“I can’t marry someone who can’t make up her mind,” the third daughter said. “Subtlety is one thing. Uncertainty is another.”
“In that case,” the people said, “you will become our first queen, and the shaman will become your first minister.”
This happened. In time the third daughter married a young hunter, and they had several children, all different in subtle ways.
The land prospered, though it was never fertile, except in the canyon bottoms. But the people were able to get by. They valued the colors of dawn and dusk, moving light on mesas, the glint of water running over stones, the flash of bugs and birds in flight, the slow drift of sheep on a hillside—like clouds under clouds. The name of their country was Subtletie. It lay north of Thingnesse and west of Change.
Back home, in the unnamed city, the grammarian’s fourth daughter came of age.
“We each have a room now,” she said to her mother, “and there’s plenty to eat. But my sister and I still don’t have dowries. I don’t want to be an old maid in the marketplace. Therefore, I plan to go as my older sisters did. Give me what you can, and I’ll do my best with it. And if I make my fortune, I’ll send for you.”
The mother thought for a while and rummaged in her study, which was almost empty. She had sold her books years before to pay for her daughters’ educations, and most of her precious words were gone. At last, she managed to fill a bag with adverbs, though they were frisky little creatures and tried to escape.
But a good grammarian can outwit any word. When the bag was close to bursting, she gave it to her fourth daughter.
“This is what I have left. I hope it will serve.”
The daughter thanked her mother and kissed her one remaining sister and took off along the highway, the bag of adverbs bouncing on her back.
Her journey was a long one. She made it womanfully, being the most energetic of the five daughters and the one with the most buoyant spirit. As she walked—quickly, slowly, steadily, unevenly—the bag on her back kept jouncing around and squeaking.
“What’s in there?” asked other travelers. “Mice?”
“Adverbs,” said the fourth daughter.
“Not much of a market for them,” said the other travelers. “You’d be better off with mice.”
This was plainly untrue, but the fourth daughter was not one to argue. On she went, until her shoes wore to pieces and fell from her weary feet. She sat on a stone by the highway and rubbed her bare soles, while the bag squeaked next to her.
A handsome lad in many-colored clothes stopped in front of her. “What’s in the bag?” he asked.
“Adverbs,” said the daughter shortly.
“Then you must, like me, be going to the new language fair.”
The daughter looked up with surprise, noticing—as she did so—the lad’s rosy cheeks and curling, auburn hair. “What?” she asked intently.
“I’m from the country of Subtletie and have a box of adjectives on my horse, every possible color, arranged in drawers: aquamarine, russet, dun, crimson, puce. I have them all. Your shoes have worn out. Climb up on my animal, and I’ll give you a ride to the fair.”
The fourth daughter agreed, and the handsome lad—whose name, it turned out, was Russet—led the horse to the fair. There, in booths with bright awnings, wordsmiths and merchants displayed their wares: solid nouns, vigorous verbs, subtle adjectives. But there were no adverbs.
“You have brought just the right product,” said Russet enviously. “What do you say we share a booth? I’ll get cages for your adverbs, who are clearly frisky little fellows, and you can help me arrange my colors in the most advantageous way.”
The fourth daughter agreed; they set up a booth. In front were cages of adverbs, all squeaking and jumping, except for the sluggish ones. The lad’s adjectives hung on the awning, flapping in a mild wind. As customers came by, drawn by the adverbs, Russet said, “How can we have sky without blue? How can we have gold without shining? And how much use is a verb if it can’t be modified? Is walk enough, without slowly or quickly?
“Come and buy! Come and buy! We have mincingly and angrily, knowingly, lovingly, as well as a fine assortment of adjectives. Ride home happily with half a dozen colors and cage full of adverbs.”
The adverbs sold like hotcakes, and the adjectives sold well also. By the fair’s end, both Russet and the fourth daughter were rich, and there were still plenty of adverbs left.
“They must have been breeding, though I didn’t notice,” said Russet. “What are you going to do with them?”
“Let them go,” said the daughter.
“Why?” asked Russet sharply.
“I have enough money to provide for myself, my mother, and my younger sister. Greedy is an adjective and not one of my wares.” She opened the cages. The adverbs ran free—slowly, quickly, hoppingly, happily. In the brushy land around the fairground, they proliferated. The region became known as Varietie. People moved there to enjoy the brisk, invigorating, varied weather, as well as the fair, which happened every year thereafter.
As for the fourth daughter, she built a fine house on a hill above the fairground. From there she could see for miles. Out back, among the bushes, she put feeding stations for the adverbs, and she sent for her mother and one remaining sister. The three of them lived together contentedly. The fourth daughter did not marry Russet, though she remained always grateful for his help. Instead, she became an old maid. It was a good life, she said, as long as one had money and respect.
In time, the fifth daughter came of age. (She was the youngest by far.) Her sister offered her a dowry, but she said, “I will do no less than the rest of you. Let my mother give me whatever she has left, and I will go to seek my fortune.”
The mother went into her study, full of new books now, and looked around. “I have a new collection of nouns,” she told the youngest daughter.
“No, for my oldest sister took those and did well with them, from all reports. I don’t want to repeat someone else’s adventures.”
Verbs were too active, she told her mother, and adjectives too varied and subtle. “I’m a plain person who likes order and organization.”
“How about adverbs?” asked the mother.
“Is there nothing else?”
“Prepositions,” said the mother, and showed them to her daughter. They were dull little words, like something a smith might make from pieces of iron rod. Some were bent into angles. Others were curved into hooks. Still others were circles or helixes. Something about them touched the youngest daughter’s heart.
“I’ll take them,” she said and put them in a bag. Then she thanked her mother, kissed her sister, and set off.
Although they were small, the prepositions were heavy and had sharp corners. The youngest daughter did not enjoy carrying them, but she was a methodical person who did what she set out to do. Tromp, tromp she went along the highway, which wound finally into a broken country, full of fissures and jagged peaks. The local geology was equally chaotic. Igneous rocks intruded into sedimentary layers. New rock lay under old rock. The youngest daughter, who loved order, had never seen such a mess. While neat, she was also rational, and she realized she could not organize an entire mountain range. “Let it be what it is,” she said. “My concern is my own life and other people.”
The road grew rougher and less maintained. Trails split off from it and sometimes rejoined it or ended nowhere, as the daughter discovered by trial. “This country needs engineers,” she muttered peevishly. (A few adverbs had hidden among the prepositions and would pop out now and then. Peevishly was one.)
At length the road became nothing more than a path, zigzagging down a crumbling mountain slope. Below her in a valley was a town of shacks, though town might be the wrong word. The shacks were scattered helter-skelter over the valley bottom and up the valley sides. Nothing was seemly or organized. Pursing her lips—a trick she had learned from her mother, who did it when faced by a sentence that would not parse—the fifth da
ughter went down the path.
When she reached the valley floor, she saw people running to and fro.
“Madness,” said the daughter. The prepositions, in their bag, made a sound of agreement like metal chimes.
In front of her, two women began to argue—over what she could not tell. “Explain,” cried the fifth daughter, while the prepositions went “bong” and “bing.”
“Here in the Canton of Chaos nothing is capable of agreement,” one woman said. “Is it age before beauty, or beauty before age? What came first, the chicken or the egg? Does might make right, and if so, what is left?”
“This is certainly madness,” said the daughter.
“How can we disagree?” said the second woman. “We live topsy-turvy and pell-mell, with no hope of anything better.” Saying this, she hit the first woman on the head with a live chicken.
“Egg!” cried the first woman.
“Left!” cried the second.
The chicken squawked, and the grammarian’s last daughter opened her bag.
Out came the prepositions—of, to, from, with, at, by, in, under, over, and so on. When she’d put them into the bag, they had seemed like hooks or angles. Now, departing in orderly rows, they reminded her of ants. Granted, they were large ants, each one the size of a woman’s hand, their bodies metallic gray, their eyes like cut and polished hematite. A pair of tongs or pincers protruded from their mouths; their thin legs, moving delicately over the ground, seemed made of iron rods or wire.
Somehow—it must have been magic—the things they passed over and around became organized. Shacks turned into tidy cottages. Winding paths became streets. The fields were square now. The trees ran in lines along the streets and roads. Terraces appeared on the mountainsides.
The mountains themselves remained as crazy as ever, strata sideways and upside down. “There is always a limit to order,” said the daughter. At her feet, a handful of remaining prepositions chimed their agreement like bells.
In decorous groups, the locals came up to her. “You have saved us from utter confusion. We are a republic, so we can’t offer you a throne. But please become our first citizen, and if you want to marry, please accept any of us. Whatever you do, don’t go away, unless you leave these ingenious little creatures that have connected us with one another.”
“I will stay,” said the fifth daughter, “and open a grammar school. As for marriage, let that happen as it will.”
The citizens agreed by acclamation to her plan. She settled in a tidy cottage and opened a tidy school, where the canton’s children learned grammar.
In time, she married four other schoolteachers. (Due to the presence of the prepositions, which remained in their valley and throughout the mountains, the local people developed a genius for creating complex social groups. Their diagrams of kinship excited the awe of neighbors, and their marriages grew more intricate with each generation.)
The land became known as Relation. In addition to genealogists and marriage brokers, it produced diplomats and merchants. These last two groups, through trade and negotiation, gradually unified the five countries of Thingnesse, Change, Subtletie, Varietie, and Relation. The empire they formed was named Cooperation. No place was more solid, more strong, more complex, more energetic, or better organized.
The flag of the new nation was an ant under a blazing yellow sun. Sometimes the creature held a tool: a pruning hook, scythe, hammer, trowel, or pen. At other times its hands (or feet) were empty. Always below it was the nation’s motto: WITH.
KELLEY ESKRIDGE
And Salome Danced
Kelley Eskridge is an American writer, essayist, screenwriter, and editor. Her stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Japan, including Century and the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Her collection Dangerous Space was published by Aqueduct Press. “And Salome Danced,” a unique gender-bending story of the theater, received the Astraea Prize and was nominated for the James Tiptree, Jr Award in 1995. This story was first published in the anthology Little Deaths in 1994.
They’re the best part, auditions: the last chance to hold in my mind the play as it should be. The uncast actors are easiest to direct; empty stages offer no barriers. Everything is clear, uncomplicated by living people and their inability to be what is needed.
“What I need,” I say to my stage manager, “is a woman who can work on her feet.”
“Hmmm,” says Lucky helpfully. She won’t waste words on anything so obvious. Our play is Salome, subtitled Identity and Desire. Salome has to dance worth killing for.
The sense I have, in these best, sweet moments, is that I do not so much envision the play as experience it in some sort of multidimensional gestalt. I feel Salome’s pride and the terrible control of her body’s rhythms; Herod’s twitchy groin and his guilt and his unspoken love for John; John’s relentless patience, and his fear. The words of the script sometimes seize me as if bypassing vision, burrowing from page into skin, pushing blood and nerve to the bursting limit on the journey to my brain. The best theatre lives inside. I’ll spend weeks trying to feed the sensation and the bloodsurge into the actors, but … But I can’t do their job. But they can’t read my mind. And people wonder why we drink.
Lucky snorts at me when I tell her these things: if it isn’t a tech cue or a blocking note, it has nothing to do with the real play as far as she’s concerned. She doesn’t understand that for me the play is best before it is real, when it is still only mine.
“Nine sharp,” she says now. “Time to start. Some of them have already been out there long enough to turn green.” She smiles; her private joke.
“Let’s go,” I say, my part of the ritual; and then I have to do it, have to let go. I sit forward over the script in my usual eighth row seat; Lucky takes her clipboard and her favourite red pen, the one she’s had since Cloud Nine, up the aisle. She pushes open the lobby door and the sound of voices rolls through, cuts off. All of them out there, wanting in. I feel in my gut their tense waiting silence as Lucky calls the first actor’s name.
They’re hard on everyone, auditions. Actors bare their throats. Directors make instinctive leaps of faith about what an actor could or might or must do in this or that role, with this or that partner. It’s kaleidoscopic, religious, it’s violent and subjective. It’s like soldiers fighting each other just to see who gets to go to war. Everyone gets bloody, right from the start.
Forty minutes before a late lunch break, when my blood sugar is at its lowest point, Lucky comes back with the next resume and headshot and the first raised eyebrow of the day. The eyebrow, the snort, the flared nostril, the slight nod, are Lucky’s only comments on actors. They are minimal and emphatic.
Behind her walks John the Baptist. He calls himself Joe Something-or-other, but he’s John straight out of my head. Dark red hair. The kind of body that muscles up long and compact, strong and lean. He moves well, confident but controlled. When he’s on stage he even stands like a goddamn prophet. And his eyes are John’s eyes: deep blue like deep sea. He wears baggy khaki trousers, a loose, untucked white shirt, high top sneakers, a Greek fisherman’s cap. His voice is clear, a half-tone lighter than many people expect in a man: perfect.
The monologue is good, too. Lucky shifts in her seat next to me. We exchange a look, and I see that her pupils are wide.
“Is he worth dancing for, then?”
She squirms, all the answer I really need. I look at the resume again. Joe Sand. He stands calmly on stage. Then he moves very slightly, a shifting of weight, a leaning in toward Lucky. While he does it, he looks right at her, watching her eyes tor that uncontrollable pupil response. He smiles. Then he tries it with me. Aha, I think, surprise, little actor.
“Callbacks are Tuesday and Wednesday nights,” I say neutrally. “We’ll let you know.”
He steps off the stage. He is half in shadow when he asks, “Do you have Salome yet?”
“No precasting,” Lucky says.
/> “I know someone you’d like,” he says, and even though I can’t quite see him I know he is talking to me. Without the visual cue of his face, the voice has become trans-gendered, the body shape ambiguous.
“Any more at home like you, Joe?” I must really need my lunch.
“Whatever you need,” he says, and moves past me, past Lucky, up the aisle. Suddenly, I’m ravenously hungry. Four more actors between me and the break, and I know already that I won’t remember any of them longer than it takes for Lucky to close the doors behind them.
The next day is better. By late afternoon I have seen quite a few good actors, men and women, and Lucky has started a callback list.
“How many left?” I ask, coming back from the bathroom, rubbing the back of my neck with one hand and my waist with the other. I need a good stretch, some sweaty muscle-heating exercise, a hot bath. I need Salome.
Lucky is frowning at a paper in her hand. “Why is Joe Sand on this list?”
“God, Lucky, I want him for callbacks, that’s why.”
“No, this sheet is today’s auditions.”
I read over her shoulder. Jo Sand. “Dunno. Let’s go on to the next one, maybe we can actually get back on schedule.”
When I next hear Lucky’s voice, after she has been up to the lobby to bring in the next actor, I know that something is terribly wrong.
“Mars … Mars …”
By this time I have stood and turned and I can see for myself what she is not able to tell me.
“Jo Sand,” I say.
“Hello again,” she says. The voice is the same; she is the same, and utterly different. She wears the white shirt tucked into the khaki pants this time, pulled softly across her breasts. Soft black shoes, like slippers, that make no noise when she moves. No cap today, that red hair thick, brilliant above the planes of her face. Her eyes are Salome’s eyes: deep blue like deep desire. She is as I imagined her. When she leans slightly toward me, she watches my eyes and then smiles. Her smell goes straight up my nose and punches into some ancient place deep in my brain.
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