Sabella by Tanith Lee

Author:Tanith Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2020-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

II

WHEN I FOUND the pendant, it was a few days after my eleventh birthday, and it was the day I started to bleed. My father had been dead for nine years, and our house was a woman’s world. Women tend, as do men, to turn into clans when thrown in with too many of their own gender, and then those clans practice mysteries. From my tenth birthday on there’d have been these mystery hintings: Once you start. Once you get to be a big girl, Bel. I knew about menstruation, school took care of that. But somehow the science had never fully related to my body. A picture on a screen was just a picture on a screen. Then one day the picture happened inside me. Even when you know, it shocks. Even when you understand it’s nothing bad, somehow it’s still bad. Now you’re different, not yourself anymore. In that moment, I turned for reassurance, applause perhaps, I turned to find myself in the eyes of another, because this is where generally human beings find themselves. But my mother gave me a tape book to play which told me what I had to do now, although I’d already heard it through at school. So I went out of town and along the road over the hidden mines and by the refineries and over the river into the meadows. Where a couple of the old dry canals opened under the rosy sands of Easterly’s neck of the deserts, that still make up four-fifths of Novo Mars, I found a hole in the ground.

Anice (or is it Alicia?) fell into a hare’s warren. Do bats eat cats she wondered, as she plunged into the dark. I suppose Sabella had climbed trees, dug into holes; I don’t recall. I think I’d even seen this hole before, assumed it was but another pit in the quarry that overhung the canal bed. Why did I go in? I foresee an analogy, the womb of the earth, Sabella’s womb. But I think it was just somewhere to hide, and maybe Alicia’s was also a hiding place from her womanhood. Certainly, the tunnel had no exclusive feminine aura. In fact, an old catapult, the sometime gadget of most Easterly boys, lay near the entrance, but when I knelt on it it broke, brittle with age.

When I dreamed about the tunnel on the plane to Ares, my mother was there, but when it happened she hadn’t been, I was alone. Nor were there tall thin pillars, as at Dawson, or up in the Calicoes. The tunnel roof was actually low, and I didn’t go far before I came on a slab of rock set endways across the tunnel. All this I discerned by feel, because my body had shut out most of the light that came in at the entrance. Even then, I thought the slab was a grave.

The rock of the slab was worn or planed as smooth as satin, and, as with the other ruins

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