The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women

by Alex Dally MacFarlane

  I am Somadeva. I am a poet, a teller of tales.

  THE QUEEN OF EREWHON

  Lucy Sussex

  “Hey you! Story-eater! Devourer of lives! Leave us alone! GET OUT!”

  Those are the first sounds on the tape: Idris spitting at me, refusing to be interviewed. I wind on a little, until I hear a different voice – Sadry speaking.

  Sadry: … ghosts. The house at Erewhon could have been full of them for all anyone knew, for there were only our family of three and the hired hands rattling around the building. Erewhon had followed the Rule for generations, not that I knew that. I was only a child; I think three. Things hadn’t got explained to me yet. I had no idea how odd my upbringing was, for the High country, with only one father.

  One night I thought I heard crying, so I got out of bed, curious. I wandered along the upstairs corridor which all the sleeping rooms led off. When I got a little older, I learnt why this space was called “Intrigue” in all the Rule houses. It kinks and curves, with crannies for people to hide and overhear – hence the name.

  Me: A public space?

  Sadry: Or a private one. I followed the sound to the outside wall, to a window with a recessed ledge. The shutters were closed and the winter curtains drawn, but between both was a space where someone might sit comfortably and that was from where the sound came. Now it sounded human, and female. I heard soft words, a male voice responding. Two people were hidden there! Curious, I stood and listened. But it was bitter frost weather, and rather than give myself away by teeth-chatter, I retreated until just round the corner I found a basket. It was filled with rags, either bought from Scavengers or our old clothes (Highlanders never throw anything away). So I climbed into it without making a sound, for it was an old Tech thing, of perlastic, rather than wicker. I curled up warmly in the contents and listened in comfort, not that I could understand much. Eventually I fell asleep, and woke in dawnlight to find my mother bending over me. And unthinkingly I blurted out the last words I had heard, which were: “I only want to be married to the one I love best, not all the others.”

  My mother said: “Where did you hear that?” and so I pointed at the ledge.

  “The two lovers, there, last night.”

  She looked at me hard, then flung the curtain back. It wasn’t me who screeched, it was her – at the sight of dust thick and undisturbed on the ledge. Then she scooped me up in her arms and went running down Intrigue, to the room she and my father shared, a small room, his younger son’s room.

  Idris: What did he do?

  Sadry: Took us both into bed, calmed us down, for now I was hysterical too, and then very gently questioned me. What did the voices sound like? Could I imitate them? When I was as dry of information as a squeezed fruit, he said: “It could have been any unhappy Queen of Erewhon.”

  And then he told me about living under the Rule, of his first wife, his brother, and their husband-lover.

  Polyandry. The first time I heard the word I thought it a girl’s name: Polly Andree. The misapprehension, though instantly corrected, stuck in my mind, so that I persistently thought of the woman at the centre of these group marriages as a Polly. And here I was in Polyandry Central, as anthropologists called it, the Highlands of Suff, and I still couldn’t shake my personal terminology. It was a bad slip to make when trying to convince Bel Innkeeper to find me space, in a town already filled to bursting for the Assizes.

  “We call them Queens,” she said.

  I’d listened to tapes of Suff accents but the actuality was something else, my comprehension of it being delayed, with embarrassing pauses at the ends of sentences. When I finally understood, I replied, too hastily: “I know. Like bees.”

  All the while we had talked on the inn’s back verandah a steady stream of fat brown bees had zoomed to and from some nearby hive, so this comment was both dead obvious and instantly regrettable.

  Bel snorted. “You Northerners! Think you know everything, with your new-Tech ways! Ever seen a hive, ever seen a Rule House? No, that’s why you’re here, to find all about the funny Suffeners, isn’t it?”

  I said, carefully: “Okay, I’m what you call a story-eater, an anthropologist. But I can understand you’ve had a gutful of being studied and written up. I’m not here to sensationalize you, but to observe the court case.”

  Bel stopped folding the inn washing and gave me her undivided attention. “Why?”

  “Because it’s important.”

  “It’s brought everyone down from the mountains and into this valley! How’m I supposed to house ’em all? And you, too.”

  She rocked on the balls of her feet, thinking. “Well, since you’re here, I’d better be hospitable. And teach you about queen bees, too.” She pointed at an outbuilding. “That’s the honey-hut, and the one free space I’ve got. Take it or leave it!”

  The hut was tiny: between pallet and beekeeping equipment there was barely any room for me. Above the bed was what I at first took to be a Tech photoimage, but it proved to be a window looking onto the mountains, made of the glass and wooden surround of a picture frame. In fact the whole building was constructed of scavenged oddments from the days of affluence: flattened tins, scraps of timber, and other usables slapped together in a crude but habitable mess. I was used to recycling, even in the neo-industrial North, but I had never seen such a higgledy-piggledy assortment before. It was to prove typical of much of the town itself.

  I lay on the pallet and dozed for a while, lulled by the soporific hum from the nearby hives. When I woke, I tested my tape recorder – a precious thing, not because it was a genuine Tech artefact, but because it was a copy, its workings painstakingly rediscovered. Of course, it wasn’t as good; nothing was, for we would never be as rich, nor as spendthrift, as our forebears. For over a century now, since the Crash, we had been adapting to an economy of scarcity. It was the adaptations, rather than the antiques, or the neo copies, that interested me – particularly the Rule Houses, and at their centre, the Queen Polly Andree. How would it feel, to have multiple husbands? And what would happen if you grew tired of them?

  Sadry: My father said, “Nobody knows how the Rule began, just as nobody knows who bred the mountain Lori to be our herd animals. A Northerner, a story-eater, once told me the Rule was a pragmatic evolution, practiced by other mountain peoples. He said large populations cannot be sustained in marginal highland. One wife for several men – who are linked by blood, or ties of love – limits breeding, and means the family land can be passed undivided through the generations. It made sense; more than what the Lowlanders say, which is that we Highlanders deliberately chose complicated sex lives! Yet he spoke as if we were specimens, like a strain of Lori. That annoyed me, so I wouldn’t give him what he had come for, which was my history.

  “When I was the age you are now, my brother Bryn and I were contracted to marry Nissa of Bulle, who would grow to be our wife and Queen of Erewhon. When I was twelve and Bryn fifteen – the same age as Nissa – we travelled to Bulle to ‘steal’ our bride, as is custom. When we got back Erewhon celebrated with the biggest party I ever saw and afterwards Nissa spent the night with Bryn. I was too young to be a husband to her, though we would play knucklebones, or other children’s games. That way Nissa and I grew friends, and then, after several years, husband and wife. But we lived without passion, all three of us. So when love did strike Nissa and Bryn, it did like a thunderbolt. And the lightning cracked through this house, destroying nearly everybody within it.”

  Market day in the Highlands is a spectacle, even without the added excitement of an Assizes and a sensational lawsuit. I woke early, to the sounds of shouts, goods being trundled down the main street, the shrill cries of Lori. When I came in the meal area of the Inn was full. Bel was cutting buckwheat bread; she handed me a slice, spread with Lori butter, at the same time jerking her head at the open door. I took the hint and went outside.

  Immediately I found myself in the middle of a herd of Lori, who assessed the stranger intelligently from un
der their black topknots, then parted and pattered around me. The animal was a miracle of genetic engineering, combining the best of sheep, llama and goat, but with three-toed feet causing less damage to mountain soils than hooves. Like the other Highland animals it was dark, resistant to skin cancer; a boon in an area cursed with thin ozone, even so long after the Crash. Various studies had posited that the Lori designer might have been the social architect who engineered the lives of Highlanders with the Rule. If so, I wondered why human genes had not been manipulated as well, given that these people had insufficient protective melanin, varying as they did from pale to brown.

  Suffeners met by sunlight would be shrouded in the robes of Lori homespun that served all purposes, from formal to cold-weather wear, wide flax hats and the kohl that male and female daubed around their eyes in lieu of the precious Tech sunglasses. But inside, or under protective awnings such as those strung over the market square, hats would be doffed, robes flipped back like cloaks, displaying bare skin, gaudy underobes and the embroidered or beaded or tattooed emblems of the Highland Houses. It was a paradox: outwardly, dour puritanism; inwardly, carnival.

  I stood on the fringes, observing the display of goods and people. Nobody in sight was armed, well not visibly, but I had read too many accounts of bloodshed and the consequent blood-price not to sense the underlying menace in the marketplace. The most obvious source was the young men, who tended towards ostentatious ornament, an in-your-face statement of aggressive sexual confidence. The women were less showy, but had an air of defensibility, as if being hardbitten was a desirable female trait in the Highlands. Small wonder, I thought, recalling the mock kidnap in the marriage ceremony, and how common real raids had been until recently.

  I felt a little too conspicuously a visitor, so bought a secondhand robe, the wool soft but smelly, and draped it over my shoulders. Thus partially disguised, I wandered among the stalls. A one-eyed man watched over Scavenged Tech rubbish, cans, wires, tires; a nursing mother examined the parchments of designs offered by the tattooist; a group of teenage boys, herders from their staffs, noisily tried on strings of beads; and two husky young men haggled over a tiny jar proffered for sale by an elderly woman. Hungry for overheard talk, information, I lingered by the tattoos, my interest not feigned, for I was particularly taken with one design, a serpent eating its own tail. Conversation ebbed around me, and I learnt the one-eyed Scavenger had found a new site, that the herders weren’t impressed by the selection of beads, that the mother wished to mark that she now had children by all three of her husbands with a celebratory tattoo, and that the men were buying a philtre or aphrodisiac, for use on a third party. Now I was slipping into the flow of Suff speak, I quickly comprehended the old woman’s spiel: “If Celat had tried my potion on Erewhon, none of this would have happened.”

  All within earshot involuntarily glanced up at the bulk of the biggest building in the town, the Courthouse/lock-up. I had, in my wanderings through the market, seen many emblems of greater or lesser Houses, a distinction the Highlanders made by the size of the landholdings. The signs were displayed on people and also the stalls, signalling the goods that were the specialties of each House. I had been making a mental checklist, and had noted two emblems unseen: the blue swirl of Erewhon, and the red swordblade of Celat. Those entitled to bear them currently resided within the lock-up, while the merits of their respective cases were decided. On the one hand, unlawful detention and threatened rape; on the other, abduction, arson and murder. No wonder the town was packed.

  Sadry: The place of graves at Erewhon is a birch grove and as we walked through it, hand in hand, my parents named each tree: “This is Bryn’s, this Moli the trader’s, by chance at Erewhon that night and for ever after.” It was a peaceful spot, even with the new thicket of saplings, Nissa’s work. I could believe that any ghost here would sleep and not walk – which was precisely why I had been brought there.

  Idris: Nissa and her lover were buried in the snow, weren’t they? Or at Bulle?

  Sadry: I don’t know …

  [A clattering interruption at this point, the turnkeys bringing in that night’s meal, the sound also coming from below, as the Celats, housed on the ground floor, were simultaneously fed.]

  Sadry: On that day, or one soon after, I saw above the birches a line of pack Lori winding their way down the mountainside. Their flags had the device of a bee: Westron, our nearest neighbours. And that proved to be the first of many visits from the local and not so local Houses.

  Me: Including the Celats?

  Sadry: [nods] The message would be always be the same: Erewhon has been decimated, and you need an alliance. That meant, me + whoever was the highest bidder. But my father said to all and sundry that they had made such offers before, when he was the sole survivor of Erewhon House. And had he not responded by a second marriage with a lowland woman, outside the Rule? I, as his only child and heiress of Erewhon, also should have the opportunity of making a choice, when I was old enough.

  Me: They agreed to that?

  Sadry: With grumbling, yes.

  Ever since contact was re-established between North and Suff, nearly a century after the Crash, anthropologists had been fascinated by the Rule. Much of their interest was prurient, with accounts of giant beds for the Queen and her consorts (a lurid fantasy, given the Intrigue configuration). I had in my pack a report positing the mechanisms by which Highland men could apparently switch from het monogamy, albeit with a brother or brothers involved in the marriage; to bisex, when an additional unrelated male entered the House, a partner for both husbands and wife; to homosex, with the Queen relationship purely platonic. It was not exactly light reading, but I persisted with it, lying on the pallet, the hum of bees filling my ears. In the end the graphs and diagrams were too much for me, and I simply stared at the wall and thought.

  On, for instance, how easily the complex relationships in a Rule marriage could turn nasty, Nissa of Erewhon being merely an extreme example. Yet divorce, with people “walking out and down”, i.e. to the Lowlands or to join the itinerant traders, was uncommon. Highlanders had a vested interest in conciliation, in preserving the group marriages: that was why many houses contained Mediators, skilled negotiators. The ideal was embodied in a toy I had bought at the market that little girls wore dangling from their belts: a lady-doll on a string, with a dependent number of men-dolls.

  Why, I wondered, dandling the puppets, did sexual options not exist for women as well as men, with, say, linked girl-dolls? Were the Queens simply too busy with their men? Feeling frustrated I wandered outside and found Bel attending to the hives.

  “Come see!” she said, and so I donned over my Highland robes the spare veil and gloves hanging behind the hut door. Bel had lifted the roof off a hive, and I stared over her black shoulder at the teeming mass of insects.

  “I think I understand,” I finally said, “why a hive is unlike a Rule House.”

  She nodded, invisible behind her veil. “Ever see a Hive where the drones bossed the show? Or without any other female bees? It would be impossible …”

  “As a House with two Queens?” I finished.

  She straightened, holding a comb-frame in her gloved hand, staring across the valley at the Courthouse roof.

  “You’re learning, story-eater.”

  Sadry: Highlanders say, when you die, you go downriver and that is what happened to me. My life at Erewhon with my parents, then my father only (after my mother went, as the Lowlanders say, underground) that is upriver to me. Everything since is the next life.

  [She spoke with such intensity that I almost reached out and touched her, to belie the words.]

  I went out alone after a stray Lori, the best yearling we had. Our herders had given up searching and my father was ill in bed, but I stubbornly kept looking. Most likely the animal had drowned, so I followed the Lori paths along a stream raging with snowmelt. Almost at its junction with the great river that runs from Erewhon to the lowlands, I saw a patch of colour in a larg
e thornbush overhanging the torrent: a drowned bird, swept downstream until it had caught in the thorns. But though it was shaped like the black finches of the Highlands, the feathers were white-gold-red: a throwback to the days before the hole in the sky opened. I wanted the feathers for ornament, so leant on the thornbush, to better reach out – but the bank collapsed beneath me.

  The water wasn’t deep and the bush cartwheeled in its flow, taking me, my robes entangled in the branches, into the great river. Up and down I was ducked, alternately breathing and drowning, torn by thorns, or dashed against riverstones. All I could do was grab at air when I could …

  [She paused and I again noted the fine white lines on her exposed skin, a tracery of thornmarks. Worst was the scar tissue in the palm of one hand, where she must have clutched at the bush despite the pain, in the process defacing and almost obscuring her birth marker, the Erewhon tattoo.]

  I think miles went by, hours – for the next thing I recall was the evening moon. I gazed up at it, slowly comprehending that I lay still, out of the helter-skelter race of the river, and that something wet and sluggish held me fast. From the taste of silt in my mouth I knew that the bush had stuck in the mudflats where the river widens. In the moonlight I saw solid land, shoreline, but when I tried to struggle towards it I found I had no strength left. But I lived! And surely my father’s herders would soon find me.