Year's Best Scifi 5 Part 47

She rocked on the b.a.l.l.s of her feet, thinking. "Well, since you're here, I'd better be hospitable. And teach you about queen bees, too." She pointed at an outbuilding. "That's the honey-hut, and the one free s.p.a.ce I've got. Take it or leave it!"

The hut was tiny: between pallet and beekeeping equipment there was barely any room for me.

Above the bed was what I at first took to be a Tech photoimage, but it proved to be a window looking onto the mountains, made of the gla.s.s and wooden surround of a picture frame. In fact the whole building was constructed of scavenged oddments from the days of affluence: flattened tins, sc.r.a.ps of timber, and other usables slapped together in a crude but habitable mess. I was used to recycling, even in the neoindustrial North, but I had never seen such a higgledy-piggledy a.s.sortment before. It was to prove typical of much of the town itself.

I lay on the pallet and dozed for a while, lulled by the soporific hum from the nearby hives. When I woke, I tested my tape recorder-a precious thing, not because it was a genuine Tech artifact, but because it was a copy, its workings painstakingly rediscovered. Of course, it wasn't as good, nothing was, for we would never be as rich, nor as spendthrift, as our forebears. For over a century now, since the Crash, we had been adapting to an economy of scarcity. It was the adaptations, rather than the antiques, or the neocopies, that interested me-particularly the Rule Houses, and at their center, the Queen Polly Andree. How would it feel, to have multiple husbands? And what would happen if you grew tired of them?

Sadry: My father said, "n.o.body knows how the Rule began, just as n.o.body knows who bred the mountain Lori to be our herd animals. A Northerner, a story-eater, once told me the Rule was a pragmatic evolution, practiced by other mountain peoples. He said large populations cannot be sustained in marginal highland. One wife for several men-who are linked by blood, or ties of love-limitsbreeding, and means the family land can be pa.s.sed undivided through the generations. It made sense; more than what the Lowlanders say, which is that we Highlanders deliberately chose complicated s.e.x lives! Yet he spoke as if we were specimens, like a strain of Lori. That annoyed me, so I wouldn't give him what he had come for, which was my history.

"When I was the age you are now, my brother Bryn and I were contracted to marry Nissa of Bulle, who would grow to be our wife and Queen of Erewhon. When I was twelve and Bryn fifteen-the same age as Nissa-we traveled to Bulle to 'steal' our bride, as is custom. When we got back, Erewhon celebrated with the biggest party I ever saw and afterward Nissa spent the night with Bryn. I was too young to be a husband to her, though we would play knucklebones, or other children's games. That way Nissa and I grew friends, and then, after several years, husband and wife. But we lived without pa.s.sion, all three of us. So when love did strike Nissa and Bryn, it did like a thunderbolt. And the lightning cracked through this house, destroying nearly everybody within it."

Market day in the Highlands is a spectacle, even without the added excitement of an a.s.sizes and a sensational law-suit. I woke early, to the sounds of shouts, goods being trundled down the main street, the shrill cries of Lori. When I came downstairs, the meal area of the Inn was full. Bel was cutting buckwheat bread; she handed me a slice, spread with Lori b.u.t.ter, at the same time jerking her head at the open door. I took the hint and went outside.

Immediately I found myself in the middle of a herd of Lori, who a.s.sessed the stranger intelligently from under their black topknots, then parted and pattered around me. The animal was a miracle of genetic engineering, combining the best of sheep, llama and goat, but with three-toed feet causing less damage to mountain soils than hooves. Like the other Highland animals it was dark, resistant to skin cancer, a boon in an area cursed with thin ozone, even so long after the Crash. Various studies had posited that the Lori designer might have been the social architect who engineered the lives of Highlanders with the Rule. If so, I wondered why human genes had not been manipulated as well, given that these people had insufficient protective melanin, varying as they did from pale to brown.

Suffeners met by sunlight would be shrouded in the robes of Lori homespun that served all purposes, from formal to cold-weather wear, wide flax hats and the kohl that male and female daubed around their eyes in lieu of the precious Tech sungla.s.ses. But inside, or under protective awnings such as those strung over the market square, hats would be doffed, robes flipped back like cloaks, displaying bare skin, gaudy underrobes and the embroidered or beaded or tattooed emblems of the Highland Houses. It was a paradox: outwardly, dour Puritanism; inwardly, carnival.

I stood on the fringes, observing the display of goods and people. n.o.body in sight was armed, well, not visibly, but I had read too many accounts of bloodshed and the consequent bloodprice not to sense the underlying menace in the marketplace. The most obvious source was the young men, who tended to ostentatious ornament, an in-your-face statement of aggressive s.e.xual confidence. The women were less showy, but had an air of defensibility, as if being hard-bitten was a desirable female trait in the Highlands.

Small wonder, I thought, recalling the mock kidnap in the marriage ceremony, and how common real raids had been until recently.

I felt a little too conspicuously a visitor, so I bought a second-hand robe, the wool soft but smelly, and draped it over my shoulders. Thus partially disguised, I wandered among the stalls. A one-eyed man watched over Scavenged Tech rubbish, cans, wires, tires; a nursing mother examined the parchments of designs offered by the tattooist; a group of teenage boys, herders from their staffs, noisily tried on strings of beads; and two husky young men haggled over a tiny jar proffered for sale by an elderly woman.

Hungry for overheard talk, information, I lingered by the tattoos, my interest not feigned, for I was particularly taken with one design, a serpent eating its own tail. Conversation ebbed around me, and I learnt the one-eyed Scavenger had found a new site, that the herders weren't impressed by the selection of beads, that the mother wished to mark that she now had children by all three of her husbands with a celebratory tattoo, and that the men were buying a philter or aphrodisiac, for use on a third party. Now I was slipping into the flow of Suff speak, I quickly comprehended the old woman's spiel: "If Celat had tried my potion on Erewhon, none of this would have happened."All within earshot involuntarily glanced up at the bulk of the biggest building in the town, the Courthouse/lockup. I had, in my wanderings through the the market, seen many emblems of greater or lesser Houses, a distinction the Highlanders made by the size of the land holdings. The signs were displayed on people and also the stalls, signaling the goods that were the specialties of each House. I had been making a mental checklist, and had noted two emblems unseen: the blue swirl of Erewhon, and the red sword blade of Celat. Those ent.i.tled to bear them currently resided within the lockup, while the merits of their respective cases were decided. On the one hand, unlawful detention and threatened rape; on the other, abduction, arson and murder. No wonder the town was packed.

Sadry: The place of graves at Erewhon is a birch grove and as we walked through it, hand in hand, my parents named each tree: "This is Bryn's, this Moli the trader's, by chance at Erewhon that night and forever after." It was a peaceful spot, even with the new thicket of saplings, Nissa's work. I could believe that any ghost here would sleep and not walk-which was precisely why I had been brought there.

Idris: Nissa and her lover were buried in the snow, weren't they? Or at Bulle?

Sadry: I don't know...

[A clattering interruption at this point, the turnkeys bringing in that night's meal, the sound also coming from below, as the Celats, housed on the ground floor, were simultaneously fed.]

Sadry: On that day, or one soon after, I saw above the birches a line of pack Lori winding their way down the mountainside. Their flags had the device of a bee: Westron, our nearest neighbors. And that proved to be the first of many visits from the local and not so local Houses.

Me: Including the Celats?

Sadry: [nods] The message would always be the same: Erewhon has been decimated, and you need an alliance. That meant, me plus whoever was the highest bidder. But my father said to all and sundry that they had made such offers before, when he was the sole survivor of Erewhon House. And had he not responded by a second marriage with a lowland woman, outside the Rule? I, as his only child and heiress of Erewhon, also should have the oppor tunity of making a choice, when I was old enough.

Me: They agreed to that?

Sadry: With grumbling, yes.

Ever since contact was re-established between North and Suff, nearly a century after the Crash, anthropologists had been fascinated by the Rule. Much of their interest was prurient, with accounts of giant beds for the Queen and her consorts (a lurid fantasy, given the Intrigue configuration). I had in my pack a report positing the mechanisms by which Highland men could apparently switch from het monogamy, albeit with a brother or brothers involved in the marriage; to bis.e.x, when an additional unrelated male entered the House, a partner for both husbands and wife; to h.o.m.os.e.x, with the Queen relationship purely platonic. It was not exactly light reading, but I persisted with it, lying on the pallet, the hum of bees filling my ears. In the end the graphs and diagrams were too much for me, and I simply stared at the wall and thought.

On, for instance, how easily the complex relationships in a Rule marriage could turn nasty, Nissa of Erewhon being merely an extreme example. Yet divorce, with people "walking out and down," i.e., to the Lowlands or to join the itinerant traders, was uncommon. Highlanders had a vested interest in conciliation, in preserving the group marriages: that was why many houses contained Mediators, skilled negotiators. The ideal was embodied in a toy I had bought at the market, that little girls wore dangling from their belts: a lady-doll on a string, with a dependent number of men-dolls.

Why, I wondered, dandling the puppets, did s.e.xual options not exist for women as well as men, with, say, linked girl-dolls? Were the Queens simply too busy with their men? Feeling frustrated, I wandered outside and found Bel attending to the hives.

"Come see!" she said, and so I donned over my Highland robes the spare veil and gloves hanging behind the hut door. Bel had lifted the roof off a hive, and I stared over her black shoulder at the teeming ma.s.s of insects.

"I think I understand," I finally said, "why a hive is unlike a Rule House."She nodded, invisible behind her veil. "Ever see a Hive where the drones bossed the show? Or without any other female bees? It would be impossible..."

"As a House with two Queens?" I finished.

She straightened, holding a comb-frame in her gloved hand, staring across the valley at the Courthouse roof.

"You're learning, story-eater."

Sadry: Highlanders say when you die you go downriver, and that is what happened to me. My life at Erewhon with my parents, then my father only [after my mother went, as the Lowlanders say, underground] that is upriver to me. Everything since is the next life.

[She spoke with such intensity that I almost reached out and touched her, to belie the words.]

I went out alone after a stray Lori, the best yearling we had. Our herders had given up searching and my father was ill in bed, but I stubbornly kept looking. Most likely the animal had drowned, so I followed the Lori paths along a stream raging with snowmelt. Almost at its junction with the great river that runs from Erewhon to the lowlands, I saw a patch of color in a large thornbush overhanging the torrent: a drowned bird, swept downstream until it had caught in the thorns. But though it was shaped like the black finches of the Highlands, the feathers were white-gold-red: a throwback to the days before the hole in the sky opened. I wanted the feathers for ornament, so leant on the thornbush, to better reach out-but the bank collapsed beneath me.

The water wasn't deep and the bush cartwheeled in its flow, taking me, my robes entangled in the branches, into the great river. Up and down I was ducked, alternately breathing and drowning, torn by thorns, or dashed against riverstones. All I could do was grab at air when I could...

[She paused and I again noted the fine white lines on her exposed skin, a tracery of thornmarks. Worst was the scar tissue in the palm of one hand, where she must have clutched at the bush despite the pain, in the process defacing and almost obscuring her birth marker, the Erewhon tattoo.]

I think miles went by, hours-for the next thing I recall was the evening moon. I gazed up at it, slowly comprehending that I lay still, out of the helter-skelter race of the river, and that something wet and sluggish held me fast. From the taste of silt in my mouth I knew that the bush had stuck in the mudflats where the river widens. In the moonlight I saw solid land, sh.o.r.eline, but when I tried to struggle toward it I found I had no strength left. But I lived! And surely my fathers' herders would soon find me.

Idris: You'd forgotten....

Sadry: On whose land the mudflats were. So I shivered through that night, until the morning sun warmed me. I had no protection against it, so covered my face with all I had, which was mud. Then I waited for help.

Idris: The next bit is my story....

Sadry: [laughing] Tell it, then.

Idris: The river had lately brought we Celats a fine young Lori, fresh-drowned. So in hopes of further luck, I scavenged in the mudflats again. The bush sticking up like a cage, I noticed that first. Next I saw a faint movement like a crab, a human hand, then eyes looking at me out of the mud. I had to use the pack Lori to drag her out, she was stuck so fast, half-dead as she was. And the bird too, the one that had brought her to me, I found that when I washed the mud from her robes.

[She pulled from beneath her underrobe a thong, pendant from it a love-charm fashioned from tiny feathers, white-gold-red. Sadry almost simultaneously revealed a duplicate charm. I wondered again at the mixture of toughness and sentimentality of the Highlanders, then at the strength of this pair, one to survive near death from drowning and then exposure, the other to save her.... In my cozy north, teenage girls are babies, but these two had a life's hard experience.]

In the courtroom, they looked tiny, my quarry, against the black-clad might of the Highland Rule. The tribunal hearing this case consisted of a Judge from Chuch, the Suff capital, a Northern Governmentrepresentative, and the only empowered woman in sight, Conye of Westron. This Queen had been the subject of a cla.s.sic study, so I knew her story well-but still boggled at the fact that this dignified old lady with the multiple tattoos had seven husbands.

I bent toward Bel, sitting beside me in the public gallery. "Now she is like the Queen of a Hive!" I murmured.

"Only because she outlived all her drones!" Bel replied.

Around us, Suffeners commented too, court etiquette permitting this background buzz, along with eating and the nursing of babies or pets.

"-I ain't disrespecting new dead, but old Erewhon was mad to say no to Westron-"

"-had a bellyful of the Rule, hadn't he-"

"-but risking all that House lore being lost-"

"Excuse me," said a male voice, from behind me. "You're the anthropologist?"

I turned to see a fellow Northerner, nervously holding out an ID. It read: Fowlds, journalist.

"I'm normally posted in Church, so I can't make head or tail of this mountain law," he said.

"And you'd like an interpreter? Meet Bel!"

The Innkeeper grinned, speaking slowly and precisely: "The two girls in that dock are one party; the two men another. They tell their stories, and the judges decide who are to be believed."

"Ah," he said. "And who is likely to be credible?"

Around us Suffeners sucked sweets and eavesdropped happily.

"Well," said Bel, "on the one hand we have a House wealthy and respected, but eccentric-maybe to the point of having gone just too far. That's Sadry of Erewhon, second generation Rule-breaker. On the other hand, Idye and Mors of Celat, a lesser House. Now they are Scavengers, but once Celat were mercenaries, hired trouble, before your North outlawed feuding."

It had been a condition of autonomy, I recalled, which had incidentally obviated the need to have a concentration of fighting men in the fortified Houses. And thus the need to create bonds between them, a prime function of the Rule?

"But the other girl is Idris of Celat? What is she doing with Erewhon?"

"That's what the tribunal is trying to establish," said Bel, as thunderous drumrolls sounded through the court, signaling the formal start of proceedings.

Sadry: I knew that somebody found me, but merely thought I had crossed into downriver, this life revisited, with a ghost Lori carrying me on its back to a ghost House. Somebody washed me and bandaged my cuts-I asked her if she was an angel spirit, but she only laughed. I slept, ate buckwheat mush when it was spooned into my mouth, slept again. The next time I woke, the room seemed full of men, all staring at me.

"Idris, do you know who she is?" said one, in a voice soft and smooth as a stroked cat.

"How could I?" said the angel.

"She looks like rotting bait," said another, so big and hairy I thought him an ogre.

"Idris, has she been instructing you how to treat her wounds?" asked the first.

Mutinous silence. Of course I had, for sick as I was, I was still an Erewhon healer.

"Only one way to find out!" said the third, twin of the second, but clearly the leader. He unwrapped the bandage on my right hand, to reveal the palm, which he inspected closely, picking at the scab with his nails.

"Blue! The missing heir of Erewhon!"

Big hands lifted the pallet, carrying it and me out the door and along the Intrigue s.p.a.ce. Somewhere along the way my raw hand struck rough stone wall, and a red haze of pain washed over me. Even the jolt as the pallet met floor again, in a larger room, I barely noticed.

"Where's that girl? Idris?"

"Here!"-but spoken as if through clenched teeth.

"Get her good and better, and soon, okay?"And with that they left. The pain had cleared my head: now I could see that the angel crying as she re-bandaged my hand was only a girl my age, in a room too stuffed with Scavengers' rubbish to be ghostly.

"Which House is this?" I asked, after a while.

"Celat."

"Oh," I said. "Trouble."

"The thugs were Idye and Iain, my brothers; the smoothie Mors, Mediator of this House, and their lover."

"No Queen?" I asked, trying to recall what I knew of Celat.

"This is her room."

Idris stared into my face, as if expecting a reaction. Something was wrong, I could tell that.

She sighed, and added: "Our mother is years downriver." Her words and tone were like a trail, down which I chased a hunting beast.

"We've been too poor and disreputable for any marrying since."

The trail was warm now, and I guessed what I would find at the end of it would be unpleasant.

"Until you came along," Idris finished. "That's why they moved the bed. Don't you understand? They want you for Queen of Celat and Erewhon."

Indeed, an ogre with three male heads, ferocious game. I knew I had to fight it, or marry it, but how?

More thinking aloud than anything else, I said: "I'd sooner marry you!"

Idris: [triumphantly] "And I said: Do you mean that? Do you really mean that?"

The hearing began with a reading of the various charges and counter-charges, then a series of witnesses appeared. I began to get a sense of Suff law, as the bare bones of the case, what was not disputed by either side, was established. But the mix of ritual and informality in the proceedings disconcerted me, as when Bel waved wildly at some witnesses, a married trio from Greym House. They waved back, before resuming their evidence: that they, being river fishers, had found a hat with blue ties in their net.

"At least there's no argument she fell in the water," Fowlds commented.

Mors of Celat rose and bowed at the judges. I thought him a personable young buck, not as loutish as Idye beside him, with a feline, glossy look-if you liked that sort of thing. An answer to a virgin's prayers? Not from the look of black hatred that pa.s.sed between him and the two girls.

"Can he address the court? I mean, he's an accused," Fowlds murmured.

Bel had gone rushing out of the gallery, leaving me to interpret as best I could.