The Call of Earth: 2 (Homecoming) (21 page)

“You think not?” asked Rasa.

“It won’t take many marriages, I think, but only one.” He smiled. “Mine.”

At last he had succeeded in startling
her.
“Aren’t you already married, sir?” she asked.

“As a matter of fact I am not,” said Moozh. “I have never been married. Until now it has always been politically preferable.”

“And you think that your marriage to a Basilican woman will solve everything for you? Even if they grant you a special exception and let you share in your wife’s property, there’s no one woman in Basilica who controls so much property that it would make any difference to you.”

“I don’t intend to marry for property.”

“For what, then?”

“For influence,” he said. “For prestige.”

She studied his face for a moment. “If you think
I
have that kind of influence or prestige, you’re a fool.”

“You are a striking woman, and I confess that you are of the right age for me—mature and accomplished. To marry you would make life a dangerous and engrossing game, and you and I would both enjoy it. Alas, though,
you
are already married, even if your husband is rumored to be a mad prophet hiding in the desert. I don’t believe in breaking up happy families. Besides, you have too many opponents and enemies in this city for you to be a useful consort.”

“Imperators have consorts, General Vozmuzhalnoy Vozmozhno; generals have wives.”

“Please, call me Moozh,” he said. “It’s a nickname that I only permit my friends to use.”

“I am not your friend.”

“The nickname means ’husband,’” he said.

“I know what it means, and neither I nor any woman of Basilica will ever call you that to your face.”

“Husband,” said Moozh, “and Basilica is my bride. I will wed her, I will bed her, and she will bear me many
children, this fair city. And if she doesn’t take me willingly as her husband, I will have her anyway, and in the end she
will
be docile.”

“In the end this city will have your balls on a plate, General,” she retorted. “The last lord of this house discovered that, when he tried to do what you are doing.”

“But he was a fool,” said Moozh. “I know it, because he lost
you.”

“He didn’t lose
me,”
said Rasa. “He lost himself.”

He smiled at her. “Farewell, ma’am,” he said. “Till we meet again.”

“I doubt we will,” she said.

“Oh, I’m sure we’ll converse again.”

“After I return and tell them what you really are, there’ll be no more emissaries from the city council.”

“But my dear lady,” said Moozh, “did you think I’d have spoken to you so freely, if I intended to let you speak again to the council?”

Her face blanched. “So you
are
no different from any of the other bullies. Like Gaballufix and Rashgallivak, you love to hear your own bluster. You think it makes you manly.”

“Not so,” said Moozh. “Their posturing and boasting came to nothing—they did it because they feared their own weakness. I never posture and I never boast, and when I decide what is necessary I do it. You will be escorted from here to your own house, which is already surrounded by Gorayni troops. All the non-resident children in your house have been sent safely home; the others will be kept indoors, since from this point on no one will be allowed to enter or leave your house. We will, of course, deliver food to you, and I believe your water supply is entirely provided by wells and a clever rain collection system.”

“Yes,” she said. “But the city will never stand for your arresting me.”

“You think not?” asked Moozh. “I have already sent one of the Basilican guard to inform the city council that I have arrested you in their name, in order to protect the city from your plotting.”

“My
plotting
!” she cried, rising to her feet.

“You came to me and suggested that I abolish the city council and establish one man as king of Basilica. You even had a candidate in mind—your husband, Wetchik, who already had his sons murder his chief rivals and even now is waiting in the desert for me to call for him to come and rule the city as a vassal of the Imperator.”

“Monstrous lies! No one will believe you!”

“You know that your statement is false, even as you make it,” said Moozh. “You know that there are many on that council who will be only too happy to believe that all your actions have been inspired by private ambition, and that you have been involved in causing all your city’s misfortunes from the start.”

“You’ll see that the women of Basilica are not so easily fooled.”

“You have no idea, Lady Rasa, how happy I would be if the women of Basilica proved to be so wise that I could not deceive them. I have longed all my life to find people of such exemplary wisdom. But I think I have not found them here, with the single exception of yourself. And
you
are completely under my control.” He laughed merrily. “By the Incarnation himself, ma’am, after conversing with you this morning it terrifies me to know that you are even
alive.
If you were a man with an army I would be afraid to campaign against you. But you are not a man with an army, and so you pose no threat to me—not anymore.”

She rose from her chair. “Are you finished?”

“Do your household a favor—don’t try to send anyone out with secret messages. I
will
catch anyone you send, and then I’ll probably have to do something grisly like delivering the next day’s rations to your house sewn up inside your would-be messenger’s skin.”

“You are exactly the reason why Basilica banned men from the city in the first place,” she said coldly.

“And you are exactly the reason why the city of women is an abomination in the sight of God,” he answered. But his voice was warm with admiration—even affection—for the truth was that this woman alone had taught him that the city of women was not as weak and effeminate as he had imagined all these years.

“God!” she said. “God means nothing to you. The way you think, the way you live—I daresay that you spend every moment of your life trying to flout the will of the Oversoul and unmake all her works in this world.”

“You are close to the mark, dear lady,” he said. “Closer than you ever imagined. Now do please bow to the inevitable and make no trouble for my poor soldiers who have the unpleasant duty of taking you home under public arrest through the streets of Basilica.”

“What trouble could I make?”

“Well, for one thing, you could try to shout some ridiculous revolutionary message to the people you pass. I would recommend silence.”

She nodded gravely. “I will accept your recommendation. You can be sure that I’ll despise you in silence all the way home.”

It took six of them to walk her home. His lies about her had been so persuasive that crowds gathered in many places to vilify her as a traitor to her city. That was bad enough, to be unjustly loathed by her beloved city, but it didn’t gall her half as much as the other shouts— the cheers for General Moozh, the savior of Basilica.

Her name was Torstiga in the language of her homeland, but she had been so long away from
that
place, far in the east, that she didn’t even remember the language of her childhood. She had been sold into slavery by her uncle when she was seven years old, was carried west to Seggidugu, and there was sold again. Slavery was not intolerable—her mistress was strict but not unfair, and her master kept his hands to himself. It could have been much worse, she well knew— but it was not freedom.

She prayed constantly for freedom. She prayed to Fackla, the god of her childhood, and nothing happened. She prayed to Kui, the god of Seggidugu, and still she was a slave. Then she heard stories of the Oversoul, the goddess of Basilica, the city of women, a place where no man could own property and every woman was free. She prayed and prayed, and one day when she
was twelve, she went mad, caught up in the trance of the Oversoul.

Since many slaves pretended to be god-mad in order to win their freedom, Torstiga was locked up and starved during her frenzy. She did not mind the darkness of the tiny cubicle where they confined her, for she was seeing the visions that the Oversoul put into her mind. Only when the visions ended at last did she notice her own physical discomfort. Or at least, that was how it seemed to her mistress, for she cried out again and again from her cubicle: “Thirsty! Thirsty! Thirsty!”

They did not understand that she was crying out that one word, not because she needed to drink—though indeed she was far along with dehydration—but because it was her name, Torstiga, translated into the language of Basilica. The language of the Oversoul. She called her own name because she had lost herself in the midst of her visions; she hoped that if she called out loud enough and long enough, the girl she used to be might hear her, and answer, and perhaps come back and live in her body once again.

Later she came to understand that her true self had never left her, but in the confusion and ecstacy and terror of her first powerful visions she was transformed and never again would she be the twelve-year-old girl she once had been. When they let her out of her confinement, warning her not to pretend to be god-mad again, she didn’t argue with them or protest that she had been sincere. She simply drank what they gave her to drink, and ate until the food they set before her was gone, and then returned to her labor.

But soon they began to realize that for once a slave was
not
pretending. She looked at her master one day and began to weep, and would not be comforted. That afternoon, as he oversaw construction of a fine new
house for one of the richest men of the city, he was knocked down by a stone that got away from the crew that was trying to manhandle it into place. Two slaves suffered broken bones in the mishap, but Thirsty’s master fell into the street and a passing horse stamped on his head. He lingered for a month, never regaining consciousness, taking small sips that his wife gave him every half hour, but vomiting any food she managed to get down his throat. He starved to death.

“Why did you weep that day?” his widow demanded.

“Because I saw him fallen in the street, trampled by a horse.”

“Why didn’t you warn him?”

“The Oversoul showed it to me, mistress, but she forbade me to tell it.”

“Then I hate the Oversoul!” cried the woman. “And I hate you, for your silence!”

“Please don’t punish me, mistress,” said Thirsty. “I wanted to tell you, but she wouldn’t let me.”

“No,” said the widow. “No, I won’t punish you for doing what the goddess demanded of you.”

After the master was buried, his widow sold most of the slaves, for she could no longer maintain a fine household in the city, and would have to return to her father’s estate. Thirsty she did not sell. Instead she gave her her freedom.

Her freedom, but nothing else. Thus Thirsty began her time as a wilder, not because she was driven into the desert by the Oversoul, but because she was hungry, and in every town the other beggars drove her away, not because her small appetite would have deprived them of anything, but rather because she was slight and meek and so she was one of the few creatures in the world they had the power to drive away.

Thus she found herself in the desert, eating locusts
and lizards and drinking from the rank pools of water that lingered in the shade and in caves after each rainstorm. Now she lived her name indeed, but in time she became a wilder in fact, and not just in appearance and habits of life. For she
was
dirty, and she
was
naked, and she starved in the desert like any proper holy woman— but she raged against the Oversoul in her heart, for she was bitterly angry at the way the Oversoul had answered her prayer. I asked for freedom, she howled at the Oversoul. I never asked you to kill my good master and impoverish my good mistress! I never asked you to drive me out into the desert, where the sun burns my skin except where I’ve managed to produce enough sweat that the dust will cling to my naked body and protect me. I never asked for visions or prophecies. I asked only to be a free woman, like my mother was. Now I can’t even remember her name.

The Oversoul was not done with her, though, and so she could not yet have peace. When she was only fourteen years old, by her best reckoning, she had a dream of a place that was mountainous and yet so lush with life that even the face of the sheerest cliff was thickly green with foliage. She saw a man in her vision, and the Oversoul told her that this was her true husband. She cared nothing for that news—what she saw was that this man had food in his hand, and a stream of water ran at his feet. So she headed north until she found the green land, and found the stream. She washed herself, and drank and drank and drank. And then one day, clean and satisfied, she saw him leading his horse down to the water.

Almost she ran away. Almost she fled from the will of the Oversoul, for she didn’t want a husband now, and there had been berries enough by the riverbank that she hungered for nothing that he might offer.

But he saw her, and gazed at her. She covered her breasts with her hands, knowing vaguely that this was what men desired, for that was what they looked at; she had no experience of men, for the Oversoul had protected her from desert wanderers until now.

“God forbids me to touch you,” he said softly. He spoke in the language of Basilica, but with an accent very different from the speech of Seggidugu.

“That is a lie,” she said. “The Oversoul has made me your wife.”

“I have no wife,” he answered. “And if I did, I wouldn’t take a puny child like you.”

“Good,” she said. “Because,
I
don’t want
you,
either. Let the Oversoul find you an
old
woman if she wants you to have a wife.”

He laughed. “Then we’re agreed. You’re safe from me.”

He took her home, and clothed her, and fed her, and for the first time in her life she was happy. In a month she fell in love with him, and he with her, and he took her the way a man takes a wife, though without a ceremony. Oddly, though,
she
was convinced that marrying him was exactly what the Oversoul required of him, while
he
was convinced that taking her into his bed was pure defiance of the will of God. “I will defy God every chance I get,” he said. “But I would never have taken you against your will, even for the sake of defying my enemy.”