by Ann Leckie
They sang it anyway. And when they were finished, the elder said, bowing, “Citizens, we will pray for the one you’ve lost.” In perfectly comprehensible, if heavily accented, Radchaai.
“Citizens,” I replied, also in Radchaai, because I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone to realize how much Delsig I spoke, just yet. “We are greatly moved, and we thank you for your song and your prayers.”
The overseer spoke up, loud and slow. “The fleet captain thanks you. Now go.”
“Wait,” I interjected. And turned to Fosyf. “Will you favor me, and give these people something to eat and drink before they go?” She blinked at me, uncomprehending. The overseer stared at me in frank disbelief. “It’s a whim I have. If there’s any question of impropriety, I’ll be happy to pay you back. Whatever is on hand. Tea and cakes, perhaps.” It was the sort of thing I’d expect the kitchen here to always have ready.
Fosyf recovered from her immediate surprise. “Of course, Fleet Captain.” She gestured toward the overseer, who, still clearly aghast at my request, herded the field workers away.
The ground floor of the building we were to stay in was one large, open space, part dining room, part sitting room, the sitting-room side full of wide, deep chairs and side tables that held game-boards with bright-colored counters. On the other side of the room we ate egg and bean curd soup at a long table with artfully mismatched chairs, by a sideboard piled with fruit and cakes. The line of small windows around the ceiling had gone dull with twilight and clouds that had blown in. Upstairs were narrow hallways, each bedroom and its attached sitting room carefully color coordinated. Mine was orange and blue, in muted tones, the thick, soft blankets on the bed very carefully made, I suspected, to appear comfortably worn and faded. A casual country cottage, one might have thought at first glance, but all of it meticulously placed and arranged.
Citizen Fosyf, sitting at one end of the table, said, “This actually used to be storage and administration. The main building was a guesthouse, you know. Before the annexation.”
“All the bedrooms in the main house exit onto the balconies,” said Raughd. Who had maneuvered to sit beside me, was now leaning close with head tilted and a knowing smile. “Very convenient for assignations.” She was, I realized, trying to flirt with me. Even though I was in mourning and so her pursuit of me would be highly improper in the best of situations.
“Ha-ha!” laughed Citizen Fosyf. “Raughd has always found those outer stairs useful. I did myself when I was that age.”
The nearest town was an hour away by flier. There was no one here to have assignations with except household members—over in the main house, I assumed, would be cousins and clients. Not everyone in a household was always related in a way that made sex off-limits, so there might well have been allowable relationships here that didn’t involve intimidating the servants.
Captain Hetnys sat across the table from me, Sword of Atagaris standing stiff scant meters behind her, waiting in case it should be needed. As an ancillary, it wasn’t required to observe mourning customs. Kalr Five stood behind me, having apparently convinced everyone here that she, also, was an ancillary.
Citizen Sirix sat silent beside me. The house servants I’d seen appeared to mostly be Samirend with a few Xhais, though I’d seen a few Valskaayans working on the grounds outside. There had been a small, nearly undetectable hesitation on the part of the servants that had shown us to our rooms—I suspected that they would have sent Sirix to servants’ quarters if they’d not been given other instructions. It was possible someone here would recognize her, even though she’d last been downwell twenty years ago and wasn’t from this estate, but another one a hundred or more kilometers away.
“Raughd’s tutors always found it dull here,” said Fosyf.
“They were dull!” exclaimed Raughd. In a singsong, nasal voice, she declaimed, “Citizen! In third meter and Acute mode, tell us how God is like a duck.” Captain Hetnys laughed. “I always tried to make life more amusing for them,” Raughd went on, “but they never seemed to appreciate it.”
Citizen Fosyf laughed as well. I did not. I had heard about such amusements from my lieutenants in the past, and had already seen Raughd’s tendency toward cruelty. “Can you?” I asked. “Tell us in verse, I mean, how God is like a duck?”
“I shouldn’t think God was anything like a duck,” said Captain Hetnys, emboldened by my past few days of outward calm. “Honestly. A duck!”
“But surely,” I admonished, “God is a duck.” God was the universe, and the universe was God.
Fosyf waved my objection away. “Yes, yes, Fleet Captain, but surely one can say that quite simply without all the fussing over meters and proper diction and whatnot.”
“And why choose something so ridiculous?” asked Captain Hetnys. “Why not ask how God is like… rubies or stars or”—she gestured vaguely around—“even tea? Something valuable. Something vast. It would be much more proper.”
“A question,” I replied, “that might reward close consideration. Citizen Fosyf, I gather the tea here is entirely handpicked and processed by hand.”
“It is!” Fosyf beamed. This was, clearly, one of the centers of her pride. “Handpicked—you can see it whenever you like. The manufactory is nearby, very easy to visit. Should you find that proper.” A brief pause, as she blinked, someone nearby having apparently sent her a message. “The section just over the ridge is due to be picked tomorrow. And of course the making of the leaves into tea—the crafting of it—goes on all day and night. The leaves must be withered and stirred, till they reach just the right point, and then dry-cooked and rolled until just the right moment. Then they’re graded and have the final drying. You can do all those things by machine, of course, some do, and it’s perfectly acceptable tea.” The smallest hint of contempt and dismissal behind that perfectly acceptable. “The sort of thing you’d get good value for in a shop. But this tea isn’t available in shops.”
Fosyf’s tea, Daughter of Fishes, would only be available as a gift. Or—maybe—bought directly from Citizen Fosyf to be given as a gift. The Radch used money, but a staggering amount of exchanges were not money for goods, but gift for gift. Citizen Fosyf was not paid much, if anything, for her tea. Not technically. Those green fields we’d flown over, all that tea, the complicated production, was not a matter of maximizing cost efficiency—no, the point of Daughter of Fishes was prestige.
Which explained why, though there were doubtless larger plantations on Athoek, that likely pulled in profits that at first glance looked much more impressive, the only grower who’d felt competent to approach me so openly was the one who did not sell her tea at all.
“It must take a delicate touch,” I observed. “The picking, and the processing. Your workers must be tremendously skilled.” Beside me, Citizen Sirix gave an almost inaudible cough, choking slightly on her last mouthful of soup.
“They are, Fleet Captain, they are! You see why I would never treat them badly, I need them too much! In fact, they live in an old guesthouse themselves, a few kilometers away, over the ridge.” Rain spattered against the small windows. It only ever rained at night, Athoek Station had told me, and the rain always ended in time for the leaves to dry for the morning picking.
“How nice,” I replied, my voice bland.
I rose before the sun, when the sky was a pearled pink and pale blue, and the lake and its valley still shadowed. The air was cool but not chill, and I had not had enough space to run for more than a year. It had been a habit when I had been in the Itran Tetrarchy, a place where sport was a matter of religious devotion, exercises for their ball game were a prayer and a meditation. It felt good to return to it, even though no one here played the game or even knew it existed. I took the road toward the low ridge at an easy jog, wary of my right hip, which I had injured a year ago and which hadn’t healed quite right.
As I came over the ridge, I heard singing. One strong voice, pitched to echo off the stony outcrops and across the field where workers with
baskets slung over their shoulders rapidly plucked leaves from the waist-high bushes. At least half of those workers were children. The song was in Delsig, a lament by the singer that someone she loved was committed exclusively to someone else. It was a distinctively Valskaayan subject, not the sort of thing that would come up in a typical Radchaai relationship. And it was a song I’d heard before. Hearing it now raised a sharp memory of Valskaay, of the smell of wet limestone in the cave-riddled district I’d last been in, there.
The singer was apparently a lookout. As I drew nearer, the words changed. Still Delsig, largely incomprehensible, I knew, to the overseers.
Here is the soldier
So greedy, so hungry for songs.
So many she’s swallowed, they leak out,
They spill out of the corners of her mouth
And fly away, desperate for freedom.
I was glad my facial expressions weren’t at all involuntary. It was cleverly done, fitting exactly into the meter of the song, and I wouldn’t have been able to help smiling, thus betraying the fact that I’d understood. As it was, I ran on, apparently oblivious. But watching the workers. Every single one of them appeared to be Valskaayan. The singer’s satire on me had been intended for these people, and it had been sung in a Valskaayan language. On Athoek Station, I had been told that all Fosyf’s field workers were Valskaayan, and at the time it had struck me as odd. Not that some of them might be, but that all of them would be. Seeing confirmation of it, now, the wrongness of it struck me afresh.
In a situation like this, a hold full of Valskaayans ought to have been either parceled out over dozens of different plantations and whatever other places might welcome their labor, or held in suspension and slowly doled out over decades. There should have been, maybe, a half dozen Valskaayans here. Instead there appeared to be six times that. And I’d have expected to see some Samirend, maybe even some Xhais or Ychana, or members of other groups, because there had certainly been more than Xhais and Ychana here before the annexation.
There also shouldn’t have been such a sharp separation between the outdoor servants—all Valskaayan as far as I’d seen this morning and the day before—and the indoor, all Samirend with a few Xhais. Valskaay had been annexed a hundred years ago, and by now at least some of the first transportees or their children ought to have tested or worked their way into other positions.
I ran as far as the workers’ residence, a building of brown brick with no glass in the windows, only here and there a blanket stretched across. It had clearly never been as large or as luxurious as Fosyf’s lakeside house. But it had a lovely view across its valley, now filled with tea, and a direct road to that wide and glassy lake. The trampled dirt surrounding it might well have been gardens or carefully tended lawns, once. I was curious what the inside of it was like, but instead of entering uninvited and very likely unwelcome, I turned there to run back. “Fleet Captain,” Mercy of Kalr said in my ear, “Lieutenant Seivarden begs to remind you to be careful of your leg.”
“Ship,” I replied, silently, “my leg is reminding me itself.” Which Mercy of Kalr knew. And the conversation with Seivarden, that had produced Ship’s message, had happened two days before.
“The lieutenant will fret,” said Ship. “And you do seem to be ignoring it.” Was that disapproval I detected in its apparently serene voice?
“I’ll relax the rest of the day,” I promised. “I’m almost back anyway.”
By the time I crossed the ridge again, the sky and the valley were lighter, the air warmer. I found Citizen Sirix on a bench under the arbor, a bowl of tea steaming in one hand. Jacketless, shirt untucked, no jewelry. Mourning attire, though she was not technically required to mourn for Translator Dlique, had not shaved her head or put on a mourning stripe. “Good morning,” I called, walking up to the terrace. “Will you show me about the bathhouse, Citizen? Maybe explain some things to me?”
She hesitated, just a moment. “All right,” she said finally, warily, as though I’d offered her something risky or dangerous.
The long, curving bathhouse window framed black and gray cliffs and ice-sheeted peaks. On one far end, just the smallest corner of the house we were staying in. The guests here must have prized this place for its vistas—few if any Radchaai would have thought to make an entire wall of a bath into a window.
The walls that weren’t window were light, elaborately carved and polished wood. In the stone-paved floor was a round pool of hot water, bench-lined, in which one sat and sweated, and next to it a chilled one. “It tones you after all the heat,” said Sirix, on the bench in the hot water, across from me. “Closes your pores.”
The heat felt good on my aching hip. The run had, perhaps, not been terribly wise. “Does it, now?”
“Yes. It’s very cleansing.” Which seemed an odd word to use. I suspected it was a translation of a more complicated one, from Xhi or Liost into Radchaai. “Nice life you have,” Sirix continued. I cocked an interrogatory eyebrow. “Tea the moment you wake up. Clothes laundered and pressed while you sleep. Do you even dress yourself?”
“Generally. If I need to be extremely formal, though, it’s good to have some expert help.” I myself had never needed it, but I had provided that help on a number of occasions. “So, your forebears. The original Samirend transportees. They were all, or nearly all, sent to the mountains to pick tea?”
“Many of them, yes, Fleet Captain.”
“And that annexation was quite some time ago, so as they became civilized”—I allowed just the smallest trace of irony to creep into my voice—“they tested into other assignments. That makes perfect sense to me. But what doesn’t make sense is why there are no Samirend working in the fields here. Or anyone but Valskaayans. And there are no Valskaayans working anywhere but in the fields, or one or two on the grounds. The annexation of Valskaay was a hundred years ago. No Valskaayans have made overseer in all that time?”
“Well, Fleet Captain,” said Sirix evenly, “no one’s going to stay picking tea if they can get away from it. Field hands are paid based on meeting a minimum weight of leaves picked. But the minimum is huge—it would take three very fast workers an entire day to pick so much.”
“Or a worker and several children,” I guessed. I had seen children working in the fields, when I’d run by.
Sirix gestured acknowledgment. “So they’re none of them making the actual wages they’re supposed to. Then there’s food. Ground meal—you had some upwell. They flavor it with twigs and dust that’s left over from the tea making. Which, by the way, Fosyf charges them for. Premium prices. It’s not just any floor sweepings, it’s Daughter of Fishes!” She stopped a moment, to take a few breaths, too dangerously close to saying something openly angry. “Two bowls a day, of the porridge. It’s thin provisions, and if they want anything more they have to buy it.”
“At premium prices,” I guessed.
“Just so. There are generally some garden plots if they want to grow vegetables, but they have to buy seeds and tools and it’s time out from picking tea. They’re houseless, so they don’t have family to give them the things they need, they have to buy them. They can’t any of them get travel permits, so they can’t go very far away to buy anything. They can’t order things because they don’t have any money at all, they’re too heavily in debt to get credit, so Fosyf sells them things—handhelds, access to entertainments, better food, whatever—at whatever price she wants.”
“The Samirend field workers were able to overcome this?”
“Some of the servants in this house are doubtless still paying on the debts of their grandmothers and great-grandmothers. Or their aunts. The only way out was pulling together into houses and working very, very hard. But the Valskaayans… I suppose I’d say they aren’t very ambitious. And they don’t seem to understand about making houses of their own.”
Valskaayan families didn’t work quite the way Radchaai ones did. But I knew Valskaayans were entirely able to understand the advantage of having something th
at at least seemed like Radchaai houses, and on and around Valskaay groups of families had set up such arrangements at the first opportunity. “And none of the children ever test into other assignments?” I asked, though I already knew what the answer would be.
“These days field workers don’t take the aptitudes,” replied Sirix. Visibly struggling now with the reeducation that had made it difficult, if not impossible, for her to express anger without a good deal of discomfort. She looked away from me, breathed carefully through her mouth. “Not that they would ever test any differently. They’re ignorant, superstitious savages, every one of them. But even so. It’s not right.” Another deep breath. “Fosyf’s not the only one doing it. And she’ll tell you it’s because they won’t take the tests.” That I could believe. Last I was on Valskaay, taking the tests or not was an urgent issue for quite a lot of people. “But there aren’t any more transportees coming, are there? We didn’t get anyone shipped here from the last annexation. So if the growers run out of Valskaayans, who’s going to pick tea for miserable food and hardly any wages? It’s just so much more convenient if the field workers can never get themselves or their children out of here. Fleet Captain, it’s not right. The governor doesn’t care about a bunch of houseless savages, and nobody who does care can get the attention of the Lord of the Radch.”