by Mike Allen
Copper whispered a curse then that curled up the air of the apartment. The sun too seemed to wither in it and threw herself off over the precipice of the horizon. Dusk veiled everything. Nightingales and tweet-birds sang from the tall scent tree outside.
One more hour later, when the sky was black and the bright windows and rosy lanterns of the city showed the path, Lamplit and Tomorrow helped Leopard into Copper’s reception chamber.
“Drink this.”
“Nothing. Please. Give me nothing.”
“Darling Leopard. It’s myself offers the drink. Look. Do you see me? Your brother. “
“I see you, dear. But take the cup away. The dead need no food, no water.”
Finally, persuaded to one sip, the kindly soporific in the drink took its effect.
Leopard was laid on the second bed, his head on pillows of silk.
But even sleeping, his face was old, and ruinous. He looked like a man who must soon die.
The physician came. This doctor was of high quality and learning, but once Copper told him why Leopard was distressed and ill the physician bowed his head. “I shall do whatever I am able. But I also had a brother once. This was thirteen years ago. He too went after The Woman, and won through to her. When she cast him out he lived only two months. We watched him night and day in case he tried to poison or hang himself. But in the end, without assistance of bane or rope or blade, he simply died. It was through his death I set myself to learn medicine, to understand the windings of the human intellect. But I doubt I can help you, or your brother.”
“She’s vilely wicked,” said Copper, “The Woman. A demoness sent up from the hells to destroy us.”
“Perhaps,” said the physician.
Then Leopard woke up and the physician set to work on him. Seven days, and the nights between them, trudged by.
Then seven more.
Copper went on with his usual duties, but refused all those clients he normally had pleasure with. He explained to them privately that he could experience no pleasure at this time. Only Prince Nine was permitted to arrive frequently, and he simply to talk with Copper, gratis, to steady him and try to ease his sorrow.
In the end Leopard began to be seen. He would walk in the courtyard or sit there quietly on his own. At evening, sometimes, he would dine at the communal table of the wine-house, if not in Copper’s apartment.
Regular customers treated him with care, and with respect and sympathy. If they were jealous of his having been a finalist, and briefly winning The Woman and lying with her, they curbed themselves. Decidedly they could see where his moment of success had afterwards dragged and abandoned him. He seemed quite soulless. He seemed part dead.
One evening a newcomer entered the wine-house, and sat down at the main table. He was an older man, of fine physical appearance, and perhaps a philosopher.
He spoke directly to Leopard, in an actor’s clear voice. “So you are the unlucky fellow who fucked the great bitch in the Palace?” he said.
Instantly silence deafened the room.
Heron, who had been eating, got up without a word and went straight to knock at Copper’s door, despite the fact Copper was just then entertaining a prince of the High Family of the Ninety-Two.
Leopard however raised his head and looked at the newcomer.
“I am he. But she is not a bitch. She is beautiful, and by me beloved, and will be so until the day of my ending.”
“Very well,” agreed the philosopher, if so he was. “Very well. Maybe she is a bitch since only circumstances have made her one. As also time has made her older and fatter. But I think a snake gave her such cold eyes.”
Leopard lowered his gaze. He did not reply.
The philosopher went on, in his clear and reasonable voice, “Surely you, or some of you here at the very least, must understand why men venerate and think such a creature wonderful?”
A man cried out: “Because she is The Woman.”
“Just so,” said the philosopher. “The only woman. That is,” he amended, “the only known woman yet living in our city, or in the existing world, who has not yet died of the excessive bearing of male children, or grown into an ancient hag.” A vast sigh, nearly a groan, curdled from the room-full of men. It passed on into the courtyard, where the other men had, many of them, risen and come to see who spoke such words. It drifted up to balconies of the wine-house and surrounding buildings, and was echoed back from them. It fled along the white streets and found some kind of other echo always there, in every masculine throat, in every masculine mind. For there were only men in the Crimson City, as the philosopher had stated. Men who were feminine or men who were male, and some who were gifted with both states, and those who were young or old. Or there were a few old, old women who had somehow survived relentless decades of child-bearing, scorned and sworn at on every occasion, which had been by now every occasion without exception, that they had produced, rather than a daughter, yet another son.
Beyond the Crimson City, did the curdling echo of the groan strike out even there, like a cold fist beating on the surface of a cold metal gong, and the reverberation unfurling, on and on? Probably so. For in all the land about, in the towns and villages, in the farthest places, still there were only the differing types of men, male men and female men, or men of both persuasions, and young men, and old men, and dead men in graves with death-stones over them like white fallen pieces of the lonely masculine moon.
And even the hags maybe heard the sigh, the groan. Even the dead women in their own graves that bore each the symbol of the barren blazing sun, the dead women burned away by bearing only men.
While outside the borders of this land, the other lands. All the same. All, all, the same.
For some years ago, about the time that the mother of Leopard and Copper Coin had herself died, the very last of all the women yet able to conceive a child, had perished.
With the last of such deaths, all chance of change died too.
And now there were only the men and the hags. And the female sun. And She. The Woman in the Palace.
* * *
When Copper tore down the stair, Prince Ninety-Two deserted above in the upper rooms, it was Tomorrow who ran quickly and caught hold of him.
“Stay, Copper—stay, stay—look there. Do you see?” And Copper halted, and his pale face went more pale and his eyes widened.
For there Leopard was, held in the arms of an unknown newcomer to the house, a man neither old nor young, but handsome and well-dressed, perhaps a philosopher, and with an actor’s voice. Leopard was weeping his heart out as since returning here he had not wept. And the philosopher raised his face and glancing at Copper said, softly, “Don’t fear it. I am his brother too, his brother in this most bleak of miseries. For I also, long before, was a finalist in the Crimson City. I also won The Woman, lay with her, lost her, failed at the Ultimate Test. A man who wandered in an earthly hell some while. But sense came back to me, and that hell faded. I lived. As Leopard may live. There is more to life than love. I am the proof, am I not, that not all men die who fail with her.”
Copper felt his heart clutch, as if a dagger had gone into it. For he sensed that here at last might be the single other man in all the world who could give back to Leopard a reason for existence. And passionate hope had stabbed at Copper’s heart, and bitter envy had cloven it.
“Do what you must,” said Copper. And offered the stranger his most beautiful and generous smile.
Then he kissed his brother on one temple, and left him in the keeping of the unknown man. And in the hands of the gods too, where all things may lie, whether they wish it or not.
4. The Woman
High above the terraced streets, the squares and courtyards and gardens, The Woman stood in a long room without a single window, lit only by tall lamps in the shape of flowers. She wore a plain garment, her hair tied back in a knot. She was barefoot on the cool painted floor. Once pink birds had sung here. But one day she had opened a door and let them go free.
They had never entirely forsaken her. They still flew about the upper arches and nested in the roofs. How wonderful, she had always thought, The Woman, their magical power of flight.
* * *
How old was she when first they brought her here? Quite young, she believed. Five, seven?
She had never been certain of her age.
She was the first and last daughter of a peasant woman called This Fern.
This Fern had birthed The Woman, and been made the heroine of her village, for only recently that year the otherwise last known female child, a girl of eleven years, had died in the far north, of stomach trouble.
But This Fern also soon died, after a bear attacked her at the edge of the forest. Everyone hunted the bear, to kill it, but it was gone, and so of course was This Fern. The Woman had only been two years old then. She could not remember her mother, though they had given her her mother’s possessions, her festival robe and her festival shoes, her wooden comb and earrings of tin, and one of her teeth, which had been knocked from her mouth ages before and preserved in a small black box.
These artifacts The Woman still possessed. Now she kept them in a chest of carved and perfumed cedar-wood inlaid with silver, and with a ruby on its clasp.
* * *
Men in authority had brought The Woman to the Crimson City. In the Palace she was trained, vigorously and often unkindly, to be a woman. That is, an important woman. That is, The Only Woman.
When, at the age of fifteen, she had fallen in love, or fancied she had done so, with one of her malely inclined tutors, he was beaten almost to death and exiled from the city.
His own feelings she never learned.
Probably he was as crazily infatuated as she.
But she was never sure, nor if he recovered from the beating and the exile.
At sixteen she began to be shown in the city.
Then, seeing young men sometimes of extraordinary attractions, gazing at, or fainting at the sight of her, she herself often lost her heart.
But she had been thoroughly lessoned by then in her role, and theirs. Since seemingly—and soon irrevocably and definitely—she was the last young human of her gender—only those with the highest qualities of looks and skills would ever be allowed to approach her.
During this era, The Woman still had one female attendant, a hag who had been almost seventy when The Woman first met her.
The hag, Ochre, was never very polite and never pleasant to her charge, let alone affectionate. The Woman supposed Ochre had been selected for her unappealing acidity because, after all, Ochre was ancient, all of her kind were by then, and must soon die. Bereavement of her would therefore be less distressing.
But the hag was presently caught anyway mixing ground glass into The Woman’s food.
Taken off to be stoned somewhere or other below the Palace, Ochre screeched that The Woman was a demoness, a curse not a blessing on the city. After this, inevitably, no further hags served in the Palace.
Later, when the first waves of lovers, having passed spectacularly well in the examinations, began to approach The Woman and she, as instructed, made love with them—initially loathing the act, which hurt her and also seemed grotesque—another unfortunate thing was discovered. The Woman did not ever conceive. Since tests had been made as well on the semen of all the young male lovers, and it was both wholesome and fertile, the fault must lie with The Woman’s body. But as she was The Woman, and the last woman of all women, it was concluded it could not be her fault, even after several quite horrible procedures to which she was subjected in order to ‘awake’ her womb, proved useless. A general decision asserted that the wicked hag Ochre, prior to the episode with the glass, had already succeeded in somehow poisoning The Woman and so negating her reproductive knack.
* * *
With maturity The Woman learned to enjoy the sexual act.
In the beginning, she herself read manuals of love she had been taught to read—and practiced such arts with the waves of lovers. But their frenzies of joy and gratitude frightened her.
She ceased to be active during sex, even restricting her cries at climax, for a similar reason.
At the start she had continued to fall in love and to wish to make a permanent union with this man or that.
But in the Palace the men in authority, who by that time grew old themselves, male hags who frequently went absent in death, had told her she might never choose any man above another. To choose one over all the rest would doubtless see him murdered. At best the city would riot and lose its collective mind.
Originally it seemed, the rite of the examinations to find the best, and the making of love between that best and herself, had been organized in the hope of children. Some of which, if the gods were tender, might be daughters.
But of course Ochre, or something or other, had forestalled that plan.
Now therefore the Woman’s only value was in her female presence, which must at intervals be revealed, offered and given to occasional males.
Until her own demise, this was all The Woman was to be for.
A vision, a goal, a sop. And a method of the most vicious rejection.
Partly she was to represent hope, still, and partly she was to teach that all women were worthless, evil, thus unregrettable. While the dying out of the human race, which now almost without a doubt was unavoidable, could be blamed on the female kind. Also too, perhaps, she was to demonstrate that death, and the death of humanity, might be no bad thing.
In these elements she was like a goddess.
For gods were cruel. They made hells as well as heavens, and all the earthly ills.
* * *
Having walked about for a while in the restful windowless room, The Woman sat down on an ivory bench.
She drank a little apricot wine.
She ate a sugar biscuit.
The enormous and never ending depression that now informed most of her days, and usually sleepless nights, came crouching up the floor and rubbed its flank against her consciousness.
Listlessly, resistlessly, she greeted it.
She did not want the riches of the Palace, nor the extreme—unreal—power she had been given. She did not really even want sex any more, let alone the intermittent torrents of young men who came to her, singing poetry, caressing and coaxing, their delicious kisses less than the momentary sweetness of a biscuit.
She might love none. She loved none.
She might choose none. She chose none.
She sent them away, and they threw themselves in the river and drowned, or slit open their veins or swallowed venom.
Oh, she did not dare give her heart now to any man. She would be loving a ghost. A thousand ghosts. Death itself.
So. The Woman did not want wealth or sex or ecstasy or worship or love.
Was there anything then that she wanted, longed for?
Yes. Yes.
The Woman wanted her mother. Sometimes even The Woman would daydream that This Fern, fresh up from her grave, would walk into the room. She would not be phantom, nor skeleton. She would not even be old. No, no, This Fern would be about The Woman’s own age. Whatever age that was.
But it was more than that, of course. Not only that she wanted the mother she had never known. It was women—Woman—The Woman wanted. Not for sexual love, never that. But . . . to talk to. To laugh with. To be with. Oh gods, women about her, easy and familiar, different and the same. Desire? Entirely. The desire of the lonely one for its other self. Here in the Palace high above the Crimson City and the world, The Woman sat on her bench of bone, pining, lamenting, slowly dying—for her own kind.
Gods who see me
When her I see,
See I have become
As a seeing god.
Translated from the poem by
Leopard
A MASK OF FLESH
by Marie Brennan
Sitting alone in the green heat of the forest, far from the road and any observing eyes, Neniza began to craft her mask of flesh.
>
She started with her toes, for the face would be the hardest part. Toes, feet, legs; the gentle curve of hips. She would have dearly loved to shape for herself the slender, delicate body of an amantecatl, but it would never work. Oh, she could take the form easily enough, but the amanteca were not common caste, and she could never hope to mimic the ways of court folk well enough to pass. Instead she crafted the petite, pretty figure of a young alux peasant. Someone innocent of city ways. Someone who could catch the eye of the lord.
Her father had taught her this work, their art, after her horrified mother saw what she had birthed and left it in the woods. He wished she were still a son, Neniza knew, wished she had not changed into a daughter. Daughters were dangerous things. But his own words had done it, telling the story of what happened to their people. Waking the anger in her. The priests spoke of the wet season and the dry season, the season of giving and the season of taking. For her people, it was no mere abstraction. Their bodies reflected their souls.
Perhaps her father could overlook the wrong they had suffered; Neniza could not. She had not told him where she was going, what she intended to do. He believed they should stay out of sight, accept the hidden existence left to them—never mind that he himself went to town all too often, to court the women of other castes, perhaps to sire more children for them to fear. It was all right for him.
But not for her. Not so long as she remained female. She was too dangerous.
That means I’m powerful, Neniza thought, and began to work on her face.
She made it a young one, and attractive, wondering as she did so if it looked anything like her mother. Her father would never say. Neniza had nothing to know her by, no way to pick her mother out of the countless aluxob working the fields, and if she were to go to town without her mask of flesh, her mother would never acknowledge a thing like her as offspring. Every time she made an alux face, she told herself it was her mother’s, and every time it was different.
