The Elementals Read online

  “A prayer?” They stared at her. Kesair had not been known as a fanatic before. Religion was unfashionable, an outmoded superstition. They believed Man was supreme in the cosmos, a belief Kesair had seemed to share. Before the catastrophe.

  “I wouldn’t care to pray to any deity who would let this happen to us!” the woman called Barra said angrily.

  A murmur of agreement rose from the others. On their faces, Kesair read a threat to her newfound authority. If she tried to force the issue they might reject her.

  She shrugged, and changed the topic to the distribution of food and assignment of tasks. After an uncertain pause, the group reverted to obedience. It was already becoming a comfortable habit. They were silently relieved that the embarrassing suggestion of prayer had been dropped.

  Day wore on, became night, became day again. And again. They sailed this way and that, found no land, no people. Nothing. More and more, they simply drifted. It did not matter.

  Social conventions were abandoned. Men and women openly relieved themselves over the side. Quarrels sprang up. The people were nervous, irritable, and apathetic by turns. Friendships were formed one day and broken the next.

  Their food stores dwindled. The sea waited.

  Byth droned on and on, listing an increasing catalog of physical complaints. The formerly brisk and bustling woman called Leel began sleeping the day away like a creature in hibernation.

  Staring morosely at the sea, Ladra swore at the water bitterly, continually. He was inventive with profanity. Against her will, Kesair found herself listening to him. Once she laughed aloud.

  He turned toward her, scowling darkly. “What are you laughing at?”

  “Not at you. I was just enjoying your use of the language, that’s all. You’re very original.”

  He gazed at her for a long moment, then went back to cursing the sea. But after that he seemed more kindly disposed toward Kesair. That night when the food was distributed, he ate sitting beside her.

  From his place opposite them, Fintan noticed the change in Ladra’s attitude. He realized he was looking at Kesair differently himself. Before the catastrophe, he had paid her no attention. Women outnumbered men in the colony and he had always had his choice, which did not include Kesair. She was too tall, too fair, and he liked small dark women. More damning still, she was a loner. She did not seem to need a man. Fintan, who liked his women dependent, had ignored her. She was an exceptionally good weaver and did her share of the work, and beyond that he had no interest in her.

  Before.

  But now … he could hardly ignore the one person who had been able to take charge when he and the other surviving men were weary and defeated.

  Surreptitiously, Fintan eyed the other female occupants of the boat. Old Nanno, two prepubescent daughters of a man who had been killed, an infant girl in her mother’s arms. And forty-six women of childbearing age, including Kesair. Kesair, to whom the others deferred.

  This gave Kesair an attractiveness Fintan had never noticed before.

  Under his breath, he said to Byth, “Look at Ladra over there, trying to curry favor. Can’t she see through him?”

  “You sound jealous.” Once Byth would not have commented on another man’s emotions. But everything had been changed by the catastrophe. Byth stroked his chin, wondering when he had last shaved. None of the men shaved now.

  “Jealous?” Fintan snorted. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Under the circumstances,” Byth warned, “it wouldn’t be a good idea to get too fond of any one woman. Think about it.”

  Fintan ignored him.

  Byth shrugged. Arthritis bit deep into his shoulder and he rubbed the joint automatically, wondering how much damage the sea air was doing to him.

  The color of the sea gradually changed. From slate-blue it became a warm, dark green. Kesair was the first to notice. She lifted her head and sniffed the wind.

  “What is it?” Elisbut asked. Elisbut was a cheerful, chubby woman who made pottery and talked incessantly. “What do you smell?”

  “Change in the wind,” Kesair said succinctly. She did not want to encourage a flood of conversation.

  Anything was enough to set Elisbut off, however. “I don’t smell anything unusual, Kesair. Perhaps you’re imagining things. I used to do that all the time. My mother—you would have liked her—my mother used to tell me I had too much imagination. Now I never thought a good imagination was such a liability in an artistic person like myself, but …”

  Kesair was not listening. “We’re going to change course,” she shouted abruptly to her crew.

  Within half a day they caught sight of a thin dark line on the horizon and knew they had found land.

  Sailing in from the northwest, they made landfall on the rocky coast of what seemed to be a vast island. It was hard to be certain; most of the land was shrouded in mist. The boat ground ashore on a beach of white sand studded with black boulders. After dragging their vessel as far up the beach as they could, they secured it and set about exploring the immediate area.

  “No sign of people,” Ladra reported after scrambling up the nearest cliff and back down again. “But there is a sort of wiry grass up there, and I’d say we could find fresh water if we go in just a little way. We’ve been lucky. So far,” he added darkly. “This could be a bad place. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  Kesair assigned armed scouting parties to explore the area more thoroughly. All brought back similar reports. Thin soil, unsuitable for farming, but a lushness of wild vegetation. A pervasive mist that rolled over the land, blew away, returned with a will of its own. Glimpses of distant grassland bordered by forest. Outlines of mountains beyond.

  “If we have to start life over,” Fintan said, “I would say we’ve found a good place for it.”

  They built a bonfire of driftwood that night on the headland above the beach. When Kesair found some of the women throwing the refuse from the boat into the sea, she ordered them to put it on the fire instead.

  “What difference does it make?” they challenged. They did not want to carry armloads of rubbish up the slope to the fire. “One load of garbage in an empty ocean, what difference?”

  But this time Kesair was adamant. Grumblingly, they obeyed. The tongues of the fire licked at the rubbish and a dark smoke rose from it, stinking of the old life.

  Blue twilight settled over them. Down on the shore, the red boat gleamed dully in the last rays of the setting sun, then turned grey, like a beached whale dying at the edge of the sea.

  As they ate their first meal on dry land, some people talked compulsively about their recent experience, retelling the boatbuilding and the battles and the flood, incidents which were already taking on a mythic quality in their minds. Others sat silently, simply trying to comprehend. Trying to realize that they were safe at last.

  Kesair was not so certain of their safety. Any sort of danger might await them on dry land, on what seemed to be a very large and unknown island. They could die a more horrible death in the jaws of wild beasts than they would have suffered by drowning in the sea.

  The next morning, Kesair organized work parties to build huts for the people and pens for the livestock. The men and women were to be housed separately, for the time being, and as leader she ordered a hut built for herself alone.

  “Why don’t we go farther inland?” Byth suggested.

  “Not yet. We don’t know what may be waiting for us. It’s better we stay here for a while until we are established and used to the place.”

  The truth was, she was reluctant to leave the sea. But she did not say this.

  They worked hard, bringing timber from the distant forest. They met no savage beasts, but twice they reported hearing a howling in the distance, as of wolves, and they were overjoyed to sight a herd of deer beyond the trees.

  The group settled into a domestic routine not unlike the one they had known before the catastrophe. “We’re lucky,” she told Byth, who had become the closest thing she had to a
confidant. “Among us we have most of the skills we shall need. We can make our own tools and clothing, we can build and repair.”

  She set up her big loom in the lee of her hut, where the morning sun supplied a clear yellow light.

  Not everyone was ready to settle down. Some seemed devoted to grieving over what they had lost, hampering the work of the colony. Kesair learned she could rely on Elisbut, Fintan, Kerish, and the women called Ayn and Ramé to do what must be done, and enlisted them to help her encourage the others.

  On a chill, damp afternoon when rain blew in from the sea in curtains of silver, Fintan came to Kesair’s hut. He paused in the doorway, stooping, peering in, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. “Are you in here?” he asked uncertainly.

  “I am,” she said from a bed made of piled blankets. “I was just resting, listening to the rain.”

  Without waiting for an invitation, Fintan entered the hut. He gave off a smell of wind and water. “We need to talk.”

  “Sit there.” The thought skittered across Kesair’s mind that she should offer him food, or drink, but she was a solitary creature by nature and had never practiced the skills of hospitality. “Help yourself to whatever you want,” she said lamely, making a vague gesture in the direction of her stores.

  “Talk is what I want, some sort of plan. We can’t just stay like this, Kesair. Winter is coming on, we probably need to go farther inland to avoid the worst of the weather. We don’t even know how bad winter gets in this place.”

  “So how do we know it might be milder inland?”

  “It stands to reason. And there’s another thing …” His eyes were used to the dimness now. He could see her leaning on one elbow, watching him, her long legs stretched out beneath a blanket. Suddenly the hut seemed very small and intimate.

  “What?” she said.

  He swallowed. “We need to get on with our lives. We’ve been tiptoeing around this for weeks, but we must face the fact. As far as we know, we may be all that remains of the human race. If we don’t reproduce ourselves, it could be the end of mankind.

  “Of course, it could be too late already, I know that. But I feel an obligation to try …” He ground to a halt. She was looking at him intently, with an unreadable expression.

  He picked up the threads of his thought. “People look up to you, Kesair. The other women follow you. If you were to urge them to, ah …”

  “Mate,” she said.

  He had not expected her to put it so baldly. “Ah, yes. Mate. Have children, a lot more children …”

  Kesair sat up, clasping her knees with her square, blunt-fingered hands. She locked his eyes with hers. “Fifty women alone on a large island with three men,” she said in an expressionless voice. “Just imagine. Every man’s fantasy.”

  He said huffily, “I’m not proposing an orgy, Kesair! You’re an intelligent woman, you know exactly what I’m saying. You understand that—”

  “—that you hope to use my mind to get at my body,” she said flatly. “If you can. If I let you.”

  Stung by the truth in her accusation, Fintan retorted, “You don’t have a very good opinion of men, do you?”

  Kesair did not answer. He could have enjoyed an argument, but he had no coping skills for female silence.

  Fintan tried to recall what he knew about her, seeking some sort of leverage. She was a latecomer to the crafts colony, having arrived with neither man nor child, only her loom and her skill, but she had proved to be an exceptionally creative weaver. Soon her work had been in great demand among the colony’s customers, becoming a mainstay of their economy. No one had been willing to risk offending her by prying into her private life.

  Very little was known about Kesair, Fintan realized. She was something of a mystery.

  A most intriguing mystery.

  He must get her to trust him. “I don’t much care for the company of men myself,” he told her confidingly. “I really prefer women, always have. I think women are the best of us.” He favored her with his most winning smile, knowing his teeth were white and even and his eyes crinkled boyishly.

  Kesair stared right through him, unimpressed.

  Fintan choked back his annoyance. Did she not understand that men were now at a premium? That he could have his choice of any woman he wanted? He could walk out right now and it would be her loss, not his. He had forty-five others to choose from.

  But he did not walk out. There were forty-five others, but Kesair was the leader. She was not beautiful, like Kerish, but she was special, she had an indefinable something extra. And he was Fintan, whose pride demanded he go for the best.

  Wiping his smile from his face, he replaced it with a studiedly serious expression he thought she might like better. “What we need to do, Kesair, is to divide the women into three groups. Each man will take responsibility for one third of the women, do you see?” He paused. “Well, not Byth, perhaps. He may be a little old. But he can at least take a few and Ladra and I can handle the rest.”

  “Responsibility? What sort of responsibility? There is already a leader. Myself.”

  She is pretending to be stupid to irritate me, Fintan thought. She wants to be blunt; very well. I can be blunt. “Responsibility for them sexually. For getting them pregnant,” he elaborated, trying to stare her down.

  To his astonishment, she laughed. “Is that all? Fine. Pick out your—how many would you say, twenty each for you and Ladra, and ten for Byth?—pick out your twenty and get on with it. Just don’t impregnate all the sturdiest ones at the same time, we need to keep an able work force. And wait for the younger girls to grow a few more years before you start with them.”

  Fintan’s jaw sagged with dismay. What had happened to the titillating mating games a woman was supposed to play? He had imagined a very different sort of afternoon in Kesair’s hut, listening to the rain on the roof, talking first impersonally and then very personally of sexual matters, advancing, holding back, weighing selected phrases with double meanings, gradually offering more intimate caresses. The mounting excitement, the thrill of the chase …

  “Which women do you want?” Kesair drawled with supreme indifference. She twisted her upper body to put back a piece of chinking that had fallen from between the timbers of the hut wall beside her. The repair had her total attention.

  Fintan got to his feet. “Not you, anyway!” he told her. He stomped furiously from the hut into slanting silver rain.

  Kesair turned her head to watch him go. A light flickered in her eyes. He’s proud, she thought. I like that in a man.

  Fintan sought Ladra, whom he found at the edge of the cliff, throwing rocks down at the sea as if he were pelting an enemy. There was hatred and anger in every throw.

  The sea had swallowed the world he knew. Ladra hated the sea. From time to time he yelled curses at it.

  “Come with me to the men’s hut,” Fintan said to him. “We need to talk.”

  Ladra squinted at him from beneath dark, tangled eyebrows. Ladra was slightly taller than Fintan, with long arms but disproportionately short legs. He looked as if he had been made from the parts of several men. “Is it important?”

  “I think so,” Fintan replied.

  Ladra hurled one last stone, then shrugged and followed Fintan. “I’m tired of being wet anyway,” he said.

  The men’s hut was empty. Byth was elsewhere. Fintan and Ladra went in out of the rain. The hut was small and dark and smelled of mud and freshly cut logs.

  “It’s time we organized our social structure for the future,” Fintan began earnestly. “I’ve been giving it a lot of thought and I’ve come up with a workable, sensible plan.”

  Ladra listened, frowning, as Fintan outlined his idea. Then Ladra said, “I don’t much care for all this organizing. It smacks of a desire to control. And I think the desire to control has caused a lot of mankind’s problems, Fintan.”

  “There will be more problems if we don’t agree on a plan soon and start to follow it. You can’t put this many pe
ople together in this sort of situation without trouble, sooner or later. I’m just making the most intelligent suggestion. People need to know what to expect.”

  “But Kesair wants us to use our energies for getting dug in here for the winter, making more tools and weapons, setting up some sort of defensive perimeter in case—”

  “We can do all that too,” Fintan interrupted impatiently.

  “What does Kesair say to your plan? You did discuss it with her, didn’t you? She and I should be—”

  “You’re making assumptions. You can’t just appropriate a woman for yourself, Kesair or anybody else. We have to be sensible about our, ah, breeding arrangements. We have to use our heads.”

  “Our heads?” Ladra said with a grin. “That’s not how I do it.”

  Fintan had the grace to laugh. “You know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean all right.” The other man sobered. “I suppose you expect the best women for yourself?”

  “To avoid arguments I thought we might, well, draw lots for them.”

  Ladra shook his head. “I can imagine you trying to convince those women out there that it’s all right for us to draw lots for them. Good luck. I don’t want to be around when you try to sell the idea.”

  “You always criticize,” Fintan complained, “but you never have a better suggestion.”

  Ladra said smugly, “As it happens, this time I do. The other women accept Kesair as leader. So have her make the assignments, just as she assigns work. If she’s willing to accept this plan of yours at all, that is. I’m not sure she is, I’d like to hear what she thinks.”

  “She said we should get on with it,” Fintan said with perfect honesty.

  “Did she now? Ah. Well then.” Ladra seemed satisfied.

  He thinks Kesair will give herself to him, Fintan thought darkly.

  When Byth returned to the hut and was told of Fintan’s plan another problem arose. Byth was insulted at the suggestion that he take fewer women than the other men.

  “But you’re always complaining about your age and your infirmities,” Ladra reminded him. “You even call yourself Grandfather!”