The Warrior Who Carried Life Read online

  ChiZine Publications

  COPYRIGHT

  The Warrior Who Carried Life © 1985, 2013 by Geoff Ryman

  Introduction © 2013 by Wendy Gay Pearson

  Cover artwork © 2013 by Erik Mohr

  Cover design and interior design © 2013 by Samantha Beiko

  All rights reserved.

  Published by ChiZine Publications

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  First published in Great Britain in Unwin Paperbacks 1985.

  EPub Edition APRIL 2013 ISBN: 978-1-92746-940-8

  All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.

  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  Toronto, Canada

  www.chizinepub.com

  [email protected]

  Proofread by Sandra Kasturi, Michael Matheson and Zara Ramaniah

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

  Dedicated to

  My Grandmother

  Edna Florence Burn Pascoe

  1889–1928

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  The Wells of Vision

  The Destroyed Woman

  The Little Thing

  that Feels Large

  Violence Begets

  Dear Daughter of

  the Important House

  The Other Country

  Flower Power

  The Wound Between

  the Worlds

  The Beast that

  Talks to God

  The City from the

  Better Times

  The Secret Rose

  The Warriors who

  Carried Life

  When the Dragon Wakes,

  We Will See Him Together,

  Each of You, and Me

  After Magic

  About the Author

  Wendy Gay Pearson

  More Dark Fiction from ChiZine Publications

  Introduction

  It is always hard to know how to start an introduction—and then, how to continue it without giving too much of the story away. But I figure you can never go wrong in the world of science fiction and fantasy by imitating that great and witty master of the genre, Ursula K. Le Guin. Asked to write an introduction to James Tiptree Jr.’s Star Songs of an Old Primate, she first quotes Tiptree as an epigraph: “Abominations, that’s what they are: afterwords, introductions, all the dribble around a story.” How then to write an introduction that’s not dribble?

  Like Le Guin, “I was honoured, delighted, and appalled” when Geoff Ryman approached me to write an introduction to this important re-issue of The Warrior Who Carried Life. Unfortunately, perhaps, for you, dear reader, I am unable to match the brevity of Le Guin’s introduction to Tiptree, where she tested a number of variations, such as

  1) Here

  Are some stories.

  2) Here are

  Some stories.

  I suppose I could reduce this introduction to: “Here is a novel.”

  But, like Le Guin herself, I find myself unable and unwilling to leave the novel’s reader with something she already knows, if she’s picking this book up in a bookstore or even ordering it online. Le Guin’s eventual two-liner is, “Here are some superbly strong sad funny and very beautiful stories,” a description which, amended to the novel form, seems very apt for The Warrior Who Carried Life—it is, indeed, “superbly strong sad funny and very beautiful.”1

  The first work of Geoff’s I ever read was a short story in Interzone. I think it may have been “O Happy Day,” a profoundly hard and challenging work that has occupied my mind ever since—although, at this distance, I cannot be sure. What I am sure of is that the first novel of Geoff’s I read was Was (1992). I read it because my partner, Susan Knabe, came home from university one day and said to me, “You have to read this. It’s fabulous.” In fact, we both thought it was fabulous and we have both, since that day, written and published on it. As one does, however, when one comes across a fabulous new author, I immediately hunted down and read as much of Geoff’s work as I could find, including his first three novels, The Unconquered Country, The Warrior Who Carried Life, and The Child Garden.

  Over the two decades since my first encounter with Geoff’s work, I have written a number of academic articles about it, primarily on Was, The Child Garden, and Lust. With Susan, I co-edited a special issue of Extrapolation on Geoff’s work, that included articles on all of his novels except for 253 or Tube Theatre, a work first published as hypertext before being re-structured as a print book. I tell you this, dear reader, not so much in the hope that you will develop a yearning to read what scholars have to say about Geoff—although some of what we say is itself “superbly strong sad funny” in its own academic way, but to start to indicate to you the importance of Geoff’s work in the fields of science fiction and fantasy and magic realism and hypertext and . . .

  But you can judge for yourselves the genres in which Geoff writes.The Warrior Who Carried Life is, like all of Geoff’s work, difficult to contain within the boundaries of a given genre. Superficially, I suppose, one might label it Fantasy—there are swords, and magic, and shapeshifting, and . . . But it has its own little touches of science fiction and it most certainly demonstrates Geoff’s interest in the problem of how we might heal the harms that we, as humans, do to the world and each other, an interest that crosses genres as easily as Geoff himself does. Warrior could also be labelled “magic realism,” a genre that began in Latin America with Borges and Garcia-Marquez and others, but was very quickly adopted by writers from places as far-flung as Canada and India.

  Indeed, one could even say that The Warrior Who Carried Life, with its gender-bending hero, Cara, is an early precursor of the boom in queer Canadian magic realist writing that began in the late 1980s. In this sense, Warrior has commonalities with quite different works, most notably, for me, the late Timothy Findley’s only science fictional novel, Headhunter, which has its own touches of magic realism (strikingly the emergence of Kurtz from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness into modern day Toronto).

  While Headhunter is an allegory about AIDS and social attitudes toward homosexuality built, magically, out of Heart of Darkness, Warrior, Geoff’s second novel, is more mythic than allegorical. Warrior draws on two myths or creation stories, if you will. The more obvious is the story of Adam and Eve (here Haddam and Hawwah) and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden; the less obvious, although it plays perhaps the larger part in the novel, is the Gilgamesh story—except that, in Geoff’s bountiful imagination, Gilgamesh here is a young woman who uses her coming-of-age year-long transformation into a beast to turn herself into that most beastly of th
ings, a male warrior, in order to avenge her mother’s death at the hands of the monstrous Galu.

  Poetic in its language and extraordinary in its feats of imagination,Warrior’s mythic qualities carry us from life in a vaguely Asian-inspired village to the Garden itself and back again. Peopled with monsters—the Galu themselves are a remarkable invention, a species birthed by and fed on hatred—but full of beauty, Warrior lures the reader into a mythic landscape that, once seen, will never be forgotten. Cara herself (and despite Cara’s bulging muscles, her penis, and her magical armour, Geoff never lets you forget that Cara is female) is both a hero and an ordinary person caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Her heroism is never quite enough; she is constantly reminded that heroes make mistakes—and some of Cara’s feed the monstrous Galu in devastating ways. But she also never abandons the goal of bringing what healing she can to the people and villages that the Galu have ravaged.

  In a sense, gender might be understood, as Jo Walton has pointed out, as one of the book’s main themes.2 More precisely, I think gender functions as an allegory in this novel for the unnecessary and damaging ways in which humanity has been divided. The novel is full of clefts and rifts that open and are (sometimes) healed. Haddam’s patriarchal desires produce the Galu and bring death, division, and destruction to the world. It is up to Cara and her lover, Stefile, to try and mend the damage.

  A related theme and one that is common, albeit in very different ways, to all of Geoff’s work, is the question of whether stories and storytelling can help to heal the harms we experience in—and do to—the world. Here I can do no better than to quote from the introduction to the Extrapolation issue:

  . . . our facility for healing is something which is, at least in Ryman’s terms, bound up with the role that literature plays in enabling that healing: both in terms of identifying that point in which harm enters the world through stories (both narratives and meta-narratives) and in how (other) stories might be the sites through which that harm can be undone.3

  The Warrior Who Carried Life identifies one moment in which harm enters the world, a moment in which a particular story, the story of Adam and Eve, both identifies its own harm and yet can also be said to have done and to continue to do grievous harm in the world. Without this story, would patriarchy have been born? Would women have been blamed for the entry of evil and death? Would heroism have been attached to men, along with the tendency to violence, and not to women? These are some of the quite difficult questions that, at least in my reading of it, Warrior asks us to consider. But does Warrior—can Warrior—propose any way of healing harms of such huge dimension?

  This is, of course, one reason why Warrior is told as a myth: to counter a myth, one needs another myth. And if that myth is profoundly damaging, the counter-myth needs to be profoundly healing. That original myth, the Garden of Eden myth, was countered in Christian mythology by the story of a birth. Warrior, too, has its birth story, the story of the child conceived by Stefile and fathered by Cara.

  Of course, the child of a slave girl and a warrior who is also a woman is necessarily going to be magical—but there, dear reader, I will leave you, for I do not wish to spoil the journey for you. You will take it with Cara and Stefile and, like them, you will go to strange and magical places. And, like them, you will find wonders and, perhaps, healing through this “superbly strong sad funny and very beautiful” novel.

  Wendy Gay Pearson, PhD

  London, Ontario, 2013

  * * *

  1 Ursula K. Le Guin. “Introduction to Star Songs of an Old Primate.” The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ed. Susan Wood. New York: Perigee, 1979. 179; 180.

  2 Jo Walton, “Primal and Mythic: Geoff Ryman’s The Warrior Who Carried Life” (http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/11/primal-and-mythic-geoff-rymans-the-warrior-who-carried-life)

  3 Susan Knabe and Wendy Gay Pearson, “Introduction: Mundane Science Fiction, Harm and Healing the World” (Extrapolation 49.2 [2008]), 188.

  The Wells of Vision

  Cal Cara Kerig was five years old when she saw her mother killed. Her mother was mad, Cara was told, and madness was a disruption of the universe.

  It was in the last days of the Gara han Gara, whose name meant Even Pressure over the Land. There was a long drought: rain did not fall for over half a year and the rice growing in steps up the canyon wall began to die. Cara’s mother went to the wells of vision, which were forbidden to women, to find why the drought had come.

  “Cara? Cara?” her mother came to her whispering one night. “I am going away, Cara. There is something very important that I have to do. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back.” Cara’s mother was sweet and startling, with unruly hair and an enormous smile and a conspiratorial way of talking to Cara that did not make her feel like a child at all.

  She was gone many days. When she returned, she did not look the same. She was even thinner. Cara could see the bones in her shoulders and the strings of muscle around her mouth when she smiled. Cara screamed and wept at the change.

  “Don’t cry, Cara, please don’t cry, there’s no reason to cry. I’ve had my vision. I know why the drought has come. It’s a wonderful reason. It’s because of you.”

  Cara’s father, who was much older than his wife, put her to bed. Cara saw him bar the door. He knelt down in front of her, to look into her eyes. “You must not let her out, Dear Daughter,” her father said. “Even if she asks. She must stay here, safe, with us. Promise me?”

  Cara did not do as she was told. When her father was out, carrying buckets of water to the high fields, she went to the door and opened it. Her mother came out dancing and clapping her hands. They had great fun together. Her mother put on her red wedding dress, and her wedding hat, a crown of brass, with brass flowers on long stems. “Because this is a special day,” she told Cara. Together they went down to the rocks, where the women had once beaten their linen clean by the river. Now the women sat huddled in black, covering their faces, staring at the cracked mud that was beginning to bake dry. Some of the men, helpless, sick with terror, sat with them.

  Cara’s mother began to dance among them, willowy, skeletal, and she began to sing in a high, wavering voice, praising the drought. She sang of great disruption to come, the destruction of the great City down the river, a harvest of blood, a drought of womankind. She held up Cara with her insect-thin arms. “Behold,” she chanted. “This is the one. This is the one.” The village wives covered their ears and fled, leaving only the men, in an angry circle.

  “You call this drought wonderful? You praise it?”

  “Yes, oh yes, um,” said Cara’s mother in her breathless voice. “All the wonderful things I see begin with it.”

  “You and your madness will bring these things upon us!” the men exclaimed, desperate for a reason for the drought, and a cure.

  “Oh I won’t. God will,” replied Cara’s mother, who had always been strange, and rich.

  Men could not kill women, it was said, or the blood would turn into serpents. But the men had their dogs. “Masu! Masu!” the men ordered, and pointed. The beasts cocked their heads to one side, not understanding. Cara’s mother called the dogs by name, and petted them, and laughed, and tried to make them think it was only a game as they snapped at her long red sleeves. Then one of them caught her, and she stumbled in the mud, and fell. Cara started to scream, and the men closed in about her, and pulled her away so that she would not see, but Cara thought they were trying to stop her from helping her mother, so she kicked and wriggled, and bit the hand that covered her eyes, and saw. She saw the dogs burrow their snouts into her mother’s stomach and make quick chewing motions until they had a grip on something they could tear. They lapped the blood and whined anxiously for their share. Far away up the hill, Cara’s father howled as he ran.

  The wedding dress was washed and repaired and returned to them. The brass crown had been polished. Cara’s father did not speak of his wife again. He did not remarry eithe
r. Cara, who had been a brave and cheerful child, became aloof and disdainful. She hated the village. She hated the men. She ached with wishing she had not opened the door. Forever after she felt incomplete and angry, as if she had been robbed of part of herself. She spent most of her time in the library of the house, reading to her baby brother the tales of Keekamis, the Only Hero, that her mother had read to her. Keekamis had gone into the Land of the Dead on a funeral barge carrying the body of his friend. Cara tried to go there too to find her mother. She drifted many miles down the river in a little boat until her father found her.

  “How far is it until I’m dead?” she asked him. He didn’t answer. He rocked her silently, and wept.

  A new ruling Family came into power, blaming the Gara han Gara for the drought. The old Family was marched out of the City, and stoned to death. The rain came again in late autumn, heavy from a dull sky, washing away dried mud from the rocks as though it had been blood.

  At unexpected times, all through Cara’s childhood, until she was an adult, the flavour of her mother’s presence would return to her: when she was lonely, just before supper, in the sunset; when she tasted the year’s first honey; when she heard someone singing far away in a high, unsteady voice. She could not remember her mother’s face. But she knew that, after death, she would know her mother’s soul the instant she found it. Her mother’s soul was so often with her.

  Then the terrible things she had prophesied began to come true.

  The Destroyed Woman

  I was a wolf, for my year,” said Sari, as she fussed. She was a plump little bondwoman with fat, shuffling feet. She was wrapping Cara in strips of white cloth, for her initiation. They were on a hillside at night, under a sycamore.

  “I hunted with the pack. I had a wolf for a mate, and a litter of wolf cubs too,” Sari said. “They come and visit me sometimes, in a full moon.”