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  In Hench Valley, the Rule was that each house was owned by the eldest woman in it. The owner could be a Grandma or a Ma or the oldest girl born to the preceding Ma: Lillis and Trudis occupied her house together. The rule also said that if there were any women of breeding age in the house, there should be a man in it, a Pa. In Lillis’s case, however, once her last consort left, she had no man in the house. Only the fact that she was the Healer Ma kept possible invaders away. Though the reason was unspoken and very possibly indefinable by local standards, no one wanted her to be owned by anyone else. She was too useful to them all.

  Someone had sent Lillis to the valley originally. The Planners and the ­people Lillis thought were responsible might not be the same person or ­people, which did not matter at the time. She had no real “relationship” with either. The Planners had governed her life until now—­and she had agreed to it, for she had been told that the result would have “beneficial consequences for mankind.” This promise came from a sufficiently exalted source in a sufficiently exalted place that Lillis believed it. Implicitly. The words were sufficiently lofty and lacking in detail to allow almost any interpretation, and “beneficial consequences” dropped into lockstep with Lillis’s unbreakable habit of looking on the bright side. All went well and as planned, thus, until Lillis had her last child, Trudis.

  Ah, Trudis! Those senders had looked deep, very deep, into Trudis within hours of her birth. Without dissent they considered Trudis to be both useless and hopeless. Worse (from their point of view) this judgment required that they look deeply into those of themselves who had arranged for the girl’s parentage. Those individuals were evaluated also, and were judged as having been, at best, inept. Years of research had been backtracked. Hundreds of studies had been reviewed and re-­re-­reviewed. Fingers of various types had been pointed at faces of various species. Everyone agreed that it was an unfortunate mistake, and—­given perfect hindsight—­completely preventable occurrence. These particular foreseers, however, did not consider perfection to be impossible. Everything else in the plan was on target, however, and in the face of Lillis’s furious determination they felt sufficiently distracted, and, moreover, sufficiently guilty to let her try to salvage Trudis.

  Prognostication said that only tragedy would result if the girl’s father stayed in Hench Valley for the length of time this salvage might take. He bid Lillis a loving farewell mixed with a feeling of loss. Lillis missed him, as she had each of them. ­People Lillis had grown up among were disinclined to use the word “love” as having too many possible definitions, but Lillis’s “liking” would have met any of them. The ones who ruled Lillis’s life (the ones who really did, not the ones who got blamed for it) rarely made mistakes; he, she, it, or they were usually very good at what he, she, it, or they did. He, she, it, or they gave her time and allowed her to try.

  Lillis had set herself to the task with grim, unrelenting determination, a determination so rarely met with defeat that she assumed defeat was impossible. Only someone stubborn as she (as her last consort had mentioned, quite fondly) would have made the effort and, having made it, continued it. Each time a new strategy failed, she rethought the process: surely a change in method, surely inventing a new way, a new trick, a trap, a snare that would capture Trudis’s . . . well . . . that was where the failure always snagged! Trudis’s what? Imagination? Ambition? Better nature? Trudis had no imagination. Certainly no ambition that lasted longer than the five minutes needed for gratification. And better nature? Better than what?

  Trudis grew quickly, a large girl who would be a large woman: tall and buxom and even attractive in a brutish, cowlike way. Years of patient teaching had taught her to string half a dozen words together in place of grunts and head shakings. This minor achievement had suggested there might be further progress, which was unfortunately misleading, for Trudis’s mind remained as unformed as it had been on the day she had emerged bloody, brooding, and mute into the world. Trudis was still Trudis, as though carved from a rough block of greedy, lecherous stone. Trudis was not mendable.

  As the years of Trudis’s childhood spun by, a certain subsection of the Hench Valley Rule had very gradually forced its way to Lillis’s attention. That subsection allowed that if a house was without a grown male in it but had a breedable woman in it, then any breedable woman of that house could get up early on midsummer morning, cook a griddle cake, and carry it to the meadow, where she could offer it to whatever male she chose from those loitering there.

  The fact that the man might be half brother or even father to the woman bearing the griddle cake was not taken into consideration. Hench Valley did not keep track of such things. If the man who was approached took a bite of the cake and followed the woman to her home before sundown, then that man had henceforth the exclusive right to breed from any female in that house! This included the woman herself, her mother, even her grandmother, if the Ma had started bearing early enough. A woman of thirty-­eight could have a daughter of twenty-­five who had a twelve-­year-­old girl child and one Pa could enjoy them all. It wasn’t even unusual—­particularly inasmuch as few of the ­people kept track of their ages at all. This practice having been carried on for as long as anyone could remember, the Hench Valley population was very closely related to itself.

  Lillis knew all about the Rule. It was not written down anywhere, but it was fully understood by everyone who lived there. Lillis was not going to let Trudis fall prey to the Rule. Trudis had to be taken from the valley before she reached puberty and fell prey to any of the Pas. Time went by, however, until the time came that Trudis would soon leave childhood behind her. Then, as though suddenly, time was running out.

  Lillis knew that if she had been unable to change the child, she would be unable to change the woman. If the woman were made infertile and left here, she would end up being savaged for not bearing, as this would reflect on the Pa-­ness of whatever male was consorting with her. However, since Lillis’s presence in the valley was no longer at all useful to the powers that be (or powers, perhaps, that had been), there were places where Lillis and Trudis could live out their lives in less dangerous surroundings. Through her long, compliant ser­vice—­and more important, by a certain admission of guilt among the powers that be, as they had been managing things and one or more of them must have made a mistake—­they owed support for Lillis and for any other child she bore.

  It was spring when Lillis made her decision. Though baby girls were generally ignored, if ever a beddable or nearly beddable female tried to leave the valley, the men hunted her down. Lillis decided to leave at Midsummer, both because it would be warm and because Midsummer was celebrated with three nights of bonfires and beer. Everyone in Hench Valley would be drunk and stumbling for at least three or four days, during which time no one would notice Trudis and Lillis had gone. If they left well after dark on Midsummer Eve, they would be able to get so far gone that the men of Hench Valley could not follow. Trudis could not be told they were leaving, however. Some other attractive reason for going into the forest would be invented for the occasion: maybe a neighboring village having a pig roast, or a crop of certain mushrooms showing up in a nearby valley. Trudis liked food . . . and drink, and she already liked sex.

  The plan was made, the packs were ready and hidden. Shortly before Midsummer, lending a whiplash of panic to an already compelling motivation, Trudis experienced her first “womanlies.” Lillis was so flustered by the event that when she explained to Trudis what was happening, Lillis actually used the word “womanlies,” which was current in Hench Valley. If she had been thinking in her usual analytical manner, she would not have done so. Trudis heard “womanlies” and remembered it. Woman lies meant she was now a woman, and there was a rule about women.

  Lillis didn’t notice. She was busy with vital details of their disappearance, details assuring they would not be followed, not be caught. There were certain things of hers that had to be hidden or destroyed. Or, in the case
of certain very rare and valuable herbs and roots, bottled or packaged so she could take them with her.

  By the morning of Midsummer Eve, Lillis had everything ready; the packs were well hidden in the forest on the way they would go. She planned to leave as soon as it was well dark and the festivities were at their height. She had told Trudis they had been invited to a pig-­roast feast at a neighboring village where Trudis had never been; a pig feast with cake and ale. Also, there was a certain herbal extract she would give Trudis just before they left, one that would make her biddable. Lillis allowed herself an extra hour’s sleep that morning. As she was sitting over her tea mug in the all-­purpose everything-­including-­the-­kitchen room, however, someone fell through her kitchen door. The woman stumbled exhaustedly to her feet, babbling that she had run all the way from Gortels, a ­couple of miles north. Rotten, a woman of Gortles, was giving birth and seemingly dying of it. Rotten had begged—­screamed—­to her friend to fetch the Healer Ma.

  “Did you call Ma Beans? She’s good help with birthing!”

  “Ma’s dead, Lillis. Ma got ’erself kilt.”

  While listening to the details of Ma Beam’s late-­night fall from a cliff road, Lillis was gathering up her kit, and she walked quickly to Gortles, thinking to be back in plenty of time to leave that night.

  During the subsequent day and night, as she battled for the woman’s and the girl baby’s lives—­successfully in the one case, though not the other—­her plans for Midsummer Eve were driven from her mind. Only when she started for home in the morning did she remember with exhausted horror what precisely it was that the Midsummer Day rule allowed. She prayed, actually prayed, that the second night of the festival would allow their departure as well as the first would have done.

  Trudis, however, now that she was a woman, had actually, for the first time in her life, planned to do something. She got up early, baked griddle cakes (very badly, one side drippy, one side black), ate all but one of them with copious amounts of the honey that her mother allowed her only sparingly (it came from elsewhere, and it could not be readily replaced). She then took the saved griddle cake with her to the meadow hoping to find Gralf Garn, a man-­sized boy she’d been looking at and sharing some fleshly amusements with for some time. Gralf Garn had taken a bite of cake, though he’d spit it out as he had followed her home, and after a lengthy interval in the one bed in the house, by early midmorning he was ensconced in Lillis’s kitchen.

  Lillis, weary past belief, came through her door at noon that day, saw Gralf Garn drinking beer in the kitchen while Trudis squirmed in drunken and lubricious pleasure on his lap. Lillis, silent more from exhaustion than prudence, thereupon received Gralf Garn’s greeting: a few rude words, several of them the same word used as noun, adjective, verb, and expletive, and in that single moment of absolute weariness let all resistance go. The inevitable fell into place around her, splitting off determination and hope and mere stubborn will. Her long battle had ended in defeat.

  Honorable defeat, she whispered to herself. At least that!

  Lillis had known Gralf Garn from birth. He was the only child she had ever delivered who came from the womb with teeth that bit the hand that drew him forth. She knew him far better than Trudis ever would, and she was saddened thereby. Trudis was no longer a girl, and would undoubtedly soon be a Ma. It was no longer worth the battle it would take to get her away. She might save the girl from Hench Valley, but for what? Trudis would make a Hench Valley around her wherever she was.

  She left the two of them drinking, and weary though she was, she recollected that she was still considered an attractive woman even after all her childbearing. Accordingly, she shoved a wedge beneath her door. In no other house in Tuckwhip would a wedge have held, but Lillis’s house had been built by Joshua, not merely thrown together. She was already prepared to leave; she needed only to sleep a few hours first. Her few treasures and necessities were already packed, waiting for her in the woods. She would pick them up when she left that night. She further assured her safe departure by dosing Gralf’s bottle when he left it briefly to go outside and relieve himself against the front wall of the house. All the men in Hench Valley did it, marking territory, like dogs. Well, he would have a good nap that would extend into a good night’s sleep. A nice long sleep!

  As a final drop of the bitterness Tuckwhip had held for her, she mused on the fact that Trudis and Gralf were undoubtedly well mated. As river stone to river stone, they were mated: each unyielding as stone, each mind shaped as river stone is shaped, worn, rounded, hard, unusable for any constructive purpose, shaped by long, aimless tumbling in careless waters so it would twist beneath your foot and break an ankle for you, only good for throwing, if one wished to hurt or kill. There were piles of such stones here and there throughout the villages. They were pointed out to women. Those were what would be flung at a woman “fer tawkin’ back ’r not havin’ supper ready.” There was less stoning of women now than in the past. One did not destroy what one could not replace, though when drunk, the men sometimes forgot that. Men who lost their temper ended up with no woman at all, and most men in Hench Valley were already in that category.

  At about midnight she left Hench Valley by the safe and easy ways she would not have been able to travel with Trudis, arriving very soon thereafter near the House of the Oracles. It was a short walk from there to her home. Though the Oracles saw her in transit, they took no particular notice, which would have surprised Lillis had she known. The persons/creatures/individuals, he, she, it, or they who had thus far actually directed her life, however, noted with deep concern that instead of looking at least fifteen years younger than her years—­which she usually did—­on this occasion she showed every year plus a few. She was desperately weary and slept for several days without moving.

  Back in Tuckwhip, both Trudis and Gralf Garn discovered parts of the Rule that neither of them had considered. Morning came and Gralf Garn woke in a strange bed with Trudis sprawled beside him. There was no Lillis in the house. He searched the area around the house, the byre, the garden, even the privy. It being the Midsummer morning, no one was around to ask if anyone had seen Lillis going somewhere to do some healing. To say Gralf Garn was astonished was to say too much; the man was not capable of astonishment, for he had only two, perhaps three, emotions. There was the pleasant feeling of being drunk. There was the edgy feeling of being hungry or lustful. And there was often the heat of anger.

  The worst of it was that when he followed Trudis home, he had not considered that Lillis wouldn’t be there. So far as Gralf had planned—­and he had actually planned to meet Trudis that morning—­Lillis had been the most important part of the deal. Lillis was needed for several reasons. One of them was that she could cook. There were other important reasons also, one of which he had anticipated forcibly explaining to her, so he actually put down his bottle and decided to hunt her down! Everyone else was sleeping off a drunk, with another two nights of being drunk to look forward to. He had no luck at all in getting anyone to go with him to look for her.

  Of his three emotions, anger seemed the most applicable. Trudis was surprised to find herself receiving both the blame for no tea water and the violent chastisement that accompanied it. She went to complain to her mother and was again surprised. Within a few days she had grown accustomed to the reality of constant surprise and constantly being hit for it. That was the way she would live in Hench Valley with Ma Healer gone. Trudis being Trudis, she soon decided being hit was easier than doing anything to prevent it.

  Bein’ hit required no effort at all. She soon didn’t even bother to yell, and Gralf soon gave up hittin’ as useless.

  LILLIS HAD GROWN UP ON a small farmlike place with an oddly assorted pack of relations and quasi-­relations. There was an uncle who spoke several languages, an aunt who had been a surgeon, two ­people Lillis had thought of as moms, one of whom had actually given birth to her, though Lillis was never certain
which of them it was. Both of them knew about animals and farming. There was a man she called Poppa who might have been her father and who had certainly read every book ever written about the history of Earth. There were also several uncles and cousins who knew frighteningly exhaustive information about “onomies” or “ologies” from astro to zoo. All these ­people came and went; all of them had spent time with Lillis, who had learned to read at age three and had been kept well supplied with books ever since. It had not occurred to Lillis that she was being “managed” in any way, nor did it occur to those who helped in the matter that they were “managing” her. It was simply what ­people did with young ones.

  The Oracles had arrived in the vicinity around the time Lillis was born. No one saw them arrive; they were simply there, occupying a series of well-­explored and rather boring caves that had been, seemingly overnight, transformed into living quarters, storage rooms, and vaults. Though the adults in the “family” had always kept their distance from strangers, including these, Lillis had introduced herself to the Oracles during those few unchallenging months between learning to toddle and learning to read. She had been welcomed as a visitor and was welcome to use the multitude of education machines that stood in the front part of the Oracles’ cave. They told her, when she asked who they were, that they were Oracles.

  She asked if they could answer questions, and was told, “All of them—­if we want to.” Since all representations made to her by adults had been accurate in the past, and since the Oracles looked (somewhat vaguely) like adult ­people, she believed this representation to be accurate also and therefore valued her association with the Oracles. She blamed her own ignorance when those answers were almost never particularly useful. She thought her lack of understanding was attributable to her age. In fact, the Oracles often told her she would understand it better when she was older.