Big Herb’s eldest boy, Carl, helped him in the iron-smith’s shop. He was a tall,
lanky kid with a shock of black hair, an explosion of freckles on his face, an
inquiring mind, but a gentle nature. That was why Uncle Tyas had chosen him to
partner Krysty in his unarmed combat lessons. Krysty remembered overhearing
Uncle Tyas talking enthusiastically to Peter Maritza-—not “old” Peter Maritza
then; by no means “old,” even though he was a good ten years ahead of Uncle
Tyas—out on the porch one night when she’d been preparing dinner, his voice an
excited hiss, a new idea clamoring in his brain.
“You get it, Peter? There’s Krysty—she’s a girl.”
“Tyas, I’m not an imbecile. I know she’s a blasted girl.”
“Okay, okay. But she’s a girl, right? Weaker sex, right?”
“Not around here, buddy. Not in Harmony. Talk like that’ll get you strung up
from the—”
“All right! In general, Peter! Generally speaking! Weaker sex in quotes, right?
Then there’s young Carl—“
“You saying he’s weak? You saying he’s some kind of milksop? Why, I’ve seen him
at the forge—”
“Peter, will you listen to me! Okay, he beats the shit out of all that red-hot
metal in his daddy’s ironshop, but he’s no great shakes when it comes to
anything else, right? Sure he’s no weakling, but he’s not what you or I’d call
positive, you get me? Got no drive in him. Just like his father. He’s faced with
a raving canny, y’know what would happen? He’d just let himself get eaten up,
sure as hell. Well, I aim to change all that. Change ’em both. Damn right.”
And he had. Changed them both. Especially Krysty. At the age of fourteen she’d
learned how to throw a guy to the ground in one second flat, how to disable an
adversary with a single one-handed squeeze, how to cripple a man for life with
one well-directed punch.
She found that wrestling with Carl in a rough-and-tumble scrimmage was sexually
arousing. That in close-quarters proximity to him, in a situation in which both
were trying their damnedest to conquer the other, in a fierce and breathless and
sweaty scuffle on the ground, rolling over and over each other, first one on
top, then the other, each desperate to out-tussle the other, she experienced a
sudden and overpowering awareness of his maleness, a sharply felt urge to
surrender to him yet also a scary and delicious sense of power over him that had
nothing at all to do with winning the bout. And the knowledge came to her as,
for a split second, they ceased their struggle and stared half fearfully, half
defiantly into each other’s eyes, that he felt the same. It was partly
emotional, she recognized, partly physical. She had never experienced such
feelings before.
At fourteen Krysty Wroth knew all there was to know about physical sex—the full
details from ovulation to conception through pregnancy and into childbirth
itself. But Sonja had also taught her from an early age that sex was not merely
an act of procreation but a powerful experience, an expression of heady passion.
It could also, if you were lucky enough to find the right partner, be fun. But
you had to look after yourself because if you didn’t have the luck to find the
right partner, you could land yourself in all kinds of unnecessary trouble.
Sonja had also told her that years ago, before the Nuke, there had been
religions that preached childbirth almost as a necessity, despite the fact that
the world was overloaded with people, a good proportion of whom lived in abject
misery and squalor. Those old religions had largely disappeared. Only in the
Baronies was religion, in one form or another, used as it had been in the bad
old days, as a means of keeping the populace quiet and as a means of keeping the
populace growing in number. Down there, you bred for the Barons. Boy children
were sent by God; girl children were a damned nuisance, fit only to skivvy and
breed—breed more and more boy children: the warrior syndrome.
Contraception was actually banned in certain of the Baronies where the old, ugly