A Woman of the Iron People

by Eleanor Arnason

  I followed her to another house. Inside was a single large room. Large pillars held up the roof. They had been carved and painted red, white, black, and brown. The patterns were intricate, made up of curving lines. They seemed to represent animals. Here and there I saw faces and hands with claws. The faces had copper eyes and copper tongues that curled right off the pillar.

  In the center of the house was a fire burning in a pit. Three people sat close to it. They were children, about half-grown. They played a game. One threw a bunch of sticks. Another bent and looked at the pattern. “Aiya! What luck you are having!”

  The third one looked at us. “What is this?”

  “A person. Be courteous. Bring us food to eat.”

  We sat down. The woman said, “I am Eshtanabai, the go-between. It’s fortunate that I was at the gate instead of some ordinary woman.”

  “You are a what?”

  The children brought bowls of mush and a jug full of liquid. The liquid was sour. The mush was close to tasteless. We ate and drank. Eshtanabai explained.

  “People get angry with one another. They do not talk. They sit in their houses and sulk. I go to each person. I listen to what they say. I say, This argument is no good. Is there no way to end it? What do you want? What resolution will satisfy you?’ Then I go back and forth, back and forth until everyone agrees on what ought to be done. It’s hard work. I get headaches a lot.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Someone must do it. The shamaness is too holy. The Voice of the Waterfall doesn’t always make sense. And how could a man—even that man—ever settle a quarrel?”

  I had no answer for that question. We finished eating, and I lay down, using my pack as a pillow. One of the children put more wood on the fire. Another child began to play a flute. The tune was soft and melancholy. I closed my eyes and listened. After a while I went to sleep.

  I woke in the middle of the night with a terrible crick in my neck. The fire was almost out. Around me in the dark house I heard the sound of breathing. My companions were asleep. I sat up and rubbed my neck, then lay down. This time I didn’t use my pack as a pillow. When I woke again it was morning.

  Sunlight shone through the open door. Eshtanabai was sitting by the fire. The children were gone.

  “The shamaness has left the village,” she told me. “People have gone with her. They will bring your friend back.”

  “Good. When?”

  “Tomorrow or the next day.”

  I ate breakfast—more mush—then went outside. The sky was cloudless, and the air was warm. It smelled of midden heaps. I decided to take another look at the plain. I found the village gate and went through it.

  A trail led around the village. I followed it. The plain stretched south and east, almost perfectly flat. There were animals in the distance: black dots that moved from time to time. I shaded my eyes, but I couldn’t make them out.

  On the north side of the village were gardens that looked exactly like the gardens in the village of Nahusai. I stopped by one.

  A woman looked up. “You are the stranger.”

  “Yes.”

  “You certainly are strange.”

  I pointed at the animals on the plain. “What are those?”

  Her eyes widened. “You don’t know?”

  I made the gesture that meant “no.”

  “How can anyone be that ignorant?”

  I said nothing. After a moment she said, “They are bowhorns. Most of the herd is in the north. In the fall the men will bring them back. The whole plain will be black then.”

  “Where are the men now?”

  She frowned. “Don’t you know anything? They are with the herd. Where else would they be?”

  “Thank you.” I wandered on.

  The next day was overcast. I went down to the river, taking my pack with me. I settled at the foot of a tree and got out my radio.

  Eddie was back. “How’s your friend?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I went to get help, and the help has gone to get Nia. I’ll find out how she is sometime today.”

  “Where are you?”

  I described the location of the village and told him about my meeting with the Voice of the Waterfall.

  “Now that sounds fascinating.” He was silent for a minute or two. Then he said, “I don’t know much about oracles. They were big in Greece, weren’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe I ought to do some reading. What is the village like?”

  I described the village. “As far as I can tell all the adults are women. The men are up north, taking care of a herd of animals. They’re migratory. The women stay put. How is the ship?”

  “Pretty much the same. We got a message from Earth.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I felt the usual excitement. “Anything interesting?”

  “There’s a new space colony, and the Ukrainians are beginning to settle the wilderness around what used to be Kiev. And someone has come up with a practical faster-than-light radio. They have sent us the plans.”

  I rocked back on my heels. We wouldn’t be isolated any longer. We wouldn’t have to wait forty years for the answer to a question.

  “How long will it take to build the thing?”

  Eddie laughed. “We can build the receiver. The engineers are almost sure of that. But in order to send messages, we have to be able to generate a very strange new particle, and the machine that does that is big.”

  “Shit.”

  “My thought exactly. The particle—you might be interested in knowing—is called fred. Not in honor of Friedrich Engels. The message was very clear about that.” Eddie’s voice had the tone he used when describing obvious lunacy. “It was found—no, theorized—by two people more or less simultaneously. Everything about this particle happens in sets of two, according to the message. The person in Beijing wanted to call it a guanyon in honor of the Chinese goddess of mercy Guan Yin. Apparently the goddess came to her in a dream, standing on a lotus flower and holding the crucial equation written on a fan.

  “The person in Santiago wanted to call the particle a pablon in honor of the poet Pablo Neruda. I don’t know why. Maybe he got an equation in a dream. Neither person was willing to back down. So the particle is being called a fred. It always comes as one of a pair. The other particle is named frieda.”

  “I suppose this is another example of the terrible whimsy of physicists,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why did they send the plans if we can’t use them?”

  “For our information and just in case we ran into a lot of metal and a lot of silica and a modern industrial society. Always be prepared, as somebody said. Friedrich Engels maybe.”

  I scratched my nose. “What is bothering you?”

  “Aside from the fred? Derek has found a lump of copper. It’s a meter across, and as far as he can tell, it’s pure. It was lying on the edge of a river. Just lying there in plain sight. People are saying, maybe we can find the resources to build the new transmitter. You people are finding too much. Why don’t you shut up?”

  “Come on, Eddie. We can’t do that. Secrecy is the enemy of democracy. Is there any other news?”

  “Derek’s moving north as well as west. He’s only a hundred kilometers from you. He’d like to join with you. Do you think your friend would object to traveling with a man?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  Something moved at the edge of my vision. “I have to go.” I turned off the radio and shoved it into my pack, then looked around and saw a bipedal animal something like the one I had seen in the canyon. This was a new variety, however, as tall as I was, with a dark blue back. Its belly was cream-white, and it had a crest: a bunch of long feathers that shone bright blue in the sunlight. The animal was feeding off a tree covered with berries, reaching up its long arms and pulling the berries off, handful after handful. It crammed the berries into its mouth, then swallowed and reached for more. I got up. It twisted
its long neck and stared at me, then went back to eating. There was something oddly human about its motions. It couldn’t be intelligent. Its crested head was tiny. Still and all—I watched till it finished eating and wandered off. Then I walked back to the village.

  In the evening the shamaness returned. I saw her enter the village. She was wearing a blue robe and a hat made of feathers. Five women followed her. Two of them carried a litter. Nia was on it. Her eyes were closed. She seemed to be asleep.

  “Don’t worry,” Eshtanabai said. “Our shamaness will cure your friend.”

  “I hope so.”

  The shamaness said, “Take the woman to my house. I will go and gather herbs.”

  Eshtanabai touched my arm. “Come with me. The shamaness will not want visitors, except for the holy spirits. And you wouldn’t want to meet them. It isn’t safe.”

  “All right.”

  I spent the evening in the house of Eshtanabai. I felt restless and uneasy. What was happening to Nia? I bit my fingernails and watched the fire. Eshtanabai played with her children. After a while I went outside. The village was quiet except for the sound of a drum. Was that the shamaness? I didn’t know. I looked up. The sky was clear, and the stars shone brightly. A cool wind blew in off the plain. It was a lovely planet: pure and clean and almost empty. We had been working on our own planet for over a century when the ship left and the work had continued. Two centuries so far. There were still scars everywhere: stripped mountains, poisoned marshes, wide stretches where the land was useless, at least to humans—eroded, full of salt or dry, the water gone, pumped up and used in the twentieth century.

  What had they been thinking of, those people then? They had left their descendants almost no water and great mountains of uranium. What kind of inheritance was that? How did they think we were going to survive?

  We had managed with not much help from them. It was amazing how many people we had been able to save. When I thought of Earth, I thought of crowds. Only the ocean was really empty and the polar ice caps and the ruined lands.

  Looking up at the starry sky I felt a terrible sense of loss.

  Not that I objected to my society. It was sane, decent, humane, the best society that Earth had ever known. But it was enormously complex. Nothing was easy. Nothing was straightforward. For the first time history was a conscious process. For the first time people were shaping their lives deliberately, knowing what they did.

  We argued every point. We voted. We compromised. We formed factions and coalitions. We thought—always—about justice and fairness, about the consequences of what we did, about the future.

  The drum stopped. The breeze shifted. Now I could smell the cooking fires and the outhouses. I decided to go in.

  In the morning I went to the house of the shamaness.

  Eshtanabai led me. “O holy one,” she cried. “The hairless person has come to visit.”

  The door opened. The shamaness peered out. “Your friend is sick. She burns. I can feel the heat in the places where her fur is thin. And she is weak. But I will cure her. Do not fear.”

  “Can I come in?”

  The shamaness frowned, then made the gesture of assent and opened the door farther.

  The fire was out. The only light came in through the smoke hole: a golden beam that slanted down and lit an old basket, faded and bent out of shape. Everything else in the house was hidden by shadows. I saw heaps of stuff, but I couldn’t tell what it was.

  “Nia?” I looked around.

  One of the heaps moved and raised a hand. I went over. It was Nia, lying wrapped in a blanket.

  “How are you?”

  “I feel terrible. Sit down. Keep me company.”

  I glanced at the shamaness. She made the gesture of assent. I sat down.

  Nia closed her eyes. For a while she said nothing. Then she said, “Is the shamaness good? Do you know?”

  “They seem to think well of her.”

  “Good. Maybe I will live.” She opened her eyes. “Enshi came to me last night. It’s bad luck to dream about dead people. But he didn’t threaten me. He joked and told me what it is like to live in the sky. Not bad, he said, though he goes hungry from time to time. He was always a bad hunter. Even when the animals come to him, as they do in that land, he still misses the shot. What a useless man! But he told good stories, and his temper was wonderful. He never got angry.” She closed her eyes. I waited. She opened her eyes. “We did a shameful thing.”

  I glanced around. The shamaness was at the door, talking to Eshtanabai. She was too far away to hear.

  Nia lifted her head and looked at the two women. Then she lay back down. “I won’t tell you about it. Not here. I am not crazy. I’m tired. I want to sleep.”

  I left her and spent the day wandering through the village, watching children as they played in the streets and talking with mothers and grandmothers. They were courteous, friendly people. A coppersmith showed me how she worked the metal. An old woman told me how the world was created out of a seed let fall by the bird who lives in the tree of the sun. In the evening I ate dinner with Eshtanabai.

  “Your friend will be fine. The shamaness told me. The shamaness says your friend is a smith. She has promised her a knife.”

  I made the gesture of affirmation, followed by the one for agreement.

  “She is from the Iron People?”

  “Yes.”

  “They live to the west of us, beyond the Amber People. They are fierce, we hear.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The Amber People say they quarrel a lot and when they give a gift, they always make sure the gift they get in return is just as good.”

  I made the gesture that meant “maybe” or “if you say so.”

  The next day I saw Nia again. A fire burned in the fire pit, and the house of the shamaness was full of aromatic smoke. My friend was sitting up, her back against a pole. I sat down. The shamaness left, closing the door behind her.

  “I asked her to,” said Nia. “I had another dream. I saw Hua, the woman who raised me. She died before anyone knew what I had done. But now she knows. She is angry. She spoke sharp words. Aiya! How they cut!

  “I told her it was none of her business what I did. And anyway, what I did was nothing bad. She said, ‘Everyone will agree with me. It was bad.’ I said, ‘I will tell the story to Li-sa. She is from far away. She knows how things are done in different places. Let her decide whether or not the thing I did was bad.’ Then I woke up.” Nia looked at me. I found it hard to read the expression on her face. But I thought she looked tired and unhappy.

  I said, “Tell me your story, if you want to.”

  Nia frowned and scratched her nose. Then she began. Up till then, I had thought she was the strong silent type. She had never said a lot. But now she spoke fluently. She must have practiced the story. I imagined her telling it—to herself, most likely. She must have gone over it again and again, trying to make sense of what had happened.

  “The first mistake was this: I helped Enshi meet his mother. I don’t know why. He was always good at talking. He could always make the thing he wanted seem reasonable and right.

  “I led him into the village—at night, of course, and waited outside the tent. He and his mother talked. She gave him gifts. He had lost the gifts that she had given him before. That was typical of him. When he was done, I went with him to the edge of the village. Now came the next mistake.” Nia clenched one hand and struck the ground. “He wanted to come again. He was lonely on the plain. He would die out there in the emptiness, he said, unless he had something to look forward to. The warm fire in his mother’s tent, good food, and new clothing. What a talker he was! I agreed to help him.” Nia rubbed her face. “What a fool I was!

  “His mother began to complain about her neighbors. She said there was too much noise in the village. She was tired of the smell of her neighbors’ cooking. There was too much garbage. There were too many bugs. She began to pitch her tent away from all the others. They had pla
nned this together. Now it was easy for him to find her tent, and people were not as likely to see him.

  “But they still needed someone to carry messages in and out of the village. They needed someone to keep watch when he came. I did it all summer and through autumn. In the winter he could not come into the village. People would have seen the tracks in the snow. I went out to find him, taking food and a new cloak, a thick one made of fur. In the spring we met and mated. That was in the hills. The young men stay there. He had the worst possible territory. It was all stone, going up and down. There was nothing to eat there. Nonetheless, I went to him.” She hit the ground a second time. “Maybe Hua is right. Maybe I am a pervert.”

  I said nothing. Nia went on. “He had nothing worth giving. He picked things up—feathers out of a bush or stones that glittered in the sunlight. He made up poetry. What kind of gift is that? He was a useless man!” She stopped for a moment. She looked puzzled. “When I was with him, I felt—I do not know what to call the feeling. I felt as if I had found a new relative, a sister or a mother. Someone to sit with in the evening, someone to gossip with. I felt contented. When the time of the lust was over, I stayed on. I liked being there. I stayed another ten days. Then I went home, and people asked me what had happened. I said my bowhorn went lame. I had to walk most of the way back, I told them. Now I was a liar.” She frowned. “What happened next? We went north and pitched our tents in the summer country. Old Hua hurt herself. She got a burn working at her forge. The burn did not heal. Her leg began to rot. In the end she died.

  “Everyone said she died the way a woman ought to—without complaining or making a lot of noise. The spirits were pleased with her. That is what people said. I found it hard to bear.

  “After she was in the ground, the shamaness performed ceremonies of purification and ceremonies to drive away bad luck.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  Nia looked surprised. “Every death is unlucky, and Hua had died unexpectedly. She was old but strong, and she had gotten burned many times before. The burns had always healed.”

  I made the gesture that meant “I understand” or “I see.”