“Oh, but very descriptive, sir. It is the unborn you heard howling in the streets. It has driven some mad and others into despair. My own mother tried to drown herself from the constant horror of it. We cannot sleep by night because of the howling, and we cannot sleep by day or we will all starve. I, myself, think it might be better to starve. My father said he would rather starve than have me raped, but my mother said nonsense, the girl must be raped because it is the law.”
I dropped the cup and heard it echo hollowly from under the bed where it rocked to and fro making clanking sounds. “Raped! By whom?”
“By you, sir. Or, rather, by nobody.”
I sat upon the side of the bed and reached for the cup with my foot. “Sylbie, pour more wine. Then sit here beside me and tell me what you have just said. I am quite young, and I do not understand anything you have said.”
“Oh, sir,” she said, falling to her knees to fetch the cup, “truly you are very stupid. I have already told you. But I will tell you again.”
“It was two years ago last Festival that the Necromancer came to Betand. He was an old man, and he amused the crowd at the Festival by raising small spirits (some said it was forbidden for him to do so during Festival, and was the cause of all our woe) which danced and sang like little windy shadows. Well, one night he was drinking at the Dirty Girdle, a tavern which, my mother says, has a well deserved reputation, and he got into an argument with the tavern keeper, a man as foul of mouth as his kitchen floor, so says my mother. Doryon, the Necromancer, would not take besting in any battle of words, so my father says, and so decided to place a haunting upon the tavern. He was very drunk, sir, very drunk.
“So he rose to his feet and made some gestures, speaking some certain words, at which, so my father says, the whole company within the place trembled, for he had summoned up a monstrous spirit which fulminated and gorbled in the middle of the air, spinning. Then, so my father says, did the old Necromancer clutch at his chest and fall like an axed tree down, straight, stiff as a dried fish and dead as one, too.
“But the haunting he had raised up went on boiling and fetching, sir, growing darker and mere roily until at last it began to howl, and it howled its way out of the tavern and into the streets of Betand where it has howled and howled until this night.”
“But,” I said, “why was not some other Necromancer brought to settle the revenant? What one can raise, surely another can put down. Or so I have always been taught.”
“Sir, it was thought so. But Doryon was very drunk, and the Necromancers who came after said he had raised no dead spirit from the past but had, instead, raised up some spirit yet unborn, twisted in time and brought untimely to Betand. None of them knew how to twist it out of being and into the future again.”
“So. And so. And so what is the what of that?” I was baffled, mystified. “What has that to do with being raped because it is the law?”
She shook her head at me as though I should have seen the whole matter clearly by this time. “If it is the spirit of one unborn, then it is in the interest of the city that it become born as soon as possible. Which means that every woman of Betand able to bear must bear at every opportunity.”
“But rape,” I protested feebly. “Why?”
“Because all sexual congress except between married persons is defined as rape in the laws of Betand. Marriages cannot be entered into lightly for mere convenience. There are matters of property, of family, of alliance. It takes years, sometimes, to work out the agreements and settlements and the contracts.”
“So they expect me to rape you, to break the laws of the city?”