The Gate to Women's Country (26 page)

At the hostel he obtained stable space for the donkeys as well as two adjoining rooms for his family, paying for a week in advance because he knew this made it less likely they would have someone else quartered with them when the city began to get crowded. The dogs, after a spell of freedom to sniff and pee, came pattering after them as they carried their gear upstairs, or at least that part of it which was irreplaceable and light enough to carry. Women's Country was notable for honesty, but at carnival time there were others about who had been reared in other systems of ethics.

The rooms were on the second floor, one of them at the corner of the hostel overlooking the street. It had a warm stove, two narrow beds, and a wide, lamp-lit table. Septemius grunted as he dropped his bag on the table, taking possession of it. Old Bowough fell onto the nearest bed with a sigh and was asleep within moments, a white dog on each side. Septemius stood looking down at him, his face drawn into vertical grooves, like the wall of a
gully. “It gets harder on him all the time,” he said to no one in particular.

“We should settle,” said Tonia. “The medic girl at the quarantine house was right, Septemius.” She lit a candle and wandered through the connecting door, approving the cleanliness behind it, the wood-paneled walls, the wide, quilted bed, the swept hearth before the tile stove in which a small fire was already alight. The other three dogs, they gray ones, were circling the hearth, their black ears and muzzles seeking appropriate smells, fuzzy tails cocked high over their rumps as they tried to agree on space and precedence.

Kostia jounced the bed once or twice, then moved to hang her clothing in the armoire, taking, by habit, the left-hand drawer and set of hooks. “We should settle down.”

“Would you settle?” he asked from the doorway, examining the room for himself, seeing to the lock on the shutters, the bolt on the door, eyes glittering like so many shards of cutting glass, sharp as bright needles, wet from unshed tears. Memory did this to him, sometimes. “Would you?”

“Perhaps not yet,” Kostia laughed. “Though we would if Grandpa Bowough needed.” She took the candle and went to the door, drifting along the hall to locate the sanitary arrangements—individual little rooms with composting toilets of the variety used in many of the Women's Cities—and the shower room with its capacious and well-stoked boiler. She drifted back, well pleased. The facilities were as clean and well kept as the rooms.

“We could have a little house in the itinerants' quarter, outside the walls,” Septemius mused, “for the old one and me. You would be accepted within the walls, no doubt. Their own citizens attend school when they are much older than you. You could go to the schools of Women's Country. There is no doubt work you could do.”

“Perhaps not quite yet,” Tonia said again, with good cheer. “Remember, Uncle, you are a historian by profession. There are still things we need to know about the lands outside the walls.”

It was a device of theirs, this assignment of profession to him who had none except mountebank and traveler. His nieces made him over in their heads, dressing him up
in scholar's robes, like the women at the academy in Abbyville, calling him a historian when he was only a wanderer who had seen what there was left of the world. And he had seen it all, many times over. The towering forests of the northwest, green with ferns and dripping with fog, misty and marvelous as a perilous faery-land; the rock-shattered coasts with the waves coming in during storm; the farmlands of the interior, hills or plain, with the surrounding fields laid out square-cornered and full of root crops or grain or flax fields so blue they seemed a reflection of the sky. And the cities strung all through there, Women's Country cities. As alike as one dog to another and as different as one dog from another. This place, Marthatown, now, it had its own flavor, partly sea-mist, partly smoke from the ovens where the cured fish hung, partly sheep manure and wool and rawhides—its own particular smell which set it apart from the other cities.

But it was not unlike the others. They all had warehouses where the food from the communal fields and flocks was stored and from which those stores were allotted, so much to each family, so much to the garrison, so much to trade with other towns. In Marthatown they stored wool and hides, grain and dried fish and some root crops. In Susantown they stored apples and smoked meat, flax fiber and linseed oil. Up at Tabithatown they stored dried mushrooms and cut lumber. The town always smelled of sawdust and pitch and rang with the scream of the saw at the watermill. All of them had a market section full of little shops and booths. They all had craftsmen's alleys where the weavers and quilt makers and candle makers and seamsters lived; every city had its candle shops and herb shops and scrap reclamation centers and streets lined with square, courtyarded houses where grandmothers lived with their daughters and granddaughters and baby boys and servitors.

All the
cities
had a Council Hall where the medical officers worked and the scarce commodities were allocated—drugs and glass, raw and worked metal. They all had plazas with gates that led out to the garrison ground. They all had streets where the provisioners of the garrison worked, and they all had carnivals, though not all at once.

“We did well in Mollyburg,” he said, apropos of nothing. “We could live out the winter on what we made there. I think the people here would give us a license for temporary residence.”

“Grandpa Bowough would probably like that,” said Kostia, clicking her thumbnail across her teeth. “He's been very tired lately.”

“Shall I see if we can rent a small house in Wandertown? Hoboville? Journeyburg?”

“Let's think on it,” Tonia said. “For a day or two.”

Conversing with Kostia and Tonia was like conversing with one person. They picked up each other's words, leaving off in midsentence to have the other complete the sense of it. One would ask and the other comment. If one closed one's eyes, it would be impossible to know there were two. So now Septemius Bird nodded at both, willing to wait a few days before making the decision. Things would come as they would, decide or no. Even the towns agreed on that. One said, “Woman proposes, the Lady disposes,” another said, “The one sure part of every plan is that it will be set awry.”

“When we were here last, you told us, did you not,” said Kostia, “that Marthatown was the first town of Women's Country.”

Septemius nodded, trying to remember when they had been here last. Four years ago, at least. Typical of himself, he did not say “Yes,” but, “So it is believed in all Women's Country. Marthatown begat Susantown, and Susantown begat Melissaville, and so on and so on. Though I believe, personally, that Annville was there before the convulsions along with its power plant and most of its factories.”

“Why do they split off? I should think life would be easier if the cities were larger.”

Septemius shook his head, gesturing a great wide motion to include the surrounding fields and sea. “Food, fuel, and trade goods, nieces. They grow what they can within an hour or so's travel of the town. They cut wood within the day's travel, too. All the women come behind the walls at night, for fear of bandits. Though the warriors have scoured the land over and over again between wars, there are enough bandits left over—or perhaps they are new ones—to make a nasty slaughter. Some may be fool-
hardy, but as for me, I prefer being behind walls at night, and I suppose the women are no more fool than I.”

“How many of them are there, Uncle? In Marthatown?” asked Tonia.

“Some fourteen or fifteen thousand, perhaps. Many of them are children, and there must be two or three thousand servitors.”

“And
in
the garrison?”

“Four thousand, I should say, including the boys. There were more when I was here last, but their latest war killed six or seven hundred of them. It is middling in size as garrisons go.”

“And when their croplands are stretched so far they cannot get behind the walls at night, they will set up a new town?” Tonia asked.

Kostia shook her head. “I should think the woodlands limit them more than croplands do. Crops grow every year, but it takes time to grow trees, and they must have wood to heat their houses.”

“There was a time people heated with electricity,” Septemius said. “My own grandmother told me. Now there
is
only one place in all Women's County to make electricity, and they use it all up on making glass and medicine and one thing and another.” He sighed, thinking of the wonders which once had been made with electricity. Septemius was a great one for wonders. “They're prolific in Women's Country,” he went on. “Scarce a woman among them has fewer than three or four. When they have expanded as far as they can, they must set up a new town. I saw it done, once, far northwest of here, in the forest country. Women and warriors marching out to set up a new wall and a new garrison.”

“There is still space then?”

“They're pushing at the desolations. Some of the new towns are close to the edge. There is much empty land, true, but little of it is good for farming.”

“We came through a stretch of that,” Kostia nodded. “As we came north to the road from Susantown. All brush and gray trees and land the color of a donkey's hide.”

“They'll have trouble finding more space very soon, I should say.” He returned to his own room, settling down before the table to spread his journals out and his day's
notes, preparing to enter the one in the other. Behind him a sigh.

“Septemius?”

“Father?”

“That was a kind young woman at the quarantine.”

“She certainly seemed to be.”

“She said I was to have eggs.”

“I seem to remember her mentioning eggs.”

“And cream. I'd like a nog, Septemius. Could I have a nog?”

“And what is a nog, Father?”

“Oh, before your time, Septemius. The yolk and white of egg whipped up, separately, you understand, and then the yolk mixed with sugar and cream and flavoring and oh, brandy, I think, Septemius, then the white folded in to make it fluffy and soft, like a coverlet.”

“That would blanket your gullet right enough, old man.”

“Most gently, Septemius. Most gently.”

There was no further word, merely a quiet snore from the corner, a bubbling rasp beneath it, like something sharp sawing away at the old man's lungs. Septemius pulled one of the books toward him and opened it, searching for the word
nog
, which led him to
eggnog
, which led in turn to searches for the words
brandy
and
rum.
Lost arts, whatever they had been. Gone, along with nutmeg and cloves. Along with pepper and turmeric. All the spices were merely words now. Chocolate was a word. And coffee. Septemius would have given his back teeth for a taste of some of those. Now how had the old man known about brandy? From his own father, perhaps, or his grandfather? Brandy led to
distilled
which led to
still
, and he perused the picture of the device with interest. If they had wine, why could they not have brandy?

Likely because the women's Councils forbade it, and Septemius Bird was too old a coyote to arbitrarily question the actions of a Council. Likely they had reason. Septemius had seen men drunk enough on mild beer, and if brandy were stronger than that….

He began to enter today's notes in his journal, making a marginal notation about
nog.
The old dictionary, among
his most prized possessions, had said it could be flavored with wine. Wine was available. If the cream and eggs were truly forthcoming, tomorrow he would make a
nog
for old Bowough.

R
EHEARSAL
:

C
ASSANDRA
I have seen the land laid waste and burned with brands, and desolation bled from fiery wombs.

P
OLYXENA
So have we all, sister. Look around you. See what is lost. You may weep for the walls of Troy, I would weep for the dances I will not step again. You weep for the dead. I would weep for honey cakes. You may weep for Troy's children slain. I would weep for the wine spilt from the jar, never drunk. Oh, I pray the Gods had given me power to strike those warriors down! I would have used it well!