The Gate to Women's Country (7 page)

Stavia came to herself with a start. “Not for months. I only see her if I happen to run into her at the market or somewhere. I guess she's never really forgiven Morgot for asking her to move out.”

Corrig shook his head slowly. “No, she's never forgiven you, Stavia. Because you stayed.”

M
YRA'S LEAVING
M
ORGOT'S HOUSE HAD BEEN IN
evitable from the moment Myra met Barten. Not that Barten had intended it or Myra foreseen it or Morgot known it would happen. No one knew, but it was inevitable just the same.

On the day the rift between Myra and Morgot began, Stavia had just turned eleven. She and Myra were in Stavia's room, going over the opening lines of the play, both of them already more than a little bored with it.

“You know, Stavia,” Myra said in her dramatically fed up older-sister voice. “You've got most of the lines all right, but you seem to keep forgetting this is a comedy!”

“I don't forget,” Stavia objected, rolling over on her bed to stare at the low ceiling. Last winter the rain had come in through the roof tiles and left a long, swirling stain that sometimes looked like a man with a long beard and sometimes looked like something else. “I do fine until they get to that bit about throwing the baby over the wall, then I think of Jerby and it doesn't seem funny.”

“Well you've
seen
it every year, for heaven's sake. You go with the rest of us, just before summer carnival. They use that crazy clown-faced doll for the baby. It doesn't even look like a real child. It isn't supposed to be a real baby. The old women aren't real old women. The virgins aren't really virgins. It's supposed to be a satire, you know?” She frowned, trying to remember something an instructor had said. “A commentary on particular attitudes of preconvulsion society.”

“I know.” Stavia knew it was a commentary, but knowing
and feeling were two separate things. She felt the play in ways she didn't know it.

Myra went on, “Hecuba and Andromache are all tarted up, like a pair of river Gypsies, with red on their cheeks and their lips as bloody as Talthybius's are supposed to be. And where he says Andromache's young yet, he puts his hand on her, you know? Then Achilles comes down the stairs with that great dong on him, sticking way out and bobbing around like anything, looking for Polyxena….”

“I
know
, Myra! I just keep thinking of Jerby, that's all.”

“He'll be all right,” Myra had said, not sounding as though she believed it. She no longer talked very much about Jerby. His being down at the garrison confused her. She did want him to come home, and yet men who did come home were cowards and tit-suckers, according to Barten, the young warrior she'd been spending a lot of time talking to from the top of the wall. Cowards and tit-suckers and impotent, too. Or else gelded when they came back. All the warriors said so. Until recently she had not thought of Joshua as a coward and a tit-sucker, and she wasn't sure what gelding really did to a man, but she supposed he must be if Barten said so. “Jerby'll be coming for a visit soon.”

“It's only two months to midsummer carnival.”

“I know.” Myra got up off the floor where she had been sitting to cue Stavia in her part. “Oh, I know.” She looked at herself in the mirror, turning her head from side to side, striking a dance pose with her arms.

“You're going to have an assignation, aren't you?”

“Maybe.” She tossed her light red hair. “One of the warriors has been courting me.”

“Is he good-looking?”

“Mmmm.” Myra rolled her eyes and made fainting motions. “Shoulders out to here, with the cutest bottom, and blue, blue eyes and his hair and eyebrows are black, and he has these lips that curve down in the middle….”

“What's his name?”

“Barten. He's in Michael's command. Tally's fit to be quarantined, she's so mad at me. He was courting her until he met me.” She preened, throwing her head back,
looking for an instant as beautiful and mysterious as Morgot sometimes did.

“How old is he?”

“He belongs to the twenty-two, I think. He's not twenty-five, at any rate. He doesn't have any scars yet.”

“What's the real reason they don't let them fight until they're twenty-five?”

“You know. They told you in women's studies.”

“I know what they told me. They're strongest and healthiest and most virile between the ages of eighteen to twenty-five, and if they're going to father babies, that's the time to do it. So, they aren't risked in battle until they're older. But is that the real reason?”

“What else?”

“I thought it was maybe to give them a few more years to decide if they want to come back or not.”

“Not very many come back after they're twenty,” Myra said definitely, her lightly freckled face drawn into a frown. “Hardly any at all.”

“I'll bet you were hoping….”

“I wasn't hoping anything!” she said angrily. “Don't be silly. Barten is proud to be a warrior. He'd never do that. Morgot says it's better if they don't get talked into it, either, or you end up with someone coming back who's just miserable. ‘A warrior home against his will remains at heart a warrior still.' Do you want to do your lines anymore?”

“No. I'm only second understudy, anyhow. I won't get to play a part until next year or the year after.” Stavia found herself slightly annoyed about this, mostly because the young woman playing the lead was, in Stavia's opinion, very bad at it. “Michy's doing Iphigenia this year.”

“Michy?” she
asked incredulously. “You're having a
fat ghost
?”

“Well, I suppose Iphigenia could have been fat. Who knows? Maybe that's why they wanted to sacrifice her. I suppose if you sacrificed a goat or a sheep, you'd pick a nice fat one.”

“A
fat ghost
!”

“Who's a fat ghost?” Joshua asked from the door.

Seeing Myra's lips set into a stubborn line, Stavia explained, hastily. Myra was continuing to be unpleasant around Joshua, not answering direct questions, pretending
not to see him. If this was the effect Barten was having on her, Stavia didn't look forward to meeting Barten, blue-blue eyes or not. Not that she'd probably have a chance to meet him. During carnival the warriors stayed near the plaza where the assignation houses and carnival taverns and amusements were; they weren't allowed in the residential sections of town, and Stavia was too young to go tavern-hopping.

“Michy will probably be dressed in floating draperies and you won't be able to tell what shape she is,” Joshua commented. “Myra, Morgot wants to see you, please, as soon as possible. And Stavia, I ran into your physiology instructress at the hospital. She sent a message that she wants to talk to you and Morgot about your going to the basic medical institute at Abbyville.”

“The institute?”

“At Abbyville. Oh, she doesn't expect you'd want to go for a few years yet. It's a nine-year course if you do the whole thing, seven years' study plus two years internship, with not much opportunity to come home. She wants to know how you feel about it, and how Morgot feels about your going, of course….”

“Why would she have told you that?” Myra asked in a dangerously unpleasant voice. “What business is it of yours?”

Joshua looked at her, a long, rather quiet look, as he sometimes looked at weeds in the garden, deciding whether to pull them out or not. “Perhaps she values my opinion of Stavia's talents, Myra. I am asked from time to time to offer opinions concerning both of you.”

He turned and left.

Myra took a quick breath, as though she had been slapped.

“Well, you had it coming,” muttered Stavia.

“Shut up.”

“I will. But if a few soppy looks from the walls make people as rude as you, Myra, I hope I never go near the walls again.”

“It's none of his business!”

“It wasn't about
you.
It was about me! And I'm willing to have Joshua talk about me, so it was his business. Who the hell are you, all of a sudden?”

“It was about me! He said he gave opinions about me,
and if you want to know who I am, I'm someone who's sick and tired of having a… a
serving man
sticking his nose in my business.”

“Oh, you'd rather some
warrior
stuck his nose somewhere else, huh?”

“Stavia!” Morgot's voice snapped like a whip. “Myra! Will you come with me, please?”

Stavia shrunk into herself, wishing she were invisible. Fighting with Myra was something she'd promised herself not to do. Myra flounced out of the room, and Stavia heard her voice through the closed door. “None of his business…. Don't know why you…? Barten says….” then the crack of her mother's voice.

“Never say to me ‘Barten says.' Never. This is Women's Country, and if you cannot hold to its courtesies you can leave it.”

Silence. Oh, Great Mother.

Weeping.

The door opened. “Stavia?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Myra would be less likely to forget herself if you didn't argue with her. Her current state of mind should be obvious to you.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“You've learned something about it.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“You know what it's called.”

“Infatuation.”

“You know what it does?”

“‘Infatuation makes otherwise reasonable women behave in unreasonable and illogical ways. It is a result of biological forces incident to racial survival.'”

“And?”

“And, ‘Infatuation should be regarded with forbearance. Though episodic, it is almost invariably self-limiting.'”

“Stavvy….”

“Mom.”

“She upset you, didn't she?”

“She was so… she was nasty to Joshua.”

“I know. Remember it. That way, if you ever go through what Myra's going through, you won't be as foolish as she is.”

“She won't just give up on the ordinances, will she? She won't just leave?”

“Become a Gypsy?” Morgot chewed her lip, as though she had had a sudden thought. “I doubt it. But if she does, well, almost all of them who try it come back in a few months.” Morgot looked even more thoughtful.

“I know. But there's quarantine.”

“Only for as long as necessary to be sure they're not sick. Well, we'll do what we can to forestall that. Speaking of Gypsies, I'm making the weekly health inspection at the camp this afternoon. I think it would be a good idea if you came along.”

“I… I didn't like it the last time.”

“Good! That's a very appropriate reaction.” Morgot started out the door, then turned back. “As a matter of fact, I think we'll take Myra along.”

“Myra! She'll puke.”

“Well, that won't kill her.” She went out, leaving Stavia with very mixed feelings. It was good to be included, but not always. Not in everything.

T
HE SOUTH WALLS
of Marthatown rose up out of sheep pens and pig pens and hay barns, a bucolic clutter wedged between the walls and the patchwork of pasture and stubble field, green and yellow and ashy white, dotted with huddles of dirty-gray sheep and scattered flocks of spotted goats to the place the fences ended. Beyond that open meadows ran off to the foot of the mountains where the woodcutters worked.

The north walls of the city were girded by warriors' territory. Armory and ceremonial rooms stood at the foot of the walls facing the parade grounds. North of the parade ground were rows of long wooden barracks, their carved gables and doors fronting on the exercise yards and the playing fields. East of these lay the pleasantly shaded walls of the officers' residence. To the north, at some distance from the city, the virtually empty hulk of the Old Warriors' Home huddled in a screening grove of trees. All this was garrison country—surrounded by a low fence—off limits to women and a more or less well-observed boundary for the men except when in search of what they were pleased to call “recreation.”

Beyond the Old Warriors' Home the river ran west
ward toward the sea. It came from the eastern hills, through the marsh, then over a series of little dams and weirs which irrigated farmland from the foot of the hills almost to the shoreland in the west. There, near the shore, a road came down from the northwest to cross the river at a shallow ford, and near this ford the Gypsies had their perennial though not continuous encampment, a ragged and fluid collection of shacks on wheels, some brightly painted and others the faded gray of sun-dried wood, a sprawl of messy domesticity around the blackened stones of a central cooking fire.

Morgot, in her role as chief medical officer of Marthatown, went out each week to inspect the Gypsies, or sent a delegate. True to her word, she had brought both Myra and Stavia with her on this particular occasion.