GEFFEN AND RAVNA: Four Sestinas

The men who brought the woman in for spying

--Ravna the Farroes, and barely a woman

they said--cast lots for her, men from levels

dark under, deep in the pits of the Station.

But Daniel Armsbearer gave her charge to Geffen

the Wardman, a choice that set those men to laughter

on that last outpost world where Terra Station

hardly called outward, least of all in laughter

to Farroes Colony. Nothing but skirmish and spying

between them over the broad snowfield, its levels

strata of rotted snow below lead sky. Geffen

the Wardman had never been known to need a woman.

And anyway, she was a Farroes woman,

alien, spined like a lizard, home in the cold levels

and angled cells of a striated station,

who looked across at Terra onyx-eyed, spying

and skirmish her iron lovers. Geffen

listened to her captive voice, no laughter

there, in interrogation. Always other levels

of meaning rose in her words, like harmonics. A woman

of fine bones, muscular swift legs, spying

clumsily, angular alien in a Terra Station

with no secrets, for Farroes who did not need them. Geffen

did not consider this, not given to laughter.

Of spying, skirmish, levels, Station, Geffen

lifelong an unquestioner of levels

cared nothing; he looked and wanted Ravna, a woman

no matter how stark the tips of her spines. Spying?

No matter that, nor how much he stirred laughter

among fat whores or grizzled warriors in the firelit Station.

In those days of her captivity Ravna watched Geffen,

a thickhaired somber man, seemed to be spying

even asleep with onyx eyes thin-lidded. Laughter

as strange to both as they to each other's levels,

laughter rolled always down the walls of the Station.

Sometimes it caused a trembling in the woman.

When Geffen felt air shivering around the woman

and heard laughter shattering off the levels

he damned skirmish and spying and every filthy station.

He waited out Ravna's presence for a word

spoken to him alone, her eye's direction:

for her thin narrow tongue to click with her light breath.

Then Daniel, a dishfaced man with sunken eyes,

said: "Days are shortening, and there's damned poor hunting."

She clenched her faintly patterned arms to her body

with a rasping of fingers over crêpy skin; the word

was of warriors who spent the summers hunting

leathery brooding beasts that grazed snow, breath

melting the frost over yellow groundleaf clumps, eyes

whiteblind sensing a warm dark direction.

She said, "Geffen, will they kill me?" hugging her body,

spines straining her robe's cord laces, the word

kill clicking against her small teeth with a breath

like a blade. His word. He looked in no direction

down smoky archways with cookpots steaming, eyes

sore with watching, soul dark with his sexual body.

"If they try, there'll be more than one for hunting."

Geffen was torn from his heavy dream over the breath

of prisoners in their night terrors, by a word

hissed: "Your serpent woman's gone whoring." His body

twitched from its thick sleep, but no direction

led to escape in Terra Station, where hunting

was short, and no game. Wardwoman Katrin's eyes

challenged. She tossed him his filched key. "What's the word,

Geffen? Shall I leave her to Daniel?"

Ravna's body

stood tight. She was pinchbruised and out of breath,

her nails bloody from scratching at captors. Her eyes

knew no direction that was not death's direction.

Katrin laughed. "He might not think she's worth hunting."

"No. I will not deliver her."

Ravna's eyes

turned defiant.

"Why'd you do that, woman?"

She spat. "What d'you care, you enemy? Hunting,

not whoring's--isn't it?--your direction,

and you're not Farroes, are you, with that body?

Are you?" A fall of icicles in a word.

"Farroes?" Her eyes were spears. His body

twinged cold, as if he'd caught the breath of hunting.

And he thought: I have waited too long for a word.

"Seven years ago we sent him to spy--and he's mine.

Trimmed off his spines, thickened his meat and bones

with drugs and strange foods, and trained him to forget

Farroes and be a thick fat lump of Earth.

We trained him too well; he has forgotten his people

and he has changed so far he might be, yes, you...."

She stood in the angles of her narrow bones.

A whisper: "We're leaving here, you see? I want what's mine.

I came and let the lewd-fingered of the Earth

pick over my body, because I don't forget

even if he means nothing to either people.

Geffen," a breath, "I want him to be you."

Geffen sweated cold. "It's easy for you

to want. I'm no betrayer. My people

are not Farroes, we're your fat lumps from Earth.

Get up, you! It's morning." He shook the racked bones

of wretches on plank beds. "These Farroes don't forget

where they come from, do they?" "No, but they're not mine."

Each hour the question weighed: Geffen, is it you?

I want him to be you.

Woman, you turn my bones

to water. However could I forget

you? She did not speak that day, but at night, "Mine,

Geffen, I want to know..." He raged: "If I am of Earth

I cannot love a woman of my people

and if I am Farroes, I'm outlandish. You say, mine,

mine! But I want firesides, meat and drink, my people

aren't Farroes from the cold levels where my bones

ache!" "Then take me to bed and let me judge you.

It is a small secret to keep. You will forget

it and me soon enough when you are back on Earth."

She fell silent. and was one of her people

again, a prisoner, one the gods forget.

When he put off his leather plates and rolled his bones

in his rough blankets he felt weak as a child, Earth

was far and alien. Her cool hand's touch: "Who are you

really, Geffen?" "Whoever, you are mine."

Her bones angled his angled arms. "I forget,"

he kissed the salt tips of her spines, "I forswear Earth's people

because Farroes is Paradise and you are mine."

Geffen thought her smell was like flowers of snow

his hard scarred flesh could not melt. He called, Ravna!

in his dream because she seemed to be moving away

murmuring, I will never find him before I die,

and there were avenues of green trees but they were cold,

and something dark that he could not remember.

He woke to see her lying like a snow

carved statue on her rack bed. He turned away.

Dread mantled him. He wrenched his mind to remember

anything of Farroes, anything of Ravna,

spent his free day at hunting, shivered with the cold

and, for the first time, to see a creature die.

He came from hunting heart-weary, with snow

in his beard. Daniel was cursing Katrin, and Ravna

gone. "Not far from here, not far enough away,"

he whispered.

"Then find her, Geffen." I will die

before I find him.

Yes. I will not remember

last night, or not for long. Deep in the cold

and fireless levels, his lantern lit Ravna

enfolding a drunken gunner. He pulled her away

and kicked the man. She wept. Her skin was cold,

her bones thin. "Don't kill me, Geffen! Remember--"

"Nothing. You are a schemer and liar and you will die."

"It was no lie that I loved you, Geffen!" The snow

melted on him and he delivered her: to die

in the deep bed of the treacherous, the shroud of snow.

When he

washed in hot cloths to turn the anguish away

the threads caught on his back's invisible scars Ravna!

and he remembered--he was forced to remember

their child's death, and their despair, and their cold.

He beat at the earth, coughed grief, and begged to die

until the breath bled in his throat.

Ravna!

The rumor that he was Farroes faded away.

Some dream he went hunting and was tusked. Some remember,

or claim, he hung about tavern kitchens complaining of cold,

gnawing stale crusts with his wine. Or, that snow

claimed him, to die unfound.

Or: there was no Ravna,

no Geffen, only the baffled and weary drifting away

from a cold world where there are none left to remember.