Master of None

by N Lee Wood

  He twisted around to gaze up at her, perplexed by her calmness. “Pratima, doesn’t it bother you, my marrying someone else?”

  “No. Why should it?”

  He stood up and hauled himself into the tree, crowding her in the hollow. “Because it’s to someone else. Aren’t you the least bit jealous?”

  She ran light fingers across his cheek. “Do you love her?”

  “Who, Kallah?” He laughed. “I don’t even know her.”

  “Then why should I be jealous?”

  “Because one of my principal duties once I’m married,” he explained with the patience he’d use with a dull child, “is to do my best to get her pregnant.”

  “Naturally.”

  “That means I’ll have to have sex with her.”

  She smiled impishly. “That’s the usual way it’s done.”

  “Pratima,” he said, exasperated, “you’re not this dense. You know what I’m saying.”

  “Yes, of course I do. You’re the one making the mistake of confusing love with sex.”

  That stung. “I know the difference, Pratima. Maybe you can convince yourself this was all nothing more than a passing fling, but I’m not ashamed to admit I love you more than anyone I’ve ever loved in my life.”

  Frowning, she sat upright and placed her hands on his face, her palms cool against his skin. “I wish you spoke better Vanar, Nate. It would be easier to explain. I never said I thought what has happened between us isn’t important; it is. Which is going to give you problems with your new wife. She’s the one who will be jealous, not me. Vanar women would like to believe men are emotionally stunted animals whose only desire is for sex. It would make life so much simpler if that were true. Kallah doesn’t love you any more than you love her. But her pride would be wounded if she thought you incapable of ever caring for her. It’s emotional infidelity that threatens us, Nathan, not physical. Vanar men are allowed all the sex they want...as long as they don’t ever fall in love. That’s the one betrayal women can’t endure, in any culture.”

  “But Kallah doesn’t love me, and she’s got two other kharvah as well. Why should she be jealous of you?”

  Pratima shrugged. “True, I’m no real danger to her, since you and I could never marry or have children, and I’ll be leaving Vanar soon enough. She knows about us, of course. Everyone does. But it must be disconcerting for her. In her mind she’ll be worrying that you’re comparing her with me, that she’ll be competing with a beloved memory she can never hope to surpass. Which isn’t the best way to start off a new marriage.”

  With consummate suppleness, she did a leisurely backward flip out of the bole to land as softly as a cat on her feet. He wasn’t quite as graceful clambering down out of the tree himself. “Be cautious about revealing your feelings quite so openly, Nathan. It can be dangerous, as you saw in Dravyam. Be careful of her other two kharvah, especially Ukul Daharanan. Ukul has not yet been able to father a child, and worries his position is threatened. He is truly devoted to Kallah, and isn’t happy about her choice in you.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  She shrugged. “Pilots love gossip. It amuses us.” She didn’t look amused. “Kallah may not love you, but she is certainly fascinated by the exotic. Let’s just hope the novelty wears off before his tolerance wears out.”

  She laced her hands behind his neck, leaning back on her arms as he held her waist. “And I want to be there, Nathan, not just because I’m Nga’esha and it’s my duty, but because I do love you. You will need someone there who does. But I will say good-bye to you now, because once you are married, we won’t have the time later. I’m leaving as soon as it’s over.”

  His heart thudded dully, and he felt suddenly ill. “How the hell am

  I going to survive here without you?”

  She smiled wistfully. “You will. Your heart beats, your lungs breathe, and somehow you’ll manage to live from one day to the next. We all do.”

  He took a ragged breath. “Give me something to look forward to, Pratima. I’ll wait fifteen years for you, if that’s what it takes. Promise you’ll come back to me, for a month, for two, I don’t care. Just come back to me.”

  She stared at him for a long moment, her pale eyes wary. He watched her internal debate, emotions flickering across her face before she kissed him gently. “Have many children. Be happy. And I promise, I’ll come back,” she whispered against his cheek, her breath warm on his skin.

  They made love gently, almost without passion. By an unspoken agreement, she waited until he’d fallen asleep before she left as if evaporating into thin air. When he woke, he wrapped his arms around his knees and wept.

  XXV

  AS WEDDINGS GO, NATHAN LATER THOUGHT WRYLY, HE’D BEEN TO BETTER. He wasn’t even sure at which part of the ceremony he actually became a married man. Not that he’d seen much of it, either.

  The basics had been described to him, and he knew somewhat of what to expect. But the reality was far worse than the anticipation. He’d spent the previous day being soaked, washed, scraped, massaged, oiled, polished, painted, and purged until he’d gone to bed with every inch of his skin tender, the bedclothes nearly painful. Shortly before daybreak, he was rudely woken from a sound sleep by a cacophonous chorus of the Nga’esha men singing loudly while bashing hand drums and cymbals. With Aelgar directing the action, he was seized and lifted bodily out of bed, carried off to the main atrium of the men’s courtyard. There, a canopied sedan chair had been elaborately decorated with hundreds of bright silk streamers and brass bells. The men carried him around it three times before setting him on his feet in front of it.

  Where he stood for the next three hours while Nga’esha men decorated him even more elaborately than the sedan chair. The weight of gold bracelets from wrist to elbow, and more on his legs from ankle to knee, dragged on him uncomfortably, making him wonder how he was going to walk with all this metal. The conventional sati had been dispensed with, and he was outfitted in a glittering costume not designed for the normal human male body. The exaggerated shoulders were settled onto him like a yoke for an ox, and someone cinched in his waist with such an abrupt jerk he gasped as the breath was knocked out of him. Once he was fastened into the rest of the costume, his thighs were squeezed together so tightly he could barely shuffle along by moving his knees.

  Huge headgear completely covered his face with a garish curtain of beads, and he wondered how he was expected to even be able to see to walk. The answer, he discovered when he was picked up like an oversized doll and installed standing in the sedan chair, was that he wasn’t expected to do anything at all.

  He clung to the canopy supports to keep from being pitched out, swaying dangerously as the chair was lifted onto as many shoulders as could be wedged under it and carried out of the men’s house to be paraded through the women’s half of the estate. Judging by the cheering as he was conveyed lurching through the halls, every Nga’esha female relative had come for the wedding, his already diminished sight further hampered by a shower of paper streamers and confetti flung over him.

  Although it was still early morning, half of Sabtú seemed to be crowded into the expansive women’s gardens. Pratha Yaenida sat enthroned on a portable dais even larger and grander than his sedan chair. She, he would notice, spent most of the festivities dozing, comfortably snuggled into her nest of cushions. They set him down in the middle of the garden as the main exhibit. Long tables groaned under the weight of the food. The aroma made his mouth water, but he knew he wouldn’t be given any.

  His role in the ceremony was a test of endurance. He would remain on display while the party went on around him. The Changriti guests arrived a few hours after the celebration had begun, when the drinking began in earnest as the level of boisterous revelry escalated. If Kallah was among them, he never saw her.

  When his part in the ceremonies had been explained, his only worry was that he’d be bored stiff and hungry. He hadn’t grasped how excruciating the torture of simply stand
ing upright for hours on end would be with the burden of the heavy jewel-encrusted costume and gold metal weighing him down. By midafternoon, the vague headache he’d had since early morning blossomed into a thumping migraine. By sunset, the small of his back ached and his ankles had begun swelling, the heavy gold squeezing them painfully.

  At one point, he reeled precariously and begged as politely as he could to be allowed out of the chair. Many pairs of hands pushed him back upright. Someone used the long sleeves of his costume to tie his wrists to the sedan chair’s posts to keep him from falling. He felt as if he were being crucified.

  “Drink this,” a male voice murmured, and poked something up under the headgear toward his face. He nearly gagged on the stem of a squeezebulb shoved between his lips, the burning liquid forced into his mouth. He managed to swallow most of it, the rest dribbling down his chin. Pinioned as he was, and burdened by the awkward headgear, he couldn’t even wipe his mouth.

  But it helped to clear his head. The quivering muscles in his legs steadied, and the headache lessened. It lasted about an hour, when another dose was thrust into his face. The intervals between doses became shorter and his agony more intense as night dragged on, the party still in full swing and showing no signs of subsiding any time soon.

  Eventually whatever was in the burning liquid had no effect on him at all. His head spun, his vision black-specked as he fought to stay conscious. He blacked out several times, the relief fleeting as the weight pulled his arms out of their swollen joints. Searing pain forced him back to consciousness. The sky had lightened to a deep indigo, sunrise still an hour or so off, when he sagged against his silk restraints, weeping helplessly from the pain. He seriously wondered if they intended to kill him.

  “I can’t take this,” he shouted, but his voice came out in a hoarse croak, lost in the music and laughter around him. He wasn’t even aware he spoke in Hengeli, unable to think in Vanar at all. “For god-sake, please, I can’t take any more!”

  “Then don’t.” He heard Pratima’s voice and wondered where it came from. Through his tears, he saw the gleam of a knife slash at his bonds, and heard the silk rip as his weight tore the sleeves from his costume. He collapsed, plunging out of the sedan chair headfirst. He never felt himself hit the ground, only remotely aware of the cheer that went up as many gentle hands lifted his body to carry him off.

  His vision clouded, he saw only a blur of white rather than her face, and felt her lips brush his cheek. “Now aren’t you glad I came?” he heard her whisper in his ear, and she was gone.

  He passed out. When he roused from the black stupor, he lay naked in a massive bed while Raetha Avachi dabbed his forehead with a warm wet cloth. He groaned, pain shooting through his joints as he struggled to sit up.

  “Where am I?”

  “Kallah’s private apartments,” another voice said.

  Ukul Daharanan appeared behind Raetha, scowling down at him. How had he gotten from the Nga’esha women’s gardens to the Changriti Estate clear on the other side of Sabtú? He hissed as Raetha patted the wet cloth against his cheek, then touched the swollen bruise under his eye with inquisitive fingers.

  “Where’s Kallah?”

  “Still at the marriage celebration,” Ukul said with unmistakable contempt. “Where you should be, had you any real stamina. I didn’t break until well after the second evening at my wedding.”

  Nathan thought to say something on the lines of Ukul being the better man, but couldn’t muster the energy to find the words in Vanar. The effort would have been wasted, he suspected. Raetha smiled wryly, glancing over his shoulder briefly as his surly partner stalked away. He leaned closer to Nathan and said softly, “But you did better than I did. I didn’t last even until sundown, quite a scandal that was.”

  The stamina of Vanar women was apparently vigorous as well. Nathan spent the next three days in bed, recovering from his ordeal. Until Kallah staggered home to welcome him to his new life as a married man.

  PART TWO

  XXVI

  AT SOME POINT, THE WALL IN HIS MIND CRACKED. HE HAD FOUGHT THE Vanar language like a crippled man trying to scale a mountain, struggling between ambition and despair. One night, he had gone to sleep, his head aching with complex syntax, abstract nouns and gerund verbs tattooing a frustrated beat in his nerves. His dreams were vague, restless, resisting his attempt to impose enough order and logic on them to let him sleep in peace. Toward morning, they’d exhausted him and he let himself sink into the morass of the bizarre.

  He dreamed in Vanar. He’d dreamt in Vanar before, of course, but in remembering the dream the next morning, the words had only been gibberish, a product of wishful thinking, as if hoping by magic the language would simply embed itself into his brain and stop torturing him. But this morning, when he awoke, he knew, knew the Vanar in his dreams had been correct, had been real.

  He stopped having to translate every word he heard into its Hengeli counterpart, the sounds taking on their own meanings for him. The rat’s-nest curling of Vanar calligraphy began to make sense, all one hundred and fifty-three letters and the innumerable underlying ideograms unraveling into their separate parts so that he could see the whole.

  His command of Vanar tripled in a week, and at one point, when Yaenida had asked him for the Hengeli translation for a word, he found himself groping for it, astonished and even alarmed that he could so easily forget bits and pieces of his own language.

  He only wished Pratima could have been there to congratulate him. Maybe she knew, anyway; there had to be some kind of communication possible between Pilots and their Nga’esha controllers, but none that would ever be permitted to him.

  He also knew he would never be completely fluent, never master the nuances various pronunciations could spin on a single word, would always miss half the jokes, the puns, the innuendoes, the double-edged double entendres. But the block was gone, and his awareness of the conversations around him had given him new insights, the first being that the Vanar had become accustomed to his incomprehension, talking amongst themselves as if he weren’t there. Many things were said in his presence that might have been wiser to say elsewhere, and he quickly decided not to educate his Vanar companions to his sudden perception. Where once he had pretended to understand when he didn’t, now he pretended not to understand when he did. He kept his face neutral, silent and seemingly disinterested in the conversation around him. Only Yaenida knew, and she had promised to keep his secret. At least for a while.

  Only once had he slipped, laughing unexpectedly at a joke he’d overheard between two women. Startled, they had stared at him, and when they spoke again, it was as if he had suddenly lost all his newfound understanding, their conversation unintelligible babble. Then he realized it was a second language, a language he thought he’d never heard before until he remembered the unfamiliar dialect Pratima had used with the Ushahayam Pilot Bralin. When he asked Yaenida, she merely nodded and said, yes, it was a woman’s language, spoken for privacy, and not to concern himself with it, as it was nothing he would be expected to learn or would ever be taught.

  The year after Pratima’s departure went by quickly enough. After his marriage, he saw little enough of his new wife, and then only when he was summoned to her personal rooms for an intimate little soiree with only himself and a dozen sahakharae, three or four taemora, a pair of the omnipresent Dhikar, and one or the other, or sometimes both, of his fellow kharvah.

  The sahakharae provided most of the entertainment, dancing or playing music, while Ukul scowled sullenly and Raetha smoked himself into a stupor, smiling absentmindedly into space. What the taemora were there for, Nathan never could figure out. Once the evening’s festivities had finished, everyone but the Dhikar left. He’d found it difficult to keep his mind on his more private obligations with two Dhikar behind the sheer linen bed curtains listening to their every grunt and moan, but somehow he managed it. To his astonishment, and Ukul’s open bitterness, Kallah became pregnant with her first child four months af
ter the wedding, and his nocturnal visits to his wife’s bed came to an abrupt end. Instead, the three kharvah were forced to endure each other’s company for the next eight months as they catered to Kallah’s every demand.

  Pregnancy didn’t agree with her, her moods swinging from irrational hostility to maudlin weeping as her belly slowly inflated. Even the medical taemora lost patience with her whining, and had to be replaced after she tactlessly suggested that Kallah’s problems were more mental than physiological. Pratha Eraelin stormed into her daughter’s quarters one afternoon, ignoring the three kharvah scattering out of her way as she and her daughter engaged in a ferocious argument. The two women screamed furiously at each other in the impenetrable language of women until the pratha Eraelin kicked over a table and stalked out, leaving Kallah still shrieking and smashing anything breakable in her mother’s wake. The three men spent the next several hours placating their wife, Ukul murmuring to her consolingly while Raetha poured an endless river of herbal tea and Nathan kneaded her tense shoulders until his fingers cramped in agony.

  Raetha Avachi had come from a large Middle Family where daughters and sons mixed with far more familiarity and affection. There he’d learned more practical ways of attending to women than the traditional songs and dance at which he was nearly as inadequate as Nathan. He taught Nathan how to cradle her against his chest to use his own body heat to warm her back, and caress her swollen belly with soothing fingers. In her fifth month, the four had been out in Kallah’s private courtyard, the heat of the sun making them all lethargic. Kallah sprawled against him, her abdomen bare under his hands, while Raetha sat behind them both, kneading Nathan’s neck gently. Ukul paid meticulous care to the pressure points in the soles of his wife’s feet. Kallah dozed, half asleep and her head nodding, waking her every time her chin dipped. Nathan had his eyes closed, leaning back into Raetha’s hands contentedly.