Six Moon Dance (33 page)

“You are kind,” said Madame, with the least possible deference in her nod.

“Not at all,” he said, departing. She sat for several moments after he left, breathing through her mouth, hearing his final words resonate, realizing at last that he had meant them literally. He was not at all kind. He would be incapable of kindness.

At the port outside Sendoph, a tall, blue-skinned protocol officer arrived on the Questioner’s advance cutter to spend half an officious hour with the Men of Business and a day with the Hags, most of it in inspection of the Mantelby mansion. Mouche and Ornery were trimming lawn edges in the garden when they saw the blue one stalk through. The two had taken the gardener’s advice and made themselves useful but inconspicuous, though Mouche did not believe for a moment that this strategy would save him from Bane’s malice. The head gardener told them Bane had been installed as Mistress Mantelby’s toy boy, and Dyre, too, had been taken up to the main house to enjoy himself.

“You’d think they were kin of hers, the way they act,” the old man whispered over the evening meal. “Oh, I hear things, I do. All the servants up there at the house, they’re talking about it. She’s shameless, that one. She’ll cosset him, or them, until they think they shit pure gold. She’ll take them to bed with her, and she’ll give them stuff to make them feel like lords of creation, and they’ll play round games. Then one day they’ll wake up in shackles in her playroom. I’ve seen it happen a hundred times….”

“ ‘lay roon?” asked Mouche, apprehensively.

The old man shivered. “Call it a dungeon, you’d be closer on. Down in the old wine cellars. Playroom is what she calls it. There’s machines in there, and sometimes when the machines are through, all that’s left is grease.”

“I don’t understand,” said Ornery.

Mouche did understand, all too well. He whispered to Ornery of the picture at House Genevois.

Ornery turned back to the old man. “You’ve seen it a hundred times, gardener? Truly?”

The old man shrugged and pursed his lips. “Well, no, boys, not strictly, no. That’s liar’s license, that is, to make the story ring right. I’d say she does for at least three or four men a year, most of ‘em Consorts, but some just plain folk, like a footman at table she takes a dislike to or some cook that spoils the roast. And nephews, o’ course. She loves disposin’ of nephews.”

“Why does she do it?” breathed Ornery.

Madame had explained psychotic sadism to her students, but Mouche could not yet speak without considerable pain, so he made no attempt to pass that information on. Madame had said some people were made that way, and they did it out of vengeance, and some were born that way, and they did it because hurting and killing made them feel powerful. Either way, there was no cure for it, for each act led to the next with no way to retreat.

“Whatever reason Mistress Mantelby is like she is, you keep tight to what I told you,” said the old man. “I’m trusting you to keep out of the way and be silent. Just like those things we used to have that never existed. You understand?”

 By the time the Questioner and her entourage arrived, affairs at Marool Mantelby’s mansion were as calm and usual as it was possible to make them. The only change for the household was that Bane and Dyre were to be housed in a suite at the far end of the servants’ quarters during the Questioner’s stay, because of the stink. So the old gardener said. For that reason and others, everyone was more or less holding their breaths until the visitation was over. It wouldn’t be long. So everyone had been told.

O
n the evening the Questioner arrived Ornery asked the gardener if they might make use of the washhouse in the compound, and he gave his permission, so long as it was after everyone else had gone to bed, provided they were stingy with the firewood in the boiler and mopped up after themselves. The stone-floored little building was near the wood stove and the pump and was furnished with wooden tubs of various sizes. Ornery took herself and her clothing inside, locked the door, lit the boiler, and heated a good quantity of water.

Mouche, however, on learning that Ornery had gone to commit an act of cleanliness, stopped scratching himself and decided it was long past time for himself to have a bath also, to rid him of vermin if nothing else, so he went along to the room, jiggled the latch, and walked into the place. She was standing in the tub, washing her hair. She was Ornery, no doubt of that, but she was also unmistakably female.

Ornery seized up a towel and covered all pertinent parts while stammering a long exposition of how she had been turned into a chatron as a boy. Mouche smiled as politely as his wound would allow. His studies at Madame’s had exposed him to women’s bodies in all varieties of age and inclination; he had seen chatrons and hermaphrodites as well, and he knew Ornery was physiologically a girl and he said so, intelligibly.

Ornery protested.

Mouche shook his head, bewildered. He knew Ornery was a girl, and moreover, he knew she had a body that was sleek and lovely. He liked the looks of her very much, though he felt no desire toward her. He had been trained not to feel desire until and unless desire was wanted, and, if he had thought about it, he would have realized that he had felt no spontaneous desire since he first saw Flowing Green.

By this time he was able to speak with reasonable clarity, though with some pain and effort. “That may have worked on a ship where, I suppose, you kept yourself covered and where few of the men had seen a woman in their entire lives, but it won’t work with me. Why don’t you just finish your hair and tell me what’s going on?”

“Don’t touch me,” demanded Ornery.

“Of course not,” said Mouche, annoyed. “What do you think I am?”

“You’re not fixed,” Ornery stuttered, reaching for her clothes. “And neither am I.”

Which was perfectly true, of course. Mouche wasn’t fixed. He wouldn’t be until he was sold. And of course he would not force himself on Ornery, because if Ornery—the female Ornery—got pregnant, she could be executed for mismothering, and Mouche was not the kind of person to endanger another in that way. So Mouche told himself, illustrating his goodwill by leaving the room with the utmost dignity and closing the door gently behind him.

Ornery checked the door. The lock was broken. It seemed to lock, but in fact it did not. So, all right, he hadn’t picked the lock in order to get at her. With some apprehension, she went back to the room they shared, where Mouche attempted once again to explain that he was both honorable and harmless and that Ornery did not need to worry. His friendly overtures were rebuffed. Further, Ornery adopted a new manner toward him, one of nervous shyness, like a young cat only recently made aware of dogs. Her native gregariousness had led them into a friendly and trusting camaraderie, but now her sense of prudence dictated otherwise. Suddenly, she became suspicious and almost preternaturally alert.

Mouche, in turn, could not decide whether he was annoyed with her or not. Given the high status of women on Newholme and the very low status of supernumes—even ones who got jobs as seamen—he could not quite envision a circumstance which would have led him, had he been female, to pretend otherwise. He would very much have liked to discuss it with Ornery, but she was not of a mood, as yet, for any discussion at all.

Q
uestioner arrived without fanfare. Her shuttle set down near Sendoph late at night. Though Questioner had intended to enter the planetary system from the side nearest the moon where the Quaggi had died, the immediacy of the geological problems on the planet had made her change her mind. The Quaggi would wait. She could stop at the outer planet on her way out.

By morning she was ensconced at Mantelby Mansion, her maintenance system unloaded and ready, her reference files properly arranged, Ellin and Bao settled, and the rest of her varied entourage provided with rooms of their own, along with a separate dining salon. The entourage had caused quite a stir. Of the eight persons attached to Questioner, in addition to Ellin and Bao, no two looked anything alike, and some of them looked only remotely mankindly. The peepers from the walls had seen this with a good deal of interest, and had immediately sent messengers off with descriptions of each one of the eight.

By breakfast, Questioner had her people taking scanner views of every street from Naibah south, and inventorying all businesses, agricultural enterprises, and the like, from Sendoph north. The work could have been done automatically, by miniature spy-eyes, but Questioner did not advise her so-called aides of this. The opportunity to be rid of them for some days, if she was lucky, was too good to miss.

Within the hour, Ellin Voy and Gandro Bao were on their way to the Panhagion in a carriage borrowed from the Mantelby stables while another, larger carriage was being modified to carry the Questioner. The ride was neither long nor uncomfortable, and Ellin considerably enjoyed the amusement of seeing Bao dressed as a woman. Questioner had approved his doing so, since he would otherwise have to wear veils and his efficiency would be impaired. Ellin had to admit that, within a few moments, she thought of him as a woman, for he acted and looked exactly as a rather grave, pleasant, youngish woman might. He had, so he said, learned women’s ways and women’s wiles over years of study with a Kabuki master of the genre.

Among all these pleasurable details, Ellin could not understand her uneasiness. There was something in the atmosphere of the place, the city, or perhaps the planet, that made her feel queasy. A melancholy in the air. A sadness. A late-autumn, leaf-burning, chill-wind-blowing, inexorable-lifeloss-coming kind of feeling. She felt it like a ghostly hand on her shoulder, and it made no sense at all.

“Do you feel it?” she whispered to Bao, her eyes on the back of the veiled coachman.

Bao stared out at the world, looked up at the sky, across the valley at the long shredded lines of smoke trailing away to the south. “Something,” he admitted in his woman’s voice. “The hairs on my neck are standing on end.”

When they left the carriage at the foot of the Temple stairs, Ellin stopped a young woman and introduced herself, asking to be taken to someone in charge. She and Bao were escorted into the forecourt of the Temple, where they watched as women placed lighted incense sticks in great sand-filled basins on iron tripods. Smoke rose from hundreds of glowing wands to fill the vault with haze that was lit by vagrant rays of light from high, gem-colored windows. Seen from below, the smoke shone in fragments of ruby and emerald, sapphire, amethyst, and amber, a shifting glory against the gold mosaic tiles of the ceiling.

“It is only the imperfection in the atmosphere that allows us to see the light,” said a voice at their shoulders. “So with us, only our own imperfections allowing us to see what perfection might be.”

The person addressing them was tall and thin and brown, dressed in a crimson, long-sleeved garment topped by a complicated headdress of striped wine and flame.
“I
am D’Jevier Passenger,” she said. “One of the Temple Hags.”

“Madam,” Ellin bowed. “My name is Ellin Voy and this is … Gandra Bao. We are uncertain as to the respectful form of address….”

“Ma’am will do,” said D’Jevier. “Or, you may call me simply Hag or Oh, Hag, or Revered Hag, though I doubt the latter is always sincere. I am your servant, Ma’am, and that of the Hagions.”

“The Hagions?” Ellin cocked her head. The Questioner had assured her that this movement, properly executed, elicited information all by itself. Persons often helped the merely puzzled while they withheld information from the demanding.

“Come,” said the Hag. “You will understand better if you see the Temple proper. We close it to men’s eyes. For millennia, mankind was so conditioned to believe that the only possible God is created in the image of a very large and powerful male, that the mere idea of a goddess made the entire male gender overwrought. Even here, on Newholme, where the Hagions have reigned for generations, we find it necessary to keep menfolk’s mouths and minds busy with other things.”

D’Jevier held aside one of the heavy curtains and they passed through into the Temple proper, Bao doing so without hesitation. So far as he was concerned, the moment he put on his wig, he became a woman, and he stayed a woman until he took it off.

The Hagions stood along the far, curved wall, their heads—or what would have been their heads—well above Ellin’s height, even though the floor was much lower where the images stood. The robes expressed a female form and a female head within a vacancy.
Here I am
, each statue proclaimed,
invisibly existent
.

“Have they names?” Bao whispered in a charming and completely womanly voice. Ellin was silent, though she felt both awed and excited by invisible images, so palpably present.

“The Goddess to the left is the maiden, in the center, the woman, to the right, an old woman, a crone. These ages typify differing types of power. There is also present a fourth, without shape or age, a spirit, invisible. The directory of Hagions is there,” said D’Jevier, indicating the low lectern at the center of the arc of effigies. “Please feel free to glance at it.”

Ellin and Bao did so, turning the pages, finding there name after name they had never heard of. D’Jevier spoke from behind them: “There are many aspects of divinity. Some are useful for occasions of joy. Others when we are troubled….”

Something in her voice led Bao to ask in his sweetly sympathetic voice, “You are troubled? We hope we have not occasioned this feeling.”

She shook her head with a fleeting smile. “We all are troubled on Newholme. Vulcanism is increasing to an extent that it may threaten both our food supplies and some of our water sources. The Men of Business are extremely worried about the cities and the farmlands, while we are more concerned with human life….”

“Do you mean mankind life?”

D’Jevier turned her face slightly aside, masking her eyes. “With all due respect to Haraldson, mankind is the only human presence on Newholme.”