by Meg Elison
Alma’s face showed something Flora had never seen before. She looked uncomfortable.
“I’m not sure you’d work well with the Leaf.” Alma was suddenly very interested in reading the labels on the doors as they walked.
“Alright. I’m not half bad at working with children. I can teach reading, and sewing. Wildcrafting, though I’m a little far from home.”
Alma would not look at her. “Oh, the Sisters in the nursery and the school have all of that well in hand.”
Flora gritted her teeth. She was beginning to see where this was going.
“Well, I know you don’t like the idea of sending women out with the mish,” she said. “But I can do that, too.”
Alma sighed. “I just don’t know who would be your companion. Who could be your helpmeet? Your partner. No one . . . no one here is like you.”
Flora swallowed a lump in her throat and breathed carefully. For no reason at all, she thought of Archie. Archie: the only man who had ever owned her. The one who had taught her what partnership usually looks like.
“What about you?” She was relieved to find that her voice was steady.
“What?” Now Alma was looking at her.
“Well, Eddy told me about your magic. The way you know too much. The way you lay hands on people and change something inside their bodies.”
Alma snorted. “That’s my mantle. Those are the gifts Heavenly Mother gives me, so that I may serve my people. As she gives me the power to spake prophecy, and to birth healthy babies.”
“So there’s no one like you here, either. You’re the only one of your kind. Yet you have a calling.”
“Yes,” Alma said at once, her eyes as narrow as blades. “A calling that came straight from Heavenly Mother, on the day that I was born. When I spake your name in prayer to Her, she answered me with silence. That’s why you have no calling. She doesn’t know who I’m talking about.”
They came to a doorway that read “MEDICAL WEST 1.” Alma stopped and laid her hands against it.
“Here it is. Just as Heavenly Mother said it would be.”
She turned a beatific, satisfied smile to Flora.
And that’s how she does it, Flora knew all at once. She sees coincidences and seizes on them. She makes magic out of happenstance. She takes her lucky womb and her blue-gray-green eyes and makes them into miracles. Nobody else hears from her god, so who are we to argue?
Alma seemed to physically shrink in her view. Her face looked puffier, less luminous. Flora could see the tiny fine lines slowly leaking out around her eyes and mouth, calling the eventual end to her impeccable youth. She saw how small and easily shaken, how petty Alma really could be.
In that timeless moment, Flora knew not to waste it. Not to applaud Alma’s obvious triumph or even let her gaze stray to the door. She looked Alma straight in the eye.
“It’s perfectly obvious that you don’t want me here. You don’t know what to do with me.”
“Heavenly Mother—” Alma began, but Flora stopped her.
“I’m not interested in your special connection to someone no one else can see or hear. You can justify it any way you want. But I’m going to tell people that my calling is going out and raiding for books for Ommun’s library. You can say whatever you like while I’m gone. But I want to be out on my own for a while. So I’m going.”
Alma’s mouth closed and her eyes took on that knowing, imperturbable look that usually accompanied a pronouncement of some kind.
“That sounds like an excellent idea.”
“I notice that I’m the only woman here that you don’t call Sister,” Flora said quietly, turning to leave. “And while I’m gone, maybe you and your god can both learn my name.”
CHAPTER 7
The Bambritch Book
Foggy moon
144N
Thinking of Ommun frustrates me so deeply now. They had a truly defensible city, hidden deep in the earth. Everything about an island makes it vulnerable except the isolation. We’re open on every side; we don’t have walls. Just the sea. Ommun had everything: old-world goods, more space and tools than they would ever need. Renewable power systems and weapons and resources I’d kill to have here.
We’ve built so much in the last decades. We have some working power, but we need a team of full-time raiders and another of smiths just to keep us in the necessary parts. We’ve never had a lot of weapons, and old-world weapons are dearer than ever. The army that approaches will find us armed with little more than sticks and stones.
I knew I couldn’t stay in Ommun, no matter how safe and comfortable they made it. It’s no wonder I had the urge to roam. I was reading the Midwife’s book and thinking I could do the same that she did.
But her world wasn’t my world. Bambritch isn’t Nowhere. I’m not her. She was alone in a way that I never really have been. There was Archie. And Alice. And Connie. And Eddy.
Eddy. I thought he would teach me everything he knew about being on the road. I thought that I would join his line, and he would pass on what he had learned from Errol and Ricardo, that I would have a new place to say I began.
He was less enthused than I had hoped.
I remember how angry Eddy was when I told him I wanted to go raiding. I caught him just as he was coming back from some mysterious raiding trip with Kelda. They brought almost nothing back; I think they just wanted to get out of the Ommun hole for a while. He could still barely stand the sight of me after Estiel. We hadn’t talked much, and he wouldn’t look at me. But I wanted to get gone as soon as I could, and no one but he could tell me what I wanted to know.
Kelda saw me coming and found a way out as fast as she could.
“I’ve got to go and tell the nursery folks I’m sorry I didn’t show up,” she said, handing off her pack to Eddy.
He looked disgusted. “You don’t owe them anything.”
“I can’t stand it,” Kelda said, biting her lip and looking furtively toward me. I’m not sure which thing she couldn’t stand: being rude or dealing with the awkward coldness between us. I think she loved us both. Truth be told, I think Kelda loved anyone who was kind to her.
Eddy sighed, taking Kelda’s pack and shouldering his own. Neither looked heavy. He nodded. Kelda bolted like a deer.
I closed the distance between us. “Can I talk to you?”
He looked up at the ceiling. “Look,” he said. “If you’re coming to apologize again—”
“I’m not,” I said quietly. “I need your advice. I have to leave. Tomorrow. Can I ask you some things about your travels?”
“Leave?” His eyes suddenly snapped to mine.
“I didn’t think you’d care much,” I said, trying to speak around the sudden tightening of my throat.
Eddy sighed. “Come in.”
We found the door to his place with Kelda. He let me in and lit a lamp. The place smelled like unaired sickness. The fans that ventilated our rooms ran in succession throughout the day, with different sections getting attention at different times. The close sourness of the air made my mouth twist, and I tried to school my face.
“Where are you going?” He sat on the bed and gestured to a chair for me.
“Raiding for books,” I said simply. “City of Demons is my goal.”
He was already shaking his head. “If Alma sent you—”
“She didn’t send me anywhere. I tried. I did ask. I made this one up on my own. I need to spend some time by myself. I’m always following someone, always waiting for someone to tell me what to do.”
“The road is dangerous,” he began. “More than you can imagine.”
I felt my face go hot. “I’m pretty sure I can imagine,” I said through my teeth. “I’ve been everywhere you’ve been. And a lot more than you, since I was a child.”
He sighed. “I know that. I know. I just . . .”
“You just what? Would you even worry about me?”
He stood up suddenly. “Of course I’d worry,” he said, staring down at me.
“Why did we come here? Weren’t we looking for safety?”
“We were, but it’s not enough for me. I want to know what else is out there. I want to be somewhere that I’m not the only one like me. Did you ever think of that?”
He gave a dry little laugh. “No, I never think of that. Please tell me all about it.”
I scowled up at him. “I’m going,” I said. “With or without your help.”
“And you won’t even go as a man,” he yelled, sitting down again and putting a hand to his forehead. The other hovered over his belly but did not quite touch. He laid them both on his thighs. “You’ll be so much safer.”
“I can’t do that,” I told him. “I am what I am.”
“You won’t be safe. You know that. There are men like the Lion absolutely everywhere.” He pulled out the small pack he always wore and showed me his blurred and faded map. “Here. Here.” He traced his fingers over the cities marked with manacles.
“You see this? You see? It’s fucking everywhere. You’ll never be free of it. You’ll need to watch yourself constantly. You won’t even take anyone with you?”
“You used to go alone all the time. To everywhere.”
He nodded. “I paid for it. Over and over.”
I sat down next to him. “Eddy, you look like you’re sick.”
He pulled away from me, though I did not reach for him. “I’m fine. And I’m not your owner. You do what you want.”
“Are you really okay?”
Eddy nodded, but he clearly wasn’t. “Let me show you on the map where to go. Places I know were mostly deserted, at least a few years ago.” He put his dry, cracking hand to the map and showed me the way. “Don’t go to Demons. I can’t tell you anything about what’s there.”
The truth was I had already decided.
My father was a raider when he was young. He was an old man when he took me in. I was too old to have parents and he was too old to have children. We were a strange match. I was watchful. Furtive. More likely to steal something than to just ask for it. I assumed he had adopted me as a youthful outlet for his last few years of sexual function, but he really did just want a daughter.
He was white haired, with hands that were delicate and powerful. His knuckles were swollen and stiff most days, and he’d hold them to the outsides of the dyeing vats to warm them up.
He brewed a hot drink out of toasted dandelion roots every day. He knew every plant from root to flower, and how to use all of them. He rarely ate meat.
We got to know one another slowly. I kept waiting for him to slip into my bed in the night. When I got tired of waiting, I just made a move for it.
He was working, pulling silk off a drying line, looking to see if the color had taken evenly. I crept up behind him and laid my hand on his cock, over his pants.
“How’s it turning out?” I asked him. I had seen fourteen summers.
He turned around slowly, gently. “I don’t want you to do that,” he said.
We had been sharing a home. He had fed me and given me new clothes. I didn’t understand why he would do any of it.
“I don’t mind,” I told him. “I want to earn my keep.” I was still looking at him and seeing Archie’s face.
“You’re going to do that,” he said. “You’re going to learn my trade. And keep me company. And maybe take care of me, if I get too old or sick to do it myself. But you’re not going to touch me like that, ever again. Okay? That’s not why you’re here.”
I shrugged. I wasn’t disappointed, exactly. I just didn’t know I could occupy any other space in the world than the one I had always known. Archie had taught me I had no needs of my own, only an endless responsibility for the needs of others. How was I to relate to a man like my father when that was the only road I knew to walk?
He saw that, or at least saw that I was unhappy.
“Can I show you something?” He nodded toward the house.
I nodded back and followed him in.
Father pulled a long trunk out from under his bed. “I was a raider,” he said simply. “All through my youth. I didn’t learn my trade until my beard was long. I came to Jeff City when I was thirty summers.
“I’ve seen all of this,” he said, passing his hand over a wide expanse of the map marked GREAT PLAIN. “But when I came here,” he said, his finger resting on a fat black dot marked DEMONS, “I saw something I had never seen before.”
“What was it?”
He sighed and put the map back down. “A tribe of horsewomen.”
I bit my lip. I knew that people talked about the horsewomen in Jeff City, but I didn’t know what they meant.
His eyes grew dreamy as he looked through the wall and across to something I’d never be able to see.
“I knew a redheaded horsewoman once. A queen. She rode across the plains, from Shy to Peka. She was so beautifully and powerfully made. I loved her, but she was always too much for me.”
He blinked and looked back to me. “But she had been a slave when she was a child. She fought to free herself, and so many others. She made me promise that I would do the same, if ever I got the chance.”
“That’s me?” I asked tonelessly. I don’t know what I wanted from him. I wanted to be wanted, I suppose. And not because of some promise or some idea. I didn’t understand him. It took me years until I did.
It was a few more months before he introduced me to the horsewomen of Jeff City. I had grown less shy with him. I’d answer his questions and he’d answer mine. He was teaching me to be a better cook. It turned out Archie had very different tastes in food than most.
Finally, the day came and he took me over to their collective home. They received him as a friend, all of them calling him Perry and many coming to plant kisses on his cheeks. I remember staring up at them, so beautiful with their complex braids and painted faces.
Father took my face in his hands and told me, “You’ll come home every night. We’ll have dinner together. But for the next few moons, you’ll spend your days here.”
I nodded. I wanted whatever it was they had.
The bathed me and braided my hair. They sang me songs and taught me to paint my face, then to make my own paints. I showed them some of what I had learned about dyes from Father, said it might work on hair. It did, but it worked best on the fair-haired and gray-haired.
They were young and old. They were from different places, though many told me they had come from around Demons, Shy, and Estiel. Many were cut, like me. Cut lips, cut balls, cut clits. Some ragged and some clean. Some breeders, some ruined. Many had been in harems, or sold as children.
It was the most beautiful time in my life. Maybe the only time when I really felt like a cherished child. They were just like me. They taught me things I could learn nowhere else.
They chose a full moon to show me the mystery of the pregnant mare. I know now from my reading that what they did is called an initiation. They prepared me and dressed me in a white gown. They put my hand to the belly of the horse and I felt the long bones of the foal inside her. They blindfolded me but I could still see the light of the moon, smell the horses. I could still feel their soft hands guiding me toward the circle.
In the light of torches, one of the older women took off my blindfold and showed me the long, shallow flats where the mare’s urine was dried. It smelled strong and strange. It dried yellow, with tiny crystals along the edges. She led me to the workshops where the dried dregs were mixed with herbs and fat and made into the smooth cream they shared in clay pots, stamped in wax with a horse’s head.
“This is ours,” she told me, her papery hands wrapped around a jar. “Long ago, the first horsewomen made the same potion. It’s been stronger and weaker, changing over hundreds of years. In the old world, it was stronger and they put it straight into their blood. They drank it and pressed it through their skin. Now we rub it all over ourselves, and we take in the power to make ourselves and become ourselves.”
The old woman’s eyes were huge and cloudy as a
dream. Three women took my white gown away and rubbed me all over with the strange-smelling cream. I felt perfectly in myself, and yet very far away.
Looking back on all this, I wonder how many others have had experiences like mine. How many, throughout time, changed and transitioned and became and fragmented and all the other words I’ve heard used for it. How many through science and how many more through magic? I have an extensive library here in Bambritch, focusing particularly on the science of gender. I have had raiders bring me books from colleges I have found all over the map, painstakingly trying to put together the history of horsewomen, of transwomen, of nonbinary people like Connie, of transmen like Eddy, of people like the Midwife and like Kelda and like Alice.
We have always existed. Even the most ancient records hold that truth. And the horsewomen weren’t lying—some form of that potion or that medicine from horses or from elsewhere has been created and used for almost as long.
When I look over the queer history of the world, I wonder if this isn’t what humanity was always meant to be. The Dying broke up the expectation that everyone is one thing or the other, and that in perfect simplicity, two by two, we will live and love and reproduce. People talk long and loud about the natural way of things, or what we lost when the world changed. But I can no longer believe that such a world ever existed. We have always been too strange for things to work out so neatly.
So when I knew I was leaving Ommun, I wanted to find the places where the horsewomen said they had been captives and catamites and slaves. I wanted to find someone who was lost as I had been lost, and bring them home. Eddy understood that. It was why he brought back girls every year. I didn’t yet understand that I was ready for a child, and that I was striking out into those places so that I could find someone to mother. It was the road that would lead me to Connie, though I did not dream of them yet.
I think about the lost ones who are still out there, each thinking that they are the only one of their kind. Somewhere, there is someone like me or Connie, being run out of town or left to starve because we’re not the ones they think will save mankind. People abandon their babies because they want to make sure there are more babies. We are not a logical race.