Chapter Two
It got dark early at this time of the year, but the curfew for Nurail hadn’t been shifted yet. Hanner had plenty of time to have his payday treat and get back to his garden before the Port Authority would be patrolling. The Port Authority was generally just as willing to beat a Nurail as look at him, and they didn’t need to justify their actions as long as there were no bones broken.
Hanner was prudent.
He would be back to his garden in good time.
The Tavart had got a residence-chit for him, and had suffered him to make a modest habitable place in one of the garden’s outbuildings so that he could live there without charge to lodgings and save his wage. The Tavart was a good maistress. She always paid full earnings on the contracted day, and there’d been a nice bit of extra this time, too, that had come into his hand with a vague mention of the winter coming on. He had a new coat of the extra. A new coat, a secure lodging, leave to take his prunings and trimmings in and out as he wished: life was not half bad, just at the present, as long as a man could manage not to mind about Danzilar and the Judicial order.
He had it better than Megh did, for a fact. And here she was, coming through the back way from the service-house into this little hire-kitchen, where even a Nurail could sit and have a bit of meat and not be molested.
Megh.
Taller than he was, shaped very becomingly, and if her lip had got set a little thin over the years of slavery she’d served her eyes were dark and glittering with life and even laughter sometimes yet.
“Hullo, there, cousin Hanner, I was afraid that I’d mistook the day. How do you go?”
She slid into the booth beside him, setting a bottle of ale down between them on the table as she did. Criminal Megh was in the eyes of the Bench, sentenced to thirty years of involuntary servitude for supposed crimes against the Judicial order. But still she was allowed a surplus ration, now that she had passed the first third of her sentence.
Service bond-involuntaries past their first third got a surplus ration of food and drink and more administrative than personal chores assigned. Security bond-involuntaries were issued a more serviceable grade of boots and better fabric for their uniforms.
“I’m a rising young man in the affairs of state, here, Megh, I’ll have you know. My maistress has called up a whole field of botanicals, I’m to discover how they thrive in the salt air, see?”
He was not a slave in the same sense as Megh; he wore no implanted governor to monitor his internal states and punish an infraction. He could think treason all he liked, so long as he did none.
He set his little posy to the Megh side of the bottle, keeping his eyes on his plate. It gave her pleasure to have a little bit of flowering straw, and a bloom that was not too unlike a golden ice-flower. Skelern felt it prudent nonetheless to wait until she had had a moment to master the pain that it also brought her before he could evaluate the success of his gift.
“Skelern, I’ve heard something.”
Startled, he looked up at her before time. She sat very still, very quiet, turning the stem of a piece of sheep-fern between her fingers. It had been for a joke, the sheep-fern; it was fodder for the animals, nothing more, but Maistress Tavart had seemed to find it rare and exotic.
“What’s the matter, Megh, nothing to grieve you?”
He should have known better than to make such a joke. He was a gardener’s son, a gardener. He knew little about the high windy, nor cared to. But Megh had come from the high windy, on her own world. Megh was a herder’s daughter.
“Nothing to grieve over, no, cousin. Maybe nothing at all but just the accident of a name.” There was a little frown between her honest eyes, an uncertainty between pleasure and fear. “There was a patron, here, these few days past. I served her her meal. And she wanted to ask about the pattern-weave.”
Megh put her hand up to the shawl across her right shoulder, a little uncomfortably. It was a cruelty to make her wear it at all, even if it was no honest weave. They liked to remind people that they could do anything they wanted, and you’ll accept it and be grateful, my girl.
“But she was polite, Skelern, thoughtful-like. As if she really cared to know. And she kept looking at me as though I reminded her.”
She was an exotic in a public house, was Megh. The most part of her job was parrying the constant curious questions of customers eager to be titillated with a bit of genuine Nurail folklore. Skelern opened the bottle, pouring two glasses full without comment. It was Megh expected to keep quiet, and let other people talk. He wasn’t about to stop her words in the small space of time that she had in which she could speak at her will. He was a gardener. He knew the value of letting well enough alone.
“She seemed kind enough. I’m not forbidden to say only so much as where and from whom. And so I told. The truth, not this rag of lies I wear, and I’m from Marleborne, you know that, Skelern.”
And her father’s people had once held a famous war-weave. The Narrow Pass, he thought it had been, though he had always tried hard not to brood upon the matter, keeping his mind on his own garden for prudence’s sake. If it hadn’t been for the war-weaves and the warlike fury they aroused in Nurail hearts the Bench might not have seen them for a threat, all of those years ago. He might have been a free man, then, and his family yet living in decent comfort here in Burkhayden.
“And she interrupted me, Skelern, startled-like. And your mother’s people hold the Ice Traverse, she said. As if she knew, cousin, but how could she know the weave, and still say my mother’s people?”
The faint hint of outraged modesty made him want to smile. “Most improper it is, cousin. Surely she meant no harm.”
Picking up her glass Megh stared at the surface of the beer, tilted back as it was, as though to see her reflection in its surface. Skelern realized with a mild concerned shock that she was blushing. “Skelern, you’ll grant me your sweet pardon, but I have to say this. My . . . my father’s wife . . . my brothers’ mother, her people, they — ”
Oh. Skelern made a smoothing gesture, fearful that she would say the taboo thing. “So how did she know of the weave in Marleborne, do you think? And yet not know the rest of it?”
“I asked her that, I did.” There was the swallowed sob of anguished hope in Megh’s quiet voice; it made him want to weep. “I couldn’t help it.” Nor would he have been able to resist the same impulse if he’d been the one ripped from his native place, with no news ever of his family. “She couldn’t think of why she thought of it, and we spoke no further on that reckoning. But she sent word a day or so after that, and it was a Security chit, so they let it through to me still as it left her.”
Else everyone would know what Megh had learned. Whatever that was. No Nurail had a right to privacy, not here in Port Burkhayden.
The glass was empty, now, but Megh hadn’t set it back down for a refill in friendship and in courtesy. She held the glass to her instead with both hands wrapped fiercely around it at its middle.
“She had met once a Security troop, and had some cause or another to have remembered him. Bond-involuntary, Nurail. And she didn’t remember what his slave-name was.” Not as if that would have told Megh anything. Other bond-involuntaries took slave-names from the Judiciary where they’d been condemned, and carried the identification of the place that defined their shame until their Day was past. To Nurail alone even that much identity was denied.
“But what she had called to her mind was a trial that she was at, a talking-drug, something. I don’t know. Being tested on a Nurail bond-involuntary. It’s what she remembered him telling, that his name was Robin, from Marleborne. And that his mother’s people held the Ice Traverse.”
There was no missing the significance. Skelern chewed on a bit of the meat from his stew-bowl thoughtfully, not wanting to intrude on the intensity of her feeling. She worried at the fringe of the shawl that she wore; after a moment he felt it might be safe to speak to her. “Your brother, then, Maistress Megh. Do you think it could be?”
Megh had thought that problem up one side of the hill and down the next, so much was obvious. “I saw him last taken away by Jurisdiction, and they were merciful to us, cousin, they let us see each other alive and whole before we were to be parted. Wanted to fight, he did, but it was kindness to let me kiss my brother, with the rest of us — all dead — ”
“Hush, now,” Skelern warned, hastily, alarmed. “Hush, now, Megh, you’ll give yourself such a headache, please, be gentle.”
She turned her head and wiped her face with his napkin, crumpling it in her hand. “Look you aren’t late for curfew, young Skelern,” she said, with a certain weight of tears to drape her admonitory tone. “I believe you are the same age that my brother would be, of course not so tall. It is to hope, that’s all.”
Little enough to hope for, surely. Bond-involuntary Security had thirty years to serve at labor that was both hard and hazardous. And to be forced to put the tortures forward, at the order of an Inquisitor —
“I’ll dream on it with you, then, if you’ll permit.” There were Nurail here in Burkhayden who had come through the camps at Rudistal, and one of the staff at Center House who had survived the Domitt Prison itself. They said that Koscuisko for one had used his Bonds tenderly, with respect. But Skelern knew that it would never have been remarked upon unless that was unusual.
“I’m glad for all the good you care to hope me,” Megh said with plain simplicity, kissing him on the cheek as she rose to go. “Come and see me again, cousin, I’ll tell you all about our new maisters, and whether they are any different than the old ones were.”
He watched her move gracefully to the back of the shop and through, her shoulders straight beneath the mockery of the weave that Jurisdiction put to her to wear, dignity and suffering alike in the gentle movement of her head.
If it were up to him there would be an entire army of brothers for her, if only they could give her comfort.
But it wasn’t up to him.
And he had to mind the curfew.
He finished his meal and went out while he still had time to get back to his garden before curfew fell over the Port and prisoned Nurail behind doors.
###
Skelern Hanner leaned against his grubbing-hoe and rested himself, the cool still air very pleasant next to his bare skin. His shirt hung on a nail outside the shed for the saving of the garment from the sweat; which made things a little awkward, of a sudden, because here was sweet little Sylyphe come running across the blue-turves to seek him.
He watched her come with embarrassment, with fondness, and with dread. A man would prefer to be decently covered in the presence of a lady, especially when a man knew he was too skinny by half to be judged beautiful. He was fond of Sylyphe. She had a good nature. He fervently hoped that she did not want to talk to him about politics.
“Skelern, Skelern, Mother has news for you, there’s a job — the Danzilar prince’s garden, for his party, there’s a Fleet Lieutenant here, and — ”
He’d had ample moments of warning, but he hadn’t stirred himself, busy watching her come scurrying over the grass. It was a pleasure to watch her, child though she was. She stopped abruptly and drew back when she saw him, the back of her hand coming up to cover her little mouth as if she’d never seen a man without his smock on before, ever.
“Oh, Skelern, this is — surely most improper, please, go and dress yourself.”
He wanted to laugh. But he went to fetch his shirt, instead. “If my little maistress doesn’t think it seemly, I would suggest she not come looking for her mother’s gardener come spring. A man likes to work in his hip-wrap when it’s hot, sweet Sylyphe.”
She was blushing as deep as a vine-ripened acid-plum, and she did it very prettily, too. Well, perhaps not; her cheeks were blotched and blighted with embarrassment. It looked pretty enough to him.
“I shall carry bells. And call out warning. What are you doing, Skelern?”
She was interested in gardening, that was true. “I’m heading the late starchies. If you don’t trim them to the ground they waste themselves away in the winter light as though it was spring, and you lose the spring blossom.” Bending down for a clump of leaves, he shook it free of dirt to offer it to her, half-joking. “Flowers, for the little maistress of the house?”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. Imagine, wearing a vegetable.” And yet she tucked the base of the leaf-bundle into her bodice, and arrayed the green leaves carefully in a symmetrical pattern upon her bosom. “There, how do I look?”
“As if you were wearing a vegetable. Of course. What were you calling to me, on your way out? A party for me, is it?”
“Um.” She was distracted by her corsage still, making further adjustments. There had been a year when such rubbish as Sylyphe’s corsage would have been his dinner. They’d eaten less likely things not so very long ago. “Gardeners for the Danzilar prince’s garden, to make ready for his party. Mother’s offered you, but you’re to be paid, of course, and to have a holiday after.”
He wasn’t quite sure that he liked being “offered,” as if he were a bundle of packaging. Still, the Tavart treated him well enough to take the sting out of any real resentment on his part. Surely the Tavart had earned the right to lend him out, with pay and bonuses. There was a good deal to be said for the contractual value of a new coat before winter, and a warm dry room safe from the weather for his bed. “Tell me about the party, Sylyphe. Am I to have a day to finish up my starchies, here?” He wasn’t going to want to let the tubers go. He needed a day or two yet in the late sun to be ready for the ice that was to come.
She dimpled at him, seeming grateful for a chance to talk about it. “It’s to be three weeks yet before the Fleet arrives. The master-gardener says a week’s worth of work, but a month’s pay is offered, Skelern, say that you aren’t cross? I mean — ”
She meant that he was prickly with her on the issue of being told where to go and how to go when he got there. “Na, there’s good to it, then. Plenty of time to finish up what’s needful.”
It was a little selfish of him to be so self-absorbed when she was all alone here and aching with the excitement of it all. Once the Danzilar arrived there would be more doing in Port Burkhayden, and probably more company for Sylyphe — company more suited than his to her high place.
“And your Lieutenant, Sylyphe, tell me about him, do.” No doubt he’d go back to being “Gardener Hanner” then, if she had time to speak to him at all. It was probably just as well.
He could not bear to think of Sylyphe trying to cope with the life of a Nurail gardener with one small room in a gardener’s shed of a wintertime, and that was the sum of the best he could ever hope to offer her.
“G’herm Wyrlann. Fleet First Lieutenant, Jurisdiction Fleet Ship Ragnarok.” She spoke the uncouth name with careful precision, as if testing the contours of it in her mouth with studious attention. “Command Branch, and he looks very stern. The uniform! And Security, they all move perfectly, Skelern, perfectly, you should just see them.”
She’d been with her mother to some public function, no doubt. As prepared as Sylyphe was to be excited they could have sent a maintenance crew, and Sylyphe would have taken them for splendid.
“The Danzilar in four weeks. Oh, your mother’s to be busy.” Parties all over town, no doubt. He’d want to see about forcing some of his second flat of ice-blooms; the Tavart liked the ice-blooms, and she made good capital of them as well. The Danzilar wanted to exploit the specifically Nurailian nature of its newly indentured world. Ice-blooms were apparently a useful token of Iaccary Textile and Cordage’s commitment to the Danzilar’s goals.
And on the tail end of his musing, a random thought, come strolling forward from his mouth before he saw it. “Shan’t be having much time to chat with you, Sylyphe.”
She bridled at the idea, seeming as surprised as he was to have heard it. “Why, whatever can you suppose that to mean, Skelern ?”
There was a silence for a moment, each staring at each, she and he confused alike by why the thought had come and why it had seemed so objectionable. Then Sylyphe recovered herself, to an extent. It was her breeding.
“There will be plenty of time to talk. Later. There’s winter gardening, I’ve read about it, I want to hear all that you can teach me.”
But her reassurance, gracious as it was, came too late for either of them. The point had been made, and there was no recalling it. Gardener Hanner it was to be. There was no way it could be otherwise.
“Later, of course.” He could only agree, or else give offense. He said it with a certain heaviness of heart all the same. “You’ll want to go into the house, before your mother catches you with a tuber in your bosom.”
“Oh, Skelern, don’t be silly. As if Mother would care.”
There was no longer any conviction in her protest.
She removed the now-wilting greens with grave decorous grief, and handed them back to him without meeting his eyes.
###
Standing in the empty echoing foyer of the Center House, G’herm Wyrlann eyed the overgrown garden through the unwashed panes of the old-fashioned clear-walls with distaste. Captain Lowden’s promises aside, he was not enjoying his brief taste of absolute power; there was so little to have power over — so little privilege to abrogate or enjoy.
Fleet’s provisioners had done their job too well, down to the very last. There was precious little left to beguile a man in Port Burkhayden, and there would be no one to carpet these bare dirty floors — to hang the high walls with insulating fabric as a barrier to the damp falling dark — to stock the kitchen with anything more than survival rations; not until Danzilar came.
“Oh, yes, very well done indeed,” he snarled, at no one in particular. He’d been all over the port inside of the past few hours — what there was left of the port. “Nothing left in the armory, nothing. Nothing left in Administrative Quarters. Nothing left here, and I swear that it would not surprise me if the local Bench itself had been carted off to Stores.”
His contact, the Fleet Liaison Officer, merely bowed as if in receipt of a compliment. And Wyrlann hadn’t meant it as a compliment. The local Fleet Liaison had gone disgustingly native, from what Wyrlann could gather. He’d received the mildest of the comments Wyrlann had felt called upon to make about Nurail, about Meghilder, about Port Burkhayden itself in particular with a blank stare of disapproval that Wyrlann hadn’t cared for, not at all.
No doubt the Fleet Liaison was already on Danzilar’s payroll behind Fleet’s back. The Danzilar’s local majordomo certainly seemed comfortable enough with him; and the Danzilar’s majordomo was Nurail, probably Free Government. There was no getting away from Nurail at Burkhayden. The place was filthy with them.
Nor had the welcoming party been so much as properly coached in the expected expressions of respect and gratitude; it had instead been apparently assembled more or less by accident, through mere word of mouth.
Four weeks until the Ragnarok arrived, and he was stuck here until then. If he’d realized that it was going to be like this, he would have suggested Lowden send ap Rhiannon instead of him. It would have been a good experience for the crèche-bred junior officer to be isolated in the middle of a derelict port for four weeks with only a suspicious — and suspiciously reserved — Fleet Liaison Officer for company.
Wyrlann sighed. The sun was going down, and if the draft was any indication the wind was picking up as well. “I’ve seen all I need to see of this, for now. Which isn’t saying much.” He had no intention of spending the night here, with the heating systems all turned off and no liquor to be had.
He hadn’t any doubt that the majordomo’s personal quarters were comfortable and luxurious enough, but Artigen was just the sort of icicle-up-his-ass administrative officer to take exception to any suggestions on Wyrlann’s part that they go find out. “There’s a service house here, isn’t there? Or have you had that shipped out as well?”
Now the majordomo answered, and he hadn’t been spoken to. Wyrlann wondered that Danzilar’s people would put a Nurail in a position of such influence and authority. On the other hand it was Danzilar’s lookout if the Nurail robbed him blind. “There is indeed, Fleet Lieutenant. It’s part of the contracted package, still in place for the Danzilar prince’s use.”
Which probably meant that it wasn’t very profitable, which in turn probably meant that it wasn’t much of a service house. As if anything different could be expected in this stinking Nurail port full of stinking Nurail. Still, as a Command Branch officer he didn’t have to pay at service centers.
He could have anything he wanted for the asking. And for now what he really wanted was a little entertainment. The service house would be adequately heated, if nothing else. “Well, let’s go, then.”
“Yes, Lieutenant.” Artigen, once more; Wyrlann was glad to see that at least the Nurail hadn’t forgotten his place to the extent of presuming himself to be included. “Your Security as well? Of course.”
Captain Lowden would expect him to evaluate what amenities remained in Port Burkhayden.
Good subordinate officers were quick to anticipate and execute the wishes of their senior officers.
###
She’d told young Hanner that she would tell him all about their new maisters. That she had. So Megh examined this Ragnarok’s First Lieutenant covertly as she set his mea] to table, mindful of the necessity to keep the inner elbow-point of her patterned shawl out of the food.
Not a sound. Not a single clink or bell-like ting or muffled thud; she knew the trick of it, setting the place without a single stray bit of noise to distract the officer. Tallish. Stoutish, but like it was all muscle and bone, no hint of any easy living, any fat. Mouth that seemed always in a sneer, even drinking his liquor, which should make a man at least stop frowning if it didn’t make him smile.
She glanced over at the officer one too many times and met his cold sarcastic gaze, which quite unnerved her. Startled, she let the silence stretch too far for a graceful recovery, and the realization unbalanced her even more. She bent her head to stare at the napery still in her hands, thinking hard and fast.
“The Lieutenant is but half a day in Burkhayden, yet?” she asked with studied timidity in her voice, falling back into the exaggerated Nurail lilt expected of her for camouflage. “How does the officer take to our salt sea, and our proud new sky-starport?”
Burkhayden had been a seaport, once, but the marsh had gotten too far into the bay, and the Jurisdiction had not cared to dredge for navigability when higher tolls could be taken in other channels.
“Can’t say that I like it at all.” The voice was harsh, amused. She knew that voice; it meant that she’d become a target, once again. That was what she was here for, of course, her primary function; one wretched Nurail slave to mock at, so that the Jurisdiction could forget tile menace that it had once felt from the war-weaves.
“Well, it’s a poor mean place, compared to what the officer — ”
He interrupted her without the slightest hint of discomfort. “You’re Nurail, aren’t you? I know the accent.”
Of course the Lieutenant knew the accent. It was the Jurisdiction Standard accent for a Nurail slave, one she had learned early on. The fact that it had nothing to do with any honest Nurail lilt that she had ever heard was just another part of the point that they were making about Nurail.
“I wonder that you caught it, sir, it takes a keen ear — ”
Interrupting again, with obvious relish this time, the Lieutenant — Megh realized — was enjoying the fact that he was being rude. That he could be as rude as he liked with impunity. “Don’t try any of that whore-pap on me. I know better. That’s not a Nurail pattern, either, so what was your weave? Tell me about it.”
Yes, the old question, the old chore. Swallowing a sigh of resignation Megh lifted the shawl down from her right shoulder, and began to count the callings that defined her life.
“Seven tones in a Nurail scale, and four half-tones to each. This color of green’s the chord called Dogwood Blossom. These notes together in this set, these chords, it’s the defining phrase for the tune of Dancing Meggins, which has been a treaty-record tune once of a time. So this space of threads gives you the Nurail Conventions at Berrine, before the Political Stabilization Acts, and here — ”
He’d risen from the cradle-chair he had been resting in and come to stand near her. The house’s best room it was, separate bath, no sound from the outside, bed big enough for five to sport in. She’d spent her time in a room like this, but not recently. She was beginning to show too much of her history, and was only bidden to smaller, more utilitarian rooms when she was bidden to provide sexual services at all.
“I thought I told you. I already know that’s not a Nurail weave.”
She couldn’t decide on his tone of voice, whether gentle or threatening. She did know that it made her uncomfortable.
“With the officer’s permission, it’s the only weave the Bench will have me speak of — ”
“Not good enough.” Draining his glass, he sat down on the table so forcefully that the cutlery jumped. “I told your proprietor that I wanted amusement. I don’t need to. hear the damn fake weave, I want to hear your weave. The one you used to have. Before you got what’s coming to any insurrectionary, you filthy little traitor.”
And she wasn’t an insurrectionary except by default, and she wasn’t any kind of a traitor, not to her weave and kind. The weave she wore was the only one she was allowed to tell over in public. It was the only one that people were permitted to demand of her.
“Begging the officer’s pardon, but it is my weave, it has been so for going on ten years . . . “
Eyes respectfully lowered, she didn’t see the hand coming across her face, and the shock almost as much as the blow itself made her stagger back half-collapsing to the ground.
“Your weave.” Crouching over her, now, and the smell of his breath was heavy with malice and liquor. “Tell your other customers whatever damn lies you please. But to me you tell the truth, understand?”
Well, it seemed clear enough. But she could not speak of her weave even to please a difficult patron, even if it might save her a beating. Her father’s people had held the Narrow Pass. She was strictly prohibited to rehearse it, and her governor made sure she would not do the forbidden thing.
“The Fleet Lieutenant surely understands better than anyone else. The weave, it’s proscribed, I may not — ”
This time she saw the blow coming, but she couldn’t avoid, it even so. Back against the heavy base of the sideboard she went, and fetched her head sharply up against it.
“I’ve had just about enough of this. Do you have any idea who I am?”
Oh, yes. She knew exactly who he was. He was a bully who beat up women, but there wasn’t much she could do about that. Influential patrons were left more or less to do as they pleased, as long as the house got its money.
Still, his musical entertainment would be coming, she could get away from him when the musicians came. And the establishment husbanded its livestock responsibly. They would not let her suffer too much pain after an undeserved beating.
“His Excellency is the First Lieutenant of the Ragnarok, Command Branch — ”
He dragged her away from the sideboard and hit her yet again, keeping a good grip on her arm so that she couldn’t put any distance between them. “Wrong. Dear me. The little whore thinks I’m an Excellency. Is that what you think, little whore? Do you think that I’m an Excellency?”
He wouldn’t stop hitting her face, and her thoughts rattled against each other into incoherence with each blow. The inside of her cheek was cut against her teeth. It was difficult to speak distinctly.
“The officer is Command Branch, surely.”
“But not an Excellency. Maybe it’s Koscuisko you have in mind. He spent a lot of time getting to know you Nurail, remember? At the Domitt Prison?”
She kept on trying to get away. She knew he hadn’t cleared this with the housemaster, and she couldn’t help but try to escape pain. She tried, but his grip was like iron, and it only seemed to make him angrier.
“Everyone knows about Black Andrej. And the Domitt Prison.” Keeping her voice low on instinct, Megh kept testing for the right approach to appease him, to get him to stop for long enough for her to get away. Once she could get away she would be safe, the house staff would surely intervene to protect her. She couldn’t be beaten for not singing her weave, even had her governor permitted it. It was a killing offense to sing any weave, let alone a war-weave like the Narrow Pass.
“Oh, well, perhaps you’re disappointed, then. You’d sing the weave for him, soon enough, but not for me, is that it?”
He shook her and let her go, but she couldn’t get to the door, because her legs came out from underneath her as soon as he released her upper arm. And he was still talking. It was important to pay attention to what he was saying; she had to find a way to placate him.
“I’ll tell you something, though. I’ve seen him work. There’s really nothing very complicated to it. Anything he can do, I can do, and better.”
It was his boot this time, and not a fist at all. A boot sudden and brutal put to her stomach, making her cry out loud of it. And yet another boot, to take the wind out of her belly, so that she rolled her arms around her middle and curled onto her side, trying to find her breath.
“There’s his tapes, you know? I watch them sometimes, with the Captain. And if Koscuisko was here I know just what he’d do. Here, we’ll pretend I’m your precious ‘Black Andrej,’ shall we? And when we’re done you can sing me your weave like an obedient little slut. Whether you want to or not.”
Stooping down to her on the floor he grabbed her wrist, and pulled her flat at length on the carpet. She tried to smooth her breathing out, to be ready for the next blow. It helped sometimes to try to guess the course of a beating, to concentrate on whatever one could use to create an illusion of control.
“And if Koscuisko were here he’d probably start with . . . well. He’d use the butt end of his driver to fuck you wide open, he does amazing things with that whip. Haven’t got a whip. This’ll do, though, just as well. I’m sure.”
He seemed minded to rape her with his boots, never minding the other ugly things he said. There didn’t seem to be anywhere that she could get to, to hide from him. He drove her across the carpet to the far wall with his blows; and when she could flee no further he stuffed her shawl deep down into her throat and raped her horribly with the wine-flask. She thought it was the wine-flask, he’d had a wine flask, but whatever it was forced her belly up into her throat with agony.
“Damn thing’s broken, well, if you think I’m going into your stinking cunt after that, you can just think again. Not to disappoint you, I know how much you crave it.”
Where were the musicians? Hadn’t it been an hour, two hours, half a day since she had come up here to set the table, and she still left here all alone at the mercy of this monster’s brutal whims?
“Of course in the end the simple things are best. Traditional. You Nurail like tradition? You’ll like this.”
She was choking on her own screams, trying to breathe.
And she could not stop screaming even so.
###
The Port Authority had come and gone, the emergency aid team had left with the injured woman, and the word went out into the silent whispering streets of Port Burkhayden.
The Ragnarok’s First Lieutenant, in the service house.
There were menials on night shifts, ready to provide hot food to comfort the patrols coming in off the streets for their warming-periods, and the message followed each mobile vendor from station to station as the night deepened.
One of the women, making his meal ready. He tried to make her sing her father's weave.
The city’s communications nets were old and poorly maintained, and now that the Jurisdiction had pulled its resources out there were chronic problems with lapses in the net. Strictly licensed Nurail maintenance crews were on call to respond at any hour of the day or night. There was a steady stream of emergency restore orders, and the news was left at nexus after nexus as the hours wore on.
Support staff, not a bed-partner, only setting the table out. Beat her with his fists, put his boots to her. Cut her with broken glass, you can guess where, because nobody wants to have to say.
During the coldest hour, the oldest hour, the least respected of the city’s servants rose up out of their meager beds to see that all was waiting, nothing wanting, when the city’s maisters rose. Fuel for furnaces, water-heaters brought up in time for them as had the luxury of showers, baths. Fresh sweet milk from outside the port’s boundaries, the morning’s fresh-picked flowers for the fast-meal table. A bite to eat for the Nurail that lived in lodgings, that had to be up and doing before the kitchen would be open to provide for them: and the sorry tale came whispering to Skelern Hanner as he stood in the darkness of his gardener’s shed and washed his hands and face in icy water, getting dressed.
The woman Megh, the Nurail, at the service house. Raped by the First Lieutenant, and with a flask, a piece of broken furniture, nobody knows what else. Taken off to charity ward, but there's no healer there for such wounds as she's taken. She may be dead already.
Skelern stood in the dark silence of his shed, half-dressed, his face still dripping with the cold water of his early morning wash, frantic phrases rushing through his mind. Megh, poor Megh, he had to go and see her.
He couldn’t hope to go see her, not on his own, they wouldn’t let him in.
He could wake Sylyphe, that he could, she was pitiful if misguided, she could take him to the hospital.
He could not possibly involve Sylyphe.
She was young and privileged. She did not understand the cruel truths in life, and the cruel truth was that a Command Branch officer in any civil port could do such crimes without reproach. Without reprisals.
If he even told Sylyphe she might make a scene in public, and her mother could be compromised by implication. He owed the Tavart for too many favors to want to see her compromised, nor her daughter permitted to make a fool of herself in public. He couldn’t see Sylyphe.
He could ask permission to ask the Tavart, but the Tavart was out of town on business, and by the time he could make his request — the day after tomorrow, sometime, and he’d need a chit from her, too, to give him authorization from his employer to go where he’d no business being otherwise — poor Megh could be dead by then, if she wasn’t already.
But he was Nurail as well as Megh was, and she would not thank him for courting a beating by risking it on his own just to see her corpse. Nurail, and a slave, and if the Port Authority did not have the legal right to use his body at its pleasure as the Ragnarok’s First Lieutenant had done Megh’s there was no lack of reasonable pretexts to torture a Nurail gardener for stepping outside of his place, for involving himself uninvited in the affairs of his betters. And no one watching to see that the punishment was restricted to the Jurisdiction Standard, either.
He washed his face again, to rinse the tears away. He would have to wait. The Tavart would grant him leave to go, he was sure of that.
And maybe Megh would not be dead before he could come to grieve for her in hospital.