Originally it seemed, the rite of the examinations to find the best, and the making of love between that best and herself, had been organized in the hope of children. Some of which, if the gods were tender, might be daughters.
But of course Ochre, or something or other, had forestalled that plan.
Now therefore the Woman’s only value was in her female presence, which must at intervals be revealed, offered and given to occasional males.
Until her own demise, this was all The Woman was to be for.
A vision, a goal, a sop. And a method of the most vicious rejection.
Partly she was to represent hope, still, and partly she was to teach that all women were worthless, evil, thus unregrettable. While the dying out of the human race, which now almost without a doubt was unavoidable, could be blamed on the female kind. Also too, perhaps, she was to demonstrate that death, and the death of humanity, might be no bad thing.
In these elements she was like a goddess.
For gods were cruel. They made hells as well as heavens, and all the earthly ills.
Having walked about for a while in the restful windowless room, The Woman sat down on an ivory bench.
She drank a little apricot wine.
She ate a sugar biscuit.
The enormous and never ending depression that now informed most of her days, and usually sleepless nights, came crouching up the floor and rubbed its flank against her consciousness.
Listlessly, resistlessly, she greeted it.
She did not want the riches of the Palace, nor the extreme—unreal—power she had been given. She did not really even want sex any more, let alone the intermittent torrents of young men who came to her, singing poetry, caressing and coaxing, their delicious kisses less than the momentary sweetness of a biscuit.
She might love none. She loved none.
She might choose none. She chose none.
She sent them away, and they threw themselves in the river and drowned, or slit open their veins or swallowed venom.
Oh, she did not dare give her heart now to any man. She would be loving a ghost. A thousand ghosts. Death itself.
So. The Woman did not want wealth or sex or ecstasy or worship or love.
Was there anything then that she wanted, longed for?
Yes. Yes.
The Woman wanted her mother. Sometimes even The Woman would daydream that This Fern, fresh up from her grave, would walk into the room. She would not be phantom, nor skeleton. She would not even be old. No, no, This Fern would be about The Woman’s own age. Whatever age that was.
But it was more than that, of course. Not only that she wanted the mother she had never known. It was women—Woman—The Woman wanted. Not for sexual love, never that. But… to talk to. To laugh with. To be with. Oh gods, women about her, easy and familiar, different and the same. Desire? Entirely. The desire of the lonely one for its other self. Here in the Palace high above the Crimson City and the world, The Woman sat on her bench of bone, pining, lamenting, slowly dying—for her own kind.
A MASK OF FLESH
by Marie Brennan
Sitting alone in the green heat of the forest, far from the road and any observing eyes, Neniza began to craft her mask of flesh.
She started with her toes, for the face would be the hardest part. Toes, feet, legs; the gentle curve of hips. She would have dearly loved to shape for herself the slender, delicate body of an amantecatl, but it would never work. Oh, she could take the form easily enough, but the amanteca were not common caste, and she could never hope to mimic the ways of court folk well enough to pass. Instead she crafted the petite, pretty figure of a young alux peasant. Someone innocent of city ways. Someone who could catch the eye of the lord.
Her father had taught her this work, their art, after her horrified mother saw what she had birthed and left it in the woods. He wished she were still a son, Neniza knew, wished she had not changed into a daughter. Daughters were dangerous things. But his own words had done it, telling the story of what happened to their people. Waking the anger in her. The priests spoke of the wet season and the dry season, the season of giving and the season of taking. For her people, it was no mere abstraction. Their bodies reflected their souls.
Perhaps her father could overlook the wrong they had suffered; Neniza could not. She had not told him where she was going, what she intended to do. He believed they should stay out of sight, accept the hidden existence left to them—never mind that he himself went to town all too often, to court the women of other castes, perhaps to sire more children for them to fear. It was all right for him.
But not for her. Not so long as she remained female. She was too dangerous.
That means I’m powerful, Neniza thought, and began to work on her face.
She made it a young one, and attractive, wondering as she did so if it looked anything like her mother. Her father would never say. Neniza had nothing to know her by, no way to pick her mother out of the countless aluxob working the fields, and if she were to go to town without her mask of flesh, her mother would never acknowledge a thing like her as offspring. Every time she made an alux face, she told herself it was her mother’s, and every time it was different.
Bushy, soft hair above a round and cheerful face, with eyes the fresh green of new corn. The mask was complete, but Neniza hesitated. Her father would warn her against this, if he knew.
Her father had proved his weakness many times over.
Neniza pulled clothes on over the fleshy nakedness of her body, loincloth, skirt, and a shawl broad enough to hide her arms, then forced her way through the trees to the road.
The city almost made her turn back.
Neniza had been to town before, disguising herself as a woman of one common caste or another, mingling into the crowds she found there, but her first sight of the city showed her how little that had prepared her.
The huge stone walls took her breath away, towering upward in interlocking blocks of carefully-dressed limestone. The tangle of forest had been cleared in a broad swath around them, so the sun hammered down on the line of aluxob with their grain and vay sotz with their packs of goods to trade, all waiting to pass through the gates. Neniza joined them, thirsty and footsore; she was unused to walking barefoot and masked on the hard, pounded dirt of the road. A few of the other travelers glanced at her incuriously, but most disregarded her, intent on their destination. She was grateful for their inattention.
Inside the walls she found a clamoring chaos that took the breath right out of her lungs. Smells, sights, sounds, people pushing at her on every side, dogs underfoot, jostling elbows, flapping birds tethered or in cages, sellers shouting, strangers of every caste packed in like ants, and over it all, rearing above the flat level of streets and houses, the imposing heights of the temple and palace mounds.
Neniza stared upward, transfixed, and then stumbled and nearly fell when a passing kisin rammed into her. He continued on without apologizing, while the flow of people buffeted her this way and that, until she lurched up against the mud-brick wall of a potter’s shop and stopped to catch her breath.