Walk to the End of the World (20 page)

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Authors: Suzy McKee Charnas

BOOK: Walk to the End of the World
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‘How could it be?’ she said, thinking of d Layo in the hemp-field.
He moved his shoulders in a shrug or a shiver, she couldn’t tell which. ‘Love between fems or between men certainly seems less grotesque; the relation of like to like.’ Again the crooked smile: ‘Or so we are taught.’
‘Your teachings are not things for a fem to know.’
‘Nevertheless,’ he said, ‘it must amuse you, all this carrying on among us – Kelmz, Servan, myself, and now this filthy brute Bajerman.’
‘That’s men’s affairs,’ she said, stubbornly.
‘Oh? I’d have said it was just the sort of thing you’ve been describing as typical of fems, but less intense; the loves and hates of dilettantes, as opposed to those of devotees. You have no need to look so sullen; I like the comparison less than you do.’
Exchanges like these provided them both with distraction. Alldera saw the danger in it and would have stopped, but she couldn’t. Even among her own lovers and friends she had never had any one to talk to like this. There had never been any security, any time, even when she found another fem with true verbal facility. This was her first experience of speech as self-expression with any degree of complexity, eliciting responses of similar quality. It gave her an extraordinary feeling of power, of reality.
That was the danger.
They camped on the upper plateau for the night. D Layo brought over his fellow-prisoner’s ration of food and stayed while Bek ate. Then he announced Senior Bajerman’s invitation: that the Endtendant come and sleep in the camper tonight.
Bek, sitting wrapped in his blanket against the highland chill, shook his head. ‘The entertainment isn’t to my taste.’
D Layo sighed. ‘I’m not exactly enchanted with it myself, but it’s better than having my throat cut. So my little fem, here, is proving more fascinating to you than our esteemed Senior? A function of familiarity, I suppose. He won’t be delighted to hear it, though.’
‘Did he do this?’ The Endtendant touched very lightly a line of raw sores on d Layo’s shoulder.
‘No. That’s from lugging you half the length of the Holdfast. I can’t get the trick of padding the yoke exactly. Bajerman does like to beat on me a bit, but I don’t mind that as much as I mind not being able to wash up at all. He seems to get a thrill from dust and sweat; I don’t remember him having been like that back in the Boyhouse, do you? And then that reeky stuff he wears gets all mixed in, I can hardly stand the smell of myself any more. You should be grateful that I haven’t made a run for it, Eykar.’
‘Why haven’t you?’
‘What, and leave you to Bajerman? He’d be on you in a flash.’
‘I have also noticed,’ the Endtendant said drily, ‘that there’s no place to hide out here, when the hemps have been cut.’
The DarkDreamer gazed off at the darkening horizon, hugging himself for warmth, and sighed. ‘I worry about you, Eykar. You’re turning into some kind of wretched realist. It’s distressing.’ He looked toward the camper. ‘I’d better go back; he’d love an excuse to come out after me and give me a whipping in front of you. It’s cold up here! The old cur won’t let me wear a shirt, either. Someday I’ll wear his famishing skin.’
Alldera slept among the carry-fems, as usual. When she served the Endtendant in the morning, she found him so stiff-limbed from lying curled up in his blanket that he could hardly straighten up. Irritably he accepted the Hemaways’ rough help in getting into the camper for the day’s ride, and he sat slumped in a corner and brooded on the squares of sunlight falling on the blanket through the roof grill. When the camper was lifted and moved on, he looked up at Alldera. His eyes were red-rimmed and gritty-lashed, as if he hadn’t slept.
‘Where do they go, these talks between us?’ he said.
She was silent. Deliberately she waited until he invited her to speak, giving a sort of sanction in advance to what she had to say. That might even be truly effective in the case of a man as scrupulous as this one tried to be, if she did eventually go too far even for him. Besides, his bending to her unspoken rule filled her with a feeling of righteous power.
He looked exhausted and downcast this morning, and that was her doing; hers and d Layo’s. Bek would no more tell her to shut up and leave him his peace than he would avert his eyes from the flirting between d Layo and Bajerman. He just took it and took it, like a fem taking her punishment. She despised him for it.
‘Ah, that look again,’ he said. ‘If I beat you for looking at me like that, you’d show some respect, wouldn’t you? Servan, in my place, would whip you till you bled. Would that impress you? You don’t accept us at our own evaluation, do you? No, surely you’re too clever, entirely too clever not to see through us.’
She made no answer. He prodded the thickness of cloth wrapped around his upper leg. ‘Change this; it’s wet again.’
The wound, though less swollen, was still draining, and the bandage was stuck at the center and had to be worked off carefully. She looked up once and saw him watching her hands with the same steady, straight gaze she had seen him turn on Kelmz, Bajerman, even on d Layo. He just looked: not for what was gratifying, not for
what was useful, not merely to fill time or distract himself from less pleasant matters, but to see what was there.
For a moment, she let her imagination fly, thinking, what could seeing eyes see in her? Anger. Beyond that – anger, grief for her helpless dead – she couldn’t see herself. It was no wonder. She, after all, had no experience with that sort of looking. She could not afford to attend to anything other than what was helpful to her own survival.
Her hands drew away the pad of cloth, revealing the glistening wound.
‘Isn’t this ever going to heal?’ he said.
‘It is healing,’ she said.
‘But the process could be slowed down – or speeded up – by a spell, couldn’t it.’
‘I’m no witch,’ she protested, alarmed by the direction his remarks had taken.
‘Tell me,’ he said, leaning back and resting the back of his hand across his eyes, ‘how you’re not a witch.’
Briefly, while she tended his wound, she told him.
The Seekers had been a club of young fems in Senior Robrez’ femhold. She had joined them, drawn by their intense conviction that the fems of Ancient times had indeed caused the Wasting by witchery, just as the men said. If the powers of the martyred Ancestresses could be rediscovered, men would have good reason to fear witchery again — from the Seekers. These youngsters had met at great risk to exchange rumors and recite spells that came to them in dreams. During hours stolen from rest periods, and often in the company of fems who had slipped away from other houses to join them, they would huddle passionately together over pathetic scraps of ‘news’: that a fem in Lammintown had brought up a man-drowning storm at sea with a song; that another had breathed life into a lump of Bayo mud.
Soon Alldera had reluctantly seen that the powers the Seekers longed for surely would have won the Wasting for any who had possessed them. Her friends were not searching out true weapons, but spending their courage and energy in the pursuit of nonsense concocted by fearful men. That did not mean that masters only pretended to believe fems might (or at one time had been able to) change shapes, steal souls, control weather, move objects and
thoughts through the air, send sickness and death from a distance, speak to past and future generations, and so on; it meant only that men were dupes of their own ideology.
She had tried to dissuade the Seekers from their path. They had not wished to be influenced, least of all by logical argument. They had labeled her a traitor and banned her from their meetings.
Of the rest, she said nothing. One of the younger members of the group, whom Alldera had loved, shortly afterward had leaped to her death from a rooftop, attempting to fly down a shaft of moonlight. Alldera’s reaction - withdrawal into lethargic sullenness — had gotten her packed off to Oldtown for discipline. Senior Robrez, an experienced femholder, had been lenient with her, not least because of the size of his investment in her training. To turn her over to the hunt would be to lose it all. The other fems had been glad to see her go; her reckless mood had endangered them all.
Bek said, ‘But if I accused you – ’
She shrugged. ‘I would burn.’
‘With no evidence, just because I said I suspected you?’
‘It doesn’t have to be you who makes the complaint. The fem who bore you was burned for witching your father into breaking the Law of Generations, but it wasn’t your father who made the charge. The Boardmen accused her themselves.’
Once his interest was engaged he couldn’t be stopped; show him horrors, and he asked to see more. ‘Have you had cubs?’
‘Twice lucky,’ she said, briskly. ‘That both were little kit-cubs and didn’t have to be chopped out of my belly by your Hospital men; and that I had little milk and didn’t have to languish forever in that boring hole, the milkery. That’s all the luck, and all the cubs, I want.’
‘Do you know which ones they are in the kit-pits?’
She sat back on her heels and looked at him. ‘Why should a fem want to know that it’s her grown kit-cub crackling in the witch fires? Or, for that matter, her boy-cub matured to manhood and fucking her in the breeding-rooms?’
‘Then how could anyone know which was my dam?’ he said sharply. ‘The mark on her neck must have been gone long before the rumors of the broken law began, and she wouldn’t have known herself.’
‘One of the Hospital-men noticed a dye-mark on her neck when
she came in and dropped her cub, and he spoke to her master about it. Her master questioned her, couldn’t get a sensible answer, had her beaten and forgot about it. She was valuable property, a speaker and fine looking. Later, when the Boardmen started asking questions about this story of Raff Maggomas and his claimed son, her master remembered that identifying mark. She was older by then. He turned her over to the Board, and they burned her.’
‘What else to do you know about her?’
‘What I’ve heard in a few songs.’
‘What was she like?’
‘She wasn’t like anything; she was what she was trained to be – as all fems are.’
‘As you were trained to be insolent and bitter?’ he rapped out.
‘I’m nothing that I haven’t learned from my trainers and masters,’ she muttered. Let him hit her, at least she knew where she was with a blow.
‘The same could be said of others,’ he said. ‘Men.’
‘Men have some choice when they are old enough to see what’s happening,’ she said. She turned to put the used bandage into a bowl of water for washing.
He rolled onto one elbow and reached to secure a buckle on the camper-flap. In mid-action he seemed to freeze, his hand still extended. Without looking at her, he said, ‘Suppose I told you to take off your clothes?’
She’d been expecting this. Often when she tended to his bad leg he became aroused. Both of them had ignored this till now.
She began to pull off her smock.
He caught her wrist: ‘Don’t!’ Thrusting her arm back down, he held her beside the bed, kneeling, with the bowl of water next to her and the bandage trailing out of it.
‘When Bajerman put his hand on Servan,’ he whispered, ‘that first night in this same camper, for the instant before he began being flippant about it Servan looked the way you do now. I think I know that expression from wearing it on my own face in the aisles of the Boyhouse Library, when Bajerman or some other like him said, “Kneel down, boy,” or “Come and kiss me, boy —” ’ He stammered with rage and disgust. ‘Or, “turn, turn around, boy, and stand right there.”
‘Now you look the same, and you have every right – I was going
to turn and pass it on to you — Bajerman’s style of routine, callous rape!’
‘Men do not “rape” fems,’ she said. ‘They use them. The act then has a certain cleanness, reminding a fem m that her duty is to receive whatever a master chooses to bestow on her.’
‘Don’t you speak that way to me, not about him! To use another person as a convenience is nothing but filth.’
‘You’re not speaking to a person,’ she spat, ‘only to a fem — whom you have already used in just that way, surely without staining your fine, manly honor!’
‘That was before!’ he cried. ‘Look around: where do you see “men”, where do you see “fems” in here? There’s nobody but us, you and me. I know you now from everything you’ve shown me and a little that you’ve tried not to show; I know you almost as well as you know me. But it’s worth nothing while I have the power of death over you.’ He unwrapped his fingers from her wrist, leaving white pressure-marks on her reddened skin.
Bitterly, to himself, he added, ‘Nothing that passes between us can be anything but rape.’
‘I’m not Bajerman!’ he burst out, ‘I won’t be like Bajerman! There has to be something clean left in me when I come to face my father!’ He lay back amid the pillows, staring up at the roof grill, and muttered, ‘Everything must be jettisoned, then, even valuables I didn’t know I had.’ He turned toward her again, and said in a tired, reasonable tone, ‘Only in dreams can a man be an all-purpose hero. I don’t have an extra lifetime to spend helping to heal up the horror between men and fems — or even just between us two. I’m on my way to meet Raff Maggomas. Everything must go toward that meeting.’
He closed his eyes and hissed his breath in. Then he said, in his old, harsh voice, ‘There must be no horror, no rape, nothing outside of the ordinary, superficial relations between men and fems. Therefore I can’t permit you to be a person. What you haven’t told me, keep. The rest I’ll do my best to forget - unsuccessfully, if it’s any comfort to you. Do you understand me?’
She understood him perfectly. She had beaten him into a retreat. She bent her head: ‘As the master says.’

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