Archery was one of the four weapon disciplines of durga, the warrior art practiced by the women of Ephesus. Forty women were in Jenna’s night class. They were positioned in staggered rows of ten. They drew their fiberglass bows, notched their arrows with the tips raised to seventy degrees, and waited.
Aubry watched from his seat near the top of the amphitheater. The bowstrings remained taut for eighteen minutes. Even with leather finger guards, despite perfect posture, pain narrowed their eyes, arms trembled, sweat rolled in sour rivulets down strain-creased faces. Every few seconds a thin, shuddering gasp of exertion pierced the night air.
At a prearranged signal, the students released their arrows. A dark cloud flew toward the padded log target, buzzing like an angry bee swarm. They thumped sh-shuck! All but two furred the log. There was a sort of group exhalation; then they returned to the ready position.
To Aubry’s way of thinking, they seemed more concerned with the ritual than the actual targeting. Somehow, they managed to produce accuracy without having it as a primary concern.
He had another impression, an image that remained in his mind regardless of his attempts to shake it loose: they were connected to the target in some manner. He couldn’t see the connective threads, but he could feel them.
Jenna looked up at Aubry, a slight and secret smile shading her lips. Then she was guru again, her attention riveted to the class.
She drilled them with knives, with staffs, with a single twenty-inch stick, and with the empty hands and feet. She pushed them on and on, driving with her will and her knowledge and her hard-won fitness, until every one of them dripped with sweat and panted for breath.
She danced her women through their stretching exercises, then reclined them for deep breathing and a measured visualization.
And here she spoke to them, in measured tones. She spoke of hills, and valleys, and the animals of the Earth. Her voice lulled them into trance, and bade them dream of children and children unborn, of art and music and the gentle rhythms of existence.
“All that is of value is born of Woman,” she said. “Of the female, and of the feminine side of men. All building, all creation. All dreams. But a child is safe only when protected, and dreams, unwalled, are torn by those who cannot sleep.…”
“Men, and the masculine force, cannot be. It must do. And it must analyze—ripping the life from what it examines. When the knowledge is extracted from the body of a chimpanzee, all that remains is meat. The masculine has feasted. Science benefits. Civilization progresses. But the chimp is dead.
“If we would have life, in our way, we must be prepared to defend it. Beauty without strength is death. Strength without beauty is death. Only together is there life.…”
Aubry sat, listening to Jenna’s singsong words, and felt as if a shell around him were cracking. As if the wind whipping in through the pine needles bore secrets, coded whispers for some part of him beneath and aside from the part he called Aubry.
And they make their knives of railroad spikes, to this day …
Where had he…?
How had he…?
He knew those words. And some others, which flitted, unbidden, into his mind.
Come, they said. Come to the Firedance.…
Aubry shook himself out of the reverie, realizing that the class was over.
Many of the women waved or smiled to Aubry as he trotted down the amphitheater stairs to the workout area. A few averted their eyes, faces tight with resentment.
Jenna directed a trio of assistants in the packing of gear as Aubry descended. Bows and arrows and staffs and knives were slotted into hardwood cabinets behind the stage.
Aubry descended and stood quietly, waiting as Jenna cleaned the gleaming, curved length of her durga fighting knives. She stroked them with an oiled white cloth with a red border. Jenna’s movements were very precise, very controlled, as they were whenever she performed her ceremonial cleansing.
Finally, she hoisted her personal gear over her shoulder, and came to him, sitting next to him. A sad, almost wistful smile warmed her face.
“Well. Aubry. How was your talk with Sister Dearest?”
“What would you expect? Dreadful. She wants to believe that the government can protect us.”
“And if they could?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well … I don’t think that it would matter. You brought Mira’s ashes back with you. They killed your last link to Warrick. They hurt Leslie. They disrupted your ceremony.”
His nod was barely perceptible.
“You’ve embraced civilization, as long as the civilized mode works for you. When it doesn’t work … well, let’s just say that you wouldn’t bleed if you had to toss it away.”
“Is that so wrong?” He was surprised by the genuine inquiry in his voice. What was right, or wrong, in a situation like this?
“It is true to who you are. But what’s the truth here?”
“The truth.” Aubry looked at Jenna, at the light cream of her skin. Whereas Promise was a blend of African and Polynesian and European bloodlines, Jenna was more European and Asian. Much lighter-skinned, not quite as pretty. Her body was made for movement, for combat, for work. She was a finely timed machine, in her own way as finely tuned as Promise. But whereas Promise and Aubry created a balance, a certain yin-yang balance that was irresistible, Jenna touched him in ways that Promise had not. Could not. That, perhaps, no other woman could.
Jenna took lovers when she wished. Sometimes women, sometimes men. But she belonged to no one. She was the combat mistress, the security chief of Ephesus, and she had always walked alone.
But she was his friend. In a strange way, perhaps the best friend he had ever had. If Aubry Knight had to be reborn as a woman, he would want to be Jenna.
“I think,” he said slowly, “that I’ve spent most of my life just reacting to what happened around me. That habit got me into deeper and deeper trouble. God—I only survived because of this body, Jenna. Because it is faster and stronger and has more energy than anybody has the right to have.”
“You talk about your body as if it isn’t you.”
“Sometimes I wonder,” he laughed ruefully. “But now I’m in this position. Ephesus. The Scavengers. The NewMen. There are people who rely upon me, depend upon me. But the truth is that Promise is doing most of it.”
“Which means?”
“That she’s growing, and I’m not.” He stretched his arms, and she heard his joints pop. Aubry’s muscular density was astounding, as was his flexibility, his sense of balance, his muscular and cardiovascular endurance. It seemed that everything about him was in perfect proportion, but functioned at abnormal amplitude.
But sometimes his eyes were those of a child. Questioning. Wounded. Wondering. Looking out at the future, uncertain of what there was, or could ever be, for him.
“I feel cold.” He wrapped his arms around his knees, and pulled his head tight against them. “I saw myself crawling across the floor like a dog, begging for death. And I know now, I know, that that’s how I’ll die. This thing inside me, this thing that pulls violence into my life, is the flip side of the skill. Unless I can find a way to heal it, one day my skills won’t be enough. One day … it will happen.”
She had to lean close now, to hear a voice that had dropped so low it was like the sound of leaves falling against grass. “I know what it is to have a family now. I’d die for them. Or for you.”
Her hand rested against his shoulder. His skin seemed to burn.
“But that’s not the death I’ll get. I’ll need to prove myself once too often. I’ll draw some piece of unfinished business from my past. I’ll stumble across a mugging in an alley. And I’ll die, away from home, away from my family. A painful, meaningless death without honor or grace. Just death.”
He looked up at her, and now more than ever his face was the face of a child. “I don’t want to die like that. I want it to be for something. I just don’t know how to get out of the loop.”
“Does going after Swarna get you out of the loop?”
“My mind says no. But my guts … my heart …” He fumbled for her hand. “There’s something going on here that none of us understand. And there is something inside me that says ‘Come.’ It laughs at me. ‘Come to the Firedance,’ it says. It promises nothing, but it says ‘Come.’ And it’s not the same voice that has pulled me into violence. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that voice before.”
Jenna put her arms around Aubry and pressed her cheek against him. For a long time she remained with him like that, breathing when he breathed, her slender, strong fingers stroking the coarse, tightly curled hair at the base of his neck. Then she said, very softly, “If you have to go, Aubry, then go. But Aubry … you don’t have to do this alone.”
He pulled back, and she saw his eyes transformed from human eyes to beads made of glass. Somehow, she had said precisely the wrong thing.
“Yes,” he said flatly. “I do.”