Starship Home (12 page)

Maze led them into the village, Zoe walking on one side of her, Meg on the other, with Harold and Zachary following as befitted Maze’s view of their status as males. Villagers paused in their work to stare at the newcomers, and Meg remembered something that she had read once about the Middle Ages, that most people back then would pass their lives without ever meeting more than a hundred people. Strangers must be rare here. In looking around, she noticed the hut that Harold had mentioned, the one with skulls hanging from its doorposts.

There was movement inside the hut and as Maze led them across the village square, a tall man came out of it, wearing a pack on his back. The pack had strapped to it a large leather-bound book.
Harold’s witchdoctor
, Zoe thought.

Harold was looking nervously around them. ‘If we all stay calm, Zachary, they won’t attack us.’

‘Shut up, Harold,’ Zoe said over one shoulder.

‘Later on I’ll do some calculations with Guinevere so I can predict eclipses of the sun and moon and impress them.’

Zoe sighed. Nothing seemed to be able to reduce the size of Harold’s enormous ego.

Maze now paused at the steps to the biggest hut. ‘In here is Our Mother. Women go first. Inside, males don’t speak. Women can cross red line on floor, males stay this side.’ Then she led the way up the steps and across the verandah.

Harold murmured to Zachary: ‘I think we’re looking at a primitive matriarchy here, Zachary, preceding more advanced societies in which men run things.’

‘I never saw anywhere that’d reached that second stage,’ Zachary said as they entered the dim coolness of the hut.

As they went in, Marlowe was leaving the village, with his pack on his back.

Inside the hut, they blinked, waiting for their eyes to adjust after coming in out of the bright sunlight. The ancient woman sat watching them, unmoving, the old agate-colored eyes taking in the details of their dress, the way they held themselves, the color of their skins, the sheen of their hair. She was learning about them as they stood there. The adults, the ancient woman thought, were very big, had been well fed as babies and children, perhaps not the man so much, but the woman was a giant, with a giant’s teeth gleaming in the dimness. She had no teeth missing, this woman, and they were very even; her hair gleamed, and the color was too pale to be real. The ancient woman had never seen hair that particular shade of blonde. Did the stranger woman color her hair? The skin was very healthy. She had always eaten of the best this woman, like a Trollwife.

The younger woman’s hair was black, as her own had been long ago. Her memory quivered, there was something about the younger woman, but the memory would not surface. Like the older woman, the young woman was a giant. They came from somewhere where there was a lot of meat to be had, a lot of grain and fruit and milk and vegetables. These strangers made her own Forester people look small by comparison.

The man was more sinewy, like the Trollmen were sometimes, the ones who had been bought in, or escaped from the slave farms in the East. The man had had a harder life than the others. The boy, the one with the writing on his shirt, the one Marlowe had been interested in, he was well-fed too but thin, not yet having finished his growth, not yet developed his adult muscles.

But all the signs were there. These people came from a place of great riches.

They could see her now, the ancient woman, sitting in her big bishop’s throne, a feathered cloak wrapped about her shoulders, staring at them with bright brown eyes.

She was once beautiful
, Zachary thought. The bones which seemed in danger of piercing the wrinkled skin of her face were the bones of a great beauty.
How old was she? How old could this woman possibly be?

‘You will call me Our Mother,’ the ancient woman said. ‘The women may approach and kiss my hand. The men are unclean and must remain beyond the red line.’

The English she speaks is much more like ours
, thought Meg.
Brought up by people of our generation? Maze must be three generations down at least? The language changing?

Zoe moved first, walked forward, crossing the red line and dropping to one knee as she took the hand which Our Mother extended, and kissing it. Meg did the same, kissing the ancient woman’s hand, feeling the skin like dry paper under her lips.

‘So the skygods have come again, have they?’ The voice was like the creaking of the unoiled hinges of an old gate.

‘Not skygods, not us, no,’ Zachary said, wanting to make that perfectly plain.

‘The women speak, the men stay silent. Maze must have told you that.’ She sat in silence, looking at them. ‘I remember people dressed like you. From a long time ago. Who are you?’ She suddenly looked at Zoe, singling her out, her old head moving with a shocking speed. ‘Tell me your names.’

‘Zachary Owens,’ Zoe said, indicating Zachary.

‘Don’t know the name Owens. Him?’ She pointed at Harold.

‘Harold Lewin,’ said Zoe.

‘Lewin. One of the lost families. Her?’

‘Meg Henderson.’

‘Henderson. Another lost family. You?’

‘Zoe Poulos.’

The old woman looked at her for so long that Zoe felt uncomfortable. ‘Zoe … Poulos.’ Our Mother breathed the three syllables. ‘Come closer.’ Zoe went closer. Our Mother stared at her in a silence which stretched almost beyond breaking point. Then she said: ‘Go to the shelf, Zoe Poulos. Tell me what you find.’

Zoe was not sure what she meant, and the old woman pointed to a shelf behind her. This part of the hut was deep in shadow, and Zoe had to get closer to see what was on the shelf. There were three very different objects: a Greek ikon of St George slaying the dragon; a framed photograph, faded by time; and a chewed teddybear. Zoe stared at them, and then silent tears were rolling down her cheeks.

‘Tell me.’

‘I find … an ikon of Hagios Georgiou, St George, like the one we used to have at home … and …’

‘Zoe? What’s wrong?’ Meg moved toward her, but stopped at a gesture from Our Mother.

Zoe was looking at the framed photograph. It was a group shot of a family: a father, a mother, two boys in their late teens, a girl in her mid-teens and a girl of about three. The girl in her mid-teens was Zoe. The toddler was her sister Helena.

‘A photo… a photograph of my mother and father and … brothers Peter and George, and my little sister Helena. And me.’ The others were staring at her as she picked up the worn bear, and looked at its back. There was some old, worn stitching on the back. Some of the stitching was gone, but the Greek letters ‘Elena’ could be read. ‘And my sister Helena’s teddybear,’ Zoe said.

There was silence, total silence, then the ancient woman spoke. ‘So it’s you. Come back. Has no time passed at all … in the place where the Slarn-demons took you?’

Zoe was looking at Our Mother, in fear as much as anything. Her tears were running from her face down onto the top of her Slarn longjohns. ‘You’re … you’re Helena? My little sister? You were three years old…’

‘I am Our Mother. Once, long ago, I was Helena. Helena Poulos. Now … for fifty years … Our Mother.’ Zoe broke. With a great sob which was wrenched from deep within her, she stumbled forward and fell to her knees by her ancient younger sister’s chair of office. She held Helena’s old hand, and words emerged from her sobbing. ‘Helena? Still alive? I left you … by the gate … a week ago…’

And the old woman repeated words of her own, repeated a story she had told many times. ‘When I came to the house,’ she said, ‘it was empty. The next-door neighbors Manoly and Sophie Alexidis had not been taken. They found me. Took me in. I’ve waited. And waited.’ She looked down at Zoe, who was looking up, her eyes still streaming. ‘Too late for tears for me. Too old for tears, sister Zoe.’ She looked up at the others and waved her hand toward the doorway. Maze and Meg, Harold and Zachary backed out into the sunlight, leaving the weeping Zoe crouched by Our Mother, who had once been little Helena. Our Mother put her hand on her sister’s head in a simple act of comfort, knowing that Zoe’s tears could change nothing, while also knowing they were tears which had to be shed.

Maze began showing Harold and Meg and Zachary around the village. Very soon they developed a following of village children, neglecting their chores for the moment in the excitement of seeing these strange new people among them. As they approached the blacksmith’s forge, Maze lowered her voice. ‘This here what we see now, smithing, is men’s work. Needs strength, not too much brain.’ She looked sideways at Harold, sensing his reaction before she said the words. ‘We don’t bother men’s pretty heads with too much brain work.’

The smith, a man in his middle years, bare-chested, sweating in the heat, was hammering out the head of a garden hoe. Above the waist he was massively developed, with great twisted cords of strongly defined muscle working under the skin. However, when he stepped aside to temper the hoe in a tub of water, they noticed that he limped, and as they moved on, they could see that one of his legs was wasted and turned at the knee.

Polio
, Meg thought,
poliomyelitis has come back
. She had had a great-aunt who had contracted polio before the Salk and Sabin vaccines had been available but she had never seen the signs of the disease on anyone as young as the smith.

‘Your smith’s lame?’ Harold asked Maze.

‘Had the child fever,’ said Maze, and added. ‘Men who can’t hunt must do other things.’

‘A lot of the blacksmith gods were lame,’ Meg said to Harold. ‘Vulcan, Hephaestus, Weland. Maybe that’s why.’ She paused, ‘Although Weland was made lame on purpose by a king who wanted to keep him from running away.’

‘King of Vic, he does that,’ Maze said casually. ‘Bad place, Vic.’

They were approaching the place in the village where the women were weaving and working around the dyepots. ‘Weaving is brainwork so women do that,’ Maze said. ‘Dyeing is science, so that’s womanwork,’ she added.

Harold reached snapping point. ‘Statistical studies have shown that men and women are at least of equal intelligence.’

‘Statistical’s wrong then,’ said Maze.

‘I happen to have topped my class every year since I was in kindergarten,’ Harold said, conveniently forgetting that Shani Walker had beaten him in third and fifth class.

Maze sneered at him. ‘What’s “top-class”? Can you dye yarn, weave cloth, find food, know what plants are poison for enemies, what plants are food for friends?’

‘I don’t regard those simple skills as signs of intelligence…’

Maze grinned at Meg and said, over Harold’s futile arguments, ‘“Top class”! He always talk like this? You let him?’ She turned on Harold. ‘We had a smart man leader before Our Mother. Wanted to fight war. He was Topclass too,’ she said, and made a casual throat-slitting gesture.

‘Quit while you’re ahead, kid,’ Zachary said and Harold fell silent. He could not help wondering exactly what had happened to the smart man leader, and by what means the ancient woman in the hut, Zoe’s sister though she might be, had become Our Mother.

In the hut, Helena was talking to Zoe. ‘You bring crisis with you. Opportunity and disaster combined.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Zoe said.

‘A Slarn starship. If the Slarn should find it here … disaster.’

‘Do they come here? I mean do they visit? I’d never heard of them before … well, there were people who said they’d seen flying saucers, but no one took any notice of them.’

‘Sometimes they visit. Not for long. We hear rumors. A rumor came ten years ago they were in old Europe. France. Marlowe, he went…’ she broke off. ‘Twenty years ago, rumor came down the Murray River they were on the east coast. Thirty years ago, 50 … they come. Never know when. But if they come looking and find that starship… disaster.’

‘Opportunity?’

‘Ah yes. You have a teacher with you, the woman Meg. Opportunity. If she teaches the reading and writing skills then we’ll feed you.’

‘No one reads and writes any more?’

‘Not here. I could, but now the eyes … everyone was too busy getting food, learning just how to stay alive. It went.’ She paused. ‘But knowing about things gives you power over them. Power’s locked up in books.’

‘So there are still books?’

‘Those that weren’t burnt by the Simples.’

Zoe was looking at Helena in question. ‘Simples?’

‘When I was your age…. a few years older. A leader rose up. Said the people had been taken because of pride. That pride came from books. A lot of people listened. They burned a lot of books before it was finished. Before their leader challenged Don Robert’s law.’ She was remembering. Mostly what she was remembering was an armored man on horseback, a man with the face of a dark angel. ‘Don Robert The Beautiful … he gave them the chance to recant, and most did when he showed them their future if they didn’t.’ Her smile was grim, as she remembered. ‘He spared the women and children, and sealed the leaders in a cave. Just as well, there wouldn’t be a book left if he hadn’t.’

‘That’s terrible.’

‘All history is. I want my women to read and write. For the clan to live and grow, my women must read and write, and do numbers.’

A short while later, when Zoe emerged from the hut, she found the others sitting under a tree out of the heat, batting at flies with their hands. She sat down with them.

‘Are you all right?’ Meg asked her.

‘About Helena?’ Zoe smiled, let her breath out in what passed for a laugh. ‘Just give me ten years to get used to it, uh? I just, ah …’ She shook her head. ‘I’ll come to terms with it but if I think about it…’ She shook her head again. ‘Okay, Our Mother. I still think of Helena as three years old, so I’ll say “Our Mother”. I think she’d really rather we were out of town, right? She’s afraid the Slarn’ll come looking for their ship. But in the meantime, Maze was right, she wants a school started in exchange for food. Basic stuff, reading, writing, arithmetic…’

‘Look,’ Meg began and then shrugged. ‘I suppose if I can teach them to read and write, I can’t just walk away from it, can I? I mean reading and writing, you accumulate knowledge … it ends in a polio vaccine, doesn’t it? I’ll do it.’