by Meg Elison
The smell of a predator. Same everywhere.
Wonder what I smell like.
He dropped the claw and it made a tiny slap sound as it hit his skin. He didn’t see the buck until it swiveled its head suddenly in that moment. It was a huge, full-grown deer with a wide-branching set of antlers. Its eyes were on him and he dared not move, not even to nock his arrow.
Take me all night to butcher it. No salt, no smokehouse. Most of it will rot.
Hungry, he clicked his tongue just loud enough to make the buck take a few leisurely steps back into the woods. The sound also scared a handful of fat brown rabbits out of the underbrush. Eddy was surprised, but he got an arrow loose in time to catch two of them. It wasn’t a great shot; the rabbits screamed and suffered, scaring away everything within earshot. Eddy ran to the two small animals trapped together by the arrow that had gone through the flank of one and the neck of the other.
The rabbit shot in the neck had either bled out or died of fright before he reached them, and it lay silent. The other kept up its awful shriek until Eddy buried his best knife in its eye. He rose with his kill and turned toward the house.
Flora stood in the doorway with her hands over her ears. Eddy shrugged at her as he came closer.
“That’s the sound they make. It’s only death. There are worse things.”
“It sounds like children screaming,” she said quietly.
It did, Eddy knew. He said nothing.
By the time the rabbits were skinned, gutted, and spitted, Flora had recovered. She sniffed as fat ran off the meat into the fire.
“Can you make bread for tomorrow?” he asked.
Flora smiled. “I learned, when I was younger. I have no talent for it, but I make good cornbread. I trade for wheat bread, from someone who knows how and has a man who can knock down a beehive.”
Eddy cut the rabbit, crunching through the backbone and laying it on Flora’s tin plate. He did the same for his own and sat beside her on the stone hearth inside the cabin. Flora tucked in immediately, drawing sharp breath through her teeth as she realized the smoking carcass was still too hot to touch.
Eddy tipped his own plate to the side, draining off the still-liquid fat into a glass jar he had set on the floor.
“If we go back to Nowhere . . .” He stared at his rabbit, waiting to see if more grease would weep off the well-fed meat.
Flora looked up at him, licking her lips but forgetting her dinner.
Eddy did not look up, though he felt her eyes upon him. “It’s south of here, along the route we’re following. I’m not going to go there until I’ve found at least one woman or girl who needs help. That is what I’ve always done.”
“Myles was—”
“Myles doesn’t count.” Eddy snapped the words, setting his plate down against the stones with a rattling clang. His head rang with the aftermath of the long, rough ride and its heady stink. “I shouldn’t have had anything to do with that. I bought her. It doesn’t matter if I gave her back to her mother, or ate her, or kept her as part of my own harem. I’m one of them, now. I’m . . .”
Flora smiled a little. “A slave trader? One of those men? A Paw of the Lion?”
He did look at her now, his brown eyes blazing. “How can you even say it? How can you . . . ?”
Eddy felt a searing in his eyes, the moisture there catching the day’s sweat at the corners and stinging, blinding him. He fought for control.
“It’s not a line,” Flora said patiently. The nervous little smile still curled one side of her lips. “I don’t understand why you act like it’s a line. It’s not as if there are slavers on this side and you and your righteous hero’s life on the other. We’re all a part of the same world, and living in it and trying to stay. We all have to do things we don’t like.”
Her smile was gone when he looked up. She had gotten back to the business of tearing her rabbit apart to eat it. A little blood showed where she cracked a joint and buried her teeth in the flesh.
Where are you right now?
“We do. Yes we do.”
I’m circling around it. I can’t explain it to her. It is a line.
“There are things that are just wrong. There’s white and black.”
Flora swallowed a big bite and clearly didn’t like waiting to take the next one. “You mean like you and me?”
“What? No. I mean like there’s male and female.”
“Like you and me,” Flora said with her mouth full.
Eddy looked quickly down and drained a little more fat off his plate and into the jar. He pulled thin meat off his own rabbit’s ribs.
“There is a line. A line I won’t cross. There’s a line that separates things from their opposites.”
“Like killing people.” Flora had given up on breaking the rabbit’s little bones and was gnawing, the whole roasted body lifted to her mouth. “That’s a line many people won’t cross.”
Dead people.
“That’s just doing what you have to do,” he said aloud. “Sometimes there’s no other way.”
“What if there were no other choice than to work with slavers?”
“There’s always a choice.” Eddy’s hunger was in him somewhere. He swallowed bites of meat, hoping they met somewhere in his hollow middle.
“Yes, there is.”
Eddy looked at her and saw his own mother in her raised eyebrow.
He sighed.
“Anyway. I don’t want to go back to Nowhere just now. I want to show you a secret. Once you’ve seen it, you can tell me where you want to go.”
“A secret? What kind?” Flora’s forehead was uncreased and serene. Nothing seemed to bother her; she always bounced back to some kind of internal peace.
Still angry at her, still frustrated. She can’t see it at all.
Want to kiss her, even so.
“A forgotten place,” he said. “It’s strange and beautiful. I’ve been there many times.”
She nodded, her eyes on the bones of her rabbit. “Alright. That sounds like an adventure.” She licked her fingers and crossed the room to rummage in her bag. She returned with a small iron pot.
“When you’re done, put your bones in this. Tomorrow, we’ll have some soup.”
Eddy nodded. “Good thought.” He tossed his bones in when they were clean. He took the jar with its tiny runoff of rabbit fat and found a similar sized jar in his bag. He pulled out the lotion Alice had made him and stuck two fingers into the thick, white preparation.
The smell of rendered fat was improved significantly by the fresh mint Alice had infused into the grease. Eddy added his ration of dinner fat and worked the two together between his hands. He rubbed the fat into his arms, lingering on his gray, dry elbows. He rolled up the legs of his leather pants and petted downward, his oily hands taming his curly leg hairs into arrows that rained down toward his ankles. He applied it to his face last, spreading it thinly across his cheeks and forehead.
Flora had wiped down their plates and kept herself busy, but when Eddy opened his eyes she was there.
“Do you need help with your back?” She smiled and he was glad he was sitting down.
Yes.
“No. Thank you, but no. I have to use it pretty slowly or I’ll be out before I get home. Unless I shoot something with more fat on it.”
Flora looked a little disappointed, but she nodded.
“I’m gonna walk the riverbank and see if I can get lucky elsewhere, then,” Flora said.
Eddy missed the hint in his eagerness to bluster. “Do you have a knife?”
“Of course I do,” she shot over her shoulder as she passed through the door. “Work on that window.”
Eddy pushed the boards that had been pried out back into place, hammering with a rock he found in the yard. The rabbit bones boiled in the pot Flora had hung over the fire in the hearth, and just the addition of what little salt they had made it smell even better than the meat had.
It was full dark and the moon was rising over the tr
ees. Eddy laid out both their bedrolls and checked all the windows and doors. He tried sitting by the fire and found that he couldn’t sit. He made an inventory of what was left in his apothecary. He paced and sat and rose to pace again.
Fine, I’ll do it.
He pulled open the leather journal he had had since his first blood. He turned a third of the way in, looking determinedly away from the chunk of pages that had been torn out. He found his last entry and put his stylus into the ink.
The Book of Etta
Year 104 in the Nowhere Codex
Summer
Drove all day, in a truck from the Lion of Estiel. Runs on deez. Stinks. Shot two rabbits. Traveling with a woman from Jeff City. Flora, who throws silk. Returned one female child (Myles) to her mother in Jeff City. Got her from a slaver.
No details. No stories. No explanations and no apologies. Less than a third of the page was filled in, even with Eddy’s large, childish handwriting.
Before he could put the book away, Flora opened the front door.
Eddy started, reaching for the knife in his boot. When he saw her, he sighed with relief.
Flora held up a muddy clump of weeds with muddier tubers dangling below. “Guess what I found!”
When washed, the tubers turned out to be arrowroot. According to Flora, their arrow-shaped leaves had been obvious in the moonlight.
Flora grinned over her find. “They’re like potatoes. You grow potatoes in Nowhere?”
“Not me, but some of the farmers do. I love potatoes. Nothing makes you feel as full as they do.”
Flora was nodding, breaking the greens off and throwing the peeled clean tubers into the pot. “This’ll be breakfast stew. Plenty of food to get back on the road.”
When she was done, she wiped her hands on the front of her skirt. “So, you keep a diary?”
Eddy glanced over his shoulder to the purple book, still lying on the floor where he had left it.
“Yes. It’s . . . it’s kind of a tradition where I come from.”
“Why?”
They lay down nearby each other, seeing slices of the starry sky through the cracks in the roof. Eddy told the story of the Unnamed as best he could, explaining how her book was the first, the book that became the history of Nowhere.
“So now everybody does it,” he said, pausing to yawn. “To record births and deaths and harvests and raids. We all write our stories so that the people who follow us know how we lived.”
“Yours must be full of the stories of where you’ve traveled! I’d love to read some of it,” Flora said.
“You can read?”
“Yes, I learned as a child,” she said patiently.
“Why? Can most people in Jeff City read?” Eddy was surprised. Scribes and Midwives were always literate in Nowhere, the scribes being chosen from the boys who learned the quickest and the Midwives from the girls who were the most clever. A few others in specialized trades, like Alice or the other druggists, learned to read, as well. Many raiders could not read more than they had learned as children, spending their youth learning to fight and to navigate. They brought home books without knowing more than their titles.
Etta had been chosen early as a candidate for Midwife. She had read the Unnamed’s whole canon, and the extra volumes besides, many times over. She had read the Physicians’ Desk Reference that was her mother’s constant companion. She had gotten her blood relatively late, not until her eleventh winter. The Mothers had come for her then, Mother Ursula, Mother Priya, and Mother Charlotte. They had taken her for three days to the red house. They had fed her red foods and told their stories of when they had gotten their blood, when they had chosen their Hives, and when they had borne their first living children.
Etta’s stomach and back had ached. She could barely eat even the delicacies that were offered to her. She listened to the Mothers’ stories and knew she never wanted any of that for herself.
They did not force her to decide. They put a necklace around her neck, a precious seashell brought from the south sea. She had walked into her own house and found Mother Ina sitting at the kitchen table.
“My living child,” she had said, rising from her old wooden chair.
Etta had been shocked to see her mother without her wooden baby belly; she wore it almost all the time. Her mother’s embrace was softer than usual, and Etta was closer to her body, closer to the place where she had been carried in her mother’s womb than she could remember ever having been.
“Mother,” she’d said softly. “I’ve decided—”
“Hush, now,” Ina said, sitting back down. She pushed a cup of raspberry-leaf tea toward Etta. The taste was bitter. Ina’s Hive kept honey in the house; she saw the face Etta made and brought her one of the short jars. As Etta stirred honey into the tea and began to drink, Ina spoke softly to her daughter.
“I have something for you, child. Before you say anything, I want you to have it. I want you to have what you want, even if it isn’t what I would choose. But I want you to go after it with both hands, whatever it is. And leave something good behind you in this life. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, Mother.”
There were three traditional gifts for a girl who would become a Midwife. One was a book. The books given to Midwives were precious, and many of them were shared. Ina’s Physicians’ Desk Reference had been swapped many times for Spiritual Midwifery and Birthing From Within.
Ina’s closest friends were Midwives, not Mothers. The Midwives could not or would not have children; there was a law to make sure that no woman would be both. The law was old; sooner or later everyone chose. Most chose to try to have a child, no matter the risk.
Other Mothers made Ina angry, with their broods of two or three living children. Despite six pregnancies, Mother Ina would only ever have one. Her book did not answer her questions about why her other children had died, or why she had not died with them. The books she borrowed did not explain why others could have so many and she only one. They didn’t hold the secret of why so many women had none at all, why so many women died with their first locked inside the casket of their body.
Mother Ina had seen two caesarean sections. One was disastrous, the other a miracle. Both were performed on dead women.
Ina knew there were worse things than dying that way.
Ina’s final pregnancy, when she had seen nearly forty summers, brought her Etta, her one living child. It had almost bled her to death and cost her her womb, cut from her by their best Midwife and taking her weeks to recover. When Ina had awakened, weak and lost, to find Dana nursing a newborn beside her, she had assumed Dana was there to tell her that her own baby had died.
Instead, Dana had handed the rosy bundle over to her, saying she was glad to have enough milk to spare.
Ina could barely raise her arms to take the child. She didn’t dare believe the baby was real, really there, really hers.
Eventually, she would nurse the child herself. Eventually, she would understand that her training to be a Midwife was at its end. Eventually, she would name the baby Etta in a ceremony attended by all the Mothers in Nowhere, all the people Ina had learned to ignore.
Mother Ina sat beside her living daughter, a package wrapped in soft deerskin in her hands.
“My living daughter, life doesn’t ever hold what you wish it would. But it holds things you can’t even dream of yet, because you haven’t seen them. Do you understand me?”
Etta nodded, her hair in braids with bone beads at their ends that clicked when she moved.
“The Unnamed saw the whole world change, but it did not stop her from chasing after what she wanted to have.”
She wanted to find her lover, Jack, Etta had thought with the thrill she always felt in this story. She wanted to save women from slavers and bring them good drugs. She wanted to be a hero.
Etta nodded at her mother.
Ina’s hands unwrapped the package and she pushed the object toward Etta, who at first could only see the glints of candlelight that
flicked across the smooth surface.
When it was before her, Etta saw that it was a revolver. A gun, a gift from the old world. She stared at it but did not touch.
“Where . . . ?”
Ina settled back in the chair, rubbing her neck where her wooden baby belly made her sore every day.
“It belonged to Bailey, the Midwife who brought you. She got it from Judith, who got it from Emily, the one who the Law is named for. Emily got it from Shayla. Shayla was willed it when Doc Jane died. Doc Jane was what they called—”
“The Unnamed,” Etta breathed.
“Yes.” Ina looked her daughter in the eyes. “This gun came across the world with her. It saved her. It’s been owned by Mothers and Midwives both. Whatever you choose, it now belongs to you. It’s been cleaned and oiled for almost a century, but not fired. The bullets were gone before even Shayla received it. But there are bullets in this world, and you will find them.”
Eyes gleaming, Etta reached out and touched the cold steel of the cylinder. Ina put her hand on top of her daughter’s.
“This is you,” she said softly. Their eyes met again and Etta, tired and emotional from her first blood, could see nothing there but her mother’s love. There was no control there, no guile. Just her mother’s hand on hers and the words she would never forget. “This gun is blank and empty, and you can fill the cylinder with anything at all. You can pack it with dirt or fill it with bullets. You can change the world forever, depending on where you point it. You can leave behind terror or justice. You can be as important as the Unnamed, or as lost as any of the men she put down with it. You hear?”
Etta swallowed. “I hear.” She took a breath and held it. “I’m going to be a raider.”
The moment broke like a dropped clay pot. Ina sat back against her chair, sagging. “Child, you don’t know what you’re going to be.”
Etta had wrapped up the revolver, sure that her mother was wrong.
The gun and the book. The tools of the Unnamed. Eddy was better with one than the other.
Flora was shaking her head. Eddy had his hand on his own book.
“No,” Flora said. “Most of the people in Jeff City can’t read. I learned before I came there.”
