Califia's Daughters (18 page)

Dian felt like a two-year-old in front of a Christmas tree as the Road opened up that morning, her jaw hanging down with the splendor of it. She saw more strangers in the first ten minutes than she had in the last ten years: women washing their shop steps; women driving animals and carrying loads of colorful wool and jangling pans; women pedaling rickshaw carts filled with produce and clothing, old machines and new shoes; women opening shops that sold jewelry and pots, hats and boots, vast gleaming heaps of tomatoes and oranges and eggplants and onions; shops with meat and shops draped with the carcasses of chickens, ducks, and geese, and some shops that Dian was not sure exactly what they were selling. One of these had a small window displaying half a dozen pictures of scantily clad men, and a stout door. Did it sell photographs of men? Did the shop act as a broker of some sort among groups who wished to trade men? Did it—appalling thought—sell actual men? Dian could not imagine that Meijing would tolerate such an activity in its area of influence, but what did the pictures signify? Dian looked back over her shoulder at the—shop?—and nearly rode into the wedge-shaped gap between a warehouse and a large wagon from which two heavily muscled women were pulling hundredweight sacks of rice and grain. She excused herself, extricated Simon from the trap, and nodded red-faced at the two workers. Laughter followed her up the road.

She had forgotten the rhythm of the Bay Road, but it soon came back to her. Every eight miles a Meijing sentry box and approval station spawned a cluster of shops, inns, churches (or mosques or temples), and services. Each cluster would begin with a sprinkling of flimsy, sometimes portable stalls among the roadside farms, the first of them selling the produce grown behind them, the next selling cooked snacks and knickknacks. Then a few houses would offer rooms, and finally came one or more true inns, large or small. In the midst of the inns would stand the sentry box, not a box at all but a tall, sturdy building capable of housing, and defending if necessary, a dozen or more Meijing guards. North of the inns came the shops with their endless variety of wares, and in their midst would be the approval station, where buyer and seller could come for arbitration, testing, and currency exchange. Then a few more, rougher-looking inns, more flimsy stalls, and a patch of increasingly sparse housing where the fields could be seen, occasionally coming down to the road itself, before the next center—and more stalls and inns—began to creep up on the traveler.

The morning remained crisp and clear. A salt tang drifted up from the waters of the Bay, and the colors and smells of harvest shone from the stalls, intensified by the oblique angle of the autumnal sun. Traffic was well under way, the clop of shod hooves on the well-patched hardtop followed by the burr of rubber tires or the rumble of iron and wood wheels, the whir and warning bells of a thousand bicycles and rickshaws, and twice the thunder and stink of a combustion engine that cleared the road and made Dian's horse shy and the dogs' eyes show white. Once she thought she saw something in the sky over the Bay, a squat dragonfly shape that looked like what the old books called a
helicopter
, but there were too many sounds around her to hear any motor, and the thing's mottled blue-gray coloration made it hard to see. When she looked up again after negotiating a narrow patch, it was gone—if it had been there in the first place, and was not a figment of her overstimulated imagination. Might as well think she'd seen a dragon.

Dian had been looking forward to this part of the journey for weeks, ever since it had been decided that she would go north, and Willa's presence would make no difference. Today the riches of northern California were laid out at her feet, awaiting only the reckless use of the heavy pouch of coins at her belt, and she intended to take full advantage of it.

She bought a few utilitarian necessities: fifty rubber canning rings, a box of assorted nuts and bolts, eyeglass lenses in half a dozen magnifications, lengths of the rubber tubing useful for everything from drawing blood to making slingshots. And she bought gifts: two dozen graduated embroidery needles for Lenore, along with a rainbow of silk floss. For Ling she found a flute made of cherry wood with a mouthpiece of walrus ivory, for Judith a trio of silver bangles such as their mother used to wear. Peter she decided would like a piece of magnificent red silk fabric that Lenore could sew into a shirt, and Kirsten would treasure a set of four ivory double-pointed sock needles. An ivory-handled folding knife for Laine, a beautiful palm-sized leather-bound book of poetry to satisfy Jeri's secret passion.

Susanna was more difficult, caught between childhood and maturity. She saw a pair of silver and abalone earrings and matching necklace, but the price seemed low, and the shopkeeper was reluctant in allowing Dian to take them to the approval station. When she insisted, taking care to speak to the guards in Chinese like a civilized person, her suspicions were confirmed by the station's Geiger counter.

“Ah, crap, that's barely a reading,” the would-be seller protested—in English. “Look at that, you could wear them twenty-four hours a day for ten years and not get so much as a rash,” but Dian had already dropped the offending jewelry in the woman's hands and left her to explain to Meijing's representatives why she was selling goods from the contaminated zone.

Two miles later Dian was looking in the window of another, more reputable silversmith and spotted the ideal gift. It was a tall, slender silver mug, etched with a double line of domestic animals around the base. It proved clean, if expensive, and joined the other objects in her bags.

Despite the delays, Willa was still deeply asleep when Dian reached the first of the three stops Jamilla had suggested. It was off the road but easily found (“Follow your nose,” the innkeeper had said), a fragrant and immaculate bakery. A bell tinkled over her head as she went in, and a round, glowing pink woman greeted her from where she was rolling out pie crusts on a vast marble slab.

“Good morning,” said Dian. “Are you Paula? My name is—”

“You're Dian,” the woman said briskly. “I had a message from Jamilla a couple of hours ago. Is the baby hungry?” She dusted off her hands on a towel and came around the counter.

“I guess not.” Dian looked down at Willa's completely slack face. “She's fast asleep. Do you think I should go on? There's another woman two hours north . . .”

“That'll be Deirdre. No, she'll be hungry long before that. I'll wake her up and feed her in a bit, as soon as I get my pies in the oven. I hate to leave pastry rolled out. You probably want to wander around, though.” Before Dian could protest, she raised her voice and called out, “Candace! Come here a minute, will you?” A younger, rounder pink woman appeared from the back, holding an apple and a paring knife. “Candace, this is the baby Jamilla sent up. Could you hold her for five minutes while I finish the pies? The lady wants to do some shopping.” Candace's eyes lit up and she went to the sink, washed her hands, removed the sticky-looking apron, and came to take baby Willa from Dian.

“My daughter Candace,” the woman said unnecessarily, picking up her rolling pin. “Come back in forty-five minutes.”

Before she quite knew what was happening, Dian was standing outside the shop. She was surprised at how much she resented being pushed away from the child and wondered, somewhat glumly, if this was the stir of some unsuspected maternal impulse. But still, it was a pleasant side street, quiet after the bustle of the Road, with a number of large trees dropping their yellow leaves on the ground on the lawns around three tall wooden houses from Before. Suddenly the noise of the Road seemed too much, and the fields at the far end of this street beckoned as a place free of sly merchants, hungry babies, and noise. She slipped the rifle from its scabbard, left both dogs to watch Simon, and strolled up the quiet street toward the hills.

In a few minutes the sounds of the Road had faded to a muted rumble. The street ended abruptly and a footpath entered somebody's market garden, lush with the last remnants of the summer tomatoes and green beans, the ready fall crops of lettuce and peas, and the beginnings of the winter's root vegetables. Dian let herself through a gate in the high deer-proof fence that surrounded the oasis of greenery, and found herself on the edge of grassland with oaks and an occasional outcropping of concrete chunks to mark the passing of a building. Cows grazed among the remains of foundations and chimneys. Overhead, three small birds dove at a hawk, driving it off armed with nothing more than agility and determination.

Dian walked out into this landscape, as foreign in its way as the Road was, and settled in the shade of a sprawling oak tree. Twenty feet away, a ground squirrel eyed her nervously, unwilling to venture far from its pile of concrete and twisted steel bars. A sentinel quail atop a chimney two hundred yards beyond too-hooed to its flockmates. The breeze brought the baked smell of dry grass. Around the base of the next tree several black and white cows lay ruminating, their jaws moving steadily, tails flicking. A memory tickled the back of her mind as she watched the cows, a memory of another hot day, other cows. And Kirsten, a Kirsten with still a faint touch of brown in her hair.

“When I was young,” she had said, as always. They were sitting on a fallen log in the upper pasture, watching the cows, and the sweet perfume of warm blackberries rose from the baskets at their feet. “When I was young—very young, I think—we went to visit a house down near the Bay. It was a big, crazy place, all twists and turns and doors that went nowhere, carved stairways that climbed up and ended at blank walls. It was beautiful, in a bizarre way, filled with lovely glass windows and fine workmanship. It made a deep impression on me—for a long while I wanted to be an architect when I grew up. I even remember the cock-and-bull story the guide told us about how the woman who built it was haunted by ghosts and believed that so long as she kept working on the house she wouldn't die. Oh, she was haunted, no doubt, but not by anyone else's spirit. She was the daughter of a family of gun makers, the Winchesters —they built the rifle that ‘won the West' in the nineteenth century. She was a rich, lonely old woman who was obsessed by the thought of all those souls torn from their bodies by the weapons her family had made a fortune on, and she kept herself busy by exercising her creativity and money on this endless, empty, beautiful house.” Dian saw Kirsten's hands reach for a gentle handful of the soft berries and pop them one by one between her already purple lips. “The image of that house comes back to me at odd times, that poor woman making a thing of crazy beauty built on blood. What Ling would call ‘working off her karma.' It's a good parable for what we used to call ‘Western civilization,' which was of course neither particularly civilized nor peculiarly Western.”

The harsh scree of an overhead hawk scattered the ghost of Kirsten's rich laughter from Dian's ears, and when she looked again at the hills around her, she realized that it must have been very near this place that Kirsten's father had died. Perhaps those massive foundations and blocks on the next rise over were where his ashes lay, mingled with the ashes of a million cremated books. The University library, according to Kirsten, had taken a month to burn.

Not that the precise site mattered. This entire area—say, a fifty-mile radius around this spot—lay drenched in blood, condemned to infamy in whatever history was left to the world. It was here that the movement that was called Destroyer was born, the final synthesis of sophisticated technology and religious fanaticism, a synthesis of knowledge turned against itself that literally blew the foundations out from under humankind and caused the world to collapse in on itself. It was a few miles to the east, across the deceptive, clear, blue, sparkling waters of the still-toxic Bay, that Joseph Walker had invented his kitchen-cupboard explosive, so beloved of the low-budget radical groups, that had set the world to flames and rubble in a few short years. It was just north of here, where live oaks now took root and deer came to graze, that one of those fanatical groups had set their homemade bomb in the University, aiming at the library, ending up in the laboratories, and thereby loosing, inadvertently or by intent, the swamp of manmade viruses that had swept away half the world's population within three months, and half of the remainder before the year was out. One of those viruses had proven to have a lasting affinity for the male genetic structure. No, Dian thought, getting up and brushing the leaves from the back of her trousers, this was not a happy place to pass through.

She made her way back to the bakery, telling herself that she was not exactly eager to see the infant, just concerned, but when she got there she found Willa in a state she'd not seen her in before: calm and alert. The child lay on Candace's lap, examining the young woman's face. Paula was taking some pies from the big oven, filling the air with spice and apple, and Dian went to stand behind the baker's daughter to witness more closely this amazing spectacle of Sixtoes awake and not screaming.

“What did you do to her?” she asked. “She's quiet!”

Paula looked at her oddly. “Fed her, burped her. Changed her diapers. Why?”

“I've just not seen her so . . . content before.” Dian leaned down to look into little Willa's face, and the wise gray-blue eyes shifted to gaze into her own. The two studied each other for a long minute, then the small face turned red and a muffled explosion came from below. The laughter of the three women startled her, but before she could screw up her face to cry, Dian scooped her up out of Candace's arms, thanked her benefactors, and went to find another diaper in her saddlebag.

ON THIS ISLAND CALLED CALIFORNIA,
THERE WERE MANY GRIFFINS,
BECAUSE THESE BEASTS WERE SUITED
TO THE RUGGEDNESS OF THE TERRAIN.

F
IFTEEN

T
HE
R
OAD
'
S TRAFFIC WAS THICK NOW, BOTH FOOT AND
wheeled, and the dust and noise rode heavy on the air. The fields receded, giving way to neat rows of squash and corn and later to small flower gardens, before disappearing entirely behind fences and walls. Grand houses began to appear—or rather, their high and solid perimeter walls began to loom over the public way, laced along their tops with wicked shards of glass and broken by iron gates with guards wearing uniforms of various colors and decorations. The shopkeepers' wares became more gleaming, despite the dust, their smiles broader, their hands more clever. Culum and Tomas grew increasingly edgy, and twice Culum showed his teeth at riders who pressed too close. The second time disturbed even Simon, when they were all crushed between an unexpectedly swerving coach-and-four and a high wall topped by jagged bits of glass. Dian cursed the driver loudly, to no response, and turned off abruptly into the next lane, which led east to the Bay.

She sat for half an hour atop the long, high ridge of gathered rubble that kept the Bay from the Road, sat and threw rocks and allowed the dogs to run after birds and the horse to crop at the stubby grass. It must have been beautiful once, she thought, when the Bay was alive, with tule rushes and seabirds and sailing boats. And oil spills and the haze of automobiles, she reminded herself. But before that, before the universities and their libraries filled with clean, proud students, even before gold's siren call pulled in the miners' thousands and the camp followers' tens of thousands, back when Richard Henry Dana had spent his two years before the mast and sailed into the pristine Bay, looked with amused disdain at the dingy settlement around Mission Dolores, and left for his aristocratic home in Boston—then it must have been a glory.

What would Dana have thought if told that two hundred years later the children reading his book in a remote one-roomed schoolhouse would be no more technologically advanced than he was? And for that matter, what about his mighty Boston? Was it still a city? Or had it, too, slipped back and become a dingy settlement with subhuman primates skulking in the debris? Boston was somewhere near Washington, if she remembered those long-ago geography drills, and as far as she knew that city still existed in some form or another, the nominal capital of what some might still call the United States. There had once been a President there. She wondered if there was today, if anyone bothered, and then she noticed that Tomas was venturing too near the water and whistled him back.

It was all too remote to matter, Presidents and a theoretical, three-thousand-mile-wide nation. Meijing mattered. The world knew that history: nameless home to generation upon generation of fishing peoples, later named Yerba Buena by the Spanish fathers who built their adobe Mission of Sorrows, then known as San Francisco, under which name it was transformed first by gold, later by trade, only to have its high towers and busy streets abandoned in the panic of the Troubles, leaving behind the inhabitants of its most crowded sector. Meijing, now the greatest remaining city for a thousand miles in any direction.

Meijing was not the seat of a great empire or military power, although her hold over the area was complete, her authority as yet uncontested. Meijing kept the peace, it was true, but only as a peripheral function to her main interest: trade. She had a port, the biggest, most reliable port along the whole West Coast short of Seattle, and through her wharves flowed a constant stream of goods, thick furs from the north and exotic foods from the warm south, scavenged Artifacts and recently manufactured machines, luxuries and essentials and the ten thousand things that kept the darkness at bay. She also controlled the only dependable north road, for the land east of the Bay was contaminated clear up to the foothills of the great mountain range. Common knowledge had it that the land was filled with monstrosities and barrenness and death, and certainly travelers desperate enough to chance it had not been known to return—although whether that was because the land was toxic, or because the Destroyers ruled there, no one could tell. Rumor had it that Meijing had launched airplanes out over the area, which had never been seen again. What the truth was, only Meijing knew, and Meijing with a secret made one of its stone Buddhas look garrulous. Like the ancient maps used to say,
Here Be Monsters
.

Rumor was changing, though. The Travelers' talk at Jamilla's had included vague references to returning life, in the northern reaches of that land across the Bay, anyway. Time would tell. In the meantime, there was only Meijing, its road, its port, and its ferry.

A large part of Meijing's power was due to the chance of her location astride the only remaining north–south road, but Meijing's greatest asset, the thing that her people nurtured and used and occasionally abused, lay in neither port nor road. Her strength and authority lay in her preservation of a hundred thousand facets of a civilization now dead, her hoarding within her walls the techniques and instruments produced by humanity at its technological peak, now lost to the rest of humankind. Her power was in her knowledge, and her knowledge was immense.

People came to Meijing with their unfixable machines, their incurable illnesses and irreparable injuries, their unanswered questions and unverifiable theories, from all the reaches of the habitable world. The gadgets, illnesses, and questions were brought to Meijing's walls, taken inside, and returned for collection at a specified later time, at a specified price. Few, very few outsiders were given leave to enter, most of those on a limited training program such as Dian's mother had gone through. Meijing was inviolate, and the outside world knew little of what went on within her walls. Dian would be one of those privileged few, not through any virtue of her own but because she was the daughter of a woman who trained there and the friend of a woman actually born there. She would have to watch herself carefully, so as not to betray that trust. She looked down at the fuzzy head nestled to her chest and not for the first time was assailed by doubts as to the wisdom of her impulsive humanitarian action. Perhaps she should—she couldn't abandon Willa now—what if in Meijing they—but surely they were too civilized to—

Dian rose, distracted if not exactly soothed by her sojourn beside the waters, and put her troops back on the Road.

         

Her second stop was to be at the workshop of a carpet weaver named Deirdre. Shortly after midday the tide of the traffic ebbed and began to turn, and where in the morning she had been caught up and pulled along by the northward flow, now the trickle of carts coming back from the city began to grow, until the wrong-minded types like herself were crowded to one side. About one o'clock she paused for a breather and a drink, and a strange thing happened: she was approached by a man.

He came up to her as she leaned against the gatepost of the small café, a mug of beer in her hand and one eye on the animals to make sure they didn't overfill their bellies at the water trough. He was a tall, cadaverous male with wild hair and a yellowed beard trailing down his chest in matted ropes, wearing the standard dust-colored robe and carrying the requisite staff. This one had neither sandals nor rucksack. He leaned over his staff, fixed her with a fanatic eye, and waited.

Dian pulled back slightly and tried not to breathe in too much of his accompanying effluvium, and racked her brain for the ritual words. What the hell were you supposed to say? Mother had done this that time—oh, yes.

“Greetings, Brother.”

“I greet you, sister.”

“Whence do you come, and where are you bound?”

“I come from nowhere, I am bound toward salvation, for I move on a holy quest.” The words came out in a bored mumble, all the syllables strung together.

“What seekest thou, Brother?”

“I seek the forgiveness of mankind and offer myself up as a sacrifice to the living God.” These were the only variable words of the ritual but seemed no more his own than any of the others. He looked at her impatiently, and she finally dredged up the closing words.

“It is a just cause, Brother, and may the Heavens bless it. Please permit me to offer you refreshment to strengthen you on your way.” He turned away before the word
refreshment
had left her mouth and was already standing at the café's serving hatch. She leaned past him to put a copper in the woman's hand, and when the Pilgrim gave a snort of incredulous disgust, dug a second one from her pocket. She drained her mug and left quickly. Granted, becoming a Pilgrim was one of the few options open to males who would or could not live under control, but they made her nervous. Even Crazy Isaiah, though relatively harmless, she found an uncomfortable reminder of the occasional inhumanity of modern life. To say nothing of the fact that Pilgrims on a holy quest had a distressing tendency to go berserk and kill themselves and others if they thought they were about to be taken captive. All in all, it was best to submit to buying the man a quick meal and get away from him.

She found Deirdre's carpet-weaving shop half an hour later in one of the largest of the eight-mile centers south of Meijing, hedged in on one side by a painfully gaudy building—covered in various oranges, yellows, greens, reds, and several pounds of gold leaf—whose sign, visible a mile down the Road, declared it to be the Church of Understanding, and on the other by a tawdry cinema house whose advertisement of
moovies, 3-D, and videos
was almost obscured by photographs of polished-looking men in a variety of unlikely poses, all of whom seemed to have artificial teeth. She tore her eyes from this array of amazingly identical yet apparently distinct males and reined Simon to a halt.

In her fascination with the cinema kings, she had not registered the vehicle in front of the shop, but now she did, a gleaming maroon and silver closed carriage pulled by a matched foursome of equally glossy black geldings. Tied alongside were six saddled horses, the entire equipage blocking a fair amount of the Road and looking out of place in front of the unassuming whitewashed shed whose small sign said only
Weavers
. Two armed women in unnecessarily ornate maroon and silver uniforms blocked the door of the shop. Dian dismounted slowly in front of the “moovies” shop and looped Simon's reins to the post ring provided, studying as she did so the extraordinary photograph before her, that of a cinema king—a movie star!—threatening passersby with an unwieldy, thrusting black weapon. Most amazing of all was the movie star's costume, which looked remarkably like human skin but bulged in an exaggeration of masculinity, veins popping, sweat gleaming, muscles writhing across his chest and shoulders. It was a clever enough joke, she supposed, then paused to reflect on the oddities of humor, that what former peoples had apparently thought highly amusing, from her point of view should only appear grotesque. She shook her head, told the dogs to stay on guard, and left her rifle on the saddle.

The two uniformed guards immediately moved away from the building, bristling like a couple of strange dogs, their gun barrels down but very ready. Dian glanced up and down the road in hopes of seeing a Meijing guard, belt bristling with all those unidentifiable shapes, but there were only civilians. So she repeated her “stay” gesture to Culum and Tomas and, touching the firm little shape in the sling for confidence, walked up to the women. She stopped ten feet away.

“I'm looking for Deirdre,” she said politely.

“She's busy,” the older one said curtly.

“Yes, I thought that might be the case. Can you tell me how much longer before she's free?”

“No, I can't.”

“Can't, or won't? Ah, never mind. She is expecting me, I'm afraid, so if you would please just give her the message that Jamilla's friend—”

“No message. You'll have to wait.” The woman had a lumpy face and small eyes that gave her a stupid, bitter expression. The younger one was tense, bony, and spoiling for a fight; for an instant Dian was tempted, but the warm burden that began to stir on her chest made her clamp down hard and keep the politeness in her voice.

“Well, I'm really sorry, but this baby is going to start yelling her head off in about two minutes, and Deirdre is the only one who can do anything about it. It may disturb your employers, but that's up to you.” She bared her teeth in a smile, and Willa obligingly let out a first, questioning bleat. To her apprehension Dian saw the younger one react, even more aggressively than she had anticipated. The woman's hard, narrow face looked almost happy as the tip of her gun came up from the ground. Dian's hand shot out to her side, palm down stiffly, and a sharp command rang out.

“No!”

The woman was startled by the unexpected movement and the command, which had not actually been directed at her. Dian continued more quietly.

“Please don't do that. My dogs really don't like it when someone points a gun at me.”

The two guards looked past Dian at the vision of three hundredweight of muscle and teeth, crouched quivering where Dian's hand had frozen them as they moved apart and toward the women who threatened their mistress. She could see the women take in the eagerness, the shoulders huge with hackles, the yellow eyes locked on to prey, white teeth beneath the lips; both guards seemed suddenly less interested in dominating Dian. The tableau held for a long moment, all of them oblivious to the traffic and noise a few feet away, until it was broken by the shop door opening. A woman not much older than Dian, dressed in the maroon uniform and with a handgun strapped to her hip, stepped out and ran her eyes over them all, stopping on Culum.

“What is going on?”

“This woman was trying to get in—”

“A woman with a baby and no gun? And you decided to push her around.”

“No, we were just—”

“I've warned you two before about this.”