Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 83

by Vandana Singh

  But if the child turned out well, they would breed her again, maybe to someone like the son of Merin who had fathered her sister’s just-born child.

  And all the while, she would have the secret of her violence in her mind. What if her child was a girl? The trait might be transmitted. She might begin a line of female monsters.

  As might be expected, she did not sleep any more that night. In the morning she was queasy and threw up. Not a good sign, the woman thought.

  But the next day she was fine, and the day after she and Eh Shawin went riding, though not down into the river valley. Instead, they wandered among the fields, now mostly harvested, and went up onto the bluff to their favorite place. They dismounted and sat a while, watching the hunting birds that soared over the valley, circling and chasing one another, not out of anger or from a need to mate, but only (the old women said) for pleasure, from joy in their skill.

  Finally Eyes-of-crystal began to speak. She had not been able to shake off her feeling of horror at what she had done, and she did not like to think of living her life with a secret like this one.

  “You are not the only person with a secret,” Eh Shawin told her gently.

  “Not like this,” she answered. “And it isn’t my secret alone. You know it also.”

  “I’m not going to tell, dear one.”

  She glanced at him, surprised. He had used a term that belonged to a lover.

  He was lying comfortably full-length on the ground, his eyes half closed, his hands folded over his belly. “You are young enough to think that people are the way they appear from the front and that they ought to be so. -- What am I? A loyal son of Eh, who carries out an embarrassing obligation as I am told to by the senior women of my lineage?”

  “I don’t know what to think of you,” said Eyes-of-crystal.

  “I have never been much interested in sex with men. That is one thing I have in common with my brother, though we differ in our attitude toward sex with women. The idea repels him so much that he has always refused to carry out any breeding contract. I like what I do, though my attitude toward the individual women varies. Still, none of them has ever been stupid, and all of them are in good physical condition.”

  He smiled at her. “Our lineage has been lucky. They have one son who wants to spend his entire life fighting and killing, which has been very useful, and another son—the twin of Eh Manhata—who is willing to put the same kind of effort into mating.

  “And I have been lucky. If my brother had been ordinary, I would have spent my life having no sex or sex with men, or I would have become a pervert, sneaking after women. Such men exist, though they are not common, even in this age where everything seems to be unraveling.

  “Instead, I am here with you, for which I think the Goddess and Manhata.”

  She couldn’t think of what to say. They were both monsters, though in different ways. She had acted in a way that no woman ever should, though she had been unwilling and was now remorseful. His actions were proper. He had done as his female relatives told him. But his thoughts and feelings were perverse.

  “What kind of child is going to come from this mating?” she asked finally.

  “I don’t know,” said Eh Shawin. “But the passing of traits is not a simple process, as we know from breeding animals as well as people, and we both have many good traits. I think it’s likely that the child will be fine.”

  She looked out at the river valley, then up at the birds, still soaring over the bluffs. A crazy idea came into her mind, and she told it to Eh Shawin.

  Why couldn’t they go off together? The world was full of people who wandered, having lost their homes in the long war. She could disguise herself like a man. Such things were possible. The actors who came to Ahara Tsal played women convincingly. Or else they could claim to be relatives, a brother and sister. She would not have to hide the person she was from the rest of her family. If the child turned out badly, at least it would not be one of the Ahara. He would not have to go back to the war.

  He listened to her patiently. When she finished, he said, “How would we earn a living? I have only two skills, fighting and making women pregnant. The second one would be useless, if I didn’t belong to a powerful lineage. As for the first skill, I don’t want to become a bandit like those men in the valley.”

  They could hunt, said Eyes-of-crystal.

  “And live like animals in the wilderness?”

  They could sell whatever they didn’t need, meat and fur.

  “Most land is held by some lineage or other. Do you think they’ll give us permission to hunt? Do you think people will refrain from asking questions, if we bring the hides of animals into a town? I’d be executed as a thief, and you would be sent off to survive as best you could. Most likely, someone would take you in. Even in this age of unraveling, there are people who will not let a woman come to harm. But you would not be the daughter of a famous lineage, and you would not be loved as you are here.

  “And if there were more children, what would happen to them? I don’t want my children to be beggars.”

  “Is there nothing we can do?” asked Eyes-of-crystal.

  “What we are doing,” said Eh Shawin.

  After that she was silent, watching the birds.

  It was midwinter before her relatives were certain that she was pregnant. The snow was deep by then and the winter unusually cold. Eh Shawin stayed on till spring, though she no longer spent time with him. She saw him, now and then, at a distance.

  When the thaw was over and the roads comparatively dry, he rode off with a group of her male relatives who were returning to the war. She was sick that day and did not see him go.

  The children were born at harvest time: two boys, large and sturdy. The older became Tsu, which was an old name among the Ahara. The younger became Ehrit, which means ‘deriving from Eh.’

  She nursed them for a year, as was customary in those days, then turned them over to one of her sisters and went back to her old habits. But hunting interested her less than it had. She missed having company, and she felt less safe than before. What if other bandits came into the river valley? Would she become violent again? Would they become violent?

  Gradually, she became more like other women, though she never became entirely ordinary. She remained more solitary than was usual, and she did not lose her fondness for riding. Now she followed the trails that went through cultivated land, and she kept her eye on the fields and pastures. When she took out a weapon, it was usually to deal with some wild animal that was doing harm to her family’s herds and crops.

  And though she wasn’t especially maternal, she wasn’t able to leave her twins entirely in the hands of her female relatives. Maybe if they had been ordinary, she would have been able to ignore them. But they were clever and active and clearly in front of most other children.

  When they were two years old, her family bred her again. This time the man came from one of the small lineages that existed at the edges of Ahara.6 He was solid and handsome with a fine glossy coat, and he did what he was asked to do with determination and competence. But he was obviously embarrassed, and it was clear that he preferred to spend his time with male relatives. Eyes-of-crystal felt disappointed, though this didn’t make any sense. The man behaved exactly as he was expected to, and he was never discourteous. She got pregnant almost at once. The child was a girl who inherited her father’s solidity and lovely fur. What about this mating could cause dissatisfaction?

  In time, another gift came from this mating: the man’s sister, who was a solid and handsome as her brother and who (unlike him) was comfortable around women. Eyes-of-crystal met her at a festival, and they fell in love. This was (the author tells us) no ordinary casual bed-friendship.

  It’s important, at this point, to realize that the hwarhath tend to see women as less romantic and more promiscuous than men. Living on the perimeter, men have time and opportunity for love. But the women live at the center of the family, surrounded by relatives, and
their strongest ties are usually with kin. For women sexual love tends to be a matter of brief couplings at festivals or long-term, long-distance romances where the two lovers visit back and forth, but are more often apart than together.

  Occasionally, female lovers will move in together, and this has happened more often in modern times. Conservatives see it as yet another example of how society is going to hell in a hand basket. What is going to become of the People, if women and languish and hold onto one another like men? Who is going to look out for the family and children?

  In the age of Eh Manhata, this kind of female affection-beyond-the-family was unusual, but it did occasionally happen, and the author of this story, who is determined apparently to break all the ordinary rules of romantic fiction, gives her heroine a lover who is willing to move away from home. The woman was maternal and had no children of her own, the author tells us, and she found Ahara Pai’s children more interesting than her nephews and nieces.

  It’s possible that the lover was added to the story to give it a happy ending. The hwarhrath insist on happy endings in their romances, though their idea of a happy ending is not always the same as ours. Or maybe the author put the lover in to shock and perturb.

  Eyes-of-crystal was bred three more times. Each time the man was different and came from a different lineage. The author gives the names of lineages, but they would mean nothing to a human reader. Two were important. One was another clinger. The children—two more girls and a boy—were healthy enough to keep, and all of them grew up to be promising. though none equaled the twins. They really were exceptional boys: quick, well-coordinated, intelligent, forceful, good-humored and charming.

  “This is the spirit of Eh Manhata showing,” said her family relatives.

  No, she thought. The intelligence and good humor came from Eh Shawin. So did the charm, though the boys were able to get what they wanted from both women and men.

  Occasionally she heard news about Shawin. Her kinfolk took an interest in him now. His life continued the way he had described it. He was often away from the army, fulfilling contracts his relatives had made. It seemed as if he almost never failed. The children he fathered were strong and healthy. They made it through the dangerous years of childhood with little trouble. His kinsmen began to call him The Progenitor, and this became the nickname that everyone used.

  He was less impressive in the war. Not a bad soldier, her male relatives said, but not what they would have expected from Eh Manhata’s twin. “Or from the man who killed those four bandits in our valley. Hah! That was an achievement! We still tell people about it! But he has never done anything comparable.”

  When the twins were fourteen, there was a festival at Taihanin. Eyes-of-crystal went, along with other women and enough men to provide protection, though the war had moved to the east by now, and all of Ahara and Eh lay between them and the nearest enemy. Her younger children stayed at home, as did her lover, but the twins were old enough for traveling, and they joined the party.

  One evening they came to a caravanserai. There were people there already: a small group of soldiers form Eh. One of her male cousins went to speak with the soldiers. When he returned, he said, “Eh Shawin is there. I asked him over. He’s never met his sons.”

  Soon the man himself appeared, walking out of the shadows into the light of Ahara’s fire. No question that he had gotten older. He was still tall and rangy, but he moved stiffly now. The fur on his shoulders and upper arms had turned pale silver-gray. But when he saw her, he smiled, and his smile was unchanged: brief, but affectionate in a way that was not common among men of the people.

  She was right, thought Eyes-of-crystal. The boys got their charm from him.

  Her cousin stepped forward and introduced the boys. Eh Shawin looked at them. They had shot up in the last year, and it seemed likely that they would be as tall as he was. At the moment, they were thin and as leggy as tsina colts. Like colts, they were nervous and shy. They hung back and ducked their heads, unwilling to meet Eh Shawin’s gaze, though they gave him many sideways glances. But there is nothing wrong with shyness in young men and boys, and their manners were good. They answered his questions promptly and clearly, Ehrit doing most of the talking, as he always did.

  Finally, Shawin ran out of questions. The boys were given leave to go, and he came over to Eyes-of-crystal. It wasn’t required that the two of them talk, but it was permissible.

  “You’ve done a good job,” he said.

  “My sisters more than I,” she said. “And my lover, though I taught the boys to hunt, and that was enjoyable.”

  He asked if she had other children. She named them and their fathers.

  “Your relatives have been keeping you busy,” he said.

  “Not as busy as the Eh have been keeping you, from what I hear.”

  He laughed and inclined his head.

  They spoke some more about the twins. She praised their qualities, while he looked across the fire. The boys were sprawled on the far side. They had gathered stones and drawn lines in the dirt and were playing a game of strategy. Now and then one of the other would glance up and see Shawin watching, then glance back down.

  “So everything has turned out well,” Shawin said finally. “You have a lover and six fine children, and I have my life, which has turned out better than I expected. Hah! I was frightened when I first realized where my sexual interests were likely to lead me.

  “I thought our relatives had been wrong. They worried about Manhata becoming a monster. He was always so relentless, and he cared for so few people and none of them male. But I was the one who was the monster. I thought, they will find out and kill me, or I will kill myself. But none of that has happened.”

  “Have you never wanted a lover?” asked Eyes-of-crystal.

  He glanced at her sideways and smiled. “How could I have one?—I’ll do what I can for your boys when they join the war, though they aren’t going to need much help, being Ahara and having the qualities you describe. But I find it pleasant to do what I can.”

  They said goodbye, and he walked back to his campfire, pausing on the way to speak again with his sons.

  Eh Shawin lived to be almost eighty, and Eyes-of-crystal reached a hundred, but they never met again, at least so far as the author tells us.

  The last part of her story is devoted to the twins, who grew up to be fine soldiers and famous men. When Eh Manhata died at the age of eighty-five, betrayed and murdered by men he trusted, it seemed as if the alliance he had created would be destroyed. It was Ahara Ehrit who held everything together, not through violence, but through negotiation. He was helped (he said) by the fact that the world was full of the children of Eh Shawin. Often, when he met with other lineages, he found that he was talking to a half-brother. And there were certain traits that appeared over and over in Shawin’s children. They were reasonable, flexible, good-humored and willing to make the best of the situation. If they had to, they could fight, but it wasn’t their preferred way to solve problems.

  Ehrit is known to history as The Negotiator or The Weaver. Eh Manhata began the alliance that finally became the world government, but Ahara Ehrit saved it.

  His brother Tsu was better at warfare, and this also was useful to the alliance. He was among the best generals of his generation, though no one in that generation could equal Eh Manhata. Still, Ahara Tsu won most of the battles he fought. His nickname was The Sword of Ahara. In the opinion of Ehrit, his qualities came from their mother. He was more courageous than was typical of the children of Eh Shawin, more relentless, more disciplined, more bloody-minded and more bent on going his own way, though he always listened to Ehrit, and discipline and loyalty kept him from doing anything seriously off to the side.

  Neither of them inherited Eh Manhata’s great force of character. But the new age did not need this quality. They both had lovers, men who stayed with them for years, and though both of them fathered children, so far as is known they did so without pleasure.

  Footn
otes:

  1 Literally “of a good thread within the woven cord.”

  2 Literally “nothing came forward.” The double entendre is in the original.

  3 Literally “with katiad.” This is the most important male virtue. If a man has it, he is steadfast, forthright, honest and sincere. He travels like an arrow that is well made and well shot, straight to the target.

  4 This is a marsh-dwelling quadruped herbivore. Its body is like a small antelope or deer, except for the broad three-toed feet. Its head is surprisingly large and looks as if it might belong to a refined wart hog. The males have tusks. Both sexes have little piggy eyes and large mobile ears, which are striped lavender and pale yellow inside. Their backs are dull red, almost the same color as the dominant vegetation of the marshes. Their rumps are yellow, except around the anus, where there is a circular area that is entirely hairless. The bare skin is bright pink.

  5 The build described here is not typical of male hwahath, who tend to be solid with torsos that go straight up and down. The author is giving us a male protagonist who is a bit odd and humanish in appearance.

  6 The old term for families like this was ‘side-clingers,’ though the word can also be translated as ‘shelf fungus’ or even ‘barnacle.’ They were too small to survive on their own, so became allies of some large and powerful lineage, which chose not to absorb them for various reasons. Most powerful was the need to have a nearby source for breeding and sexual partners. In the area where this story takes place, the incest taboo forbade—and still forbids—sex of any kind within a lineage. As the lineages grew larger and larger, this began to be a problem, which was solved—at least in part—by the accumulation of clingers.

  First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July 1994.

  About the Author

  Eleanor Arnason published her first novel, The Sword Smith, in 1978, and followed it with novels such as Daughter of the Bear King and To The Resurrection Station. In 1991, she published her best-known novel, one of the strongest novels of the ’90s, the critically-acclaimed A Woman of the Iron People, a complex and substantial novel which won the prestigious James Tipree Jr. Memorial Award. Her most recent books are Ring of Swords, Tomb of the Fathers, Mammoths of the Great Plains, and a collection, Big Mama Stories. Her story “Stellar Harvest” was a Hugo Finalist in 2000. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.