Heroines Have It Hard
I was looking through my copy of The Light Fantastic when a sentence caught my eye. It was a description of Herenna The Henna-Haired Harridan's job search. It decribed how she was 'Too big to be a thief, too honest to be an assassin, too intelligent to be a wife, and too proud to enter the only other female occupation generally available.'
That
sentence caught me. I decided to write a story based on it. First I came up
with an atrocious bit of alliteration for the title, and the rest just followed
on from there. (All this was at about two in the morning, by the way.)
Xerina the Terror finished killing the last of the two hundred soldiers attacking the town. She turned around and looked at the townspeople standing in a group behind her. Now, what was she supposed to do next? Ah, yes. She raised her heavily bloodstained sword above her head and yelled, hoarsely, "The enemy is destroyed!"
A ragged cheer went up. It was not,
she noted, as loud as the one Hrun had got last time she had seen him in
action, and that was only rescuing a village from a bunch of greenstick
raiders, and there must be nearly three times as many people here at least.
It has to be the gender difference,
she thought. Heroes can get a reasonable reward for anything, I've heard
Cohen the barbarian once got five hundred gold pieces for getting some
cigarettes for some wizard or the other, but a heroine can save the world and
people will still pick holes in a perfect performance.
Heroines have it hard.
The crowd was already breaking up. The
town mayor came up to her, surrounded by aldermen. She noticed wryly that the
mayor had thrown his chain of office over an ordinary suit, and one of the
aldermen was carrying a sack with a gold chain just visible over the edge. He
had quite clearly been preparing to run. They didn't expect me to win.
The mayor handed her a pouch. It was made out of ordinary sacking,
rather than the traditional red velvet. He began an official speech.
"The citizens of Mimble would like to
thank you for…"
She
really didn't feel like doing his right now. "Yeah, yeah, just give me the
gold, will you?" she said.
The mayor had the grace to look
embarrassed as he handed her the pouch. She opened it. Not gold at all, but
silver, the misers! She didn't mind much about the cheer, but any decent town
should be able to throw together enough money for a decent reward, at least!
She sighed, said her polite thank-you speech without bothering to pay any
attention to what she was saying, declined the offer of lodging for the night
as tradition required, then left the town with her back straight and her sword
in her hand.
As
soon as she was sure she was out of sight, she wiped the sword on the grass,
sheathed it, and ran for the cave where she had left her pack. If she was
quick, she might be able to get back to the town before the gates closed for
curfew, and then grab a room in the cheapest inn for the night. She wasn't
going to spend another night out in the open if she could help it!
She took out her sensible cloak and
hood and put them on, hiding her studded leather hero's outfit underneath. Then
she picked up her pack and set out for the town.
She got there just as curfew rang. The
doorman – a sour-faced person who she hadn't seen in the crowd – demanded some
money to let her in. She was too tired to argue, so she gave him one of her
silver pieces. Then she moved off towards the nearest inn. It had no rooms
free, so she had to move on to another, more expensive one. She paid the
outrageous fee for one night, and made her way up to her room. It was on the
sixth floor. It was damp. It smelt like it hadn't been cleaned in years. It
probably hadn't.
She collapsed onto the Spartan bed.
One of the bedsprings broke.
Heroines have it hard.
She rolled over, away from the
bedspring, and considered her life.
She was a daughter of a Hubland
barbarian. Traditionally, of course, this meant that she should stay at home
and cook greasy meat over hot fires for her father and brothers until she
married, whereupon she would start staying at home and cooking greasy meat over
hot fires for her husbands and sons until her eldest daughter could do it for
her. Then she would retire to a rocking chair, become extremely fat and start
regaling grandchildren with stories of famous barbarians.
Unfortunately, there were problems
with this option, the main one being her parents. Her mother was what the old
grandmothers called 'new-fangled', which meant she believed that her daughter
could have a choice of what she wanted to be in life. As long, of course, as
she didn't want to follow in her father's footsteps, Xerina could do what she
wanted.
If only.
She had visited Ankh-Morpork, which
was supposed to be the best place for young women looking for jobs, and found
she had a choice. It was a choice between guilds. She could join the Assassins,
the Thieves or the (Hem hem) Seamstresses. Or she could become a member of that
unofficial, fast-growing guild, the 'Slaves, Housemaids, Cooks, Nurses,
Gardeners, Nannies, Blame-Takers and General Bottle-Washers-In-Chief', also
known as the wives.
In the famous words of Herenna The
Henna-Haired Harridan, she had been 'Too big to be a thief, too honest to be an
assassin, too intelligent to be a wife, and too proud to enter the only other
female occupation generally available.'
So she had decided to put to use her
early skills with a sword and become a heroine, in spite of her mother's
protests.
Of course, she didn't have all the
qualifications for a hero – she could read! - but heroines were considered an
exception to the rules in any case, so it didn't really matter. She was
reasonably pretty, she had red hair – that was one of the things necessary for
a heroine – she could look good in iconograph pictures, she knew how to use a
sword, she wasn't embarrassed to wear the traditional studded leather outfit,
and she knew all the speeches – the 'Stand forth and do battle', the 'Begone
foul fiend', the 'I am here in your hour of need', the 'No, I must return to my
wandering', the 'thank you kindly for this reward' the 'the enemy is
vanquished!' and the most important one, the 'I may die, but at least I will
have died gloriously'. Xerina always considered that last to be a rather stupid
speech.
Sometimes she wished she had joined
the seamstresses. At least she would have been guaranteed a comfortable bed.
Yes, heroines definitely had it hard.