by NS Dolkart
“What’s the matter?” he asked. He was trying to control himself, but his voice was not as gentle as it should have been.
Bandu glared at him. “It hurts! Why you are angry with me? I don’t hurt you!”
“I’m not angry,” Criton lied. “I’m just – I’m not angry.”
He covered himself and moved away. Bandu said nothing, just watched him while he glared off into the distance.
“I’m sorry it hurts,” he said finally. “I didn’t know it would hurt. Did I – did I do it wrong?”
Relief rushed through her. He was worrying about her now, and not himself. “It is better later,” she said, putting an arm around him. She hoped it would be.
“So what now?” he asked.
She pushed him gently down and laid her head on his chest. “I listen to your ban-doo.”
“My Bandu,” he repeated. “My Bandu.” He began stroking her hair.
She awoke to find herself bleeding. It had been about a month since the last time, so that much was normal, but Phaedra gave her a funny look when she asked for one of those pads that were so useful. Bandu wondered if something was wrong.
“Next time we’re in town,” Phaedra said, sounding normal enough, “we can buy more wool and linen and I’ll show you how to make your own.”
That evening, Phaedra finally revealed what was going on in her head. While Hunter was busy putting up their tent and the others were out looking for firewood, she leaned over and asked Bandu, “So, what is it like?”
Bandu looked at her curiously. What was ‘it?’
“I heard you two sneaking off,” Phaedra explained. “How does it feel?”
“What feels?” asked Bandu. “What is sneaking? I am sneaking off what?”
“Oh, you know,” Phaedra nearly whispered. “Off to make love. With Criton.”
Oh. Bandu shook her head. “It hurts.”
Phaedra nodded, as if this was normal. “They say it’s supposed to hurt the first time. I guess it doesn’t later. But congratulations! The first time is special.”
“Why?”
“Well, because it’s a big change. You were a virgin, and now you’re not.”
“What is virgin?” Bandu asked.
“Someone who hasn’t done it before. A maid, like… well, like me.”
There was a sinking feeling in Bandu’s stomach. “I not like you now? Why changed?”
“Just because,” Phaedra said uncomfortably. “Because it’s different. You can never be a virgin again. Making love shouldn’t hurt as much now, and it won’t make you bleed again even if you want it to.”
That was the most ridiculous thing Bandu had ever heard. “Why,” she asked slowly, “do I want to bleed more?”
“Oh, you won’t have to,” Phaedra said hurriedly. “Criton won’t leave you, so you’re safe. It won’t come up.”
That made even less sense. What was Phaedra trying to say? Bandu didn’t think her bleeding had anything to do with Criton, but apparently Phaedra thought otherwise. Could she be right? If Criton left, would it make Bandu bleed more? Or did she mean that mating would hurt her all over again if she did it with someone else? What if she didn’t want to mate with anyone else, or to ‘make love,’ as Phaedra called it? And if she did, how would her body know that it wasn’t still with Criton? Bandu wasn’t even sure what to ask first. In the end, she just said, “What?”
Phaedra might have been trying to confuse her, because she tried to make up for the nonsense of her words by saying them faster.
“Well, you know,” she said, “some men take women’s virginity and leave, which is terrible because then you’ve been disgraced and you can’t marry anyone else. If you did, they’d find out you weren’t a virgin because you didn’t bleed. A lot of women in Karsanye ended up that way, and their fathers disowned them, and they had to become whores or starve. A whore makes love to men for money, Bandu. Everyone said those girls wished they could be virgins again, but it was too late. But don’t worry, you’ll be fine because Criton is a good man and he’ll marry you.”
Bandu scratched at a scab on her knee, and tried to make sense of all that. “What is ‘marry?’” she asked. “Why it needs virgins?”
Phaedra looked a little shocked. “You don’t know what it means to – um, all right. When a man marries you, it means you… you belong to him. And he belongs to you, sort of. You don’t make love with anyone else. It’s a lifelong bond.”
“Why?”
Phaedra just stared for a moment. Bandu thought she had heard, but she repeated herself anyway just in case.
Phaedra wrinkled her brow. “Why is it lifelong, you mean, or why don’t you make love with other people?”
Bandu nodded. “Yes,” she said.
Phaedra looked a little horrified. “Because… because you’ve shed your blood with him! It’s sacred!”
Sacred? Oh! “The Gods are angry?” she asked.
“Yes,” Phaedra said, sighing. “Yes, it makes Them very angry.”
“Why?”
“It just does. It insults Them.”
It seemed to Bandu that the Gods were getting worse and worse. What business did they have deciding how people mated?
Hunter was listening to them, she noticed, though he was pretending not to. He was done with the tent, but he was still walking slowly around it and looking it up and down, as if he thought he might have made a mistake somewhere.
Phaedra was too frustrated and confused to notice. She saw Bandu looking elsewhere and asked, “What part don’t you understand?”
Bandu blinked, and looked back at her. “I marry because I hurt every time I make love with a new man? Or because Gods want me only with Criton?”
Phaedra shook her head. “No, no, you’re not listening hard enough. I thought I said, you can only lose your maidenhood once. After that, lovemaking won’t make you bleed. But when you’ve lost your maidenhood, your virginity, you can’t marry anyone except for the man who took it.”
“Because then Gods kill me?”
Phaedra looked a little angry. “No, Bandu, because no man will want to marry you then. They only want to marry you if you’re a virgin.”
“Oh,” said Bandu. She continued slowly, carefully. “So men only marry if virgin, but Gods only kill if I marry wrong person. If I don’t marry, then is safe.”
She was sure she had understood it this time, so why was Phaedra getting angrier?
“No, Bandu,” she said. “You have to marry. If you make love to a man but don’t marry him, you’re no better than a prostitute!”
Bandu scratched her head. “Do Gods kill them?”
“No!” Phaedra nearly screamed. Then she turned and saw Hunter nearby, and lowered her voice. “Bandu, it’s not about the Gods this time, all right? The Gods don’t kill prostitutes. Oh, hold on, I should have said – ’prostitute’ is another word for whore. Sorry if I confused you. The important thing is that men don’t take care of prostitutes, they only pay them. Men take care of their wives, the women they marry.”
This was why Bandu did not like talking. It made people angry sometimes, and she still couldn’t make sense of what they were saying.
“I think I know now,” she said to Phaedra, to calm her down.
It worked. Phaedra heaved a big sigh of relief, and calmed down almost immediately. “You understand, then?”
The trouble was that Bandu wanted to understand. “I try,” she said. “I don’t know why men marry only virgin. Can you say?”
Phaedra nodded warily, but she did not say anything for a long time. Bandu wondered if she had forgotten the reason. Finally Phaedra began to speak, slowly, as if she wanted to give Bandu time to hear everything. But Bandu suspected her real reason was that she needed time to invent an explanation.
“Men want to be the first,” Phaedra said. “If you bleed, they know they were first. If you don’t, they know someone else was first.”
“Oh. Why they need to be first?”
Phaedr
a nodded at the question, but paused again before she answered. “They only want to marry someone who will be faithful to them. If they weren’t the first, then they know you were already unfaithful to someone else.”
Bandu snorted. She couldn’t help it. “They don’t know,” she said. “Maybe someone else dead! Maybe someone else leaves, like you say about Karsanye. They know if they ask!”
“Well, that’s true,” Phaedra said. She tried again. “But it’s not really just that they want to be first, Bandu. It’s that they want to be the only one. If they weren’t first, then they couldn’t have been the only one.”
“Only one is important?”
“Yes,” Phaedra said. “It’s very important to them.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s more special that way.”
Maybe they were finally getting somewhere. “Why more special?” Bandu asked. “And how you know if you are only one for them?”
Phaedra shook her head. “You don’t. But you don’t really need to be. Men are more experienced, and that’s all right.”
Now Bandu was getting annoyed. “Why all right? Man needs to hurt and make bleed so he feels good that he is only one, but he never bleed and doesn’t need you to be only one for him? You say men are wicked!”
“No,” Phaedra said. “Well, that is, not all of them. Anyway, if they marry you, they promise in front of the Gods that they’ll stay with you as long as you both live.”
So that’s how the Gods were involved! Finally, an explanation!
“I understand,” Bandu said. It was all starting to make sense. “They do not break promise, because then they make Gods angry and they die.”
Phaedra looked extremely uncomfortable. “Well,” she said, “it doesn’t always work that way. It can take the Gods a long time to notice, and if They favor a man for some other reason, They’ll often overlook things like infidelity.”
Bandu’s eyes widened of their own accord. “So you say men are wicked because they think Gods won’t care?”
“Well, yes,” Phaedra said. “I suppose that’s true. But keep in mind, also, that men can’t always control themselves.”
It was Bandu’s turn to be shocked. “But you say they need to be only ones for us! They want to hurt us, so they know they are only ones, and then they marry and break promise to Gods because they can’t control? So you say men are wicked and stupid, and want to hurt us.”
Phaedra shook her head, but she said nothing. Bandu understood. If Phaedra had nothing to say, that meant that Phaedra did not want Bandu to be right, but that she was right anyway.
“You are wrong,” Bandu said gently, trying to reassure her. “Criton is not stupid, and he doesn’t want to hurt me. And I don’t bleed last night, only today. If he doesn’t know about blood, and doesn’t ask, then he doesn’t care.”
Phaedra looked surprised, even a little confused. “He’s a good man,” she said weakly.
“But you say first time is good and special,” said Bandu, “and that is also wrong. If first time is special, then I hope only because first time is bad. I say if other people want to be virgin again, they are stupid. I am not stupid, and men are not all stupid.”
“I hope not,” Phaedra said.
“If some men want first time to hurt and bleed,” Bandu said, “then those men are wicked. They are very wicked, and you should not want them.”
Phaedra nodded noncommittally. “I’ll have to think about that,” she said.
Bandu hoped she would.
24
Criton
They traveled northward for some time, hoping to encounter the same hospitality they had found for Narky not so long ago. But though the lands here were fertile and the villages robust and prosperous, the pale residents all shut their doors to the islanders.
“Black skin, black hearts,” one old lady said, as she slammed her door in their faces.
Phaedra’s health continued to improve, but she still could not walk. They rested under almond trees, passed through fields of wheat and rows of fig trees, and sampled the fruits when Hunter and Phaedra weren’t looking. Phaedra claimed that they should be welcomed at any temple, but the first one they came to was closed to them as well. It was a temple of Pelthas, who Phaedra reminded them was the God of Justice.
“Get away, accursed wanderers!” the priest there shouted.
“Some justice,” Narky spat. They moved on.
Criton wondered about the religion of his people. Was God Most High really a cruel God, as the scroll had said? Were His priests more hospitable than those of Pelthas?
“Phaedra,” he asked, “do you know anything about God Most High?”
Phaedra shook her head. “I think He must be dead,” she said gently. “After all, the dragons and your ancestors were all destroyed.”
Criton nodded sadly. He had half expected her to say that. If the Gods really were in constant conflict, it stood to reason that a God no longer worshipped was a God no longer living.
“Do you know what killed the dragons?” he asked her.
Phaedra looked apologetic. “They say the Gods did, but they always say the Gods when they don’t know the real answer. Sorry. Until I met you, I thought the dragons might have been just a legend.”
“The same way you thought about fairies,” Narky pointed out.
“You know,” said Phaedra, frowning at him, “if you had said that with a smile and a joking tone of voice, it might not have come off as so rude.”
“But it’s not a joke,” Narky said. “It’s true. You thought that fairies were a myth.”
“She realizes that,” said Hunter.
“I don’t see why people would smile or act like they’re joking if they’re really criticizing each other,” Narky went on.
“It’s only criticism if you don’t smile,” Phaedra told him. “If you smile, it’s friendly teasing. If you’re going to insist on pointing out people’s faults, you may as well do it politely.”
Narky shrugged. “All right, I guess I’ll try that next time.”
Phaedra arched her eyebrows. “You’re welcome.”
They continued northward along the mountains, leaving the tent to Phaedra, Narky and Hunter while Criton and Bandu slept outside. Criton wanted to try making love again, but he was afraid of the way Bandu might look at him if he suggested it. He sighed to himself and said nothing.
After perhaps a week, Bandu finally tugged at his arm. “Go with me,” she said.
He started up immediately. “Really? You’re ready now?”
She only tugged harder. “Phaedra hears us here,” she said. “She always say she doesn’t want to know things, and then she wants anyway. We go away then is good.”
She was right. Then was good. At first he was afraid that he would hurt her again, or that she would make him stop because she didn’t like it. He was afraid he would do it all wrong. So he followed her lead this time, and she guided him until her quickening breaths were the only guide he needed. After that, he stopped thinking.
They lay shuddering together for some time, even after it was over. When they finally separated, Bandu nestled into the crook of Criton’s arm and laid her head on his chest. It was marvelously comfortable, he thought, although it was odd the way his hip sockets ached now. He hadn’t realized that hip sockets could ache. Even when all his limbs had seized up after their climb out of Hession’s cave, his hips had felt perfectly fine.
“You want to marry me?” Bandu asked suddenly.
“What?” he asked, startled. “Bandu, what made you think of that?”
She put an arm over his stomach and nestled closer. “Phaedra says after people make love they marry and promise not to have others. She says you marry me because you are good.”
Criton stiffened. I could kill Phaedra! he thought.
“Phaedra said that?” he asked. “What did she tell you about marrying?”
“She says people make promise to Gods,” Bandu said, looking up at him. “Why do yo
u do like that?” She sat up.
“Do what?”
“Stop moving. Make body not soft anymore. Why?”
He shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Her eyes went wide. “You are afraid! Why you are afraid?”
He rolled over and turned his back on her. “I’d rather not talk about it,” he said.
What did Phaedra have against him, that she would fill Bandu’s head with thoughts of marriage? They were dangerous, so dangerous. Marriage had trapped his mother.
“We don’t need to promise Gods,” Bandu said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I don’t care about Gods. You can promise me.”
“Forget about marriage!” he said, pulling away again. “Just go to sleep, all right?”
Bandu punched him in the back. “You want others!” she cried. “You not promise because you want others!” She slapped at his shoulder and side, making his skin sting and burn.
Criton sat up in anger, swiping back at her. Bandu recoiled. He had missed, thank the Gods! With these claws of his, he could easily have ripped the flesh from her body.
The look of shock and fear in Bandu’s eyes horrified him. He jumped to his feet and ran off into the darkness. His head was pounding. It was her fault! Bandu had ruined everything! Phaedra had ruined everything! Why did they hate him so?
He ran on and on, until he could no longer hear her voice or even feel the stiffness in his legs. There was a fire in his throat, and he let it out in great billows of smoke and flame. A stream glittered before him in the moonlight, but Criton didn’t slow his pace. He jumped, and did not fall. Soon he was past the stream, and still his feet did not touch the ground. An almond tree loomed in the darkness, and he rose through the air until he could graze its top. He circled a few times, then came to land on one of its branches. His head was still pounding. Marriage! Were they crazy?
After a time, Criton calmed down. How had he gotten up here? How had he done that? Would Bandu ever forgive him for running away?