Dave Duncan - West of January

“I’ve brought a present for you, wetlander.” He wheezed a sort of chuckle and spread a large leaf on my chest. It felt cool and damp, but its coolness was not the cause of the shiver that convulsed me then. I looked over at Ing-aa. In the light from the doorway, I could see that there was a leaf lying on him also.

“Eggs?”

“Silkworm eggs,” the old man agreed. “Thirty of them. Try to rear as many as you can and please the lady. The more you carry to the end, the longer you get to heal afterward.”

I think I would have cursed him and Ayasseshas most roundly then, but another shadow blocked the light for a moment. It dropped its garment, and I recognized Quetti. His pale skin was scrolled with dark lines of raw flesh, as if his slender frame was wrapped in a giant fishnet. He moved to the one vacant bed.

“Help me, please?” His young voice quavered more noticeably than it had earlier. Assisted by the old man, Quetti managed to stretch out on the silk without damage to any of the vile parasites clinging to him.

He raised his head to look across at me. “Us wetlanders have to stick together, Knobil.” If that was humor, there was no joy in it; it might have been an appeal for comfort. He was holding three fingers over one eye. The silkworm slug had almost reached it. An oozing red stripe on his neck and cheek showed where it had grazed his skin on the way there. Another was progressing along his forearm, and there were two in his armpit. I retched and looked away without speaking. I had no sympathy to spare for Quetti.

He lay back with a sigh. “Othisosish? You’ll come and tie me soon, when it’s gone by?”

“That I will, lad,” the old man replied gently. The drape fell back behind him.

For a moment there was dark silence, broken by the mindless whimpers from the thing on the bed across from me and the animal-like wailing from the other huts nearby.

“How can you do that?” I yelled at Quetti. “Just lie there and be eaten alive?”

“They only take the top layer. It grows back. Hardly a scar. Except for things like nipples, of course.”

“But it hurts?”

“Oh yes, it hurts. Indeed it hurts. Especially when they get big like this…but they’ll start spinning soon, and then it’ll be all over.”

“Until the next time?”

“Until my lady asks me to pasture another crop,” he agreed.

I was drenched with sweat from the heat in that foul place, and yet my insides felt cold as death.

“The big ones are the worst?” Ing-aa asked in his deep voice.

There was no reply for a moment, while Quetti battled agony. Then he released one of the gasping sighs I had heard before and said, “No. The little ones. They burrow.”

“Burrow?” I wailed.

“Ears…and things. I couldn’t save this eye if this was a little one. It would get under my fingers. I’ve been lucky. I haven’t lost anything important yet.”

“But how can you just lie there and be eaten?”

There was a longer silence then, until he said sadly, “You still don’t understand? I love Ayasseshas. We all do.”

“But…”

“Who is this fat woman that Shisisannis has gone to fetch?”

“Her name is Misi.”

“So when Misi gets here, Ayasseshas will untie you. It’s best to be untied and walking around…healthier. Force-feeding is a lot of work, and dangerous. The mad ones usually die from choking while they’re being fed. They often manage to rub the babies off against the silk, too. It’s better to be up and free…and willing. Except for sleep. That’s why I asked Othisosish to come back and tie me. I might pull them off in my sleep.”

“Sleep? You can sleep?”

“I haven’t slept in so long… Yes, I think I’ll sleep.”

His voice choked off in a whimper of pain, but he had said enough. I could see how Ayasseshas would give me a choice: I must nourish her crop of slugs, or she would pasture Misi instead. Misi was huge and would be capable of feeding many silkworms, but her skin was darker than mine. Only wetlanders made water silk.

And when I went mad, then Misi would be trussed and cropped anyway. Even knowing that, I would not be able to refuse the spinster. I would try…but yet I was a coward. I did not think I could endure as Quetti was doing. Oh, Misi! I must not fail you!

“And it’s that potion that does it, isn’t it?” I said bitterly. “She gives you that and you copulate insanely, and after that you can refuse her nothing?”

“We worship her,” Ing-aa said softly. “We will do even this to please her. I only wish I were white like you, wetlander. The worms I shall feed will make black silk, of very little value, so I must try to endure much and give her many crops. But I am strong. I will bear anything to make her happy. Double-cropping—anything! She is my queen, my love.”

“Your love!” How could these deluded fools serve such a monster? I could guess now that Misi had trapped me in the same way as Ayasseshas had ensnared her army. I had not realized earlier that my feelings for Misi had sprung from that diabolic potion. And yet, even knowing it, I loved her just as much. Love, it is said, is blind.

My companions’ mindless obedience to the spinster seemed like inexplicable insanity to me. My love for Misi was a holy, joyous, precious thing.

Spread out helpless in the fetid dark, I lay for a long time, sorrowing for Misi, listening to occasional stifled sobs from Quetti and the rising, falling chorus of agony from other huts.

Hrarrh had known, of course. Ants knew more of Vernier than most races did, and his original tribe might even have dwelt within a forest. This was the vengeance he had wanted. Eventually some trader would come, offering water silk. Hrarrh would buy it for his wife, so she could have a bright-dyed gown to cover her squat ugliness. Every time he saw it he would savor his memories of me.

Hrarrh knew how my screams sounded. He could imagine the rest.

He would have his revenge in full.

Yet it was not the thought of Hrarrh that troubled me most. The blackness that choked me then was worse than anything he had done to me, worse than anything I had known in the ants’ nest. There, in the spinster’s pen, in the darkest moment of my life, I was faced with the terrible knowledge that my entire life was a failure. I had failed the mother I had sworn to avenge, failed to follow through on my promise to become an angel, failed the seawoman I had married, failed to escape from the traders when that had been my intention, and now I had failed to protect Misi. I had betrayed the woman I loved. Yes, I knew her faults—but no woman is perfect, and men must follow where their hearts lead them. I had betrayed Misi to the spinster. I had been unworthy of my beloved, and that is a man’s ultimate failure.

I wept for Misi…only for Misi.

My chest had begun to itch.

MY DARLING MISI… At first I had been fooled by her habitual pretense of stupidity. Later, blinded by love, I had overestimated her cunning.

Silk raising goes on all the time. In nature, the silkworms are tiny parasites of a small burrowing animal called a ground pig. Something in human skin delays their cocoon stage and allows them to grow into the monsters I had seen on Quetti. The eggs can be picked up around any ground pig burrow. It is not difficult to tie up the human victim and seed him, so there is always a small supply of silk trickling into the trade routes.

But, as Quetti had told me, it is hard to restrain an unwilling subject so firmly that he cannot scrape the worms off. It is hard to feed him for long against his will. The key to successful silk production is the virgin’s web and voluntary pasturing. Male spinsters have been recorded, but they fare poorly, for any spinster is an unpopular neighbor, needing an army for both defense and recruitment. Female warriors are just not as effective as males.