The Very Best of Kate Elliott by Kate Elliott
“I see the stars. And there! There’s the moon.” It was thin and curved, like a clay sickle.
“What are the stars?”
Eili opened her mouth, then stood there, gaping up at the stars. “I don’t know. They’re stars. They’re the light by which the gods feast in the temple up in heaven.”
“Watch the stars,” said the voice, and nothing more.
Eili hissed between her teeth, angry at these riddles. She heard nothing, not even footsteps rustling away—but the voice did not speak again.
And now, as her irritation faded, she became curious. What were the stars? She watched for as long as she could keep awake, shivering in the cold night air. Like Anu, the stars rose in the east and set westward, rolling down into the underworld.
Finally she returned to the hut to curl up in a dry corner and sleep. In the morning the priestess brought her water to wash and a bundle of leaves to soak up the blood, though there wasn’t much. She brought bread as well, served on a plate with dates and freshly baked sea-perch.
“How long will I stay here?” Eili asked, but the priestess only smiled in her grave manner and handed her a spindle and flax so that she could spin.
In this manner she passed a tedious day in solitude.
That night, the voice came again.
“What are the mes?” it asked her.
“The mes are the spirits that govern the decrees the gods make. Everyone knows that!” Her belly ached a lot right now. That, and these stupid questions, made her grumpy.
If the voice could hear her bad mood, it took no notice but went on. “The Great Serpent troubles the world, wanting to return everything to the old sea which was all and everywhere before the first creatures came to be. But the mes keep order. The stars keep order.”
“Hiai!” She forgot about her aching belly as a flood of questions came to her tongue. “How do the stars keep order? Are they mes? Are they also spirits?”
“Watch the stars, curious one. Watch the stars, you who know everything there is.” Now the voice sounded amused, and Eili knew it could not be a demon. Demons didn’t know how to be happy.
She crawled out of the hut and watched the stars. To her amazement, she recognized some of the patterns. At least some, then, were the same as they had been last night, bright torches flung up into the heavens: a sicklelike head traced in stars; a cluster of six bright stars like a handful of shining pearls just above a pair of horns; a wagon and curved shaft; two bright stars standing close together as might a sister and brother, she and Indu. The moon, like Indu, had been eating and had gotten a little fatter.
The next day the priestess brought food again, bread, fish cakes, and beer, and graciously allowed her to spend the day grinding emmer into meal.
The next night she waited and waited, but the voice didn’t come. At last she curled up and fell asleep . . . only to be woken suddenly by a low chuckle and a hissing, like a snake. She jumped up, horrified. With the wood plate as a weapon she slapped the floor around her to kill any snake or scorpion that might have snuck in and curled up under her mat. But the hiss came from neither snake nor scorpion.
“When comes the New Year?”
The question startled her, and she stood, flatfooted, wood plate dangling from her fingers, and considered. She had never before given much thought to when the New Year came, only that the priestess always told them when the time was right to celebrate. But she wasn’t willing to reveal her ignorance so easily.“Soon. It comes soon.”
“When?”
Maybe it was a demon questioning her. Only demons would be so persistent.“Right before the floods come.”
“When will the floods come?”
Did this voice know how to speak at all except to ask her questions she couldn’t answer? “Soon, I said!”
“When?” the voice repeated without changing its patient tone.“How does the farmer know when to harvest?”
“When the grain is ripe, of course!”
“In this same way the stars tell us when it is time to make the world live again, to bury the old year and give birth to the new one.”
This was a long way from ripening grain. She had to set down the plate in order to think about it.“How can the stars tell us that?”
It was very late. She saw now that the first faint lightening had come, the waking breath of Anu, the sun. Peering out through the drill holes, she tried to see who was talking to her, but she could see only shadows.
When she ducked outside, the priestess came to meet her in the gray light of dawn, carrying a bundle of rushes. Hiai! She did not need to ask what today’s work would be. But she had never minded weaving mats: she liked the way the single strands wove together to make a solid whole whose pattern she could read and trace with her fingers.
When dusk came, the priestess led her up the stairs set against the temple wall. Several mats lay on the flat roof, and with some apprehension Eili followed the priestess over to them and gingerly sat down cross-legged, imitating the woman.
“Look there,” said the priestess, pointing to the zenith—the sky directly above them—and at once Eili knew who had questioned her the past three nights. Overhead shone a sickle of stars. “That is the Lion’s head,” said the priestess.
“A Lion’s head!” Eili could see it now, traced for her: the proud neck and head of the fearsome king who prowls the heavens unafraid.
“The Lion rules this sky. You see, there, the Lion has defeated the Bull, who sinks into the underworld together with Anu.” Pointing to the western horizon, the priestess traced another pattern of stars just below the waxing sickle of the moon.“There lies the Sevenfold One and the horns of the Bull. See how they die now, with Anu?”
“But won’t they rise again tomorrow night?’ As the deep twilight darkened into full night, the horns of the Bull sank beneath the horizon, lost to her view.
“No, the Bull has died, killed by the Lion.” The priestess pointed overhead again, then to the horizon, the gateway to the underworld.
Eili could not contain a gulping gasp, a sudden tremor of fear. Suddenly those questions about the Great Serpent devouring the world and returning everything to the all-encompassing sea seemed much more frightening. If the stars could die, then perhaps the world was about to come to an end.“Is the Bull gone forever, then?”
The priestess smiled.“Only to rest until the New Year.”
“Until the New Year? But how do you know when the New Year comes?”
The priestess did not speak at once. Eili stared, gape-mouthed, at the stars. “In about forty days the Bull will rise in the east at dawn. That is how we know to celebrate the birth of a new year. The Bull brings the new year. Our duty as servant to the gods is to maintain the order of the world, to celebrate a-ki-til at the proper time, the power of making the world live again.”
“What would happen if we didn’t celebrate it?”
It was very dark now. Below the sickle head of the Lion Eili could see its bright heart, brightest of the stars in its body. A cold wind blew up from the marshes, soughing through the palms. The deep, croaking call of the night-heron sounded from the canal.
“The Great Serpent waits for us to make a mistake. It is also our crimes, our faults, our errors which let loose the Great Serpent. That is why the gods have set the four corners of the year, as pillars so that we may help defend the world against chaos.”
The four corners of the year. With a flash of insight, Eili remembered the four animals painted on the niches within the temple. “The Lion, the Bull, the Scorpion, and the Ibex.”
“Ah,” said the priestess, with approval.
“But how do we make the world live again at a-ki-til?”
“What? You don’t know everything, Eili? I thought everything was old for you, nothing new at all in this old place. Isn’t that what you tell your mother every day?”
Eili wiggled on the mat, trying not to bounce up and down in her impatience and her excitement.“I didn’t know about all this!??
The priestess chuckled.“Do you want to learn?”
“Yes! Yes!”
“But I warn you, you’ll have to be attentive. There’s much to know you haven’t discovered yet. And more to learn than you can learn this year—or perhaps in your entire life.”
The priestess spoke with laughter in her voice, but Eili ignored it. “Are all the four corners of the year set in the stars? Then where is the Scorpion, and the Ibex?”
“Only wait, child. Only wait. You have learned a great deal for one night. I am an old woman and easily tired, and it will rain soon. You may escort me to my bed, and sleep on a pallet beside me, if you wish.”
“Then I may stay here, in the temple?” The question caught in her throat, and as soon as she uttered the words, she was sorry to have said them. Hiai! How brash of her to presume so much, to ask such a thing of the priestess!
But the priestess only wrapped a corner of her shawl more tightly around her as the wind brought a spattering of rain over them, on their silent perch. “Of course. Who else would answer all your questions? I have already spoken to your mother about your dowry.”
With that, they picked their way along the spine of the roof and climbed carefully down the stairs to the silent temple yard. The priestess made her bed in one of the stout reed huts.
But Eili could barely sleep for excitement. The wash of a late rain over the village woke her. She listened to the night calls of birds, to the honking of geese, and the barking of dogs. Each insect click, each drip of water startled her back awake, her mind tumbling all its new thoughts over and over. If only she could weave them into a pattern. . . .
In the morning, as soon as the dawn washed to pink and the first herons glided over the marshlands to stalk their prey, she was up and outside. With a stick she drew lines in the dirt, a picture of a lion grappling with and defeating a bull.
She glanced up at the sky, but Anu had washed it clean of stars. Clouds moved in from the east.
She sat back on her haunches, thinking about the four corners of the year. With a palm leaf she swept clear a patch of dirt and then drew a square with four corners and in each square, as in the niches in the temple, traced the rough outline of an animal: here, at the New Year, the Bull; here, for the high, hot summer, the Lion; for the late dry spell, the Scorpion; for the winter rains, the Ibex. A shadow eased across the dirt, shading her, and she turned to see the priestess standing behind her with a slight smile on her ageless face.
“Hiai, restless one! Is your heart now content?”
“No, not at all!” cried Eili without thinking. “Do all the stars have names?”
“Ah,” said the priestess in the tone of a woman who has opened a box and found the finest pure lapis lazuli shining within. “The gods have many decrees set upon the world so that we can maintain order against the Great Serpent. Can you remember them all?”
Eili nodded, but her attention had already wandered back to her picture.“It isn’t quite right,” she muttered as she thought about the Bull sinking into the underworld, only to appear again in the east forty days later—as it would every year.
The priestess squatted beside her and gently took the stick from her hand. The woman drew a straight line from Bull to Scorpion and Lion to Ibex, then a curved line that linked them all in a circle.
“It’s a wheel!” murmured Eili. She touched each animal in turn.“The four corners of the year are a wheel that turns around each year. It always comes back to its beginning.”
“Making the world live again.” The priestess was smiling as Anu’s light spread over them in a wash of brightness, bringing a new day. “What, no questions, restless one?”
But for this once Eili was too filled with wonder to reply. After all, there would be many more days, and nights, in which to ask questions.
FOUR ESSAYS
INTRODUCTION
WE INCLUDED THESE FOUR essays (all originally posted online) because they felt integral to the issues and themes discussed in the introduction. I wrote “The Omniscient Breasts” as a teaching tool, with the hope it might help people see with fresh eyes how women are too often portrayed in an objectifying way and then offer the idea that, by being conscious of this gaze, writers can change their own writing if they wish to.“The Narrative of Women in Fear and Pain” expresses my anger at narrative forms that use suffering and pain to entertain while mostly ignoring the consequences of suffering. “And Pharaoh’s Heart Hardened” specifically addresses the topic of immigration and race and prejudice in the USA, from the perspective of a child of immigrants; it was written during a particularly contentious discussion of immigration in the USA within the science fiction and fantasy online community. “The Status Quo Does Not Need World Building” calls into question the idea that a world can be created out a contextless space of “pure imagination.”
THE OMNISCIENT BREAST:
THE MALE GAZE THROUGH FEMALE EYES
MY READING EXPERIENCE OF fantasy and science fiction over forty years is that it is mostly written with the male gaze. By this I don’t mean it is written from the point of view of a male character, although that is often the case. Nor am I speaking about the gender of the writer: a male writer does not automatically write every line of every book with a male gaze just because he is a man; in fact, a male writer can write with a female gaze, and women can (and often do) write with a male gaze.
How am I using the terms “male gaze” and “female gaze”?
In fiction it is easy to simplistically understand the male gaze as, for instance, the gaze of a male author reflected across the entirety of his story; he’s a man so therefore he has a male gaze. It’s easy to understand it as that of the male reader reading the story. I have heard people say, “But if it is a male character, then of course the character is seeing with a male gaze.”
The idea of “the gaze” is a theoretical concept about how we look at things, especially in visual culture. Who is presumed to be the viewer, and how does the viewer view the people in the frame? For the purposes of this essay I will use two short definitions.
Film critic Laura Mulvey writes that “the male gaze occurs when the audience, or viewer, is put into the perspective of a heterosexual male.” An example of the male gaze in film would be when the camera lingers on a partially clad or fully naked female body (rather than on a male body) or when, in film or advertising, women are photographed in more sexual poses and wearing fewer clothes than men.
When I asked on social media how people might briefly define the concept in its broadest terms, graduate student Liamog Drislane (@ AnotherWord on Twitter) said,“The ‘male gaze’ is shorthand for a story being tailored to the perceived knowledge, interests, and prejudices of men.”
I think it matters for fiction writers to recognize if, when, and how they are using an unexamined default “male gaze” in this broader sense as they write. But here is what I want to talk about in this post:
YOU CAN WRITE FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF A FEMALE CHARACTER AND STILL BE WRITING WITH THE MALE GAZE.
A female point-of-view (pov) character is not necessarily written from the perspective of a female gaze. Everything about her might be male defined. By that I do not mean “defined within the cultural context of the narrative” as in “culturally in this society she is defined as the daughter of Lord John.” I mean, defined unconsciously by the writer who is not aware of writing a female character through a male gaze— that is, one that “tailors” her to the preconceived tastes and prejudices of (heterosexual) men.
One day on Twitter I exchanged comments about female characters and their often problematic depiction in fantasy novels with @ Halfrican_One, aka TJ Tallie, a PhD student in history at the University of Illinois.
Reflecting on an epic fantasy novel he had recently been reading with several female point-of-view characters, he tweeted: “At one point I think one of the POV characters is having her breasts described omnisciently to the reader.”
A pov character is a
Briefly, just to clarify my terms, first person is “I saw the child vanish around the corner” (and then nothing else because “I” can’t see around the corner), third person is “She saw the child vanish around the corner” (and then nothing else because she can’t see around the corner), and omniscient is “She saw the child vanish around the corner. The child ran into the candy store” because the omniscient narrator stands above and thus outside the action and can therefore See All.
Imagine a female pov character is going along about her protagonist adventure, seeing things from her perspective of the world as written in third person. She hears, sees, considers, and makes decisions and reacts based on her view of the world and what she is aware of and encounters. Abruptly, a description is dropped into the text of her secondary sexual characteristics usually in the form of soft-focus Playboy-magazine-style sexualized kitten-bunny-I-would-fuck-herin-a-heartbeat lustrous-eyes-and-nipples phrases. Her breasts have just become omniscient breasts.
This is what I mean when I speak of the male gaze. The breasts are no longer her breasts, they have become the breasts as described by the omniscient heterosexual male narrator (in the person of the writer) who is usually not even aware that he has just dropped out of third person and into omniscient to describe her sexual attractiveness in a way that caters to a heterosexual male audience.
Listen, I like to read about positive, consensual sexual relations in stories. I am all good with descriptions of people’s sexual attractiveness as an aspect of their person, whatever their sexual and gender identity, as long as it is not the only thing about them that matters.
One way a writer might describe a woman’s sexual attractiveness is through the direct specific lens of another character examining her because that other character is attracted to her. “JJ checked out the woman as she walked into the room. Etc.”