And I believed him. He believed himself. My mother knew better.
Maybe some day it will be possible for a boy to choose his life. Among your peoples a man’s body does not shape his fate, does it? Maybe some day that will be so here.
Our Castle, Hidjegga, had of course been keeping their eye on Ittu ever since he was born; once a year Mother would send them the doctor’s report on him, and when he was five Mother and her wives took him out there for the ceremony of Confirmation. Ittu had been embarrassed, disgusted, and flattered. He told me in secret, “There were all these old men that smelled funny and they made me take off my clothes and they had these measuring things and they measured my peepee! And they said it was very good. They said it was a good one. What happens when you descend?” It wasn’t the first question he had ever asked me that I couldn’t answer, and as usual I made up the answer. “Descend means you can have babies,” I said, which, in a way, wasn’t so far off the mark.
Some Castles, I am told, prepare boys of nine and ten for the Severance, woo them with visits from older boys, tickets to games, tours of the park and the buildings, so that they may be quite eager to go to the Castle when they turn eleven. But we “outyonders,” villagers of the edge of the desert, kept to the harsh old-fashioned ways. Aside from Confirmation, a boy had no contact at all with men until his eleventh birthday. On that day everybody he had ever known brought him to the Gate and gave him to the strangers with whom he would live the rest of his life. Men and women alike believed and still believe that this absolute severance makes the man.
Vev Ushiggi, who had borne a son and had a grandson, and had been mayor five or six times, and was held in great esteem even though she’d never had much money, heard Ittu say that he wouldn’t go to the damned Castle. She came next day to our motherhouse and asked to talk to him. He told me what she said. She didn’t do any wooing or sweetening. She told him that he was born to the service of his people and had one responsibility, to sire children when he got old enough; and one duty, to be a strong, brave man, stronger and braver than other men, so that women would choose him to sire their children. She said he had to live in the Castle because men could not live among women. At this, Ittu asked her, “Why can’t they?”
“You did?” I said, awed by his courage, for Vev Ushiggi was a formidable old woman.
“Yes. And she didn’t really answer. She took a long time. She looked at me and then she looked off somewhere and then she stared at me for a long time and then finally she said, ‘Because we would destroy them.’”
“But that’s crazy,” I said. “Men are our treasures. What did she say that for?”
Ittu, of course, didn’t know. But he thought hard about what she had said, and I think nothing she could have said would have so impressed him.
After discussion, the village elders and my mother and her wives decided that Ittu could go on practicing hornvaulting, because it really would be a useful skill for him in the Castle; but he could not herd cattle any longer, nor go with me when I did, nor join in any of the work children of the village did, nor their games. “You’ve done everything together with Po,” they told him, “but she should be doing things together with the other girls, and you should be doing things by yourself, the way men do.”
They were always very kind to Ittu, but they were stern with us girls; if they saw us even talking with Ittu they’d tell us to go on about our work, leave the boy alone. When we disobeyed—when Ittu and I sneaked off and met at Salt Springs to ride together, or just hid out in our old playplace down in the draw by the stream to talk—he got treated with cold silence to shame him, but I got punished. A day locked in the cellar of the old fiber-processing mill, which was what my village used for a jail; next time it was two days; and the third time they caught us alone together, they locked me in that cellar for ten days. A young woman called Fersk brought me food once a day and made sure I had enough water and wasn’t sick, but she didn’t speak; that’s how they always used to punish people in the villages. I could hear the other children going by up on the street in the evening. It would get dark at last and I could sleep. All day I had nothing to do, no work, nothing to think about except the scorn and contempt they held me in for betraying their trust, and the injustice of my getting punished when Ittu didn’t.
When I came out, I felt different. I felt like something had closed up inside me while I was closed up in that cellar.
When we ate at the motherhouse they made sure Ittu and I didn’t sit near each other. For a while we didn’t even talk to each other. I went back to school and work. I didn’t know what Ittu was doing all day. I didn’t think about it. It was only fifty days to his birthday.
One night I got into bed and found a note under my clay pillow: in the draw to-nt. Ittu never could spell; what writing he knew I had taught him in secret. I was frightened and angry, but I waited an hour till everybody was asleep, and got up and crept outside into the windy, starry night, and ran to the draw. It was late in the dry season and the stream was barely running. Ittu was there, hunched up with his arms round his knees, a little lump of shadow on the pale, cracked clay at the waterside.
The first thing I said was, “You want to get me locked up again? They said next time it would be thirty days!”
“They’re going to lock me up for fifty years,” Ittu said, not looking at me.
“What am I supposed to do about it? It’s the way it has to be! You’re a man. You have to do what men do. They won’t lock you up, anyway, you get to play games and come to town to do service and all that. You don’t even know what being locked up is!”
“I want to go to Seradda,” Ittu said, talking very fast, his eyes shining as he looked up at me. “We could take the riding cows to the bus station in Redang, I saved my money, I have twenty-three coppers, we could take the bus to Seradda. The cows would come back home if we turned them loose.”
“What do you think you’d do in Seradda?” I asked, disdainful but curious. Nobody from our village had ever been to the capital.
“The Ekkamen people are there,” he said.
“The Ekumen,” I corrected him. “So what?”
“They could take me away,” Ittu said.
I felt very strange when he said that. I was still angry and still disdainful but a sorrow was rising in me like dark water. “Why would they do that? What would they talk to some little boy for? How would you find them? Twenty-three coppers isn’t enough anyway. Seradda’s way far off. That’s a really stupid idea. You can’t do that.”
“I thought you’d come with me,” Ittu said. His voice was softer, but didn’t shake.
“I wouldn’t do a stupid think like that,” I said furiously.
“All right,” he said. “But you won’t tell. Will you?”
“No, I won’t tell!” I said. “But you can’t run away, Ittu. You can’t. It would be—it would be dishonorable.”
This time when he answered his voice shook. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t care about honor. I want to be free!”
We were both in tears. I sat down by him and we leaned together the way we used to, and cried a while; not long; we weren’t used to crying.
“You can’t do it,” I whispered to him. “It won’t work, Ittu.”
He nodded, accepting my wisdom.
“It won’t be so bad at the Castle,” I said.
After a minute he drew away from me very slightly.
“We’ll see each other,” I said.
He said only, “When?”
“At games. I can watch you. I bet you’ll be the best rider and horn-vaulter there. I bet you win all the prizes and get to be a Champion.”
He nodded, dutiful. He knew and I knew that I had betrayed our love and our birthright of justice. He knew he had no hope.
That was the last time we talked together alone, and almost the last time we talked together.
Ittu ran away about ten days after that, taking the riding cow and heading for Redang; they tracked him
easily and had him back in the village before nightfall. I don’t know if he thought I had told them where he would be going. I was so ashamed of not having gone with him that I could not look at him. I kept away from him; they didn’t have to keep me away any more. He made no effort to speak to me.
I was beginning my puberty, and my first blood was the night before Ittu’s birthday. Menstruating women are not allowed to come near the Gates at conservative Castles like ours, so when Ittu was made a man I stood far back among a few other girls and women, and could not see much of the ceremony. I stood silent while they sang, and looked down at the dirt and my new sandals and my feet in the sandals, and felt the ache and tug of my womb and the secret movement of the blood, and grieved. I knew even then that this grief would be with me all my life.
Ittu went in and the Gates closed.
He became a Young Champion Hornvaulter, and for two years, when he was eighteen and nineteen, came a few times to service in our village, but I never saw him. One of my friends fucked with him and started to tell me about it, how nice he was, thinking I’d like to hear, but I shut her up and walked away in a blind rage which neither of us understood.
He was traded away to a castle on the east coast when he was twenty. When my daughter was born I wrote him, and several times after that, but he never answered my letters.
I don’t know what I’ve told you about my life and my world. I don’t know if it’s what I want you to know. It is what I had to tell.
* * *
The following is a short story written in 93/1586 by a popular writer of the city of Adr, Sem Gridji. The classic literature of Seggri was the narrative poem and the drama. Classical poems and plays were written collaboratively, in the original version and also by re-writers of subsequent generations, usually anonymous. Small value was placed on preserving a ‘true’ text, since the work was seen as an ongoing process. Probably under Ekumenical influence, individual writers in the late sixteenth century began writing short prose narratives, historical and fictional. The genre became popular, particularly in the cities, though it never obtained the immense audience of the great classical epics and plays. Literally everyone knew the plots and many quotations from the epics and plays, from books and holo, and almost every adult woman had seen or participated in a staged performance of several of them. They were one of the principal unifying influences of the Seggrian monoculture. The prose narrative, read in silence, served rather as a device by which the culture might question itself, and a tool for individual moral self-examination. Conservative Seggrian women disapproved of the genre as antagonistic to the intensely cooperative, collaborative structure of their society. Fiction was not included in the curriculum of the literature departments of the colleges, and was often dismissed contemptuously—“fiction is for men.”
Sem Gridji published three books of stories. Her bare, blunt style is characteristic of the Seggrian short story.
Love Out of Place by Sem Gridji
Azak grew up in a motherhouse in the Downriver Quarter, near the textile mills. She was a bright girl, and her family and neighborhood were proud to gather the money to send her to college. She came back to the city as a starting manager at one of the mills. Azak worked well with other people; she prospered. She had a clear idea of what she wanted to do in the next few years: to find two or three partners with whom to found a daughter-house and a business.
A beautiful woman in the prime of youth, Azak took great pleasure in sex, especially liking intercourse with men. Though she saved money for her plan of founding a business, she also spent a good deal at the fuckery, going there often, sometimes hiring two men at once. She liked to see how they incited each other to prowess beyond what they would have achieved alone, and shamed each other when they failed. She found a flaccid penis very disgusting, and did not hesitate to send away a man who could not penetrate her three or four times an evening.
The Castle of her district bought a Young Champion at the Southeast Castles Dance Tournament, and soon sent him to the fuckery. Having seen him dance in the finals on the holovision and been captivated by his flowing, graceful style and his beauty, Azak was eager to have him service her. His price was twice that of any other man there, but she did not hesitate to pay it. She found him handsome and amiable, eager and gentle, skilful and compliant. In their first evening they came to orgasm together five times. When she left she gave him a large tip. Within the week she was back, asking for Toddra. The pleasure he gave her was exquisite, and soon she was quite obsessed with him.
“I wish I had you all to myself,” she said to him one night as they lay still conjoined, langorous and fulfilled.
“That is my heart’s desire,” he said. “I wish I were your servant. None of the other women that come here arouse me. I don’t want them. I want only you.”
She wondered if he was telling the truth. The next time she came, she inquired casually of the manager if Toddra were as popular as they had hoped. “No,” the manager said. “Everybody else reports that he takes a lot of arousing, and is sullen and careless towards them.”
“How strange,” Azak said.
“Not at all,” said the manager. “He’s in love with you.”
“A man in love with a woman?” Azak said, and laughed.
“It happens all too often,” the manager said.
“I thought only women fell in love,” said Azak.
“Women fall in love with a man, sometimes, and that’s bad too,” said the manager. “May I warn you, Azak? Love should be between women. It’s out of place here. It can never come to any good end. I hate to lose the money, but I wish you’d fuck with some of the other men and not always ask for Toddra. You’re encouraging him, you see, in something that does harm to him.”
“But he and you are making lots of money from me!” said Azak, still taking it as a joke.
“He’d make more from other women if he wasn’t in love with you,” said the manager. To Azak that seemed a weak argument against the pleasure she had in Toddra, and she said, “Well, he can fuck them all when I’ve done with him, but for now, I want him.”
After their intercourse that evening, she said to Toddra, “The manager here says you’re in love with me.”
“I told you I was,” Toddra said. “I told you I wanted to belong to you, to serve you, you alone. I would die for you, Azak.”
“That’s foolish,” she said.
“Don’t you like me? Don’t I please you?”
“More than any man I ever knew,” she said, kissing him. “You are beautiful and utterly satisfying, my sweet Toddra.”
“You don’t want any of the other men here, do you?” he asked.
“No. They’re all ugly fumblers, compared to my beautiful dancer.”
“Listen, then,” he said, sitting up and speaking very seriously. He was a slender man of twenty-two, with long, smooth-muscled limbs, wide-set eyes, and a thin-lipped, sensitive mouth. Azak lay stroking his thigh, thinking how lovely and lovable he was. “I have a plan,” he said. “When I dance, you know, in the story-dances, I play a woman, of course; I’ve done it since I was twelve. People always say they can’t believe I really am a man, I play a woman so well. If I escaped—from here, from the Castle—as a woman—I could come to your house as a servant—”
“What?” cried Azak, astounded.
“I could live there,” he said urgently, bending over her. “With you. I would always be there. You could have me every night. It would cost you nothing, except my food. I would serve you, service you, sweep your house, do anything, anything, Azak, please, my beloved, my mistress, let me be yours!” He saw that she was still incredulous, and hurried on, “You could send me away when you got tired of me—”
“If you tried to go back to the Castle after an escapade like that they’d whip you to death, you idiot!”
“I’m valuable,” he said. “They’d punish me, but they wouldn’t damage me.”
“You’re wrong. You haven’t been dancing, and your va
lue here has slipped because you don’t perform well with anybody but me. The manager told me so.”
Tears stood in Toddra’s eyes. Azak disliked giving him pain, but she was genuinely shocked at his wild plan. “And if you were discovered, my dear,” she said more gently, “I would be utterly disgraced. It is a very childish plan, Toddra: please never dream of such a thing again. But I am truly, truly fond of you, I adore you and want no other man but you. Do you believe that, Toddra?”
He nodded. Restraining his tears, he said, “For now.”
“For now and for a long, long, long time! My dear, sweet, beautiful dancer, we have each other as long as we want, years and years! Only do your duty by the other women that come, so that you don’t get sold away by your Castle, please! I couldn’t bear to lose you, Toddra.” And she clasped him passionately in her arms, and arousing him at once, opened to him, and soon both were crying out in the throes of delight.
Though she could not take his love entirely seriously, since what could come of such a misplaced emotion, except such foolish schemes as he had proposed?—still he touched her heart, and she felt a tenderness towards him that greatly enhanced the pleasure of their intercourse. So for more than a year she spent two or three nights a week with him at the fuckery, which was as much as she could afford. The manager, trying still to discourage his love, would not lower Toddra’s fee, even though he was unpopular among the other clients of the fuckery; so Azak spent a great deal of money on him, although he would never, after the first night, accept a tip from her.
Then a woman who had not been able to conceive with any of the sires at the fuckery tried Toddra, and at once conceived, and being tested found the fetus to be male. Another woman conceived by him, again a male fetus. At once Toddra was in demand as a sire. Women began coming from all over the city to be serviced by him. This meant, of course, that he must be free during their period of ovulation. There were now many evenings that he could not meet Azak, for the manager was not to be bribed. Toddra disliked his popularity, but Azak soothed and reassured him, telling him how proud she was of him, and how his work would never interfere with their love. In fact, she was not altogether sorry that he was so much in demand, for she had found another person with whom she wanted to spend her evenings.
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 75
