“You mustn’t…”
“Perhaps your kind was right to draw away from us and teach us to worship you.”
“No, Arvil. What’s true for these men and women isn’t true for us.”
I lay down next to her. She was silent for a long time, and then her hand touched my hair, brushing it back from my face. “Whatever you felt, you didn’t act on it. I couldn’t have fought you, but you held back. There’s evil enough in all of us—what matters is whether or not we act on it.” She paused. “You’re still my friend, aren’t you?”
“You shame me by asking. You’re more than my friend.”
“I need your friendship here. My child will need you. I fear what will happen even if I live through this birth. I’ll have to have another child, and then another—the others will expect it.”
“No,” I said. “I can’t let you suffer this again.”
“If we don’t have another child, the men will wonder why. They’ll begin to think that one of them might produce a healthy child with me. I might be forced to lie with one of them.”
“Never,” I muttered. “We’ll have to leave this place.”
“How? With a baby? Do you think they’d let us leave now?” She nestled at my side. “Arvil, I’m afraid to stay here, and yet the women have been kind to me. They have some hope even if it is an illusion. It would be hard just to abandon them although I can do little for them.”
Her lips touched my cheek. Her hands caressed me; she was seeking my touch. My longing swelled inside me.
“Isn’t it better this way,” she whispered, “having me want you?”
Her body was new, her breasts full, her belly large against me. I lay on my side as I drew her toward me.
Hyacinth’s time came a few days later.
As she stood next to Gull, holding the food she was to serve him, she suddenly doubled over. The meat and the stone platter fell from her hands. Gull lifted his hand as if to strike her, then let his arm fall.
“It is her time,” Cress said without asking if she could speak. The other women got up and led Hyacinth to their hut. Cress turned toward Birana. “You had better come too. We may have need of you.”
Birana’s hands trembled as she stood. I was about to follow when Tern motioned to me. “This is not our business,” he muttered.
“I have learned of healing. I should learn of this as well.”
He shook his head. “This is not something for a man to see.”
We finished our food and cleared the space around the fire ourselves. From time to time, Hyacinth moaned or let out a cry. The men made no sign that they heard this, but each of her cries made me tense with fear.
As I lay in the men’s hut that night, her cries grew louder until they resounded through the camp, and I shuddered at the pain she must be enduring. Tern and Pelican, on their own mats, breathed evenly as they slept on. Even Gull, who had brought this upon Hyacinth, slept soundly. I could not sleep, could not understand how the men could sleep.
Birana would suffer in the same way.
I slipped silently from the hut. Firelight flickered in the entrance to the women’s dwelling. Hyacinth was screaming almost without pause. I crept toward the light and peered inside.
The screams suddenly died. Hyacinth panted rhythmically, reminding me of the moans Birana sometimes made when I joined with her. The women crouched around Hyacinth, and then Cress and Violet took hold of her arms as she squatted. Her body shone with sweat. A tiny head bright with blood was emerging between her legs.
I gasped with fright. Willow turned. “Get away.” She jumped up and pushed me from the entrance. “This isn’t a sight for you.”
I backed into the clearing and sat down by the banked fire. I felt terror, but mingled with the terror was awe of what I had seen.
I had viewed women as those who ruled Earth and men as beings who were separated from the ways of other creatures by our ancient punishment. But in the enclaves, women still bore their young as Hyacinth did, whatever magic they used to ease it, and men still gave their seed without knowing that they did. Now I saw how linked to Earth we all were, how Earth’s ways still ruled us.
I had found something new to worship in place of the faith I had lost—life itself, the ability of women to bear their young, the power of men to make young ones with their seed. I thought of how the seed of another man and woman lived in me and of how part of me might live on in the child Birana carried. Tal lived inside me still. This was the destination of our souls—to live on in those that followed us on Earth, not in the Lady’s realm in the next world.
Someone was near me. I looked up at Birana’s shadowed face. “It’s over,” she said. “Hyacinth is well.”
“And her child?”
She lowered her eyes. “The child is a girl. She lives, but she’s weak. Cress said that she was born too soon.”
I took her hand. “And when your time comes?”
“Don’t fear too much. The women have more knowledge of these matters than I thought—they know how to help with the breathing, that their hands and the knife they use to cut the cord must be clean, other things. Perhaps the ancestor who was expelled long ago was able to pass on some knowledge to them.”
“She cried out so much…”
“Her labor was hard, but it was over quickly. It may not be so hard for me.”
I stood up. “I must tell the men. Gull will want to know.”
“Let them sleep. It’ll be morning before long. They’ll celebrate, and for once Gull will wait upon Hyacinth for a day. You’d better rest now.”
I held her for a moment before returning to the hut.
We feasted the next day. The men passed by the women’s dwelling and peered in at Hyacinth and her child as they sang. I could not keep from gazing often at the mother and child and watching as the young one sucked at Hyacinth’s breast. That was how, I learned, such a child had to be fed, and I wondered at how a woman could give not only life but nourishment as well.
I had not expected the child to be so small. Once a woman had held me in that way, had fed me. All those memories had been taken from me, and even the dreams I had once had of such a time had faded. Now they returned to me when I slept, and I heard the voice of the one who had borne me sing to me again.
The men were joyous, the women more somber. By the looks that passed between the women, I knew that they feared for the child. The camp’s celebration was short-lived. Three days after her birth, the child breathed her last.
Hyacinth stumbled from her dwelling and wailed; Gull answered her wail with his own. They stood together, the woman weeping while Gull tore at his hair and beard. “My seed is cursed,” he cried. “First Lily, and now this. What have I done?” He threw himself on the ground and pounded with his fists until Tern and Pelican led him away.
Cress, surrounded by the other women, carried the small body out of the camp. I followed with the men. We walked until we came to the hill overlooking the sea, then made our way down to the shore. There, the weeping women lay the child on the sand. Gulls shrieked as they circled overhead, adding their cries to ours.
We waited until the waves reached the body. As the child disappeared into the sea, Hyacinth screamed while Violet held her. Birana’s hand was over her belly as she glanced at me.
The men averted their eyes, but not before I had seen the fear of death in them—not fear of the death of one, but the fear that their entire band might die out soon.
Tern moved closer to me as the women left the beach. “It seems,” he murmured, “that our hopes now lie with your child.”
BIRANA
Often I thought of my mother and how she had hoped for a refuge. She had, I supposed, imagined a place where women lived in a settlement not unlike a primitive city, where they practiced what arts they could and ruled over the male servants they might need to survive. My time with Arvil had given me another image of a possible refuge, a place where men and women might have learned to love, to live as comrades
.
I now saw how foolish such hopes had been. A settlement large enough to be viable, to avoid inbreeding, to be able to move from a life of hunting and gathering to farming, would grow too large to escape the notice of roaming bands of men and, eventually, the attention of the cities. Only small bands were possible, groups that might cling precariously to life for a few generations, until they grew too weak and too few in numbers to survive.
I had hoped to find companions, women who had retained some knowledge of the cities and their accomplishments, with whom I could talk of what I had read and learned; I had imagined men who might open their minds to this knowledge. But such ideas were useless in this world, where the only knowledge that mattered was of which plants to gather and which animals to hunt and how to make tools and shelters.
These women had lost the knowledge of their ancestors, and the cities were only fabled places of magic to them. The demands of their children, the fact that the women had to bear them and nurse them and look out for them when they were small, forced them to depend on the men. The men in turn exacted their price for this dependence.
Violet, the oldest of the women, did not see things this way. She took pride in the women’s endurance, in those children they had been able to bear, in their ability to do their work and tend to the men’s needs. Although the men might glory in their greater strength, the women, among themselves, mocked this pose while dreaming of the day the cities would reach out to them and raise them up. They lived among men, and yet in some ways their lives were as separate from the men’s as they might have been in a city, for they hid many of their thoughts and allowed the men to believe what they wished.
When I first arrived in the camp, they waited until the men were asleep and then came to me with questions. If I had been sent out of a city, did that mean that others would follow me? Was this a sign? I had answered them vaguely, saying that the Lady had hidden Her purpose from me, for although I did not want to encourage false hopes, I could not bear to dash them either. They believed that the Lady would send others to them—if not this season, then the next; if not during their own lives, then during the lives of those who followed them. They believed that their souls would be reunited with the Lady at death, but that the men might be punished for scorning the Goddess.
Other questions, asked of me in secret when we dug for roots together or sat around the hearth at night, were usually about life in the cities. The women did not seek knowledge, but tales of a place where food appeared whenever it was wanted, or where women rode through the air in ships, or where it was always warm and snow never fell. They marveled at my compass, a sign of the city’s magic, but grew distracted when I tried to explain magnetism to them. The technology that had made the cities possible—the energy that powered them, the discoveries in physics that had produced our shields, the chips and circuits that allowed the cyberminds to mimic human thought—was of no interest to them. The fact that the cities had once dreamed of building upon their scientific knowledge, or of exploring the cosmos, but now clung only to what they had, was not something these women could understand. Only Lily seemed interested in my talk of the stars above and what lay beyond the earth, but the demands of her life, I knew, would dull her curiosity in time.
The women listened patiently when I encouraged them to change their conduct toward the men but scorned such an idea. “Let them believe in their strength,” Violet said. “It keeps them content and holds back their anger, and we know the truth of it anyway.”
“You should not be so easy in Arvil’s presence,” Hyacinth advised me. “It will only enrage him, and then he may hunt for you no longer, or give you no more children. He may stop summoning you and find one who is more yielding.”
“Better to act as they believe us to be,” Willow would murmur. “A time will come when we’re raised above them and will have magic that can bend them to our will.”
Only Cress did not offer such advice to me. “Arvil is not like other men,” she would mutter, “and Birana has some of the Lady’s magic in her still. Let them act as they wish as long as they do not offend the men. Perhaps if their child is a healthy one, our men will note that and treat us as Birana is treated.”
The air was often damp and heavy, making the days seem colder than they were. The wind from the sea, so fresh and soothing in the summer, was now cold and often fierce. The band abandoned the central fireplace for fires inside the huts, as they had before whenever it rained. Instead of serving the men and then eating with them, we carried food to their hut before eating by ourselves in our dwelling. We had stored food but could not rest; wood was collected, mint, nuts, and other plants were gathered, fish were taken from the river. The men hunted whenever the weather broke.
I soon thought of little except my child. I moved through the camp as though my surroundings were only part of a dream, doing my work automatically until I could rest. I told few tales of the city and passively followed the commands of the men instead of bridling at their words. Only the child was real; even my body and brain were no more than a host to serve it. I did not want to think of what might happen after it was born, how it would live, how we might escape this place.
Cress fed me green plants, fish, and potions made with finely ground shells and bone, assuring me that these would aid my child and keep me strong as well. Arvil practiced his healing with the men, bandaging a wound on Skua’s leg so that it did not fester, draining an abscess in Tern’s mouth and removing a rotting tooth. It seemed that we might pass through the winter without illness or misfortune.
The first light snowfall came and a colder wind with it. Violet began to cough, then to rasp when she breathed. Two mornings after the snow fell, she was unable to rise from her mat. I touched her fevered face, then ran to fetch Arvil. He covered her with hides, brewed potions, wiped her brow. Violet babbled wildly as her fever raged, twisting and turning as she tried to throw the hides from her body. Arvil sat with her during the day and Cress tended her at night.
Violet struggled against her illness for three days, and then her body grew quiet as her breathing became more labored. Lily sat in one corner, trembling as Hyacinth held her. Arvil turned his head toward me.
“Will she live?” I asked in the lake language.
“No,” he replied. “Her chest fills. She cannot breathe. The fever has burned away her strength.”
Violet opened her yellowish eyes. “Do not fear,” I said. “You will be with the Lady. Your soul will struggle no more.” It did not matter what I said as long as she was comforted.
“My son,” she whispered.
“I will get him.” I hurried from the hut. Skua, who had given Violet her son, was standing by the men’s dwelling. He had not come to see her, had refused to believe she might die.
“Skua!” I cried out, forgetting the phrases the women used when addressing the men. “Fetch Egret. Violet would see her son now, before…”
The boy came out of the hut as Skua drew himself up. “Do not order me about, Birana.”
“I beg you and the boy to come now.”
He strode toward me, the boy at his heels. “Be gentle with her,” I said more softly.
“Do not tell me what to do.”
“Forgive me, brave spirit,” I said harshly. “These may be Violet’s last moments and if you and Egret won’t make them easier for her, then leave us so that I can.”
“She cannot die. Arvil will heal her.”
“Arvil has done all he can.”
Skua groaned, pushed me aside, and entered the hut. I waited outside until Egret’s wail told me that his mother was gone.
We carried Violet’s body to the shore and shivered on the snowy beach as her body drifted into the sea. The band sorrowed, but Violet had been old by their standards. She had given birth to no children for some time, had been weaker that year; if she had lived, she might have become just a burden. The band, grieved as they were, could accept her death.
Only a few days later, another illness
came to the camp, one which struck all three of the children. They burned with fever and vomited while their bowels ran. The women refused to let me near them, fearing for me and my child.
Arvil carried the children to the small hut. There, he and Cress tended them, doing what they could. Egret and Pelican survived. Lily, unable to recover, died.
The men had paid little attention to the girl. Even Willow and Violet had sometimes mocked her tremors and her lisping speech. Yet Lily’s death affected the band more deeply and drew more sobs from them than Violet’s had. Lily, whatever her afflictions, had been one who would have grown into a woman and given new life to the band.
Once again we bore a body to the beach and laid it at the edge of the gray, wintry sea. The women tore at their hair and wept while the men mourned silently. As the waves carried Lily off, I felt the eyes of the band on me. Violet was gone, Willow was still without a child, Cress would probably bear no more children, and Hyacinth seemed doomed to have children who could not live. I sensed them all clinging to life through me.
I left the camp to gather wood. A snowstorm had blown through the camp two days before, forcing us to retreat to our dwellings; from the women’s hut, I was barely able to see the men’s house through the swirling flakes.
The snow now lay in drifts along the riverbank, in mounds under the trees and along the path leading up from the camp, covering what wood was on the ground. I searched for twigs that had been blown into shrubs and dead branches that rested in the lower limbs of trees; my belly made it impossible for me to stoop very low. I could no longer recall what it was like to move freely, to bend, sit, and stand without the burden of my child.
In the city, I would have been anticipating the child’s birth. I would have spent time with other pregnant women, would have prepared a room for the child, heard reassuring comments from women about their own pregnancies and deliveries. A physician would have tended me; I would have known what my child was to be. I wondered what I would bear, whether the baby would die, whether I would live. I wanted the birth to be over and yet dreaded it.
The Shore of Women Page 51
