The Gate to Women's Country (37 page)

R
EHEARSAL
:

(Achilles approaches the group of women purposefully)

A
CHILLES
This then is Polyxena.

P
OLYXENA
(Yawning)
Yes, I'm Polyxena.

A
CHILLES
My slave, Polyxena.

P
OLYXENA NO
one's slave, Polyxena.

(Achilles attempts to grab her and finds he cannot hold her)

A
CHILLES
She sifted through my arms, like rays of sun,

like moonlit smoke, like mist, like….

I
PHIGENIA
Like a ghost.

A
CHILLES
Like a ghost. Yes.

P
OLYXENA
(Pleased)
Somehow I was not surprised.

A
CHILLES HOW
can I force obedience on this? In other times I've used the fear of death to make a woman bow herself to me. If not the fear of her own death, then fear for someone else, a husband or a child. How can I bend this woman to my will?!

P
OLYXENA
I think I will not bend.

I
PHIGENIA YOU
see, it's as we've tried to tell you, Great Achilles. Women are no good to you dead.

A
FTER LEAVING
S
EPTEMIUS
, C
HERNON HIKED OUT
of the flatlands onto a moderate height, camped on it, spent a virtually sleepless night, and then lit a smoky fire at dawn. Stavia rose early, watched for the smoke, and was already out the northern gate of the sheep camp by the time Chernon buried the fire, which he did very shortly after lighting it. All was precisely according to plan. She traveled toward him in a mood of fatalistic expectancy, not precisely joyous, but with more contentment in her than she had felt in some time, her feeling of guilt toward him eased.

It took her several hours to reach him. Though he kept himself well concealed in forest as she had instructed, he watched for her from the high edge of a ridge, growing more impatient and heated with each passing moment. When she arrived he had no words to greet her with. Imaginings had kept him awake for most of the night; his restless body had done the rest. He took hold of her as she approached the camp, pulling her away from the donkey, dragging her toward his spread blankets, covering her mouth with his own so that she had no time to speak. He gave her no time, no word, nothing but a frenzied and almost forcible ravishment which, while it did not totally surprise her, left her, when he rolled away, completely unfulfilled and trembling in a state of pain and half-aroused anger. He was tangled into his blankets, eyes closed, breathing like surf in deep, liquid heavings. If it had not been precisely rape, it had been close to it.

She drew her clothes together and rose, crouching
away from him, as she might have done from some normally tame animal which had turned dangerous. He sank deeper into sleep, and she retreated farther into the woods where her pack animal waited patiently, reins dragging on the ground. She lifted the pack off, pegged the animal to a line, searched until she found a trickle of water down a nearby wooded gully, then stripped and washed herself, pouring the water over herself again and again from cupped hands, all very quietly, trying to keep from screaming or striking out or going back where he lay and killing him. There was blood on her thighs, but she had more or less expected that. She had received more hurt than pleasure from the encounter, but she knew that was not unusual. She had started women's studies at ten; she had had classes in physiology and sexual skills; at her age she was far older than almost all of her acquaintances in gaining her first actual experience, but she was no less prepared than they had been. Chernon had simply given her no time or opportunity to do or be anything except a receptacle for his hasty passion. She was not terrified or greatly hurt, but she was angry.

He had said nothing! Nothing loving, nothing sentimental. He had done no wooing. He had taken her as though she had been one of the Gypsies….

“You could have stopped him,” the actor Stavia remarked from some dim and cavernous mental recess. “You could have laid him out, Stavia.”

“It wasn't stopping him that mattered. I wanted something else from him, not something else from me.” That wasn't the real reason. It wasn't. She tried again. “I was so surprised, I couldn't figure out what to do, and then it was all over.” And still again. “This wasn't what I thought he wanted.”

“Better let me handle it.”

“All right.” Certainly she couldn't handle it herself. She would kill him if she did. Let the actor Stavia do it.

She put on her clothes, fastening them tightly, went back to the place she had met him, and kicked him sharply in the ribs.

He woke with a whoof, staring wildly about him.

“If you ever do that again,” she told him, “it will be the last time you ever see me.”

“Do…,” he mumbled, gradually focusing on her. “Do… what did you expect me to do?”

“I expected you to act civilized. I did not expect to be attacked. Is that kind of behavior considered honorable in the garrison?”

He couldn't answer her. Certainly it was. It wasn't acceptable in Women's Country, he knew that, but in the garrison? Of course it was. With… with… certain kinds of women. Women who came out to the camp for you….

She saw the way he looked at her, looked away, the quick darting of those suddenly guileful eyes. “So, Chernon,” the actor Stavia demanded, “is this your idea of getting even?”

He blushed. Maybe. A little. It had been.

“Did you expect me to like it? Accept it?”

He shook his head, searching for an acceptable reply, remembering too late that he had been sent to woo information from her. “I didn't think at all. I've been… I've been waiting for you for weeks. I've been… I've been thinking about you. I just couldn't… I couldn't wait, that's all.” He flushed again, got to his feet. “I'm sorry, Stavia. I wasn't even… I wasn't even here, I guess.”

“Shall we get some things straight?”

He nodded, giving a crafty appearance of willingness though he was beginning to feel aggrieved. Saying it once had been quite enough. She could let it go. It wasn't anything they needed to go over and over.

“We're supposed to be companions on this trip. I agreed to this whole thing at least partly to make up to you for having misled you when we were just kids. Well, when I was a kid—what was I, ten, eleven years old?—we agreed to make this a kind of adventure. Fulfillment of some kind of fantasy for both of us. Right so far?”

He nodded. Of course that is what they'd said, what he'd said, mostly. Did she think he had forgotten?

“I'm not some girl you've seduced out to a Gypsy camp for your pleasure. The pleasure is supposed to be mutual. That means we both work at it and are careful of one another's feelings.”

He couldn't think of any suitable response. Certain
things about the encounter had just struck him, and he was trying to figure them out.

After waiting for a time she said, “I'm hungry,” in a neutral voice which hid a mild nausea. She got the necessary supplies out of the donkey pack and set about putting together a meal of bread and cheese, lighting a tiny, smokeless fire to heat water for tea. “I left very early,” she went on, still in that neutral, impersonal voice. “Before breakfast.”

They ate together, silently on the whole, though Chernon managed one or two comments on his trip with Septemius. Stavia thought the remarks were unnecessarily carping, but said nothing. He might merely be trying to be funny.

Finally he found a source of his discomfort and blurted, “That was the first time you ever…? Wasn't it?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you all started when you were real young. Beneda did.”

“Beneda may have been teasing you. She certainly had not had any assignations when I left for Abbyville.”

“You were gone nine years,” he said in a hostile voice, as though she had somehow offended him by being a virgin.

“I know.”

“Eighteen carnivals,” he asserted. “I…”

“I'm sure you took part in carnival, Chernon. I didn't expect you not to. But, except for a little drinking and singing at the one just past, I didn't. I didn't have time.” She gave him a look which he did not return. What was it that bothered him? She could not find an explanation for his reasonless hostility. “Look, we were never ‘lovers.' I loved you, I think. The way a kid does. Infatuation, maybe. For you—well, I was your little sister's friend and you used me to get books. Then I realized what I was doing and stopped it, and you got angry at me. And then I went away. That's all there really was between us. Let's not pretend there was something more than that.”

She said nothing about all that time in Abbyville, the carnivals there that she had avoided, always thinking of him, of Chernon, of that boy with the wheat-colored hair and the wary, hurt look in his eyes. She wanted him to listen to her, to hear her. She wanted him to say something
that told her he saw her. “This adventure—this is my way of saying, ‘I'm sorry I hurt you when we were young.'”

My way of saying I love you, Chernon.

“But it can't go on unless it's enjoyable for both of us….” She was not really seeing him there before her, the man's body, the man's face. She was seeing the boy, still, wanting the boy, still. The boy wasn't in there. The boy was gone. Somewhere in there, Chernon had metamorphosed into something different, not merely grown up but changed in kind. “… that wouldn't be fair to either of us,” her voice went on.

Trite. What was fair? Was anything fair? This whole thing was a cliché. He wasn't answering her at all.

Inside, she wept. It had all been a stupid idea. Septemius had tried to tell her. Kostia had known. Tonia had known. Her own ten-year-old self would have known. What was it Stavia herself had said about Myra's infatuation for Barten? “She doesn't have any sense at all.”

“No,” Morgot had yawned. “None of them do. Neither did I, when I was that age.”

“I refuse to be that age!” Stavia had asserted.

“I wish you luck,” Morgot had replied.

Meaning, we all do it, daughter. All of us. We know what's sensible and right, and we do foolishness instead.

And here she was. Actor Stavia, trying to make the best of it. While inside the silly, sentimental, loving part of her howled for her own lost childhood.

And then he smiled, like the sun rising, suddenly, without warning. She saw it on his face: capitulation, a decision not to be angry. What she saw was not an emotional need to reconcile himself to her but a conscious decision that anger would do nothing for him. She could not see to the reasons behind that decision; she saw the mind at work, however. “You're right, Stavia. I behaved like… like one of those ancient peoples in Beneda's book. Like a barbarian. Let's start over.” And smiled again.

She perceived the coldbloodedness of it, the chill manipulation of it, but decided to ignore it. They were new to one another after all. She let everything within her melt and flow and reform again
in
a new and softened shape.

S
TAVIA HAD NEVER
had a lover before, so she had no one to compare their lovemaking with. She did compare him with other men she knew, however. With Joshua. With Corrig. With her surgical instructor in Abbyville.

Chernon seemed anxious, rather than eager, to give her pleasure and sometimes succeeded, though it happened more often by accident than it did through Chernon's understanding of what he was doing. He was so engrossed in his own feelings that he wasn't able to pay much attention to her. She was soon adept at pleasing him, which was not very complicated. He needed little arousal and did not tolerate long delays. He reminded her a little of the ram lambs she had seen in the meadows around the camp, suddenly hungry, butting at their mothers' udders with fierce determination, only to become as suddenly satiated. Everything was now. Nothing was later. She remembered what Beneda had said about him, years ago: “When he comes home, he eats all the time, everything, just gulps it down and doesn't even bother to taste it….”