by Meg Elison
Connie. My Connie. I wish you were in this book more often.
Alice is still here with me. She has her own house and a Hive so big I can’t keep track of it. We haven’t been together like we were in the old days for a long time. Years, now. She’s off the council, twenty summers gone by. Forty that we’ve been here. We’re old women now. She’s too busy teaching the raiders to gather and sketch wild herbs. Her students have a greenhouse that keeps us all out of pain.
I hope it’s still here, come spring.
After Alice left the council, we were four. Even numbers deadlock, so we had to choose a replacement.
Eva was young in those days, her hair still mostly black and with no cane at her side. She had come from Cruises, just south of where the Midwife had begun her journey. She had lived among free women, in old houses that sat between the forest and the sea. They had all taken ill, and she and her daughter had had to move on. Eva carried baby Wallis north for many months, finding no one and afraid of slavers. They had come to Settle before following the salmon and the stories to Bambritch.
I’ve read her book. It is a tale of loneliness and persistence. I helped teach Wallis to read myself.
It was Eva’s idea that the council should include a man.
“Most of the island is men,” Eva reminded us, her voice patient and sweet as always. “They deserve a voice on the council.”
“Men cannot be trusted to rule,” Hortensia insisted. I remember thinking she was the oldest woman I’d ever seen, and that was years ago. She’s likely to outlive us all. She dries and braids lavender in huge bunches every year. She has no lovers. She lived and still lives alone.
“They can be taught not to stare. Not to touch. Not to interrupt. But they cannot overcome their predilection to violence. I don’t want to be ruled by someone who thirsts for blood.”
“Calm down, you baying old hound,” said Zill. “You’re talking about men of your generation, not mine.”
Zill reminds me of Eddy, when almost no one else here does. Zill shaves her reddish hair down to an inch of fuzz. Her skin isn’t nearly as dark as Eddy’s, but she’s dusky. She speaks hard and fast, and she seems like she’s always spoiling for a fight. She was raised by fishermen, but she’s a raider (what else?).
“I’ve never had a man interrupt me in my life. And most of them thirst for blood far less than I do.”
Hortensia did not argue, but she pulled her lips in tight, like the rim of a drawstring purse. “Well, we can vote on it, I suppose. But we’re four, and we might not get an answer.”
“Let’s try it,” I told them.
Zill and I voted for, Hortensia raised her hand stubbornly against. Eva didn’t vote at all.
“You’re abstaining?”
Eva looked around the room, anxious. “It depends on the man,” she said. “Can’t we talk about an individual, rather than some general idea?”
I smiled at her. “You’re right. Does anyone have a nomination?”
Zill perked right up. “Yeah! I nominate Carol, son of Alice.”
Alice had been the first one to attempt to continue Nowhere’s system of identifying children by their Mothers’ names, and she’s so popular that it actually caught on here.
“Carol is only, what, sixteen summers? Seventeen?”
“About that,” Zill said, still grinning. “What difference does it make? He’s a well-trained healer. And working as a builder. He’s clearheaded and decisive, but he’s also a careful listener.”
Eva was nodding, looking fairly persuaded.
Hortensia had pulled a knitting project out of her basket and was studiedly not looking at Zill. “Does he have any children?”
Zill shrugged. “He’s a member of two Hives that have children. Nothing obvious.”
Hortensia nodded to her knitting. “Does he act like a father? Or like a child, who competes for attention?”
Zill looked at me. I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Hortensia nodded again. “Show me a man who isn’t a child in his Hive, and you’ll have my vote.”
So we had to go and watch Carol interact with his Hive kids and the women in his life, under some pretense. We had to satisfy our elder to get our youngest member. But we did it.
Hortensia is always like that. She wants proof. She has to lay her hands on it, or she won’t believe that it’s real.
She’s still like that today. When raiders started talking about this army, she didn’t believe them.
“There’s no way they can get those old war machines moving,” she said, shaking her head. Her white hair is so thin now I can see her scalp.
The raiders showed her their drawings of a huge, boxy car that crawled along the ground on treads, not wheels. They showed her the tracks it made in the mud. We sent a boy to the library to look it up. A tank.
They showed us drawings of guns longer than a person and trucks carrying too many people, all armed.
“The sound,” I pleaded with her. “That awful sound like a mosquito in the night.”
Still, Hortensia was not convinced. “I don’t hear it,” she said stubbornly.
“You don’t hear anything.”
It was only a few days ago, when the refugees came in, that Hortensia really believed. I could see it in her eyes when those boys and their mother climbed out of the boat that had landed in the dark before false dawn.
“More behind me,” the woman said. The edges of her hair were burnt. “I don’t know how many, but more are coming.”
“Where is the army now?” asked Zill. “Where did you come from? Settle?”
“Coma,” the woman said, glancing over her shoulder. “They were headed for Settle. We had to come up all the way around the other islands. There’s nobody else out there.”
“How did you know we were here?” Hortensia asked.
Eva frowned at her. “Everyone knows we’re here. We trade with every town for miles.”
Hortensia frowned right back. It was too late or too early to argue.
The refugee woman held her little boy’s head to her chest. They were barefoot.
Zill looked her over and realized we were interrogating the wrong person. “Come on, I’ll take you somewhere you can get warm and rest. Somewhere safe.”
The family followed Zill. The rest of the council waited on the shore for signs of another boat.
Carol joined us, sleep crusting his eyes. He was shirtless, with gooseflesh all over his chest.
They landed far away from us, near the oyster beds. We followed the sound of yelling.
This was a larger boat, filled with men. They’d been fighting; they all smelled like smoke and many were wounded.
“We have to take them to the Midwives,” Hortensia exclaimed. Now that she believed, she could catch up to the rest of us in our panic.
Some had to be carried. We moved slowly, like a long, limping centipede. The Midwives got word and streamed out to help us, bringing people into the infirmary and triaging at once.
I sat with a middle-aged man who looked scared but mostly unhurt. Someone brought us tea.
“Can you tell me anything about them?”
The night was warm, but he shivered. He looked up, so I looked up, too. Low gray raggedy clouds slid between us and the stars.
“They have terrible weapons.”
I nodded. I took a sip of my tea, hoping he’d do the same. He just held it.
“They destroyed our village so quickly. Nowhere to hide. We ran for the boats, but they fired on us as we ran. On defenseless people.”
“Did they ask for anything? Did you refuse them women?”
He shook his head. “They kept asking for frags. I don’t even know what that means. Their leader was so angry that we didn’t understand.”
I sat with him as long as I could. I patted him on the shoulder before walking away. He still hadn’t touched his tea.
I pulled the council members away for a meeting. We were far from the council house, so I led them toward o
ne of the shelters where oysters are sorted. The smell off their beds was salty and lively. I could hear the water lapping gently against the rocks.
“We may not have a chance to negotiate with them,” I said. “The raiders and the refugees say the same thing: the army asks for frags. They’re after something that doesn’t exist.”
Hortensia’s mouth flattened to a line. “Nonsense. Absolute nonsense. They may as well ask for a baby that shits honey. They can’t get that monster machine across the water to us. The tank. The big guns. They don’t have a boat big enough.”
“We don’t know that,” Zill moaned. “We don’t know if it can swim, either.”
Carol was shaking his head. “I read that war machine book longer than anybody. That machine can’t swim. Those guns are too heavy. They’re going to attack us with people and guns, but likely nothing more.”
“What if the plane is real?” Eva looked suddenly terrified. “What if they can attack us from above?”
Hortensia turned on her. “If the plane was real, they would have used it already. The raiders would have seen it. The refugees would tell us that the fire came from above.”
Eva nodded but did not look comforted.
“We have to pull all the boats on the Settle side to the island,” Carol said. “Don’t leave them anything. Coma is gone, but they’re probably going to launch the attack from Settle.”
I thought about the rest of the towns around us. He was more than likely right. No other port was as big, and Bambritch is visible from Settle.
“Can we get a crew together to do that now, before dawn?”
Carol was already moving. “What we can’t bring this way, we’ll burn.”
That made my jaw ache. Building boats was hard work, and we have only a few who know how. But better to lose boats than suffer the same fate as Coma, or the other towns the army has come through.
When Carol had left us, we three women closed our circle in tighter.
“What do they want?”
“They can’t want to just kill.” Eva was chewing her lip raw.
“What if we offer to host the army? Round up all the willing women we have and fuck them weak?” Hortensia never talked about sex, so her frankness shocked me.
“Do you think that would work?”
Her gaze was as level as a stone. “Do you think there’s a man alive who wouldn’t consider it?”
I thought about the population of the island. I knew almost everyone. “I think we could get ten volunteers.”
“I think that number will be better tomorrow, when more have seen the refugees. Plus catamites.” Eva was calmer now, doing the math.
I nodded.
I gathered them closer, lowering my head. “That’s not what they’re after, though. It might work, but I keep hearing that the commander of the army is looking for frags.”
Eva scoffed. “Frags? They’re not real.”
Hortensia shrugged her thin shoulders. “Yes, we all know that. But they’re serious, and they’re willing to kill over it.”
“Can we fake it?”
Zill looked around, angrily chewing her lip. “How? Hand over a pregnant woman and say she did it to herself? What would convince them?”
I shook my head. “We’re not doing that. But maybe we could get them to believe we know that frags are real, and send them off on some errand to find them.”
“They’d only return angry when they figured it out,” said Zill.
“That’s not the immediate problem,” Eva said. “The first thing we need to worry about is those guns. They might just kill us all.”
I was silently wondering what the range on those guns could be. If they could stand on the shore in Settle and shoot at boats, or even at the island. If they could kill us without ever so much as seeing our faces. If our offer of flesh would be one they never heard. If they’d be willing to talk about the question of frags, and if we could convince them to look elsewhere and leave us alone.
Out loud I said, “That’s almost a plan. Call a town meeting. We need everyone to know what is going to happen, and what we’re planning to do.”
Hortensia and Eva broke in two different directions, away from the oyster house. Zill headed up the road to pass the word that we would meet. I walked to the oyster bed and pulled a bivalve up out of the mud. I shucked it open with one of my knives and ate it while it lived.
How many oysters will be left when we are all gone?
CHAPTER 13
SHY
Early in the morning, Can came to the rooms where Flora was staying. Flora was carefully shaving her face and neck in the gorgeous large mirror that hung on the wall. It was an old-world treasure, only cracked in the upper corner and hardly cloudy. Flora had not seen so much of herself at once in a long time, unless she could count the distorted image of herself in a pool of water. She took her time, braiding her hair in the best style she had learned from the other horsewomen and hiding her darkened roots beneath her work. She lined her eyes with her own preparation of charcoal in oil, working the black solution into her brows and eyelashes as well.
She had been without the marin the horsewomen made in Jeff City for a long time now. She had not gone home, and no one in Ommun knew the practice of drying out mare’s urine and purifying it into ointment. She felt the loss of it, and she tried hard to compensate. As she heard the knock on the door, she nicked the very corner of her chin with her sharp razor, and a thin line of blood ran down her pale neck.
“Damn it,” she swore to herself. “Who’s there?” she called aloud.
“Can.” The visitor did not offer any further information.
Flora pressed a tiny square of cloth to the cut on her face and went to the door. She opened it.
Can stood there in her everyday leather armor, her arms crossed over her chest. She looked bored.
“What is it?”
“You said you wanted to see a brewery,” Can said. “Came to take you.”
Flora nodded, glancing surreptitiously at the dot of blood on her cloth. “I’ll be right with you. Come on in.”
Can strolled in and flopped down on Flora’s neatly made bed. “Cut yourself shaving, huh?”
Flora looked back over her shoulder, alarmed. “Yes.” She began to pack her shaving things, wiping every piece clean first.
“Lots of the older women here have whiskers that make the spotters up on top of the gates look twice,” Can said with a grin. “Can’t blame them for not going to the trouble, but I like a smooth chin myself.”
“Me too,” Flora said quietly. “Where I come from, some women shave all over.”
“All?”
Flora looked back again and saw Can’s eyebrow was up and she was smiling.
“All.”
Can grinned a little wider. “I’d like to see that.” She put a hand up and rubbed the close-cropped fuzz on her own head, showing a lusty thatch of hair in her underarm.
Flora smiled to herself but did not answer. She finished stowing her gear and made sure everything was neat behind her.
“Alright, show me to the brewery.”
Can popped up, leather creaking. She led the way.
The brewery Can chose to show Flora was in a huge open building. Women wove through a complicated maze of steel and copper drums, carrying baskets of wheat, hops, and fruits. The whole place smelled like steamed yeast, and Flora tried to control the look of disgust on her face until she got used to it.
A short woman with black hair cut straight across her forehead came to them, bringing samples poured off a barrel into glass jars. The beer was dark, thick, and bitter smelling. Can downed hers at once, seeming to swallow it all in one go. Flora took a sip and found it objectionably thick, sour, and foamy. She coughed and blew suds off her lips.
Can laughed a little and pounded her on the back. “That’s alright. You’re not used to it.”
They gave their glasses back and passed through, looking over the clean brewing equipment.
Can
looked sideways at Flora. “I thought you’d enjoy this. You said you’d never seen one.”
Flora shrugged. “I haven’t. But I don’t have a taste for it, I guess.”
“What do you have a taste for?”
Flora tucked her arms into the long folds of her elaborate silk wrappings. “Weaving and books.”
“You’ve seen the library?”
“Oh yes,” Flora breathed. “You have a great one here.”
“Girls here can study anything they want,” Can said with pride. “We have some who study the stars. Some who write stories. Some who put together dancing and singing shows. There will be a show tonight, at the gathering. Since you’re entertaining us, the mayor thought we should entertain you, too.”
“I don’t know that my story will be all that entertaining,” Flora began. “It was mostly just—”
“No, don’t give it away!” Can’s eyes were shining. “I’ve been wanting to run a raid through Estiel since I was a kid. I want to wait and hear your story properly.”
Flora sighed. “There are places just like Estiel. And worse. You’ll get another chance. There’s always another man like the Lion.”
Can actually licked her lips. “I know it.”
The tour of Shy’s industries dragged on, but Flora could barely pay attention to any of it.
They want me to tell the story in front of everyone so they can feel like they lived it. Who would want to live that? How can I tell it so that they believe me, but I can stand to go through it again? Will they think I was weak for serving the Lion instead of defying him? For feeding his slaves instead of freeing them? Will they hate me like Eddy did? Will someone try to shoot out my eye?
Around midday, Flora pleaded hunger and headed back to her borrowed room. She didn’t eat, instead flopping herself down on the bed and screaming into the down-filled pad there. She would not cry. Would not. The heat in her eyes and the fist in her throat could push all they wanted to; she would not give in.
Crying brought the memory of Archie as nothing else did. If she let even a single tear leak out, he’d be there. Sitting on the edge of her bed, a cigarette in his hand. His yellow skin hanging from his jowls and making loops across the long bones of his arms.