HIGH PRAISE FOR SHERI S. TEPPER’S
THE GATE TO WOMEN’S COUNTRY

“What keeps us reading is the gradual unfolding of the workings of the society…. What makes the story good… is Tepper’s experienced pen. She not only keeps us reading, but by carrying several feminist dreams to the point of nightmare, she provokes a new look at the old issues.”

—The Washington Post

“A rewarding and challenging novel that is to be valued for its provocative ideas.”

—Publishers Weekly

“In The Gate to Women’s Country, Sheri S. Tepper has produced a book which exemplifies all of her previous virtues, and which is in addition poignant and profound. I’m deeply impressed.”

—Stephen R. Donaldson

Bantam Spectra Books by Sheri S. Tepper

Ask your bookseller for the ones you have missed.

BEAUTY
THE GATE TO WOMEN’S COUNTRY
GRASS
SIDESHOW
A PLAGUE OF ANGELS
SHADOWS END
GIBBONS DECLINE AND FALL

STAVIA SAW HERSELF AS IN A PICTURE, FROM THE outside, a darkly cloaked figure moving along a cobbled street, the stones sheened with a soft, early spring rain. On either side the gutters ran with an infant chuckle and gurgle, baby streams being amused with themselves. The corniced buildings smiled candlelit windows across at one another, their shoulders huddled protectively inward—though not enough to keep the rain from streaking the windows and making the candlelight seem the least bit weepy, a luxurious weepiness, as after a two-hanky drama of love lost or unrequited.

As usually happened on occasions like this one, Stavia felt herself become an actor in an unfamiliar play, uncertain of the lines or the plot, apprehensive of the ending. If there was to be an ending at all. In the face of the surprising and unforeseen, her accustomed daily self was often thrown all at a loss and could do nothing but stand aside upon its stage, one hand slightly extended toward the wings to cue the entry of some other character—a Stavia more capable, more endowed with the extemporaneous force or grace these events required. When the appropriate character entered, her daily self was left to watch from behind the scenes, bemused by the unfamiliar intricacy of the dialogue and settings which this other, this actor Stavia, seemed able somehow to negotiate. So, when this evening the unexpected summons had arrived from Dawid, the daily Stavia had bowed her way backstage to leave the boards to this other persona, this dimly cloaked figure making its way with sure and unhesitating tread past the lighted apartments and through the fish and fruiterers markets toward Battle Gate.

Stavia the observer noted particularly the quality of the light. Dusk. Gray of cloud and shadowed green of leaf. It was apt, this light—well done for the mood of the piece. Nostalgic. Melancholy without being utterly depressing. A few crepuscular rays broke through the western cloud cover in long, mysterious beams, as though they were searchlights from a celestial realm, seeking a lost angel, perhaps, or some escaped soul from Hades trying desperately to find the road to heaven. Or perhaps they were casting about to find a fishing boat, out there on the darkling sea, though she could not immediately think of a reason that the heavenly ones should need a fishing boat.

Near the Well of Surcease, its carved coping gleaming with liquid runnels and its music subsumed into the general drip and gurgle, the street began its downhill slope from the Temple of the Lady to the ceremonial plaza and the northern city wall. At street level on the right a long row of craftswomen’s shops stared blindly at the cobbles through darkened windows: candle makers, soap makers, quilters, knitters. On the left the park opened toward the northwest in extended vistas of green and dark, down past the scooped bowl of the summer theater where Stavia would play the part of Iphigenia this summer. Not play, she thought. Do. Do the part. As someone had to do it. In the summer theater. In the park.

A skipping seawind brought scents of early spring flowers and pine and she stopped for a moment, wondering what the set designer had in mind. Was this to remind her of something? All the cosiness of candle flame and gurgling gutters leading toward this sweet sadness of green light and softly scented mist? Too early to know, really. Perhaps it was only misdirection, though it might be intended as a leitmotif.

The street leveled at the bottom of the hill where it entered the Warrior’s Plaza, unrelenting pavement surrounded on three sides by stories of stolid and vacant colonnades. The arched stone porches were old, preconvulsion structures. Nothing like that was built today. Nothing so dignified, so imposing, so unnecessary. The ceremonial space seemed far emptier than the streets behind her. The arches wept for spectators; the polished. stones of the plaza cried for marching feet, the rat-a-bam of drums, the toss of plumes, and the crash of lances snapped down in the salute, kerbam! The plaza sniffled in abandonment, like a deserted lover.

Oh yes, the journey had been meant as a leitmotif, she could tell. The plaza made it clear.

On three sides of the plaza, the colonnades. On the fourth side, the towering wall, high-braced with buttresses, glimmering with mosaics, pierced by the Defender’s Gate, the Battle Gate, and the Gate of the Warriors’ Sons, which comprised a triptych of carved timbers and contorted bronze depicting scenes of triumph and slaughter. The Defender’s Gate was at the left of this lofty arrangement, and she stood close to it for a long time—perceiving herself before it as though from a front-row-center seat, the compliant lines of her cloak melting before the obdurate metal—before reaching out with her staff to knock the requisite three times, not loudly. They would be waiting for her.

The small door at the base of the great portal swung open; she walked with every appearance of calm down the short corridor beyond. In the assembly room she found an honor guard. And Dawid, of course.

How could she have forgotten he was fifteen? Well, she hadn’t. She was thirty-seven, so he was fifteen. She had been twenty-two when… when everything. All this pretense that the summons was unexpected was really so much playacting, a futile attempt to convince herself that something unforeseen might happen despite her knowing very well what the plot required. Despite Dawid’s ritual visits on holidays, his twice-yearly homecomings—during which the initial shyness of the original separation had turned to fondness, then to shyness again, finally becoming the expected, though no less wounding, alienation—despite all that, she had chosen to go on thinking of him as she had when he was five and had gone into the hands of the warriors.

So, now, she must guard against speaking to that child, for this was no child confronting her in his polished breastplate and high helmet, with pouted lips outthrust. No child anymore.

“Dawid,” she said formally, bowing a little to indicate the respect she bore him. And “Gentlemen,” for the respect she bore these others, also. One had to grant them that; one could grant so little else. She risked one raking glance across the ranked faces above the shining armor, subconsciously thinking to see faces that she knew could not be there. Those that were there were young. No old faces. No old faces at all.

“Madam,” intoned one member of the host. Marcus, she thought, examining what she could see of his visage between the cheek and nose guards of his helmet; Marcus, probably, though it might have been another of her sister Myra’s sons—all three looked disconcertingly alike and had, even as babies. “Madam,” he said, “your warrior son greets you.”

“I greet my warrior son,” the actor Stavia said while the observer Stavia annoyed herself by weeping, though inwardly and silently, as befitted the occasion.

“I challenge you, madam,” said Dawid. His voice was light, very light, almost a child’s voice, still, and she knew he had been practicing that phrase in the shower room and in corners of the refectory, no doubt listening with heartbreaking attention for the vibrant echo of command. Still, it quavered with a child’s uncertainty.

“Oh?” she questioned, cocking her head. “How have I offended?”

“During my last homecoming”—he gave the word the aversive twist she had believed only a mature warrior could give it, “homecoming,” as though it were something dirty; well, perhaps it was—“you made a suggestion to me which was unworthy of my honor.”

“Did I, indeed?” The actor Stavia was properly puzzled. “I cannot remember any such.”

“You said,” his voice quavered. “You said I would be welcome to return to my mother’s house through the Gate to Women’s Country.”

“Well, and so you would be,” she said calmly, wishing this farce were done with so she might go home and weep. “So are any of our sons.”

“Madam, I summoned you here to tell you that such a suggestion offends my honor! I am no longer your son. I am proud to name myself a son of the warriors. I have become a Defender!”

So, and well, and what had she expected? Still, for a moment she could not respond. The observer Stavia held the actor in thrall, just for this moment, seeking in that face the face of the five-year-old Dawid, mighty hunter of grasshoppers, thunderer on the toy drum, singer of nursery rhymes, leading contender in the skipping race from home to candy shop. That level-browed, serious-eyed, gentle-lipped child. No more. No more.

No, it was all bronze and leather now. The Marthatown garrison tattoo was on his upper arm. He had a cut on his chin where he had shaved himself, though his skin looked like a baby’s. Still the arms and chest were muscular and almost adult, almost a man’s body. Fit for love. Fit for slaughter.

Get on with it, wept the observer Stavia.

“Then I relinquish all claim to you, Dawid, son of the warriors. You need not visit us again.” A pause for the words which were not obligatory but which she was determined upon. Let him know, even now, that it cut both ways. “You are not my son.” She bowed, believing for a moment that the dizziness which struck her would prevent her getting her head up, but then the actor had her up and wheeling about, finding her way almost by instinct. Women could not return through the Defender’s Gate. There was a corridor here to the left, she told herself, remembering what she had been told and managing to get into it with level tread, not breaking stride, not hurrying or slowing. Even the hiss behind her did not hurry her steps. A serpent’s hiss, but by only a few, possibly only one set of lips, and those not Dawid’s. Stavia had played by the rules since Dawid was born, and all those metal-clad automatons knew it. They could not hiss her in good conscience, and only zealots would do it. Despite them, she would not hurry. No, no, and no, the thing must be done properly if it had to be done at all.

And then, ahead of her at the end of the narrow corridor she saw it for the first time, the gate that all the fuss was about, narrow and quite unprepossessing. The Gate to Women’s Country, as described: a simple sheet of polished wood, with a bronze plaque upon it showing the ghost of Iphigenia holding a child before the walls of Troy. On the right was a bronze latch in the shape of a pomegranate, set low, so that even a small woman could reach it easily. Her eyes sought it, her thumb pressed it down, and the door swung open smoothly, as though well used, well oiled.

In the plaza arcade, where the gate opened, old Septemius Bird was waiting for her with his nieces, Kostia and Tonia, their twinned exoticism long since become familiar and dear. Though not friends of her childhood, they were neighbors now, and Morgot must have told them the summons had come. Beneda was there as well, even though Stavia didn’t really want to see her, not right now. But Beneda was a neighbor, too, and she had found out about Dawid somehow. Well, she had a right, in a sense. Besides, Beneda always found out about such things.

“Alone?” she now asked. Beneda had become fond of rhetorical questions and purely exclamatory phrases, needing to fill all silences with little explosions of sound, like a string of firecrackers which once lit could not keep itself from popping, set off no doubt to keep her own demons away. So she repeated herself. “Ah well, Stavia, so you return alone, as I have done, as we all have done. We grieve, Stavia. We grieve.”

Stavia, who had loved her dearly once and still did, wanted to tell her to be quiet for heaven’s sake, but instead merely smiled and reached for her hand, hoping Beneda would silence herself for lack of anything to say. What was there to say? Hadn’t they all said it to one another, over and over again.

Septemius, on the other hand, knew how to be comforting. “Come on along, Doctor. I’m sure it’s no more than you expected, and these girls of mine have been to the Well of Surcease for a kettleful. There’s a nice cup of tea waiting.” His arm around her shoulders was firm and wiry, as though it belonged to someone half his age. Next to Corrig, who as a servitor could not appear in the plaza with her, Septemius was the one she found most comfort in.

As they returned through the empty streets, the observer Stavia, now in command of herself once more, noted the quality of light. What she had thought was nostalgic and sweetly melancholic was now livid and bruised. The light was a wound, and like a wound it throbbed and pulsed. If it had not been for the old man’s arm about her shoulders, Stavia might not have managed the last few steps into her own house where Morgot and Corrig waited with the tea, where Stavia’s daughters, Susannah and Spring, waited with questions.

“So Dawid chose to stay with the warriors, Mother.” Susannah was thirteen now, her face already firming into a woman’s face, with serious dark eyes and a strong jaw.

“Yes, Susannah. As we thought he would,” said Stavia, telling them the truth she had refused to tell herself. She had not really let herself think he would stay with the warriors, even though both Joshua and Corrig had known that it was certain.

“I wish for your sake he’d come home to us,” Spring said, repeating some adult comment she had overheard. Spring was only eleven, still a little girl. She would be slenderer than Susannah, and prettier. For Stavia, looking at Spring was like looking into the mirror of her own past. Now the girl added her own perceptive comment. “I knew he wouldn’t come back. He never really cared about us.”

She knew more than I, Stavia thought, looking deep into Spring’s eyes.

“What are you thinking?” Corrig murmured into her ear as he warmed her tea.

“Of me when I was almost Spring’s age,” she said. “Long before I knew you. Of my first trip to the Warrior’s Gate when we took my little brother, Jerby, to his warrior father.” She turned to her mother, murmuring, “Remember, Morgot. When you and Beneda and Sylvia and I took Jerby to the plaza.”

“Oh, so long ago,” Beneda, overhearing, interrupted with a little explosion of breath. “I remember it well. So very long ago.”

“I remember,” said Morgot, her face turning inward with a kind of intent concentration. “Oh yes, Stavia. Of course I remember.”

STAVIA HAD BEEN TEN. SHE REMEMBERED KNEELing in the kitchen, picking at her bootlace to make it lie absolutely flat. It was a bargain that she had made with the Lady. If she learned the whole Iphigenia play, word for word, and if she cleaned up her room and did the dishes by herself and then dressed perfectly, without one dangling button or wrinkled bootlace, then they wouldn’t have to give Jerby away. Not ever. Not even though her older sister, Myra, was already standing in the doorway, impatiently brushing the five-year-old’s hair to get him ready.

“Stavia, if you don’t hurry up with those boots, Myra and I are going to leave you behind.” Morgot had arranged the blue woolen veil over her head for the tenth time and had stood before the mirror, running her fingers over her cheeks, looking for lines. She hadn’t found any lines in her beautiful face, but she had looked for them every day, just in case. Then she had stood up and begun buttoning her long, padded ceremonial coat. Time to go.

“I’m hurrying,” ten-year-old Stavia had said.

“Stand still,” Myra commanded the little boy she was brushing. “Stop fidgeting.” She sounded as though she were about to cry, and this took Stavia’s attention away from her boots.

“Myra?” she said. “Myra?”

“Mother said hurry up,” Myra commanded in an unpleasant voice, fixing her cold eye on Stavia’s left foot. “We’re all waiting on you.”

Stavia stood up. The arrangement she had made wasn’t going to work. She could tell. Not if Myra was almost crying, because Myra almost never cried except for effect. If something was bad enough to make Myra cry for no discernible advantage, then Stavia couldn’t stop it, no matter what she did. If she were older, then she could have tried a bigger promise, and maybe Great Mother would have paid attention. At age ten one didn’t have much bargaining power. Of course, Morgot and Myra would tell her there wasn’t any reason to make promises or seek changes because the Great Mother didn’t bargain. The deity didn’t change her mind for women’s convenience. Her way was immutable. As the temple servers said, “No sentimentality, no romance, no false hopes, no self-petting lies, merely that which is!” Which left very little room, Stavia thought, for womanly initiative.

This depressing fatalism swelled into a mood of general sadness as they went down the stairs and into the street. Her mother’s friend Sylvia was there with her daughter Beneda, both of them very serious-looking and pink-cheeked from the cold. Sylvia’s servitor Minsning stood to one side, chewing his braid and wringing his hands. Minsning always wrung his hands, and sometimes he cried so that his bulbous nose turned red as an apple. There were other neighbors, too, gathered outside their houses, including several serving men. Joshua, Morgot’s servitor, had gone away on business, so he wasn’t able to tell Jerby good-bye. That was sad, too, because Joshua and Jerby had been best friends, almost like Stavia and Beneda were.

“Our condolences go with you,” a neighbor called, dabbing at the inside corners of her eyes with a crumpled handkerchief.

Morgot bowed, receiving the words with dignity.

Sylvia said, “Morgot, are you going to be all right?”

Stavia’s mother nodded, then whispered, “As long as I don’t try to talk.”

“Well don’t. Just bow and keep your veil straight. Here, let me carry Jerby.”

“No!” Morgot stepped away, hugging the little boy through his quilted coat. “Sorry, Syl. I just… want to hold on to him as long as I can.”

“Stupid of me,” Sylvia dithered, turning red. “Of course.”

The six of them went down the hill in a quiet procession: Morgot carrying Jerby, with Sylvia alongside, then Myra by herself, then Beneda and Stavia—who was trying not to cry and to look dignified at the same time, and failing at both. Beneda giggled, and Myra cast them an angry red-eyed glare over one shoulder.

“You little girls behave yourselves.”

“I am behaving myself,” Stavia said, then more softly, “Beneda, you stop getting me in trouble.” Beneda often said things or did things suddenly that got them both in trouble, though she never meant to. Stavia was more self-conscious. When Stavia got into trouble, it was generally over something she had thought about for a very long time.

“I wasn’t getting you in trouble. I was just laughing.”

“Well, it’s not funny.”

“You look funny. Your face is all twisted up.” Beneda mimicked Stavia, screwing up her eyes and mouth.

“Your face would get twisted up, too, if you had to give your little brother away.”

“I don’t have a little brother. Besides, everybody has to. It isn’t just you.”

“Jerby’s not everybody. Joshua will really miss him.”

“Joshua’s nice.” Beneda thought about this for half a block. “Joshua’s nicer than Minsning. I wish our family had a servitor like Joshua. Joshua can find things when you lose them. He found my bracelet that Mother gave me. He found Jerby that time he was lost, too.”

Stavia remembered hysteria and weeping and Joshua calmly concentrating then going to the empty cistern and finding Jerby curled up in it asleep. “Maybe we can do something to make it up to him.”

“Maybe Mother will have another baby boy,” said Myra, not looking back.

“She’s had three already,” said Stavia. “She says that’s enough.”

“I didn’t know that,” Beneda said, looking curiously at the women. “My mom only had one. And then there’s me and Susan and Liza.”

“Mother had Myra first, then Habby, then Byram, then me, then Jerby,” Stavia confided. “Myra’s seventeen, and that means Habby and Byram are thirteen and twelve, because they’re four years and five years younger than Myra, and that’s how we keep track. How old is your brother? What’s his name?”

Beneda shook her head. “About the same age as your brothers, I think. His name is Chernon. He’s the oldest. He went to the warriors when I was real little, but I don’t think he’s fifteen yet. Something happened and he doesn’t visit us anymore. He goes to Aunt Erica’s house. Mom doesn’t talk about him.”

“Some families don’t,” Myra offered. “Some families just try to forget about them unless they come home.”

“I won’t forget Jerby,” Stavia announced. “I won’t.” Despite all her good resolutions, she heard the tears in her voice and knew her eyes would spill over.

Myra came back to them abruptly. “I didn’t say you would,” she said angrily. “Jerby will be home twice every year, for visits, during the carnival holidays. Nobody’s going to forget him. I just said some families do, that’s all. I didn’t mean us.” She turned and stamped back to her place ahead of them.

“Besides, maybe he’ll return when he’s fifteen,” comforted Beneda. “Then you can visit him, whatever house he’s assigned to. You can even travel to visit him if he goes to some other town. Lots of boys do come back.”

“Some,” amended Myra, turning to glare at them with a peculiar twist to her mouth. “Some do.”

They had walked all the way past the Market District to the Well of Surcease. Sylvia and Morgot each took a cup from the attendant and filled it, spilling some toward the Lady’s Chapel for the Lady, then sipping at it, drawing the time out. Myra took their offering to the poor box outside the chapel door, then sat on the well moping, looking sulky. Stavia knew that Myra just wanted to get it over with. There was no necessity for stopping at the well. The water was purely symbolic—at least when drunk directly from the well like this—and offered no real consolation except a reminder that surcease would come if one didn’t fight it. “Accept grief,” the priestess said at services for the lost ones. “Accept grief, but do not nurse it. In time it will go.” At the moment, that was hard to remember, much less understand.

“We all have to do things we don’t want to do,” Morgot had said. “All of us here in Women’s Country. Sometimes they are things that hurt us to do. We accept the hurt because the alternative would be worse. We have many reminders to keep us aware of that. The Council ceremonies. The play before summer carnival. The desolations are there to remind us of pain, and the well is there to remind us that the pain will pass….”

Stavia wasn’t sure she could ever learn to find comfort in the thought, though Morgot said she would if she tried. Now she merely took off her boiled wool mittens and dabbled her fingers in the water, pretending there were fishes in the fountain. The water came from high up in the mountains where the snow lay deep almost all year long, and there were fishes up there, people said. The hatchers were putting more of them in every year. Trout-fishes. And some other kind Stavia couldn’t remember.

“There could be fishes,” she told Beneda.

“There are fishes in the big marsh, too,” said Beneda. “Teacher Linda told me.”

“Vain hope,” sniffed Sylvia, overhearing her. “They’ve been telling us there are fishes in the marsh for twenty years now, but nobody’s caught any. Still too contaminated.”

“It might take several more decades before they’ve multiplied enough to be harvestable,” Morgot said. “But there are some new things living there. When I was by there last, I saw a crawfish.”

“A crawfish!”

“I’m pretty sure it was a crawfish. I’ve seen them in some of the other marshes. With armor on the outside. With lots of legs and two bigger claws in front?”

“A crawfish,” Sylvia marveled. “My grandmother used to tell me a funny story about one of her grandmother line eating crawfishes.”

“The thing I saw didn’t look good to eat,” Morgot remarked, making a face. “Very hard on the outside, it was.”

“I think the meat’s inside.”

Deliberately, Morgot rinsed the cup from the overflow spout and set it down. The fountain attendant came forward politely to take it, replacing it with a clean one. “Condolences, matron.”

“Thank you, servitor. We can always hope, can’t we?”

“Certainly one can, matron. I will pray to the Lady for your son.” The man turned away and busied himself with his cups. He was very old, perhaps seventy or more, a grandsir with white hair and a little tuft of beard. He winked at Stavia, and she smiled at him. Stavia liked grandsirs. They had interesting stories to tell about garrison country and warrior sagas and how the warriors lived.

“Best get along,” said Morgot, looking at the sun. The dial above the fountain said almost noon. She picked Jerby up once more.

“I want to walk!” he announced, struggling in her arms. “I’m not a baby.”

“Of course you aren’t,” she said lamely, putting him down once more. “You’re a big boy going to join his warrior father.”

His thickly clad little form led them down the long hill and into the ceremonial plaza. Once there, Morgot knelt to wipe Jerby’s face with a handkerchief and set the ear-flaps of his hat straight. She gave Myra a look, then Stavia. “Stavia, don’t disgrace me,” she said.

Stavia shivered. It felt as though Morgot had slapped her, even though she knew that wasn’t what her mother meant. Disgrace Mother? On an occasion like this? Of course not! Never! She wouldn’t be able to stand the shame of doing something like that. She reached down inside herself and gave herself a shake, waking up that other part of her, making it come forward to take over—that other Stavia who could remember lines and get up on stage without dying of embarrassment. Real Stavia, observer Stavia, who was often embarrassed and stuttery and worried about appearing wicked or stupid, watched the whole thing as from a shocked dream state, feeling it all, but not making a single move. It was the first time she could remember purposely making her everyday self step aside, though it had happened occasionally before, in emergencies, all by itself.

“Morgot! What an unkind thing to say to the child!” Sylvia objected. “Even now!”

“Stavia knows what I mean,” Morgot replied. “She knows I want no tantrums.”

Observer Stavia reflected gloomily that she hadn’t had a tantrum for at least a year. Well, part of a year. She had been so guiltily miserable after the last one, she might never have one again, even though sometimes she desperately felt like screaming and rolling around and saying, no, she wouldn’t do whatever it was they expected her to do because they were always expecting her to do something more or be something more until it didn’t feel like there was enough of her left to go around. Still, it wasn’t really fair of Mother to bring that up now, and she longed to say so.

Actor Stavia, however, kept her role in mind and merely held her face still as she moved at Morgot’s side. Myra was on the other side, holding one of Jerby’s hands as the little boy stalked sturdily along, taking two steps to Myra’s one. They stopped before the Gate of the Warriors’ Sons, and Morgot went forward to strike its swollen surface with the flat of her hand to make a drum-gong sound, a flat, ugly thum-hump.

A trumpet blew somewhere beyond the gate. Morgot swept Jerby up into her arms and retreated to the center of the plaza as the gate swung open, Myra and Stavia running at either side. Then there were drums and banners and the crash of hundreds of feet hitting the stones all at the same time, blimmety blam, blam, blam. Stavia blinked but held her place. Warriors. Lines of them. High plumes on their helmets and bright woolen skirts coming almost to their knees. Bronze plates over their chests, and more glistening metal covering their legs. To either side, groups of boys in white tunics and leggings, short-hooded cloaks flapping. One tall man out in front. Tall. And big, with shoulders and arms like great, stout tree branches.

Everything became still. Only the plumes whipping in the wind made any sound at all. Mother walked forward, Jerby’s hand in hers.

“Warrior,” she said, so softly Stavia could barely hear her.

“Madam,” he thundered.

His name was Michael, and he was one of the Vice-Commanders of the Marthatown garrison. First came Commander Sandom, and under him were Jander and Thales, then came Michael—Michael, Stephon, and Patras commanding the centuries. Stavia had met Michael two or three times during carnivals. He was one of the handsomest men she had ever seen, just as Morgot was one of the most beautiful women. When Stavia’s older brothers, Habby and Byram, had been five years old, each of them, too, had been brought to Michael. Beneda had said once that this meant Michael was probably Stavia’s father also, but Stavia had never asked Morgot about it. It wasn’t a thing one asked about. It wasn’t a thing one was even supposed to think about.

“Warrior, I bring you your son,” Morgot said, pushing Jerby a step or two in front of her. Jerby stood there with his legs apart and his lower lip protruding, the way he did when he wanted to cry but wouldn’t. His little coat was bright with embroidered panels down the front. His boots were worked with beads of shell and turquoise. Morgot had spent evening after evening on those boots, working away in the candlelight, with Joshua threading the beads on the needle for her and saying soft words to comfort her.

The warrior stared down at Jerby and Jerby stared back, his mouth open. The warrior knelt down, put his finger to the flask of honey at his waist and then to Jerby’s lips. “I offer you the sweetness of honor,” he whispered, even his whisper penetrating the silence of the plaza like a sword, so sharp it did not hurt, even as it cut you to pieces.

Jerby licked his lips, then grinned, and Michael laid his hand on the little boy’s shoulder.

“I give him into your keeping until his fifteenth year,” Morgot went on. “Except that he shall return to his home in Women’s Country during the carnival holidays, twice each year until that time.”

“A warrior chooses his way at fifteen.” Michael was thundering once more. He had a voice that would bellow across a noisy battlefield.

“In that year he shall choose,” said Morgot, stepping back and leaving Jerby there all alone.

The little boy started to turn, started to say, “Mommy,” but Michael had seized him up, lifted him high, high above his head, high above his dark eyes and laughing mouth, high above his white gleaming teeth and cruelly curving lips as he cried, “Warriors! Behold my son!”

Then there was a wild outcry from the warriors, a hullabaloo of shouts and cries, slowing at last into a steady, bottomless chant, “Telemachus, Telemachus, Telemachus,” so deep it made your teeth shiver. Telemachus was the ancient one, the ideal son, who defended the honor of his father, or so Joshua said. The warriors always invoked Telemachus on occasions like this.

Stavia scarcely noticed the uproar. One of the tunic-clad boys was watching her, a boy about thirteen years old. It was an eager, impatiently sulky look with something in it that stirred her, making her feel uncertain and uncomfortable. Somehow the boy looked familiar to her, as though she had seen him before, but she couldn’t remember where. Modestly, as befitted anyone under fifteen, she dropped her eyes. When she peeked at him from beneath her brows, however, he was still looking at her.

There was another rat-a-blam from the drums and a rattle of shouted commands. The warriors moved. Suddenly the white-tunicked boy was beside her, staring intently into her face as the plaza filled with wheeling warriors, plumes high, guidons flapping in the breeze, feet hammering on the stones.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Stavia,” she murmured.

“Is Morgot your mother?”

She nodded, wondering at this.

“I’m her friend Sylvia’s son,” he said. “Chernon.”

Then someone took him by the arm, he was pulled back into the general melee, and the marching men hammered their way through the gate, drowning out Jerby’s cries. Stavia could see her brother’s tearful little face over Michael’s shoulder. The white-clad boys boiled through the opening like surf, and the Gate of the Warriors’ Sons closed behind them with a ring of finality.

Chernon had eyes the color of honey, she thought. And hair that matched, only a little darker. He had looked familiar because he looked like Beneda, except around the mouth. The mouth looked swollen, somehow. Pouty. As though someone had hurt him. His hair and eyes were just like Beneda’s, though. And his jawline, too. This was the brother Beneda had mentioned! Why did he never visit his family during carnival? Why had Stavia never seen him before?

Morgot and Sylvia had turned away from the plaza to move up the stairs that led to the top of the wall. Stavia climbed behind them to find a low place where she could look over the parapet into the parade ground outside the city. The ceremony of the Warrior’s Son was continuing there.

Michael’s century came marching out through the armory doors, Jerby high on Michael’s shoulder while the men cheered. As they came through, the trumpets began a long series of fanfares and flourishes, the drums thundered, the great bells near the parade ground monument began to peal. At the foot of the monument was a statue of two warriors in armor, large and small, father and son. Before this monument Michael went down on one knee, pushing Jerby down before him so that the little boy knelt also. There was a moment’s silence, all the warriors pulling off their helms and bowing their heads, then the drums and trumpets and bells began once more as the procession swept away toward the barracks.

From the tail of the procession, one of the white-clad boys looked back and raised a hand toward Stavia.

“Who are those statues?” asked Beneda.

“Ulysses and Telemachus,” said Sylvia abstractedly.

“Who’s Ulysses?”

“Odysseus,” murmured Morgot. “It’s just another name for Odysseus. Telemachus was his son.”

“Oh,” said Beneda. “The same Odysseus that Iphigenia talks about in our play? The one at Troy?”

“The same one.”

The women went down the stairs, across the plaza to the street, the way they had come. Myra was walking beside them now, her arm around her mother’s waist. Both Morgot and Sylvia were weeping. Beneda ran to catch up, but Stavia dawdled, looking back over her shoulder. Chernon. She would remember the name.

SITTING IN THE FIRELIT ROOM WITH CORRIG AND the others, thirty-seven-year-old Stavia reflected that she might have been better off now if she had not remembered Chernon’s name then. Better for everyone if she hadn’t remembered him or seen him again. She caught Corrig’s gaze upon her and flushed. He went on staring at her and she said, “I was remembering the day we took Jerby down. It was the first time I saw Chernon. That day.” He gripped her arm for a moment, then went to get more tea as she gazed around the room. It was a combination of common room and kitchen. Everything in it had memories attached to it. The thick rag rug before the stove was where Dawid had curled up while she read him bedtime stories. When he was home at carnival time. Before he grew up. His napkin ring was still in the cupboard. Joshua had carved it for him. Every shadowed corner of the place was full of things that said Dawid, or Habby, or Byram, or Jerby.

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