by Meg Elison
I like them already.
Eddy shook his head. “I take no trade in women or girls,” he said.
He reached into his pack and brought out the wooden box. “I was just curious because some of the drugs I carry are made for women.”
A black-haired man rose. “I’m a doctor, and I assist in childbirth. I can talk with you about them.”
A man Midwife. Eddy pursed his lips.
“Alright, then. What do you have need of?”
The manwife spoke again. “Do you have deep sleep for childbirth? I’ve heard stories about how much it helps.”
Eddy stared at him. “How can a sleeping woman give birth?”
Manwife shrugged. “The stories say that the woman can sleep while her body does the work. There’s less pain and it’s much quieter.”
What is the difference between the woman and her body? How do they come apart?
“Could you plow a field in your sleep? Or bake bread?” Eddy looked around at them, bewildered. “Why would you want to?”
No one spoke.
“I don’t have that,” Eddy said, scowling. “I have dried red-raspberry leaf, to strengthen the womb. I have powerful painkillers and toothache remedy.” He waited.
The men conferred openly and came to a decision to ask for two painkillers and cannabis.
“Oil, leaf, or tincture?”
James smiled broadly. “Leaf. Smoke with us, brother.”
Several of them produced pipes made from corncob, and Eddy handed over a generous-sized wool bag.
The haze hung over them as the men settled and slumped in their seats. Eddy looked them over, deciding they had smoked before, but not often. The manwife had disappeared.
I can get the truth of it now, if I’m gentle.
“I’ve got a girl back home. Alice. She grows all kinds of plants and refines them. Like this.” He held the pipe at arm’s length, as if considering it. James reached for it, nodding.
“We grow a lot of food here,” he said before taking a long pull on the pipe. “But none of us has training to make good drugs.”
“Sure, sure,” Eddy said. “Alice could travel and teach people. A lot of the people I meet on the road don’t know a drug maker. Maybe she could teach one of you.”
Junior scoffed a little. “Not one of us. One of the ladies, maybe.”
Eddy was patiently silent. He knew better than to jump on it first.
“Yeah,” said a ginger-haired man. “Ladies can make drugs.”
There was some low laughter. Eddy tracked it as it circled him.
“Alice is pretty great,” he said, with just the right edge of stubbornness. “Her mother did it before her, taught her.”
“Was your father a traveler?” Junior was red eyed, already far gone.
“Oh, I didn’t know him.”
“That’s right, you said that.”
“Is your father teaching you a trade?”
James smiled at his son. “Well, we’re all farmers, one way or the other. But I learned to butcher pretty well from my father, and I’ve been teaching James Junior.”
Eddy nodded. “That’s a fine trade. Do you hunt, as well?”
Junior scoffed. “Hunting is women’s work.”
The low ripple of laughs passed through the men again.
“What, do you hunt?” Junior looked as incredulous as a thoroughly stoned teenager can.
Eddy shrugged. “I hunt for myself when I’m out on the road. I have no woman to hunt for me.”
“Yeah, but at home? Do men hunt for themselves where you’re from?”
“Sure, anyone can hunt. Why should it be women’s work?”
Junior shrugged. “Women are naturally more patient. They can sit and wait for hours, or stalk a wounded animal. I’d just lose interest and give up, like any man.”
“I see.”
A little silence passed.
“So who does the farming?”
James answered this time. “Farming is men’s work. Planting seeds, just like making children.” He spoke simply and directly, as if Eddy might be too slow to understand.
“Of course.” Eddy nodded. “Do you keep any animals? Chickens for eggs, or goats for milk? Cows?”
“Sure we do, brother. Of course we do.”
“Who cares for them?”
“The women, naturally. They have that nurturing instinct.”
Maybe that’s where all the women are, he thought. Out doing most of the work.
The ginger-haired man produced cups and dice and struck up a game. Eddy watched in silence.
The men began to drift off as soon as full dark fell. James Jr. offered to show Eddy to a bed. Eddy accepted gratefully, lifting his pack.
“So, do you live with your father?” Eddy glanced around while he asked, looking nonchalant.
Junior shook his head, a black shape against the dying light. “I lived with him when I first became a man, but I moved into a bigger dorm later. I wanted to read at night, and he’s in an all-dark.”
Eddy didn’t quite understand until they entered the long log house where Junior slept. Rows of beds lined both sides of the room, neatly lined up. Young men were in about half of the low beds, each with its own deep fluff of down-filled pad and intricately sewn quilts. Eddy had to fight his knees from buckling at the sight of such luxurious goods. Quilts and down mattresses were costly projects; someone had to devote weeks or moons of work to even one.
Warm yellow light glowed from tallow candles all around the room. Many of the young men were sewing, but a few were reading from battered old books. Eddy looked closely, seeing that the men’s hands were occupied with everything from basic mending to very fine embroidery.
Junior put his hands on the foot of an empty bed. “You can have this one. I made it for my brother, Josh, but he’ll be a boy for two more years.”
“You made this?” Eddy stepped forward and sank both hands into the depth of the bedding. He wanted to sink into that bed and sleep for a year.
“Yeah, I collect feathers from butchered birds and clean them up. The real work was in the quilt. I’m not much for building or designing, the way that some brothers can just add things up in their heads. But the geometry of quilts makes good sense to me. So the quilt took me one whole winter, but it turned out well.”
Eddy looked at the pattern of interlocked triangles in green and blue and brown.
“It’s fine work.” His eyes strayed back to the hands around the room, stitching in rhythm. His eyes burned with fatigue and drug. “I thank you. I’d like to sleep now, if it’s alright.”
“Sure, sure. You can light your own candle, if you want to read.”
I should write, he thought as he slid off his pack. Instead, he got out of his boots and into bed, fully clothed. He tied a long, loose piece of string to his wrist and attached the other end to his bag, which he slid beneath the bed.
He was sorely sorry that he could not sleep in this deliciously clean, pillowy bed freshly bathed and naked. The regret lasted less than a minute, however, and he fell into a deep, untroubled sleep.
What woke Eddy was the near-soundless stirring of the men around him at first light. Some had risen and were getting their boots on. Others were sitting up in bed, taking a little time to get more sewing in. At least two, Eddy realized, were masturbating in a businesslike manner, stroking beneath their bedclothes, staring at nothing in particular. He averted his eyes from this, focusing on the reddish light of dawn spilling through the door.
After a few minutes, most of the men had their boots on and were walking out the door. Eddy shouldered his pack and caught up with them. He expected to follow them to breakfast and be on his way.
Instead, he followed the almost entirely wordless herd of men to the edge of the forest on the east side of their town. All of them came near the woods and stopped, staring and waiting.
Eddy didn’t speak but glanced around, watching their faces. The men were rapt, anticipating something without fear. They sto
od in preternatural stillness. The morning was windless and the birds had not yet woken.
Out of the darkness between the trees, a figure in a long, hooded cloak emerged. The men around Eddy tensed up visibly. The air surrounding them seemed to thicken.
The figure strode forth, approaching the edge of the trees. It didn’t leave the forest. Between it and the men there was left a moat of brown pine needles—a boundary. Eddy stared.
White hands appeared from under the dark cloak, rising to push back the hood. The face of a young woman appeared, and Eddy was pierced with longing. He realized he had made a small sound when she appeared, only because the men around her had moaned aloud.
The woman was startlingly beautiful, black eyes like inky brushstrokes, slashing upward in her luminous skin. Her mouth had been stained, Eddy could tell, with berries or blood. She was black, white, and red; she glowed and grinned like a wolf in the dim light.
She held her slender hand before her, three fingers extended.
Her low, musical voice rippled out to them. “Gregory Ivansson. John Johnson. Ben Travisson.”
The three men whose names were called fairly bolted toward her. She stayed them with the raising of her other hand. When they stood still, she reached into her cloak and produced three thick, shining, blue-black braids of her own hair. She handed one to each of the men and began to walk, leading them behind.
When they were gone back into the shadows, the other men began to mutter and groan. Slowly, they turned back toward town. Eddy craned his neck and filtered through the crowd, watching for Junior.
He spotted the younger man and hung back to walk with him.
“What was that?”
“The summoning.”
They walked a little slower, letting the others pass them.
“What’s the summoning?”
Junior shrugged, dejected. “The women send a summoner to choose men to mate with. They go and mate for three days, then they send them back with fresh kills. Those lucky fucks.”
“How do they choose the men? What makes a man get chosen?”
“They choose a brother who’s proven to produce children. When you first get called, you get three tries. If by the third try you’ve failed, or if the woman dies in childbirth, you never get called again.”
“Have you been called before?”
“No,” Junior said bitterly. “I’ve been a man for four years. Not once.”
About seventy men here.
“How many women?”
Junior shrugged. “I don’t know. I only lived with Marla and her house, and there were six there. I know there are others, but the boys are kept apart.”
When they reached town, cornmeal mush was being served for breakfast. Eddy salted his and traded toothache remedy for a little more food for the road. The men were chastened since last night. There were no songs or dice games this morning, and precious little conversation. More than once, Eddy heard the three men’s names uttered like curses. Their manner made him nervous.
He stood to leave, pack on his back. “Thank you, men and brothers, for your hospitality. I hope I may pass this way again.”
Gruffly, with strained politeness, they paid their respects in waves and pats on the back. Eddy was glad to be on his way. He headed back out to the road from whence he had come before circling around to cut through the woods where the woman with the three braids had disappeared.
CHAPTER 11
The Book of Eddy
Summer
Manhattan isn’t one town, it’s two. Like me. So I’m going to change.
He didn’t think about it. He didn’t feel about it. He did it as a series of mechanical processes, there in the deep woods.
Binding off, shirt open at the neck. Washed face and throat, washed hands. The face in the still puddle beside the stream did not seem to change. Look deeply for a moment too long. Rummage deep in the bag. No skirt, but there never was one in there, why would there be? Touch short hair, nothing to be done. Try to arrange the eyes to hold them open wider, try to soften the mouth.
Will it be known?
The Book of Etta
Approaching the city of women. If they’re hunters, they’ll be on better guard than their men.
She couldn’t make herself wait. She walked, listening carefully, straight along the path that had clearly been trod recently. Etta wasn’t an expert tracker, but three men dragged along behind symbolic braids weren’t stealthy, either. She followed footprints in the soft earth and the mashed-down thorny brambles that proliferated everywhere in this wet wood.
Through the trees, she spotted the wide, smooth side of a building made of wattle and daub.
Mud houses. No log cabins on this side.
Women’s work.
If I see those three boys, I’m sunk. Maybe they’re kept real busy.
She crossed her hands and crossed the line into Womanhattan.
Three girls were weeding in a bean patch when she came upon them. They looked up, shielding their eyes. Most of them worked topless, their hair falling in long braids. The palest of them wore white cotton shirts that covered them up, but even the freckled ones braved the sun.
“Good women?” She spoke as girlishly as she could, turning up her sentence at the end, trying to be very clear. She straightened her spine a little.
Don’t hide them. Not here.
The women blinked at her.
“Good women, I am a traveler. Just looking to trade. Do you have a marketplace?”
One of them took her hand away from her eyes and pointed west. Etta nodded and smiled.
“Thank you! Good day to you.”
None of them answered her.
She passed other women as she walked. Many would not look at her, and not one spoke to her. Many wore cloaks, like the woman in the woods had done. She wondered why they would bother with that, in this heat. The stickiest part of the year was on them now. Etta knew that back home, the best fruits would have just started to come in and Alice would be bothered every few hours for something that could keep bugs away.
When she thought of Alice, a set of dull claws raked inside her ribs. An echo followed when she thought of Flora, and she shut it down before Ina’s face could appear to her.
Etta came to a place where two paths crossed in front of a house that had the unmistakable stink of a brewery. She stood a moment, considering.
A tall woman approached her, and Etta shielded her eyes. This woman’s skin was ruddy brown, nearly as red as the deerskin vest she wore over her bare chest. Deer leggings covered her from the waist down, laced together at the sides. Her brown hair was braided double on her head, emphasizing her heart-shaped face.
“Hey, you!”
Etta smiled automatically. “Good woman! Good Mother? I am a traveler.”
The deer skinner stopped in her tracks and regarded Etta. She didn’t speak.
“I . . . I am looking for your marketplace, if your people would trade with me?”
“As I bleed. You are one of us!”
“One of you?”
The deer skinner stepped forward and gripped Etta’s upper arm.
Eight in, eight out. Where are you right now? What are you?
“I am Etta,” she said, trying to politely pull her arm away.
The tall woman let go, stepping back and looking Etta up and down.
“I am Kelda. Are there other women who travel the roads? Are you a tribe of women? Do you follow the herds?”
Etta laughed a little. “No, just me. I come from a place far south of here.”
Kelda was grinning, getting happier by the minute. “A city? A fair place?”
Etta shrugged. “Fair enough. A small city, with farms and a fort.”
“And there are other women there? More than you? Well, of course more than you, because they let you go! How many women?”
“I—I don’t know, a lot? Lots of women.”
Kelda looked joyous beyond reason. “Will you tell the sisters? You have to. O
h, we have to.”
“The sisters?”
“Follow me.” She was holding Etta’s arm again in a grip that hurt. Etta felt the terrible strength in the woman’s hand with alarm followed by envy. She looked at the woman’s biceps and the feeling intensified. This tall person could be anything she wanted.
She would never be small. She would never find herself trapped—
Where are you right now?
“Where is your city?” Kelda interrupted her train of thought, and Etta was grateful.
“Many days’ walk from here. Days and days to the south.”
Kelda shook her head. “Yes, but I could ride there, on a horse. It’s a few days from here?”
Etta blinked, thinking of a lie.
Do I need to lie here? What is this city of women going to do?
They pushed through the door of another earthen house, and Etta stumbled down a few stairs. The sunken room was cool and circular inside the square of the walls. Older women sat ringed around the room, working at small tasks. One pounded corn in a stone bowl, several knitted and sewed.
They looked up when the two women entered. Kelda’s voice was loud in the small space.
“Sisters! I have found a traveler who—”
As one, every woman in the circle raised a finger to her lips and trained her eyes on Kelda. Etta found it deeply unsettling.
Kelda sighed and trudged to the woman nearest her, dragging Etta along behind her.
Etta watched as Kelda’s hands flew through a series of gestures, landing on her own body several times. The old woman watched Kelda’s face with rheumy eyes. When her gaze darted to Etta, Etta smiled and ducked her head a little, as though speaking to one of the Mothers of Nowhere.
Kelda tapped her throat again and again.
She’s begging to talk.
The old woman sighed and made a gesture that signaled permission, even to someone who knew nothing of this language of gestures.
Kelda fetched a deep breath and fell heavily into a cross-legged position on the packed earth floor. After a moment and a few looks, Etta joined her.
They waited. The old woman finished a line of stitches in the garment she was mending patiently, without hurry. She set it aside before turning to face them.
