by Meg Elison
Flora looked over at Can, who had oiled her biceps and shone in the city’s cast-off light. “Where I come from, most people bathe alone. Some of my friends come from a city where there are bathers, who help with combing and shaving and delousing. But I’m . . . I’m somewhat shy. About being naked. With people I don’t know.”
“You’re shy in Shy,” Can smiled. “Do you have scars? Moles? Pox?”
Flora shook her head. “Just shy.”
Can reached out and put a hand on Flora’s shoulder gently. Flora looked up and saw a tiny cloud drift in front of the moon.
“I’ve seen it all. The mayor’s seen it all. Stripes from birth, and stripes from slavers. My old aunt had the stump of a hand. Saw a girl once who was webbed between her toes like a bullfrog. No shame in it.”
Flora shook her head. She felt the same exposure as when she had stood on the stage. She would choke if she didn’t say it.
Just say it. Just say it and get it over with. Isn’t it always worse if it’s a surprise?
“Have you ever seen a girl with a cock?” Her voice was lighter than she thought it would be. Too light for a word with so much weight.
Can smiled wryly. “Only every time I take my pants off. Is that what you’re worried about?”
Flora looked at Can, unable to close her mouth. “I thought men killed the world.”
Can laughed. “They did. That’s why there are no men here.” She saw the look on Flora’s face and shook her head. “You worry too much, stranger.”
The shortcut brought them back to Flora’s little room faster than walking the street would have.
Can put a brisk, friendly kiss on Flora’s cheek. “Rest easy, silkworm. Come to the baths and have a good time. Tell the mayor a story; she likes that. And then come get me and I’ll take you back to Demons. Alright?”
“Alright,” Flora said softly.
She locked the door behind her. She combed out her hair. She rubbed goose fat from a small pot into her dry elbows. It was too hot to sleep in anything but herself, so that was what she did.
CHAPTER 14
The Bambritch Book
Fog back in
144N
I remember Shy looking just like the books say heaven was supposed to be. I thought about never going back, just letting the folks in Ommun worry a little while and then forget about me. What was there? Eddy didn’t want me. Alice could have anything she wanted, so she’d get over it fast. Alma didn’t trust me or like me, so what could the future hold in that city under the earth?
In the awful, unrelenting heat of the night in places like that, there is no sleep. I remember when I first came here, how blessedly cool it always seemed. I loved the rain just as much as I loved coming out of it and warming myself by the fire. I learned from the folks who were holding Bambritch how to live on the island. They were old and childless. Just a handful of them, Gilly and Fred and Walker and John, and Hortensia. They taught me to dig clams and oysters and geos out of the wet sand, how to make a feast of them and the small potatoes they grew and herbs and goat butter. It reminded me of the rich food I had loved in Shy, and how I was tempted to stay.
My time with Archie had inured me to slavery. I could accept it until I could not. Out of Estiel, everything was different. I was coming around to Eddy’s way of seeing things in black and white. I don’t know if that’s just the result of getting older, or if the world was changing, or if what I saw changed me. Maybe it was all three of those things. But once I knew, I couldn’t unknow. I had to leave Shy.
Can came to me in the heat of that night. I was naked and alone, oiled up and covered in my own sweat, trying to think of anything that would lull me to sleep. She knocked at the door and I wrapped myself in a sheet. She took my hand and led me out into the night.
There was this lush field off the end of the block. It was hopping and singing with bugs, and the moon was so clear. I was shy about being naked out of doors, and then much more so when I realized there were others out there. Half of Shy was out there, fucking in the heat of the night. The rising and falling rhythmic sound of sex was everywhere, though the grass was too tall to see much of anything. I caught a flash of Max, her hair tossing in the windless green, riding someone with a deep, throaty chuckle. It could only be her.
Can dragged me down. I had not been with a woman like her—a woman like me—since the horsewomen of Jeff City. It was strange and familiar, like singing a song I remembered from long ago. She was hot and soft and sticky and insatiable. She whispered that she wanted to eat every piece of me. I gave in. I was eaten.
She thrashed and moaned to be taken, so I took her. She bit my shoulder and came like the bursting of a berry, so very sweet. It is a fine thing to take and be taken and belong only to yourself. Can was brief and bright, but she understood that. I will never see her again, anywhere in this wide and strange world. But I’d be glad if I did.
Everything seemed to die down like a round, each completing verse and chorus in its own time until the last notes rang out among the bugsong. I was wet and dirty, Can was too. She asked me back to her place.
In her house, she had built a wide, flat reservoir on the roof that gathered water and kept it, with an opening above the tile enclosure of her shower. The water that poured down was not cold or warm, but somehow just silky streams that passed over the skin, leaving nothing behind. She washed me first, petting her rough hands down along the length of my body.
“You don’t grow any hair,” she said, not really asking.
“A little,” I said. “I still have to shave, a bit. It’s because I was cut so young.”
“You’re beautiful,” she said low, planting a kiss in the dip below my hipbone. I smiled down at her as she worked the mud from my feet.
She stood and I washed her too, taking just a little of her precious soap. It was expensive in Shy, and she used it like a thing that could not be replaced. When we ran out of water, she brought me a clean, rough sheet to dry myself. I was wrapped in it and feeling very relaxed when a little boy opened the door and crept in.
“Hello?” I was startled, but the kid didn’t even notice. He dipped his head without speaking and began to crawl across the floor.
“That’s Tatty,” Can said dismissively. “Don’t mind him. He’s just here for the laundry.”
“Oh,” I said, watching the child gather the dirty sheets from the bed and use them to make a parcel of Can’s rumpled clothes in the hamper.
“What do you pay him?” I asked. Laundry is an arduous task, and the boy was so small. He was rail thin, with every rib visible in his bare chest as he bent and worked.
“Nothing,” Can said in the same tone, clearly not thinking that this was worth talking about.
“Oh, do you trade?” I looked over the skinny kid again, growing concerned. “Do you feed him?”
“No, his keeper feeds him.”
Tatty was quick and silent. He slipped out the door without a word to or from Can. I got the feeling that if I had not been there, Can would not have acknowledged that the child was in the room.
“Who’s his keeper?”
“I dunno,” she said lightly. “One of them.”
I sat down on her bed and looked around. “I need you to tell me how this works. I don’t understand.”
Can was toweling her bald head and searching for clean clothes. “How what works?”
“Why do you have children who work for you, but you pay them nothing? Does everyone in Shy have that?”
She sighed and sat down beside me. “There is so much work that needs to be done, every day,” she began. “Nobody can do it all for themselves. I don’t want to have to grind my own flour, gather my own eggs, trade for my own sugar. So I concentrate on doing what I do best, and other people do their part.”
I nodded, frustrated. I understood the way cities divided labor, but I didn’t want to tell her I wasn’t stupid. I just let her talk.
“There are a lot of small jobs that keep Shy running tha
t children can do. So the kids who haven’t become women yet are put to work, when they’re old enough. They all report to a keeper, who’s responsible for feeding and boarding them. They’re cared for, and they see their parents regularly. But they have to earn their keep, just like everyone else.”
“When do they become women?”
“When did you?”
I pressed my lips together. “I’ve always known who I was,” I said, finally.
Can smiled. “Well, most of us have to decide. I became a woman during my twelfth summer. I was stubborn and I wanted to believe there were some good men, somewhere. When I was apprenticed to a raider who would train me, I learned the truth. I became a woman as soon as I came home.”
I thought for a long time before speaking again. “So these children are slaves,” I said. “They aren’t paid, and they have no other choice.”
“Well, you don’t have to put it like that,” Can said, with a clear scoff in her voice. “Nobody hurts them. Nobody fucks them. They’re safe and they’re taken care of. What more is there to childhood, anyway?”
I couldn’t answer her then, and I cannot now. In my travels, I have learned the same lesson again and again; every city as rich as Shy has that same flaw at its heart.
The life I live now is beautiful, but no one on Bambritch is entitled to the labor or the body of another. That is our one unshakable rule.
When I think about what may be lost if this advancing army overtakes us, I feel a cold so deep that my bones are above it. Reports still say they’re three days away, but what if that plane can fly? What if they have old-world weapons capable of leveling cities or poisoning the water around us? What if my Connie ran off to join the fight against them and . . . I can’t even write the rest of that sentence. I won’t. They have to be safe. They must be. They are.
CHAPTER 15
OMMUN
Etta followed Alice down a series of almost unused hallways. The emptiness rang around them, echoing their footsteps on the metal walkway. Etta put her fingertips against the warm metal, dragging them as she walked.
“Wait until you see it,” Alice was saying. “It’s maybe the best old-world laboratory I’ve ever seen. Glass and syringes and steel tools. Good steel. No pits, no rust. How they weren’t using it, I’ll never know.”
“They don’t know any better,” Etta muttered.
“What?”
Alice didn’t look behind her; she was too focused on her goal.
“Nothing,” Etta said.
Alice found her door and pushed it open.
The space was well lit and immaculately clean. Alice had begun her work already, hanging up drying bundles of plant matter and beginning the tricky processes of refining and purifying with heat. A low flame burned below a flask of cloudy yellow liquid. Etta could see three pots of poppies drying around the room.
Alice patted a freckled hand on a steel exam table. “Hop up,” she said.
“I don’t want to do this,” Etta said, her voice like a croak.
Alice came forward and took Etta’s hand. “I know you don’t, okay? I know that. But you have some decisions to make, and I want them to be yours rather than time’s. Do you get that? I want to help you.”
Etta nodded numbly. She pushed herself up onto the table with her palms and sat there, not moving.
Gingerly, with infinite care, Alice put her hands on Etta’s belly.
Etta let out a long, shaky breath.
Alice felt around, her thin lips flattened to a white line. She looked nowhere, seeing only with her fingers.
“You’re further along than I thought. Three, maybe four moons.”
Etta made no sound.
“It’s not too late, if you want to call it. I have everything here that you would need. I would help you. But it’s late enough that it won’t be easy.”
Etta sat silent, looking at the floor.
“Is this . . . is this the first time that—” Alice broke off, awkward, not wanting to say it.
“No,” Etta said flatly.
“How did it go last time?” Alice’s voice was soft.
“Not well. But I didn’t have to call it. It took care of itself.” Etta folded her arms over her middle. She was wearing her shirt pulled out of her pants and loose, hiding the bulge there that would soon be too much to hide.
“Well,” Alice began carefully, “if that were going to happen again this time, it would probably be soon. By this point, the stickers have stuck. You’re going to have something. Maybe a baby, maybe not. But chances are good.”
Etta snorted. “Good.”
Alice put her hands on Etta’s face, not a professional anymore but a friend and lover. She kissed Etta’s cheek up high, just below her eye. Her lips dampened.
“Let me get Sylvia. I’m no Midwife, not really. Let’s get someone who knows what she’s doing.”
“No,” Etta said, her voice breaking. “I can’t even look at Sylvia. Or Ani. Or her girls. It’s my fault, what happened to them. To all of you.”
Alice tried to lift Etta’s face and found she could not. “That’s not true at all! We would have eventually come to the Lion’s notice. You might as well say it was my fault. It was my drugs that made him come to us. It was me and Flora who told him where the city was.”
Etta did look at her then, her eyes blazing. Alice put her hand on Etta’s head, the low, close curls just growing in there. Etta hadn’t shaved in months. “It wasn’t your fault. Or Flora’s. I just . . .”
“You just think you can fix everything. You just think you should have broken the world with two hands and remade it for us.”
Etta laughed a little jaggedly, on the edge of crying. “Only that.”
“We have all done what we had to do. Your mother. My mother. The little ones. Shit, even Alma. She does what she has to.”
At the mention of the Prophet’s name, Etta sighed hard. “She’s going to be weird about this when she finds out.”
“Everyone is,” Alice agreed. “Is there any way to tell them it wasn’t the Lion? Was there anybody here in Ommun who might have done it, before?”
Etta shook her head slowly. “I don’t know what to do.”
Alice let go of her and walked a few steps away. “You told me you wanted to find the carry berries and have done with it. I told you what to look for, and you went out to find it. What happened?”
Etta sighed. “I don’t know. I wanted to do it. I think of this thing as a parasite and I want it gone. But I couldn’t kill it. I had everything I needed, and I couldn’t do it.”
“Did you bring any back?” asked Alice, always eager to keep up her supplies.
“In my pack,” Etta said listlessly. “I’ll dig it out.”
She rummaged. Alice watched her carefully. “I’ll make it for you, now. I’ll stay with you until it runs its course. I can put you out, if you want that. I have enough som—”
“No,” Etta said, pulling a cloth bundle of berries out of her bag.
Alice put her hand on top of Etta’s. “If you’re sure. But you’re going to pass the point of no return. Soon.”
Etta said nothing, not even nodding. She slid off the shiny metal table and Alice heard her boot heels hit the floor.
“Who else knows?” Alice looked away, pretending to straighten something.
“Kelda. She’s been staying with me.”
Alice swallowed. “Your mother?”
Etta shook her head.
“Will you let Sylvia look at you?”
“Not yet.” Etta looked at the floor. “Not yet.”
Alice watched her. “Okay. That’s up to you. But I’m going to keep asking. I don’t know how this will go for you, but I don’t want you dead. You’ve got a better chance of coming through this if you have some help.”
“I know that.” Etta’s voice was small. She was pulling her pack onto her shoulders, already aiming for the door. “I keep thinking I can kill him again, if I kill what’s his.”
Alic
e didn’t ask what she meant. She knew.
“But I’d be killing me, too. Something in me that wants to live. Anything that can live, should live. Shouldn’t it? Like Sheba?”
Blinking, Alice thought a minute. “That skinny girl who doesn’t talk? Sheba? What’s she got to do with anything?”
Etta sighed. “Like Chloe. Like Flora. The ones that lived through it all.”
“Like you.”
Etta looked up at Alice then, her clear brown eyes like something trapped in a cage.
“You did that, too,” Alice said. “You’ve lived through it all. You ought to tell your whole story. Write your book, like the Unnamed.”
“You sound like my mother.”
“It’s good to leave behind your understanding. Other people can learn from it.”
Etta’s hand came to settle on her low belly. “I wish my whole life wasn’t filled with people asking me what I was going to leave behind. Can I just fucking live?”
Alice had no answer for that. Etta slipped out, and the drugmaker worked to process the berries while they were still bruised and fresh. She might need them sometime soon.
CHAPTER 16
SHY
The baths smelled like bad eggs. Flora pulled her silk to her nose as she approached the old building. There was no guard or attendant at the door, so she went in.
She followed the sound of voices, down and down old stone stairs. On the bottom level, the staircase opened up and spilled into a huge room full of pools lit by torches, where the egg smell was stronger still. One long pool filled the middle of the space, with smaller ones ringed all around.
A voice rang in the cavernous space as Mayor Max called out to her. “Flora! So good of you to join us. Slip out of all that wrap and get into this lovely water. It’s nice and hot today!”
Flora saw the woman’s large pink arm waving to her. She walked quickly in that direction.
Most of the pools were empty at this still-early hour. She could see a few women quietly enjoying the stillness, ignoring the mayor.
Max was surrounded in her small pool by four other women. Flora recognized two of them from the theater the other night.