Carefully, she scratched a scowling mouth onto Sister Moira’s head. In the skit she was planning, Sister would get smooshed. Lovely.
Without thinking, she curled her tail around to hold Sister steady. Bad! Growling, she snapped it back over her shoulder. The tip hit a nettle; tears came to her eyes. She scrubbed them away with a handful of hair (so much glossier and stronger than any of the other girls’).
She had a tail because she was Kirekuni. So did her mother—but her mother’s tail was dark-patterned with tattoos, beautiful curly designs. None of the other children were Kirekuni, except for the Shard boys, who were much older, and a couple of the babies. But she’d never thought much about it until Daphne, her best friend, had told her they couldn’t hang out anymore because Kirekunis and Ferupians were at war, they were enemies.
In the end it had proved to be just another of Daphne’s things, like not wanting to play dress-up, or painting suns and moons on the knees of her breeches. But the idea had kept on bothering Rae, at meals and at prayer, and whenever someone slighted her, she couldn’t help wondering if that was why.
Rae hardly ever spoke to her mother—though she watched her constantly. But at last, yesterday, she had sought her out in the kitchen. Over the clattering of cooking and washing up, she tried to ask her about being Kirekuni. Later she realized this was a bad mistake. Saonna hated kitchen duty. She didn’t want to be distracted from the giant pan of scrambled eggs she was stirring. Sweating and biting her lip, she told Rae to go away.
So Rae went. She cried.
She didn’t want to remember. Pinching her lips together, she pressed a piece of white curtain damask onto Sister Moira’s torso for a dress. But she wasn’t careful enough. The clay ball split, and half of it rolled into the grass. Rae gasped, threw Sister Moira down, and scrambled down the bank to dig more earth out of the muddy overhang.
Last night, feeling slightly desperate, she had gone to the third consort’s bedroom to wait for Saonna. The bedroom was on the third floor of the mansion, right below the dorm where Rae herself slept. Underneath the central dome of the ceiling stood a canopied bed, its covers spilling onto the floor. Mirrors hung at strange places on the rose-patterned walls—some near the floor, some at the ceiling, and just one small one over the dressing table where Saonna’s perfumes and creams stood uncapped. Big pink chairs were draped with lovely clothes: dresses of fur and velvet—Rae would have liked that material for theater costumes—lace underwear, sateen corsets, and long lambswool underwear for winter. Saonna never, ever put anything away. Nobody in the cult did, except Rae and the other children, who had to clean up the dorm rooms and the dining room every day.
This is the way it should be, Rae had thought, seizing a long yellow ribbon and twining it around her hair. This way, you can see everything there is. All at once. Like it will be after we transcend.
Waiting was the only way to live. She knew that. But the meditative slowness of all the adults around her, so frustrating when they imposed their deliberation on the madcap, aimless games with which the children filled their time, sometimes gave her a funny feeling of being not suspended, but caught up in an onrush of fleeting days. She cried every time she had a birthday. She didn’t want to grow up. Because soon—Sister Flora said probably when Rae was in her early twenties—the Queen, the Last Queen of the Dynasty, was going to die far away in Kingsburg and all of humanity was going to come to an end.
The adults often discussed how it might happen: plague, black rain, the end of childbirth, floods. They spoke of these terrifying things quite calmly. They had even calculated how long it would take death to reach Plum Valley Domain, presupposing that it would spread outward from Kingsburg. They didn’t know how it would come. All they knew was that it was coming. That much had been revealed to the Prince in a vision. It was why, long ago, he had joined the Dynasty.
Such was the stuff of myth among the children of his acolytes.
But the end of humanity wasn’t a myth. It was a fact.
No more dress-up. No more sweet to suck clover. No more Daphne. No more Saonna. No more Rae.
Transcendence.
In her mother’s bedroom, she shook herself, and throwing a robe of mangy leopard fur around her shoulders, pranced over to gaze in one of the mirrors. For three hours, while the cult convened for prayer and supper downstairs, she amused herself trying on Saonna’s dresses and creaming her face, playing music hall. All the actors at real music halls were men, with short hair, wearing wigs and heels—so she couldn’t quite manage to believe in herself. When Daphne was around, that didn’t matter. But without her it wasn’t as much fun.
And Saonna did not come. And it got to be Rae’s bedtime. Through the ceiling, she could hear the other children talking and scuffling. Her eyes were sore with tiredness. She was usually a good girl; Sister Flora would turn a blind eye to her absence, since she didn’t make a habit of it; yet she was appalled at her own temerity. She climbed onto Saonna’s bed, crawled under the fluffy but rather matted covers, and curled up, breathing in the heady smell of Saonna mixed with the scent of must.
And she must have fallen asleep, because suddenly she was awake, and a big, heavy-breathing animal was crawling onto the bed, jerking the covers away from Rae, flopping down hard on the mattress. The room was horribly dark. Rae lay stiff and still.
“Mother?” she whispered. She never called Saonna that. “Mother?”
“Rae? Rae, is that you?”
“Motherrrr,” Rae said. “Motherrrr! Will you light a candle?”
Saonna tossed. She groaned and sighed. It sounded as if the bed itself, that massive, rotting piece of furniture, were releasing air from the depths of its frame.
“Please!” Rae nearly screamed.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Saonna mumbled. Letting out soft cries as if in agony, she slithered head down off the edge of the mattress and crouched with a thump on the floor. Rae held her breath.
Steel scratched on flint. Yellow light flowered into the room, shaking up and down the walls as Saonna heaved herself back up onto the bed to sit facing Rae.
Her hair was tousled. She wore nothing but a grimy negligee. Under her daughter’s open-mouthed stare, she twisted her head uncomfortably and gathered the filmy stuff close to her throat.
“Where were you?” Rae asked. She felt herself close to tears for the second time in one day. “I was waiting and waiting!”
“It’s none of your business what I was doing.” Saonna seemed to take charge of herself. “And I don’t know what you and your little friends were playing at in here, but you can just leave now. I have to be up early. I have to feed the bloody hogs at dawn.” She snapped her fingers. “Go on.”
Rae wrung the cover desperately with her hands and tail, twisting it up around her like a nest. “Mother,” she wailed, “I love you,” and, bursting into tears, she threw herself across Saonna’s lap.
“Oh, Queen,” Saonna whispered. Distractedly, her hands rubbed Rae’s back. It did not feel like a caress. Not like Daphne’s arms and legs wrapping around her when they curled up in bed at night; not like Sister Flora’s gruff one-armed embrace, that she gave you when she was pleased with you. A hard, embarrassed rubbing that rucked Rae’s shirt up on her back. “By the Dynasty, how I wish your father was alive!”
Rae gulped. She knew her father had not made it out of Kirekune; she had never dared to try to find out why. “How—Mother, why is Father dead?”
“Don’t call me that.” But Saonna’s voice sounded fat away, as if she were thinking of something else. “There was a lot of snow. Far more than we expected. A blizzard hit us after we had entered the mountains, before we reached Khyzlme—the trading post. Our horses died. Our food was running out. Vashi forced me to eat the larger share of what we had left, so that I could nurse you.” She laughed. “My family hated Vashi. My sister Saia was incivil to him. I was never able to convince her that he was a good man—that his affiliation with the Dynasty didn’t mean he didn’t l
ove me. But Saia didn’t understand him any more than she did me. I never belonged in Okimako!”
“Why not?”
“Oh, Kirekunis like outpourings of emotion. They like fancy words and flamboyant clothes.” Saonna’s words dripped with distaste. Rae wondered what Saonna thought, then, of the gorgeous music-hall dresses Rae had tried on that evening. “They are so vulgar! One doesn’t realize the full extent of it until one has lived in Ferupe. But it was—it was ironic that Vashi, by his self-sacrifice, should have proved Saia so wrong, and never have got the satisfaction of seeing her eat her words. Not that he would have rubbed it in, anyway. That would have made him just like her.”
Saonna had stopped rubbing Rae’s back. Rae was afraid to remind her that she was there. Lying perfectly still, she whispered: “How did you—and—and me—get out of the snow?”
“What? Oh. A trader came by, eventually. He took us into Khyzlme. A horrid smudge of a place, stinking of meat and leather, with dogs running around in the snow. The wild men there couldn’t believe we had entered the mountains without trading our horse and wagon for a dogsled. How were we supposed to know? We never met anyone who had come west across the pass. Only traders and peddlers travel into Kirekune, because there’s nothing over there that would be of interest to anybody except a merchant. But to tear oneself out of Kirekune, now—that is noble! So many of our mansion had gone before us... ” Saonna snorted. “And many more were planning to follow. I expect their bones lie under the snow. The Shards made it. So did you and I. So did the Greys and the Dirkes. And there are other Kirekuni families at other mansions. But we are just a fraction of those who tried.”
Rae shivered. It took an effort of will for her to dispel the image of those frozen skeletons. “Why?” she whispered. “Why did they all want to leave Okimako?”
It did not sound like such an unpleasant place to her. Surely people wouldn’t make fun of you for being Kirekuni in a place where everybody was? She envisioned lots of mansions clustered together, their halls and ballrooms filled with people in bright-colored clothes, their black hair flowing, their long tails (tattooed like Saonna’s) carried high behind them.
“Oh... the religious are persecuted there. Not that we aren’t persecuted everywhere, in this degenerate century! But the presence of the Dynasty is so small there that it’s frustrating. The Decadents of the East cult was growing more popular when I left—I suspect their conversion rate has overtaken ours by now. Posing imbeciles! They believe dancing in the streets will save them when the Queen dies!” Saonna tapped Rae eagerly. “Girl, one must be of a certain class to comprehend the doctrines of the Dynasty. That is how the survivors of the apocalypse will be self-selected. And an atmosphere of refinement can be quite pleasant when one has grown up the way I did, let me tell you! I shan’t go into details, but... To speak truth, that was the greatest attraction the Dynasty held for me, before I became enlightened.”
Rae did not understand her mother’s allusions. She was fascinated with the idea of Kirekune—of Okimako—a gaudy trader’s city. Even the horrors it held would probably be delightful. But she didn’t dare ask Saonna to explain. It was rare enough to hear anybody speak with passion, let alone her mother; let alone with her as audience. Apparently she had finally managed to catch Saonna at the right time. Conscious, as always, of the brief blinding torrent of days that lay ahead of them, she thought suddenly, And it may well be the last time!
She buried her nose in Saonna’s musky negligee.
“Taraszune Hone was the Prince under whom I first studied the doctrines of the Dynasty. He was great. But the most propitious Mansions of the Dynasty in the world are right here, in central Ferupe. Rae, we live in the Seventeenth Mansion of the Glorious Dynasty! The First Mansion is not three hundred miles from here! We are assured transcendence! Even in Okimako, we knew that our best chance lay in coming to Ferupe. The sad thing is that we knew so little of the thousands of miles we would have to cross.” She was silent for a long moment. “And there. Circumstances govern us all, even the Children of the Dynasty.”
Another pause. Saonna straightened her back as if to push Rae off her lap. Rae tried desperately to think of some way to keep her talking.
“But Mo—Sister Saonna! I know the Dynasty is great, but why don’t other people want to become part of it? I mean—in Greenberith—they call us culties—crazies—”
Saonna sighed. “Oh, Rae! I don’t believe you’ve understood a word I’ve been saying. It takes a certain purity of soul to live in Waiting. I don’t think they should allow you children to go into the town... it does nothing for your morals. As I said, the Dynasty is different from other cults. It is the first and truest. The Easterners of Okimako, for example, will allow anybody off the street to come in and dance with them and meditate with them and partake of their food, as a result of which they’ve made themselves a public nuisance. It’s a very Kirekuni approach to transcendence. We, on the Other hand, are essentially Ferupian—in the old sense—in that we don’t make a show of ourselves. And so the degenerate don’t understand us. It can be hard—but that’s why we live here in the mansion. As you grow older, you’ll find that it’s in you to bear misunderstanding, and even take pride in it. You’re a child of the Dynasty. You are of a certain class.” She laughed wonderingly. “When I first came to the mansion in Okimako, I couldn’t even read and write! I could not speak any Ferupian. And even my Kirekuni was poor—I had such a new-city accent. Well, it took me a year, but I learned Ferupian. That was the only reason I survived the rest of the journey here, after Vashi died. One trader after another... and all of them wanted just one thing from me. You’re lucky. You’ve been raised up right. That’s what your father died for.”
For no reason Rae found herself thinking about the music hall she had once gone to. That had been the best escapade of her life. She and some of the other cult children had stolen a lift into Salmesthwarth on a hay cart. They had worn their nicest clothes—though the hay hadn’t done those much good. They had not let anyone know they were from the mansion. Maybe that was why they had been allowed to stay inside the theater, after they were discovered sneaking in through a storeroom door.
What little she understood of the bawdy songs and skits had both shocked and delighted her. At each fervent rendition of “Ferupe Loves Our Queen,” she jumped up, put her hand to her chest and bawled out the words as lustily as any of the happy, drunken people around her. Only later—so much later that the music hall was ineradicably embedded in her memory as a paradise of glitz and glory—did Brother James happen to mention that those who frequented such places were low. Commoners.
She rolled onto her back and stared up at her mother’s face. The commoners had looked at her tail; she remembered that now. She’d had it commented on more times in the space of that evening than ever before. Of course, that was before Daphne’s pronouncement, before Rae got the thing of being Kirekuni stuck in her mind, like a burr in her hair.
At the music hall, she’d grinned and let anybody feel her tail who wanted to. But she’d only been seven. Stupid seven.
“Mother,” she muttered, not trying to get Saonna’s attention, just testing the word. “Mother.”
Viewed from below, Saonna’s face did not seem to belong to the person Rae covertly observed during the day: it looked haunted, tired. She was gazing out of the huge window. Even with the candle still guttering, Rae could see that dawn was coming, graying the tops of the trees around the mansion, bringing the fields that jostled higgledy-piggledy beyond into hazy silver focus.
Everybody else was going to die anyhow.
She packed her clay hard in her hands, rolling it, walloping it, thwacking it against the trunk of a sapling willow. Splat. Thock.
Everybody else was going to die anyhow.
The children of Greenberith who whispered behind her back, even when the tall beautiful Shard boys took her to walk between them. (She was in awe of the Shard boys. She was glad they were going to transcend.) The mus
ic-hall actors in Salmesthwarth. The farmers who wouldn’t let the cult children play in their fields, and never gave them ripe plums, although the local bullies got theirs regularly at the start of the fruit-harvesting season. Squire Carathraw, who turned up every so often on the front doorstep of the mansion, half-drunk and ragged, pointing to the weeds that clogged the front drive and blubbering that the cult had ruined the land of his fathers. Well, it was his own fault, wasn’t it, if he had been greedy enough to sell?
The Dynasty “did not deem modification of the physical world necessary.” Brother James said that when the cult first bought the mansion from Squire Carathraw in 1855, all the lands which were now tangled forest had been a sculptured garden. Twenty or more locals had lived here just to take care of them, and of the daemon machines that mowed the lawns and clipped the topiary and burnished the windows. Those were now, mostly, fallen in glittering heaps beside the walls of the mansion. Some of those ex-servants, graying now, still turned up to accuse and beg, although unlike the squire, most of them had been reabsorbed into their own world. (The condemned world.)
The squire’s world had not wanted him, Rae supposed.
Brother James said of course it hadn’t. The vice of greed had brought Carathraw low. He was an example.
And it was his own fault. Only the worst kind of squire, those who valued cold sterling over the land their fathers had held for hundreds of years, would sell their houses—no matter how tempting the price. And the Dynasty offered very tempting prices! But eventually, inevitably, the money was spent and the firework flared to earth. The squire, by this time generally without his family, came crying home to his ancestral mansion. But the Prince who now ruled the mansion had to close the door in his face. The squire had sold, had he not? He was not the sort who would be able to profit from joining the Dynasty. He was an example for the rest of the people, some of whom would eventually grow in spirit enough to seek out the Dynasty.
The War in the Waste Page 6