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If women taking on male identities can be explained away for practical reasons (safety, economics, social power) then where is the explanation for men taking on female identities where those advantages are reversed? If women taking on male identities can be explained as a necessary requirement for desiring women, then where is the explanation for their female partners desiring them? If women taking on male identities can be explained by innate inborn gender identity, then what of the life histories that begin with a parent imposing the gender presentation which later is exaplained as "feeling natural?" Applying the simplest explanation: historic people changed their gender presentation for a wide variety of reasons and motivations, in a variety of contexts, and with variable permanence. This greatly complicates the "naming and claiming" approach to queer history that has prevailed for almost every flavor of queer that tackled the question of "what are our historic roots?" It's why that bug-a-boo of conservative historians "we just can't really know" can't be dismissed out of hand. In some cases, there is enough evidence, rooted in the individual's own testimony, and without the shadow of compulsion or legal threat, to be fairly confident about how they viewed their identity (if "identity" is even an accurate term in their context). But that still leaves the question of how much their own identity was shaped by the models and options their society offered to them. In the big picture of history, there is always clearly a spectrum. At one extreme are those whose identities and desires are rooted in their individual being and will come out in some fashion regardless of their cultural context. At another extreme are those whose expressions of identity and desire are built from the tools their specific society offers them. But it isn't a simple binary sliding scale, for desires and identities operate independently.

Boag points out that even within the fairly constrained scope of US history on the Western frontier in the later 19th century, the cultural explanations for the interplay between gender and desire were messily various, depending greatly on larger social movements and anxieties. And fictions of gender set in the "Wild West" were part of that interplay. Keep that in mind when writing your own Western fictions.

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 315 – The House of the Women by Jeannelle M. Ferreira - transcript

(Originally aired 2025/05/31 - listen here)

Every time I encounter a new story by Jeannelle M. Ferreira, today’s author, I’m impressed with the breadth of historic settings she can tackle, from the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars in her novel The Covert Captain, to Jewish communities in Russia in her previous story for us, “Your Fingers Like Pen and Ink,” to early 20th century New York in some of the stories in her collection The Fires and the Place in the Forest. Today’s story takes us back to ancient Crete in the Minoan era, among bull-leapers, brightly-painted frescos, and the ever-present threat of volcanos. If you do an image search on “Minoan,” “fresco,” and “saffron” you’ll get some lovely visuals to keep in mind as you listen to “The House of the Women.”

Jeannelle writes queer historic romance and poetry and comes as something of a matched set with today’s narrator, Violet Dixon, who has done several stories for use previously, as well as narrating the two books of Jeannelle’s mentioned previously.

This recording is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License. You may share it in the full original form but you may not sell it, you may not transcribe it, and you may not adapt it.

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The House of the Women

Jeannelle M. Ferreira

 

“I’m sorry about your mother.”

“Get out of my light.” Iset lifted the hand she could. Bone-black sifted from her fingertips. Her other hand held the linen sketch taut over plaster, and nothing could fall yet.

“Iset, it’s hours past dark.”

There was only one lamp, and a ghost in its flicker. Iset more than half turned, to glimpse her. Her weight was all in her shoulder, pinning the sketch, when Sira said Iset again, and the earth shook.

The earth shook and Iset unbalanced as if she were not island-born, with a cry and a dizzy dread for the landing. Her back went into her workbench, hard enough to shift the stone mortar and make the pestle roll. The cup full of bone-black hit the floor. Her lump of blue frit rolled and shattered, breaking the dish with tomorrow’s grind of red. She was not reddened, herself, only stunned; a second tremor had gone before Iset blinked at the darkness; the last one, Geb and Poseidon tipping the cup out, before she thought to look for the light.

Sira stepped over the mess, not a fleck or a shard against her bare feet, and scooped up the fallen lamp before Iset’s luck slipped worse. She kept the flame close to her hollowed hand – she must have calluses yet – and lifted it safely far from her own skirts and the pigment-powder blossoms on the floor. As if the light wasn’t Iset’s and paid for, Sira moved from wall to wall, from figure to figure there, so slowly her bracelets and anklets were silent.

“She finished the ones downstairs.” Sira would not name the dead. “But all these are you. All these are – Iset –” She stopped, and lifted her hand – there was lily-red, somehow, on her fingernails. She would have touched; no harm to pigment and plaster, but the world was still wrong-ended, still shaking through Iset’s palms and the soles of her feet, and it felt too intimate to allow.

“Well done you, knowing a gryphon from a monkey.”

“Go to the crows.” Sira came to stand over her, so the light spilling down onto Iset was almost blinding and the room around them was lost to the dark. She looked as if she’d curse the mountain into shaking again – but when she did speak, it was as if it hurt to breathe. “What happened?”

“Color-makers’ cough.” Breathe stone-green or glass-blue all your life and it showed red in the end. Iset’s own cough was hollow, but not every morning; not every night, as Nefret’s had been too.

Iset would not have chosen to meet again. Not like this, with lime-splashed cheeks, in an old bag tunic stained with ochre and bone char. She hadn’t bought hot water in a week. Her hair was still shorn down for her mother, born in the Black Land, and Nefret, too young to give up her doll to the Huntress or do any harm. Sira had come over with the dawn boats, had no right not to reek of fish, and might have stepped down off the wall. Her kohl and powder couldn’t mask her pity.

Not pity, thought Iset. She carried Nefret front, back, and sideways into the hills, and rolled down with her. She ate at Mother’s hearth more nights than the sky has stars.

“Why’ve you come back?” It was harsher than Iset meant, as if she’d forgotten how to talk to a person; a splinter of a question, too sharp after so many years.

“I’m not a prisoner.” Sira stared. “I came to count the harvest.”

“Numbers, still – for a goddess? You could do that here for your sister.”

“I didn’t choose. Did you think I – my sister said this was your commission now.”

They’d never spoken to one another like this, so coldly Iset thought she wouldn’t see color by morning. If they had, better to forget. Sira set down the lamp and offered her hand to Iset – never bending.

They’d grown up together tumbling, leaping, learning to get a body through space: everyone on the island did. Iset was tired, childish, and in love to the ends of her eyelashes still. She reached, wrapped her hand above Sira’s elbow, and pulled.

***

Siraya knew where she wasn’t. Not the temple, because silence was no real thing when supplicants, merchants, clergy and clerks shared time and space. Not on a couple of goat-skins at the back of Neriya’s warehouse: she didn’t feel crowded-in, or smell unwashed wool. Her overskirt was rolled up for a pillow, and someone else’s head held it down too; her traveling cloak had come up under her chin, the clean salt scent of open water mixed, a little, with a hold full of squid. No one had shuttered the windows last night, and a cool wind rose off the bay – it must be almost cold, outdoors, but Siraya was warm.

Beside her on the floor of the empty building, Iset made a little cat-gesture against the curve of Siraya’s neck, and she knew where she was.

All the memories she carried with her were of Iset in motion, in feeling, in flight – her eyes and eyebrows smoke-black, bitter-black, her nose straight and sharp and her cheeks struck with color, from paint powder or a fight. Stillness made Iset almost unfamiliar: she looked a little softer, a little sad. Tiny traces of blue and white were on her cheeks and eyelids; a rosy mark – light as a sketch – lay over the fawn-reddish skin of Iset’s shoulder, and the linen there was notched, a little.

Siraya let her fingertips hover over Iset’s mouth, the painting-perfect curve of her lower lip. There were very few ways, over salt and under sky, to make Iset shut up; Siraya had never taken the chance to start from perfect quiet.

She had time. Her time, here, wasn’t woven through a hundred others’. The morning light was still pale at the windows’ edges. She was so spoiled, from her time on the big island, that she let herself picture a real bed and pillows to soften it. Heat crept across her face, she had to close her eyes, and noise rose from the street below.

Iset curled away from the sounds – away from her – and when she moved she coughed, hard. Her hands caught and scraped at the floorboards; she touched a bit of Siraya’s bundled-up overskirt, and sat up like the room’s guardian-gryphon come to life. “...Sira?”

Carefully, carefully she offered her shoulder, and waited for Iset to rest there. “Breathe, meryt.”

She shook herself, hard. “No. You shouldn’t say those things –”

 “Someone else should?”

“No,” Iset said again. “But I – in my dream, we were in Kemet. I’ve never seen it. Don’t know it from chalk on a wall. We were there because we couldn’t be here. Just… just nothing, between Kesiya and this side of the bay.” She tried to run her hands through her hair; her fingers splayed in the soft stubble, instead, and Siraya didn’t dare reach to make it lie smoothly again.

Iset wouldn’t look Siraya in the face. “You must have things to do.”

“We,” Siraya answered. “We are going to my sister’s place before she sends the watch out. We’re having a decent wash. We’re getting breakfast. I’m starving.”

“Neriya’s going to stick you with the baby. Or the books.”

“She can cook her own books. I’m not here on the business of mortals.” She couldn’t make that stick, not with Iset. “Or I’ll do them while you find something to wear. Isha gives her new dress lengths every time she has a child. If he wanted to get out of this life cheap, he shouldn’t have picked her.”

***

Iset was sure of it: if Sira had been so nimble ten years ago, she’d have been given to the bull dance. They’d sprinted through the nearest bathhouse inside twenty minutes, so she reached Neriya and Isharu’s place with her tunic stuck to her skin and sand all over her oiled feet. Sira flew up the stairs to the family’s rooms as if Iset would follow, and stopped on the second landing to shout when she didn’t. “I left my bag here last night. Come and say hello, at least!”                                                                                                                                                                                 

Neriya was two or three years older than Sira, no more. Still beautiful, fifteen years into a business marriage, and dressed as if eight children were no matter. Whenever Iset saw her, Neriya looked sweet-eyed and sleepy, until it was too late; now she turned a mood like fresh coals on Sira. “Out all night, and late this morning! What if I had left the latch open for you?”

“You never would.” Sira kissed Neriya’s hands and cheeks. “So I knew you were all quite safe.” They were not very like each other in temper, but each sister could have been the other’s undersketch: fair as milk, with bright-brown eyes and black hair. Sira had a strong nose and Neriya’s was a snub; after so many children, Neriya stood with her weight settled into her hips, while Sira was always half-forward, balanced almost on her toes.

“Sit and have tea. A little while more won’t matter once you’ve seen the fields. Painter!” Neriya called, “See that Madu doesn’t throttle himself on the loom.” She gestured indoors and Iset moved a step or two without thought, as though Sira’s family had been the ones to hold her mother’s debt, as if a well-dressed landlady had the power to command.

Sira caught Iset’s hand, her voice light as thrush-song, her eyes sharp and cold. “Oh, no, I can’t spare Iset today. If I’m by myself, the elders will talk me to death.”

“She can’t go with nothing to wear!” Neriya said it as if there were princes out there, not sharp stones, drowsy wasps, and a bellyful of dust – as if proper flounces and ribbons were what brought the crocuses in.

“Agreed.” Sira twisted one earring free, then the other, and held them in her sister’s sight: bees, with fluffy basalt shoulders and onyx stripes across their tiny gold bodies, gold-wire wings almost thin enough for flight. “I’ll take five minutes in your wardrobe.”

They were not invited to breakfast with Neriya and her children.

Iset didn’t know what to do with the pile of wool and linen Sira chose – striped petticoats, blue-and-white overskirts, a dress printed all over with papyrus blossoms in red and green. Every tying-tape had a pattern woven through it, flowers or stars; every pin was gilt or dipped in bright colors. It was more cloth than she’d ever possessed, and suddenly Iset knew how it was to be warm in the first of winter.

“There’s a cape, but it isn’t hemmed or finished yet.” Sira patted her bag, bulkier now than a couple clay tablets and styli could make it. “Tell me if you’re cold, and I’ll try to find a pin.”

“There must be twelve on me!”

“All load-bearing, unless you want to turn so many heads, meryt.” She went on uphill, laughing. Under her veil she’d braided and twisted her hair almost tamely down her back, and she hadn’t left home so covered in gold and fine stones, but Iset thought Sira must be much the same, despite years. Springing toward the shoreline, off the cliff’s edge, to the next thing, without even sandals to slow her.

She was beautiful, the ivory-and-earthen way Kefti women liked to be painted, though her eyebrows would never lie neatly and in paintings, ladies never had soft dark hair along their upper lip. She adored being gazed-at, would dance rather than be still, loved to flirt by touch; Sira had every art of dress and gesture. She’d practiced them on Iset, younger, and surely other women since, even if the Lady of Owls was one of the chaste gods –

“Barley water or twelfth-part wine, I said?” Sira balanced two clay cups in one hand, two skewers of grilled eel in the other, and tossed her head to keep eel sauce from her veil.

“Whichever you don’t,” Iset began, stumbling, and got weak vinegar. “And tell me what I owe –”

“You lent me your bed. Now I’ve fed you. Nothing’s owed.”

“There wasn’t a bed.” Iset’s ears went hot.

“And we weren’t sleeping. We say polite things in the street, Iset-Like-Sunrise.” Sira had done that almost from always, put another name on Iset’s own, the way other people’s lovers might say dear. Some of them had made Iset’s mother laugh into her hand, and some made her thoughtful and quiet: one day she’ll curl her hair at the shoulders and say she’s your husband. I don’t mind that wild girl looking after you, sayti, but who’s looking after her? She talks to more gods than wise people do.

I look after her, Iset said, for all the years until it wasn’t true. Now, under cold clouds and a wind off the mountain, as the street became a pebbled path into the hills, Iset wondered what held true again and what was lost. She was still weaving and unpicking when, beside her, Sira fell out of step. She put a hand on the nearest stone, then sat down in the dust with her veil over her face. The gauze was second-dye saffron, to lend gold to her pale skin, but now a flush like fever showed through the cloth.

“Sira, Siraya, what’s wrong?”

“I forget if you’ve ever given me my whole name. The last bit’s not a sound in Kemic, is it? The way you draw it out, it’s pretty.”

“I’ll say it again some time. Answer me?” Iset knelt and touched Sira’s throat and the nape of her neck, as if a fever or broken breathing might take hold in ten minutes’ walk; she found her skin only a little warm, and no one had ever been set tipsy on barley water.

“It’s nothing. It’s only I don’t spend so much time under the sky,” she said. “The temple’s just built like that – covered up, built over – as if when they started, they thought holy and secret were the same. Some of the oldest bits don’t want anybody there. I’d swear the stones move to make us lose the way.”

“Take a ball of flax with you; pay it out as you go.”

“You think that’d break the magic?” Sira lifted her veil, as if to let Iset in; she looked sincere, and her cheeks were still clover-blossom pink.

“What do I know of your people’s magic? But you could follow it back the way you came.”

Sira laughed, the light, young-girl’s laugh that made Neriya and a hundred others see her for a pretty little fool, until she hit back with the cold proof of numbers or both fists; when she reached for Iset her hand was cold, but not shaking. “Come back with me, meryt, and save us from ourselves.”

“I’ll think on it. Better, now?”

“I must be spoiled. Poor me, the light’s too bright and the air’s too –” Sira sat up, and fell back again on one elbow. “I’d swear the air is wrong. I was fine in town. Will you give me your arm, or do you think it’ll make people talk?”

“It’s my hand you’re meant to ask for, if you want gossip.” Iset only spoke to cover her concern, and it sounded silly and scared and brittle.

“All right, that too.” Sira fell against her, only a little on purpose. “Are you not dizzy?”

“I breathe pretty rocks and at least one bug that makes you see the gods. If I’m dizzy, it’s too late.”

The hills looked like a wash-day: linen spread over the most level places, twenty girls with baskets and their skirts tucked up at the waist. Everywhere small fires were burning, visible only by their smoke; the daylight was bright but bone-white against the face of the mountain. There was ash in the wind.

Even now, after some days’ harvest, a purple veil should have rested over the curves and hollows of the mountain’s slope. The earth lay in long, bare striations as far up as Iset could see. There were patches of saffron-flowers, but too few to call a crop; grit blew along the rows where green plants should have been. The girls with their baskets jostled past, teasing the elders sent to mind them, laughing and leaping into a game of huntress-and-hounds. They were younger and a little older than Iset remembered. Young enough to ring-dance around Iset and Sira and see old women. Old enough, settled enough in themselves that the strain of their muscles, the sting under their nails counted as an offering, but there was almost nothing to offer.

Sira, just ahead, pushed her traveling bag over her hip and knelt by one plant – alone, and Iset might have stretched to reach another. Sira brushed away ash like snow, pinched the flower from its stem and shook it apart in her hand. She showed Iset the three red strands, for the girl, the bride, and the elder; petals for the purple-workers, pollen for the dyers, and what was green to die again. Sira breathed one low hmm like a midwife come too late, and let purple, gold, and red fall to the ground. “You try. Maybe the white ones are better?”

Iset felt too tall and twice too old. Her new skirts weren’t meant for climbing, even kilted up by her knees, and the air seemed to waver when she looked ahead. Sheltered by a half-moon of piled stones – a shepherd’s sleeping place, long ago – was a cluster of saffron-flowers, without cloaks of ash to dim their white. Iset’s wrist, thumb and first finger found the arc of remembered motion, the gentle gathering-in and the pinch. The weight in her hand was too little, the petals’ plush already gone.

“They look all right, poor things, but they’re dry.” The three red filaments crumbled, a bright-clay-colored smudge across Iset’s palm.

““Not dry, dried. Did a frost come?”

“Come from where? The ground’s hot.” Iset kicked through a layer of pale, fragile pebbles. “And there used to be a stream by the wall, here. I know it.”

“I remember.”

“I was here,” said Iset, “with my hands in the stream, when you left. Mother wanted a shell-full of the leavings – to make yellows – and someone asked me, why are you here and not the harbor? Nefret had to tell me you’d gone to the owls.”

“Gone to the owls.” Sira sat on the wall’s crumbling edge, put her weight on her hands and lifted her face to the thin afternoon sun, as if she’d set down her basket for a minute’s rest and no years had passed at all. “She’d take you too, you know.”

“That’s not – that wouldn’t be –”

“Say Neit, then. She doesn’t care. The eldest of elders came from Larsa when she was a tiny girl, and she says Ištar. The wine pours the same.” Sira took out a tablet and stylus, as if naming the Lady of Owls recalled her to her work, but only looked down at the smooth surface and rested the stylus’ end against her teeth.

Iset gave herself three breaths to trace and rough-in that life, with strangers – with her, and let it go again. She sat in Sira’s shadow and let their shoulders touch. “What will you tell them?”

“That something’s wrong.”

Little owls dipped and curved through the twilight overhead. There was enough wine to make the night warm, even cut for young girls and old women. Sira had traded one of her long pins for honeycomb and a pomegranate. When she stretched out beside the fire, her head just-resting on Iset’s knee, her dress lay open almost to her hips. More than pomegranate or honey, Iset wanted chalk and charcoal; more than to sketch, Iset wanted to touch.

“You’re allowed.” Fast enough her bracelets rang together, she set Iset’s hand just below her ribs. Sira’s breathing was firm, not even wine-touched, and her bare skin cool as moonlight against Iset’s palm. Her beaded, braided hair and her veil twisted together in Iset’s lap.

“You’re a priestess!” Iset died four different ways, while people watched, in the firelight.

“What’s that to do with what’s mine – or yours?” Sira lifted a cupped palm of pomegranate arils to Iset’s lips. Rude to refuse them, a mess to accept; Iset’s tongue brushed the hollow of Sira’s hand and made her tremble. “And why should I lie? All these ladies know us. None waited for me to take a husband.”

Iset swallowed, the darkly-sweet and the bitter too. “What’s the truth matter, if you go back to your owls and I stay here?”

“Maybe I won’t go back. Maybe you won’t stay here.” Pomegranate juice shone on Sira’s mouth and fingertips. Along her wrists carnelian, garnet and gold were alight. The Lady of the Mountain might have laid her head in Iset’s lap, her veiled hair the net of the stars, her eyes dark and ancient as the bay. “Iset-in-All-Your-Names, we don’t have to know everything tonight.”

***

It was her last night in town, maybe for years, and her sister’s accounts were across Siraya’s knees. The work wanted every lamp in Meryamun’s workshop – Iset’s workshop – and what stayed in the shadows wasn’t much, a bedroll and a little household shrine. Renenut with no food to watch over, Bes and Taweret, cracked, and a doll that had been Nefret’s: a patient gaze, a crimson mouth, and a tiny costume no one in town could have paid for in the proper size, even Neriya.

“I don’t know how we made that,” Siraya said. She could never, from years of the stylus and pen, manage such tiny stitches now. “I forgot doing the fringe. Where did we get silk?”

“Stole it off your sister’s floor.” Iset needed no lamplight to grind ochre; she was a neat arc of motion at the corner of Siraya’s vision, reaching and returning like a wave in the bay.

“She ought to have had a doll that looked like her.”

“They don’t make –” Iset flipped the grindstone and banked a small hill of reddish-brown pigment out of the way. “We’d been free for half a minute. She was lucky to get it.”

Siraya tried to get from under last quarter’s scroll, whether it tore a seam or not, but Iset had gone on working; she looked up, at the scrabbling sound of reed paper, and what had been in her voice was not on her face.

“Anyone skimming from the woven goods trade? Payments to dark-eyed girls marked export tax?”

“Oh, Isharu’s boringly upright. He keeps my sister from swindling anyone too hard. Does get a bit off his port tax, coming and going – he serves his hitch in the navy when the king asks – and some of my wage comes over, for your…” She’d grown too used to reading for the temple’s weavers, talking-balancing-talking with the other keepers of accounts; she stopped her mouth too late. The grindstone fell silent with one sharp scrape, and this time Iset sat back on her heels.

Siraya shrugged. “I make more than I need. I don’t pay for a bite I eat or a thread I wear. I love Neriya, but she’s greedy, meryt, she’d take it from you if she could –”

“She lowered my rent by three fleeces two years ago. Lowered it again, this year, and someone – you settled the bill for Mother’s rites.”

“You shouldn’t have to worry about anything. I don’t want you to. I don’t want you in debt to my kin. Not for one room that lets the rain in off the street!”

“All right.” Iset was cutting-quiet. “Me and the gods and the neighbors know what you want. I would have wanted to know it was you. I would have thanked you, somehow.”

“I asked them to give you my love. Every time!”

“Not one for passing a message, your sister.” Her eyes closed and her lips pressed thin. Siraya knew Iset was keeping something hurtful behind her teeth, really trying, shying away from a fight like the edge of a cliff. “You couldn’t put sent you a little something, darling and chuck it at a fisherman? You have nice writing. You might even have fit my name.”

Siraya breathed with care, to keep tears at bay, and she would not bring her veil over her face. She sat in Iset’s one chair, lips parted dumbly as yesterday’s fish, and searched too long for the words to unravel her mistake. She’d gone red – or white – in the lamplight; she could feel it, hot and cold, sick and awful. Iset was up from the earthen floor, and her anger was still sharp but her worry was quicker.

“I’m sorry.” She said it before Iset could. “I didn’t know if… I never asked you if you could read.”

“Can.” Iset brushed her hands clean and took up one of the lamps. “Well. I’m for work, then. I lost today – and yesterday.” With you went unspoken, but the silent weight of it was between them.

“Work?” Siraya reached for her. “It’s pitch dark. It’s half tomorrow by now.”

“The women’s guilds want their new building, and your sister wants the credit for donating it. The plaster-paintings come last.”

“Iset. Please, we don’t have – please, let it wait. I insulted you and I’m sorry and you can take it out of me all the way to the harbor.”

“I’m not insulted.”

She knew, from Iset, that no one’s eyes were truly black but a thousand colors in a hundred different lights – but Iset’s were flat, flint dark in the shadowed room, as if they had no light to give back; then they looked silver-lined, because Iset was trying very hard, in front of her household gods and Siraya, not to cry.

“I thought you kept quiet because you weren’t allowed to –” Iset bit at her lip. “To be with anybody, or it hurt you too much to think of us, or you were just trying to bear it – the way I tried. I am not insulted by someone who couldn’t be bothered!” She swept up her bundle of brushes and the roll that held her plaster knives and scrapers, and was out the door so fast it caught her heel.

Siraya could still hear Iset, cursing in pain in the street, as she banked the tiny hearth and blew out the lamps. She lost her footing, a little, when the stones trembled beneath her; the Lady of the Mountain was sleepless. She thought the swaying might slow Iset, too, at least enough to catch up while they were both stumbling. Then the ground creaked, a thing felt as well as heard, and under Siraya it rose and fell like a wave.

“Not now.” She picked herself up, palms stinging, and closed her eyes against daybreak in the middle of the winter night. Mother of the Bay, Siraya thought, when the wind pushed her down again, Bastet-Who-Rises, for Iset’s sake, and then the sound struck her ears. Please don’t kill us yet. She had to look, because to be blind while the mountain had driven her deaf was more than Siraya could bear; her veil was full of ash and sand, and to the height of the houses everything was lost in a cloud of plaster. Siraya dared a few steps uphill. She tried a shop’s stair, to see above the dust, and then she would have called on every god she knew; all that came, helpless-small and half trapped in her throat, was a whimper.

Fire spun into the wind like sea-spray at the mountain’s summit, saffron-red, seething white, and molten gold.

***

Iset was dredged in plaster, bleeding here and sore there – one great gust had carried hot ashes downhill. There was so much work undone, so much paint shaken free and so many cracks to fill in, Iset stood still and watched the colors up on the peak: reds she’d never capture, a white at the edge of violet. She cried from dust, from tiredness, from having to begin again; but she’d been crying before the mountain woke.

The ceiling was still falling onto the stairs, but Iset thought she heard footsteps below. Slow, and struggling – but a human sound, not lath and plaster breaking. “Iset? If you’re dead I’ll kill you, meryt, please say –” Sira, covered in scrapes and shrapnel-stung, went deathly still in the doorway. “Oh, no.”

It was pure heartbreak – the echo of Iset’s own heart – and Sira reached down for a fallen curve of plaster as if she could set it right.

“Don’t, my own. Nothing’s to be done.”

Sira caught her by the waist, curled her hand at the nape of Iset’s neck and drew her in for a kiss. It wasn’t like the hundred kisses of the past few days, not fevered, not fierce, nor making up for lost time; it was I’m here, I’m sorry, I love you.

“What are you – why were you out in the –” Iset stopped. She didn’t need answers while Sira stood quietly bleeding. Clean rags and a pot of water were under her workbench, to damp out mistakes; she soaked a bit of old linen and got to work. Sira kept still, without a flinch or a sound, while Iset unpinned her torn veil and wiped the dust from her face, blotted her forearms and the heels of her hands, and bent – as long as she could bend, without shaking – to press the wet cloth against Sira’s skinned knees.

“I had to see you. I had a question. Doesn’t matter now. You’ll stay here, I know, until all this…”

Iset shook her head. Couldn’t say it; couldn’t not know it either.

“You’d go with me? You’d try, for a season or two?” Sira caught up Iset’s hands and held tight, though it must have stung. “Please, Iset. Live with me or don’t. Talk to me or don’t.”

“Siraya –” It was still not-right, but Sira’s face lit with her trying. “What if it doesn’t matter, my leaving, our starting over? What if this is the world ending, and all we can do is wait for what comes?”

“Then wait with me, even if we fight from sunrise to moonset.” She put her head down on Iset’s shoulder, as if she’d fall asleep amidst paint fragments and ruin. “But I’d as soon do without the fighting, meryt.”
 

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Show Notes

 

Another chapter in the America's queer suffragists book. I almost have the next book all written up and ready to go. And--hey!--I worked on a fiction project today! I'm doing revisions on my "skin-singer" stories with the goal of self-publishing them as a collection, combined with a concluding never-before-published novelette. Mind you, I've been saying for years, "This is the year I get the Skinsinger collection out," but for real this time. My goal is to have it available by Worldcon (makes a nice target). In addition to the revisions, I'll need a cover, and working up the formatting, and confirming my understanding of the distribution system I plan to use. Since the previously published stories have already been paid for (and in some cases, are still generating royalties), I'm less concerned about it making money and more focused on using it to learn the ropes.

I think this chapter is the weakest in terms of framing the topic as "queer" since it's basically "suffragists in the US and Britain talked to each other and sometimes had the same types of interpersonal relationships with each other that they did with their fellow contrytwomen. Also: there was a lot of Pankhurst fangirling.