much.
Hera resumes: “For eleven months, Clara sang me and my sisters to sleep. Then, on her eighteenth birthday, Clara was taken for harvest.”
The room erupts in a rage of crashing tankards and cries of anger and bitter curses. Hera waits patiently. And continues her tale.
“My third sister was Shiva, named after the Indian goddess. She was a happy and a very beautiful child. But she was, still, only a child, younger than her years really. Shiva was sixteen when Clara was harvested. She had only two years to wait before her own Special Day. But she became melancholy, and listless. It was up to me and my other sister, Persephone, to manage the family. We did the shopping and cooking and cleaning, we hosted all our family parties in the harem. We treated Shiva like a princess, she wanted for nothing. Every night we told her stories of magical faraway places and handsome princes and princesses who lived happily ever after. I was eleven by this time, Persephone was thirteen. But we were women. We began every day with a smile on our lips, we sang, we made our house a beautiful and treasured place. And Shiva, for much of the time, was happy. But then she went to harvest.”
I can see tears rolling down Hera’s face. She has to stop, because the teardrops are splashing on the table in front of her. Grendel walks over and gently wipes her face dry. Then he embraces her – this huge hairy giant of a man, gently caressing the small, fragile, frightened young woman.
Hera takes a large draught of wine. She speaks, but her voice is cracked and she takes a few moments to collect herself. But then she resumes her tale, and she has her voice and her rhythm back.
“After Shiva went to harvest, Persephone and I decided to apply our minds to an understanding of the world. There was a library in the harem, kept under lock and key, but we found a way to escape from our rooms each night and we spent many hours in the library reading the printouts and computer files and even books. We learned about physics and astronomy and history and culture and fashion. We read books about love and romance. I found an author who, even now, I still adore. Her name is Jane Austen. She wrote books about men and women in love.” Hera laughs a hollow laugh. “It was my pornography, my glimpse of the forbidden.
“Then Persephone went to harvest. I had two years of living alone. The other girls were wonderful with me. But I refused to be adopted into another family. I kept my own home, I hosted parties, I cooked glorious six-course meals which I ate alone. I thought a lot about Darcy, and whether he had brown hair, or fair.
“Then it was my eighteenth birthday and I was taken to the harvest.
“You must remember that at this point I had never been out on to the surface of my own planet. We lived in the harem, a massive complex of beautiful buildings with light conducted down funnels from the sky but with no views, anywhere, of anything. So my first voyage on a jet was a terrifying experience. I had to walk across an airfield with this vast yellow fire burning in the sky and actual animals skeetering and running on the ground. I saw men, too, human men, with lazy seductive eyes who looked me up and down as if I were a goddess. I know, now, that life on Hecuba for the men is a strange and barren existence. They work in fields and factories, they sing as they work, they paint paintings and write poems about their love for women. But, of course, they are homosexual by necessity. It isn’t such a bad life, for men. They can live until eighty or ninety or even beyond. They have a culture and community, and they feel the heat of the sun. But to my mind, it is no life for men to live without women. We are the lock and the key, the Yin and the Yang. We are the breath and the breather. Men, and women. We are one species.”
The words reverberate. The tale continues. Each word is unfurled for us, like a flower opening in the morning light. Hera has the gift of capturing our hearts with her every gesture; we feel her anxiety as she walks across the airfield. We feel her terror as the jet lifts up into the air and flies. We feel her rising trepidation as she is ushered into the palace.
“I was bathed and clothed by manservants. They took obvious joy in the sight of my naked body. That night I was stripped and perfumed and massaged and oiled and then laid down to sleep. In the morning, the process began again; the massage, the perfumes, the oils. My skin became a repository of rich scents; my body tingled with sexual and sensual awakening.
“I didn’t, entirely, know what to expect. I think I would have been accepting if I had been disembowelled or beheaded or tortured on some rack. Instead, I was wined and dined in the company of a hundred beautiful eighteen-year girls. Our hosts were giants, huge men and women of incomparable beauty and formidable strength. We girls were asked to dance and sing, which we did. Then the first girl was called before the Sultan and he took his clothes off and he pleasured himself on her naked body.”
She paused. Then “We Hecubans were, as you may all know, bred for our durable hymens. And the masters of our planets – the Doppelganger Robots who ruled us – were bigger than human size in all respects. So after her rape, the girl inevitably bled to death. And that, I realised, was in fact our fate.
“I shall speak no more of what happened on that evil, terrible night.”
We nod, soberly, imagining, choking back our horror.
“But I survived. I woke at the bottom of a mountain of the dead deflowered. I crawled my way out. I escaped into the hills. And, one day, I was able to steal a jet and fly up into the stars. My reading in the library had equipped me with a basic notion of astronomy. And the jet was, paranoidly, equipped to cope with years of deep-space travel. So I flew into the stars and was found some eighteen months later, more dead than alive, by a pirate vessel. And here I am today.”
Hera lifts her glass. “I propose a toast.” We raise our glasses.
“To Naomi. To Clara. To Shiva. To Persephone. And to all the other girls of Hecuba. To my sisters.”
The throng echo her toast in a full-throated shout: “To your sisters!”
I look at Lena. She is pale and trembling.
“How,” she whispers to me. “How did we let it come to this?”
Flanagan
Another tale is told. The Illyrians dance for us. The Meccans enact a puppet play of inordinate skill and beauty. A gang of Lopers enact a hunting scene.
Lena bangs her tankard. All eyes turn. She stands. “This is my story,” she tells them.
Lena
“I have a son, and I cannot love him.”
The words ripple through the hall.
Lena continues: “And you may ask: So what? Compared to what others have been through? I know of your suffering. I have friends who have spent their lives in a prison cell, too low for them to stand up, on preposterous trumped-up charges. Refused access to lawyers and the rule of justice. For what? For nothing. They have lost their lives not as punishment, not as deterrent, and not because they were guilty, but because the system sometimes chews people up and does not spit them out.
“I know all this and yet… I cannot love my son and it corrodes my heart.
“I didn’t love his father either. And my son Peter was a frozen embryo for nearly a century, as I went about living my life. When he was born my situation was difficult. When he was a toddler I became very ill. I spent months in hospital, and convalesced for nearly four years. My son was effectively raised by strangers, but when he became my son again I tried to love him. I tried so hard. When he was eleven we danced together in Saint Mark’s Square in Venice, Earth, to the music of the band in Florian’s Cafe. He was sandy-haired. Freckled, like me. Very intense, very serious. But he was a cruel child. He once skinned a cat. Later, he became a drunk. An alcoholic in fact. He abused drugs. As an adult, he had a juvenile sense of humour, he loved to taunt his friends and humiliate them. He wasn’t like me, so much, after all. But by then I was busy again. I had entered the world of politics. I was responsible for great changes in society.
“I created Heimdall.”
Another ripple; this time of astonishment.
“I was a politician, and a pioneer of the space colonisation movement. My son was on one of the second wave of spaceships that went out to settle space, he eventually landed on Meconium. A bleak, desperate planet which was never adequately terraformed. When they landed, my son was still a relatively young man. And
