The Gate to Women's Country (27 page)

H
ECUBA
Polyxena! How can you? To shed your tears for cakes!

P
OLYXENA
What tears? The dead have no tears. I can not weep. If I could cry, then I would cry for cakes—sweet cakes, gay dances, and bright flowing wine. You grieve your losses and I'll grieve for mine.

C
ASSANDRA
(Shaking her head and crying)
No one hears me! I have seen blood, not this blood here today. I have seen bodies broken, but not these! I see a desolation yet to come! In time! At the end of time.

A
NDROMACHE
She's at it still, I see.

H
ECUBA
(Motioning toward her head)
Poor thing.

C
ASSANDRA
(Weeping)
Apollo said you wouldn't believe me.

H
ECUBA
(Cuddling her)
Well old Apollo can go scratch himself, of course Mother believes her little girl….

S
EPTEMIUS AND HIS PEOPLE WERE IN THE STREET
when they saw Stavia next, she coming along the walk with her marketing bag on her shoulder, brow furrowed with concentration over something or other, so she almost bumped them before hearing Kostia and Tonia's greeting, a vibrating “Hello, Medic,” which hung on the air like the reverberation of a gong.

“Ahum,” she said conversationally, trying to remember where she was and who these were. “The magician's troupe!”

“Madam,” he bowed. Bowough nodded, mistily, hardly seeing her. Though he had slept very well, it was one of his mostly off days, one of those times when he wandered more in memory than in reality. Kostia and Tonia reached out to take her hands, ostentatiously not seeing the warning glance Septemius gave them. Kostia and Tonia always found out about people. Septemius did not know how they did it, but it seemed to work better when they touched the person in question.

“Stavia,” they murmured in unison. “Well met.”

She remembered them now, and, remembering also she had not told them her name, she regarded them with some alarm.

“May we return your courtesy of last evening by offering you a cup of tea?” Septemius, his usual florid manner banked like coals kept for the morning, hands fingertipped together.

They were on the sidewalk before a teahouse, just half a block from the Well of Surcease. Inside the windows
they could see women and servitors gathered around the tables. There were a few itinerants there as well. “Why not?” She smiled. “Actually, I was coming to see you later today. I have some medicine for your father.”

“Medicine?” They went into the teahouse and took a table near the wall. The servitor set five cups before them, tip-tap, tip-tap-tap, and Septemius smiled. An omen.

“Something that may help his chest. I'd forgotten we had it, until Morgot—the chief medical officer, my mother—reminded me. An oil made from the eucalyptus trees, useful in boiling water to make a cleansing vapor for the lungs.” Stavia nodded her thanks to the servitor who brought them the steaming pot of the tea she had suggested. “Put a kettle of it on the stove in your room and pull his bed nearby, with a sheet over his head and the spout so he breathes it.”

“Ah. Something you have not used yourself?”

Stavia flushed. “As you can no doubt tell, Septemius Bird, I am newly assigned to the quarantine house, my first medical post after seven years at the medical academy in Abbyville and a two-year internship there. The quarantine house is a junior post, given to new graduates. I am told that in preconvulsion times, medical training would begin where I have already left off, and the extent of my ignorance oppresses me. So, we do what we can with herbary since our production of pharmaceuticals is so limited, but Abbyville taught little herbary and I have still very much to learn. Learning must come bit by piece, catch as catch can, on the job. If this stuff does your father good, I will be glad to learn of that.”

“I see.” And he did see. Ah, these girls of Women's Country! Often given their first postings at seventeen or eighteen, expected to continue their education meantime as well as having babies every year or two. And, of course, to take part in the arts and crafts of the community. “Your science is medicine then.”

“Yes. My art is drama, and my craft is gardening. Is your work a science, a craft, or an art, Septemius Bird?”

“My magic? If it has no science, it fails, Stavia. If it has no craft, it bores, and if it has no art, it offends.”

“You are fortunate to wrap everything up so neatly,”
she said, a pinch at the corner of her lips betraying that she meant more than the words said.

“It must be difficult to be a talented young woman in Women's Country,” he replied sympathetically. “I don't know how you can get everything done.”

“Oh, if it were only just Women's Country,” she burst out, then, horrified, put her fingers over her mouth. “Forgive me.”

“Would it help to talk about it?” he asked. “To an intinerant?” she blurted, surprise making her sound rude, even to herself. “Why would I?”

“Because,” said Kostia placidly, “he is a very wise man…”

“An outsider,” said Tonia, “who has been everywhere there is to be…

” “And has seen bits and pieces of everything…”

“And can be objective about things…”

“Which others of us are unlikely to be.”

Stavia flushed. “I didn't mean to be offensive.”

“I took no offense,” Septemius assured her. “My nieces are partly right. I make no claim to wisdom, but I am a fairly objective observer. My family has been in this business for generations, you know? Even before the convulsion, I am told, there were Birds traveling the wider world with carnivals and traveling shows. It came down at last to Bowough Bird and his Dancing Dogs, my father's troupe of mountebanks, and then to me. I am the last male of my line, but these two vixens may continue the work of the Birds, if they choose.” He was talking to cover the awkwardness, to get a distance from it. He should not have suggested she confide in him. It had slipped out from habit, from being so much with Kostia and Tonia, from trying so hard to remedy the confusion of chaotic generations with a sneaky discipline of his own. Musing on this, he went on, “If there is art in our work, it comes from understanding human nature. There are several old words which were once used to describe what we magicians do. One such is legerdemain, meaning ‘deftness of hand,' but the hand can only misdirect when the mind understands what is to be misdirected….” He allowed his voice to trail off into his teacup.

Old Bowough said, “This is a very good tea, miss. Kind of you to suggest it.”

“Kind of you to have offered it,” said Stavia, giving him a close look. The tea had brought color to his face and a gleam into his eyes. He was older than she had first thought. Ninety, perhaps. A great age for a man in these times, but she did not like the crepitant sound of his breathing. Septemius himself looked well into his fifties, while yet hale and athletic in all his movements. The mother of the girls must have been younger. She became conscious that she was staring. “I was searching for a family resemblance,” she murmured self-consciously. “But the girls do not look much like you, Septemius.”

He shook his head. “Their mother was not related to me genetically. She was a foster child of my mother, the daughter of an old friend. We were reared together. She married late—you are aware of the custom of marriage?—and died in childbirth.”

“Yes, I know of the custom,” she said, being careful not to show on her face what she thought of such barbarism. “You should have brought her into a city of Women's Country,” Stavia murmured, aghast at the thought of any woman dying in childbirth.

“Uncle Septemius would have done,” said Kostia.

“He has high regard for your sciences,” said Tonia.

“But our father would not permit it.”

“More fool your father, then,” Stavia blurted, outraged.

There was a strained silence, broken, strangely, by Bowough. “He was a fool, yes. We have a saying, we travelers: Tor a man's business, go to your troupe leader; for a woman's business, go to Women's Country. For a fool's business, go to the warriors.'

“He was a warrior?” Stavia's face was suddenly ashen.

Septemius nodded. “Much decorated. Much honored. Retired from active duty, so he said, by his garrison. Allowed to travel as he would.”

“I have heard that warriors sometimes decide to travel,” she said with an oddly furtive expression, “but they are never retired from active duty. Not even when they go to the Old Warriors' Home.”

“So I believe,” said Septemius. “So you know. So these nieces of mine believe and know. But my sister—well, she wished not to believe it.” Seeing the look in Stavia's eyes, he changed the subject. His nieces had been right.
There was something eating away at this girl, and it was more than mere romantic wondering whether some young warrior would keep an assignation.

On the following day, they moved the wagon to the edge of the plaza and set up the stage under the interested gaze of the plaza guards, afterward returning to the hostel with the donkeys. Bowough seemed to be profiting from the rest, and from the extra food. The cook at the hostel had made him his nog, and he had profited from that, as well. They had all tasted it. To Septemius it seemed that something was lacking. It was what was always lacking, some mysterious dimension of taste which his imagination could evoke but which his tongue or nose could not fulfill, some spice or flavoring that did not exist any longer—vanilla in this case, said the cook, referring to her ancient recipe books. “A tropical product, no doubt,” she commented, sighing. “We have nothing from the tropics in this age.”

“Are all the tropics then dead?” Kostia asked, intrigued by Septemius' annoyance concerning the lack of spices and flavorings.

“Who knows?” Septemius replied, moderating his tone somewhat. “We cannot reach them, if they are yet alive, nor they us. Who knows if they are dead or not?”

“Have you ever tried to go there?” Tonia asked. “Has anyone?”

“To go south? I remember a journey, long ago, when I was young. The troupe went along the coast, circling inland to avoid the gray devastations which lie along the water. My grandfather had heard rumors of inhabited lands there that are not part of Women's Country.” He said nothing more about the inhabited lands. They were not lands he would want to travel to again, nor would he want Kostia or Tonia to come there, even in flight for their lives. “Our southernmost journey ended in a place where three monstrous devastations came together, a plain of glass beside a huge bay with twisted remnants of great bridges thrust up out of the stone. We could find no way around it.”

“Perhaps farther inland,” murmured Kostia.

“Perhaps if you had had a ship,” murmured Tonia.

“Well, perhaps,” he said. “That was a quarter century ago. It is getting time for Women's Country to send their
exploration teams. They do it every now and then, to see what has changed in that time. Perhaps they will find spices again.”

“We do not miss them,” said Kostia.

“Because we have never had them,” said Tonia. “They are little things, after all.”

“A little spice may outweigh whole generations of potatoes,” growled Septemius Bird. “None of us have ever had them. But some of us would weep over not having them just the same.”