Walk to the End of the World by Suzy McKee Charnas

had been wearing at the time. She had refused him, as she was bound to do in order to protect him from contamination. But the man’s Juniors had witnessed the incident, and he wanted some redress for his injured standing. Alldera had been assigned to the Rendery while the Pennelton Seniors considered whether she should be burned for witching the man into missing the token of her uncleanness in the first place. Doing so would restore the drunkard’s self-respect, so it was a likely outcome.
    So Alldera had to be whisked out of Bayo for her life’s sake. The fems in charge of the Rendery would report that she had bolted into the marshes, where her starved corpse presumably would be discovered someday as others had been before.
    It was no news to Servan that some men were excited by the thought of fucking a fem soiled with her monthly blood-tribute to the Moonwitch. But somehow the account rang false to him. The campaign that old Fossa had mounted was too dangerous to the fems to be performed merely to save the life of this pie-faced youngster. How valuable could one fem be to other ferns? It couldn’t be simply that the two fems had been owned by the same master; that was a source of friction rather than closeness among fems. There had to be something else to justify the lengths to which these fems were going to get Alldera out of Bayo. Even the Rovers wouldn’t be missed, Fossa promised; that could be managed. They had no guarantee that one of the men would not at some point inform the Board of the organization they had found here in Bayo, with the inevitable result. Yet if these fems were worried by any such possibility, they didn’t show it.
    Well, then, suppose they were to be reckoned with in some way that was not yet clear. Let them try to trick him and use him in some game of their own. He accepted the challenge. Everybody was an antagonist, after all, at least potentially. The remedy was simply to recognize that this was so, and to try to use the other person before, and better than, he used you.
    At last, the preparations were done. The fems picked up every scrap of cloth and thread and put out the lights in the kitchen. Fossa and young Alldera took the men out on the roof of the next building, which connected directly on the west side with the causeways. There, the fugitives found themselves suddenly in the midst of a creaking, droning party of hags whose job was to deploy the laver-carts at various points on the causeways for collection of the next day’s harvest. The moon was up, a mere scrap of light not nearly bright enough to show the incongruity of the men’s tall forms to any watching sentries. In no time at all, the lighted windows and the music of Bayo fell behind.
    Soon the old fems with their rattling carts milled to a stop in the windy darkness. Their mumbling and singing died. The stars sparked cold light from the surfaces of the laver-ponds that stretched alway, glimmering, on either side of the causeway.
    Fossa, a stick figure in the starlight, stepped forward. She said, ‘Safe journey, masters.’
    ‘Too bad it’s not you coming with us, old dam,’ Servan said. On
that note the men and the young fem, canted forward under the pack-basket on her back, departed westward toward the City as fast as they could travel.
    The idea was to cover as much ground as they could that night, unobserved, rest all morning in one of the shelters built into all major intersections of the causeways, and in the afternoon turn and move as slowly as possible back in the direction of Bayo, as if coming from the City instead of fleeing toward it. It was not unusual for a Senior of one company to inspect, without warning, the work of another company’s Juniors. They often did it, in the name of competition and in hopes of shaving a rival company’s work-points. A day of slow ‘inspection’, followed by another night of hard running in the opposite direction, should see the travelers to the City walls.
    It was the