The Female of the Species. Lionel Shriver
jokes. Since no one else was there, no one will remember that we ever held each other on that bed and kissed and ran our fingers through each other’s hair.
Perhaps at the end of their litany both Gray and Charles looked around the room in confusion, wondering, To whom am I talking, anyway? I must be talking to myself. So, since there was no one else in the cabin, Gray did not need to excuse herself, but turned on her heel and walked out the door. It must have been disconcerting for a woman who could control the weather to step into a torrent and immediately be drenched to the skin.
Charles turned away and went back to building his model. Yet had Charles watched Gray a moment longer he would have seen her fall from grace most literally. Her foot slipped at the top of the ladder to pitch her ten feet through the air to the thick black mud below.
As she lay spitting mud out of her mouth, Gray was sure that her left arm had never been in precisely this position in its life. She thought, Get up, but for some reason she did not get up. All that rose were her eyes, and as she took them up from the ground, they met a pair of long, muddy, patient feet, and, at the top, other eyes, with great frightening whites and too much intelligence. Gray found herself thinking rather irrelevantly that Africans were lucky to have waterproof hair. As strands dripped into her face, she wished hers would bead like that, with smart gleaming droplets crowning her head. For the goddess was looking poorly; Odinaye, princely and serene.
“I help you?” asked Odinaye in English, extending his hand.
Gray didn’t take it. She felt suddenly as if the arm under her chest were a filthy secret she should keep to herself and protect. “I’ll be fine,” said Gray, pointedly in Il-Ororen. “Even a god must rest sometimes.”
“Kaiser,” he said, like Charles. “No rest in ground.” There was that gleam in his eyes again, that slight smile at his mouth, as he grasped her right arm and started to pull her up. When Gray gasped on her knees he let go. It had been a small, dry cry, but it was unmistakably the sound of pain.
With his eyebrows high and a look of feigned solicitude and surprise, Odinaye looked down at Gray’s left arm. Gray, too, couldn’t resist discovering what was hanging on the other end of her elbow. The flesh was swelling and purpling as they watched. There was a foreign object poking into her arm. It took her a full moment to realize that the object was sticking not in but out—that it was her own bone. All of this was bad enough, but worst of all for the immortal on her knees was the other, that substance, and Gray kept wishing it would rain harder; but the rain could not wash down her arm fast enough to rinse away her bright-red secret winding its watery way in streams to the tip of her elbow and pooling in the crook of her arm.
“Oh my,” said Gray, “look at that.” She tried for a tone of mild, disinterested curiosity; to a surprising extent she succeeded, too. Yet the whites of Odinaye’s eyes loomed large before her, and she was sure now that this man knew her every weakness, her every flaw—that he could see not only that her bones were fragile and her blood red as his, but that she had stolen a roll of Life Savers from a drugstore when she was ten.
“I call help,” said Odinaye, and he was now unabashedly smiling, his teeth sharp, shining in the rain.
“No—” said Gray, but Odinaye was already shouting; four other natives appeared around her. She thought clearly: They are witnesses. Coldly Gray requested a board. Refusing any other assistance, she placed the wood under her arm and stood, carefully holding her limb before her like a roast on a platter. All this while the natives stared, and not so much at her arm as at her face. Gray knew this and gave them a fine performance. Those muscles were a miracle of ordinariness and careless physical comfort. Standing straight as ever, Gray dismissed her parishioners and balanced herself elegantly rung by rung up to Corgie’s cabin. It was a shame Charles missed this ascent—it was one of those moments he would have hated but also admired, the way he felt about most things she did, but maybe for once the admiration might have won out. It was hard, after all, to strike a fine figure covered in black mud, or to look that haughty and regal and unaffected when in the very process of being dethroned.
“I think we’re in trouble,” said Gray from behind Charles.
“Woman,” said Charles, not looking up from his model, “we’ve been in trouble from day one.” He may not have fallen at her feet for returning so soon after such a fight, but for once his woodchips would stay where he put them, and he bound the sticks with dry grass easily and with satisfaction.
“We’re in extra-special trouble today.”
There was a strain to her voice, but after such a scene he’d expect that. “So you came back,” he said, still focused on his monument, “to admit you don’t mind being a goddess. Why don’t we have a drink on it, Kaiser?”
Charles put his knife and grasses down and turned around just as Gray was saying, “Maybe two.” Though her vision was dancing, Gray did succeed in watching Corgie’s face go through a transformation—all its cockiness sloughed off. Gray wondered if she’d ever seen Charles look—serious. “Jesus fucking Christ,” said Charles, reaching immediately for the board on which Gray’s arm was laid, and taking her swiftly to lie on his bed.
Gray kept trying to explain reasonably what had happened and to warn him about Odinaye while Charles cleaned her up, but he kept telling her to shut up, and finally she did. Gray did not protest when Charles took off all her clothes, which were caked with mud and soaked through; he undressed her tenderly, but also with a careful asexual air. She was surprised she didn’t mind lying before him naked. Without embarrassment she let him sponge her clean. He covered her slim, shivering body with a blanket. At last he reached for her left arm, swabbing it delicately. Gray turned her head to the side and pressed her cheek into the pillow.
There seemed to be a commotion building outside.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Charles, pushing her back down.
The sound got more insistent. Waves of discontented murmuring washed through the room.
“You know, Kaiser,” said Corgie softly, brushing the matted hair away from her forehead, “we’re going to have to put that bone of yours back. You might need it someday.”
Gray nodded, and tried to smile. “I had,” she said, “grown rather attached—”
“Shut up,” said Charles fondly.
Outside, there were shouts. For a few bars the crowd struck up a chorus. Its words were unmistakable: “White skin! Red blood!” Il-Ororen shouted. “White skin! Red blood!”
Charles acted as if he heard nothing. “I’m going to get you some honey wine. I’d give my right arm right now—if you’ll forgive the expression—for a good bottle of brandy, but then it would also be nice to have morphine and a hospital and the entire faculty of Yale Medical School. Wine will have to do.” Corgie started out the door, paused, turned back to take his gun. As he walked out of the cabin the crowd grew silent.
“Dugon.” He spoke calmly in Il-Ororen to one of the natives in the front row. “Bring me two jugs of honey wine.”
Dugon looked at the warriors on either side of him and then at the ground. He shifted his weight from foot to foot.
“Dugon,” said Corgie with exaggerated patience, “did you hear me? I meant now.”
“Il-Cor-gie,” said Dugon, not looking Charles in the eye, “is it true about Ol-Kai-zer? That her bones break and her flesh bleeds?”
“Dugon,” said Charles, bearing down on the warrior with those eyes of his that could do their work awfully well when they had to—even if Dugon was already convinced that Charles was a mere mortal, he was discovering it didn’t make much difference. “You changed the subject. We were speaking of wine.”
Yet Dugon was surrounded by warriors who made small motions of discouragement; Dugon looked up at Corgie with an expression of appeal.
Charles let his gun dangle down toward Dugon’s head. “Remember this?” Dugon nodded. “Do you doubt my magic enough