Califia's Daughters

by Leigh Richards

  She gnawed a bit of rough skin from her knuckle and opened her eyes to the rich fields and the orchards beyond, to the smooth pond and the lush hillside vineyard and, rising dark above the far orchard, the protective curve of hills, clothed in silent redwoods. A pulse of some series of emotions seized her, something that for an instant brought her absurdly close to tears: love for those hills, that orchard; despair that she couldn’t seem to be happy within those bounds like Judith; knowledge that somewhere—hidden deep, faintly felt, instantly suppressed, but nonetheless there—had been a tiny wistfulness at the idea of being free of the Valley, that finding the vultures squabbling over their bones would have been a horror but also (don’t even think it!) a freedom.

  Alone was a word with two edges.

  The gentle sound of ice chips moving against delicate glassware broke her bitter reverie, startled her with a brief but vivid evocation of a string of naming ceremonies: Mother, Judith . . .

  But it was only Judith, backing through the inner door, holding a laden tray with solemn attention.

  “Both ice and the glasses?” Dian asked. “I don’t know that the day calls for a celebration, Jude.” Ice marked a social occasion, since the supply was limited to what one small freezer in the healer’s office could produce and what the Valley had managed to store in the deep cave under sawdust. The glasses holding the ice were quite simply irreplaceable.

  Judith set the tray on the table and lowered her bulk into the chair next to Dian’s. She handed Dian a glass and held her own up to the light to admire the pale color of the liquid and the translucent slice of lemon, running her tongue voluptuously over the smooth edge before she drank deeply. She set the glass down with care on the table.

  “I find them a comfort. Sometimes I get one out just to have a drink of water. It’s like I can feel Mother’s hands on them. And Father’s too.” Judith’s father had died before his daughter entered womanhood, so that Dian had only a vague memory of him: neatly trimmed beard, strong arms, happy voice. One of his sons had lived, the pride of the community, Judith’s big brother, Peter—hidden away in the cave now with the others. “I’ve gone ahead with the preparations we talked about. The sentries are set, the next ones should go out in about an hour; that’s what Jeri said you wanted. I decided that you were right about wanting to keep the visitors away from the houses, but keeping them outside the Gates entirely seemed too blatant a message. They’re hardly concealing themselves, after all. So I set Hanna and her family to putting up tables outside the slaughtering sheds, asked her to heat up the boilers. Did everything seem to be coming along okay when you rode by?”

  Dian nodded. “Yes, it looked fine. I still think outside the Gates would be better, but even in the meadow I can put Laine and Jeri in the trees with their rifles, to cover us. What did you decide about Ling?”

  “Dian, I can’t send our healer up to the caves when there might be trouble.”

  “‘Trouble,’” Dian snorted.

  “For heaven’s sake, she’s been here ten years, plenty long enough to knock the aristocratic edges off her. And she never was as fragile as she looks.”

  “That’s true,” Dian admitted. The healer’s delicate hands had never hesitated in that emergency amputation last year; her lovely Chinese eyes had not so much as winced away from the sight of the Smithy’s bloodbath. The woman was an enigma—no family, no casual relationships, no reason to be here, as far as Dian could see. She’d just ridden in with Mother from a trip to Meijing nine and a half years ago and been here ever since. She’d come here to leave something behind, no doubt. Or someone.

  Dian shook her head to clear out the extraneous thoughts and tapped the last precious chips of ice into her mouth, placing the glass on the tray with care. “I’d better go feed the dogs,” she said, then paused in the act of getting to her feet. “Speaking of whom, how many of them do you think I should have down there tonight? I’m not sure I can control more than four at once if things go bad. I’d have to just turn them loose.”

  Judith looked at her grimly. “If things go bad, we’d want them turned loose. Bring five or six. You won’t have any trouble with that many if things stay friendly.”

  “Right.” Dian raked her long fingers back and forth through her hair, loosing a shower of dried leaves and dust. “Look, you asked me this morning if I thought there was danger. I don’t know, but it doesn’t feel exactly dangerous.” Her hand moved to the back of her neck, and she stood, cupping the spot. “I wish I could pin it down, but it just feels like something very odd is going on. On the surface this whole thing is a straightforward problem, but I feel . . . prickly. And it’s not just the foxtails in my shirt either!” She shot a glance at Judith, then sighed, gathered her weapons, and went out. Judith sat and looked at the sparkling, empty lake, her hands unconsciously traveling up and around the swollen globe of her belly.

  The sun moved across the sky, the shadows began to lengthen. In the chapel, Judith recited the prayers she had learned at her mother’s knee, then sat listening to the polyglot prayers of those around her, from Latin Hail Marys to half-remembered Nicene Creeds: the age-old divisions between Catholic and Protestant meant about as much now as the division between MacCauley, the Valley’s nominal owners, and Escobar, who had begun as farm hands. Judith was both, as her prayers were both Catholic and Protestant. In the infirmary, Ling the healer finished packing up her scanty drugs, set another batch of bandages to sterilize, and lit a stick of incense in front of her small Buddhist altar, praying in fervent Chinese that her services would not be needed. In the barn, Carmen, speaking her own native Spanish, reciting her own form of prayer, talked to her equine charges, telling them what was going on and that they shouldn’t worry, before she went to help her two co-wives with an early milking.

  Not all the residents prayed. Dian finished doctoring the paw of the young bitch, Maggie, who had limped home during the afternoon, then went to look for Laine and Jeri. She found her two lieutenants arguing over sniper positions among the trees and buildings, and settled it by telling them who she wanted where. Before Laine could do more than bristle, a rider cantered up the road with news of the wagons’ progress; she hesitated between Laine and Dian, then to Dian’s further vexation, gave her report to the space between them. The report was brief; the rider’s relief at getting away from the two aggrieved women palpable.

  Others prepared for the coming invasion in a manner neither spiritual nor combative but merely practical. In the clear space between the sheds atop which two snipers would lie, plank tables were being assembled, cook fires lit, beer barrels hauled, slabs of beef laid ready, mountains of corn shucked.

  Of all the residents of the Valley, perhaps only one nurtured a degree of satisfaction: Judith’s thirteen- year-old daughter, Susanna, although as apprehensive as anyone else, was also gratified that she had been allowed to stay in the Valley instead of being hidden away with the men and the children. She pestered Dian until finally her aunt threatened to throw her bodily into the pond and sent her down to help at the makeshift kitchen.

  And in the big cave, hidden deep in the hillside over the Valley, more prayers were said, another set of defense preparations was made, and old Kirsten prepared to tell one of her simple stories of Before.

  KIRSTEN

  Kirsten was old, had been old ever since anyone could remember. Ling, who in addition to being the village’s healer was its unofficial historian, had long tried to pin down her age, with limited success, because the old woman made a game of keeping everyone guessing—even her granddaughter Judith didn’t know for sure. The next oldest resident was about sixty-five, having been born during the final throes of what the West called “civilization.” Pubescent when she had arrived, Ruby remembered Kirsten as being gray-haired even then; that would make Kirsten now in her late eighties or nineties; Ling would not bet that she had not passed her century mark.

  Although her eyes had dimmed and she often slept now in the afternoons, Kirsten’s hands and voic
e were firm, and her wits as sharp as ever. As she sat waiting for her audience to settle, the sunlight crept into the passageway that connected the cave with its entrance. The ancient eyes looked past the half-illuminated moving figures, past them and into a time long, long gone.

  I am so tired, she thought to herself. I have seen too much, fought too many battles, tasted more adrenaline than one woman ought. Long, long ago I was granted a few sweet years of childhood; then the Troubles began, with images burned into our minds: planes slipping into buildings with a bloom of fire; a city school dead down to the last classroom pet; a small town littered with corpses from a bioweapon. The vocabulary of terror—virus and nanophage, genetic modification and dirty bombs—causing the collective mind to wince back from the horrors, that grinding fear of crowds that seized us all, and our powerful mistrust of all but the simplest of technologies, followed finally by the Valley’s retreat into itself. Riots raging Outside, and civilization’s Destroyers—technophobia gone mad—at the Gates for our last male-fought battle, which saw three of our precious boys bleeding into the earth: my sweet Tony, little more than a child, pounding down the road with a gun in his hand, a David into battle. Only this Goliath killed his shepherd-boy before falling.

  Too many sights, too many changes, too many years of chosen blindness—growing crops, raising children—and here we are, yet again counting our bullets and sharpening our arrows while old Kirsten keeps her people occupied and calm.

  What pretty stories shall I tell you, my children? she mused. About my mother, maybe? First in her family to go to university (and last, it looks like, for a long time), fought her way out of a bad first marriage (No bad marriages now, are there, my children? We can’t afford them) and through a male-oriented tenure system to establish a department of Women’s Studies? There’s a pretty story for the cave: the bitter joke of feminism, so many strong women fighting for so long to get the merest crust of equality, only to have the world turn around and shovel the entire feast onto our heads. Shall I tell you about equal rights, and we can laugh until our throats hurt?

  No; all you want now, my children, is men’s history.

  Not the story of Alicia, for three years my very best friend, who came here from being raped by a mob, who whimpered whenever she saw more than two or three menfolk walking together, who finally hanged herself from the walnut tree when she was nineteen. And not how secretly glad it made me at first, for her sake, to hear that men all over the world were dying off.

  Oh, my bones ache. How old does a woman have to be, to be allowed to vent her anger?

  But they sit and wait, needing me.

  No; when the time comes for you to hear those tales, when curiosity begins to unfurl like a fern frond out of a fire-ravaged hillside, you will begin to remember the books we all wrote for you, sitting on the library shelves, untouched and waiting. I won’t live to see the day, but never mind.

  For now it’s a pretty story you want, my children, not something to trouble your sleep too much. Something to set the mood so we can pretend this is a party, a tale to take our minds off those approaching wagons.

  Not a dark story, then. But because I am old and my bones do ache so, there may be threads of dark showing through the light. That I can’t help.

  The cavern had quieted, the faces were expectant. Kirsten’s old lungs drew breath and she began obediently as she always began: When I was young . . .

  “When I was young, the Valley belonged to my grandparents, and we always came up for the summer. When school stopped in June we would all come up together for a couple of weeks, before my father went back to work in the city. It took us half a day to get here. We would load up the car the night before—you all know what a car was?” This was a ritual question, and invariably the children would demand to be told, and Kirsten would launch off into a description of the joys and terrors of the great, gleaming steel monster whose rusted shell now lay in the lower orchard, a home for mice and a beloved plaything for the children. “And once when I was a little older than Shawna here we had a car with a top we could fold back, and driving it over the hills to the farm the wind would grab our hair, and I remember how it felt to let my hair fly in the breeze, like some movie star.” (“The movies” and “television” were two other favorite topics with her audiences, although it had been years since the last television screen had gone black, and the Valley’s sole computer in Ling’s infirmary was too valuable to spend on the few remaining discs.) “It took me two days to get the snarls out of my hair,” she laughed a rueful chuckle, “and I cut it all off the following week.”

  “How many people used to live here, Grandma Kirsten?” prompted one of the girls.

  “Well, let’s see. My grandparents the MacCauleys lived in the big house, and the Escobars had the three houses at the far end of the Great Meadow—I married the son of one of them, Rosario, much later. So maybe twenty people altogether. Of course, when I was about, oh, ten or eleven maybe, my mother brought us up here for good, when the plagues began and the world began to go strange. By the time my womanhood came on me there were thirty-eight or forty of us here, almost as many men at first as women. My mother was here—my father was killed in one of the first Destroyers riots—and Grams and Gramps, although he died soon after we moved up. And of course my little sister and my brother Will. My mother’s two sisters brought their families, and a bunch of Escobar relatives came, and some friends of both families came here too, toward the End. Now, who would you like to hear about?”

  Voices called out names—”Gramps,” “your father,” “Aunt Eve”—but gradually the requests for “Will” won out. None of the children actually remembered Will, who had died ten years before, but they all felt they knew the irascible old man whose passion for gadgets and tinkering had given the community all of its most basic machines, from the heavy water-mill machinery to the much-repaired photovoltaic panels that powered Ling’s computer and freezer, and whose stubborn refusal to be “coddled,” as he called it, had driven the women to despair while setting a secret model in the minds of the young men.

  “Will, is it?” Greeted with shouts of enthusiastic agreement, her old eyes glittered with amusement at their choice. “Ah, Will. He was a real rascal, that one. Always had bits of string and wheels and clock gears falling out of his pockets, always off somewhere in his mind. We used to tap on his head to get his attention—he’d never hear us otherwise.

  “Will was a few years younger than me, and how he loved those early summers up here, more than any of us. It was safe here, you see, and he could run to his heart’s content without fretting about the cars and crazies of the city. Starting at Easter time he’d begin making plans, sketches and drawings, books from the library, talking to Gramps on the telephone—you all remember what a telephone is?” Most of the women present had been to Meijing, but few would have actually used one of the city’s telephones. To the rest it was another children’s toy, a Remnant lump of colored plastic that they took on faith as a variation on the cup-and-string lines of the kids’ forts; nonetheless, all nodded. “So, he knew weeks in advance what he was going to do, and just how long it’d take him.

  “Then in the middle of June we’d set off, pack one day and leave early the next morning. Once, when I was very young, it took only three or four hours to get here, but later the roads were bad, and bridges would go down, and toward the end we’d have to circle way south and then come up along the coast to avoid the crazies on the hill. We’d pack a lunch, and we’d drive and drive, and the sun would always be so hot, and the air-conditioning never worked—you know what an air conditioner was? No? You know the refrigerator in Ling’s office, that she uses to keep her medicines cold? It was like that, only it kept a room or a car cool instead of just a box. An air conditioner. Anyway, it was always hot, and we’d sit and wait and fuss and ask, ‘How long now?’ about two thousand times until my parents were going crazy with it, and then finally, finally we’d come over the last hill and see the trees. We’d a
ll shout and yell, even Mom, and when we got down to the creek at the bottom Dad would stop the car and we’d all spill out and run down to the water and splash for about two seconds, and then we’d all jumble back in any which way, and we’d start up the last hill, past the sheds and across the bridge, up the curve, through the orchard, and at last we’d pull up through the gate and under the walnut tree and stop at the house, and there would be Grams and Gramps waiting for us, and Grams would say, ‘Oh, you must be fair parched for thirst,’ and we’d all stretch and groan and go off to the veranda, but—who do you think had other things on his mind? That’s right—Will. He’d jump out of the car holding the box of drawings and ideas he’d been saving up and shove them straight into Gramps’s hands, and Gramps would push back his hat and scratch his head and say, ‘Now, what have we here, young Will?’ and the two of them would go off to the workshop back of the barn, heads together, Will’s bobbing up and down and his tongue going a mile a minute, and the two of them would spend the next eight weeks in just that position, bent over Will’s drawings for a new kind of gopher trap or building a wind-powered water pump, or a donkey-powered threshing flail, or any of a hundred other things. The rest of us spent the summer riding horses and swimming and exploring the hills, but Will spent it getting grease under his fingernails and bruising his thumb with the hammer.

  “Sometimes, though . . .” The old voice faded for a minute and became reflective. “Did I ever tell you how this cave was discovered?” A few of the older women exchanged glances and shifted slightly in their places, but it was not a bad story, really, just . . . troubling. They did not interrupt. “I didn’t? Will found it. Or maybe I should say, it found him.