by N Lee Wood
He clutched his card and the booklet, thanking her as he bowed and walked backward, impatient to leave. It was already near sundown by the time he was ushered back out onto the street.
The same woman was at the gate, and she pressed a small coin into his hand. It was not money, but a Family token, presumably hers, for what he had no idea. He thanked her hurriedly, stuffing it in the sleeve of his mati.
“Come again soon, young bhraetae,” she called after him.
Not bloody likely, he thought determinedly as he walked quickly away.
VI
JUST WHEN HE WAS BEGINNING TO DESPAIR THAT YAENIDA HAD FORGOTTEN her promise, his pahlaqu arrived with a stout middle-aged woman in Nga’esha watered-blue saekah and kirtiya. He had not even the tiniest regret to be leaving the lifeless room in the charity shelter, and it took him less than two minutes to pack. The Nga’esha woman stood in the doorway, arms crossed across her robust chest, and glared ominously as he quickly threw his possessions into the wicker box: his spare sati, his few toilet articles, the battered reader and collection of bookcubes, the patched umbrella, the small potted plant just beginning to bud into flower, the few odds and ends he had collected since he had been released.
His heart thumped as he added a small box he’d scrounged from the rubbish, worn and stained with berry juice, expecting her to make him open it. It contained the dried leaves and seeds of what few unknown plants he had been able to collect for study. She didn’t, and when he closed the lid, she merely grunted and turned away. He carried the wicker box down the stairway and out into the bright sunlight. She had kept a taxi waiting. The driver took his luggage from him, tossing it carelessly in the open back before she indicated Nathan should follow suit. The pahlaqu and Nga’esha woman sat next to the driver inside the protected cab, their backs to him. He was only grateful he wasn’t expected to carry the damned box all the way on foot.
They drove through the massive gates of the Nga’esha Estate, the pahlaqu disappearing into the women’s quarters while the heavyset woman indicated for him to follow her before striding off without a backward glance. He picked up his luggage and trotted after her through the men’s gate. The star-shaped courtyard was deserted, the koi in the fountain sluggish under the rain-gray clouds.
He was shown to a large room in the House littered with large, embroidered pillows. A low, narrow bench ran both lengths of the long room, holding both a collection of rolled-up sleeping mats and wicker boxes much like his own. She led him to an unoccupied mound of heavy cushions, the farthest from the window. He stood in front of it, the wicker box still in his arms. After a moment’s hesitation, the woman muttered to herself, took the box from him, and dropped it unceremoniously on the shelf behind the rolled bedding.
When she left, boy’s faces materialized as if by magic, bright eyes watching him. None of them were over ten, which explained the bed’s minuscule surface area. He unrolled the sleeping mat and settled into his small space, arranging pillows under his back against the wall. Trying to ignore the giggles and whispers, he studiously reread one of the few books he had in Hengeli for a few hours before Yaenida finally sent for him.
Vanar medical genetics and submolecular technology matched or surpassed any of that of other modern worlds, the preservation and manipulation of bloodstock common for producing such utilitarian castes as the Dhikar. But that was as far as Vanar doctrines took genetically designing their offspring. Although mothers were quite capable of controlling the sex of their children, most chose not to, at least not those in the Nine Families. Vanar kinship expanded into complicated networks, the individual subsumed into the huge community of relatives. Child swapping and adoption were common and children raised with little attention to their genetic parentage. Daughters were needed to continue running the family business. Sons were valued for the profitable alliances the family could make with other business families. Those families with no daughters, rather than resort to a medical remedy, often arranged with another to adopt a younger infant from one blessed with too many in order to carry on the adoptive family’s financial interests. It was always better to be the only adopted daughter than the one competing with two or three other natural-born sisters.
Neither castes nor position within the family were rigid. Competition in the Common and Middle Families was fierce, as a woman of outstanding talent from the lower classes could always hope for marriage or even adoption into the High Families, supplanting a less-talented natural daughter. Business was paramount to blood. The households of the Nine Families were well supplied with such taemorae, unmarried professional women hoping to find either patronage or high-caste men who would make advantageous marriage partners.
For him, his adoption was far less complicated than the marriage would be. Only the peculiar circumstances entangled what was normally a relatively simple matter. As Nathan was neither an infant nor daughter and with Yaenida blessed by an abundance of family, including several sons as well, there had been a heated dispute over the necessity of adoption. He had had no family to negotiate for his side, or even to sign the legal papers. The argument continued, up to the last minute. After much vociferous haggling, he was made a temporary ward of the state for the two minutes it took his pahlaqu to sign the adoption consent papers, and Yaenida paid the token sum determined to be his fair childprice.
Nathan watched from the sidelines, along with dozens of Yaenida’s family and friends who gathered, he suspected, more out of curiosity than for the celebration. He understood little of the heated debate, despite Yaenida’s running commentary to him in Hengeli, although he felt vaguely affronted by this haggling over his childprice value and his lack of any legal rights. But neither would an infant have much say about the proceedings, and the contortions the Vanar Court found itself having to perform in order to satisfy its own laws amused him.
Yaenida asked for his datacard, and he pulled it out of the little holder around his neck he kept tucked inside his sati. The chief legal clerk slipped it into her reader to transfer the data to his new card, this one a pale blue ringed with High Family gold. Anyone could wear a blue sati, but it was harder to forge an identity card, his DNA encoded in the strip making it useless except to the one person whose genetic prints matched the card. The new card was adjusted to reflect his new family alliance and suddenly elevated status. There was some confusion and argument, which Nathan understood once he was brought over to the reader. The space allowed on the form to record an infant’s handprint was far too small to accommodate his adult-sized hand. Finally, they were satisfied with his thumbprints only. No one seemed particularly interested in the fact that he was literate enough, even in Vanar, to have signed his own name.
Her hand had to be supported on the reader, but Yaenida signed with a bold if shaky signature, then turned toward him with a brash smile. “Welcome, my son,” she said with a touch of irony. “Come and kiss your mother with the respect she is due.”
He kissed her brow, then the palms of her hands, before he knelt on the floor beside her chair, receiving congratulations and gifts from friends and family. Some were traditional: cloth and foodstuffs for the new mother, and an herb to lessen teething pain for him. The young woman who offered it stiffly was nearly vermilion with embarrassment, obviously unaware of the nature of the “child” when she had received the invitation. She couldn’t know how much Nathan valued it: he would examine the herb later, his botanical interest kindled by its medicinal properties.
Some gifts were practical: a full sati and matching mati for him in pale Nga’esha blue that would identify him thereafter as an unmarried member of Yaenida’s family. When he married, the mati would be changed to Changriti burgundy. Yaenida’s daughter, Yronae, laid it in his lap smiling at him arrogantly, her expression both chilly and faintly amused. Yronae may have been his new sister, but she was also Yaenida’s heir, the next pratha h’máy of the formidable Nga’esha Family. He also knew she had not approved of her mother’s odd arrangement. He thanked her in car
efully deferential if stilted Vanar.
The amount of jewelry he received surprised him, until he later understood it was useless as none of it actually belonged to him. It was a sort of dowry, adding to his personal value as a spouse. Although he would keep it the rest of his life, he would be expected to wear it only at certain times, family ceremonies and spiritual holidays, as an advertisement of his quality for his wife’s benefit. The rest of the time, it would remain in Yaenida’s coffers until his marriage, when it would be transferred to Kallah’s. If he was lucky enough to father a daughter, most would be given to her first husband on her marriage day.
Two of her granddaughters supported Yaenida’s surviving kharvah as he tottered toward him, a man even more aged and frail than Yaenida herself, and one not in full control of his mental capabilities. “This is your new son, Grandpapa,” one of the women said gently, and placed the old man’s hand on Nathan’s face. It was dry and cold, feeling Nathan’s features with a tentative lightness, like the brush of insect wings.
“Welcome, my son,” the old man quavered, a bewildered look on his blind face.
Nathan kissed his brow and hands. “Thank you, Father,” he said, and the old man looked even more confused by his new son’s strange accent as he was steered away toward his own seat surrounded by his male relatives.
The afternoon’s feast, he later knew, was not as sumptuous as it might have been, but then, he was not really a child. Nor was he a girl, thus the celebration might have been unseemly were it too lavish. But Yaenida was the matriarch of one of the most important Families on
Vanar, and, bizarre or not, it was necessary to congratulate her for the new addition to her family.
It would also have been an unforgivable insult to Yaenida had Eraelin Changriti not showed up, but the hostility was palpable as she stepped in turn to praise Yaenida’s new progeny. Nathan had the brief impression of the evil fairy hovering over Sleeping Beauty’s cradle, predicting horrible death by spinning needle, as the Changriti pratha h’máy recited her formal admiration of Yaenida’s “infant” in a cold monotone. When she finally turned away, he shivered, reluctant to admit even to himself just how badly the woman unnerved him, still shaken by the murderous attempt on his life.
Her daughter, his future bride, smiled apologetically. Kallah dva Ushahayam Changriti, heir to one of the wealthiest and most powerful women on Vanar, who would someday become pratha h’máy of the Changriti branch of the Nine Families in her turn, was slightly over-weight and more than a little plain. She pressed a small box into his hands, her own trembling, before moving on. That touched him until he remembered he would be her third kharvah, lowest man on the totem pole. As they had not been included in the day’s ceremony, he had yet to discover their feelings about her marrying him.
He opened the box surreptitiously, and glanced inside. A small gold brooch in the shape of a fat beetlelike creature nested in the colored paper. Its body was a polished dark red stone, its middle legs designed as a clasp to hold the folds of his sati secure. It looked old, and very expensive.
“How nice,” Yaenida said quietly from her vantage point above him, and he shut the box quickly in reflex. “It’s yours, by the way,” Yaenida added in the same hushed stage voice. “You can keep it. It’s not part of your marriage value.”
He slipped it into the folds of his sati.
The feasting went on until late into the night. Yaenida had dozed off, snoring gently, cocooned in her chair with her fingers curled around the stem of a cold water pipe. His new father had been led away hours before by his small entourage. Nathan remained where he was, seated cross-legged on the overlarge cushion by Yaenida’s chair, adrift on his life raft in a sea of women.
They kept his glass full, and his head buzzed, pleasantly inebriated. His facial muscles began to hurt, and he realized he had been grinning rigidly for too long. He drained his glass, and rested it on his knee while he watched a group of women dance together at one end of the room, arms linked, feet weaving enthusiastically if somewhat erratically in a complicated pattern to the music. When one stumbled, and at that stage of intoxication it happened frequently, the line rippled like dominoes on a string, the dancers laughing as they flailed for balance. It was fun to watch. He nearly dropped his glass when someone filled it. Startled, his head jerked around. It was Kallah. She nodded to him stiffly and sat down beside him.
“Hello,” she said in hesitant Hengeli.
That surprised him. “Hello,” he returned.
After a few moments, she said, “How are you?” with the cadence of someone who has memorized phonemes by rote with no understanding of their meaning.
“Fine, thank you. And you?”
She looked around, obviously at a loss, before she smiled, her eyes squeezed by the flesh of her cheeks, and shrugged. “That’s all I know,” she said in Vanar. That she had bothered to make the effort surprised him.
“Good,” he said in his own primitive Vanar. “Good you Hengeli very much to say.” He was distantly aware of how drunken his voice sounded, and he struggled to remember the words at all.
Then they sat together awkwardly, isolated by his lack of vocabulary and her stiff reserve. And I’m going to be married to this woman for what might end up being the rest of my life? he thought dryly, and wished she hadn’t sat down beside him.
A dancer tottered, then her feet slid out from under her, dragging down the line on either side. Her companions laughed as she crawled drunkenly on hands and knees out of the dance toward the cushions piled around the pillars. Kallah watched them, slapping her palm against one thigh in time with the music, ignoring him as completely as if she had forgotten his existence.
“You,” he said, gesturing with his hand toward Kallah, then at the dancers, “nartamasi, dance, no?”
She glanced at him, intrigued, before he remembered it was bad manners for a man to initiate a conversation. Then she shook her head, and said something he didn’t understand. He nodded knowingly, as if he did, while fervently hoping she asked him no questions that would reveal his pretense. After a few more strained moments, Kallah patted his hand and rejoined her friends, to his relief.
He finished his glass, and watched it magically refill as one of his new “sisters” passed by. Almost as a game, he drained one after another, just to see how long it took before it was replenished. Soon the room spun and his ears burned. The skin on his face felt like it was all trying to crawl into a point on the bridge of his nose. He knew he was very drunk, and didn’t care. He hadn’t been drunk in a long time. It was satisfying. He polished off another.
Another dancer went down, and he laughed with the rest, clapping his hands loudly in rhythm to the music. A few of the women turned toward him, faces flushed with the dance and wine. On impulse, he pointed to himself, then toward them questioningly. They laughed, and beckoned playfully for him to join them.
He lurched to his feet, his stomach rebelling at the sudden shift of gravity. Men did not dance with women, he knew, but the astonished delight on the women’s faces told him that the violation of etiquette would be allowed this once. He was drunk, he was the evening’s celebrity, and most important, he was a foreigner. He knew he could be forgiven a good deal for his alienness, and would get away with much more than a native. He pushed the sleeves of his mati up his arms as one of the women slipped the end of his sati between his knees and tied it firmly around his waist to keep him from tripping over it. Gripping the forearms of the women on either side of him, he slowly bounced on the balls of his bare feet in imitation as they linked into the circle, coordinating their steps with the music. The line abruptly jerked, and he felt himself nearly lifted off the floor as the circle moved. Sheer cloth billowed as they kicked and whirled, dozens of feet jingling with gold ankle bracelets, stamping a complex rhythm against the floor.
The shorter woman on his left took up the responsibility of teaching him steps, and the rest rewarded his efforts with cheers and laughter. The musicians played slow
ly, then gradually faster, accelerating the pace until he felt as if he had somehow become a disembodied part, caught up with the pulse of the dance, his feet remembering steps without his conscious effort. He felt the sweat on his palms making his grasp slippery, and he held on tighter, feeling his partners’ fingers dig into his own arms. The tempo sped up, dancers whifling faster and faster, reaching the limits of their abilities. He concentrated on the movement, not feeling the ache in his shoulders as he was pulled along, the burning in his calves as he pushed himself to dance as fast as he could.
A dancer two down from him missed her step, and he found himself yanked off balance, not realizing he had fallen into a near dream state until it had been broken. He tumbled to the floor, sitting down heavily, exhilarated and exhausted. His wet face suddenly hot and uncomfortable, he laughed with the rest, tangled into a pile of arms and legs and sati. His heightened senses became aware of the smell of sweat and perfume, his rapid heartbeat echoing in his ears, the rainbows of colors through a lingering haze of sweet smoke, and most of all, the touch of women’s hands as they helped him off the floor, their arms around his waist, the heat of their bodies as they balanced him against their hips, half guiding, half carrying him back to his place by Yaenida’s now empty chair.
His excitement subsided as he caught sight of Kallah, frowning disapprovingly in his spinning vision. Music vibrated in the pit of his stomach. An aftertaste of wine with a hint of bile rose at the back of his mouth. He pretended he hadn’t seen her.
He didn’t remember falling asleep, but remembered waking once, knowing it was far late in the night. He lay curled on his side, fists tucked under his chin, his head resting on the firm thigh of a young sahakharae. His neck hurt from being in one position for too long, his cheek damp with sweat. The boy smiled at him, stroking Nathan’s hair from his forehead. He rolled onto his back, distantly aware of his dislike of sahakharae but unwilling to give up his pillow, and glanced around the room through an infant hangover.