Woman Who Loved the Moon (28 page)

Helen was talking to her. “Baby? Louise? Oh, damn.” She half felt hands on her. 1 can hear you perfectly, Luisa wanted to say. But Helen was muttering off to the nursing station. Luisa was walking the line between wakefulness and dreams, that was all. She imagined it as a thin line cut in concrete, like the lines in the sidewalks she had skipped over as a child, chanting. “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” If only they would stop pulling her back into life. Even Helen, who understood, who always told her when one of them had gone, even Helen held her to life. One day through the tubes they would feed her arsenic, and then it would be all over.

Fantasy.
She built against the dark of her closed eyes the trembling blues of Corfu.

* * *

At six o’clock Mark made his final rounds. The fluorescent lights were watery in the dawn. Out of the beds the old people stared, sleepy, flat-eyed, blind-eyed. He was alone. Morton was m the hospital, St. Francis, cut. up by a mugger, rolled on his way to work, left to bleed to death in an alley. What had he gone into an alley for?
Su-i-cide;
he could hear Morton saying it in that fag drawl.

Someone was moaning. He walked into 209. The old lady was shifting and turning her head. The tape that held the respirator tube was loose. She was supposed to be comatose, or semicomatose. He watched her for a while. The movement looked purposeful. He reached out and patted the tape down again. She moaned. Her eyes were cloudy, and he remembered that she was blind. How did it feel to have hands come out of the night at you like that? Like the hands with the knife that had cut Morton. “Listen, sweetie,” he said, “you want me to take that tape off? That tube out? If I do that you’ll die, you know, poof, out like a damned light. You know that?” Her body was still, frozen, stiff as a board. He put his hand on the tape again to tease her. Comatose, semicomatose, what did doctors know? he thought. She’d heard him. I’d be scared; Christ, I’d be petrified. “I won’t do it,” he told her. “I could lose my job.”

He drowsed through the report that ritualized the shift change, and then went downstairs to collect his book and his bottle. He leaned against the dirty gray wall and took a long drink. Warmer than any woman. One for the road. And one for Morton. He wondered how bad Morton was. He capped the bottle and tucked it, brownbagged, decently clad, under his arm. He wondered what Morton had left uncollected in his locker. A pack of cards?

The wind was bitter. He held tightly to the bottle, glad that his was only a short walk home. It came to him suddenly that he was drinking himself to death. The thought was mildly entertaining. It could be worse. On the ice patches he staggered, and it became a game to see if this one or the next one would trip him. He beat them all. He decided to shortcut through the tunnel under the freeway. There would be few cars through it on a Sunday morning, 7 a.m. on an icy day. The tunnel walls were gray and smooth. He found himself thinking back to 209. He had almost done it to the old lady. Christ. That would have been a mistake.

The car came diving into the neck of the tunnel, a bullet-shaped red toy. Mark watched as it slipped on the street ice. The driver took the skids, slid, and then pulled out, nonchalant as if it were a game for kids. Smooth, he thought.

The car grew suddenly very large and very red.

The dream, he thought, it’s the car of the dream. The tunnel wall was flat and cold at his back. He was pressed down and there was nowhere he could go. The bright fender grazed him, and like a bull, the car was gone. The driver honked back at him. Bastard, you missed me, he thought, you missed me! Torn between rage and joy, he threw the bottle into the air. It went up like a rocket. His feet slipped out from under him. “Hey!” He was falling. You bastard, he thought in wonderment as the bottle shattered all around him, you bastard.

* * *

“Morning, baby. You doing any better today? It’s raining. Gray outside. I almost didn’t want to come to work this morning, it’s so ugly. But then I thought, what would Louise think if I weren’t there? She’d worry. Honey, you remember that night orderly Mark?” Helen’s voice dropped. “You know, they found him under the freeway this morning with his neck broke, and all cut up and covered with whiskey. An accident. Isn’t that something? He was young, too. But Morton, you remember Morton, he’s okay and coming back to work tonight, so there’ll be someone on duty to look after you. Imagine, he just slipped on the ice! Cruel way to die.”

Luisa dreamed. Cruel. That was cruel.
April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead earth..
. Lord, must these bones live? The tube in her chest pumped Her mouth hurt, her back hurt. Mark, she thought, remembering his voice and the thick alcoholic breath of him and the feel of his hand on her cheek. It was cruel of him to tease me. Out like a light, he had said.
Out, out, brief candle.
The light in Greece stains the air like yellow wine. Why would they not let her go? Arsenic through the tube would be easy. That would be murder, they would never do that. She lay and dreamed of all the ways there were to die. Arsenic, gas, ropes and cliffs,
the white cliffs of Dover,
steely razor blades with blue edges, blue water to drown in, and cars, bright red lethal cars. So many ways to die, she thought, but not here, and her heart clenched in a sudden fury. Again, she urged it, again, again. They do it for each other, but not for us, the bastards, never for us.

The Woman Who Loved the Moon

When Jessica Amanda Salmonson asked me, three years ago, to contribute to her anthology
Amazons!,
I said yes although I had no idea what I would write. Aside from “Wizard’s Domain,” which was still unsold, I had written no heroic fantasy. Nevertheless I wanted to be a part of this project, and I was sure the story would come—I could feel it in my psyche. When I finally sat down at the typewriter to do the story, the setting emerged first, and I recognized the landscapes of my first invented country, Ryoka.

As it unwound in my head I saw that the story was a myth. When it was done I reworked it twice and sent it to Jessica. And that, I thought, is that—except that the culture and history of the story have taken root, as it were, in my mind. Someday there will be a book whose hero is Kai Talvela’s great-great-great-many more greats-granddaughter.

* * *

They tell this story in the Middle Counties of Ryoka, and especially in the county of Issho, the home of the Talvela family. In Issho they know that the name of the woman who loved the Moon was Kai Talvela, one of the three warrior sisters of Issho. Though the trees round the Talvela house grow taller now than they did in Kai Talvela’s time, her people have not forgotten her. But outside of Issho and in the cities they know her only as the Mirror Ghost.

Kai Talvela was the daughter of Roko Talvela, at a time when the domain of the Talvelai was smaller than it is now. Certainly it was smaller than Roko Talvela liked. He rode out often to skirmish at the borders of his land, and the men of the Talvelai went with him. The hills of Issho county resounded to their shouts. While he was gone the folk of the household went about their business, for the Talvela lands were famous then as they are now for their fine orchards and the fine dappled horses they breed. They were well protected, despite the dearth of soldiery, for Lia Talvela was a sorcerer, and Kai and her sisters Tei and Alin guarded the house. The sisters were a formidable enemy, for they had learned to ride and to fight. The Talvela armorer had fashioned for them fine light mail that glittered as if carved from gems. At dawn and dusk the three sisters rode across the estate. Alin wore a blue-dyed plume on her peaked helmet, and Tei wore a gold one on hers. Kai wore a feather dyed red as blood. In the dusk their armor gleamed, and when it caught the starlight it glittered like the rising Moon.

Kai was the oldest of the sisters; Alin the youngest. In looks and in affection the three were very close. They were—as Talvela women are even in our day—tall and slim, with coal-black hair. Tei was the proudest of the three, and Alin was the most laughing and gay. Kai, the oldest, was quietest, and while Tei frowned often and Alin laughed, Kai’s look was grave, direct, and serene. They were all of an age to be wed, and Roko Talvela had tried to find husbands for them. But Kai, Tei, and Alin had agreed that they would take no lover and wed no man who could not match their skills in combat. Few men wished to meet the warrior sisters. Even the bravest found themselves oddly unnerved when they faced Tei’s long barbed spear and grim smile, or Alin’s laughing eyes as she spun her oaken horn-tipped cudgel. It whirled like a live thing in her palms. And none desired to meet Kai’s great curved blade. It sang when she swung it, a thin clear sound, purer than the note of the winter thrush. Because of that sound Kai named her blade
Song.
She kept it sharp, sharp as a shadow in the full Moon’s light. She had a jeweled scabbard made to hold it, and to honor it, she caused a great ruby to be fixed in the hilt of the sword.

One day in the late afternoon the sisters rode, as was their custom, to inspect the fences and guardposts of the estate, making sure that the men Roko Talvela had left under their command were vigilant in their job. Their page went with them. He was a boy from Nakase county, and like many of the folk of Nakase he was a musician. He carried a horn which, when sounded, would summon the small company of guards, and his stringed lute from Ujo. He also carried a long-necked pipe, which he was just learning how to play. It was autumn. The leaves were rusty on the trees. In the dry sad air they rattled in the breeze as if they had been made of brass. A red sun sat on the horizon, and overhead swung the great silver face of the full Moon.

The page had been playing a children’s song on the pipe. He took his lips from it and spoke. The storytellers of Ujo, in Nakase county, when they tell this tale, insist that he was in love with one of the sisters, or perhaps with all three. There is no way to know, of course, if that is true. Certainly they had all, even proud Tei, been very kind to him. But he gazed upon the sisters in the rising moonlight, and his eyes worshipped. Stammering, he said, “O my ladies, each of you is beautiful, and together you rival even the Moon!”

Alin laughed, and swung her hair. Like water against diamond it brushed her armor. Even Tei smiled. But Kai was troubled, “Don’t say that,” she said gently. “It’s not lucky, and it isn’t true.”

“But everyone says it, Lady,” said the page.

Suddenly Tei exclaimed. “Look!” Kai and Alin wheeled their horses. A warrior was riding slowly toward them, across the blue hills. His steed was black, black as obsidian, black as a starless night, and the feather on his helmet was blacker than a raven’s wing. His bridle and saddle and reins and his armor were silver as the mail of the Talvela women. He bore across his lap a blackthorn cudgel, tipped with ivory, and beside it lay a great barbed spear. At his side bobbed a black sheath and the protruding hilt of a silver sword. Silently he rode up the hill, and the darkness thickened at his back. The hooves of the black horse made no sound on the pebbly road.

As the rider came closer, he lifted his head and gazed at the Talvelai, and they could all see that the person they had thought a man was in fact a woman. Her hair was white as snow, and her eyes gray as ash. The page lifted the horn to his lips to sound a warning. But Alin caught his wrist with her warm strong fingers. “Wait,” she said. “I think she is alone, let us see what she wants.” Behind the oncoming rider darkness thickened. A night bird called
Whooo?

Tei said, “I did not know there was another woman warrior in the Middle Counties.”

The warrior halted below the summit of the hill. Her voice was clear and cold as the winter wind blowing off the northern moors. “It is as they sing; you are indeed fair. Yet not so fair, I think as the shining Moon.”

Uneasily the women of Issho gazed at this enigmatic stranger. Finally Kai said, “you seem to know who we are. But we do not know you. Who are you, and from where do you come? Your armor bears no device. Are you from the Middle Counties?”

“No,” said the stranger, “my home is far away.” A smile like light flickered on her lips. “My name is—Sedi.”

Kai’s dark brows drew together, and Tei frowned, for Sedi’s armor was unmarred by dirt or stain, and her horse looked fresh and unwearied. Kai thought, what if she is an illusion, sent by Roko Talvela’s enemies? She said, “You are chary of your answers.”

But Alin laughed. “O my sister, you are too suspicious,” she said. She pointed to the staff across the stranger’s knees. “Can you use that pretty stick?”

“In my land,” Sedi said, “I am matchless.” She ran her hand down the black cudgel’s grain.

“Then I challenge you!” said Alin promptly. She smiled at her sisters. “Do not look so sour. It has been so long since there has been anyone who could fight with me!” Faced with her teasing smile, even Tei smiled in return, for neither of the two older sisters could refuse Alin anything.

“I accept,” said Sedi sweetly. Kai thought,
An illusion cannot fight. Surely this woman is real.
Alin and Sedi dismounted their steeds. Sedi wore silks with silver and black markings beneath her shining mail. Kai looked at them and thought, I have seen those marks before. Yet as she stared at them she saw no discernible pattern. Under her armor Alin wore blue silk. She had woven it herself, and it was the color of a summer sky at dawn when the crickets are singing. She took her white cudgel in her hands, and made it spin in two great circles, so swiftly that it blurred in the air. Then she walked to the top of the hill, where the red sunlight and the pale moonlight lingered.