A Woman of the Iron People

by Eleanor Arnason

  There was a long silence. Nia kept her pose, standing very straight, her axe raised. Hakht stared at her and frowned. At last Hakht said, “Very well. We will come back tomorrow.” She turned and walked away. The rest of the villagers followed. In a minute or two they were gone—out of sight in the forest.

  Nia sighed. Her shoulders went down. She took a step back and leaned against the wall of the house.

  “Did you really kill a person?”

  She made the gesture of assent. “I was very angry.” She looked out at the forest. “I would like to kill Hakht, but I am not angry enough.” She dropped the axe. “Go in. Get ready to leave. I will come in as soon as I stop trembling.”

  I went inside and packed. After a while Nia came in. She reheated the remains of dinner. We ate.

  “Maybe this is good,” she said. “I might have stayed here till I was an old woman. Now I will see the plain again.” She got up and pulled a bag out of the rafters. “I’ll have to leave my anvil and most of my tools. Aiya!”

  She went to the smithy. I went to the stream to wash. When I got back, she was dressing. The bag lay at her feet. It was half-full and lumpy.

  “What did you pack?”

  “As little as possible. And nothing really big. The kinds of tools I use are not light. The bag is going to seem very heavy, after I carry it for a while.” She paused, then made the gesture that meant “so be it.” “I am not willing to leave everything behind.”

  She finished dressing and folded up a cloak made of leather. It went into the bag, followed by all the bread in the house. Ten pieces. “Let’s go. Hakht might change her mind.” She handed me one of the axes, then picked up the other and slung the bag over her shoulder. I put on my backpack. We left the house.

  The sun was up. The sky was cloudless. A strong wind blew.

  “A good day,” Nia said.

  “What will happen to Yohai?” I asked.

  “She will listen to Hakht. It will be hard for a while. Then she will get used to it. And Hakht will become friendly when she sees that Yohai does nothing against her wishes. In the end they will get along. The fight was never between the two of them. It was between Hakht and Nahusai. This is my opinion, anyway.”

  We took the path that went toward the village, walking quickly, and reached the river before noon. I looked around. On the far side of the river was a fence, a low one made of wood. Beyond it was a garden. Blue leaves glistened in the sunlight. I saw no gardener. That was odd. The people of the village seemed to spend a good part of every morning in their gardens.

  In the distance something honked. A musical instrument. Maybe a horn. I heard voices, wailing and shrieking.

  “The ceremonies,” Nia said. “They are going around the outside of the village, making noise to drive Nahusai away, into the far land.” Nia frowned. “My people are not like this. We do not fear the dead—only death, which is unlucky. There must be ceremonies, of course…”

  The horn honked again. It sounded closer. Nia paused and listened, then went on.

  “The ceremonies drive away bad luck. They make the village clean. But we do not fear our friends and relations simply because this bad thing had happened to them. They are—they must be—the same people they were before.” She resettled her bag on her shoulder, then walked off.

  I thought of asking her for more information about the funeral ceremonies, but she was moving quickly. I had to hurry to catch up, and I had no breath to spare.

  Enshi

  We followed a new path that went upstream along the river. The sun went on ahead of us—or seemed to, anyway. We were traveling west.

  Midway through the afternoon we turned onto another trail. It led north into an area of low hills. The soil was sandy. The trees were small and scrubby. Here and there we came upon outcroppings of a sandy rock, yellow or dull orange. The trail was barely visible: a faint line that wound among the rocks and trees. It led finally—in the late afternoon—to a shack, made of long branches leaning against rock. Skins were stretched over the branches. Smoke came out of a hole. What a sad little dwelling place!

  Nia stopped. “We bring gifts,” she called.

  A deep voice answered, “Go away.”

  “I am Nia, the iron smith. Do you want a knife? It has a sharp blade. The handle is bone. Very handsome, I think.”

  There was a long silence. “What gift do you want?”

  “I need food. Smoked fish, if you have it.”

  “Yes.” There was another long silence. “Put the knife down. Go away. When the sun is out of sight, come back.”

  “Yes,” said Nia. She rummaged in her bag and pulled out a knife, which she laid on the ground. Then she turned and walked off. I followed.

  We went only a short distance. Nia put down her bag. “This is far enough. He can’t see us here.”

  I sat down. “Who was that?”

  “I don’t know his name.”

  “It is a—” I paused. I didn’t know the word for man. “It is what a boy becomes?”

  “A man. Yes. Who else would live out here alone? I have met him before. He is friendlier than most men.”

  “You call that friendly?”

  “Yes. The men around here have no manners. Their mothers raise them badly, and the old men who ought to teach them to behave when they leave the village—the old men are surly and mean. They lack self-respect. This is my opinion, anyway.”

  “Why do the men leave the village?”

  Nia stared at me. “What kind of question is that?”

  “Do all men leave the village?”

  “Yes. Of course.” Nia frowned. “What kind of person are you? Why do you ask something like that?”

  I thought for a moment. “I come from a long distance away. My people are different from yours. How different, I don’t know. Maybe the differences are small—things on the surface, like the fur that you have and I don’t. Maybe the differences are big. In any case, among my people men and women live together.”

  Nia frowned again. “How can that be? After the change no man can bear to be with other people—except at the time of mating, of course, and except for Enshi.”

  “Enshi?” I asked.

  Nia stared at the sky. “The sun is almost gone. We can go back.”

  We returned to the shack. Firelight shone through gaps between the skins. I didn’t see anyone, either inside or out. The knife was gone. In its place was a basket, full of smoked fish.

  “This is good!” Nia said. “Now we won’t starve.”

  The basket had a top. She put it on and fastened it, then put the whole thing in her bag. “Come on. We’ll go back toward the river and find a place to camp. This fellow won’t like it if we stay here.”

  “That is true,” the deep voice said. “It is a good knife, Nia.”

  Nia glanced at the shack. “The fish smells good. Thank you.”

  We walked off. The sky darkened and stars appeared along with a moon: a point of light that moved rapidly up from the eastern horizon. We stopped in a hollow. Nia made a fire, and we ate a couple of pieces of fish. It was bony and oily with a strong smoky taste. I did not especially like it.

  “Who is Enshi?” I asked.

  Nia stared at the fire. There was a brooding expression on her face. At length she glanced up. “I made up a poem about Enshi after I had been in this place a year. It goes like this:

  “I am in this dark place,

  this forest.

  “He is in that dark place,

  that grave.”

  “He is dead?”

  Nia made the gesture of affirmation. “I will not talk about him. Do your men really live with the women?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s very strange. Is it right?”

  The word she used had several meanings: “usual,” “well made,” “moral.”

  “We think so. We’ve always lived this way.”

  Nia made a barking noise. “If Hakht knew this, she would be certain that you are a demon. Of
course, her people do many things that are not right.”

  “What?” I asked.

  Nia frowned, then scratched her nose. “They do not like men, not even their sons. ‘A son is a mouth,’ they say. They mean a son is something that eats food and makes noise and does nothing useful.”

  “Hu!” I said.

  Nia made the gesture of agreement. “It is very badly done. There is something else…” She paused. “They do not like to mate with men. Often in the spring they go out, two women together. They stay in the forest. They do things with their hands.” Nia shivered. “Do your people do anything like this?”

  “Some of us do. I don’t.”

  “Do you think it’s right?”

  I thought for a moment. “It is common. I don’t think that it is wrong.” I used a word that meant “unusual,” “immoral,” “badly made,” or “done in a seriously inept fashion.”

  Nia shivered again. “I did it once. Yohai kept asking me. One spring I went with her. I do not know why. I didn’t like it. I felt ashamed. Aiya!” She paused for a moment. “I wish we had something to drink.”

  The next day we went back to the river. We continued west along it. The land was flat and covered with forest. The sky was cloudless, and the river shone. Birdlike creatures glided from tree to tree, and other things—invisible to me—moved through the underbrush. I saw one as it crossed our path: a bronze shell about half a meter long with many quick-moving little feet beneath it. Two huge faceted eyes stuck out on top.

  “What?” I asked as the animal vanished.

  “It’s called a wahakh,” Nia said. “It can live in water and out of it. The people here say that it carries messages from the spirits, and sometimes it acts as a guide for women who go on spirit-journeys. They never eat it, though it is delicious when roasted.” She paused. “We’ll leave it alone.”

  Toward evening we came to a lake. The water was clear and dark green. Rushes grew at the edges.

  Nia looked around. “I have been here before—when I came east, after I left my people. I remember this place reminded me of a lake in my country. The Great Rush Lake. This is smaller, of course. Aiya! How the years go by!”

  We made camp. Nia spent the evening staring into the fire. I went off and called Eddie and told him what had happened in the last few days.

  “You take chances, don’t you?” he said.

  “A few. Not many.”

  “That crazy shamaness might have decided to kill you.”

  “I don’t think that’s likely. I get the impression these people aren’t violent.”

  “Uh-huh. Tell that to Derek.”

  “What happened?”

  “He decided he had to tell the people in his village that he was a man—to see what would happen. He is, as you remember, extremely curious. They tried to stone him. He grabbed his radio and ran.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “Yes. But what would’ve happened to someone else, someone who couldn’t run the way he can?”

  I thought about that for a while. Derek was a tall blond from southern California, an aborigine who’d spent his childhood traveling on foot in the desert. When he was fifteen, there had been a drought. He walked up to a trading station on the coast and said, “I’m tired of living like this. Teach me something else.”

  They sent him to school, and he took up running as a sport. Over short distances he was good. Over long distances he was unbeatable.

  “Where is he? On the ship?”

  “No. He’s traveling west. The country is pleasant, he says. Rolling hills, forest, and some prairie. There’s a lot of game, much more than in California. He is going to make a bow.”

  A bug flitted past me. I batted at it and missed. “How is Gregory?”

  “Fine. But he says his people are treating him differently. They talk to him slowly and firmly, and they give a lot of orders. Very simple orders. He thinks they’ve decided he is not very bright. What other explanation is there? He doesn’t know the right behavior, and he can’t take care of himself.”

  I grinned.

  “One other thing,” Eddie said.

  Aha, I thought. The zinger for today. “What is it?”

  “Gregory says there must be gold in the mountains. His people wear a lot of jewelry, and most of it is gold.”

  “What’s so interesting about that?”

  “The planetologists think it may be significant. The planet is denser than Earth, and there’s plenty of evidence of volcanic activity. There’s a good chance, they say, of finding metal close to the surface. Not just gold—silver, copper, platinum, tin, iridium, chromium, you name it.” His voice sounded peculiar: flat and careful.

  “What’s going on?”

  “People up here are getting interested. Members of the crew, mostly. I don’t think they have enough to do. They are talking about possibilities. If the metal is here, and if it’s high quality, and if it’s close to the surface, maybe even on the surface, then it could be mined.”

  I rocked back on my heels and looked at the radio. I couldn’t really see it, of course. The night was too dark. “A mining colony? Eighteen light-years from home? Do they have any idea of the transportation costs?”

  “They are thinking of a manufacturing center. A colony to build ships.”

  “No one is ever going to build a ship at the bottom of a gravity well, unless you are talking about the kind of ship that goes through water, and I don’t think you are.”

  “Final assembly would be done in space.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “There are problems,” Eddie said. “Everyone admits there are a lot of problems, but they won’t stop talking. They are absolutely fascinated by the idea of all that metal.”

  Hardly surprising. Our ancestors had done a job on Earth. Most of the metal and coal and oil that was easy to reach was gone, along with other resources. Much of the water. Much of the soil. Hundreds—no, thousands—of species of plants and animals.

  Eddie went on. “I’ve been thinking about Cortez and what happened when he found gold in Mexico.”

  “You worry too much.”

  “Uh-huh. I’ll bet that’s what Montezuma said to his councilors.”

  I rubbed my eyes and tried to think. I was exhausted. “Eddie, I have to sleep.”

  “Is it night down there? I guess it is. Sweet dreams, Lixia.”

  I went back to camp and lay down. Above me the stars shone. Somewhere up there was a relay satellite and a long way to the south—over the middle of the ocean—was the I.S.S. Number One. I imagined it, turning in the light of this system’s primary, gleaming just a little: an enormous hunk of lithium hydride, shaped like a cigar. The surface was pitted and discolored. More than half the mass was gone. The lithium hydride had been our fuel as well as our main protection against radiation.

  At one end of the cigar was a series of metal and ceramic coils. These were the magnets that contained and controlled the fusion reaction that drove the ship. The other end was bare. When we left Earth there had been an umbrella made of cermet, additional protection against the tiny amount of matter between the stars. We had dropped the umbrella at turnaround. From that point on, the engine acted as protection, burning whatever bits of space debris might lie ahead of us into ionic vapors, which the magnets guided away.

  That was it: a dirty white cigar and a series of rings, black and tan and gray. The living quarters were invisible, hidden in the middle of the cigar: a cylinder made of ceramic, encased in salt.

  That was the part of the ship I knew: the rooms and corridors lined with tile. They gave the ship one of its many nicknames—my favorite, the China Clipper.

  It had no sails, of course. That idea had been abandoned early on. And there wasn’t a lot of porcelain onboard. The wall material reminded me of earthenware. It was dull and a bit rough, light orange in color. In places it was glazed, usually white or blue.

  It was a lovely material: light and hard and durable, immune to corrosion, resista
nt to heat, excellent insulation. Eddie was nuts. We hadn’t gone to the stars in a tin can. We had gone in something made of clay and salt. There was plenty of both where we came from. We didn’t need the metal on this planet.

  For the next three days Nia and I continued west. The land rose. We entered a canyon. At the bottom was a narrow shallow stream. In the spring it must have been an impressive river, for it ran through the middle of a wide bed. Even now the water moved quickly. Here and there it was streaked with foam.

  Cliffs rose on either side of us. They were dark gray and flecked with something that glittered in the sunlight. Mica?

  I saw a new kind of animal. It was tiny and dark gray, the color of the cliffs. Its skin—or shell—glittered as if it were flecked with mica. In most parts of the canyon the animal seemed to be uncommon. But one section had hundreds of the little things. Motionless, they were invisible. I saw them when they moved, flashing out from under my feet, running up a rock away from me. It seemed as if pieces of stone were coming alive, changing into—what? Lizards? Not exactly. For one thing, they had six legs. On Earth that would have made them insects. But they didn’t look like bugs, and the bugs on this planet seemed to have at least eight legs.

  “I don’t know what they are,” said Nia. “And I don’t know why there are so many of them. This isn’t my country. Ask me questions when we come out onto the plain.”

  I made the gesture of acknowledgment.

  Late on the third day she said, “A person is following us.”

  “What?” I looked back.

  The canyon was shadowy, and I couldn’t see far, but as far as I could see, the trail was empty.

  Nia grabbed my arm and tugged. “Keep going. Don’t let him know that we know.”

  We trudged on.

  “I saw him twice today, this morning and a short time ago. If he means to do harm, he’ll do it tonight.”

  “Harm?” I said.

  “There are men who go crazy. They become violent. They attack other people.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. But some men—when they go through the change—become like animals. They cannot control themselves. And there are other men who are fine till they get old. They grow weak. They cannot get women. This makes them angry. I have met one like that. They do not attack large groups of women, but if a person travels alone or in a small group, a twosome or a threesome—that is asking for trouble!” She glanced at me. “We have to find a place to camp.”