Arama
She stuffed everything she owned into her fine canvas bag. A couple of drab, stiff dresses, two head scarves, her makeup made of oils and clay, her salves and tinctures, bandages, a few ancient hardcover books that she'd read hundreds of times over, and her spare knife. It was the same routine every night. She put on her finest dress, strapped her knife to her hip, carefully and systematically packed up all her things, stared at the bag for awhile, then carefully and systematically unpacked everything, and put it back where it belonged in the room she once shared with her brother. After she unpacked and made sure everything looked exactly as it had before, she would leave her grandfather's house and have sex with another girl's husband.
Lately it was Raven. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and he had a nose like a bird's beak. He was older than her, by about eight years. He had three children with his wife Patricia, two boys and a girl. The eldest was ten. A few months ago, the boy scraped himself up bad while climbing on some rocks, so Raven brought him to her.
Even though she'd revolutionized medicine in the tribe, the office of tribe healer was still regarded with suspicion and scorn. Dark Mother's legacy as a butcher and mystic met her reputation as a seductress. To the tribe's credit, her reputation as a seductress was well-earned. Raven's wife knew quite a few women whose husbands had fallen for her charms and she didn't want him to talk to her, but he said he had to for their son. She refused to join, her fear and scorn of the girl outweighing her fear of losing her husband. He didn't ask her to come anyway. By the time he approached her carrying his son in his big, ropy arms he was nearly the only married man not an elder she hadn't slept with.
She watched him approach, warily appraising him with her big tired eyes. She was lounging near the center of the village, taking a break after gathering herbs. He strode confidently up to her and she waited for him to speak first, fighting back a wry smile. He told her about his son, and she appraised the boy's wounds thoughtfully, then looked into his scared but determined eyes.
"Will you help my son?" his father asked.
"Come with me," she smiled a sly smile and beckoned him to follow her to into her grandfather's home. She had transformed the front room into a makeshift doctor's office. The floor and walls were cluttered with salvaged medical equipment, crutches and tubing that made the room smell funny. Old strips of bandages that she'd cleaned, used and re-used, hung from the ceiling drying. She wiped down the smooth stone table on the edge of the room (an extremely expensive addition) with a cloth she pulled out of frothy water in a metal bucket and told Raven to lie his son down. She took a glass jar full of healing salve out of the big, pre-war cabinet in the corner, and carefully applied the salve to the boy's wounds before wrapping them in bandages. She ignored Raven and spoke only to his son, smiling and telling him he was a brave boy for not crying. When she tried to apply salve to his arm he yelped and retreated, so she dosed him with some painkiller in order to examine it. It was broken. She made a cast out of mud, then helped Raven bring him out into the sun so it could dry.
"He won't be able to use that arm for awhile, but when it's healed it'll be stronger than ever," she smiled at Raven, that heavy-lidded I know something and I'm not telling smile. He couldn't help smiling back but mostly focused on his son, who smiled a dopey, drugged-up smile at him. She went back inside to clean the jar of salve she'd emptied while he sat with his boy in the hot wasteland sun.
"Thank you for taking care of my son," he told her when she came out again. He looked right into her brown eyes. She averted his gaze and blushed.
"Thanks," she mumbled. She stood looking at her feet for a moment, then looked back up into his eyes and added, "After a day or two you should bring him back so I can change his bandages."
They stared at each other like that for awhile. He stood more than a foot taller than her. Next to him she looked tiny and vulnerable, but in her eyes he saw great courage and great sadness, a deep well that went farther than the endless night sky.
"I don't ever see you at feasts," he said finally. She scoffed, fell back against the wall of her grandfather's house, and resumed drying her jar with a rag.
"That's because I don't go," she said to her jar. She smiled a bitter smile, "Grandfather stopped trying to get me to go years ago. I think he finally realized it's in everybody's best interest."
She finished drying her jar and let her hands fall to her side, rag in one jar in the other. She looked curiously back up at Raven. She could smell his sweat in the midday heat, and she cocked her eyebrow to ask him why he cared. A lock of her dreads fell over her wide forehead. Her flirtations reminded him of her reputation and he looked away, even as he couldn't help but find her alluring.
"Everyone else goes. Maybe it would help you fit in better," he tried to be nice. She stared off into the middle distance and quietly said, "Yeah."
They stood that way for a minute longer, staring into nothing in particular before Raven gathered up his son and said, "I will return in a day or two."
She didn't say anything. In an instant she was beside him, and gripping the jar with her teeth she made a sling for the boy's arm out of the rag she was using. Standing so close to Raven he could smell her, a sickly sweet smell like dying flowers. She smiled at him when she was done and he thanked her again, this time stumbling on his words with a new-found nervousness. She sashayed back into her grandfather's house and he stood confused for a moment before walking away.
For the rest of the day he couldn't get her out of his mind. He awoke the next morning thinking of her. He thought of the looks she gave him, of the way she moved her body, of the way she smelled. None of these things were new to him. In fact, nearly four years ago, just as she was beginning to blossom, she had clumsily attempted to seduce him with a childish technique that worked on quite a few of his peers. She was just jealous of other girls who had been given the right to marry, and Raven politely deferred to help her with her jealousy.
This was different, though. She was no longer petulant and ill-mannered. She had a place in the tribe and, even if she wasn't always successful, she did contribute. She was no longer the angry, spoiled brat who took it out on others when she didn't get her way. She wasn't quite a woman (she would never be a woman, not according to the tribe anyway) but she had matured.
He waited a day before he took his son back to see her. The boy seemed to be recovering, although he wasn't happy at how limiting a broken arm was. He sobbed when his father told him he couldn't play so rough with the other boys, and that he wouldn't be going on hunts until his arm was fixed, but Raven put his foot down. The next day the boy was equally unhappy to be going back to the healer, but secretly Raven was eager to talk to her again, for the opportunity to try and solve the enigma of her being.
She had been thinking about him, too. She also remembered her unsuccessful seduction years before, but only after he left. She was scrubbing her expensive stone table, trying not to think of how big his arms were when it came to her without warning. Immediately she was awash with embarrassment, but she suppressed it quickly. That was in the past. She never liked thinking about the past. Most of her memories were bad, and the ones that were good weren't good enough to suffer the bad ones, and so she just let them all go. Instead, she lived in the present, but planned for the future.
The night of the day Raven came to visit her she repeated the same routine. She gathered all her belongings in a canvas sack, before putting them back where she found them. The man she was sleeping with that night was young, younger than she was. He was flighty, and temperamental, but he made her feel in control and she liked that. It had been easy to seduce him, she merely found him by himself and invited him back to her grandfather's house when her grandfather was out. They were worlds apart in bed, and their sex would only last between a minute and three minutes. She never came with him. That didn't matter to her. She'd been with plenty of more experienced men who couldn't make her climax, either. He was less a lover and more her play-toy. While sleeping with him was unsatisfying physically, she derived more than enough satisfaction knowing that while he had all the power over his young wife she had all the power over him. She'd even managed to convince him to give her cunnilingus, something the older men of the tribe considered deeply degrading and staunchly refused to perform. By the time she was finished playing around with her boy that night, she'd forgotten all about her embarrassing history with Raven.
When she awoke the next day in the room she once shared with her brother, she wondered if Raven and his son would visit. There was a chance he'd never come back, if he considered the treatment she'd given his son good enough as it was. She hoped he'd return, although she couldn't quite lie to herself about why. Getting the bandages back so she could clean and re-use them would be helpful, certainly, and she wanted to provide good medical care, definitely, but deep down she really just wanted to see Raven again, to be near him. He had a hold on her she couldn't put into words.
The day after he came to see her with his son passed without note. She ate in the morning with her grandfather as she did every morning, neither of them speaking while they ate gecko egg and drank black coffee boiled from coyote tobacco. Her grandfather left the house to convene with the other elders and lead a war band to capture slaves for the Legion. She made a few half-assed overtures to clean up the front room of the house, then made salve out of the herbs she gathered the day before. For most of the day she sat around doing nothing, occasionally reading but mostly relaxing and trying not to think about Raven. Even that night as she had another liaison with her toy in the darkness on the edge of the village she thought about Raven and the way he towered over her.
He returned the next day, and she did her best to hide her excitement. He brought his son again, who needed his bandages changed, as they were starting to smell funny. The boy was sullen and withdrawn around her, blaming her for his broken arm and its subsequent restrictions, but she was all smiles to him. Her cheer and optimism got the better of him and he lightened up, but she was actually sublimating her joy at spending a little more time with his father. Raven couldn't help but be excited to spend time with her, too, as much as he wished it weren't so. Ever since he'd taken their son to see her his wife was distant. There wasn't a single repercussion he'd face for stepping out on her, and she was well aware, but powerless to stop it. He couldn't understand her anger at her powerlessness, and thought she was pushing him away. After spending two nights with Patricia sullen and withdrawn he was all the more vulnerable to her charms.
"Thank you for returning the bandages," she said to him in a professional and courteous way after she redressed his son.
"It's no problem," he said diplomatically, "I understand it's hard for you to get good medical supplies?"
"It's not that war parties don't make it a priority, there just isn't much to go around in the badlands," she explained, "I guess everything was mostly used up years ago, when the tribes were new."
"They must have thought it was going to last forever," Raven speculated. She nodded in thoughtful assent. She sidled up to him sneakily and caressed his arm while speaking to his wide chest.
"Isn't that how it always is? No-one thinks about the future," she said, flashing him a big smile, "all everybody thinks about is now."
Their breathing was in sync, heavy animal breaths. She bit her lip and flashed him a look. He wanted to grab her and kiss her right there, he wanted to throw her down and fuck her with abandon right in the center of the village. She wanted him to, she was flush with anticipation. Their hearts raced, their blood boiled, and their visions blurred until all else faded away and it was only them, just them and their lust for each other's bodies. They both stepped back and took a breath, regained their composure. Her head was spinning and his hands were shaking.
"Maybe... maybe we should all think about the future more," Raven said. He ran his fingers through his dreadlocks. She bounced on her heels and clasped her hands behind her back, sticking her chest out and biting her lip.
"Sometimes I go down to the river at night, and I stare out over the water and think about things. There's a little beach, just down the shoreline past the old bus? It's a great place to get some privacy," she indicated with her head, "Y'know, to think."
"I may have to check it out sometime," Raven couldn't contain his smile, "it's hard to find a good place to think."
Later that night they met at the beach. She was there first. When she was younger, the beach had been a place of special significance to her, a refuge when she felt sad or alone. In all of the affairs she'd carried out in the past four years she hadn't invited any of them there. Despite how perfect it was for carrying out illicit relations, she kept the place hers and hers alone until Raven. Somehow, it just felt right. She thought there was a special connection between them, and after he arrived and they embraced she was proven right.
The Twisted Hairs were the dominant tribe in the region. What Dry Wells didn't provide the Twisted Hairs took, and they kept large numbers to maintain their power. There were more men in the tribe than some tribes had members, and she had fornicated with most of them. They were all different in the ways they fucked. Some were slow and deliberate, some were fast, some had brought her to climax and most had not. She didn't regret the sex she'd had, but all of it paled in comparison to that night at the beach. Never before had her body been so in sync with another body during the act. She'd had sex plenty of times by that point, on a nightly basis, even, but never before had she made love. When they were finished, he cut off one of his dreadlocks, removed the ornaments, and wove them into one of her own like the men before him.
They were together for hours but neither of them realized it. It was practically dawn by the time they went back to the village, still glowing from their tryst. At the edge they kissed deeply and passionately before separating and returning to their respective homes. She skipped on the way back to her grandfather's house.
Within the day everyone in the tribe knew of the affair, that he had finally succumbed to her charms and she had successfully scored another notch in her bedpost (metaphorically). Patricia found herself among a support network of other tribal women with unfaithful husbands, all of them bonded in their hatred of the healer and seductress. Raven, meanwhile, found himself uncomfortable among a back-patting and ego-stroking boy's club, unable to express how different it was when he made love to her, how special their bond was and how unlike the rest of her relationships with these men it was. Her grandfather expressed disappointment in her new relationship, as he'd been disappointed in all her relationships since she first started sleeping around.
"Sha Raven is a good man," he told her over his morning coffee. It was all he said to her all day.
They continued their affair that night. Both of them spent the day away from each other, Raven went hunting with his friends and she stayed inside all day, not eager to absorb all the scorn that waited for her amid the women of the tribe. They both spent the entire day in anticipation of another encounter, just waiting until they could once again find each other on the beach. When they did it was much the same as the first time, a long passionate night full of declarations of love and tender embraces.
As the affair progressed they grew more bold. They snuck kisses during the day, occasionally he would grope her when no one was looking. Once, he brought his son to get his bandages removed (except from the arm that was still broken) and he sent the boy home alone while he made passionate love to her in her grandfather's house during the middle of the day.
"The war party had a big victory today," he told her one night, after a session of lovemaking. They were on the beach again, this time with a blanket and a fire. Raven even brought some wine to drink. It was like a real date, like something she'd read in a book she'd traded for one-hundred and eighty pages of a medical textbook she got from a traveling merchant in the village center.
"The plan is to have a big feast tomorrow. The whole tribe will be there," he continued after he kissed her tenderly on the lips. She nuzzled up against his chest.
"You should come," he proposed hesitantly, nervous to suggest it. Her estrangement from the tribe was a sore spot between them, and when he brought it up it was the closest they ever came to fighting. He only had her best interest at heart, or at least what he thought was in her best interest. When they talked it wasn't like talking to his wife, she wouldn't simply obey him because they were married. Sometimes he felt more like he was talking to another man, the way she held different opinions and defended them. He didn't mind, though. Their relationship was different from marriage and so he expected their interactions to be different from his and Patricia's.
She didn't answer him immediately and he felt her tense up in his arms. She knew he was just trying to be nice, but he didn't understand. He didn't know- no one knew- that she was still packing up all her things every night, still trying to leave. It had been harder since they'd started their nightly rendezvous, but she was still doing it. He'd never understand how she felt with their people, how it felt to not belong.
"Okay," she whispered, small and frightened into his chest. She closed her eyes and fell asleep and when she awoke he was gone. The Colorado churned in the early morning, and fog hid the world outside the beach.
She walked home wrapped in the blanket he'd left, staring at her feet the whole way back to her grandfather's house. No one in the village was awake except for the guards, who didn't notice and didn't care as she walked past. She went home and slept. The feast was scheduled for evening, as the sun set and the night sky overtook the day sky. She planned to sleep until then, but a visitor came.
A young girl who she didn't know very well came to the front door of her grandfather's house just after midday. The girl had been in pain for quite some time, but hadn't braved a visit to the healer until she discovered that she was bleeding from her vagina. She didn't know what was happening, and had no one to turn to except for her.
"You're... Erica, right?" she asked in a bleary haze, awoken by the afternoon heat to find the girl standing in the front door scared and alone.
"Desert Flower, actually," the girl said, "Erica is my sister."
"Need something?" she asked irritably. Desert Flower nodded her head vigorously and she beckoned her to come inside, "What seems to be the trouble?"
"I, uh, I," Desert Flower stammered.
She softened and smiled reassuringly at the girl, "It's alright, take your time. Do you have any pain anywhere?"
"Yes, here," the young girl responded. She gestured to her midriff.
"Have you eaten anything strange recently, some old meat or something from a dented can?" she asked. The girl nodded her head no.
"I uh, I..." Desert Flower stammered. She finally blurted out, "I'm bleeding!" and lifted her dress to show the blood that smeared her thighs.
She grimaced involuntarily. The girl saw her expression and began to panic.
"No, no, it's fine," she reassured her.
"You've become a woman," she added morosely. The girl realized why that might make the healer sad. Here she was, only eleven years old and already at the first step to being married, while the healer would languish in spinsterhood until she was old and forgotten. The girl felt ashamed for unwittingly rubbing it in her face.
"I'm sorry," Desert Flower whispered. Both of them stared at the floor.
"No, I'm sorry," she whispered sorrowfully in reply, "You should... you should tell your father. He will help you get ready for the ritual."
She helped the girl clean herself up then handed her some bandages to wrap herself in and sent her on her way. She stood in the doorway and watched her leave, hugging herself and silently reciting prayers for all the young women of the tribe.
She started her nightly ritual after her grandfather left for the feast, but stopped before packing her tinctures. She could hear the sounds of the celebration in the central circle from her room. Children were laughing and playing, adults talked and joked with each other. A woman shrieked with laughter. She stood alone in the dim light of the room she once shared with her brother, once again at the precipice. She grabbed her canvas bag, turned it upside down and furiously shook its contents out onto her bed. She put makeup on her face, made sure she looked good in her mirror, then strode purposefully out of her grandfather's house.
At the edge of the light from the feast she stopped. She watched her tribes-people relax and celebrate. Men boasted to each other and women cooked and laid out the meal. She could see Raven and she smiled. He was talking to the other men, gesturing emphatically about some martial conquest. When the men he was talking to brushed his story off, he laughed and made his way over to his wife, who was pounding out some bighorner meat to be grilled. He came up behind her and wrapped his arm around her waist and kissed her on the cheek. She smiled, then caressed his face and kissed him back.
As she watched her smile disappeared. She saw his son, disobeying orders to play gentle, chasing another boy in and out of small gatherings of adults. She saw Desert Flower, no longer scared but excited, telling her friends how she was to be married soon, not knowing what that really meant. In the darkness she watched them all. She felt heartbroken and betrayed, even as she knew there was no one to blame but herself. Her childish delusions of her great romance with Raven were shattered, she realized whatever they had it wasn't love. He already had plenty of love in his life. They all did. Silent tears streamed down her face as she turned around and began to walk, not stopping even as she left the village far behind. Many years later, she would remark to herself how funny it was what was important to her back then.