The Gate to Women's Country (25 page)

“Get on with you, all four of you. Considerin' how polite you are, I won't make you use the outside entrance. You don't need to go back outside the gates. Quarantine house
is
down this road to your left. There's a medic there now,”

The wagon rocked off down Wallside Road, leaving the guardswoman to shake her head. Carnival brought
strange folk to Women's Country. Magicians, fire painters, dance troupes, animal trainers. And the likes of Septemius Bird. She sneaked a look at herself in the mirror hung behind the door while considering that she was looking rather well that evening despite this really regrettable tabard she had to wear to identify her status.

At the quarantine house they found a young medic on duty, more or less, a woman with a thick mop of tawny hair, eyes green as grass—though full of sleep—and a wide, tender mouth.

“Health cards,” she demanded with a bright, wide-eyed stare, as though she was suspicious of them ail or covering up the fact she had been drowsing when they entered. She hunched over the proferred cards making noises, hm and ah, to show she knew what the chicken tracks on them meant. “Seven days ago in Mollyburg, a clean record there. Any contact since?”

“If by that, madam, you mean any lascivious conduct, lecherous behavior, lubricious or priapic pauses in our days' endeavors, no. I am unsuited to such by mere inclination. Bowough, there nodding his gray head, is unsuited by age. My nieces, precocious though they are, are unsuited by aesthetic preference, which time will, no doubt, reverse.”

Stavia, for it was Stavia, gave the girls a quick look. Prepubertal, surely, though it would not be the first time some huckster had tried to sell his female companions, over and over again, as virgin nymphs. She had learned of such in the academy at Abbyville, of such and of half a hundred other suches she would as soon not have known of. These girls had not that look about them, though. There was none of that Gypsy-camp lewdness in their eyes, though there was other sorts of wisdom there, the Lady wot. A certain knowledge of the world, perhaps. They returned her hard look with calm ones of their own, blue eyes like clear tidewater pools, reflecting the measureless sky.

She fought her way out of those pools, examining the books again. No! These women were the same age as she. Twenty-two years in the bodies of sylphs? Surely not. “They assist you?”

“A moment's thought will assure you of the value of identical twins to a magician, particularly twins who look
like mere children.” He flashed his teeth at her, a fox's smile. “May I introduce you to Kostia and Tonia. They are my sister's daughters, and I had the deepest affection for my sister.” This time he did not smile, and Stavia believed him.

“For their sakes, showman, you'd do better to let them live in Women's Country.”

He shook his head, evidently accustomed to this suggestion, placing his hands on the edge of her desk, poised on their fingertips, each hand like some five-legged creature pressing up and down, up and down. “I have considered that, from time to time. My sister thought not, however. There are advantages to our life, madam.”

“If you can stay clear of bandits, no doubt.” She sighed, and he heard the sigh. Something there that made her sympathetic to a wandering life. He gave no sign of having heard or understood that sigh.

“Thus far we have been lucky.”

Stavia went through the motions with them, though both instinct and experience told her they were clean. The oldster—who sat beneath her ministrations almost unmoving, more than half asleep—had more than a little congestion in his chest, a bit of cold, perhaps, not helped by sleeping on the ground or in the unheated wagon. That should be watched. Pneumonia was no joke these days, for the drugs that cured it were the same that cured sexual diseases. Women's Country had only the one pharmaceutical manufactury, and production of drugs always lagged behind demand. The girls bloomed with health and showed no signs of sexual use. All four wore the seal of Mollyburg on their left cheeks still, so she stamped them on the right. “Will you be staying in the entertainers' hostel? Or in the wagon park?”

Bird cast a quick glance at old Bowough and shook his head. “My old friend could use a soft bed, if the hostel has such.”

Her heart warmed toward him. “I was about to suggest as much. I'm giving you a supplemental ration card for him, as well, which will entitle him to extra foodstuffs while you are here. He will be the better for some cream and eggs.”

Bird bowed, his extravagant bow, and said, “This is generous of you, Medic.”

“Not really,” she laughed. “All of Women's Country seems to be going to have an exceptional harvest this year. All the warehouses will be full to overflowing. All the ewes have had twin lambs and the fishermen have never seen such weight of silver in their nets. We can spare some cream and eggs for someone who has devoted his life to amusing us.”

He bowed again, this time seriously, and she aped him, laughing. “Where will you be performing, magician?”

“Arriving early in this way, shouldn't I be able to secure a place in the plaza?” It was a question, accompanied by a quirked eyebrow and widened nostrils.

“You are among the first.” She nodded. “I'll stop by tomorrow and take a look at your kinsman. Have you been together long?”

“Some might say long enough, madam. He is my father.”

She handed them their ration cards, then stood staring after them as they took themselves off, the wagon rattling on the cobbles as it climbed the winding street toward the marketplace.

Septemius, on the wagon seat, held the reins in his left hand and put his right hand on the seat, balanced on its fingertips, each finger finding a rounded depression, five in all. “By five,” he mumbled to himself, pressing his fingers down, his lean, agile hand doing five quick pushups on the wooden seat. Five was Septemius's mandala, his secret key. As a tiny child he had had a blanket with five embroidered bees upon it. The fingers of his hands had fit upon those bees as upon a spread glove. He had learned to count on that blanket. As a boy, he had sought five as a sign, a symbol of guidance. As a man, no less. Sometimes he mocked himself, denying it, while at the same moment seeking some configuration of stars or holes in the wall or trees growing in a meadow which fit his predetermined pattern. Five, done always the same way, one-two, one-two-three. Tip-tap, tip-tap-tap. If this pattern was then followed by another tip-tap, it was a signal of the most urgent kind, seven syllabled, tokening his name. He had learned that sept meant seven in some old language. Fives and sevens were his signposts, his omens, his prayers for protection.

He had never told anyone about this. Even to himself,
it sounded silly, babyish, an attempt to attribute order in a world where there was little enough. Septemius had been reared to the belief there was no order, even when there seemed to be.

He had been the only child in the troupe. There had been Bowough, his father, and Genettia, his mama. There had been Old Brack and Old Brick—Bowough's parents—and Aunt Ambioise, Uncle Chapper, Cousin Bysell, as well as Aunt Netta, who was not really an aunt at all, and her sons and daughters, five of them, all grown up. All of them were animal trainers or magicians or acrobats or knife throwers or whatever else they chose to be at the time. All of them were very strong-willed. No two of them agreed about anything.

The earliest memory Septemius had of this peculiarity of the Troupe Bird had been the matter of the dishes. He could not have been more than five or six, just learning to help with campish chores. Mama had set him on a stool at the tailgate of the wagon with a towel in his hands as she washed the plates and handed them to him. Old Brick had come in and moved the stool to the other side, saying something about fools and mountebanks washing from right to left when every reasonable person knew it was done from left to right. Then Papa had said either way was wrong, that dishes were to be soaked in the soapy water then rinsed all at once with boiling water. Then someone, Mama probably, though it might have been Aunt Ambioise, had screamed a name at him, and they were off, seething like a pot on the fire, with Septemius huddled down upon the stool as each of them boiled up at him at intervals, “Isn't that so, boy? Isn't that so?”

That was the first time he remembered, but after that, he remembered little else. Everything Septemius tried to do partook of the same quality of uncertainty. Whether it was feeding donkeys or training dogs or hauling water from the stream; whether it was driving the wagon or washing his own socks. If Mama did it, everyone let her alone. If Papa did it, no one said anything. Any adult member of the troupe could do what he or she chose with no more than a few carping remarks from observers. If Septemius did it, everyone in camp insisted on showing him how, none of them agreeing, each of them claiming to have the correct and only acceptable way, and the
whole troupe demanding he openly approve of one or the other. “Isn't that right, Septemius? Isn't that right?” If he seemed to lean one way or the other, there were tears and protestations. The wonder was that anything got done at all and that he was not torn into pieces.

Septemius came to think of himself as a clot of flotsam on a restless channel full of sucks and eddies, each as unforeseeable and reasonless as the next. After a time, he learned simply to float on this turbulent flow of demands, sometimes touching this shore or that, not fighting them as he was wrenched away and twirled around and dipped and sucked at before being thrust toward another bank or tree or bed of reeds. He did not learn this, however, until after Octobra came, and she came too late to save him.

He had been about ten. Just outside Abbyville, a tall, wordless man had brought a little girl to their wagons and had delivered her to Genettia with a note. The girl was Octobra. The child of an old friend. Parentless now, and homeless unless Genettia would take her in. Of course Genettia did take her in. The troupe took her in, called her Octobra Bird. Another child for them to badger.

And they tried. They caught her up in their net of confusion and demanded of her, too. “Isn't that right, Octy? Don't you agree with me?”

She never answered. Never seemed to notice. Melted away from them like snow. After a time, they stopped, as though they stopped seeing she was there. Not Septemius, of course. From the moment she arrived, she with her bottomless eyes and hair like sunset, he never lost sight of her for an instant.

He remembered lying face to face with her in the back of a painted wagon, the moon falling in slender arrows through the shuttered window, touching fingertips. Thumb to thumb, finger to finger, pubescent children making magic.

“Don't ever change,” he had begged her. “Don't ever let them catch you. Without you, I'd go crazy. Don't ever change, Octy.”

“I never will,” she had promised him, pressing her fingers five times against his own to signify an oath. His adopted sister. His lover. The only steady shore in a sea of molten disorder. And in the end, she, too….

He had never learned what solid ground was like.

It hadn't been only the chaos of the conflicting emotional demands on him but the rootlessness of constant travel as well. Nothing to hold to. No one to cling to. As time went by, various of them left the troupe or died, but those who were left had gone on badgering him until the very end. Even when Bowough and Aunt Ambioise had been the only ones left, they had still kept him in the unquiet middle of things, “Isn't that right, Septemius? Don't you agree with me? Tell him he's crazy, Septemius.”

Only now that Old Bowough was the last had the appeals for his approval stopped. Now his approval didn't seem to matter anymore.

Septemius had learned to navigate the inconstant sea of his life by intuition and indirection. By signs and omens. By never saying either yes or no. He still avoided definite answers to anything. Even though Women's Country now sometimes seemed very solid to him, with observable permanencies about it, he still stayed alert, sensing hidden currents, a fluid flow, with trickery and deceit swimming beneath the surface. If he settled, begged admission, would everything stay the way he thought it was? Or would it change, suddenly, leaving him awash, circling once more, like a chip in a gutter?

Until this very hour, it had seemed wisest not to take the chance, wisest to use charm and evasion whenever permanence was suggested, keeping free, just in case. It had seemed foolish to attempt assurances. “By five,” he had always told himself. “Don't you fall for their blandishments, Septemius!”

He drove the wagon down from the market to the warren of alleys which extended eastward from the plaza, toward the hostel he remembered, built around an extensive yard, with capacious stables for the animals. He drove silently, scratching at his cheek where the drying ink made a small itch, lost in old memories.

“She was very distressed about something,” Kostia said. “Tonia and I both felt it.”

“Who, girlies?” He had lost track of the immediate past. Who? Not his sister, not Mama or Grandma? No. “The medic back there? Now what could a pretty woman
of that age have to be distressed about? What is she, twenty? Twenty-two?”

“That, about,” Kostia affirmed. “There is a man in her mind, Septemius. A warrior.”

“Oh, by the Lady of the Cities. Is she worried he will not keep an assignation, perhaps?” Septemius knew it was more than that. He merely wanted his own perceptions confirmed.

“More than that,” said Kostia. “Something interesting, Septemius. Something very interesting. All complex and knotted together, like some tapestry where the pictures are only half drawn, yet….”

He gave her a quizzical look but did not pursue the matter. Kostia and Tonia found many things interesting, and they would undoubtedly enlighten him if the time proved propitious. As for him, he spent a good deal of time forcing himself not to think of them as if they were Octobra, come back to him again, never mind they were as like her as twins. They were, he reminded himself, themselves. He prayed he had built a strong enough island for them that they could live on or around it, never feeling like flotsam, driven by unknown eddies. If so, he had done all he could expect of himself. All Octy could have asked of him if she had lived long enough to ask.