He looked up at a knock on the door and yelled: “Enter!”
“Admiral Talbot,” the messenger said. “Whale signal from Hazhir: Made rendezvous.”
Chapter Twenty-six
Megan had returned to the castle with a pack train of clothes and supplies, a slightly increased force courtesy of Malcolm Innes and a distinct distaste for riding and the society of the Gael. She was appalled by the speed with which the locals had reverted to a very sexually segregated, and repressive, society. It, quite frankly, infuriated her. Mirta, however, was much less upset by it.
They had been talking one evening after dinner when the kitchen had mostly been cleared and she and Megan had taken up stools by the fire. Baradur was perched in the corner, as always a silent observer. Since Jock had assigned him to her he had never been far away. He slept by the door of her room, tasted her food before she ate it and even checked the latrines when she had occasion to use them.
Mirta was, as ever, sewing. She had gotten some rough sections of wool and was making a better dress for herself when Megan burst out with her complaints.
“I like Jock McClure, I even like Malcolm for all his ‘Gael madness,’ but this… this… slave camp they run is ridiculous! Serfs in the fields, women kept out of the main room except to serve. It’s disgusting.”
“A bit,” Mirta said, looking up for a moment, then going back to her sewing. “But it fits the society very well. Have you asked Jock or Flora about it?”
“No,” Megan admitted. “Frankly, I don’t want to piss him off.”
“You might find it enlightening,” Mirta said. “I doubt he recalls but I’ve met him before. He was one of the local dukes in the Society. Never quite made it to king, but he’s a pretty dab hand with a claymore or battle-axe. Nice guy. I don’t recognize Flora; he wasn’t married back then. But he wasn’t one of the very old-fashioned chauvinists you sometimes ran into in the Society. And a serious student of history. So, you have to ask yourself, why’d he change?”
“I don’t know,” Megan admitted. “Even in Ropasa it wasn’t this bad. And from what I hear of Norau they’ve really maintained a very straightforward equality system. This is just so… -medieval!”
“And there you put your finger upon it,” Mirta pointed out, tying off a knot. “Let me ask you something: Why were women in preindustrial societies considered second-class citizens?”
“Because…” Megan paused and thought about it. “Because the men of the society kept them that way?”
“To an extent,” Mirta replied. “To an extent. But you have to ask why it started. Did men and women wake up one morning and say: ‘Okay, the guys are in charge?’ Which came first, the chicken or the egg? More to the point, the human race went through a few hundred thousand year process of evolving a society where women were, almost invariably, chattel and second-class citizens. Even in most hunter-gatherer societies, despite the various tracts trying to disprove that unpleasant fact. Then, when technology started to dominate, women were suddenly empowered. What does that tell you?”
“That you know the answers and aren’t willing to just give them,” Megan said, frowning.
“The way to true understanding is to answer the question yourself,” Mirta replied, smiling as she sewed.
“And the journey of a thousand miles often ends very badly,” Megan said with a grin. “But I get your point; that the difference was technology. But I don’t like the answer.”
“Okay, let’s take a look at the current situation,” Mirta said. “Think in terms purely of economic value. The basis of the economy around here is small farming and sheep herding. What do small farmers do?”
“Plow and harvest?” Megan asked.
“Far more than that. But that will do. What do both require?”
“An ox?” Megan laughed, taking a sip of herbal tea then thinking about it. “I don’t know, I’ve never done either.”
“They require a good bit of upper body strength is the answer,” the seamstress replied. “To keep a plow straight requires constant adjustment, which means pointing, and often lifting, a huge chunk of wood and metal. And the faster you can plow the more you can plow and the more likely you are to get your crops in the ground at the right time. Or at least more crops. Now, despite genetic tinkering, women are weaker than men in upper body strength. We also don’t have the stamina for long-endurance, high-energy efforts that males do. Men can keep plowing or swinging a scythe long after women of equivalent condition and mass have dropped to the ground. Women are better in both, today, than males prior to genetic tinkering. But men are equivalently stronger. Sheep farming also requires a good bit of strength: You haven’t lived until you’ve tried to shear a sheep. Lifting bales of fodder or wool, throwing a bull to make it a steer, cutting with a scythe, these are all things that men can do better than women. A farm can be run by one woman and two or three men, but the same farm would require six or seven women alone. And they require the equivalent food level of the males. The work that women do in the culture is important, but, frankly, anything they can do, except making babies, can be done by a man. Women get the jobs they do, caring for the hearth, cooking food, sewing, because they cannot do the jobs men do as well as men. By and large, as an average.”
“I don’t like that,” Megan said. “I don’t like it one bit.”
“Don’t like it all you’d like.” Mirta sighed. “It’s truth. Now in some societies, Ropasa to an extent and from what I’ve heard Norau to a greater extent, it’s possible to mitigate the effects of the relative… worthlessness, and I chose that word precisely, of women. They have economically important jobs, clerks, managers, designers, that women can do as well as men. If they’re permitted to. Ropasa was well on its way to forcing women out of such jobs, though. With Sheida as queen of Norau they’re not going to start forcing women out very soon. I have no idea what it will be like in the long-run. But here it’s different. They are on the ragged edge of survival; they don’t have clerks and factory workers. And the most important people are not farmers or sheepshearers, but fighters, people who can hold a shield and swing a sword and stand up to the attack of Changed. To hold on to the land that they do have for farming and sheep raising.
“Now, there are a few women, even here, who could probably do the job. But, by and large, the men can do it better. I suspect there were a few women at the beginning who told everyone they were just as good as any man. And I suspect that most of them died on some battlefield or another. Men died, too, but not in the same numbers. Because men are pretty well designed for fighting and women just aren’t. You could kill Paul because you used smarts and took him by surprise. Try to take on a male of equivalent strength, training and size in the middle of a battle and what will happen?”
“He’ll kick my ass,” Megan admitted, looking over at Baradur who was watching with calm and unreadable eyes. “I still don’t like it.”
“Again, don’t like it all you want,” Mirta grinned. “There’s more and it’s worse, but I’ll let someone else cover that one. But that’s some of the reasons that this group fell into ‘traditional’ roles so fast.”
“How do you stop it?” Megan asked. “I don’t want my granddaughters as drudges to some man!”
“You don’t even have daughters, yet, dear,” Mirta pointed out. “Bit early to worry. But I know what you mean. Well, I’ll be interested to see what Norau is like. I’m sure that Sheida has thought of this and if she hasn’t I’m sure that Edmund will have brought it up. I know both of them, by the way, and they will remember old Mirta,” she added with a chuckle. “Oh, the stories I could tell about those two!”