The floor beneath the unconscious woman was a sodden mess. Lutha dragged Saluez to a drier spot, removed her filthy robes—little filthier than Lutha’s own—and covered her with clean blankets. While she was doing this the ex-king returned with a full bucket, put it near the stove, and departed with a nervous look in Saluez’s direction.
Lutha scrubbed her hands and arms, then bathed Saluez as best she could. Snark finished her self-imposed task and rejoined Lutha, bringing her “catch basket” with her: an emergency kit with a hand-sized opening surrounded by latches cannibalized from other kits.
Snark set it down with a thump. “The lid,” she said, adding a thick slab roughly cut from another kit.
Lutha was muttering over the lack of medical equipment. Had it been oversight? Or had it been purposeful? Had those who sent the shadows to Perdur Alas not cared that they might be hurt or ill? Or had they simply not thought about it?
Snark tapped her. “Stop fuming. There’s antibiotics in the kits. We’ll make do with those.”
Growling, Lutha went to fetch them while Snark dug out several of the unused overalls and ripped them up to make a dry bed between Saluez and the floor.
“She’s sucking that veil in every time she breathes,” Snark said. “Let’s get it off her.”
Lutha removed it and set it aside, turning back at Snark’s exclamation.
“Her face!”
Saluez’s face was a whole face. Like Lutha’s. Like Snark’s. No bone showing through. No mutilated lips or eyelids. One ear was still slightly battered looking, but even that flesh was smooth.
“How?” breathed Snark.
Lutha had no idea. The woman between them moaned, a remote, careless sound. Her eyes stayed blank. She wasn’t there. She didn’t know what had happened to her.
They propped Saluez’s knees on folded blankets.
“What else?” asked Lutha.
“We wait.”
“I’m tired of waiting.”
Lutha stared at Saluez, her face, her form, the skin of her legs. She’d never seen a natural birth before. Leely, of course, but there had been medical people there, able to handle any emergency. What would they do if Saluez was in trouble?
“What?” asked Snark.
“Just…my mind, pestering me. I need to think about something else.”
Snark grinned ferociously. “Think about this. I hated you, you know?”
Lutha swallowed. “So you said.”
Snark squirmed, settling herself, her eyes on Saluez. “I got to thinking about that. Truth was, it wasn’t just you. I hated ever’body. Ever since they called me a liar and thief in that home, I hated ’em.”
She scowled, lines of concentration between her eyebrows. “Thing is, I got to figuring, it wasn’t just me! It’d been the same for any female. If it’d been a boy and they’d called him a liar, he’d have said so what and who wants his nose flattened over it?”
“Probably,” Lutha said, intrigued.
“Boys get in a fight, nobody thinks much about it. Boys tell a few stories, or thief a few things, boys’ll be boys, an’ nobody says civilization’s coming to an end. Do they?”
“Not usually,” Lutha agreed. “But you think it’s different with girls?”
“Girls go for somebody, they’re out of control! People at the home said that; justice machine said that. Snark, you’re out of control! I never done anything men I knew didn’t do, and they’re still back on Central, scavenging and telling lies, just like always. Men a lot like Mitigan, killing folks right and left. Men like Leelson, doing whatever he wants…”
Saluez moaned. Snark’s voice trailed off, waiting. The moan didn’t go anywhere. It fell off into quiet, and Snark resumed her discourse.
“It’s different for women. And for some men. Men like the old Procurator, I guess. And for the king too.”
“Jiacare?”
“Him, yeah. Old Proc and the king, they’re more like Saluez, trying to be in control all the time. More like you.”
“Like me?” Lutha was astonished.
“Yeah. You carry on—crying, laughing. Flapping around sometimes like a bird. Lotsa drama, you know, but down at the bottom of it, you’re like Saluez too. Trying to hang on.”
Lutha laughed, a hollow sound. “Drama,” she said. “My family does have a tendency toward …drama.”
Snark accepted this. “What I think is, men, they can rape and ruin, maim and murder, kill each other off in dozen lots, so long as there’s one left, he can make babies enough for the next go-round without even working very hard at it. If you’re a woman or a king, though, you got more invested than that, right? You got yourself invested in civility, ‘cause that’s what’s safe for people. You get invested like that, you got to be righteous and do the looking out for other people. There’s the young ones, the old ones, the sick ones. Got to stay in there, hoping for something different…”
Saluez moaned again. Snark wrapped several folds of her shirt around her hands, like clumsy mittens, watching intently while Lutha wet a cloth and wiped Saluez’s sweaty face.
Lutha asked, “You think that’s what Saluez is doing? Hoping for something different?”
“Saluez says she wants to lie in sweet grass, eating apples,” said Snark. “That’s different. That’s paradise. Like it was on Breadh.”
“Were there many people on Breadh?”
Snark laughed, abruptly joyous. “Hardly any! That’s what made it paradise! I told Kane the Brain about Breadh. He said we all make up an Eden. Some old-time place. Some never-never place. Someplace just over the hill, maybe, where things’re the way things used to be, ought to be, the way they never were.”
Lutha caught her breath, aware of a sudden pain behind her breastbone. Not her heart. Lung and stomach, probably, contending for the title of chief dramatist. It hurt, nonetheless. “Can’t there be a real Eden?” she gasped, astonished at the pain
