Six Moon Dance (3 page)

“Well, hormones aren’t the only reason,” Papa comforted him. “Women are also valuable because they’re fewer than men. Only one girl is born alive for every two boys, as we know to our sorrow.”

“Then not every man may have a wife, may he, Papa?” Mouche knew this was so, but at this juncture, he thought it wise to have the information verified. “Even if he has a dowry?”

“Only about half, my boy. The oldest sons, usually. The younger ones must keep hand-maids.” Which was an old joke among men, one Mouche already understood. Papa wiped his face with the tail of his veil and went on, “Once, long ago, I heard a story teller’s tale about the world from which our people originally came, that was Old Earth, where men were fewer than women….”

“That’s impossible.”

“The storyteller said it was because many males died young, in wars and gang fights and in dangerous explorations. Anyhow, in his tale, men were worth much more than women. Women sought men as chickens seek grain, gathering around them. A man could father children on several women, if he liked, without even dowering for them.”

“Fairy stories,” said Mouche. “That’s what that is. Who would want a woman you didn’t dower for?” Everyone knew what such women would be like. Old or ugly or both. And probably infertile. And sickly. And certainly stupid, if they didn’t even bother to get a good dowry first. Or even maybe invisible. “Are there more invisible men than there are women?” he asked, the words slipping out before he thought.

Papa stopped in his tracks, and his hand went back to slap, though it did not descend on Mouche’s evil mouth. “Which only a fool would say,” Papa grated instead, thrusting his head forward in warning. “You’re too old to tell stories of invisible people or see such fairies and bug-a-boos as babies do, Mouche. You could be blue-bodied for it.” Mouche ducked his head and flushed, not having to ask what blue-bodying was. When a supernume was incorrigible and his father or master or boss or commander could do nothing with him, he was dyed blue all over and cast naked into the streets for the dogs to bite and the flies to crawl upon, and no man might feed him or help him or employ him thereafter. People who died foolishly were said to be “independent as a blue body.”

Papa hadn’t finished with him. “Such talk could bring the Questioner down on us! Do you want Newholme to end up like Roquamb III? Do you?”

Stung, Mouche cried, “I don’t know how it ended up, Papa. I don’t know anything about the Questioner.”

“Well, boy, let me tell you, you’d be sorry if words of yours reached
her
ears! As for Roquamb III, well,
she
took care of those poor souls. Imagine what that would be like. The whole world dying around you, and you knowing it was your fault!” Papa glared at him for a moment, then started down the road again, leaving Mouche thoroughly confused and not much enlightened. He’d been told something about the Questioner at school, but at the moment, Mouche couldn’t remember what.

He decided to talk about something else during the rest of the trip, something with no danger to it. The dust puffing up between his toes gave him inspiration.

“Why do we have to walk everywhere, Papa? Or go behind a horse? Why don’t we have engines? Like in the books?”

“Interstellar travel is very expensive,” said Papa, grateful for the change of subject. “Our ancestors on our Moth-erworld saved up for centuries to send off our settlement, and the settlers had to pick and choose carefully what they would bring with them. They brought just enough rations to keep them until the first crops could be harvested. They brought seed and fertilized stock ova and an omni-uterus to grow the first calves and foals and piglets and lambs, and an incubator to hatch the first chickens.

“Our population was small and our first generations tended flocks and herds and planted crops and cut wood and quarried stone, and the next generation built up the towns, and searched for metal ores and rare biologicals to build up our trade. Then came sawmills along the river, and then the first smelter and the little railroad that runs from the mines to Naibah, and so on. Now we are almost ready to become industrial.”

“It sure seems slow,” mumbled Mouche.

“Well, it’s been slower for us than for some, partly because we have so few women, and partly because Newholme has no coal or oil. We hadn’t exactly counted on that. Every other planet that’s had life for millions of years has had fossil fiiels, but not Newholme.”

“I know,” Mouche muttered. He really did know all this; he’d learned it in school. Sometimes he thought it would be easier if the schools didn’t talk about life on Old Earth or on the older settled worlds where people had replicators and transporters and all the robotic industries to support them. If he didn’t know there were any such things as transporters and replicators, walking to Sendoph or working in the garden wouldn’t seem so hard. It would just be natural.

That night was a good supper, better than any they’d had in a long time. The next day, too, as though Papa could not let him go without stuffing him first. Like a goose, Mouche thought. Off to the market, but fattened, first. Between these unexpectedly lavish meals, he had time to say good-bye to most everything that mattered. The pigs. The geese. The milk cow and her calf. With the money paid for Mouche, the family could get by without selling the heifer calf, and when she grew, they would have more milk to sell. With the money paid for Mouche, the mill could be repaired, and there’d be money coming in from grinding the neighbor’s grain and pressing their grapes and olives. With the money paid for Mouche….

It was only fair, he told himself, desperately trying to be reasonable and not to cry. If he’d been a girl, he’d have brought in a great dowry to Eline and Darbos. Just as the money paid for Eline had gone to her family, so money paid for a daughter would go to this family. But that would be honorable, which this was not. Buying a Hunk was honorable enough, it was only selling one that wasn’t. Still, getting a good bid for a girl was just good sense. Why should getting a good bid for a boy be different?

Mouche said farewell to pasture and woodlot and barn, farewell to the cat and her kittens, allowed the freedom of the loft and a ration of milk in return for ridding the granary of the Newholmian equivalent of mice. And finally he went to Duster’s grave and knelt down to say goodbye, dropping more than a few tears on old Duster who had been his best and only friend, who had died in such a terrible way. He could have had one of Duster’s pups from the neighbors—Old Duster had been an assiduous visitor next door—but there had been no food to feed another dog, said Mama. Well. Duster had left a numerous family behind. He was g’Duster, for sure, and long remembered.

Then it was farewell to Mama on the last evening and a long night listening to Papa cry in the night, and very early on the morning of the fifth, before it was light, he and red-eyed Papa were on the road once more, back to Sendoph, Mouche carrying only a little bag with his books inside, and Duster’s collar, and the picture of a sailing ship he had drawn at school. Papa didn’t have to put his veils on until they were far down the road, and he spent most of the time until then wiping his eyes.

When they came to House Genevois, Mouche asked, in a kind of panic, “Can we walk down to the river, Papa?”

His papa gave him a sideways tilt of the head, but he walked on past House Genevois, down Bridge Street past the courtyard entrance, on to the corner where one of the little green-patinaed copper-domed towers topped the wall above the riverbank, and thence out over the stone arches of Brewer’s Bridge itself while the invisible people moved back and forth like little mud-colored rivers running in all directions, their flow breaking around the human pedestrians without touching them, those pedestrians looking over the heads of the invisibles and never lowering their gaze. The breweries stood across the water, four of them, and on the nearest stubby tower a weathervane shifted and glittered, its head pointing north, toward the sea.

The river was low and sullen in this season, dark with ash from the firemounts to the south and east, with the islets of gray foam slipping past so slowly it was hard to believe they were moving at all. Between the water mills, the banks were thickly bristled with reed beds, green and aswarm with birdy-things, and far down the river a smoke plume rose where a wood burning sternwheel steamboat made its slow way toward them against the flow. Down there, Mouche thought, was Naibah, the capital, lost in the mists of the north, and beyond it the port of Gilesmarsh.

“The sea’s down there,” he whispered.

“No reason you can’t go to sea after you retire,” said Papa, hugging him close. “Maybe even buy a little boat of your own.”

“Ship,” said Mouche, imagining breakers and surf and the cry of waterkeens. “Ship.”

His thoughts were interrupted by a rumble, a shivering. At first Mouche thought it was just him, shaking with sadness, but it wasn’t him for the railing quivered beneath his fingers and the paving danced beneath his feet.

“Off the bridge,” said Papa, breathlessly.

They ran from the bridge, standing at the end of it, waiting for the spasm to end. Far to the east, the scarp was suddenly aglow, and great billows of gray moved up into the sky, so slowly they were like balloons rising. Down the river, one of the legs of the rotted wharf gave way, tipping it into the flow. Everything was too quiet until the shaking happened again, and yet again, with tiles falling from roofs and people screaming.

Then it stopped. The birdy-things began to cheep, people began to talk to one another, though their voices were still raised to a panicky level. Even the usually silent invisible people murmured in their flow, almost like water. The ominous cloud went on rising in the east, but the glow faded on the eastern ridge and the earth became solid once more.

Mouche remained bent over, caught in an ecstacy of grief and horror, come all at once, out of nowhere, not sure whether it was his heart or the world that was breaking apart.

“Boy?” Papa said. “Mouche? What’s the matter?”

“Oh, it hurts, it hurts,” he cried. It wasn’t all his own feeling, from inside himself. He knew that. It was someone else’s feeling, someone suffering, some huge and horrid suffering that had been let loose when the world trembled. Not his own. He told himself that. He wasn’t dying. He wasn’t suffering, not like that. His little pains were nothing, nothing, compared to that.

“There, there, boy, I know it does,” said Papa, completely misunderstanding. “But the pain will pass if you let it. Remember that, Mouche. The pain will pass, but you have to let it.” And he looked at Mouche with the anguish he had carefully kept the boy from seeing.

After a moment, Mouche was able to raise his head and start back to the corner, trying not to let Papa see he was crying, easy enough since Papa was resolutely keeping his own face turned away. Mouche did not know who he was anymore. It was as if his whole world was coming apart and he with it. And though Papa had said it would pass, it felt more like pain on the way than pain going away. It had an approaching feel to it. Like the whistle of the little train, rising in pitch as it approached, so the pain seemed to intensify toward the end rather than fading.

The packet of gold was waiting Papa in the foyer of Genevois House, counted out by a stern-faced steward, some put into Papa’s hands, some taken into keeping for Mouche. For later. When he was old. He signed a receipt for it in his best hand and put it back in the steward’s hands, then the inner door was opened just wide enough for Mouche to enter.

“Well, come in, boy,” said Madame. “Don’t dawdle.”

And his life as a Hunk began.

T
he first of mankind to land on Newholme had been an all-male schismatic group from the skinhead planet, Thor, that had set down on the flatlands east of the River Giles in a stolen ship full of plunder and recently captured slaves. They had started building two towns and had conducted trade in biologicals and furs for more than a decade while they went on building, getting ready, so they told the traders, for the time they would go out and capture themselves some women. All this was a matter of record.

While the two towns were still abuilding, along with fortresses at the center of each, disaster struck. A trading ship, arriving on its usual schedule, found the port abandoned except for rampaging monsters of whom the ship’s crew killed a goodly number. Cursory investigation indicated that the planet was abandoned except for a few surviving slaves who said the settlers had all vanished in the darkness, a few days past.

The trader crew put the slaves aboard the settlers’ ship, and flew it to the nearest COW station, claiming both slaves and ship as salvage even before reporting the disappearance to the Council of Worlds. Questioner I (the predecessor of Questioner II, of whom Mouche’s Papa had spoken, and of whom we will learn more in due time), was sent by the COW to survey the situation. The two settlements were indeed empty, the half-built fortresses held nothing but dust, and though Questioner found no sign of monsters, it felt a definite sense of disquiet about the planet as a whole and said so.

At that stage of history, however, Questioner I was still rather new and had not yet gained the full confidence of the Council of Worlds. Recommendations based on mere “feelings” were almost always ignored because Questioner wasn’t supposed to be able to “feel” anything. The planet was, therefore, listed as vacant by the proper COW committee, which opened it up for another wave of settlers. These were not long in coining. They named the planet Newholme and the two half-built towns Naibah and Sendoph. The fortress in Naibah was called the Fortress of Lost Men, and the one in Sendoph became the Temple, or Panhagion, headquarters for the Hags.

The level and fertile lands along the river were soon claimed, and successive generations of farmers settled farther east, finally moving up among the Ratbacks, an area of crouched and rounded hills that ran to the very foot of the scarp. In these remote valleys the dower rules of the Hags could not be rigorously enforced, and the farm folk acquired a bucolic and obstinate independence. It was not unknown for a cash-poor man, if he was persistent and personable, to talk a woman into coming to his farm to help him pay off her price through time payments to her family.