Califia's Daughters

by Leigh Richards

  “Culum, fetch Mai.” He looked at her, eyebrows peaked, tail stirring uncertainly. She repeated the command a couple of times until, just as she was about to give up, he understood and bounced across to where Mai stood. There he stopped. Fetching horses or sheep was easy, but this Mai had no reins, and one simply did not nip at friendly humans. He started to take her trouser leg in his teeth, only to be put off by her startled step back; finally he just walked around behind her and leaned. With considerable authority. The children were ecstatic.

  The following morning brought a light tap at the door soon after what would have been dawn had it not been raining. Dian told the dogs to stay where they were and raised her voice. “Come in.”

  The door opened to admit one of the household’s children, balancing a small tray with a cup and teapot on it. Carefully closing the door, the child, who looked about nine, walked over to place the tray on the table next to Dian’s bed, then stood back to address her in careful English.

  “Grandmother asked me to tell you that the first ferry will go in three hours, and we will eat breakfast in one hour if you wish to join us.”

  “Thank you, I would enjoy that. Um, could you remind me of your name? I’m afraid I can’t keep track of all the new people I’ve met.”

  “My name is Jian.”

  “Oh, yes, of course. Jian, thank you for bringing me a cup of tea.” The child stood there hesitantly as if she had a question on the tip of her tongue. Dian reached over and poured herself some tea. “Is there anything I can do for you, Jian?”

  The child was silent for a moment longer, then blurted out, “How did you get those scars?” She pointed to the puckered skin on Dian’s shoulder and the thin jagged line that ran down over her ribs, and rather belatedly Dian realized that perhaps she should have covered herself before inviting the child in. She wasn’t even sure this person was a girl, after all. She reached casually for her shirt.

  “A wild boar.” She looked at the expression on the small face, the lips forming an o, and burst out laughing. “Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Actually it was stupidity. Most injuries happen because of stupidity. It’s true I was chasing a wild pig, but it wasn’t the pig itself who did this. He doubled back quickly and my horse dodged and I fell off into a tree. The branches were sharp. I was fifteen, but I should have known better than to chase a pig through the brush. That’s what the dogs are for,” she said, and gestured at Culum and Tomas. The ruse succeeded in distracting her examiner, whose disappointment at the lack of romance in Dian’s story was patent. The curious black eyes studied the dogs, who in turn were watching her (him?) with equal interest. Another question was bubbling up, though this one burst without any nudging from Dian.

  “May I touch your dogs?”

  “I’m sure they’d love to say hello to you. In fact, would you like to take them downstairs and let them out for a while? Perhaps your grandmother would let you feed them too. She knows what they eat.”

  Her offer was greeted with great enthusiasm, and the door closed carefully behind the wagging tails. Dian listened to their noisy progress down the stairs, but she was sure that even Tomas would take care not to knock into a person who weighed less than half what he did. The sounds of children’s voices grew at the window and then faded as Jian showed off her—his?—living trophies to various small relatives.

  She sat back against her luxurious pillows and laughed ruefully into the empty room. Ladies and gentlemen! She walks, she talks, she reads and writes and drinks from a cup. She even eats with chopsticks! Presenting, for your delight, the Wild Woman from Borneo! Dian sipped her tea with pinkie raised, to the acclaims of imaginary thousands, then went off to take what she suspected would be her last decent bath for a very long time.

  Breakfast was, as usual, tea, fruit, and a simple, sustaining rice porridge, in marked (and necessary) contrast to the sumptuous evening near-banquets. After she had finished, she took her leave of Teacher Jung and found herself touched to damp eyes when the old woman kissed her as a daughter. Then, feeling faintly ridiculous, she went to find Willa, and although the child was more interested in her breakfast than saying good-bye to her rescuer, Dian picked her up when she came up for air and kissed her sweet-smelling, pleasingly rounding cheeks, then gave her back before her protests could develop.

  “She is looking very beautiful,” she told the woman who was acting as wet nurse.

  “She very big,” said the woman. “Very, so very big.”

  “And getting bigger. Thank you.”

  “Very big.”

  Mai came for her and took her on a perfectly terrifying ride on the electrical train that ran, unseen and unsuspected, along the top of the wall. Mai bemoaned the lack of view, but Dian found the sheer walls an arm’s length from the windows quite thrilling enough, and when they passed another train going in the opposite direction her heart nearly stopped. The wall fell away at irregular intervals, offering brief lightning flashes of life inside the wall that were more tantalizing than illuminating. Several held nothing more than groups of people, quickly glimpsed before the vision flicked off and the wall was back before her face. Once she glimpsed a concrete canyon strung with what looked like a thousand wash-lines, comforting in its homeliness; her next vision, so brief as to seem hallucinatory, was less reassuring: a courtyard filled with heavily armored vehicles, surmounted by three of the blue and gray dragonfly shapes that could indeed only be helicopters—her sighting along the Road hadn’t been imaginary after all.

  The dogs, oddly enough, were unfazed at this novel method of travel. Not until the end of the quarter-hour ride did Dian think to wonder if Simon was hidden in one of the other cars, but when she tottered out on uncertain legs he was there, saddled and waiting under a long shed roof on the ferry quay. She ran her hands over his familiar sides, let him snuffle hopefully into her cupped hand, and threw her saddlebags over his back. An official led him off through the wet morning to the livestock hold, after Mai assured her that her possessions were completely safe and guarded, then the two women went up to the snug cabin. There were tables there, with benches, but Dian went over to the rain-swept window, trying not to think how very dreary it was going to be to ride through the stuff. The ferry cast off for its short trip across the Gate, and she looked up in silence at the Remnant of the great bridge overhead, that magnificent reminder of the abilities of a race gone by, the patchy orange towers balancing what remained of the cables and roadway—and then Dian’s eyes narrowed.

  “Do I see people working on it?”

  “Yes, didn’t you know? Three years ago the Council decided to repair it. We should have it open in another ten years or so.” Her pride and her love for the bridge was apparent in her voice and eyes. “And look, this will also be new since you were here.”

  Mai pointed across the cabin to the eastern side. “We are making a shrine out of the Rock.” The island’s ugly concrete Remnants were gone; in their place lay a wide, flat stone platform centered in a green park, with a huge shapeless framework of beams and posts woven on top. “The workers are nearly ready to start covering the frame,” Mai told her. “It will be a Buddha, one hundred feet tall and covered in gold leaf. We’ve been collecting jewelry for twenty years!” she told Dian happily.

  Dian pictured the impact of sailing in from the ocean, beneath the restored bridge, an immense golden Buddha in front and the austere walls of the city rising on the side. “It will be magnificent,” she agreed, and felt more of a barbarian than ever. Ah, well, perhaps Willa would drink in some culture during the next few weeks.

  “Would you like to show me the route you propose to take?” Mai asked. A neatly folded map had appeared on the table, as an offer rather than a demand for information. Dian did not hesitate to join her to pore over it.

  She traced her finger along the dotted line that indicated where the highway Remnant ran, noticing two bridges that her own map said were still standing but on this map were marked as down. She sighed, thinking of the additiona
l scrambling and backtracking ahead. Mai leaned intently over her finger, giving bits of information such as, “That village is best avoided,” and, “The schoolteacher in this town is very helpful.” When they had finished, Dian folded the map and made to hand it back, but Mai shook her head.

  “It’s yours, if it is helpful.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I remember your mother,” Mai said unexpectedly.

  “Do you? When did you meet her?”

  “Nine, or was it ten years ago? I believe it was her last trip here. She was a fine woman.”

  “She was.”

  “She would not be happy at your venturing north.”

  “You think not? She was happy enough to take first Judith and then me to Meijing, and that ninety miles is by all reports more hazardous than the two hundred ahead of me.”

  Mai studied her, and smiled. “You’re probably right. Too, she would not have encouraged timidity in her daughters. But still—you must promise me that you will go no farther into Oregon than your friend’s small village.”

  “I intend to turn right around and come back.”

  “Good. There is . . . ugliness to the north.”

  “Ashtown? Some people were talking about it.”

  “And their allies. You do not want to be within their grasp.”

  “I promise, I have no intention of sightseeing beyond Isaac’s village.”

  They were nearing the dock on the other side when Mai reached for her bag, drew out two small parcels, and handed the first one to Dian. “Grandmother asked me to give this to you.” Dian curiously unwrapped the parcel and held up a folded sheet of slick, thin, clothlike stuff. Her bewilderment must have showed as she thanked Mai, because the woman picked it out of her hands to shake it out and drop it over Dian’s head.

  “It’s a rain poncho, from a waterproof cloth called nylon we’ve just started making. It seems to work very well, though we’re not sure how many years it will last before the waterproofing wears off. At least three, anyway. It’s both lighter and more dependable than the waxed cloth you wear.”

  “And to think I was just dreading riding in this drizzle. Thank Jung Xiansheng for me, would you please?” She examined the odd cloth closely, then looked up to see Mai holding out the other package.

  “And this is from me. I thought you might find it useful.” She watched Dian unfold an unadorned pale brown shirt, as lightweight as the raingear but far more elegant. “It’s silk, and I know it feels delicate but it’s really very strong, much tougher than cotton. And, it doesn’t have any diaper stains on it yet.” She cut off Dian’s protests with a friendly but firm look. “We cannot have it known that a guest was allowed to leave without the proper equipment, or even a clean shirt, now, can we? Bad for our image.”

  Dian decided that it was at least partly a joke, so she chuckled. Mai smiled back at her.

  “I know you feel you will have to repay us, but please don’t. You are family, and families help each other. Perhaps, if you need to repay us, you could consider allowing one of us to come visit your home one day.”

  “No need to consider, I’d love it. So long as it’s you.”

  “It would be a great privilege to be chosen. I have never been more than twenty miles from here.” Mai studied the runnels on the window wistfully. “I would like to see how free people live, before I am given so much responsibility that I am unable to leave.”

  Mai’s remark gave Dian much cause for thought as she joined the boat’s exodus on the northern shore, and over the next days as well. On the whole, she eventually decided, given the choice, she’d rather be a barbarian.

  Before the end of the first day, Dian had shaken off the remnants of civilization and cultivated farmland to disappear into the unfamiliar hills and woodlands north of Meijing. She soon grew into the dreamlike rhythms of moving through complete wilderness, of going a day, two days without seeing a creature that walked on less than four legs; she rediscovered the sensation of being the head of a corporate animal composed of herself, the large and powerful partner beneath her, and two sets of sensitive, roving eyes and noses around her, which at a gesture transformed themselves into jaws and teeth. She moved beneath the trees and the sky, she went hours, an entire day, without using speech, she forgot the words to Kirsten’s songs. One night, awakened by the rip of a cougar’s voice, she found herself wondering if the Valley really needed her back.

  Whether it was the climate or a particularly bad dose of the epidemics, human beings had become nearly extinct along California’s northern coastline. Villages clustered at the edges of what had been midsize towns, and although the inhabitants were gentle people, probably due to a combination of poor nutrition, ill health, and the depressing squalor of their surroundings, she found herself avoiding them. Cities had become villages, towns were inhabited only by ghosts, and after she saw a green sign with still-visible white letters saying Welcome to Ukiah, pop. 15,297 being used as the roof of a communal henhouse surrounded by a group of a dozen tin shacks in the middle of a log palisade, she left the road entirely and took to the hills.

  The first snow met her in Crescent City, and on a whim she stopped at an inn that reminded her of Jamilla’s, neat and unpretentious. A barely legible sign was hung carefully beside the door, the original bed-and-breakfast sign, with the subscript: est. 1987.

  She stayed an indulgent two nights there, getting clean, eating absurd quantities of food, sleeping, and on the second afternoon walking down to the smithy and spending an enjoyable couple of hours there gossiping while Simon was being shod. When she left town in the morning the ground was white, and the dogs bit at the snow happily and Simon snorted and blew. They rode north awhile, crossed the river, and turned inland, making for the hills. She figured that, riding cautiously, they would come to Miriam’s village in four, maybe five days.

  She was wrong.

  . . . SO VIOLENTLY THAT SHE WAS FORCED TO DROP ONE KNEE TO THE GROUND.

  EIGHTEEN

  THE ATTACK CAME WITHOUT WARNING. EVEN THE dogs were caught unawares, and Dian’s growing sense of unease she had put to the threat in the sky. As the afternoon’s first flakes began to fall, her mind was preoccupied with the question of where to hole up in strange terrain, and her eyes had been studying the cliff that rose from the frozen stream she was following, in hopes of seeing an overhang or cave. So it was that the silent arrow flew against the wind into their midst. An instant too late, a blinding alarm shrieked out in Dian’s head and she threw herself to one side, so the arrow that was aimed at her belly sank instead deep into the side of her upper thigh. The combined zip of the passing arrow beside his nose and Dian’s sharp move on his back startled the placid Simon into a shy, tumbling Dian headfirst and uncontrolled out of the saddle. The last thing she knew was a brief blur of dogs, Culum and Tomas launching themselves downwind with the roar of battle beginning to break from their chests; then the rocks rose up to meet her, and she knew no more.

  She came back slowly, reluctantly, perhaps an hour later. Her first dim awareness was, ironically, one of comfort, of being warmed and protected from the elements. Gradually some less pleasant sensations intruded. The rock jabbing her left cheek brought her up closer to consciousness; as she began to stir, she became aware of the deep ache in all the parts of her that were not so warm, parts that were in fact deadly cold. Her eyes fluttered open and gazed in dull incomprehension at the tawny field that dominated her vision. Her eyes had no inclination to focus, but as she lay thinking muzzily about what her current state might mean, she eventually decided that what she was seeing was fur, light-brown fur dusted with flakes of snow. She lay with that fact for nearly a minute, incurious, before her sluggish brain dredged up a degree of awareness. This was Culum’s neck. It was Culum nestled into her belly. There was also warmth and motion coming from her back. Something told her the warmth was unlikely to be Isaac. Tomas? Yes, Tomas was lying against her spine, his deep chest filling rhythmically with air and pressing regularly int
o the middle of her back. She thought of this, and a trickle of uneasiness entered her heart, a sense of wrongness that went beyond her lying on a cold, hard surface. Tomas’s breath against her back. Culum’s neck in front of her. Culum’s still neck.

  Realization exploded in her mind. The horror, the impossibility of Culum’s stillness drove her to stand and look, to prove herself wrong, to pummel him back into breath and warmth, but at the first whisper of movement her thigh came awake. The breath was driven from her lungs, and her throat emitted, not the shriek that reverberated within her, but a queer breathy moan, oddly like the sounds Judith had made in the final stages of her labor. She lay very still, trembling, and the arrow in her leg grew and burned there until it felt like a firebrand being ground into her flesh. The pain pounded in her ears, made her dizzy, and then well-meaning Tomas stirred from his place along her spine and stood up. That added jostle pushed her over the edge, and she blacked out again.

  This time she emerged more quickly and aware of where she was. The cold was penetrating, now that Tomas was gone from her back, although she could feel his nose and breath on the nape of her neck. Keeping her muscles absolutely lax, the arrow’s burn was manageable, and she forced herself to think. The temptation to sleep was immense. Particularly when, after a few minutes, she knew what she would have to do in order to leave this place.

  There was no shelter here. Therefore, she had to get on the horse. To get on the horse, the arrow would have to come out, or the moving point was going to mangle her until she either bled to death or would never walk normally again. If it was barbed—and by the looks of it, it would be—there were two ways to remove the thing. One was surgical, to slice her own flesh open with her knife, dig out the arrowhead, and bind the terrible wound—without passing out forever. The other was to treat it like a fishhook (and for a moment Ling was there, the black cap of her hair gleaming in the summer sun as she bent over the hook embedded in the web between Susanna’s thumb and forefinger, Ling’s voice in the mutter of the iced-in stream, saying, “Better an inch of clean cut than half an inch of carnage”). An exquisitely cautious exploration with her fingertips told her that the arrow was buried in the strong muscle along the back of the upper thigh, having caught her just as she threw herself sideways. It had missed major blood vessels and skimmed past the bone, but it felt to her well and truly sunk in. On the other hand, it was aimed at the back of her thigh, not toward bone or artery. No choice, then—but, oh, God, she wished Ling were here.