by Janis Ian
It had been dark for hours now. The street-lights had come on as the sunlight faded, yes, but with the trees that lined the pavements still in leaf they were as private as if they were alone in all the world. Marnissey couldn’t remember a time when she’d been so happy.
Reaching up for Camm’s face in the dark she kissed him tenderly, and stood in the warm embrace of his arms for a long moment before she shook herself free and walked on. "I don’t expect to be welcomed into your family, Camm, except as your wife. I mean I won’t be expecting any special treatment. All I ask for is a chance to show that I love you, and I’ll be happy."
This was her block; it was just three houses down, now, to her house, where the light at the door was still turned up brightly. Waiting for her. The rest of the lights in the house were already down, so her parents had gone to bed. She felt a little rush of grateful relief for that: no confrontations would ruin her memories of tonight’s perfect romance. "If there’s anyone could over-come their reservations, it’d be you, Mar," Camm said with humorous resignation in his voice, slowing his steps as they got nearer the house. "I’ve never met anyone with so much determination—"
Something was wrong.
The small hairs at the back of Marnissey’s neck prickled in a nervous rush of reaction to something she could not quite sense: and the shadows exploded, the darkness on either side of the pavement rising up and rushing at her screaming unintelligible curses. Something hit her, struck her in the stomach, she fell down backwards onto the pavement but something warm broke her fall—Camm.
She knew that it was Camm, though she could not recognize his voice. They were hitting him. Kicking him. She couldn’t breathe, and just as she began to gasp for air something cold and viscous and heavy struck her in the face and filled her mouth. Her nose. Her eyes, her ears, it stank, her head was stuck in something horrible; struggling to free herself Marnissey heard the final taunts from her attackers as they fled—"Blood-soiler. Watch the shit between your legs!"
Blood-soiler. It was a bucket, over her head. Marnissey pushed it the rest of the way off and tried to clear her mouth and nose of filth, desperate for air. A bucket filled with mud and excrement, she was covered with it, and collapsed over Camm’s slowly struggling body in despair. Why weren’t people coming to help them? Hadn’t anybody heard? How could they not have heard, she was sure she must have screamed, she’d heard Camm yell when they’d started hitting him, a shout of outraged fury mixed with pain—
It seemed to take forever for the police to come. There was blood all over Camm’s face; she couldn’t stop retching. They helped her up and into the ground-car, and took her down to the police station.
~~~~~
The priest from the university chapel had come, Uncle Danitsch, the wrong priest—the young one, the sincere one, the strict one. Marnissey went to Uncle Birsle when she went to chapel at all because Birsle was much more tolerant of the compromises that daily life demanded, but Birsle wasn’t on duty at this time of night. The matron had brought Marnissey a dampened towel so that she could wipe her face, but she stank, and she could taste the obscene mix of hatred and contempt with which she’d been assaulted in her mouth still.
"Thank you for your statement," the policeman said. "We take these things very seriously indeed, Miss. We’ll be investigating as aggressively as we can. We won’t tolerate this sort of ugliness in our city."
It was comforting and it was nice to hear, but Marnissey wasn’t sure she could believe it, because ever since she’d gotten to the station she’d had an uncomfortable suspicion that they were laughing at her. That they were sorry she was hurt, but believed that she’d been asking for it, as though she was to blame in some way for having been assaulted. "You haven’t gotten anywhere with any of the other incidents, though, have you?"
Her accusation came out sounding a bit more savage than she’d intended. Uncle Danitsch shifted uncomfortably where he stood leaning up against the heavy table in the interview-room, but held his peace. He hadn’t been at the school for very long. She hadn’t heard much about him, but if she put her mind to it she remembered that Danitsch was pledged to Spotless Purity.
She didn’t like that thought. Spotless Purity was one of the Nine Filial Saints, and his Order maintained the genealogies of the Dolgorukij—especially the great houses, yes, but also of all the rest of the Holy Mother’s children. Spotless Purity could tell if you’d ever had a Sarvaw amongst your ancestors, and would, too, if there was a risk that you might marry into an unsoiled family line and compromise the purity of its Aznir or Arakcheyek or Telchik blood with that of slaves.
"’Other incidents,’ Miss, I’m not quite sure I follow," the policeman said, very bland-voiced, very professional. Down at the foot of the table Camm was shaking his head; she could see him, out of the corner of her eye, but she refused to notice. It wasn’t the first time someone had assaulted Camm since he’d come here. This had to be added to the reports, to construct a case, to build a dossier.
"You know perfectly well. Camm was attacked in the library three months ago. They hurt his arm, his leg, his knee." It had been the beginning of their relationship, in a sense. She’d noticed him before, of course; she could hardly not have noticed a Sarvaw among the other students on campus.
Still, it hadn’t been until he’d disappeared for a few days—and then reappeared with a limp and a bandaged face—that she'd started to pay attention to who he really was. She’d wondered what he’d done to have deserved a beating. Then she’d realized that he hadn’t done anything, anything at all, except be Sarvaw in a Telchik school.
"I’m sorry, Miss, but we ran a check when you came in. This is the first report of any such blood-soil incident all year, excusing your presence, Uncle."
She couldn’t believe that. The people who’d attacked Camm had told him to stay away from Telchik women; Camm had described the whole horrible thing to her—what he remembered of it. How could that not have been reported as a blood-soil crime?
She turned her head to stare at Camm in confused consternation, but Camm had turned his head away, and there was something in the ashamed angle of his bent neck that explained it all to her. He hadn’t reported it. He hadn’t wanted to make trouble, he’d always told her he knew he had to put up with a certain amount of mischief because he was an outsider but she hadn’t realized he was as determined as that. He hadn’t reported the beating; had he reported any of the other incidents?
Uncle Danitsch intervened before she could confront Camm, demand he tell the police about the earlier assaults. "If you’re satisfied with her statement, officer, I’ll take this young lady home. The doctor’s coming for her friend, I understand?"
For whatever reason this simple question was too much for Marnissey to bear, and why it should be so after everything else that had happened to her tonight Marnissey couldn’t say—but it was. "He’s not my friend," she said, and began to cry at last. "He’s my fiancé."
Camm rose stiffly from where he was and came to her, embracing her to comfort her. She wept. This hadn’t been the way she’d wanted to announce her engagement; was it to be the pattern of her future?
~~~~~
Now that the news was out she spent each available moment with sweet Camm, as much because no one else would have anything to do with her as that she loved him desperately. Only three days and the school had turned against her, against them both—yet oddly enough it seemed she bore the brunt of it; she was the one who was lowering herself, she was the one who planned to commit the blood-soil crime against her ancestors.
There seemed to be less blame assigned to a Sarvaw for aspiring to a Telchik wife than to a Telchik woman, the guardian of the purity of the blood, for electing to debase herself with a Sarvaw husband. It was as if all of the hostility previously directed against them both had focused on her alone.
It wasn’t easy. Camm was subdued and quiet, and though he did the best he could to support her Marnissey began to realize—slowly, painfully—how di
fficult the task that she had taken on so thoughtlessly really was. The complications of her life were not fully revealed to her, however, until the moment—three days and counting after the attack—when Marnissey on her way from her study group to her academic counselor noticed her friend Abythia talking to Uncle Danitsch, beside the chapel arch, noticed at first because Uncle Danitsch was not usually about so late in the afternoon, but then caught a fragment of what Abythia was saying and froze in her tracks.
"Blood soiler," Abythia said, her voice cold and heavy with poison. "To think that my own prayers might be contaminated—isn’t there some penance I can do, for having ever known such a person? Ugh."
The concept was one she’d heard before from other people, sneering at other targets. The Holy Mother, so the theory went, would sniff suspiciously at devotions offered by honest Telchik unfortunate enough to be tainted by association with an unfilial daughter; and what could be more grotesquely unfilial than degrading the purity of one’s genetic heritage by giving oneself to a Sarvaw?
It had been octaves since the Sarvaw had been re-integrated into the Dolgorukij Combine by force of arms. There was still no word in High Aznir for "female Sarvaw hominid" that didn’t mean the same thing as "property" or "whore," nor any word for "adult male Sarvaw hominid" that didn’t also mean "slave" or "beast of burden." Her own parents were no help to her, and Marnissey was miserably aware of having failed them in a real sense. She should have waited until she could at least have told them. She should have given them some time to become accustomed to the fact before she had published it to the whole world.
And still it wasn’t any of those things that truly stunned her. Not the things Abythia said; just the one phrase. Blood soiler. She’d heard Abythia say those words before. It had been Abythia who had assaulted her.
Uncle Danitsch took Abythia’s hands in his own, turning away from Marnissey when he saw that they were observed. The gesture was telling—and terrible.
Abythia had assaulted her. Abythia had been a part of that obscene ambush, Abythia, Abythia had dumped a bucket-full of filth and mud over her head and called her names. Her own friend Abythia. Worse than that—Uncle Danitsch was a part of it; the picture that he made with Abythia was too overtly conspiratorial for any other interpretation, no matter how Marnissey’s horrified mind sought to place it in another light.
She’d grown up with Abythia. She’d gone to school with Abythia. She’d celebrated saint’s days, complained about the politics of girlish cliques and cabals, pored over courses of study, dreamed about the future, agonized over admission tests with Abythia.
She hadn’t been close to Abythia since she’d started her degree studies at the university—they were in different programs—but it was so much worse that Abythia should despise her than her own parents. She expected her parents not to understand, but she would have trusted Abythia with the deepest secrets of her heart. Abythia, Abythia, Abythia had assaulted her; how was she to live?
The shock left her numb all the rest of the day. She sat through her appointment with her academic counselor almost not caring that her interim grades were very much reduced from expectation or that her counseling-team had serious doubts about her fitness for a job in the education of young children, but was willing to acknowledge that perhaps it would be all right—the standards in Sarvaw schools being so much less stringent, due to the correspondingly reduced ability of the children.
They assumed that she’d move off-world once she was married; there seemed no possible future for her here, in her own home, and she’d always supposed that she’d join the academic establishment in Orachin where she’d been born, and live out her life respected—valued—cherished—as a teacher. She would never teach in Orachin if she married Camm. What was she to do?
She didn’t have the heart to see Camm and share the things she’d learned today with him. She went to chapel instead, to see Uncle Birsle and ask for his help. She hadn’t spoken to him since before the attack; she’d lost track of time—her world had ended that night, when she’d thought it was just beginning.
"Well, it is too bad that Danitsch was called," Uncle Birsle agreed, carrying a flask of rhyti from the warmer-service near the door to his office to set it down in front of her. "A bit of a fanatic, I’m afraid, I’ve spoken to our superiors about it. I’d have suggested you love your Camm in private for a while longer, myself. A long while longer. Until you were graduated longer. There’s just no getting around the fact that there’s ugliness out there, but I’m sorry that you couldn’t be spared. Both of you."
Birsle’s office was small and dark, but warm. Dennish, in a sense, a haven for a wounded spirit, but the icon of the Holy Mother on the wall behind his desk still seemed to look at her accusingly, for all of his gentle reassurances. "Is that the way it has to be?" Marnissey demanded, struggling with tears of loss and shame. "It can’t be so great a crime to love. How can it be so horrible a sin as that? He’s the best—the most beautiful—the man I want, as I’ve never wanted any other—"
He shrugged, but kindly, with sorrow of an impersonal sort in his gentle smile. "Don’t be naïve, Marnissey, look at what you’re doing to yourself and him and your family. What happened to you the other night is only the beginning, and what do you expect for your children? His family will be no happier to have a Telchik woman in their midst than yours is to find itself related to a Sarvaw. But you told the police that you meant to be married, so there’s nothing to be done about it. Except perhaps withdraw from attending classes, and petition to complete your degree program on remote."
Uncle Danitsch was collaborating with her attackers; Birsle gave her no comfort, only hard unromantic strategies. "The Holy Mother would be ashamed to hear you," Marnissey accused bitterly, through her tears. "She loves the Sarvaw just as much as she loves any other Dolgorukij. It says so. In the text."
From the small pained smile on Birsle’s face it almost seemed he had expected the attack. "Equally well," he agreed. "But separately, Marnissey, remember? Now go home. Don’t make any more trouble for your family than you already have."
Even the Church was to be denied her, then. She had nowhere to turn, nowhere but Camm. She didn’t want to see Camm just now. How could she complain to him of all the snubs and shunning that she was being made to suffer? It would seem as though she was blaming him for it all.
She went home. Her mother had gone into the city today and wouldn’t be home until much later. Her father had prepared a quick stew, she could smell it as she came into the house, and she knew without being told that he hadn’t wanted to go to the grocer’s today to buy fresh food.
She liked her father’s quick stew, but she couldn’t face the dish now knowing why her father had made that choice for third-meal. Marnissey went up the stairs to her bedroom alone and lay on her back on her bed long after the sun had gone down, staring at the ceiling in the dark.
~~~~~
She had study-groups for the next few days and didn’t go. Camm came to the door; she heard him, and she wanted to see him, but she stuffed her pillow into her mouth and let her mother send him away. The school sent a message that her absence had to be excused, or it would reflect against her academic record—a bit of petty administrative bullying that was almost as much funny as infuriating, it was that obvious. That stupid.
She went to her study groups the next day following. No one would speak to her, and she sat in the back, disheartened. She tried to participate, but the group-leader wouldn’t acknowledge her presence; when she got home there was another note from the administration, saying that she shouldn’t come to study-group unless she was prepared to join the discussion. It was too much. She needed to see Camm. She put on an old jacket and crept out of her house by the bedroom window to go down to the student dormitories.
She didn’t make eye contact with the people that she passed in the street, in the halls. She’d lived in the city of Orachin all her life, some of those people had been as close to her as members of her
own family, and it was as though they had all of them been bewitched and turned into monsters, jeering harpies speaking in faery tongues. She could hardly bear it.
Camm, beautiful Camm, Camm who she needed so much was in his room sitting at his work-station reading a text. He frowned when he saw her. She closed the door; he got up and opened it again. "You don’t want to be behind closed doors with me," he warned. "People will talk. We’ve got to be a little more careful for a while, Mar, I’m afraid."
She was tired of afraid. Had it only been two weeks since their engagement, and the attack? How could she live with any more "afraid" than this? "Don’t let them govern our behavior, Camm," she said. "People who would take it wrong aren’t worth being concerned about. And I need you to hold me. It’s been awful without you."
But she could guess the problem. If they couldn’t be behind closed doors together, still less could they embrace in his bedroom, even with the door open. There was to be no comfort for her. None. Camm sat back down at his work-station, slowly, and shook his head. "We have to be strong," he said. "It’s too bad we were startled into letting our secret out too soon."
Secret, what did he mean, secret? They hadn’t discussed keeping it a secret. She felt completely overwhelmed: now even Camm was deserting her, denying her comfort and support. "Are you sorry?" she challenged him, with cold fury in her voice. "Maybe you’ve changed your mind about marrying me. Is a Telchik wife more than you can handle after all? You don’t seem to be doing very well with a Telchik fiancée."
It was horrible thing to say. She knew that the moment she heard the words come out of her mouth. More horrible still was the fact that Camm didn’t get angry, Camm didn’t leap to his feet and reproach her, Camm just sat at his work-station looking up into her eyes with the one lone tear fleeing down his cheek.