He turned back to her, flushing, face as eager as Jerby’s would have been at the promise of candies, and her reluctance seemed arbitrary and unkind. And yet… it was against the ordinances.
She put on a deliberate gayety. “In return for which you can do me a favor.”
“Name it!”
“Tell me what the warriors call that monument you’ve got at the end of the parade ground.”
“The Ulysses Statue?”
“No. The tall one.”
He turned red. “We call it the reviewing stand.”
She shook her head in exasperation. “That’s silly. You can’t stand on it.”
He blushed again.
“Come on, Chernon. Why do you call it that?”
“It’s an erection suitable for a parade ground,” he muttered.
It took her a moment. “I see. What is it, really?”
“Just what it looks like,” he muttered again. “Blooded warriors take their oaths of honor on it. It’s a symbol of shared manhood.”
“Penis worship?”
“It’s symbolic,” he said resentfully.
“Yes,” she agreed in amazement. “It certainly is.”
CARNIVAL TIME gathered momentum. Habby and Byram and Jerby all home, with Joshua and Morgot fixing special meals and giving presents. Popcorn by the stove, holiday pies, the whole family off to see the magicians or the fireworks together. Except for Myra. She went flitting out every morning with flushed cheeks and a giddy laugh, her usual trousers changed for short, colorful gowns—for which Habby and Byram had learned a short and very vulgar name—going twice a day to the assignation house, drinking beer and wine and dancing with Barten in the carnival taverns until all hours of the night.
There was no time to miss her or worry about her with the dozens of itinerant clowns and magicians; the rockets screaming into the evening sky; the acrobats; jugglers; jongleurs; the city full of the sound of music and drums and choirs. There were song contests between the warriors and the women—which the warriors almost always won. Warriors had a lot of time to practice, all the time they weren’t fighting or practicing fighting, or engaged in their interminable sports contests. They sang battle epics, mostly, though they did do some amusing songs and some of the old folk songs and love songs that everyone knew: “Gone Away, Oh, Gone Away,” and “The Lost Century,” and “What the Warrior Wears Beneath His Kilts,” and “I Lost My Love at Carnival,” a lament. The women didn’t have nearly as much time to practice, but they sang nonetheless, and the town resounded with voices.
After five or six days of it, Stavia got the impression that Myra might be tired.
“Just because I yawned,” Myra snarled, “it doesn’t mean I’m tired.”
“You can miss a day if you like,” Morgot said.
“I don’t like.”
“Well, maybe skip some of the drinking tonight and get a night’s sleep.”
“Barten doesn’t want to drink alone.”
“He wouldn’t be alone, Myra,” Habby yawned, echoing the gaping jaw on Myra’s face. “He’d find somebody.”
“Habby!” Myra, red in the face, was really angry. Or hurt.
“Yes, Habby,” Morgot remarked. “I’d keep my helpful suggestions to myself, if I were you.”
The eighth day, Myra didn’t go out at all. Sodden sounds from her bedroom, gulpings and howls.
“They had a fight,” Morgot explained.
“He had a fight,” said Stavia. “Chernon told me all about it. All of the young warriors planned to have a fight with their sweethearts after seven or eight days. That’s so they can try some of the others.”
“A basically self-defeating proposition,” sighed Morgot. “Since the ‘others’ are all at home crying, too.”
There seemed to be some logic in that. A messenger brought a plea from Barten for Myra to join him.
She went out, giddy-eyed.
“Oh shit,” said Stavia. “She doesn’t have any sense at all.”
“No,” yawned Morgot. “None of them do. Neither did I, when I was that age.”
“I refuse to be that age.”
“I wish you luck.”
THEN CARNIVAL ENDED. Chernon went back to the garrison. So did Habby and Byram and Jerby—Habby and Byram resignedly, Jerby in tears. It was easy to know how they felt, but Chernon? Who knew what Chernon was feeling?
“He likes you, doesn’t he?” begged Beneda, her eyes shining. “When you’re older, maybe you can be lovers.”
“Beneeda,” Stavia protested.
“Well maybe you can. And maybe you can have Chernon’s baby, and we really will be like sisters.”
“Beneeda! I won’t talk about that.” Her face burned. She couldn’t talk about that. It was too close to feelings she was having that she couldn’t understand or control.
The great central gate through which warriors had been coming and going for two weeks was slammed shut on the plaza once more. Bemused women set about cleaning the littered streets. The shedlike carnival taverns were closed, the drink barrels drained until next brewing time. In the houses of assignation, sheets were thrown over the furniture, the plumbing was drained, and the doors were closed again.
There was an almost silence in the city, a funeral quiet. Doors shut quietly. Voices murmured. Even the Well of Surcease seemed to have muted its music, and bird song came as a puzzled question rather than an affirmation. It seemed a time of mourning. “Severance,” murmured Morgot, quoting a Women’s Country poet. “‘The silence of severance, a vessel of quiet to hold mourning, for those who have said welcome, and farewell; a time to summon once again those things not so much lost as unremembered.’”
“I think everybody’s just tired,” said Stavia practically. She knew she was tired. Not being with Chernon was unthinkable, but being with him made her weary in strange ways. “Just tired.” Preoccupied with her own confused feelings, she did not see the appraising look that Morgot gave her.
The week after that, Stavia went back to her studies.
Not before she gave Chernon a book, however, against her better judgment, against her common sense, the observer Stavia pleading with the actor Stavia to be sensible. Actor Stavia did it anyhow, asserting that the ordinances were stupid, arbitrary, and that Chernon was different.
“And you’ll bring me more, won’t you?” Chernon pled through the hole in the wall, their fingers touching deep within that recess,
