Woman on the Edge of Time

Luciente led her by the hand down wide steps curving into a submerged courtyard. The yard itself was paved and had in the center a big weather-beaten table with benches all around and a scattering of chairs. A chess game sat on the table half played, under a clear cover like those Connie had seen put over big cakes. The four walls around the court were of glass threaded with spidery lines almost too fine to focus on.

“The glass can be opaqued or made one-way,” Luciente explained.

“This whole house belongs to Erzulia?” Maybe they were richer here.

“No! They live in families. Everybody has private space, but they have common space too, for family. For eating, playing, watching holies. The walls are plenty thick for quiet.”

Individual rooms opened onto courts and the courts served partly as hallways and partly as common space. Halls joined rooms on other courts. Luciente guided her through the maze, occasionally consulting her kenner to ask permission to open a door. They cut through a kitchen, where Luciente begged a taste of a hot spicy seafood stew. Only two private rooms were occupied at this time of day. In one, Luciente said, somebody was meditating. On the door was hung a paper hand with the fingers held up.

“That’s what they use when they don’t want you to enter. I say meditating—of course they may be coupling, reading, sleeping, or just pouting.”

Erzulia’s room faced west. It was spacious, with walls entirely covered in woven and embroidered hangings, texture upon texture and color upon color. Her bed was a high platform reached by a ladder, the space underneath closed in with hangings to make a dark cave of cushions, a small altar, shelves of herbs in bottles. The furniture was of a dark knobby substance that reminded her of bamboo. On the bed a strange blue costume was laid out.

“We should not stay here. That’s Erzulia’s raiment.” Luciente used the old formal word.

“Is she a mother getting ready for a naming?”

“Zuli’s never been a mother. Sappho is dying and Erzulia is her friend. They share a sense of old rites. Zuli follows voodoo as a discipline, as many do in Cranberry, while Sappho is an Indian old believer. But they share a closeness to … myths, archetypes.”

“Sappho? That old woman who was telling stories to the kids?”

“The same. A great shaper of tales. Now person is very old. It’s time for per to die.”

“Oh?” She saw the sharp face of the corpse in the tunnel. “I wonder if she’s so sure it’s time.”

“Per body has weakened since Wednesday. Time comes for any fruit to fall. It’s a good death that arrives when you’re ready for it, no?”

They climbed another broad stair to the ground, where the rain was easing and dark clouds scudded over rapidly, going out toward the bay. The air smelled clean and cottony.

In the old white Grange Hall with its octagonal tower, twenty-five or thirty people sat around an oblong table arguing about cement, zinc, tin, copper, platinum, steel, gravel, limestone, and things she could not identify. Many of them seemed to be women, although she often found when she heard a voice that she had guessed wrong. They ranged from sixteen to extreme old age. Few of them looked entirely white, although their being tanned by the sun made that harder to judge than it might have been in the middle of the winter. They spoke in ordinary voices and did not seem to be speechifying. Behind some seated at the table sat others listening closely and at times putting in their comments and questions.

“We have a five-minute limit on speeches. We figure that anything person can’t say in five minutes, person is better off not saying.” Luciente and she pulled up chairs to sit behind Otter, whom she had not at first recognized with her black hair in a single braid and her body in overalls splashed with mud and salt. Otter flashed them a smile before turning back to the display set in the table between every other delegate that showed figures, allotments, graphs they were discussing.

“This is your government?”

“It’s the planning council for our township.”

“Are they elected?”

“Chosen by lot. You do it for a year: threemonth with the rep before you and three with the person replacing you and six alone.”

“We want to clear some of the woods on Goat Hill.” A map flashed on the displays set in the table. The person speaking, with sideburns and a bristling mustache, somehow drew on the map indicating the section he referred to. “We would like to increase our buckwheat crop.”

Luciente murmured, “Rep from Goat Hill, Cape Verde flavor village upriver.”

“Seems to me that cuts into the catchment area for rain water. We have none too much water, people,” a person with green hair said.

“We are only thinking of a matter of fifty, sixty acres of second-growth woods and scrub. Our region imports too much grain, we have all agreed on that,” the mustache argued.