by Meg Elison
“The last time we gave them free rein to use poison, we had people eating poisoned deer. They’re irresponsible with it.”
“Can’t we just fortify the silo to keep the raccoons out?” Emory sat back in his chair, his long legs splayed out in front of him. He was strikingly handsome, as brown as a yearling deer with thick hair and a cropped beard. “We could build it up at the base, with metal bars that they can’t get through or around, right?”
Janet spoke softly, her hand resting on the swell beneath her deerhide dress. “They’re too smart, that’s the problem. You can’t keep them out of anything.”
Bronwen had spotted Etta by this time and was staring her down. “Can’t keep you out, either, can we, child?” But she was smiling, showing her still-healthy teeth.
“Mother Bronwen. Mother Carla. Mother Jenn. Janet. Emory.” Etta nodded to each of them in turn and they nodded back. Each smiled as well, except for Carla.
Emory rose smoothly, shocking Etta with his height as he always did.
The Lion was about that tall. Bigger, though. She looked him up and down before she accepted his proffered seat.
“Thank you, Emory. Mother Bronwen, you know I’m always looking to free women and girls.”
“Of course, child.” Bronwen’s eyes were looking over the sheets of paper again. She was expecting a typical report.
Etta leaned forward and clamped her hands on the edge of the table. “Mother Bronwen, Mother Jenn, I have to tell you something. There is a man in Estiel who calls himself the Lion.”
Bronwen looked up then, her cloudy brown eyes very focused. Carla rose, and Janet clutched her belly with both hands.
“He’s holding a harem of women and girls, I don’t know how many, but surely too many. I was able to take a child from him and return her home, but we left many more behind.”
Carla put her mouth beside the ear of one of the young boys at the door, and moments later, the boy ran from his post. Etta knew the boys were runners, and Carla had probably sent him for tea. She ignored Carla and kept talking.
“They’re all on the upper floors of a riverfront hotel. A group of armed raiders with a good-size boat could clean the place out. The trouble . . . The trouble is . . .”
Carla was standing with her freckled arms crossed, frowning at her.
She knows. She knows about me and Alice. That’s why she’s giving me this look.
Etta swallowed hard. “He’s got a lot of men. And he’s got . . . well, lions. That’s how he got his name. Two, on chains. One lion, one tiger, and full-grown. Probably inbred as hell, but they still look deadly. I don’t know how many, I just saw the two. But it’s dangerous. I couldn’t do it alone or I’d have done it already.”
Bronwen was looking at Carla. Emory was staring at his boots. Etta realized that no one in the room would meet her eye.
What the hell?
The messenger boy returned, beaming. Behind him, Alice walked in. Flora followed right behind her.
Carla reached out and took her daughter’s hand. “Alice came here yesterday, with our newcomer. They had something very similar to tell us, didn’t they?”
Alice and Flora exchanged a glance.
Just set me on fire.
Carla waggled her ear trumpet. “What’s that?”
Bronwen rolled her eyes. “Flora, you’re from a city that’s loyal to this Lion?”
Flora took a step forward and nodded warily. She looked clean and rested, and her eyes kept darting to Alice.
Nobody needs to set me on fire, I’ll just burn from the inside out.
“Yes, in Jeff City. We pay him tribute in goods and women.”
“Is he a slaver?” Janet looked uneasy.
Flora shrugged. “Not really. He keeps women, he doesn’t sell them. And catamites.”
“But they’re not free to leave,” Etta began, with a murderous edge in her voice. “Being held in slavery isn’t better than being sold constantly.”
“Nobody said it was, child.” Bronwen’s voice was maddeningly even and aloof. “But the situation is complicated.” She gestured to Flora.
Flora found her voice slowly. “The Lion . . . he’s heavily armed. There are more smiths and bullet makers in Estiel than in any other city I’ve heard of. All they do is make bullets and knives. And he’s got thousands of men, easily. Then there are those cats to think about. I don’t know that the women there are poorly treated. They’re not starved and they look—”
“You don’t—” Etta started, but Bronwen cut her off with a look.
“They look alright,” Flora finished lamely.
Eight in, eight out.
Etta’s nightmare stirred in the recesses of her conscious mind and she lifted her right foot slightly without knowing she was doing it.
Carla patted Alice’s hand and let it drop. “You’re trying to raise an army for a doomed rescue that doesn’t even need to happen. Etta, there’s no call for this kind of thing.”
Alice looked guilty, but she agreed with her mother. “Didn’t the Lion offer trade for som? Flora told me that he’d pay us very well, including trade in women. We could free them peacefully, without risking anyone.”
Heads nodded around the room, and Etta realized she had lost this battle before she woke up this morning.
“Child, there’s no call for this kind of fight. You’ll see that when you’re older.” Carla crinkled her eyes, not smiling.
Etta’s hands were clenched at her side, and Flora would not return her gaze.
“Good Mother, respectfully, you don’t know what it’s like out there. If we agree to trade with the Lion, then we’re agreeing that women should be traded. We become just like them.”
Janet shifted uncomfortably. Jenn began rolling up papers and moving them to the far sides of the table.
Etta took a step toward Bronwen, cutting both Alice and Flora out of her line of sight. “And sooner or later, the Paws of the Lion will reach Nowhere. They’ll come here, and we’ll lose to them, one way or the other. What I’m proposing is that we get ahead of that.”
Bronwen was shaking her head. “That’s not what we do here.”
Oh, fuck this.
“It’s what the Unnamed would have done.”
Bronwen’s thin lips disappeared altogether. When she spoke, it was as if she were biting off every word to spit it into Etta’s face. “The Unnamed left women behind all her life. She gave them drugs and hoped for the best, and she only killed when she had to. What you’re doing is not what she would do, it’s what a man would do. Go start a fight to die in, whether it’s the right thing or not. Go take some women, whatever the cost. Maybe living on the road has made it hard for you to think like a rational woman. Maybe you should stay home for a while and think about that.”
Etta’s neck stiffened and she shot a glance at Emory. He was staring at his huge, empty hands.
When Etta looked at Flora, she didn’t know what she expected to see there. Triumph, maybe. But Flora’s gray eyes were full of pity. Alice held her head high and returned Etta’s blazing gaze, and Etta realized that Alice had lined her eyes exactly as Flora did. Maybe with the very same tool, this morning.
Disgusted, she turned to leave.
“You could always become a Midwife,” Bronwen called to her back. “When you’re ready to settle into a woman’s real work, and do as the Unnamed actually did.”
Etta didn’t answer but stalked out, too angry to speak. She heard jogging steps behind her and whirled, expecting an apologetic Alice or a tearful Flora. But it was Emory who stood there.
“I’d go with you,” he said. “If that was the mission. I’d help you take down this Lion. For what it’s worth, I think you’re right.”
Etta huffed a sigh.
“Men aren’t rational, you know.” He put his hands at his hips and leaned back a little. “It’s not our fault, it just how we’re made. We don’t bleed like women, so we have to find ways to bleed like men. It leads us into foolhardy things. Lik
e the wars of the old world. Or keeping lions on a leash.” He smiled at her, ducking his head to seem smaller.
“It isn’t foolhardy to take a heroic action,” Etta said. “It’s the things we do to change the world.”
Emory shrugged, crossing his arms. “Maybe. But trading with him does seem more sensible than your way. My way. Our way, you know?”
Our way. Eddy’s way.
She couldn’t bring herself to thank Emory. She squinted up at him in the early sunlight. “What if I went without approval? Just on my own, maybe with a couple of raiders? Would you come with?”
He laughed a little. “I’m on the council because they think I’m not like other men.” He looked back over his shoulder. “I just wanted to tell you that I know how you feel, not to encourage you. There are easier ways. Less violent ways. That’s all.”
He jogged back without saying good-bye.
When Alice and Flora returned to Alice’s house, it was clear they had not expected to see Etta there.
She stood against the front door, one leg folded to put her foot flat against it, head down. When she heard them approaching, she did not look up.
“Etta?” Alice sounded a little worried.
“You told me I had to knock next time, so here I am.” Etta looked at Flora, not at Alice.
Alice flushed beneath her freckles and moved toward the door. “Please come in, Etta.”
The three of them went inside and Etta fought the urge to grab Alice by the shoulders and kiss her while staring Flora down.
Instead, she sat on the low couch in Alice’s front room, just off her laboratory with a view of her greenhouse.
Flora stood against the wall with her hands clasped behind her.
If she could fade into the wall, she’d do it.
“I just wanted to come over and thank you for running straight to your mother with my report. Saved me some trouble.”
Alice poured water into a tall glass. “Thirsty?”
Etta kept her eyes on Flora as she answered. “Yeah, I am. Every time I try to get a drink, someone else seems to get there first.”
Flora blushed and looked away.
I don’t believe this. I’m out of sight for less than a day and they’re fucking.
She took the glass of water, and Alice sat across from her on a hassock. She motioned to Flora, who sat on the floor beside her.
“So, are you part of her Hive now?”
Flora would not meet her eyes.
Alice reached up calmly and snapped her fingers in Etta’s face.
Etta was so shocked she nearly dropped her glass of water.
“You can’t keep coming here and acting like a little boy, Etta. I won’t have it. I don’t owe you anything. And yes, I went to my mother with useful information. And yes, Flora is staying with me. Indefinitely.”
“I’m a little boy? I’m acting like a man? How can you say that to me, when you’re sleeping with a—”
Etta grasped for the words.
“Horsewoman?” Alice arched one perfect golden eyebrow. “Are you angry because everybody already knows your stories, or because you’re not getting what you want?”
For a moment she could see herself clearly throwing the water in Alice’s face. She gulped it down instead.
Flora spoke first, laying a hand on Alice’s shoulder. “You’d never be able to take the Lion’s harem, Etta.” She said the name a little too hard, landing on the t’s like d’s, and Etta knew she had nearly called her Eddy again.
“You’ll just make things worse,” Flora continued. “Things can work as they are, and you can do good within it.”
Etta clenched her jaw and counted her breaths.
Alice nodded her chin toward the greenhouse outside. “I can make you enough som to clean him out. You can have gallons of the stuff, more than you could carry. I never run short, and the bees are doing so well this year I have enough wax to seal up every bottle I’ve got. You can bring home all of them, and nobody gets hurt. Let me help you.”
“It’s not enough.”
“Oh, Etta, it’s never enough for you.” Alice looked up at Flora. “We have so much more than most of the women in the world, and you don’t appreciate it at all.”
“She’s not even a woman!” As soon as she said it, Etta was sorry.
Alice, as ever, rose above the bait. “I know exactly what she is. You’re as narrow-minded as a monogamous man, you know that? We’ve always been outside of that, with our own secrets. Flora is just like us, but you’re too closed off to see it. It’s the same. Do you want to go after the Lion to stop him, or to take his place?”
Etta bolted up. Her voice shook. “I do want the som. As much as you can make. I’m going to come back with them, and I’m going to get their stories recorded. And then you’ll get it. Everyone can tell me then that I’m a narrow-minded irrational man.”
She turned on Flora. “You told me he wants the som for the breeders, is that right? To keep them calmed down, to take their children from them, is that it? Have you seen them up close? Have you seen how childbirth tears them apart? Have you drunk the milk of dead women?”
I’m not going back there with a trade for him, Etta thought with dead certainty. Never again. I won’t trade with him or anyone else.
Flora had averted her face from Etta’s. She was crying.
“I’ve seen things you couldn’t understand,” Flora said.
“You know it isn’t better here, don’t you? You can’t be with Alice, not really. No one will let it happen.”
“It is better here,” Flora said, looking at the floor. “I know you can see that. You’re not stupid.”
“Better isn’t good enough.” Etta’s throat closed up and she knew her voice would betray her if she spoke again.
Alice laughed a little, standing up. “Etta, what do you want? We’re left alone. It’s not like they’d haul us out into the street and kill us, sell us to men for doing what we do. It’s just frowned on. You can’t live with your mother raising an eyebrow?”
“It’s not about that.”
It’s all the same thing, she wanted to scream. Slaves and harems and my mother’s eyebrows. We can’t be what we are, because of how we were born.
She said nothing.
“Etta, I think you’d better go.” Alice’s voice was cool but firm.
Swearing and shaking, Etta went.
The smell of Alice’s house faded from her nostrils as she walked through the marketplace on her way back home.
The springtime stalls were full of first fruits and bright colors. Sweet corn was everywhere in bushels, ready to be practically given away. She stopped and traded a few old-world trinkets for some fresh berries with cream. She ate ravenously, still angry and feeling like she’d never be full. There would be a community dinner tonight, with spring lamb roasted for everyone. She’d have to be there.
She wanted to bind and change her voice and her walk. She wanted to be harder, simpler. Her own self.
I don’t care what they call me. Fuck Alice. She doesn’t know me.
Being Eddy doesn’t solve it. Would moving in with Alice solve it?
She spun, unable to point to true north. She didn’t know where to go with that feeling.
There was nowhere to go.
Ina’s house was empty. Etta didn’t want to go there but she didn’t know what to do with herself. Alone in her bedroom, she finally pulled out her binder and put it on. She sat down with her book and pen and waited.
When it finally came, it was as if her hand moved without her volition.
The Book of Eddy
She stared at the name. It was the first time she had written it down.
Eddy
Eddy
Eddy
She wrote it a different way each time, trying out slightly different styles. She held the pen roughly and scratched the words down.
Eddy was born in the chair.
Once the words were written, her mind could not stop itself.
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The chair the chair the chair the rust.
She slammed the purple book shut, knowing that the words hadn’t dried and would be stamped in reverse on the opposite page.
She unbound herself, gasping for breath like she had come up from under water.
Eight in eight out.
Where are you right now?
But it was too late, she was in the chair.
It was over a hundred years old, and every move in it screeched like a caged bird. The rusty stirrups beneath her bare feet were like sharp crusty claws digging into her skin. She could smell everything, the dust of the place, the sweat of a stranger.
Etta vomited a splatter of berries and cream that looked like foamy blood across the floor. She wiped her face with the back of her hand and went and found Julian (son of Carla) and told him there was a mess in Ina’s house she needed him to clean up. Julian scurried immediately and Etta watched him go. He had none of his mother’s traits—not her white streak or the strange eyes that made Alice so unusual and beautiful. He was brown eyed and brown haired and so pleasantly normal that it calmed her to call him “father” and send him on his way.
An accident. A decision of who to sleep with and a risky stew of blood. You get blue eyes, you get brown eyes. You get light skin, you get dark. You’re a boy and you’re a girl.
Etta went to the shrine of the Unnamed and knelt there in the semidarkness until her legs went numb. She thought of Errol and Ricardo somehow finding and following her trail to the west, walking backward to the sea.
The dinner bell woke her and she rose gingerly, letting her legs warm up slowly. The memory of her cramps seemed very long ago but felt very near.
Ina waved to her the minute she walked into the hall, and she went dutifully to sit with her mother. She could smell roasting lamb with rosemary and sage, and her stomach growled. Men carried smoking trays of roast potatoes and green beans and corn out to the long tables, and bread followed with huge bowls of butter. Etta’s mouth watered, and even Ina licked her lips.