by N Lee Wood
When she stepped back from him, she blushed furiously, embarrassed. Pressing her hands together, she bowed, giggling, before she darted down the narrow alleyway, sandals slapping, and vanished around the corner.
Amazed, he stood alone for several minutes, his legs rubbery and, although the air was cool, his face uncomfortably sweaty. Clutching his goods, he walked back to the shelter and climbed the stairs, stopping to catch his breath halfway up.
When he unpacked his goods, he found that besides the vegetables, the girl had given him bread, soft-shelled eggs, a bottle of clear yellow oil, a sack of honey-colored short grain, several small jars of unfamiliar condiments. Not a bad bargain for a clandestine peek at his pubic hair, he decided. The second bundle turned out to be a selection of spices, equally strange. He recognized few of the vegetables, experimentally cutting and sniffing, touching them to his tongue before electing to cook it up as a soup. The result was not delicious, but at least edible.
He did not go hungry that evening.
IV
HE DREAMT OF SOMETHING VAGUE AND FRIGHTENING, OF BEING trapped inside a ruined house, occupation military police searching outside. A huge hand smelling of smoke clamped across his mouth, threatening to suffocate him; a heavy body crushed him facedown into the rubble-strewn floor. Labored breath whispered beside his ear in time with the constant thump of artillery in the distance. Pressure rather than pain hammered into him, familiar, sour. The dream shattered, and he struggled bolt upright, heart pounding, queasy with momentary disorientation. It took him several seconds before he remembered where he was and wondered what had awakened him.
That: the sound of urgent voices in the hail. His feet had barely swung over the edge of the sleeping shelf before a woman appeared at the archway of his room and strode directly inside. She wore a voluminous saekah of bright rainbowed geometrical pattern cuffed at the ankles, her kirtiya blouse a shimmering purple. On someone slightly taller and slightly younger, it might have been attractive, but on her it only seemed garish. “Tah byat, bahd’hyin,” he said quickly, bowed and straightened to comb his fingers through sleep-disheveled hair falling over his face.
She merely grunted in reply and stared at him: a middle-aged woman with an unsympathetic square face, before inspecting the flat-reader she held cradled in the crook of her elbow. “Nay-teen Kahroo.”
He wasn’t sure it was a question, but answered anyway. “Hae’m l’amae.”
She studied the screen and said in an oddly syncopated Hengeli, “My name is Dronsanu Harinyua. I am pahlaqu, guardian to this place.” She looked up at him critically. He realized she was reading from a phonetical text without any idea of the meaning of the words, gauging by his reaction if he understood.
“Hae’m l’amae.”
She nodded, satisfied, then consulted her reader again. “I be financial manager of you.” Her words were chopped into ponderous syllables. “I to come one times every month, same times. You obligatory here. No here, very bad trouble.”
She glanced up again, eyes narrowed, and stabbed one finger at the floor emphatically. Behind her, a few of his new neighbors hovered by the archway, watching curiously but ready to jerk back out of sight should she suddenly turn around.
“Hae’m, l’amae,” he repeated.
He would repeat it several times before she struggled all the way through her prewritten text, and he wondered if she’d done her own translation. This charity shelter, he managed to work out, was one of several in the city for naekulam, men without families. It was one of the better ones, she informed him, reserved for the elderly, the disabled, and other nonviolent residents. Any infraction and he’d quickly find himself in less pleasant accommodations where his independence would be severely restricted. No violence, she warned with an insistent edge. She glared at him, and he realized her arrogance wasn’t skillful enough to cover her fear of him. He wondered if she knew where he had just spent the last six months of his life.
“Hae’m, l’amae,” he said with heartfelt sincerity.
The pahlaqu would come to observe him, see that he had enough to eat, make sure he got medical treatment if he was unwell. No one was homeless on Vanar. No one starved. Although no one would much care if he committed suicide or not, as he would discover later. There were usually one or two a month, with the resulting mayhem as tenants scrambled to swap their own rooms for one better, a noisy, heated restructuring of the social hierarchy.
She demanded his datacard, flipped it open, and painstakingly showed him how to use it. Even as a naekulam, Nathan would have a nominal government subsidy to draw from. It was enough to cover food and small luxuries such as tea and coffee, soap and bath fees. In the meantime, his limited funds precluded anything much more expensive than wandering the streets for entertainment. Her lecture finished, she smiled scornfully at him. “Do you have beings to asking of no questions?”
He smiled back. “Máat, l’amae.”
She snapped her reader shut and left. He heard her speaking with several other men, tones of entreaty or admonishment more eloquent than the words.
Even armed now with food and a few guidelines from his pahlaqu, he was abandoned to his own devices. He had no more lessons with Pratha Yaenida. Other than the pahlaqu, no one ever came to see him, no one questioned him. But he knew that if he had any hope of ever escaping, he would have to learn as much as he could about his prison, find the chinks in the walls, learn the rules before he could break them. Not an easy job when you couldn’t even ask directions to the nearest airport.
His new life, although better than prison, was not that less Spartan. A small crate made of thin woven reeds held what few possessions he owned: his spare mati and two worn hand towels, his toiletries, the handful of bookcubes Yaenida had given him along with a secondhand reader. He’d found a discarded pot and planted a hydrangea cutting he’d furtively taken from a public garden, the plant just now sending out roots from its place on his windowsill.
He spent much of his time struggling to learn Vanar from simple bilingual children’s stories translated into painstakingly correct Hengeli. Obviously translated by someone whose Hengeli was slightly less than fluent, sometimes the mistakes were amusing, sometimes simply puzzling. A woman’s voice read the stories in the most basic audio Vanar: “The girl has a ball. The ball is red. See the red ball.” He tried to decipher the ornate squiggles matching the sounds before giving up and simply listening to the stories, repeating the words. More than a few nights, he would end up with the reader propped on his chest and an empty cup on the floor beside him, sound asleep despite the strong tea.
The charity shelter had been built wedged into a rock cleft running down the side of the far west bank of the river. Twenty layers of boxlike rooms balanced one atop the other, latticed with haphazard staircases. Roofing overshot narrow porches barely wide enough to allow space for a single man. Passing another habitant along the balconies often meant squeezing by while avoiding looking over at the sheer drop below. His was one of the less-desirable rooms, a tiny cell at the top of the complex accessible only by plodding up several steep stairways. There was a service elevator, he eventually realized, but that was locked, restricted for use only by the police authorities or emergency medical teams. The winding stairs served to keep the inhabitants either physically fit or indoors.
He spent the next few months watching his neighbors, listening, wandering the streets for clues. He learned where to buy his food from following other white-garbed naekulam, how to pick up extra money on his card by leaving the complex before dawn with an eye out for shopkeepers willing to pay naeqili te rhowghá, the ostracized class of familyless outcasts, for such odd jobs as sweeping the storefront or hauling away the previous day’s rubbish. Hiring a human being for such manual labor, before the computerized cleaning machines keeping the city scoured and pristine arrived and automatically totaled the charges, was not only cheaper, the Vanar considered it a charity to recognize the men’s existence at all. The little money he earned
with such menial labor supplied a bit more luxury than the state stipend allowed. He was grateful for any such jobs, his size and strength and cheapness occasionally winning out over the shopkeeper’s wariness of him.
While the other residents had no objection to his trailing them, so long as he maintained a safe distance, his first few attempts at friendly gestures were utterly rebuffed. Offers of a shared meal or simple company earned him only nervous, hostile silence. After his initial tentative approaches failed, his personal contact with his fellow naekulam was reduced to wary nods in passing. While he had no friends in the complex, at least he had made no enemies, either. But the sound of laughter made him even lonelier.
He tried to ignore other sounds, the soft, urgent moans in the night. He listened with passive incomprehension to quarrels usually conducted with muted hostility, not knowing how to cross the isolation even enough to enjoy arguing with his neighbors. He watched as they passed by in the hall, pretending not to see him. Despite his long isolation, he craved the illusion of privacy and used his spare linen sati to hang across the doorless entrance to the room, another feature of Vanar architecture he could not get used to. Then, instead of his fellow residents ignoring him, he was subjected to having his makeshift screen twitched aside at any moment, curious eyes peering in to see what he could possibly be hiding. He finally took it down.
He practiced folding the long sati into intricate patterns in his hands and tying the pleats he’d made from it around his body, as Pratha Yaenida had taught him. Eventually, Nathan’s technique improved so that the knots didn’t unravel to leave him standing in the one-piece mati with a pile of cloth tangled around his ankles. In the confined privacy of his small room, he walked in circles and trained himself to balance on one leg while hooking his foot around the edge of the sati to move it from around his knees before he knelt, just the edge of the mati showing over his knees. Too little and the cloth would be trapped under his legs and jerked out of its intricate folds. Too far, and his thighs would be bared, the mati hitched up indecently.
Other simple things—the nuances of gestures and body language, the unspoken minutiae understood by everyone but himself—continued to elude him. Or blindside him. Razors, for example, were not a common item. Vanar men were as smooth-faced as the women, keeping their face and bodies denuded by using the various depilatories supplied at public baths in the complex. He had watched one afternoon in amazement as one resident subjected himself to having all his body hair removed, the hair on his chest, back, legs, and groin ripped away with a gluey paste embedded in cloth. The man had not made a single sound, his bored expression one of habitual practice. Nathan chose to shave in private, as the public baths tended to want to also strip the hair from areas of his body young Namasi had found so fascinating.
He had thought about her since then, and once believed he’d spotted her on the streets. But when the woman had turned around, her ivy green sati over a wine-colored mati, he was both relieved and disappointed to see it was someone else. The woman had stared at him, and touched her companion on the arm, nodding her head in his direction. Embarrassed, he’d pretended to be unaware of their scrutiny, and had walked by with the end of his sati drawn up over his head to shadow his face.
Although he was lonely, he was rarely alone. Everything about Vanar life tended to be conducted in the company of others. The Vanar men spent a good deal of their waking hours in the shelter’s community baths, more, he suspected, out of boredom than an obsession with personal hygiene. Nathan’s flash sink doubled as a toilet, but for anything more than a simple piss in the night, he had to use the community baths on the ground floor.
He found the baths a necessity, but didn’t enjoy the curious stares or the silence that fell whenever he walked in, the empty circle that formed around him as people backed away in distrust. Whenever he disrobed and fed his clothing into the bath’s cleaner, standing naked and impatient for it to reemerge, he endured the open examination of men marveling at his freckled pale skin, the whispers and indiscreet pointing at the blond hair at his groin, the glint of gold curling across his chest. Only their obvious fear kept him from being physically touched.
He finally learned to use the baths at night, by silent agreement with the other residents. Alone, he exercised nude in the shelter’s gymnasium and swam to exhaustion in the long, shallow pools, his muscles slack from long disuse in prison. As his body hardened, he felt his mood improve, his spirit reviving. He had survived growing up in Westcastle. He could survive Vanar. Eventually, just as he had West-castle, he would escape Vanar as well. He would never give up hope.
Although he was still treated with wary distrust, he was often stopped in the streets, usually by a Vanar woman either scolding or curious. His halting apologies and incomprehension usually discouraged any lengthy conversation. He learned which areas to avoid, not for fear of crime, but because naekulam were discouraged from invading areas reserved for more privileged classes, particularly women from the Nine Families.
Curiously, one place that was not off limits to him, or any Vanar regardless of family, sex, or rank, was the Assembly of Families, the heart of Vanar justice. The Assembly was the largest building in the city.
A long, undulating staircase led up to the columned porch of the semicircular building, and an assortment of Vanar citizens usually could be found scattered across the steps, a colorful spectrum of sati. Anyone could petition to be heard by the Assembly, even the white-robed naekulam generally huddled protectively at the far end of the shadowed colonnade, with expressions of either hope or dejection as they waited for their hearing.
He spent several weeks sitting on the floor in the men’s public balcony watching the proceedings on the multiple layers below, not understanding a damned thing, but entranced by the mystery. It became the highlight of his day, hours spent enjoying the choreographed chaos, the multitude of discussions flowing around him like atonal music. Here was the key, he knew, to the soul of Vanar. He knew there was some kind of pattern, just outside his comprehension. The gestures and faces were curiously relaxed, like a family reunion of a thousand contentious relatives, everyone at ease with the familiarity and the arguments.
He watched as an elderly naekulam gestured eloquently with his hands as he talked to two Vanar women, serious expressions on their young faces. Whatever point the old man had to make, it convinced the women to lead him off across the vast hall, swallowed up by masses of other discussions. Nathan saw the three later when he descended from the balcony, the old man and two women now kneeling beside an older woman seated against the marble wall, the naekulam silent and immobile as the younger women discussed his plight, their hands moving with the same grace as they spoke. He wondered if the old man had won his case, wondered what his case might have been. Wondered if he would ever be able to understand Vanar well enough to plead his own causes.
Occasionally, he would see a face he’d seen elsewhere in the city in the swirl of figures in the vast open hall and feel the strange shock of recognition without actually knowing who she was. Once he had seen young Namasi dva Ushahayam ek Sahmudrah, sitting on a ledge with a woman in an identical shimmering green sati who could have been her sister. He observed how they spoke, their hands flitting like butterflies in rhythm with their speech. It made him again deeply lonely and intensely aware of how naturally the Vanar touched each other with casual ease, all but him. Namasi threw back her head and laughed, her round face smooth, delicate, her companion’s arm around her shoulders. He felt his face flush hot, a bittersweet tension in his gut, watching from his hidden vantage until they left.
Once he saw the Dhikar police Qsayati, Vasant Subah, walk by below him, unaware of his presence. His skin prickled with a strange fascination. She strode confidently across the marble floor, kneeling gracefully before two other women seated along the curved ledge. The Qsayati bowed and sat back on her heels. As she spoke, she gestured languidly with one arm. Even from this distance, Nathan knew which arm it was. Her mouth mov
ed, words drowned in the chorus of voices echoing through the hall.
And once, he had seen a high-level meeting of the nine prathae h’máyah of the High Families, all but two in the flesh. Of the two being sent in remote, he recognized only Yaenida Nga’esha, the other transmitted image of a woman far younger and, he assumed, far from Vanar. The nine matriarchs of the High Families sat with the female members of their families in a circle around the center of the hall, listening as several women took their turn to speak. The audience was larger than usual, tension in the air, but he understood no more of this discussion than he had the old naekulam’s. One pratha h’may had spotted him in the crowd, a woman with a face like chiseled stone, wearing the Changriti burgundy. Even separated by the mass of bodies milling between them, he felt the hatred in her eyes like an unpleasant intimate touch. Not all Vanar found him an entertaining novelty.
Vanar was a warm planet with a shallow axis, the seasonal difference between winter and summer measured in rainfall. Even in the dead of winter, it was infrequently cold but rained constantly. He found a discarded umbrella in a rubbish pile in the early morning while wandering the streets looking for odd jobs before the automated cleaners arrived. Half a dozen of its intricate spokes were broken, the fragile silk torn. He sat cross-legged on the floor of his room with tiny bottles of varnish and glue, scavenged scraps of cloth and pieces of wood shims he carved himself, carefully repairing the umbrella while rain fell in gray sheets outside his window.
His nearest neighbor across the hall, an elderly man with a ratty white-streaked braid reaching nearly to his knees, sometimes halted just beside the archway, watching him while pretending not to. Nathan learned to ignore him, surprised one dismal afternoon as the man leaned in the doorway and placed a bright red umbrella against the wall then brushed away an imaginary insect from his face to avoid looking at Nathan. When the man left without a word, Nathan examined his umbrella, opening it to find a long rent in the silk.