Archive of Our Own

Eucharis stands at the edge of the marshes, watching. She has been standing still, watching the figure walk toward her for hours. She watches the distribution of weight, the center of balance, the shape of the torso: she watches to wait and see.

It is a man. He staggers in ragged boots and he walks like his feet hurt. He walks like his whole body hurts. His face has a dumb, puzzled sneer all over it. He falls at her feet, sunburned and unconscious. Eucharis bends over and touches him. It is a man. A man alive is something she has not seen for twenty-three years.

Eucharis is strange but clever. Before she even knew what she was watching, she knew she’d have something to collect before the sun was down. She brought a wheelbarrow with her to the rim of the marshes, and, little nymph, she’s stronger than she looks. She rolls and she heaves, and though the man is enormous, she topples him into her barrow. She walks home into the setting sun, grunting and squinting. The man is dehydrated, and does not wake. Sometimes she stops to pry open his jaw and drip water in. There is hair on his face, wiry hair, and it thrills and pleases her. She wonders if he will be happy to wake up in a land of only women. She has heard stories about men.

She brings him to her house. Doubtless in the morning someone will follow the deep ruts in the dust and come in to find out what she scavenged that was so heavy. Eucharis takes off his boots and tips him onto a pallet on the floor. He grunts, but does not wake. Curious, she unbuttons his pants and looks at him. It does not look like how she thought it would. She buttons his pants again and gets into her own bed. She lies on her back, hands folded over her breast, and thinks so much she cannot fall asleep.

In the morning, her sister comes to visit her. Eucharis is pounding a mortar full of corn. She says, “I need to bake more loaves of bread.” Her sister sees the man stretched out on the floor and does not know what she is looking at. “He will have an appetite,” Eucharis says, squeezing the pestle, and watches.

*

Jayne Cobb knows eight hundred and eighteen ways to kill a man, but the dead land knew more. He wouldn’ta done it if he’d spared half a glance at anything, but he got stupid and he panicked and now he’d been cast away. When he wakes up, first he’s just happy to open his eyes. When he wakes up to a room full of women, he wonders if he really hasn’t died, because hell, there were plenty of worse eternal rewards than this one.

“He’s awake,” says someone above him. “Hey, can you talk, mister?”

“Where’n the hell am I?” he slurs, trying to focus. All of a sudden the room’s all a-flutter, women talking up a frenzy ‘til someone has to shout ‘em down.

“All of you, go! Leave us alone. C’mon, scat, go! You’ll hear it at the town meeting, now just go and let us handle this! Shoo!” Some middle-aged ox of a female squats down next to him, chewing on a pipe. “I don’t know how you’re not dead, but I sure wish we knew it twenty years ago,” she murmurs, eyeing him. “You got a name, fella?”

“Gimme somethin’ to eat and drink and I’ll tell you.”

Thin ankles connected to small feet and thin legs approaches the run-down bed on the floor. A little thin thing sets down a plate of cornbread by his hand. He waits for something to wash it down, and she brings him a mug of something like cider too. He can’t inhale it fast enough. The ox-mama snorts. “Glad to see that’s as I remember it.”

He pauses between bites. “Lost my ship somewhere east of here. Name’s Jayne Cobb.”

The ox-mama’s hard-worn face splits and crinkles with a grin. “Boy,” she says, “have you come to the right place to have a lady’s name.”

*

“We don’t know what killed them all,” says Callie, tough as baked earth, “but it did it, and it done good. It was a sickness, like a rot in the corn or something. It came at us slow, and we didn’t think it would carry on this far. It wasn’t just the men: we lost a few bulls, some horses and billygoats, but the mares and the ewes and the hens were all fine.

“This was all twenty-five years ago, you understand. First wave of deaths, we wailed and buried, and hoped it was all done. Second wave, we began to fret real fierce. Ships don’t come here, and we can’t call ‘em. We’ve always been self-sufficient. Well, then there’s ten boys left in a village of three hundred women, and that third wave was the worst. Fights broke out. Lot of people shot at each other. Four of those men died in gunfights. Some tried to walk to another settlement, but shit, ain’t nothing for miles in the hundreds around here. That’s what you get for wanting to be left alone.

“A couple of babies were born – Eucharis who found you, she and her sister were some of the last – but those final few, they just gave up and faded. I couldn’t explain it to you if I had a thousand dictionaries.”

“Damn,” says Jayne, shaking his head. “What do they call this place, anyway?”

“Ogygia,” Eucharis tells him. “The navel of the world. The farthest place from anything you can be.”

*

Jayne thinks about being here forever. These women ain’t got no damn transportation. Hardly know what a real machine looks like, gorram Earth-That-Was revivalists. For the first day or so, he harbors fantasies of repopulating the moon, and he gets a good snicker out of that before he imagines what Mal’s face would be upon meeting all his little progeny, and thinking on Mal and the rest of the crew, even the dead ones, just does him no good, does it.

It’s going to be a stupid way to die, if he never gets off this rock. Panicking in a rough patch and taking the escape pod. Serves him right, though, don’t it. Wash could have brought them out of it just fine – he’d have stayed put then; but they’d left Wash behind a month ago and Mal couldn’t get to the controls in time and Jayne didn’t think even Kaylee could save River’s Reaver-slicing ass on this one.

He isn’t even a man here, just a spectacle. Jayne knows he has a lot to be proud of between his legs, but these women won’t touch, they just look. He finds himself longing for that brothel job from a couple months back. That was a good job, right there. Ain’t nothing to do here. These women freak him out. They don’t do hardly nothing but pass the day. It just ain’t natural.

Then again, not a lot here is, truth be told.

*

The oldest woman in Ogygia speaks:

I had a classical education, once. I was an idealist who came here to forget the inner planets long ago. The other women here, they’re of a different stock now: sensible, hardy, unsentimental. They know there are things that can’t be forgotten and things that can’t be talked about. Back when there were still men, they used to let me name the children, because my names were always so pretty. All from the oldest texts, of course. I named the territory too. I’m that old. Those names embodied what we were striving for, that old nobility in knowing the land, knowing the spirit, communing with the pure. We used to have all the heroes among us – Theseus McClure, Pythagoras Burns, Aeneas Miller. I could list all of them, but they’re all gone now.

We lost the classical ideal too, you know. All of it, lost to the ages. It’s been left behind on an empty planet, both derelict. Rome fell, and the barbarians came, and it only mattered on the outskirts anymore. Our diaspora has failed. I could not tell you why. But the ancients attributed such things to the will of the gods. I have no other explanation to give them. Like my names, they accept it and wait for it to mature.

*

Eucharis goes to him in her house one night, curious again. She’s skittish and strange, but she’s naked and Jayne will take what he can get.

*

Zoe, Mal, and Simon come to Ogygia when a week has passed. The women pour from their houses onto the streets to watch the ship land near the marshes at the edge of town.

“You really think he’s here, sir?”

“You ever known Jayne to lose scent of womankind?”

“Is anyone else picking up on the pronounced spookiness of this place, or is it just me?”

“Now, doctor, let’s not be impolite. One man’s spooky is another man’s snug.”

“I don’t see any men here, Captain.”

“Well, I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation, which this friendly-looking lady looks more than ready to share with us. Hello, ma’am. Do you by any chance know of the whereabouts of a man called Jayne Cobb?”

Callie looks at Malcolm Reynolds like the second coming of Jesus himself. “Three in a week – are you raining from the sky all of a sudden?”

Mal smiles, thinks he’s all charm. “You might say that. I’m guessing that means you’ve got him. Much as I’d like to leave him behind, he’s a member of my crew and his dishes are still waiting to be washed, so if we could have him back that’d be very much appreciated.” Simon glances at Zoe, but Zoe is watching the women, observing.

Callie stares at them all for a second, then mutters to someone behind her, without looking. “Go find Eucharis, tell her she’s got to give that man back.” The messenger leaves dust at her heels as she hurries to a nearby house.

“It’s a fine town you’ve got here, ma’am,” Mal says, keeping the encounter light as he can.

“It’s a cancer,” she says suddenly. “It’s eaten all our boys.”

Simon looks both discomfited and interested, and is immediately ashamed of each. “What do you mean?” he asks, to cover.

Someone screams in the house where Eucharis lives. Everyone looks. Soon the messenger is dragging her out into the open. She has no clothes on and she fights against the other woman. Jayne comes running after, buttoning his pants. “What’s this?” Callie booms. Eucharis stands facing the women of Ogygia, fists clenched.

“She copulated with him, Callie,” says the messenger.

“It weren’t anything! Look, you know how damn rude it was, barging in like that, lady?”

“Eucharis,” Callie says, her hackles up.

Eucharis holds her chin up high. “I wanted it.” Her eyes are not sorry.

“You would make another be younger than you? Be last when the time comes?”

The girl presses her hands against her belly. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t have had it.”

Mal shoots Jayne a look. Jayne hitches his belt up and strides over. Eucharis watches him, raw, young, and desperate. Mal frowns, then turns to Jayne. “You can say sorry for the cut-and-run later. Get back on the ship.”

“She came to me, Mal,” he says, leaning close. “I don’t know what this is all about, but it ain’t my fault.”

“Did I ask for more words from you? Go.”

Jayne affords one backwards glance at Ogygia, then stalks off. Eucharis makes a sound in her throat and starts forward, but Callie grabs her wrist and yanks her back. Mal smiles again, wary. “Well, ladies, thank you for your time. Sorry to inflict Jayne on your charming town. We’ll do our best to keep the excitement to ourselves from now on.” He turns to his first mate. “Zoe?”

She nods at the women, standing silent in tableau. “Sir, with all due respect, these women are trapped here.” She’s staring hardest at Eucharis, naked and struggling in the dust.

Mal lowers his voice. “We don’t have room on the ship for all this, Zoe.”

“We have room on the ship for her, at least.”

Mal faces Ogygia again. He surveys them all again. The wind keens, a gull far inland. “I don’t know your story,” he says, in a voice that carries. “I don’t imagine I can know. But I’m as friendly with unhappiness as anyone in the ‘verse. Now if any one of you want passage to someplace else, someplace away from here… now’s the time.”

Unthinking, Eucharis lunges. She breaks away from Callie and doesn’t stumble. Simon is reminded cuttingly of his sister.

Another woman from the crowd tackles Eucharis. Zoe reaches for her gun, but Mal puts his hand on her arm. “We can’t force ‘em.” Eucharis struggles but makes no sound. Zoe glares at them, the women of Ogygia, and turns around before she does something rash.

“It’s not ours to leave,” says Callie.

Mal pretends not to understand. He and Simon follow Zoe out.

*

Jayne is explaining his ordeal to Kaylee when Serenity lifts off. “Oh my God,” Kaylee is saying as Mal and Simon and Zoe cross the hold. “What, like a disease? How awful! How come it didn’t get you?”

Jayne shrugs, big, male, casual. “Maybe I’m just more man than all their folk was.”

Zoe climbs the stairs, head bent. Everyone can hear her. “Maybe you want to keep your mouth shut, Jayne.” She disappears into crew quarters. Kaylee looks at Mal but he just shakes his head.

“Let’s keep moving.”

*

By the time you hear this we may already be gone.