The Gate to Women's Country (22 page)

She went to the wall, day on day, finally managing a meeting which was unlikely to be overheard. He whispered to her to bring books to the secret hole, but she shook her head. “I'll meet you in the assignation house, Chernon. At midwinter. Bring that last book I gave you. We'll talk about it then….”

He was stubborn and resentful, but she felt she had already yielded too much. She would not yield again.

“C
HILD, YOU'RE NOT OLD ENOUGH
,” the assignation mistress said, a quirk at the corner of her mouth saying clearer than words could, “Oh, look at this precocious little miss, thinks she's in love with some warrior.”

Joshua had told her what to say. “It isn't sex, ma'am, if you please. He's almost like my brother, just turned fifteen, and wants to talk to me. You know how it is—there's no place quiet he can go now….”

A flipping of records, and the woman nodded. “I see. That's Sylvia's son, Chernon. You're neighbors.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“I'll give you the end room nearest the plaza, first day of carnival, at six in the morning. That's an hour before we open for the lovers, so you'll have a chance for a quiet chat.” She had a different expression now, a yearning, as though she had had a brother once, or a dear friend, she had wanted a quiet time with. “I wish you luck, child. Bring him home if you can.”

Stavia flushed. It was a secret they all shared. Someone to be brought home; someone who could not come.

As it seemed he could not.

“You have to
give
me the book, Chernon.” They were sitting side by side on the wide couch, not touching, embarrassed by the place, by the time.

“In exchange for one, Stavia. Just like always,” he said stubbornly, lower lip clenched and angry. He had truly expected her to come to him before now, offering to put everything back as it had been before she refused him. Michael had thought she would.

“Not in exchange for anything. Oh, Chernon, don't you care about me at all? Or yourself?”

What was this? He was shifty, biting his cheeks, eyes darting this way and that as though she were trying to trap him. “Yes. You're my friend.”

“Then don't risk our lives, Chernon.”

His jaw sagged. “What do you mean?”

“If I don't get it back, I must tell the Council, Chernon. I broke the ordinances. Now that you're really going to be a warrior, I can't go on breaking them. If you won't give it back, I'll have to….”

“Don't,” he said hastily, too hastily. Michael wouldn't want that. Michael wouldn't want the Council knowing
anything about Chernon at all, about Chernon and Stavia!

“Besides, you should be worried about what the warriors might do to you.”

He had to detour her, distract her. He put out his hand to touch her face, the soft tips of his fingers making gentle trails down her cheeks to her jaw, his mouth like one on a tragic mask, drooping. “You were really worried about me. I didn't know. I thought you were just being… trying….”

She had been
being, trying.
She was still
trying
, but none of that got through to him at all.

“I'll… I'll bring it back to you this afternoon,” he said. “I'll put it through the hole.” They had widened the hole. It was almost a window, now, suitable for the passage of books. When she leaned tight into the wall on the inside, and he on the outside, they could touch hands in the dark depth of the stone while the tree sifted the light onto his face. He could never see her, but she could see him. She felt he was closer to her then, separated by all that thickness of wall, than he was now.

Now he started to go and she stopped him. “Stay, Chernon. We have this room for an hour.”

“No, no,” he said, sounding trapped again. “I can't. Can't stay. Oh, Stavia….”

And then he was kneeling before her, his head in her lap, weeping while she tried frantically to comfort him.

“I don't know what to do!” he wept, surprising himself by this flood of honest, uncalculated tears. “I think I've got it picked, and then I'm not sure, and then I think I'll do something else, but that's worse. I couldn't do anything that would make them hate me, Stavvy. I want him to, Michael to…. I just couldn't. You know that. I shouldn't have to. There should be something else I can do….”

She held him. She didn't ask what he meant. There was nothing she could say. If she told him she loved him, it would only trap him more! She couldn't beg him to come home to her—she had already done that. It was all in the ordinances, ordinances she had already broken. All she could hear, inside her head, was Myra's words when she saw Barten's body. “So they've killed him, too!” It was as though she had killed Chernon, too. If she had not given
him the first book, perhaps he would not be weeping now. She had wronged him, hurt him. She was guilty. Somehow, she would have to make it up to him. She swore to herself she would make it up to him. Somehow.

She held him, rocking back and forth, her face frozen. They stayed there until the attendant knocked on the door, telling them their time was up.

Joshua was waiting for her at home. He saw her face and his own changed. “Do you have the book?”

“He said he'll probably bring it. This afternoon.” She was numb from emotion, pain, guilt.

“Tell me, Stavia!”

She temporized. “He's confused, Joshua, that's all. I don't think he knew how much danger he was in.”

“I'll come with you this afternoon.”

“You're not supposed….”

“By the Lady, Stavia, you've already got me in over my head.”

All his willingness to bend the customs did no good. When they went to the hole in the wall, the book was there, but Chernon was not. Joshua, after a long, calculating look at Stavia's stricken face, decided that something drastic had to be done.

R
EHEARSAL OF
I
PHIGENIA AT
I
LIUM
:
C
OUNCIL
woman Stavia in the part of
Iphigenia.

C
ASSANDRA
I have seen blood….

H
ECUBA
Cassandra, do sit down.
(To Polyxena)
Odysseus had Andromache's child thrown to his death from high atop the walls.

P
OLYXENA
A pity, though no more than one might guess would happen with these disputatious Greeks.

I
PHIGENIA
For all the joy they take in getting sons, they take as great a joy in killing them. There's not a warrior but would have his sons be warriors in their time.
(To Andromache)
If Hector lived would he not teach this baby how to kill and how to die?

A
NDROMACHE
He would have, yes, if he'd lived long enough. He would have felt dishonored if his son had not espoused the sword.

I
PHIGENIA
(Jiggling the baby)
It's just as well, then, that he didn't live.

A
NDROMACHE
Do you speak of my husband or my child?

I
PHIGENIA
What difference? I speak of either one.

P
OLYXENA
Who are you to have cared for Hector's son?

I
PHIGENIA
Iphigenia, Agamemnon's child. I came to Ilium to avenge myself on him who murdered me.

C
ASSANDRA
I have seen blood.

H
ECUBA
Hush, dear, please.

C
ASSANDRA
Blood and bodies broken.

H
ECUBA
Shh, Cassandra. We know, dear. We have seen
blood enough to last our lives. Blood and dead children and the bones of men. I cannot understand how warriors live among so many slain. They seem to take their strength from dying men as do the Holy Gods from sacrifice!

C
ASSANDRA
White altars red with blood. With heart's blood shed. With blood and bodies broken.

H
ECUBA
Shh.

F
OR FIFTY DAYS AFTER THE WAR WITH
S
USANTOWN
, Casimur, warrior of the thirty-one, had waited on death's landing for death to open the door—waited and stank and screamed until everyone in the Old Warriors' Home stuffed wool in their ears and drank themselves into insensibility. It would have been a courtesy to kill him, a courtesy for him to take the Well Water the women offered him, but he wouldn't. Even now that he was sure he was dying, Casimur was very set on his honor. He screamed about it again and again, until his throat was raw from screaming and he could only make a hoarse, ratcheting sound, like a ladle rattling in an empty wooden bucket.

Chernon sat beside Casimur to serve him. He had to wait by Casimur's bed, ready to receive the last words or the spirit or the instructions or whatever it was Casimur might want to give him. There was always a boy set beside a dying man, a boy to carry on the honor. Fifty days he had been there, changing bandages and cleaning up when Casimur dirtied himself and trying to spoon soup down his throat.

When Casimur was not screaming, Chernon tried to sleep. In the deep of night, Chernon struggled with his pillow, searching for a way out, away from wherever he was in the dream country. Where he was was bloody. He walked in gore, lifting clotted hands, gagging at the smell of it. He waded through the swamps of the sleep country, bellowing into the very mouth of the black cave he had tracked his dream guide into. “Is the way out through
there?” No matter how sweetly he had called, it was never sweetly enough to evoke an answer. Sometimes in the dream he was horned and mighty. Sometimes in the dream, no walls or chains could hold him, and yet he could not find the way out. No maps were drawn in his dark dreaming, or, if they were, they were not written on his pillow when he awoke.

He turned
in
sleep, sweating, peering behind the pillars of the cave, hoping to see a road, a signpost, a pointing finger, but everywhere was only Casimur's agonized face, Casimur's voice screaming about honor.

Chernon believed in honor, as he understood it, as Michael and the others had explained it to him. It was honorable to protect women because warriors needed them to breed sons and—so dogma had it—they were incapable of protecting themselves, though there might be some doubt about that now, with this rumored weapon or power of theirs. Michael said women weren't strong enough to trust with power or weapons and that if it turned out they had any such thing, it would be perfectly honorable to conquer them and take the power away from them. Women didn't have the right kind of minds to use such things properly, so it would be most honorable to remove the danger from them. Michael had explained about Besset, too. How sometimes it was necessary to do unpleasant things for the greater good. Like turning Besset loose to join a bandit pack so he could bring back information. Even though the bandits sometimes killed people, the information was more important than worrying about their lives.