Strangers by Gardner Duzois

Author:Gardner Duzois
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2012-10-18T15:35:59+00:00

10

At the end of the month, Liraun went off to the Hall of Tailors for her tests. There was a great deal more involved than a single pregnancy test, however, and Farber understood little of it. The testing was interwoven with an elaborate mesh of ritual and symbology that Liraun was reluctant to explain. She had fasted and practiced total abstinence for the past three days, sleeping alone on a hard pallet near the hearth. Indeed, although she continued to cook and clean for him, she refused to touch him, or even come near him, and she spoke almost not all. Farber kept at her until he had convinced himself that her sullen iron absorption could not be broken, and then he submitted to the situation with as good a grace as he could muster. He spent the evenings trying to catch up on his correspondence, writing letter after letter, that he would almost certainly never send. Things are different here, he would write, and then pause, sometimes for hours, staring at the paper, mesmerized by the homogeneity of the banal and the inexpressible.

Across the room, his wife would be scooping warm ashes from the hearth, adding powdered bone, charcoal dust, a few drops of an unknown viscous liquid from a vial, kneading the mixture into a dark oily paste. She now painted herself with this substance every night—transforming her face into a tragic ashen mask, rubbing it into her scalp until her hair became a dull dead gray, painting gaunt-black starvation shadows under her eyes. She looked then like a grimy, desolate ghost, and, before she went to sleep, she would sing a ghostly little song to herself in a shivering, keening voice that seemed to avoid any key familiar to Farber’s ear. On awakening, she would wipe her face clean and start again with different substances. This time her face would become a frightening—almost insectile—mask, done in streaks of dull green and blue and black, with little spots of sullen red. Fierce resignation, righteous rage, religious ecstasy, sexual frenzy—Farber could never decide which of these, if any, the face was intended to represent. She would also paint concentric circles around her nipples, cabalistic swirls on her flat belly, stylized arrows thrusting down her loins into her pubic hair. Her canine teeth would gleam against the dully glistening face paint, suddenly seeming much longer, suddenly—shockingly—becoming fangs. She would remain naked all day, unselfconsciously, paying no attention whatsoever to Farber’s periodic attacks of prurience.

She hadn’t washed in days, and she was beginning to develop a rotting-sweet smell that was not entirely unpleasant.

Neither was it entirely unpleasant to awaken to intense cold, as Farber did on the morning of the test: a cold more sensed through the sleeping-furs as yet than actually experienced, giving him a shuddery, almost pleasurable intimation of the discomfort to which he would be subjected when he finally did get up. He drowsed for a while, relishing the warmth he was wrapped in. Then he stuck his head up above the furs.

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