtered downward, along with the rattle of tambours and the thud of many feet stamping in unison.

  “Owl House,” said Black Owl, when they had climbed almost to the top. The building he indicated was tiled with a design of eyes and wings, talons and beaks. On the hard earth before it, a circle of gorgeously costumed men danced to the sound of the drums, stopping every now and then to confer about their performance, while the drummers and chanters stood impassively on the sidelines and a scattering of onlookers watched from the porches on three sides. Smoke rose from pits at one side of the house, and the smell of roasting meat made Abasio salivate hungrily.

  “Do the dances have meaning?” Abasio asked.

  Black Owl cast a quick look around him, then said sotto voce, “Don’t ask that of anyone else. Our men would be much offended that the meanings aren’t clear to you after the endless hours they spend in ritual, in making costumes and carvings, in learning the stories of our people and our land.”

  He led Abasio toward a circle of chairs set in the shade of the porch, two of them occupied by elderly men with gray braids and bright blankets wrapped around their shoulders “A guest,” he called. “A dyer, from manland, who travels through Artemisia.” He turned to Abasio and indicated the elders. “Tall Elk. Night Raven. Now, you will sit here, in comfort, watching the early dances. And when the womenfolk join us, we will eat.”

  He slipped away among the clustered participants, leaving Abasio to seat himself between the two old men. Despite the color and rhythm going on all around him, his thoughts were back in the river bottom, where Olly was. What was she learning? What could Arakny tell her?

  His distraction was broken by the man to his left, Night Raven:

  “You are a cityman?”

  Abasio nodded. “From Fantis.”

  “Fantis, alas,” said Tall Elk.

  “Cities, alas,” returned Night Raven.

  Abasio took this for a ritual exchange and merely nodded.

  Tall Elk nodded in return. “You have a name?”

/>   “Sonny Longaster.”

  “Ah.”

  Night Raven rocked forward to get a good look at Abasio’s face, saying, “Tonight we dance the return of the bison.”

  “Bison?” asked Abasio.

  Night Raven nodded slowly. “Soon after men went to the stars, the Animal Masters cut all the fences, then bred many bison and returned them to the prairies. I have ridden there myself to see the bison on the grasslands, yes, from the foot of the mountains to the far forests.”

  “My grandpa told me there are Black and White clans in the forests,” Abasio remarked.

  Tall Elk commented, “Our storytellers say they were different colors long ago. Long have they fought, capturing one another’s women and fathering children upon them. They are all the same color now. Still, those who once were blacks call themselves blacks, and those who once were whites call themselves whites, no matter who their mothers were.”

  Abasio forestalled any further questions about himself by asking, “The woman who said she was the Wide Mountain Mother—whose mother is she?”

  Night Raven laughed, tugging at the long gray braid that lay across his shoulder. “She is all our mother. She was chosen to be mothermost of all the Wide Mountain women.”

  “But she obviously wasn’t your real mother.”

  “A real mother is who?”

  “The one who had you, who was pregnant with you.”

  Tall Elk gave him a curious look. “Do you, then, know who bore you?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “I don’t know who was my birth mother. Do you, Raven?”

  Night Raven scratched behind one ear, reflectively. “I always thought it might have been White Rose People used to tell me I resembled her. And I also thought I was the birth son of Stout Bear. Do you remember him?”

  “Of course. He died fighting that winged thing that was stealing the sheep. We sing his praises still.”

  “So you don’t know who your parents were?” Abasio persisted.

  “They were healthy. What more is needful to know?”

  “How do you know that?”

  Tall Elk pursed his lips and looked severe. “We do not allow pride to get in the way of the health of our children, that’s why.”