Walk to the End of the World

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  How impressed she had been with the size of his femhold: a private squad of seven fems under the domination of Fossa, who at that time had been only a year away from discard. At first, Alldera had not perceived the sly politicking among the other fems of the hold, the jockeying for favorable positions from which a lower fem could hope to vault into Fossa’s place once it was vacated. Gradually, young Alldera had recognized the aping of men’s hierarchical concerns among the fems, even though rank for them could only be a pretense; no real power - beyond the reach of a master’s whim – accrued to any femmish position.

  Then there was Senior Robrez himself. With time, his pomposity, his pettiness and his spite had all revealed themselves, and the god-like virtues she had attributed to masters (real masters, not trainers brutalized by life in Bayo) had been toppled forever in her mind.

  She told how Senior Robrez had had her painted up one night as a pet, so that he could humiliate an unfavored guest by assigning a hideous fem to attend him. Delightedly, the other fems had decorated Alldera for the occasion, not permitting her to see herself or to guess the true purpose of her assignment to personal service that night. Only later, in the privacy of the guest-alcove, she had glimpsed her own face in the surface of the water she brought the man for washing.

  They had lacquered her hair into a spiky crown; her skin had been covered in blue and green spirals; and her lips had been made up into a great bruise-colored weal. No wonder the guest had regarded her with such disgust, once they were both hidden from the amused eyes of others.

  After that, Alldera had redoubled her efforts to acquire the speed skills that Senior Robrez had hired a man to teach her. Her trainer had been a Skidro derelict who had once trained young men of the Squires Company to race in intercompany games. She remembered the good pain of pushing herself to the limit, the wind of her own speed (though her steps only brought her around again to her trainer in the end).

  She stopped speaking. She hadn’t meant to tell about that last part; it was a private thing, and therefore treasured. She remembered the glory of racing through the streets of the City early in the morning or late at night alone. That the messages she carried were most often trivial (plaints of love and jealousy, protests at infringements of standing, claims on others’ time or property or loyalty, simple gossip) didn’t seem to matter then. Neither did she care that the chief use of her hard-won speed skill was to race after some departing guest, arrive at his door before him, and greet him there with messages from Senior Robrez, whom he had just left.

  When she had realized that messages of any urgency could be sent more quickly from rooftop to rooftop by means of coded flags, she had fallen into her first despair. The skills of which she was so proud had no real purpose. Rather than live as a luxurious symbol of her master’s wealth and status, she had decided to run herself to death. Her chosen method of suicide had proven a poor one; she had only exhausted herself and come down with a cold …

  None of this was for any man to hear. Her purpose was to disturb him, not to cause herself pain. She had an uneasy feeling that his stillness and concentration, while permitting her to omit the phrases of submission, were drawing more from her than she had intended to give.

  ‘And?’ he prompted. ‘How was it that you were returned to Bayo?’

  ‘To Oldtown first,’ she said, ‘for work-discipline.’

  He frowned. ‘What is there for a fem with your talents to do in Oldtown?’

  ‘Nothing. That’s why it’s discipline.’

  Oldtown was the processing center for the hemp harvested from the plains. The hemp yielded not only all fibers from fine threat to cable-rope, but a variety of foods made from the seeds, roots and leaves. Manna for dreaming was a product of the taller, more widely scattered highland hemps grown west of Oldtown and handled entirely by male crews. Fems were forbidden to have anything to do with the plants which made the dreaming drug. Nevertheless, the winds blew westerly, and during hemp harvests the plain breathed a sweet redolence that could give even Oldtown fems strange visions.

  Alldera’s job had been at the take-in sheds where the leaves were pulled from the stalks and fed to the curding-mills, and the hempseeds were beaten out, pressed, and ground into flour. The sheds, having no walls, let in the stench of the retting ponds, where the stripped stalks decayed under water until the fibers came loose.

  She hadn’t minded. She found herself describing her time there with nostalgia.

  Of her fantasies – and she had had her share – she said nothing. To recall the dream in which no one – man or fem – could understand a word of her speech was still terrible, a rending betrayal of that first great astonishment at discovering that communication need not be confined to the grunts and snarlings of the kit-pits. She had wakened sweating and gasping from that nightmare. The longing to run until her heart burst had recurred, no less impracticably than the first time.

  Finally the Matris had sent a message to her in Oldtown, saying by way of the news-songs that they had a job for her to do. She had feigned loss of her speech skills (due to lack of practice in the take-in sheds), so that when her work-discipline at Oldtown had been completed, she had been sent back to Bayo for retraining.

  There she had discovered the existence of the Pledged rebels, and she had grown restless. All winter arguments had raged among the Matris about her suitability for the mission of going inland and all the risks of sending such a messenger at all. If she had been steadier they would not have taken the time to maneuver her into the Rendery as a chastisement and a testing. They would have sent her west sooner, with a shipment of newly trained fems to the City. She might not have been caught like this, her job half-done and the murder of fems already begun, if she had been more dutiful toward the Matris and less proud. Knowing that she was the only speed-trained messenger they could get hold of just then, she had hesitated and argued, instead of bowing at once to the Matris’ plan and getting on with it …

  She had fallen silent, thinking of these things. The Endtendant was watching her.

  ‘Did you think of running away?’ he prodded.

  ‘From Oldtown? To where? What should a fem eat in the Wild, stones? As for bolting to hide inside the Holdfast, that just gives men a fem to hunt for sport. I have never actually seen a formal fem-hunt; the last time they caught a runaway and set her loose in the City for the Rovers to catch I was in Oldtown, so I missed it. There are plenty of stories of such hunts and songs about them – locked doors and crowds of men on the rooftops to cheer the Rovers on and to see to it that their own fems watch the futile flight of the quarry.

  ‘But I saw a fem bolt in Oldtown. It was early in the morning. She just put down her beating-stick, took off her apron, and ran. The men sent Rovers to pull her down and kill her. Work was held up for a while so the men could watch and gamble on the result. The rest of us paid for her moon-madness — the moon was up that morning – by having to work double time until her replacement arrived.’

  ‘Why did she run?’

  ‘Fems are creatures of impulse.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ he snapped. ‘That’s obviously the last thing you can afford to be. Did Rovers guard you there on the Oldtown work floors?’

  ‘No, they patroled the perimeters of Oldtown, more on the watch for Scrappers than for escaped fems. Where we worked, the noise and activity of numbers of us would have put Rovers too much on edge.’

  ‘Yet Captain Kelmz held those two Penneltons in the depths of Bayo without evident strain.’

  ‘He was a first-class officer. We had few of those at Oldtown. The companies like to keep them home in case a skirmish is called.’

  ‘You fems can tell a good officer right away, can’t you.’

  ‘It’s important to us. At Oldtown, we could even spot Rovers trained by Kelmz. He turned out clean killers, quick, accurate, no hesitation or flailing about. It’s worth the effort for fems to know roughly what kind of behavior to expect from a given brace of Rovers.’

  �
�Like the Juniors,’ he remarked, sardonically, ‘though most young men would not be pleased to see the similarity. You can’t have enjoyed traveling with Captain Kelmz.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yet you came with us, in spite of his being one of our group.’

  ‘Old Fossa told you; I had to get out of Bayo.’

  He looked at her, and said nothing.

  The camper was being carried up the steep portage road which ran from the plain to the upper plateau through the defile cut by the descending river. The slow, lurching progress, already more than an hour old, was bothering the Entendant’s wound. Dark patches of sweat stained and spread from the armpits of his shirt. He kept shifting his bandaged leg from one position to another.

  He had not asked her again to repeat what he himself had said to Kelmz at the Scrappers’ that night; he did not ask now. Instead, as if he were still pondering his connection with the dead man, he asked about love and friendship among fems.

  In carefully chosen generalities she sketched the explosive style of relations among people whose lack of security intensified their loves and hates to extraordinary levels. There was no time among fems for the ripening of delicate affinities. Fems went where their masters went, often without warning or time to send messages of farewell to lovers in other femholds. Did this man feel sorry for himself because his friend d Layo was inconstant in adversity? Alldera told of betrayals, disfigurements, even murders among femmish lovers.

  ‘And fems who love — masters?’ he probed.

  ‘Fems who bewitch their masters? They are burned for it.’

  ‘Do fems ever love masters as some men fall into loving fems? Tell me what your songs say.’

  ‘They make fun of such perversions.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, with a sour twitch of his mouth. ‘Books of the Ancients on the subject say much the same. But sometimes they suggest that such perversion could be a great glory.’

  ‘How could it be?’ she said, thinking of d Layo in the hemp-field.

  He moved his shoulders in a shrug or a shiver, she couldn’t tell which. ‘Love between fems or between men certainly seems less grotesque; the relation of like to like.’ Again the crooked smile: ‘Or so we are taught.’

  ‘Your teachings are not things for a fem to know.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ he said, ‘it must amuse you, all this carrying on among us – Kelmz, Servan, myself, and now this filthy brute Bajerman.’

  ‘That’s men’s affairs,’ she said, stubbornly.

  ‘Oh? I’d have said it was just the sort of thing you’ve been describing as typical of fems, but less intense; the loves and hates of dilettantes, as opposed to those of devotees. You have no need to look so sullen; I like the comparison less than you do.’

  Exchanges like these provided them both with distraction. Alldera saw the danger in it and would have stopped, but she couldn’t. Even among her own lovers and friends she had never had any one to talk to like this. There had never been any security, any time, even when she found another fem with true verbal facility. This was her first experience of speech as self-expression with any degree of complexity, eliciting responses of similar quality. It gave her an extraordinary feeling of power, of reality.

  That was the danger.

  20

  They camped on the upper plateau for the night. D Layo brought over his fellow-prisoner’s ration of food and stayed while Bek ate. Then he announced Senior Bajerman’s invitation: that the Endtendant come and sleep in the camper tonight.

  Bek, sitting wrapped in his blanket against the highland chill, shook his head. ‘The entertainment isn’t to my taste.’

  D Layo sighed. ‘I’m not exactly enchanted with it myself, but it’s better than having my throat cut. So my little fem, here, is proving more fascinating to you than our esteemed Senior? A function of familiarity, I suppose. He won’t be delighted to hear it, though.’

  ‘Did he do this?’ The Endtendant touched very lightly a line of raw sores on d Layo’s shoulder.

  ‘No. That’s from lugging you half the length of the Holdfast. I can’t get the trick of padding the yoke exactly. Bajerman does like to beat on me a bit, but I don’t mind that as much as I mind not being able to wash up at all. He seems to get a thrill from dust and sweat; I don’t remember him having been like that back in the Boyhouse, do you? And then that reeky stuff he wears gets all mixed in, I can hardly stand the smell of myself any more. You should be grateful that I haven’t made a run for it, Eykar.’

  ‘Why haven’t you?’

  ‘What, and leave you to Bajerman? He’d be on you in a flash.’

  ‘I have also noticed,’ the Endtendant said drily, ‘that there’s no place to hide out here, when the hemps have been cut.’

  The DarkDreamer gazed off at the darkening horizon, hugging himself for warmth, and sighed. ‘I worry about you, Eykar. You’re turning into some kind of wretched realist. It’s distressing.’ He looked toward the camper. ‘I’d better go back; he’d love an excuse to come out after me and give me a whipping in front of you. It’s cold up here! The old cur won’t let me wear a shirt, either. Someday I’ll wear his famishing skin.’

  Alldera slept among the carry-fems, as usual. When she served the Endtendant in the morning, she found him so stiff-limbed from lying curled up in his blanket that he could hardly straighten up. Irritably he accepted the Hemaways’ rough help in getting into the camper for the day’s ride, and he sat slumped in a corner and brooded on the squares of sunlight falling on the blanket through the roof grill. When the camper was lifted and moved on, he looked up at Alldera. His eyes were red-rimmed and gritty-lashed, as if he hadn’t slept.

  ‘Where do they go, these talks between us?’ he said.

  She was silent. Deliberately she waited until he invited her to speak, giving a sort of sanction in advance to what she had to say. That might even be truly effective in the case of a man as scrupulous as this one tried to be, if she did eventually go too far even for him. Besides, his bending to her unspoken rule filled her with a feeling of righteous power.

  He looked exhausted and downcast this morning, and that was her doing; hers and d Layo’s. Bek would no more tell her to shut up and leave him his peace than he would avert his eyes from the flirting between d Layo and Bajerman. He just took it and took it, like a fem taking her punishment. She despised him for it.

  ‘Ah, that look again,’ he said. ‘If I beat you for looking at me like that, you’d show some respect, wouldn’t you? Servan, in my place, would whip you till you bled. Would that impress you? You don’t accept us at our own evaluation, do you? No, surely you’re too clever, entirely too clever not to see through us.’

  She made no answer. He prodded the thickness of cloth wrapped around his upper leg. ‘Change this; it’s wet again.’

  The wound, though less swollen, was still draining, and the bandage was stuck at the center and had to be worked off carefully. She looked up once and saw him watching her hands with the same steady, straight gaze she had seen him turn on Kelmz, Bajerman, even on d Layo. He just looked: not for what was gratifying, not for what was useful, not merely to fill time or distract himself from less pleasant matters, but to see what was there.

  For a moment, she let her imagination fly, thinking, what could seeing eyes see in her? Anger. Beyond that – anger, grief for her helpless dead – she couldn’t see herself. It was no wonder. She, after all, had no experience with that sort of looking. She could not afford to attend to anything other than what was helpful to her own survival.

  Her hands drew away the pad of cloth, revealing the glistening wound.

  ‘Isn’t this ever going to heal?’ he said.

  ‘It is healing,’ she said.

  ‘But the process could be slowed down – or speeded up – by a spell, couldn’t it.’

  ‘I’m no witch,’ she protested, alarmed by the direction his remarks had taken.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, leaning back and resting the back of his hand across h
is eyes, ‘how you’re not a witch.’

  Briefly, while she tended his wound, she told him.

  The Seekers had been a club of young fems in Senior Robrez’ femhold. She had joined them, drawn by their intense conviction that the fems of Ancient times had indeed caused the Wasting by witchery, just as the men said. If the powers of the martyred Ancestresses could be rediscovered, men would have good reason to fear witchery again — from the Seekers. These youngsters had met at great risk to exchange rumors and recite spells that came to them in dreams. During hours stolen from rest periods, and often in the company of fems who had slipped away from other houses to join them, they would huddle passionately together over pathetic scraps of ‘news’: that a fem in Lammintown had brought up a man-drowning storm at sea with a song; that another had breathed life into a lump of Bayo mud.

  Soon Alldera had reluctantly seen that the powers the Seekers longed for surely would have won the Wasting for any who had possessed them. Her friends were not searching out true weapons, but spending their courage and energy in the pursuit of nonsense concocted by fearful men. That did not mean that masters only pretended to believe fems might (or at one time had been able to) change shapes, steal souls, control weather, move objects and thoughts through the air, send sickness and death from a distance, speak to past and future generations, and so on; it meant only that men were dupes of their own ideology.

  She had tried to dissuade the Seekers from their path. They had not wished to be influenced, least of all by logical argument. They had labeled her a traitor and banned her from their meetings.

  Of the rest, she said nothing. One of the younger members of the group, whom Alldera had loved, shortly afterward had leaped to her death from a rooftop, attempting to fly down a shaft of moonlight. Alldera’s reaction - withdrawal into lethargic sullenness — had gotten her packed off to Oldtown for discipline. Senior Robrez, an experienced femholder, had been lenient with her, not least because of the size of his investment in her training. To turn her over to the hunt would be to lose it all. The other fems had been glad to see her go; her reckless mood had endangered them all.