Pretender

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Honored, nadiin.” A bow from staff to staff, and a quick departure.

  “Amazing,” was Banichi’s acid comment. Lord Tatiseigi, actively insulting to a human under his roof, had never evinced the least interest in seeing his human guest properly dressed, fed, or sheltered on their first night. Now he sent his servants, while the house was in crisis, and while the lawn was full of Taibeni rangers? And the servants of this conservative country estate had just conducted their business past the lord’s presence, ignoring him entirely, while snippily questioning Jago’s presence, a woman on a man’s staff?

  Bloody hell, Bren thought. He had wanted servants. He was ready to pitch this pair out.

  “The aiji may have requested them,” Jago said.

  Tabini had not seen Lord Tatiseigi’s performance on their arrival, and might have no idea they had been only scantly seen to. “Or the aiji-dowager,” Bren said, “possibly even without consulting Lord Tatiseigi.”

  That thought afforded Banichi and Jago a grim amusement. Ilisidi had been romantically and politically involved with Lord Tatiseigi in her reckless youth, perhaps even while married to Tabini’s late grandfather, and it was true she had no hesitation in ordering Tatiseigi’s staff as if she were still resident here. It was a good guess that Ilisidi was behind it, and if she was, he had hopes of seeing his wardrobe resurrected, if only the precious pair came back with an iron.

  Meanwhile, the bath water would not wait forever, which meant the paidhi-aiji should take his pale, skinny human body off to the tub before two servants became fortunate three and then five and seven—granted that they were, in fact, going to be providing clean sheets and towels and pressing his clothes in the bedroom.

  And just wait, he thought with grim satisfaction, until they asked more directly where Jago did sleep, and just wait until that answer reached the old lord’s ears. It was the one particular of their domestic arrangement he had never broadcast for the world’s consumption. And if this house had not made arrangements for Jago, then the scandal was theirs to deal with.

  He took out his pocket com, the spare ammunition clip, and his pill bottle, taking them with him as things he had no wish to surrender to Atageini servants, and dropped the coat back onto the pile of hopeless clothes on the floor before, gun in hand, he walked into the tiled bathroom. He laid the firearm and the other items safely on a tiled shelf above the slosh-line, but where he could reach the weapon and the clip if an alarm sounded. The tub, which would have qualified as a small pond in any human garden, was nearly full, though water was still cascading in from the fire hose-sized faucet. It was a bath built for socializing. It would have been a bath sufficient for grandest luxury, if its owner had decided to equip it with sufficient towels, scents, and oils, and if he had sent his servants to provide tea and other amenities for relaxation. There was not, in such an upstairs room, a mud drain, as there was in belowstairs baths, for servants, for hunters returning from the field, but there was at least a drain grating around the tub to carry away the water pushed over the edge and he spied, on a tiled shelf, a flower vase devoid of blooms—one of the countless details the Atageini had never properly attended in this room. He took up that antique vase for a pitcher, partially filled it from the tub and poured it over himself as he stood over the drain. He repeated the procedure, sluicing off the worst of the grime, until coming up behind him, Jago took the full vase and poured it over his head.

  Both hands free, he raked a twig out of his hair, and laid it on the shelf. A second vaseful followed. He undid his braid, and laid aside the bedraggled, sodden, once-white ribbon. Jago shed her black leathers and boots and tee, and being no cleaner than he was, poured the makeshift pitcher over herself, washing dirt into the drain as the relative chill of the air drove him to the depths of the tub. He submerged, surfaced, embraced by fluid warmth.

  “It should be safe for the rest to join us, Jago-ji,” he said. “I have no modesty left.”

  “Oh, they will take their turn,” she said. Her black skin showed a few scrapes, a few trails of red film from untreated cuts. Her pigtail, freed of its confines, separated into temporarily curling strands that sent trails of moisture down a broad, strong back, and he watched that beautiful back in absolute satisfaction and enjoyment, rejoicing to see her alive and in one piece. He was, himself, polka-dotted with bruises, with red chafe marks, with scrapes, scratches, and one long raking cut on the leg that was not as painful as the blisters, but it hurt like hell in the water, right along with his splinter-invaded hands.

  Still, oh, it was good to duck his head under water, to sink down over his head, and resurface with his nose just above warm, steaming water. He stirred from that bliss, spying bits of straw and twigs that had bobbed to the surface, about to get into the filter. He put them, collected, onto the stone rim, and the next moment his straw bits were awash for a second time as Jago stepped into the bath. She submerged. The water cut itself off, having reached its level, and Jago surfaced, eyes shut, content to sink back against the wall and soak for a moment.

  So was he content, blissful, until Tatiseigi’s manservant turned up next to the bath edge with a tall stack of snow-white towels.

  “One may put them on the shelf, nadi,” Jago said severely, shocking the man, quite surely—one only hoped he was too embarrassed to report the scene to his lord, but one greatly doubted it.

  And at this precise moment, Bren said to himself, he didn’t give a damn what the servants gossiped.

  The gentleman of service went back to the door, delicately took a tray from his female fellow-servant standing oh so modestly and properly outside, then came back and set it down on the bath edge. It held the unguents and oils and linaments Jago had requested. A small box of plasters Timani set above the water-zone, and then stopped dead, staring at Bren’s gun on the shelf on eye level with him. Underwater, next to Bren, Jago had braced a foot—to spring, it might be.

  But then, without coming near that deadly object, the manservant slipped out.

  “One should not have left that there,” Bren muttered.

  “One should not,” Jago agreed: never a syllable of flattery or excuse over a security breach, and likewise she was probably annoyed with herself. Then came the drift of remarks passed outside: Tano, very near the bathroom door, accosted the servants to discuss clothing, clean and otherwise, and the urgent need for shirts and underwear.

  “We shall be gossiped about,” Bren muttered. “One deeply apologizes, Jago-ji. Not least about leaving the gun there.”

  “Better to be gossiped about,” Jago said, sinking back, “than taken for the furniture, nandi.” A wicked smile chased the frown, and a wink. “That is a true domestic. He is not Guild.”

  That was good to know. Meanwhile Jago was close and soap-scented, and in good humor. For a few moments after, just to spite fate and the local gossip, they indulged in conventions some human, some atevi, some common to both, and several things that downright hurt—but about the pain, he didn’t, at the moment, care. Being alive was good. Being with Jago was glorious. He had intended to spend his bathtime extracting splinters, and dismissed the notion for perhaps ten whole minutes—before they got out to give the others the chance at the tub.

  Then he found that the hot water had him dripping blood from that gash he hadn’t thought amounted to much, not to mention the sensation of air hitting the raw spots.

  “I shall ruin the towel,” he protested, when she wanted to stop the flow.

  “One is very certain, Bren-ji, that the staff has bleach at their disposal.” Jago settled him on the dressing bench and set to work with the bottles the servant had brought in on the tray, some preparations that stung, most that he was glad to find didn’t. She salved spots he wouldn’t have anyone else reach, pulled splinters from his hands, including one quite nasty one on the side of his right hand, and stuck plasters onto several cuts. They were plasters designed for her complexion, not his, true, but they were, except the one on the side of his hand, all in incons
picuous places.

  And somewhere in that process the pain greatly eased, pain he’d carried so many hours he hadn’t even realized it, until the steady presence of misery changed to the sting of treatments. He returned the favor on her scratches, rubbed liniment left-handed into her shoulders. They had both become far more pleasantly aromatic than the condition in which they had arrived, and were both towel-wrapped, evergreen-smelling and warm by the time Banichi came in. He laid his own gun on the shelf and claimed the bath, sending water over the side. Then Tano and Algini added themselves to the tub, and the slosh-drain became a vital necessity.

  Bren retreated from the flood with Jago and took up watch in the bedroom. There was no bathrobe provided by their host. There was no help with his hair from the servants, but Jago put on most of her uniform and he, wrapped in a luxurious huge towel, plaited Jago’s damp queue while she sat on the floor in front of him, one of the rare times he could persuade her to take precedence, for duty’s sake.

  The servants slipped in the front door again. Timani, the man, brought them soap, towels, combs, brushes, and a stack of black uniform shirts, and tried not to notice the impropriety in progress, not looking at Jago nor quite at him.

  The two fled back out the door, in haste, and Jago outright laughed at the retreat.

  “Hold still,” Bren complained, and replaited the last few turns, which, with her movement, had escaped the half-tied ribbon and his unskilled fingers. His own hair was still wet. When braided, it tended to curl right out of its ribbon, unless very expertly handled. Hers was always straight and sleek and perfect.

  So was she, once she stood up: straight and sleek and perfect, wearing her last uniform tee and black leather pants.

  “I shall track down the servants and see what the laundry staff intends to do about your clothes, nandi.”

  “And underwear,” he said solemnly. “I am down to the very last.” He suffered a kiss on the forehead and sat afterward with his eyes closed, listening to Jago put on her coat and leave, listening to the Atageini house elsewhere recovering from last night’s attack, upstairs and down, inside and out. A mecheita in the general direction of the stableyard bawled its complaint at the heavens. Someone had begun hammering with a vengeance in the last few minutes, two someones, or a strong echo, coming from somewhere inside the house—he thought downstairs, and indeed, they had been moving scaffolding in the foyer. Servants shouted instructions and questions at one another in halls that, before the attack, had been orderly and quiet. This room, unprepared and lacking amenities, was probably one they accorded some village lord’s third son during the seasonal hunts and otherwise never touched. He had a go at plaiting his own hair, with indifferent results. He could by no means tie the ribbon, but he clipped it into a finish.

  And he recalled then he was supposed to be guarding the room, and he had left his gun and pocket com on the shelf in the bathroom. He got up and went after the means for self-defense.

  “The door opened,” Banichi observed, tilting his head back from his comfortable place in the tub, Tano and Algini having arranged themselves around the other rim.

  Atevi hearing. Jago had not been that noisy in her leaving.

  “Jago went out to question the staff,” he said, “she says about my wardrobe, but likely about other things, too.”

  “The house is full of strangers coming and going, Bren-ji. Atageini, Taibeni.” A high member of the Atageini house staff having been in Kadagidi employ, it remained a wonder they had not all been murdered in their beds on the first night, if the traitor had once found a way past their personal security. “Your staff earnestly asks you stay away from the doors. If there should be an arrival, even of the servants, immediately duck in here and trust that we shall leave this bath in very rapid fashion.”

  “I shall sit far to the inside of the room,” he promised Banichi. The water around his staff had gone murky. The bathroom smelled of strong evergreen soap. “But the servants have already been here. Shirts have arrived. One assumes there are enough for all of you, nadiin-ji.”

  “Good,” Banichi said, and heaved himself up to his feet, sending tides over the edge. He climbed the ledge, leaving the water to Tano and Algini. “But one does not approve this coming and going of strange servants.”

  “Jago was here at the time.” He was mortally sorry to have disturbed Banichi’s bath. “And, Banichi-ji, one is quite sure ill-meaning servants could equally well poison us at dinner or shoot us in the halls—”

  “Access,” Banichi said, wrapping a towel about his waist. “Everything is a question of access and the propriety of the house. This Timani is vague on the matter of his man’chi, and until someone owns up to him and his partner, we do not allow him—”

  The foyer door had opened, not a furtive opening, but a thump. In a single stride Banichi elbowed Bren out of the way, had his gun in hand, and stood to meet an arrival in the bedroom.

  “Daja-ma,” Banichi said in dismay.

  Bren put his head through the door. Only two women alive rated that “my lady” from Banichi. And the visitor was not the dowager. It was Damiri. Tabini-aiji’s wife. Mother of the heir. She was resplendent in a silk robe of muted green with the white Atageini lilies. Banichi and he stood there in towels. Her own bodyguard was in attendance, two women in Assassins’ black leather, professionally impassive, standing behind her. Dared one suspect amusement in the lady’s eyes?

  “Daja-ma,” Bren said, making his own small bow.

  “One trusts the paidhi’s welcome now does credit to my uncle’s house.”

  “We have seen two servants,” he said. “Are they yours, daja-ma?”

  “They are persons we know, at least,” Damiri said, “They are not Guild, nand’ paidhi, but they are reliable in man’chi to the Atageini house.”

  “Then the paidhi-aiji accepts them,” Bren said, “with all confidence and gratitude, daja-ma.”

  “Our Ajuri cousins will arrive this evening,” Damiri said, “with additional personnel, most domestic—but not all.” Ajuri was Damiri’s mother’s clan, a small fact from the basement of the paidhi’s knowledge, one he raked up into memory. He had met Damiri’s mother once, at a social occasion: the Ajuri were a small clan to the north of here, a postage stamp of a territory, but a rich one, within Dursai Province, and almost within the Padi Valley. “Local construction companies are assessing the damage to the house and making urgent repairs,” Damiri said further. “Certain of my husband’s staff have just come in.”

  Those would be likely more arrivals from Taiben province, Taibeni clan. Ragi, the aiji’s own clan, by ethnicity, like most of the central regions. “One is extremely glad to hear,” Bren said with a bow of his head. Everything was, on the surface, good news—hasty, too hasty perhaps, the moves of these ordinary citizens arriving as if the skirmish was a single incident, the construction companies coming in as if they were sure the fighting was at least at a long pause, and as if there was no likelihood at all that the Kadagidi would come sweeping in with airplanes and bombs in the next round. He certainly wanted to believe they were safe from further attack. But bombs were not the only danger.

  And the arrival of the Ajuri, marginal outsiders to the district, added more than one more clan to what was gathering here; it added intrusion from another association, a situation which, among atevi—given atevi instincts—did not seem to diminish the tension. Modern atevi didn’t generally fight wars, knowing they were hard to stop. But this situation was widening.

  “We have had at least a preliminary report about your voyage, nandi, the things done, things seen. Clearly our son has grown. And learned new things.” There was a mother’s regret in that, he sensed it: two years of her son’s life had passed in which his mother and father had had no part at all. “You did extremely well for him, nand’ Bren. And you risked your life for him, latest. We shall not forget.”

  He felt heat in his face. “One made every effort, daja-ma.” She had graciously not added that his influence ove
r the heir had become a serious liability in this backlash of atevi resentment against human influence in the court. “But he is in all respects your son, and acted as he saw fit.” He gave her back a son who’d grown up on The Three Musketeers and shared tea and cakes with an enemy alien. A son who longed for dinosaurs and devoured pizza with a circle of human playmates. All these innocent passions had become a liability to the boy and a puzzlement to his parents.

  “We have heard things here and there,” Damiri said, “that you did at great risk. Things the aishidi’tat must know, nandi.”

  Support. But he needed it not only for his own sake. He needed desperately to make things understood, and he seized on it, perhaps too recklessly. “We hope to give a wider report, daja-ma.” With thoughts of the computer lying in its concealment.” We have evidence. We have profound reasons to argue that your husband must be the one in authority.”

  “Our confidence in you is justified,” Damiri said, not a yes and not a no. She added, in a pragmatic vein, “Anything that you may require, nandi, ask of Timani.”

  Timani. Whom they had deeply and deliberately shocked. God, Bren thought. And that act of his might reach the lady’s ears, if staff gossip had not embroidered it already.

  “Thank you. Our deep gratitude, daja-ma.”

  She gave a little nod, then turned, gathering her own bodyguard, and left.

  This was the house in which she had spent her growing years, in which her Atageini father had died, assassinated. It was the house in which she, a minor child, had come under her great-uncle Tatiseigi’s governance—and played childish pranks, so one had heard, faintly. It was a tradition her son had certainly carried on. She was not the lady of the house; she was somewhat greater in power, or had been, until the overthrow.