Alyx - Joanna Russ Read online

  “Huh!” she said, dismissing the tavern. Blackbeard was losing his temper. His face suffused with blood, he put both enormous fists on the table to emphasize that fact; she nodded civilly, leaned back on her part of the wall (causing the bench to rock), crossed her knees, and swung one foot back and forth, back and forth, under the noses of both gentlemen. It was not exactly rude but it was certainly disconcerting.

  “You. Get out,” said the other gentleman.

  “I’m not dry yet,” said she in a soft, reasonable voice, like a bravo trying to pick a quarrel, and she laid both arms across the table, where they left two dark stains. She stared him in the face as if trying to memorize it—hard enough with a man who made it his business to look like nobody in particular—and the other gentleman was about to rise and was reaching for something or other under the table when her gentleman said:

  “She’s crazy.” He cleared his throat. “You sit down,” he said. “My apologies. You behave,” and social stability thus reestablished, they plunged into a discussion she understood pretty well but did not pay much attention to, as she was too busy looking about. The owl blinked, turned his head completely around, and stood on one foot. The blowfish rotated lazily. Across the room stood a row of casks and a mortared wall; next to that a face in the dimness—a handsome face—that smiled at her across the serried tables. She smiled back, a villainous smile full of saltpeter, a wise, nasty, irresponsible, troublemaking smile, at which the handsome face winked. She laughed out loud.

  “Shut up,” said Blackbeard, not turning round.

  He was in a tight place.

  She watched him insist and prevaricate and sweat, building all kinds of earnest, openhearted, irresistible arguments with the gestures of his big hands, trying to bully the insignificant other gentleman—and failing—and not knowing it—until finally at the same moment the owl screeched like a rusty file, a singer at the end of the bar burst into wailing quartertones, and Blackbeard—wiping his forehead—said, “All right.”

  “No, dammit,” she cried, “you’re ten percent off!”

  He slapped her. The other gentleman cleared his throat.

  “All right,” Blackbeard repeated. The other man nodded. Finishing his wine, drawing on his gloves, already a little bored perhaps, he turned and left. In his place, as if by a compensation of nature, there suddenly appeared, jackrabbited between the tables, the handsome young owner of the face who was not so handsome at close range but dressed fit to kill all the same with a gold earring, a red scarf tucked into his shirt, and a satanic resemblance to her late husband. She looked rapidly from one man to the other, almost malevolently; then she stood rigid, staring at the floor.

  “Well, baby,” said the intruder.

  Blackbeard turned his back on his girl.

  The intruder took hold of her by the nape of the neck but she did not move; he talked to her in a low voice; finally she blurted out, “Oh yes! Go on!” (fixing her eyes on the progress of Blackbeard’s monolithic back towards the door) and stumbled aside as the latter all but vaulted over a table to retrieve his lost property. She followed him, her head bent, violently flushed. Two streets off he stopped, saying, “Look, my dear, can I please not take you ashore again?” but she would not answer, no, not a word, and all this time the singer back at the tavern was singing away about the Princess Oriana who traveled to meet her betrothed but was stolen by bandits, and how she prayed, and how the bandits cursed, and how she begged to be returned to her prince, and how the bandits said, “Not likely,” and how she finally ended it all by jumping into the Bosphorus—in short, art in the good old style with plenty of solid vocal technique, a truly Oriental expressiveness, and innumerable verses.

  (She always remembered the incident and maintained for the rest of her life that small producers should combine in trading with middlemen so as not to lower prices by competing against each other.)'

  In the first, faint hint of dawn, as Blackbeard lay snoring and damp in the bedclothes, his beard spread out like a fan, his woman prodded him in the ribs with the handle of his sword; she said, “Wake up! Something’s happening.”

  “I am,” she added. She watched him as he tried to sit up, tangled in the sheets, pale, enormous, the black hair on his chest forming with unusual distinctness the shape of a flying eagle. “Wha’?” he said.

  “I am,” she repeated. Still half asleep, he held out his arms to her, indicating that she might happen all over the place, might happen now, particularly in bed, he did not care. "Wake up!” she said. He nearly leapt out of bed, but then perceived her standing leaning on his sword, the corners of her mouth turned down. No one was being killed. He blinked, shivered, and shook his head. “Don’t do that,” he said thickly. She let the sword fall with a clatter. He winced.

  “I’m going away,” she said very distinctly, “that’s all,” and thrusting her face near his, she seized him by the arms and shook him violently, leaping back when he vaulted out of the bed and whirling around with one hand on the table—ready to throw it. That made him smile. He sat down and scratched his chest, giving himself every now and then a kind of shake to wake himself up, until he could look at her directly in the eyes and ask:

  “Haven’t I treated you well?”

  She said nothing. He dangled one arm between his knees moodily and rubbed the back of his neck with the other, so enormous, so perfect, so relaxed, and in every way so like real life that she could only shrug and fold her arms across her breast. He examined his feet and rubbed, for comfort, the ankle and the arch, the heel and the instep, stretching his feet, stretching his back, rubbing his fingers over and over and over.

  “Damn it, I am cleverer than you!” she exclaimed.

  He sighed, meaning perhaps “no,” meaning perhaps “I suppose so”; he said, “You’ve been up all night, haven’t you?” and then he said, “My dear, you must understand—” but at that moment a terrific battering shook the ship, propelling the master of it outside, naked as he was, from which position he locked his woman in.

  (In those days craft were high, square and slow, like barrels or boxes put out to sea; but everything is relative, and as they crept up on each other, throwing fits every now and again when headed into the wind, creaking and straining at every joist, ships bore skippers who remembered craft braced with twisted rope from stem to stern, craft manned exclusively by rowers, above all craft that invariably—or usually—sank, and they enjoyed the keen sensation of modernity while standing on a deck large enough for a party of ten to dine on comfortably and steering by use of a rudder that no longer required a pole for leverage or broke a man’s wrist. Things were getting better. With great skill a man could sail as fast as other men could run. Still, in this infancy of the world, one ship wallowed after another; like cunning sloths one feebly stole up on another; and when they closed—without fire (do you want us to burn ourselves up?)—the toothless, ineffectual creatures clung together, sawing dully at each other’s grappling ropes, until the fellows over there got over here or the fellows over here got over there and then—on a slippery floor humped like the back of an elephant and just about as small, amid rails, boxes, pots, peaks, tar, slants, steps, ropes, coils, masts, falls, chests, sails and God knows what—they hacked at each other until most of them died. That they did very efficiently.

  And the sea was full of robbers.)

  Left alone, she moved passively with the motion of the ship; then she picked up very slowly and looked into very slowly the hand mirror he had taken for her out of his chest, brass-backed and decorated with metal rose-wreaths, the kind of object she had never in her life seen before. There she was, oddly tilted, looking out of the mirror, and behind her the room as if seen from above, as if one could climb down into the mirror to those odd objects, bright and reversed, as if one could fall into the mirror, become tiny, clamber away, and looking back see one’s own enormous eyes staring out of a window set high in the wall. Women do not always look in mirrors to admire themselves, popular belief to
the contrary. Sometimes they look only to slip off their rings and their bracelets, to pluck off their earrings, to unfasten their necklaces, to drop their brilliant gowns, to take the color off their faces until the bones stand out like spears and to wipe the hues from around their eyes until they can look and look at merely naked human faces, at eyes no longer brilliant and aqueous like the eyes of angels or goddesses but hard and small as human eyes are, little control points that are always a little disquieting, always a little peculiar, because they are not meant to be looked at but to look, and then—with a shudder, a shiver—to recover themselves and once again to shimmer, to glow. But some don’t care. This one stumbled away, dropped the mirror, fell over the table (she passed her hand over her eyes) and grasped—more by feeling than by sight—the handle of the sword he had given her, thirty or forty—or was it seventy?—years before. The blade had not yet the ironical motto it was to bear some years later: Good Manners Are Not Enough, but she lifted it high all the same, and grasping with her left hand the bronze chain Black-beard used to fasten his treasure chest, broke the lock of the door in one blow.

  Such was the strength of iron in the old days.

  There is talent and then there is the other thing. Blackbeard had never seen the other thing. He found her after the battle was over with her foot planted on the back of a dead enemy, trying to free the sword he had given her. She did so in one jerky pull and rolled the man overboard with her foot without bothering about him further; she was looking at an ornamented dagger in her left hand, a beautiful weapon with a jeweled handle and a slender blade engraved with scrolls and leaves. She admired it very much. She held it out to him, saying, “Isn’t that a beauty?” There was a long gash on her left arm, the result of trying to stop a downward blow with nothing but the bronze chain wrapped around her knuckles. The chain was gone; she had only used it as long as it had surprise value and had lost it somewhere, somehow (she did not quite remember how). He took the dagger and she sat down suddenly on the deck, dropping the sword and running both hands over her hair to smooth it again and again, unaware that her palms left long red streaks. The deck looked as if a tribe of monkeys had been painting on it or as if everyone—living and dead—had smeared himself ritually with red paint. The sun was coming up. He sat down next to her, too winded to speak. With the intent watchfulness (but this will be a millennium or two later) of someone focusing the lens of a microscope, with the noble, arrogant carriage of a tennis star, she looked first around the deck—and then at him—and then straight up into the blue sky.

  “So,” she said, and shut her eyes.

  He put his arm around her; he wiped her face. He stroked the nape of her neck and then her shoulder, but now his woman began to laugh, more and more, leaning against him and laughing and laughing until she was convulsed and he thought she had gone out of her mind. “What the devil!” he cried, almost weeping, “what the devil!” She stopped at that place in the scale where a woman’s laughter turns into a shriek; her shoulders shook spasmodically but soon she controlled that too. He thought she might be hysterical so he said, “Are you frightened? You won’t have to go through this again.”

  “No?” she said.

  “Never.”

  “Well,” she said, “perhaps I will all the same,” and in pure good humor she put her arms about his neck. There were tears in her eyes—perhaps they were tears of laughter—and in the light of the rising sun the deck showed ever more ruddy and grotesque. What a mess, she thought. She said, “It’s all right; don’t you worry,” which was, all in all and in the light of things, a fairly kind goodbye.

  “Why the devil,” she said with sudden interest, “don’t doctors cut up the bodies of dead people in the schools to find out how they’re put together?”

  But he didn’t know.

  Six weeks later she arrived—alone—at that queen among cities, that moon among stars, that noble, despicable, profound, simple-minded and altogether exasperating capital of the world: Ourdh. Some of us know it. She materialized so quietly and expertly out of the dark that the gatekeeper found himself looking into her face without the slightest warning: a young, gray-eyed countrywoman, silent, shadowy, self-assured. She was hugely amused. “My name,” she said, “is Alyx.”

  “Never heard of it,” said the gatekeeper, a little annoyed.

  “Good heavens,” said Alyx, “not yet,” and vanished through the gate before he could admit her, with the curious slight smile one sees on the lips of very old statues: inexpressive, simple, classic.

  She was to become a classic, in time.

  But that’s another story.

  1. Ones, tens, hundreds, myriads, tens of myriads

  The Barbarian

  Alyx, the gray-eyed, the silent woman. Wit, arm, kill-quick for hire, she watched the strange man thread his way through the tables and the smoke toward her. This was in Ourdh, where all things are possible. He stopped at the table where she sat alone and with a certain indefinable gallantry, not pleasant but perhaps its exact opposite, he said:

  “A woman—here?”

  “You’re looking at one,” said Alyx dryly, for she did not like his tone. It occurred to her that she had seen him before—though he was not so fat then, no, not quite so fat—and then it occurred to her that the time of their last meeting had almost certainly been in the hills when she was four or five years old. That was thirty years ago. So she watched him very narrowly as he eased himself into the seat opposite, watched him as he drummed his fingers in a lively tune on the tabletop, and paid him close attention when he tapped one of the marine decorations that hung from the ceiling (a stuffed blowfish, all spikes and parchment, that moved lazily to and fro in a wandering current of air) and made it bob. He smiled, the flesh around his eyes straining into folds.

  “I know you,” he said. “A raw country girl fresh from the hills who betrayed an entire religious delegation to the police some ten years ago. You settled down as a pick-lock. You made a good thing of it. You expanded your profession to include a few more difficult items and you did a few things that turned heads hereabouts. You were not unknown, even then. Then you vanished for a season and reappeared as a fairly rich woman. But that didn’t last, unfortunately.”

  “Didn’t have to,” said Alyx.

  “Didn’t last,” repeated the fat man imperturbably, with a lazy shake of the head. “No, no, it didn’t last. And now,” (he pronounced the “now” with peculiar relish) “you are getting old.”

  “Old enough,” said Alyx, amused.

  “Old,” said he, “old. Still neat, still tough, still small. But old. You’re thinking of settling down.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Children?”

  She shrugged, retiring a little into the shadow. The fat man did not appear to notice.

  “It’s been done,” she said.

  “You may die in childbirth,” said he, “at your age.”

  “That, too, has been done.”

  She stirred a little, and in a moment a short-handled Southern dagger, the kind carried unobtrusively in sleeves or shoes, appeared with its point buried in the tabletop, vibrating ever so gently.

  “It is true,” said she, “that I am growing old. My hair is threaded with white. I am developing a chunky look around the waist that does not exactly please me, though I was never a ballet-girl.” She grinned at him in the semi-darkness. “Another thing,” she said softly, “that I develop with age is a certain lack of patience. If you do not stop_making personal remarks and taking up my time—which is valuable—I shall throw you across the room.”

  “I would not, if I were you,” he said.

  “You could not.”

  The fat man began to heave with laughter. He heaved until he choked. Then he said, gasping, “I beg your pardon.” Tears ran down his face.

  “Go on,” said Alyx. He leaned across the table, smiling, his fingers mated tip to tip, his eyes little pits of shadow in his face.

  “I come to make you rich,” he
said.

  “You can do more than that,” said she steadily. A quarrel broke out across the room between a soldier and a girl he had picked up for the night; the fat man talked through it, or rather under it, never taking his eyes off her face.

  “Ah!” he said, “you remember when you saw me last and you assume that a man who can live thirty years without growing older must have more to give—if he wishes—than a handful of gold coins. You are right. I can make you live long. I can insure your happiness. I can determine the sex of your children. I can cure all diseases. I can even” (and here he lowered his voice) “turn this table, or this building, or this whole city to pure gold, if I wish it.”

  “Can anyone do that?” said Alyx, with the faintest whisper of mockery.

  “I can,” he said. “Come outside and let us talk. Let me show you a few of the things I can do. I have some business here in the city that I must attend to myself and I need a guide and an assistant. That will be you.”

  “If you can turn the city into gold,” said Alyx just as softly, “can you turn gold into a city?”

  “Anyone can do that,” he said, laughing: “come along,” so they rose and made their way into the cold outside air—it was a clear night in early spring—and at a corner of the street where the moon shone down on the walls and the pits in the road, they stopped.

  “Watch,” said he.

  On his outstretched palm was a small black box. He shook it, turning it this way and that, but it remained wholly featureless. Then he held it out to her and, as she took it in her hand, it began to glow until it became like a piece of glass lit up from the inside. There in the middle of it was her man, with his tough, friendly, young-old face and his hair a little gray, like hers. He smiled at her, his lips moving soundlessly. She threw the cube into the air a few times, held it to the side of her face, shook it, and then dropped it on the ground, grinding it under her heel. It remained unhurt.