Alyx - Joanna Russ Read online

  “What shall I do now?”

  “Nail boards,” said Alyx slowly.

  “Yes, then?” urged the girl.

  “Pitch,” said Alyx. “Bail it out.”

  “You mean the boat will pitch?” said Edarra, frowning in puzzlement. In answer Alyx shook her head and raised one hand out of the water to point to the storage place on deck, but the air drove the needles deeper into her fingers and distracted her mind. She said, “Fix,” and leaned back against the wall, but as she was sitting against it already, her movement only caused her to turn, with a slow, natural easiness, and slide unconscious into the dirty water that ran tidally this way and that within the blackened, sour-reeking, littered cabin.

  Alyx groaned. Behind her eyelids she was reliving one of the small contretemps of her life: lying indoors ill and badly hurt, with the sun rising out of doors, thinking that she was dying and hearing the birds sing. She opened her eyes. The sun shone, the waves sang, there was the little girl watching her. The sun was level with the sea and the first airs of evening stole across the deck.

  Alyx tried to say, “What happened?” and managed only to croak. Edarra sat down, all of a flop.

  “You’re talking!” she exclaimed with vast relief. Alyx stirred, looking about her, tried to rise and thought better of it. She discovered lumps of bandage on her hand and her leg; she picked at them feebly with her free hand, for they struck her somehow as irrelevant. Then she stopped.

  “I’m alive,” she said hoarsely, “for Yp likes to think he looks after me, the bastard.”

  “I don’t know about that," said Edarra, laughing. “My!” She knelt on the deck, with her hair streaming behind her like a ship’s figurehead come to life; she said, “I fixed everything. I pulled you up here. I fixed the boat, though I had to hang by my knees. I pitched it.” She exhibited her arms, daubed to the elbow. “Look,” she said. Then she added, with a catch in her voice, “I thought you might die.”

  “I might yet,” said Alyx. The sun dipped into the sea. “Long-leggedy thing,” she said in a hoarse whisper, “get me some food.”

  “Here.” Edarra rummaged for a moment and held out a piece of bread, part of the ragbag loosened on deck during the late catastrophe. The pick-lock ate, lying back. The sun danced up and down in her eyes, above the deck, below the deck, above the deck. . . .

  “Creature,” said Alyx, “I had a daughter.”

  “Where is she?” said Edarra.

  Silence.

  “Praying.” said Alyx at last. “Damning me.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Edarra.

  “But you,” said Alyx, “are—” and she stopped blankly. She said “You—”

  “Me what?” said Edarra.

  “Are here,” said Alyx, and with a bone-cracking yawn, letting the crust fall from her fingers, she fell asleep.

  At length the time came (all things must end and Alyx’s burns had already healed to barely visible scars—one looking closely at her could see many such faint marks on her back, her arms, her sides, the bodily record of the last rather difficult seven years) when Alyx, emptying overboard the breakfast scraps, gave a yell so loud and triumphant that she inadvertently lost hold of the garbage bucket and it fell into the sea.

  “What is it?” said Edarra, startled. Her friend was gripping the rail with both hands and staring over the sea with a look that Edarra did not understand in the least, for Alyx had been closemouthed on some subjects in the girl’s education.

  “I am thinking,” said Alyx.

  “Oh!” shrieked Edarra, “land! Land!” and she capered about the deck, whirling and clapping her hands. “I can change my dress!” she cried. “Just think! We can eat fresh food! Just think!”

  “I was not,” said Alyx, “thinking about that.” Edarra came up to her and looked curiously into her eyes, which had gone as deep and as gray as the sea on a gray day; she said, “Well, what are you thinking about?”

  “Something not fit for your ears,” said Alyx. The little girl’s eyes narrowed. “Oh,” she said pointedly. Alyx ducked past her for the hatch, but Edarra sprinted ahead and straddled it, arms wide.

  “I want to hear it,” she said.

  “That’s a foolish attitude,” said Alyx. “You’ll lose your balance.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Come, get away.”

  The girl sprang forward like a red-headed fury, seizing her friend by the hair with both hands. “If it’s not fit for my ears, I want to hear it!” she cried.

  Alyx dodged around her and dropped below, to retrieve from storage her severe, decent, formal black clothes, fit for a business call. When she reappeared, tossing the clothes on deck, Edarra had a short sword in her right hand and was guarding the hatch very exuberantly.

  “Don’t be foolish,” said Alyx crossly.

  “I’ll kill you if you don’t tell me,” remarked Edarra.

  “Little one,” said Alyx, “the stain of ideals remains on the imagination long after the ideals themselves vanish. Therefore I will tell you nothing.”

  “Raahh!” said Edarra, in her throat.

  “It wouldn’t be proper,” added Alyx primly, “if you don’t know about it, so much the better,” and she turned away to sort her clothes. Edarra pinked her in a formal, black shoe.

  “Stop it!” snapped Alyx.

  “Never!” cried the girl wildly, her eyes flashing. She lunged and feinted and her friend, standing still, wove (with the injured boot) a net of defense as invisible as the cloak that enveloped Aule the Messenger. Edarra, her chest heaving, managed to say, “I’m tired.”

  “Then stop,” said Alyx.

  Edarra stopped.

  “Do I remind you of your little baby girl?” she said.

  Alyx said nothing.

  “I’m not a little baby girl,” said Edarra. “I’m eighteen now and I know more than you think. Did I ever tell you about my first suitor and the cook and the cat?”

  “No,” said Alyx, busy sorting.

  “The cook let the cat in,” said Edarra, “though she shouldn’t have, and so when I was sitting on my suitor’s lap and I had one arm around his neck and the other arm on the arm of the chair, he said, ‘Darling, where is your other little hand?”

  “Mm hm,” said Alyx.

  “It was the cat, walking across his lap! But he could only feel one of my hands so he thought—” but here, seeing that Alyx was not listening, Edarra shouted a word used remarkably seldom in Ourdh and for very good reason. Alyx looked up in surprise. Ten feet away (as far away as she could get), Edarra was lying on the planks, sobbing. Alyx went over to her and knelt down, leaning back on her heels. Above, the first sea birds of the trip—sea birds always live near land—circled and cried in a hard, hungry mew like a herd of aerial cats.

  “Someone’s coming,” said Alyx.

  “Don’t care.” This was Edarra on the deck, muffled. Alyx reached out and began to stroke the girl’s disordered hair, braiding it with her fingers, twisting it round her wrist and slipping her hand through it and out again.

  “Someone’s in a fishing smack coming this way,” said Alyx.

  Edarra burst into tears.

  “Now, now, now!” said Alyx, “why that? Come!” and she tried to lift the girl up, but Edarra held stubbornly to the deck.

  “What’s the matter?” said Alyx.

  “You!” cried Edarra, bouncing bolt upright. “You; you treat me like a baby.”

  “You are a baby,” said Alyx.

  “How’m I ever going to stop if you treat me like one?” shouted the girl. Alyx got up and padded over to her new clothes, her face thoughtful. She slipped into a sleeveless black shift and belted it; it came to just above the knee. Then she took a comb from the pocket and began to comb out her straight, silky black hair. “I was remembering,” she said.

  “What?” said Edarra.

  “Things.”

  “Don’t make fun of me.” Alyx stood for a moment, one blue-green earring on her ear and the other i
n her fingers. She smiled at the innocence of this red-headed daughter of the wickedest city on earth; she saw her own youth over again (though she had been unnaturally knowing almost from birth), and so she smiled, with rare sweetness.

  “I’ll tell you,” she whispered conspiratorially, dropping to her knees beside Edarra, “I was remembering a man.”

  “Oh!” said Edarra.

  “I remembered,” said Alyx, “one week in spring when the night sky above Ourdh was hung as brilliantly with stars as the jewelers’ trays on the Street of a Thousand Follies. Ah! what a man. A big Northman with hair like yours and a gold-red beard—God, what a beard!—Fafhir—no, Fafh—well, something ridiculous. But he was far from ridiculous. He was amazing.”

  Edarra said nothing, rapt.

  “He was strong,” said Alyx, laughing, “and hairy, beautifully hairy. And willful! I said to him, ‘Man, if you must follow your eyes into every whorehouse—’ And we fought! At a place called the Silver Fish. Overturned tables. What a fuss! And a week later,” (she shrugged ruefully) “gone. There it is. And I can’t even remember his name.”

  “Is that sad?” said Edarra.

  “I don’t think so,” said Alyx. “After all, I remember his beard,” and she smiled wickedly. “There’s a man in that boat,” she said, “and that boat comes from a fishing village of maybe ten, maybe twelve families. That symbol painted on the side of the boat—I can make it out; perhaps you can’t; it’s a red cross on a blue circle—indicates a single man. Now the chances of there being two single men between the ages of eighteen and forty in a village of twelve families is not—”

  “A man!” exploded Edarra, “that’s why you’re primping like a hen. Can I wear your clothes? Mine are full of salt,” and she buried herself in the piled wearables on deck, humming, dragged out a brush and began to brush her hair. She lay flat on her stomach, catching her underlip between her teeth, saying over and over “Oh-oh-oh-”

  “Look here,” said Alyx, back at the rudder, “before you get too free, let me tell you: there are rules.”

  “I’m going to wear this white thing,” said Edarra busily. “Married men are not considered proper. It’s too acquisitive. If I know you, you’ll want to get married inside three weeks, but you must remember—”

  “My shoes don’t fit!” wailed Edarra, hopping about with one shoe on and one off.

  “Horrid,” said Alyx briefly.

  “My feet have gotten bigger,” said Edarra, plumping down beside her. “Do you think they spread when I go barefoot? Do you think that’s ladylike? Do you think—”

  “For the sake of peace, be quiet!” said Alyx. Her whole attention was taken up by what was far off on the sea; she nudged Edarra and the girl sat still, only emitting little explosions of breath as she tried to fit her feet into her old shoes. At last she gave up and sat—quite motionless—with her hands in her lap.

  “There’s only one man there,” said Alyx.

  “He’s probably too young for you.” (Alyx’s mouth twitched.) “Well?” added Edarra plaintively.

  “Well what?”

  “Well,” said Edarra, embarrassed, “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Oh! I don’t mind,” said Alyx.

  “I suppose,” said Edarra helpfully, “that it’ll be dull for you, won’t it?”

  “I can find some old grandfather,” said Alyx.

  Edarra blushed.

  “And I can always cook,” added the pick-lock.

  “You must be a good cook.”

  “I am.”

  “That’s nice. You remind me of a cat we once had, a very fierce, black, female cat who was a very good mother,” (she choked and continued hurriedly) ‘‘she was a ripping fighter, too, and we just couldn’t keep her in the house whenever she—uh—”

  “Yes?” said Alyx.

  “Wanted to get out,” said Edarra feebly. She giggled. “And she always came back pr—I mean—”

  “Yes?”

  “She was a popular cat.”

  “Ah,” said Alyx, “but old, no doubt.”

  “Yes,” said Edarra unhappily. “Look here,” she added quickly, “I hope you understand that I like you and I esteem you and it’s not that I want to cut you out, but I am younger and you can’t expect—” Alyx raised one hand. She was laughing. Her hair blew about her face like a skein of black silk. Her gray eyes glowed.

  “Great are the ways of Yp,” she said, “and some men prefer the ways of experience. Very odd of them, no doubt, but lucky for some of us. I have been told—but never mind. Infatuated men are bad judges. Besides, maid, if you look out across the water you will see a ship much closer than it was before, and in that ship a young man. Such is life. But if you look more carefully and shade your red, red brows, you will perceive—” and here she poked Edarra with her toe—“that surprise and mercy share the world between them. Yp is generous.” She tweaked Edarra by the nose. “Praise God, maid, there be two of them!”

  So they waved, Edarra scarcely restraining herself from jumping into the sea and swimming to the other craft, Alyx with full sweeps of the arm, standing both at the stern of their stolen fishing boat on that late summer’s morning while the fishermen in the other boat wondered—and disbelieved—and then believed—while behind all rose the green land in the distance and the sky was blue as blue. Perhaps it was the thought of her fifteen hundred ounces of gold stowed belowdecks, or perhaps it was an intimation of the extraordinary future, or perhaps it was only her own queer nature, but in the sunlight Alyx’s eyes had a strange look, like those of Loh, the first woman, who had kept her own counsel at the very moment of creation, only looking about her with an immediate, intense, serpentine curiosity, already planning secret plans and guessing at who knows what unguessable mysteries. . . .

  (“You old villain!” whispered Edarra, “we made it!”)

  But that’s another story.

  I Thought She Was Afeard Till She Stroked My Beard

  Many years ago, long before the world got into the state it is in today, young women were supposed to obey their husbands; but nobody knows if they did or not. In those days they wore their hair piled foot upon foot on top of their heads. Along with such weights they would also carry water in two buckets at the ends of a long pole; this often makes you slip. One did; but she kept her mouth shut. She put the buckets down on the ground and with two sideward kicks—like two dance steps, flirt with the left foot, flirt with the right—she emptied the both of them. She watched the water settle into the ground. Then she swung the pole upon her shoulder and carried them home. She was only just seventeen. Her husband had made her do it. She swung the farm door open with her shoulder and said:

  she: Here is your damned water.

  he: Where?

  she: It is beneath my social class to do it and you know it. he: You have no social class; only I do, because I am a man. she: I wouldn’t do it if you were a—

  (Here follows something very unpleasant.)

  he: Woman, go back with those pails. Someone is coming tonight.

  she:Who?

  he: That’s not your business. she: Smugglers. he: Go!

  she: Go to hell.

  Perhaps he was somewhat afraid of his tough little wife. She watched him from the stairs or the doorway, always with unvarying hatred; that is what comes of marrying a wild hill girl without a proper education. Beatings made her sullen. She went to the water and back, dissecting him every step of the way, separating blond hair from blond hair and cracking and sorting his long limbs. She loved that. She filled the farm water barrel, rooted the maidservant out of the hay and slapped her, and went indoors with her head full of pirates. She spun, she sewed, she shelled, ground, washed, dusted, swept, built fires all that day and once, so full of her thoughts was she that she savagely wrung and broke the neck of an already dead chicken.

  Near certain towns, if you walk down to the beach at night, you may see a very queer sight: lights springing up like drifting insects over the water and others
answering from the land, and then something bobbing over the black waves to a blacker huddle drawn up at the very margin of the sand. They are at their revenues. The young wife watched her husband sweat in the kitchen. It made her gay to see him bargain so desperately and lose. The maid complained that one of the men had tried to do something indecent to her. Her mistress watched silently from the shadows near the big hearth and more and more of what she saw was to her liking. When the last man was gone she sent the maid to bed, and while collecting and cleaning the glasses and the plates like a proper wife, she said:

  “They rooked you, didn’t they!”

  “Hold your tongue,” said her husband over his shoulder. He was laboriously figuring his book of accounts with strings of circles and crosses and licking his finger to turn the page.

  “The big one,” she said, “what’s his name?”

  “What’s it to you?” he said sharply. She stood drying her hands in a towel and looking at him. She took off her apron, her jacket and her rings; then she pulled the pins out of her black hair. It fell below her waist and she stood for the last time in this history within a straight black cloud.

  She dropped a cup from her fingers, smiling at him as it smashed. They say actions speak louder. He jumped to his feet; he cried, “What are you doing!” again and again in the silent kitchen; he shook her until her teeth rattled.

  “Leaving you,” she said.

  He struck her. She got up, holding her jaw. She said, “You don’t see anything. You don’t know anything.”

  “Get upstairs,” he said.

  “You’re an animal,” she cried, “you’re a fool,” and she twisted about as he grasped her wrist, trying to free herself. They insist, these women, on crying, on making demands, and on disagreeing about everything. They fight from one side of the room to the other. She bit his hand and he howled and brought it down on the side of her head. He called her a little whore. He stood blocking the doorway and glowered, nursing his hand. Her head was spinning. She leaned against the wall and held her head in both hands. Then she said: