The two women regarded each other evenly. It was the first time they had been this close. The Princess was in remarkably good fettle, Mother thought initially. Her skin was ivory with no crowsfeet or créche at the neck, but as her slip settled about her wet body, Mother noticed the Princess was a veritable web of scar tissue, sutured expertly to be sure, as if one had taken a vellum map of Cannonia at its greatest extent in the Middle Ages and superimposed upon it the late-nineteenth-century railway system. There was a much-repaired main spur across the bridge of her nose, crescents beneath each ear and jowl, trunk-lines beneath the breasts, and a strange, serpentine freight-changing yard at an angle to her navel.
They spoke of surgeries, their mutual fear of microbes and loathing of physicians, not to mention the men who you have to teach to comb their hair and eat with a fork, and who then deceive you. “Marriage is an entombment,” the Princess whispered hoarsely, carrying out the general line of argument she had begun, “but my husband is the only man who will love me to the death.”
Mother refused to be drawn into this. “My husband brought me out of childhood without pain,” she said. “He freed me from the gods of the riverbanks. I can never forget that. And in all relationships, everyone enjoys in different ways, and different times, the position of the master.”
“But what, my dear, do you like about him?”
Ainoha thought this over for some time. “Well, he remembers what he reads.”
“You can’t say so!” the Princess exclaimed.
“And he makes no claim on feelings he doesn’t feel.”
“Extrordinaire!”
“Yes, and there’s this: he suffers over real things.”
The Princess appeared downcast as she studied her faux-tigerish nails, registering the boredom of a triangle player in a symphony.
“But isn’t it odd,” she blurted, “how resentments start to build even the very first day?”
“My only regret is that there was no one to steal him from,” Ainoha averred. “That would have made it perfect! In any event,” she went on, depetalizing a daisy, “the problem is neither of the marriage yoke nor one of equality. The issue is how to be superior, or so I’ve always thought.”
“How well you put it,” the Princess laughed, her absentminded expression dissolving for a moment.
“And the problem with superiority,” Mother mused, “is how to show it without being unfaithful.”
“Ah, yes,” the Princess cawed. “I may love my country, mais mon cul est international!”
The ladies’ frank talk was interrupted by coarse shouts across the water. On the towpath on the far bank, thirty pairs of horses, interspersed by an odd brace of water buffalo, were towing a ship upriver, the craft itself still concealed around the bend. Preceding the ship in a dugout canoe rowed by four men, the pilot called out to the driver managing the straining animals on the bank, and while ropes twanged, horses whinnied and zillions of frogs and birds began to scream, he cursed them through a speaking tube: “Heave, you cuntbitten crawdons, you dodipal shit-a-beds, heave on!” Just then, around the bend appeared a small three-masted frigate, Count Zich’s Penelope III, green sails lashed to her mast, its twenty-four rowers straining furiously at their portholes. At such moments Ainoha loathed the river, a ditch of universal filth and violence beside which sat women deflecting the desperate glances of men looking up from work of which they had little comprehension except its difficulty, and no aim but to escape it in their arms.
“Heave, you ninny lobocks, heave you turdy membertoons!”
As few boats were worth towing on the arduous journey up the Mze, no passengers were ever carried on these return trips upstream, only the most profitable cartage. Generally, the ships were abandoned downstream, broken up at Therapeia, and sold for scrap. Through her opera glasses, which she was never without, even in the water, Ainoha could make out the bulky cargo lashed to the deck between the leering sailors. It was an Astingi theater set. The Penelope III carried the sky, the earth, a bower of roses, a dungeon, a town’s spires, many swords and spears, as well as the sun, the moon, and a great sheet of winking stars — Astingi props, being towed against all the forces of history and nature.
The horses stepped in the wake of the others like a caravan of camels. The drivers ran among them, keeping the towropes from entanglement, alternating lashings with gifts of oats. The towpath often disappeared and the horses went up to their bellies in the foaming muddy water. The sailors, dressed in Venetian garb, ran to and fro on the deck, bidding sweet farewell, saluting, and finally gesturing obscenely toward the two unblushing, unmoved women on the foggy shore.
In the half-hour it took for the Penelope III to pass, the Pilot was the only man on the river whose back was to the women. Ainoha saw the captain on the fo’c’s’le, his spyglass trained upon her. She raised her glasses to the bluffs, where Father and the Professor strode back and forth, occasionally waving their arms at each other, totally absorbed in Project Topsy. She could see the hair in their ears and the sweat on their brows.
“It’s almost as if they’re dancing,” the Princess said.
Across the river, below a rocky ledge wetted with streams, Ainoha could also make out an Astingi squadron emerging from a dark wood of unlimbed beeches. They were in ceremonial warrior garb, carrying lances of cornel tipped with iron, and burnished quivers stuffed with blue lead darts. Their glossy golden mounts wore purple saddlecloths and golden snoods with golden bits clamped between their teeth, and both horse and rider wore pliant twisted strands of gold upon their upper chests. But as this vanguard cleared the wood and descended upon a large bald, the Field of Mars, striplings practicing horsemanship appeared on either flank, like birds driven inland from the sea. They rode barechested, their pantaloons held up by suspenders of their mothers’ hair, skulls smartly slicked beneath wolfskin caps, one foot roughly booted, the other bare. The commanders cracked their whips as they weaved left and right, and behind each, two files of six boys rode in open columns. The columns cantered left and right, wheeled, and with their lances lowered, charged one another, alternating parades and counter-marches, retreats and skirmishes. The Field of Mars was white with bones, and on its distant reaches one might still come across the skeleton of a horse, its ribs plunged with the skeleton of its rider, surrounded by an iron hedge of spears. Fertilized with blood and ashes, the earth sprouted giant nasturtiums and violets which would make the best dog giddy, even faint. Horses got the bends, cattle bloated and toppled over. Bees locked their feet in clouds over gargantuan lilies; even the butterflies were punch-drunk. But now this field was sere.
This was no patrol but a mimicry of combat, and its seriousness was sealed when Mother saw the Shaman himself, never before present during maneuvers, observing from the edge of the wood astride a huge stallion with white pasterns and a snowy blaze across his forehead. He alone was dressed simply, no military decorations nor an ounce of gold, his white beard flashing down his raspberry tunic into his lap, and armed only with a cello. The Astingi were on the move to enlist new gods.