Woman Who Loved the Moon (9 page)

“Take one of the knives.”

“I don’t dare. I’d probably cut myself in the dark.”

“Don’t go,” pleaded Akys.

“I must.”

At last she got away.

At the cave, she would not look at the spyeyes. She had told Akys the truth, they would not come at night, she was sure of that. But in the morning... She twisted her hands together until her fingers hurt. What have you chosen, woman of Reorth?

She couldn’t sleep. She sat in the cavern with her machines, banks of them. With them she could touch anyplace on Methys, she could change the climate, trouble the seas, kill....The bracelets on her wrists shimmered with power. She dulled them. If only she could sleep. She rose. Slowly, she began to walk, pacing back and forth, back and forth, from one side of the cave to the other, chaining herself to it with her will.

You may not go out, she commanded herself. Walk. You may
not
go out. It became a kind of delirium. Walk to that wall. Now turn. Walk to
that
wall. Turn. Do not impede. Walk. This is desirable. Walk. Turn. You may not go out.

* * *

In the morning, when the machines told her the sun was up and high, she left the cave.

She went down the path toward the hut. The smell of smoke tormented her nostrils. She passed the pool, went through the trees that ringed it, and came out near the river. The cabin seemed intact. She walked toward it, and saw what she had not seen at first: the door, torn from its hinges, lying flat on the tramped-down, muddied grass.

She went into the cabin. Akys lay on the bed, on her side. There was blood all around her, all over the bed and floor. She was naked, but someone had tossed her sheepskin cloak across her waist and legs. Jael walked to her. Her eyes were open, her expression twisted with determination and pain. Her stiff right arm had blood on it to the elbow. Jael’s foot struck something. She bent to see what it was. It was a bloody knife on the stained floor.

Jael looked once around the cabin. The raiders had broken down the door, to find a dead or dying woman, and had left. It was kind of them not to burn or loot the tiny place, she thought.

She walked from the hut. Smoke eddied still from the village below. She went down the path. She smelled charred meat. The storehouses were gone. They had come burning and hacking in the dawnlight. She wondered if they had killed everyone. There was a body in the street. She went to look at it; it was a ewe-goat with its throat slit. A man came out of a house, cursing and crying. Jael blurred Herself to human eyes. She went in through the broken door. There were dead women in here, too: one an old lady, her body a huddled, smashed thing against the wall, like a dead moth, the other a young woman, who might have once been beautiful. One could not tell from the things they had done.

Had they killed only women, then? She left the house. No, there was a man. He lay against a wall, both hands holding his belly, from which his entrails spilled. Flies buzzed around his hands.

Around Her the sounds of weeping rose and fell.

She walked the length of the street, and then turned, and walked back again, past the dead man, the dead ewe, the granaries smoking in the sunlight. They had left enough people alive in the village to starve through the winter. She followed the river past the cabin, past the pool. Just below the cabin She hesitated, drawn by a change in the mutter of the stream. The raiders had tossed a dead body into the clear water, and wedged it between two big rocks, defiling it.

She returned to the cave.

She lit it with a wave of Her hand. The light flamed and stayed, as if the stone walls had incandesced. Surrounded by bright, bare, burning stone, Jael walked to Her machines. She flung a gesture at the lumenings: the points of light whirled crazily, crackled, and died. The screen went blank. She passed Her hand over it; it stayed blank, broken, dead.

She smiled.

She turned to a machine, setting the controlling pattern with deft fingertips. She had not used this instrument since the plague time, when She had had to mutate a strain of bacteria. Meticulously She checked the pattern, and then tuned it finer still. When She was wholly satisfied, She turned the machinery on.

It hummed softly. A “beam went out, radiation, cued to a genetic pattern. It touched Spykos of Rys, where he lay in his war tent outside the walls of Mykneresta’s capitol, the city of Ain, with a twelve-year-old captive daughter of that city whose home and street his soldiers were busy burning to ash. It touched the guard outside his door. It touched the soldiers pillaging the city. It touched the little bands of raiders raping and killing in the countryside.

It touched the nobles of Rys. It touched Araf, Hechlos’ king, where he lay with his third wife, and Asch, his son, where
he
lay with a slave girl whose looks he’d admired, that morning. His new wife slept alone. It touched the nobles of Hechlos, the high families of Dechlas.

It touched every male human being over fourteen on the six islands. It did not kill, but when it encountered the particular genetic pattern to which it had been cued, it sterilized. The men of Kovos, Nysineria, and Mykneresta it ignored. But on Rys, Hechlos, and Dechlas, and wherever it found men of that breed, it lingered. No seed, no children; no children, no dynasty; no dynasty, no empire; no empire, no war.

At last She shut it off. Around Her the stones still burned with light. She looked once around the cave that had been Her home for three hundred years. Then, using the bracelets, She set a protective shield around Herself, and summoned the patient lightning from the walls.

To the remaining villagers who saw it, it seemed as if the whole of the Lady’s mountain exploded into flame. Balls of fire hurtled down the mountainside; fire-wisps danced on the crags like demented demons. Stones flaked and crumbled. “It is the Fire God of Rys,” the villagers whispered. “He has come to vanquish the Lady.” All through the night they watched the fires burn. By morning the flames seemed gone. That day some brave women crept up the path. Where the Lady’s pool had been was a rushing stream, scored by the tips of jagged rocks like teeth. Above it the mountaintop was scoured into bare, blue ash. The Lady had fled. The grieving women stumbled home, weeping.

* * *

No seed, no children.

With the coming of the first snow, word came to Mykneresta, carried by travelers. “The women of Rys are barren,” they said. “They bear no children.” And in the villages they wondered at this news.

But in the spring, the singers one by one came from their winter homes, to take their accustomed ways along the roads. They told the news a different way. “The Fire God’s seed is ash,” they cried, “He burns but cannot beget,” and they made up songs to mock Him, and sang them throughout the marveling countryside. No children, no dynasty. They sang them under the walls of the brand new palace that Spykos of Rys had built in Ain. But no soldiers emerged to punish them for this temerity, for the brand new palace was empty, save for the rats. No dynasty, no empire. There was war in Rys over the succession, and Spykos had gone home.

It was the women who brought the truth. They came from Rys, from Hechlos, from Dechlas. Leaving lands, wealth, and kin, they came to the islands their men had tried to conquer.

They came in boats, wives of fishermen, and in ships, wives of nobles. Wives of soldiers and merchants, kings and carpenters, they came. “Our men give us no children,” they said. “We bear no sons for our fields, no daughters for our hearths. We come for children. Have pity on us, folk of Mykneresta; give us children, and our daughters will be your daughters, and our sons, your sons.” No empire, no war.

Then the whole world knew. The poets sang it aloud: “The Lady is with us still, and She has taken vengeance for us.” In Ain they rebuilt Her altar, and set Her statue on it, and they made Her hair as red as fire, and set hissing, coiling snakes about Her wrists, so real that one could almost see them move. Even on Rys the poets sang, and under the Harvest Moon the people danced for Her, keeping one eye on the Fire God’s mountain. But it stayed silent and smokeless.

On Mykneresta the trees and bushes grew back on the Lady’s mountain. One day in late summer, when the streams were dry, some rocks slid and fell. After the rain a pool formed, and it stayed. The old women went up the path to look. “She has returned,” they said.

In spring the next year a woman came to the village. Her face was worn and weathered, but her back was straight, and though her red hair was streaked with gray, she walked as lightly as a young girl. “I am vowed to the Lady,” she told the villagers, and she showed them the bracelets, like coiled snakes, on her slim brown wrists. “I am a healer. I have been in many lands, I have even been to Rys, but now I must come home. Help me build a house.”

So the villagers built her a cabin by the curve of the stream, below the Lady’s pool. They brought her meat and fruit and wine, when they had it, and she tended their sickness and healed their wounds. They asked her name, and she said, “My name is Jael.”

“Have you really been to Rys?” they asked her.

“I have,” she said. And she told them stories, about cities of stone, and tall men with golden hair, and ships with prows like the beaks of eagles, and streets with no children.

The children of the village asked, “Is it true they killed their king, because they thought he brought the Lady’s Curse?”

“It’s true,” she said. “Camilla of Ain rules in Rys, and she is a better ruler than Spykos ever was or ever could be.”

“Will they ever come again?”

“No, they never will.”

A girl with brown braids and a small, serious face, asked, “Why did they come before?”

“Who knows? Now, be off with you, before night comes.”

The children ran, save for the brown-haired girl. She lingered by the door. “Jael, aren’t you ever afraid, so close to Her holy place?”

“How could I be?” said the healer. “This is my home, and She is good. Go on now, run, before the light goes.”

“May I come back tomorrow?” said the girl.

“Why?” said Jael.

“I—I want to learn. About herbs, and healing, and the Lady.”

“Come, then,” said Jael.

The girl smiled, like a coal quickening in the darkness, and waved, and ran like a deer down the path beside the stream. Jael watched her go. Above her the clouds spun a net to catch the moon. She stood in the cabin doorway for a long time. At last the cold wind blew. Turning from the night, she pulled her green cloak close about her throat, and closed the cabin door against the stars.

We All Have To Go

This is the first of my short stories to be published. It has a remarkable publication history, most of which was created by one publisher’s monumental bad faith. The story was accepted in 1974 by Scott Edelstein for an anthology called
Future Pastimes
, which he was editing for Aurora Publishers. Supposedly,
Future Pastimes
was to be the first of a series of anthologies; other titles in the series were
Outpost, Black Holes, Thanatos, The Universe Within,
and
Future Professions.

It soon became clear that Aurora had no knowledge of and no real interest in science fiction. God only knows how Scott managed to talk them into publishing anything. It took about eighteen months before I was paid. The anthology was actually published in 1977, long after Aurora’s rights—to the original stories, at least—had expired. None of the other anthologies ever appeared. A number of the contributors never got any money, and Scott had to sue Aurora to get it. His letters got progressively stranger.

Now to back up: in 1975, Bill Pronzini and Joe Gores were editing the annual anthology of the Mystery Writers of America. I knew Bill slightly. In a conversation over lunch, he discussed the volume and asked me if I had written anything that could possibly be called a crime story. I mentioned “We All Have To Go,” rather diffidently.

Bill asked to see it. I brought it to him the next week. Some weeks later he informed me that, pending revisions, he and Joe wanted to buy it. Technically it would be a non-professional sale; the money which would normally be paid to contributors to the MWA anthology goes into MWA’s coffers. I was of course delighted, but explained that I didn’t know if I could let him have it: Aurora owned the first publication right, and
Future Pastimes
had not come out. I queried Scott Edelstein, who said rather wearily that he had no idea when
Future Pastimes
would appear. Since my contract was with him, as editor, he gave me formal permission to let Bill use the story. It was published in
Tricks And Treats
in 1976, well before the publication of the Aurora anthology, but after their right to publish the story had expired.

Got that?

I think of this as my Chicago story. The version here is the original version which appeared in
Future Pastimes.
The revisions Bill asked me to make undoubtedly tightened the prose, but they eliminated several passages about the city which I enjoyed writing and I thought you might enjoy reading. Anyone who asks, “Where did you get your idea?” for
this
story has obviously never lived in Chicago.