Unconquered Countries-Four Novellas

by Geoff Ryman

“All right,” said Third with a shrug.

  “You will be here? You will not go back to that line?”

  Third worked a piece of pork loose from between her teeth. The line was her business.

  “I’ll give you money, you won’t have to.”

  “I’ll be here,” said Third, scowling.

  “Tomorrow, then,” he said, and turned sideways to move through the crowd.

  “Hoi!” Third called after him, and he looked around. “Why are you doing this?”

  “For the sake of the People,” he said, no longer smiling, and gave her another equal’s bow.

  The next day he was there, waiting for her. That made him even more of a mystery. He bought her the food and then began to tell her about himself.

  “I am not very good with numbers,” he said, and smiled as if he had made a joke. “I was not much good at school. But I am good in the army.”

  He is not very intelligent, Third decided. That is why he smiles. For some reason, this made her smile too, and feel indulgent.

  “Before that,” the soldier said with innocent assurance that she was finding this interesting, or in some way necessary, “I was a priest.”

  In the real days before the war, all young men had been priests instead of soldiers. He must have chosen to become one. Why, wondered Third, is he telling me all this?

  “I had the shaved head. The yellow robes. And I did not work, I was given food. When someone died, I sat with them and listened to the story of the one who had died. We sat like this for hours.” He showed her how he sat, his hands on their shoulders, rocking. “I wrote the story down, and put it in the temple so their history would be known.” He smiled again.

  “I would put one third of the food I was given in the ghost boxes to feed the dead. Many of the priests did not do this, they kept the food for themselves, but that is wrong. The food is meant for the dead. So they will not feel alone.”

  Does he believe it? Does he believe in ghost boxes and life histories? What does he want from me? The answer when it came was so simple that Third felt foolish for not understanding before.

  He wants, she understood, a wife. Oh, poor man. That’s it, he has been a priest and his time is up—all young men were priests for two years, and then they married, and now is his time to marry. She found his adherence to the pattern touching. It was almost mathematical. And sad. For this man was ugly.

  His name was Crow. Crows were omens of death. The family had been given a cursed name as a punishment, and so they were outcasts, except now, when soldiers were needed. As a priest he would have been shunned. Willing and smiling, she saw him, willing and smiling. No one of any station would want a family history written by someone called Crow.

  “You have not told me your first name,” she said. Only after she said it did she realize that it was exactly what she should have said. That was the pattern. You know the last name, and only ask the first name later. When you are courting.

  He told her, and she had to close her eyes with embarrassment, shut out the world. Oh, it was not possible, poor, poor, ugly man.

  His name, in a certain light, meant Nourisher of the East. It could also mean, more simply, Dung. Crow Dung with the constant smile.

  And I am ugly too, she thought. Oh, she knew that too. She was short and bowlegged, with a thick waist and thick wrists. He wants a wife who is not beautiful, and he wants one of no social standing. He wants a wife to be grateful. And yet…there was something else. He was a country man. Perhaps he was also kind?

  A kind man, however ugly, who wants a wife is an opportunity. Very well, Crow Dung, she thought. I am sick of hunger. I am sick of noise and people’s sheets hanging out over my window. But this is being very hard. I also think you have virtues. I will see.

  “I am a country girl,” she told him. “The city confuses me. But I have, I am told, great skills. The thing a woman needs in housework is proportion. That, I have always had. My family used to call me Little Princess, because princesses have time to arrange flowers. I had no time, but I was quick enough to arrange all things. That sounds like I am boasting.”

  Third looked down, shyly. She was surprised at how easy it was for her to become a country girl after all this time. She had thought she was playacting.

  “But I love beauty. And I love things to have a place. And I love the space between things.” She found she was telling the truth.

  “I often think the stars have a place. When I put the mat and the bowl and the jug of sauce on the floor I think: these also have a place. Like the stars.” And she smiled.

  Oh, Third, she thought, you are shameless. Crow Dung grinned and grinned.

  Right, she thought.

  The next morning, her Blood Agent came. “I have fallen heir to great fortune,” she told him. “I do not need you.”

  “What about my ten percent?” he asked.

  Third saw his ten percent ever so much more clearly than he did. She threw it over him, her blood, very exactly ten percent of what she usually gave him. He stumbled backward, squawking. He knew very well the blood of Dastang Tze-See often had disease, though he still sold it. His bagpipe creature made sucking noises, sensing its feed. It took ten percent too.

  Well, she thought, watching him go, now we will see. I can always get another Blood Agent. But she still had the marks on her arm.

  Crow Dung did come courting, with heavy formality. “I come to visit the young Mademoiselle,” he said, bowing in his army uniform. He was so proud of being in the army. Third thought he looked ridiculous.

  He had brought her a gift. “I saw this,” he said and passed her a gift box made of glazed and woven reed, “and I thought: someone in my position cannot arrive without something to show for himself.”

  Why don’t you ask me about the marks on my arm? Third thought. Why don’t you ask me how it is that I am alive? She looked at the gift box, and her lip curled, and she passed it back to him. “I don’t want it,” she said.

  Third had a beast in the back of her head, and it was born of hunger and filth; filth and disorder and shame, like a sharp stench. The beast said, I must have this. The beast said, I will not get it, I have never got anything without ripping something out of myself. She confused Crow Dung with people like her Blood Agent. She did not realize that she was hateful to him.

  Whenever he visited she insulted him. “You are a common soldier. Some sergeant, you say. I cannot be seen with you. I am of good family. It is wrong. Why do you keep coming here?”

  And Crow would keep smiling. Is this some kind of joke to you? she thought.

  When he was not there, when she was no longer bitter and anxious and ready to be aggrieved, it came to her that perhaps Crow understood. He understood why she was angry, though she herself did not. Either that, or he was too stupid to notice. I must, she told herself, stop thinking of people as stupid. Who am I, Dastang Tze-See, to call anyone stupid?

  She ate her meals alone. She ate a kind of curd that was made from sewage, processed by microorganisms. It was called War Tofu, and was odorless and absolutely tasteless.

  She was cold at night, shivering like a dog having dreams, under a single thin blanket.

  Oh, Lord Buddha, send him back, and I will beg his forgiveness, she would say, to the night sky that had no stars.

  And he would come back, and she would rail at him, and Crow would smile and bow. She was behaving exactly as a country girl should.

  Then he asked her to the Ceremony.

  This was so unasked for, so wonderful, that Third could not help but throw him out in a fury. Ceremony? How could she go with him, Crow Dung, to the Ceremony? She was already asked, she had many friends, he was to go away and silently ask himself where he thought he was.

  It was so beyond hope that anyone would take her to the Ceremony.

  The People had a Prince. The mention of his name was enough to make the bottom edge of their eyes sting with salt tears, for the Prince was from the old days, when the Country was Unconquered. He
was fat and healthy, with fine white teeth, and he was kind and clever. Even the Neighbors could see his fine qualities. That was why, thought Third, they put him back on the throne. Under their noses, he prayed for the deliverance of his People. Third kept pictures of him from the papers on her walls. She prayed to him. She loved him, not in the way you love a man, but in the way you love yourself and the things that make you. She was fierce on the subject of the Prince.

  And Crow had asked her to the Ceremony, where she would see him.

  She thought she was not worthy. She thought she was ugly and dark-skinned and could not dress suitably. When Crow asked her, she wanted to hide, hide her head and run from the house.

  “I am going with someone else,” she told him. She was so poor her nervous hands had nothing to play with.

  “That someone is very honored,” replied Crow.

  I hate you, thought Third. Why are you so honeyed? You are like a windup doll.

  “I am, I hope, a friend,” continued Crow. “So, please, I hope you will find this to your taste and that you will wear it to the Ceremony with your friends.”

  He laid out on the floor of Third’s house—oh, in the old days, she would not have had a house by herself, and if she did, he could not have been there alone with her, it was all a shadow show, but he wanted to believe. It was he who wanted to believe. He laid out on the floor a new dress. It was black, deep black, fine black, not the sort of black that goes patchy when it rains, good black. And it had gold leaves on it. Third almost wept.

  “Why did you do that? I did not ask you to do that!” she raged. “I don’t need your dresses.”

  “Of course. Oh, that is evident,” replied Crow. “But it would be such an honor for me if you wore it.”

  Third felt like weeping on her knees. “I will consider,” she said. She had two dresses that had long ago forgotten what color they were. When Crow was gone, she held the dress up to the light. The light caught on the leaves. There were twenty-one of them. An auspicious number. The dressmaker knew and probably wondered if anyone else knew or cared that the dress was an oracle. I care, Third said to the silent dressmaker. Then she felt panic. How will I tell him that I will go with him? I have been so rude. I have sent him away, will he come back?

  He did, but with no gifts. That is good, Third thought, you have given me enough. No gifts. It is time I treated you with some respect.

  And so she bowed when he entered. “Mr. Crow,” she said. “We find ourselves in strange situations, with no guide. And I think: here is one of the People, who serves in the army because he thinks this is right. Now this is an honorable thing. And I should not despise his rank. Or fear it. And I think: my fabled friends are as nothing to this one man who cares so much for his People and for his work. I should not be hard. And so I make an easy decision. One that is happy for me. I tell my friends: there is a special person who must take priority at this time. Next year this might not be the case. Perhaps I will not have the opportunity next year. Life is such that we are only given the opportunity to do the right thing once. And it is our duty to do the right thing.”

  And so she went to the Ceremony.

  The Ceremony was in the Old City, with its streets of stone. A foreign city, she thought as she walked through it. She hated right angles. So many broad avenues met at right angles, and she knew that foreigners must have made them. But suddenly the streets went small and sheltering again, and she thought: we built in stone once too. So she did not hate the stone any longer. She and Crow walked to the central square.

  The square was the most ancient part of the city of Saprang Song. There were umbrella pines all around it, and temples. The temples were made of volcanic rock or brick, with thin and delicate spires and smiling stone faces that were images of the Buddha. In the middle of the square was a concourse of green, tended grass with a gravel track around it, and bleachers along one side. It was used mainly for horse races now. Once a year, it was used for the Ceremony…

  A temporary stage had been built in the center of the green. A small orchestra in formal evening wear sat on it, miserable with the heat. Rows and rows of priests, in yellow, with freshly shaven heads sat in pride of place, just in front of the stage. Behind them, on the grass or in the bleachers, were the prosperous people of the city. They sat on blankets with picnic hampers, and they wore the clothes of the Big Country. They had beautiful children, little girls in pink or orange trousers with white socks and shiny black shoes, who ran laughing, holding ice creams. The women sat serenely on rugs, like princesses, their legs folded under them, their hair in smooth oiled domes with shiny tin stars on it.

  Third only had one shirt, which she had to wear with her new dress. The shirt was cheap cotton, with faded blue flowers, frayed around the collar. Her dull, unoiled hair, pulled back severely and tied with a bit of colored yarn, was that of a peasant. She clutched her meager little beaded purse and walked without looking around her, blind with shame.

  “Sergeant! Sergeant!” a voice was calling. “Sergeant Crow!” A man, sitting on a folding chair, wearing sunglasses and a uniform and a black beret, was waving to them. He was smoking a cigarette in a holder made of bone, his teeth clenched about it as he called again. He wore polished boots to the knee.

  As they approached, Crow bowed, grinning, and bowed again, hands held high above his head. “Colonel Tam Dah. Sir!” Crow said in an unpleasant, barking, official kind of voice. “Madame Tam Dah!” he said to the colonel’s wife. She inclined her head slightly, with an unperturbed smile. She looked away from him and through Third, smoothing down her trouser suit and adjusting her sunglasses.

  “We find this Ceremony most important for the People,” the colonel said. “A sense of continuity is most important, don’t you feel, Sergeant. Under the circumstances.”

  The circumstances, thought Third, are that the Neighbors hold us and that you City People have joined them. No wonder you lower your voice.

  “Certainly, Sir. The wisdom is apparent,” Crow said briskly. Even in his new green coolsuit and slicked black hair he looked wretched and small, dipping and bowing. Third moved from one foot to the other. The colonel’s wife tapped her knees with the tips of her fingers. A pair of earplugs were whispering music to her. On top of the hamper was a bar of broken-open chocolate. In a moment, politeness would demand that the colonel ask Crow to watch the Ceremony with them.

  Then Crow said, “I must make excuses, Colonel, Sir. But we have seats in the bleachers, and we must make our way to them.”

  “Of course, of course,” said the colonel, already looking elsewhere. He gave a lax wave of dismissal with his hand as it hung over the arm of the chair.

  “It has been delightful, Sir. Delightful, Madame,” Crow assured them.

  As Third walked away, she heard the wife say, her voice too loud because of her earplugs. “Hmm! The Crow and his Turtle.”

  Third stormed up the steps of the bleachers ahead of Crow. She pushed her way past a seller of sparrows in cages, and trod on the toes of people who stood up to let her pass. If I am a peasant, I will act like a peasant, she thought. She sat down without smiling and greeting the people next to her, without looking at Crow when he joined her. She answered him with fierce, short grunts.

  “Look, Third, people from the Big Country,” he whispered. Third had never seen Big People before. They had been given special places under a canopy by the stage. They arrived all together, lumbering like houses, tall, clumsy, with enormous booted feet, and they did indeed have skin the color of plucked chickens. Their wives, towering columns of crumpled cotton, dropped down onto their deck chairs, relieved of their own weight. They were all so large, it seemed, swollen with power, sprawling on the chairs, chewing gum. They frightened Third, and made her angry. What are they doing if they don’t want to be here, she thought. We don’t want them. They don’t understand. They don’t believe. This is our country. One of them had orange hair and was covered in speckles, like a fish. Or a Shark.

  Suddenl
y there was a sound like the sea, and all the People stood up and roared. It must be the Prince. Third looked wildly around her and finally saw, in the air, coming out of the north, a van, held aloft by four giant swans, and there was a man in it, and Third felt something unexpected catch in her chest. Yes, yes it was him, and he looked just like her pictures. He smiled and waved, and flung up both his arms over his head, like the Spirit of Happiness. The van swept low over the crowd, and he threw out handfuls of white lotus blossom. His suit and his tie were white. The swans were white, their long necks held straight out, their wings whistling. They began to pump backward, furiously, and the carriage was lowered toward the stage. Guards ran out to steady it. The orchestra struck up a cheerful, seesawing song that the Prince had composed himself. Before the van was quite down, he launched himself over the side, like a fat, happy schoolboy. “Up! Up!” he shouted, and suddenly, from behind the stage, a flock of balloons was released.

  They were silver, thousands of them, one for each year of the Country’s history. They all seemed to be blown toward the bleachers. They wriggled their way through the air, toward the People, and each of them, in silver, was a sculptured portrait of the Prince, and each one of them said, with the Prince’s voice, “An offering. An offering to the Buddha. A holy offering.” At the ends of each of their tethers, which were segmented metal bands, was a three-fingered hand. The hands reached out, and the People eagerly surged forward, reaching over each other’s shoulders to place earrings or rice cakes into them. Third reached out with one small brass coin. The balloon’s hand felt warm and rubbery. “Thank you, sister,” the balloon said. Third’s face was reflected back at her from the Prince’s own.

  “To Heaven! To Heaven!” said the Prince, and the balloons sucked in air, and swelled, and slowly, en masse, began to rise. The Prince urged them on with great windmill circlings of his arms. The priests, who had been still, leapt to their feet and began to bash gongs and bells and cymbals. The balloons interwove with each other, flashing with reflected sunlight against the pure blue of the sky. Spots of sunlight flittered across the crowd, dazzling them, making them yelp. Then rising above all the other noise, slow and heavy, there began a song.