Brutal Women (18 page)

Verj is moving now, slowly. She
stands, stumbles. She steadies herself against one of the trees. I step toward
her to help, but she motions me away.

The pack between us, we walk.
Verj’s face goes from flush to ashen as we make our way into the scar.

How long did it take me to get to
this point when I walked here? A night? That would be nearly nine hours this time
of year. And I am hungry. Verj is hungry. She was eating bits of her suit the
night before.

We walk.

We make it to the other side,
across the quiet, lead-tasting air of the scar, before she has to stop.

“Here,” she says, and the word
comes out in Neuter, but I know it.

We collapse onto the pack. It is
the first time I think to go through the pack. Could they have dropped water
and food with it as well? Med rations? I try to pull open the top, but I can
see that it’s bugged for a TD. Only Gian can open it. I curse.

“Can you carry the rest… alone?”
Verj says, and I look at her. She is slumped up with her back against the pack,
her limbs lax, head lolled toward me, eyes closed.

“You’re not going to die!” I say,
and I am startled at how loud my voice sounds. The whir of the chorus beetles
in the grass around us abruptly ceases at the sudden noise.

Verj opens her eyes. Dust and gold.

“Listen,” I say, “when my trench
director gets this open, there will probably be med rations in it. Probably
thornbug pinches. You understand? We just have to get there.”

Verj gives me a wan smile. “Ah,”
she says. “You told me you already had thornbug antibodies in your trenches.”

“I lied to you,” I say. “You would
have lied too. But listen, Verj, they’ll be in here. They have to be in here.”

She begins humming softly, some
melody that I have no name for, but sounds familiar. A child’s lullaby,
something my mothers would have sung to me.

“Stand up,” I say.

I stand, as if to show her. I reach
down and take her hand. “Up. Stand up!” I pull her to her feet, but she leans
heavily on me.

I wait until she has her balance,
then I grab for the pack. “Come on,” I say. “Please. Please, Verj, I can’t do
this without you.”

She takes hold of the pack strap
like an automaton. Her eyes have taken on that outward gaze, ever outward,
looking in.

We are dragging the pack now.

I think of Androgynies with their
filters up. I think of Androgynies with thornbug bursts. I think of a hundred
terrible bursts and bacterial shells I have never seen.

And then Verj stumbles, and I can
think of nothing but this moment, now, this one human being, and the
overwhelming urge to
live
.

I start to talk to her. I tell her
about my mothers. I tell her about Elan. I tell her about the Neuter duels I
used to go and see. Some of it gets confused, and I realize I am speaking some
of it in our language, and I have to stop and go back and start over in
Consortium, but Verj does not seem to notice.

The pack smoothes a long trail of
broken red grass behind us. I tell her I fell in love with Elan and moved in
with her before she told me her secret. She did not desire me. She wanted
Neuters to touch her, not me.

The sky is turning the gray of dusk
again. I am so thirsty. The hunger has dissolved into a dull ache. I help Verj
up for the third time. The left side of her face is a blotchy blue-black, the
color of a new bruise.

I have forgotten what language I am
speaking in. “They found out about her, Home Defense did,” I say. “I came home
one night, and she had killed herself. Home Defense said she must have found
out they were coming for her. But you know what I think? I think they killed
her. I think Women killed another Woman. It’s not bad enough that we kill other
people. Now we kill each other. Bugs don’t kill each other.”

And I fall.

Verj tumbles down next to me. The
pack rests between us. I can hear her breathing, a phlegmy rasp that makes me
shiver. I reach out to her. She takes my hand. I look out past us, there,
across the beaten down red grass, and I can see the smoky glow of the globes,
thirty yards distant.

“Verj,” I say. I squeeze her hand.
“Verj, we’re here.”

Her hand feels so hot. She murmurs
something I cannot hear.

I hear the chorus beetles grow
quiet. I hear the tread of footsteps across the grass. Some part of me expects
to see an Androgyny face.

“Runner?” says a Woman’s voice.

And I feel that I am home.

I dream that the last of the Men
have been run into the sea. The sea is the color of smoky foam. There is no
horizon line over the water, only an endless gray haze, a merging of sea and
sky. The Men’s bodies disturb only the water along a narrow shore, the thin
perimeter of a vast body whose breadth is impossible to measure.

I walk along sand the bleached
color of death. I see the Men’s bloated bodies rolling in with the tide. I look
into their mouths, and they are filled with dragonflies.

I hear Elan’s voice, “This is the
way the world ends.”

I am pulled through a haze of
successive dreams-and-wakings. They’re putting tubes into me, feeding me bugs;
someone puts a pinch into me, tells me she’s curing me of red ague. Gian is
yelling at me, something about a Neuter.

“It’s Verj,” I say. “Verj is
important. She’s a queer.”

And Gian spits red kaj and curses
at me and says something about not trusting a queer runner.

“It’s all right,” I explain to her,
and my voice sounds far away, “She doesn’t like Women.”

Gian spits at me again.

When I wake again, the real waking,
I wake to the little violet-gassed waif who first summoned me. She says I am
needed on the line.

“Verj?” I say.

“The Neuter?” she says.

“Yes.”

“Are you really a queer?” she says.

“Verj,” I say.

She points across the med tent to a
still, solitary figure in a low-slung hammock.

I roll out of my hammock. My leg
bleeds pain. I limp over to Verj. Taking her hand is like holding a rotting
melon. The tissue beneath the skin is rotting away. Her face is unrecognizable.
Blue-black, the flesh beginning to liquefy.

“Verj,” I say.

Her lips move, and then, “You
liar.” But she is not angry.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and I want to
squeeze her hand, but I know the flesh will spill open. She will dissolve
before my eyes. I saved her just to watch her die.

“It does not mean she did not love
you,” Verj says.

“What?”

“Elan,” she says, and the name
sounds strange coming from the lips of a Neuter, a thing Elan desired far more
than she desired me. “You can love a person you do not desire,” Verj says, and
she tries to laugh, maybe, but it turns into a liquid cough. Blood smears her
chin. “What strange creatures you Women are, to think you must devour the body
of one you love. Perhaps, the translation is wrong… love… you use the wrong
words for everything, you Women…”

“Nadav.” The waif is behind me.
“The trench director,” she says.

Verj has not opened her eyes. I let
her hand go. Someone has taken off her suit and covered her in clean white.

I walk out of the med tent and the
med trench, and up to the front line. Gian is there. She has her arms folded,
waiting. She is taller than me, and she frowns when she sees me.

“Ready?” she says.

“For what?” I say.

Dawn is breaking across the sky.

“You brought it. You should see
it.” And she gestures to the women behind the big rotating guns. They pour
resin into the barrels.

“The CFR?” I say.

She nods.

“The pack was too heavy to be
holding only those bursts,” I say.

“Med rations,” Gian says.

“Thornbug pinches,” I say.
“Antibodies. You asked for them. You told them to bug the pack for a trench
director.”

Gian does not look at me. “Of
course.”

Gian spits kaj at her feet. “Can’t
be too careful with queers, now, can I?”

“No,” I say. “I suppose not.” I can
still feel Verj’s hand in mine.

Our filter winks out. The guns
fire.

I watch two neat spherical bursts
shoot out over the long swath of red grass between our trenches and the
Androgynies. The bursts are beautiful. They look transparent, like soap
bubbles. But I know they are not colorless; they are full of color, painted in
it, awash in it.

I hear the bursts pop.

And the world is filled with
dragonflies.

This is the way the world ends.

Finally, I wanted to end this
collection with the original Nalah story I wrote back at Clarion. This one made
the rounds at all the major (and a lot of minor) magazines, but was never
loved. I still had a long way to go to figure out pacing and plot and tension
(oh my). I never did figure out how to “fix” it in a way that would sell it. My
first novel,
God’s War
, was inspired in large part by this portrait of a
disillusioned warrior battling it out in the desert (Nalah even makes an
appearance in the third book in my series). You’ll also see a lot of
similiarities between this story and
My Oracles at the End of the World
.
And, once again, plenty of woman-on-woman misogyny. Women vs. ladies happens
all the time out here. Divide and conquer works.

Nalah sent the boy out across the
sand in search of Hanife’s rebels three days ago. They left her this of him.

Nalah pulled out the blade sheathed
across her chest. It was the dull blade she used for traitors and criminals,
the blade she had carried with her since the beginning.

She looked across the blistered
body of the boy to where Tarik, her second, stood - his tall form outlined in
the dusty red haze of the sky. His onyx-colored hair was braided back against
his scalp, and his eyes were cold, intense, set close together in his narrow
face.

“Blade,” she said.

He tossed her a sharp steel blade.
She caught it by the hilt, turned back to the boy. The boy opened his mouth,
gurgled words she pretended not to hear. The red sand would chew him apart come
nightfall. To leave him as he was invited the sand to eat through the open
wounds of his body.

She took hold of the boy’s mop of
black hair, brought the knife down cleanly across either side of the throat.
Blood rushed out across her forearm.

This was not the war she had agreed
to fight.

Nalah tossed the weapon at Tarik’s
feet.

“Bury him,” she said.

Another offering to the insatiable
sand.

She turned on her heel and slipped
back across the red sand to where her group of fighters squatted at the bottom
of a dune a dozen yards distant, all eyes on her and the body. She walked past
them and up to the crest of the dune, gazed south.

Tarik met her later, licking the
blood from his calloused hands. The desert would eat him if he left blood on
his skin. Nalah stared down at her own bloody hand. The desert did not eat
women.

“We should press on to the hold,”
Tarik said. “If the runner’s blistered like that, it means they marched on to
the hold sometime after dawn.”

“They don’t know where the hold is.
They could still be wandering.”

“You should have sent Shani,” he
said. He didn’t look at her.

“I thought of it.”

“An emotional decision.” Tarik
glanced at her from the corner of his eye. “Should I wrap you in a red dress
and call you lady?”

“Save your questions for the city.
There’s no place for them here.” The boy’s blood felt sticky on her hand. “We
push on,” she said. “Send out a runner ahead to see if they’ve reached the
hold.”

“Another runt?”

“Send Shani.”

“Done.” He slid back down the dune.

She gazed after Tarik, watched the
red sand shift in his wake, and thought of dead boys in shallow graves.

Nalah led the march, a force of
just over fifty, across red dunes and loose pockets of red rock. Jagged pillars
of gray stone thrust up from the hilly landscape, made deep shadows across the
sand as dusk fell.

Shani traveled back to them just
after dark, running hard and fast under a big full moon and smaller half-moon
of radiant scarlet.

“They won’t be expecting us,” Shani
said. Her bare blade was wet with blood, and Nalah watched her lick it clean.
“I found their runner.”

Nalah led them across the twilight
sand. She crept to the edge of a sandy rise with Tarik. Her force outnumbered
the one below by a full half, and the people that milled about the brightly lit
tents below were robed for the city. King Hanife’s youngest boy had never lived
out on the open sand. He knew nothing of thirst and blood and stealth.

Nalah drew her sword and moved. Her
fighters moved with her. They came silent as night into the camp, and in the
flickering light of the fires, the rebels saw them too late.

Dust and sand and dirt stung
Nalah’s eyes. In the heat and darkness, she saw a dead boy in place of the one
she faced, a dead boy clawing out at her from a shallow, sandy grave.

She tread across a dead, cooling
body, sandals pressing the choking form into the sand.

Nalah heard something above the
grunting, clanging fray - Tarik’s voice, rich and loud in the sobbing night.

“I have him!” he cried. “I have
him!”

For Nalah, there was only her next
opponent, only her sword, only his staff and knife. A body fell beneath her.
She twisted around to take note of the camp. Her fighters were finishing
skirmishes at the edges, but most of the robed men had fallen. Sweat slathered
her skin.

She nodded at Shani, and Shani
knew: the sand would finish the wounded. Loot the bodies before it swallows
them.

Shani leapt over a dying figure,
her knife raised. She called for a handful of fighters, her voice exuberant.