Old Music and the Slave Women Read online

  At some point he was taken to a bed in a room with a window, but he was still in the crouchcage, swinging high above the dusty ground, the dusties' ground, the circle of green grass.

  The zadyo and the heavyset man were there, were not there. A bondswoman, whey-faced, crouching and trembling, him trying to put salve on his burned arm and leg and back. She was there and not there. The sun shone in the window. felt the wire snap down on his foot again, and again.

  Darkness eased him. He slept most of the time. After a couple of days he could sit up and eat what the scared bondswoman brought him. His sunburn was healing, and most of his aches and pains were milder. His foot was swollen hugely; bones were broken; that didn't matter till he had to get up. He dozed, drifted. When Rayaye walked into the room, recognised him at once.

  "Minister Rayaye," Esdan said.

  "Mr. Old Music. How kind of you to recall me! I'm sorry you've been unwell. I hope the people here are looking after you satisfactorily?"

  "Thank you."

  "When I heard you were unwell I inquired for a doctor, but there's no one here but a veterinarian. No staff at all. Not the old days! What a change! I wish you'd seen Yaramera in its glory."

  "I did." His voice was rather weak, but sounded quite natural. "Thirty-two or -three years ago. Lord and Lady Aneo entertained a party from our embassy."

  "Really? Then you know what it was," said Rayaye, sitting down in the one chair, a fine old piece missing one arm. "Painful to see it like this, isn't it! The worst of the destruction was here in the house. The whole women's wing and the great rooms burned. But the gardens were spared, may the Lady be praised. Laid out by Meneya himself, you know, four hundred years ago. And the fields are still being worked. I'm told there are still nearly three thousand assets attached to the property. When the trouble's over, it'll be far easier to restore Yaramera than many of the great estates." He gazed out the window. "Beautiful, beautiful. And Aneos' housepeople were famous for their beauty, you know. And training. It'll take a long time build up to that kind of standard again."

  "No doubt."

  The Werelian looked at him with bland attentiveness. "I expect you're wondering why you're here."

  "Not particularly," Esdan said pleasantly.

  "Oh?"

  "Since I left the Embassy without permission, I suppose the Government wanted to keep an eye on me."

  "Some of us were glad to hear you'd left the Embassy. Shut up there—a waste of your talents."

  "Oh, my talents," Esdan said with a deprecatory shrug, which hurt his shoulder. He would wince later. Just now he was enjoying himself. He liked fencing.

  "You're a very talented man, Mr. Old Music. The wisest, canniest alien on Werel, Lord Mehao called you once. You've worked with us—and against us, yes—more effectively than any other offworlder. We understand one another. We can It's my belief that you genuinely wish my people well, and that if I offered you a way of serving them—a hope of bringing terrible conflict to an end—you'd take it."

  "I would hope to be able to."

  "Is it important to you that you be identified as a supporter of one side of the conflict, or would you prefer to remain neutral?"

  "Any action can bring neutrality into question."

  "To have been kidnapped from the Embassy by the rebels is no evidence of your sympathy for them."

  "It would seem not."

  "Rather the opposite."

  "It would be so perceived."

  "It can be. If you like."

  "My preferences are of no weight, Minister."

  "They're of very great weight, Mr. Old Music. But here. You've been ill, I'm tiring you. We'll continue our conversation tomorrow, eh? If you like."

  "Of course, Minister," Esdan said, with a politeness edging on submissiveness, a tone that he knew suited men like this one, more accustomed to the attention of slaves than the company of equals. Never having equated incivility with pride, Esdan, like most of his people, was disposed to be polite in any circumstance that allowed it, and disliked circumstances did not. Mere hypocrisy did not trouble him. He was perfectly capable of it himself. If Rayaye's men had tortured him and Rayaye pretended ignorance of the fact, Esdan had nothing to gain by insisting on it.

  He was glad, indeed, not to be obliged to talk about it, and hoped not to think about it. His body thought about it for remembered it precisely, in every joint and muscle, now. The rest of his thinking about it he would do as long as he lived. had learned things he had not known. He had thought he understood what it was to be helpless. Now he knew he had not

  When the scared woman came in, he asked her to send for the veterinarian. "I need a cast on my foot," he said.

  "He does mend the hands, the bondsfolk, master," the woman whispered, shrinking. The assets here spoke an archaic-sounding dialect that was sometimes hard to follow.

  "Can he come into the house?"

  She shook her head.

  "Is there anybody here who can look after it?"

  "I will ask, master," she whispered.

  An old bondswoman came in that night. She had a wrinkled, seared, stern face, and none of the crouching manner of other. When she first saw him, she whispered, "Mighty Lord!" But she performed the reverence stiffly, and then examined swollen foot, impersonal as any doctor. She said, "If you do let me bind that, master, it will heal."

  "What's broken?"

  "These toes. There. Maybe a little bone in here, too. Lotsalot bones in feet."

  "Please bind it for me."

  She did so, firmly, binding cloths round and round until the wrapping was quite thick and kept his foot immobile at one angle. She said, "You do walk, then you use a stick, sir. You put down only that heel to the ground."

  He asked her name.

  "Gana," she said. Saying her name, she shot a sharp glance right at him, full face, a daring thing for a slave to do. She probably wanted to get a good look at his alien eyes, having found the rest of him, though a strange color, pretty commonplace, bones in the feet and all.

  "Thank you, Gana. I'm grateful for your skill and kindness."

  She bobbed, but did not reverence, and left the room. She herself walked lame, but upright. "All the grandmothers are rebels," somebody had told him long ago, before the Uprising.

  The next day he was able to get up and hobble to the broken-armed chair. He sat for a while looking out the window.

  The room looked out from the second floor over the gardens of Yaramera, terraced slopes and flowerbeds, walks, lawns, and a series of ornamental lakes and pools that descended gradually to the river: a vast pattern of curves and planes, plants and paths, earth and still water, embraced by the broad living curve of the river. All the plots and walks and terraces formed a soft geometry centered very subtly on an enormous tree down at the riverside. It must have been a great tree when the garden was laid out four hundred years ago. It stood above and well back from the bank, but its branches reached far over the water, and a village could have been built in its shade. The grass of the terraces had dried to soft gold. The river the lakes and pools were all the misty blue of the summer sky. The flowerbeds and shrubberies were untended, overgrown, but not yet gone wild. The gardens of Yaramera were utterly beautiful in their desolation. Desolate, forlorn, forsaken, all romantic words befitted them, yet they were also rational and noble, full of peace. They had been built by the labor slaves. Their dignity and peace were founded on cruelty, misery, pain. Esdan was Hainish, from a very old people, people who built and destroyed Yaramera a thousand times. His mind contained the beauty and the terrible grief of the place, assured

  the existence of one cannot justify the other, the destruction of one cannot destroy the other. He was aware of both, only aware.

  And aware also, sitting in some comfort of body at last, that the lovely sorrowful terraces of Yaramera might contain within them the terraces of Darranda on Hain, roof below red roof, garden below green garden, dropping steep down to shining harbor, the promenades and piers and sail
boats. Out past the harbor the sea rises up, stands up as high as his house, as high as his eyes. Esi knows that books say the sea lies down. "The sea lies calm tonight," says the poem, but he knows better. The sea stands, a wall, the blue-grey wall at the end of the world. If you sail out on it, it will seem flat, but if you see

  truly, it's as tall as the hills of Darranda, and if you sail truly on it, you will sail through that wall to the other side, beyond end of the world.

  The sky is the roof that wall holds up. At night the stars shine through the glass air roof. You can sail to them, too, to worlds beyond the world.

  "Esi," somebody calls from indoors, and he turns away from the sea and the sky, leaves the balcony, goes in to meet guests, or for his music lesson, or to have lunch with the family. He's a nice little boy, Esi: obedient, cheerful, not talkative quite sociable, interested in people. With very good manners, of course; after all, he's a Kelwen and the older generation wouldn't stand for anything less in a child of the family, but good manners come easy to him, perhaps because he's never any bad ones. Not a dreamy child. Alert, present, noticing. But thoughtful, and given to explaining things to himself, such the wall of the sea and the roof of the air. Esi isn't as clear and close to Esdan as he used to be; he's a little boy a long time ago and very far away, left behind, left at home. Only rarely now does Esdan see through his eyes, or breathe the marvelous intricate smell of the house in Darranda—wood, the resinous oil used to polish the wood, sweetgrass matting, fresh flowers, kitchen herbs, the sea wind—or hear his mother's voice: "Esi? Come on in now, love. The cousins are here from Dorased!"

  Further conversations with Bayaye were deferred. The zadyo came with his apologies. The Minister had been called back to speak with the President, would return within three or four days. Esdan realised he had heard a flyer take off early the morning, not far away. It was a reprieve. He enjoyed fencing, but was still very tired, very shaken, and welcomed the rest. No one came into his room but the scared woman, Heo, and the zadyo who came once a day to ask if he had all he needed.

  When he could he was permitted to leave his room, go outside if he wished. By using a stick and strapping his bound onto a stiff old sandal-sole Gana brought him, he could walk, and so get out into the gardens and sit in the sun, which was growing milder daily as the summer grew old. The two veots were his guards, or more exactly guardians. He saw the two young men who had tortured him; they kept at a distance, evidently under orders not to approach him. One of the veots usually in view, but never crowded him.

  He could not go far. Sometimes he felt like a bug on a beach. The part of the house that was still usable was huge, gardens were vast, the people were very few. There were the six men who had brought him, and five or six more who had been here, commanded by the heavyset man Tualenem. Of the original asset population of the house and estate there were ten or twelve, a tiny remnant of the house-staff of cooks, cooks' helpers, washwomen, chambermaids, ladies' maids, bodyservants, shoe-polishers, window-cleaners, gardeners, path-rakers, waiters, footmen, errandboys, stablemen, drivers, use-women and useboys who had served the owners and their guests in the old days. These few were no longer locked night in the old house-asset compound where the crouchcage was, but slept in the courtyard warren of stables for horses people where he had been kept at first, or in the complex of rooms around the kitchens. Most of these remaining few were women, two of them young, and two or three old, frail-looking men.

  He was cautious of speaking to any of them at first lest he get them into trouble, but his captors ignored them except give orders, evidently considering them trustworthy, with good reason. Troublemakers, the assets who had broken out of compounds, burned the great house, killed the bosses and owners, were long gone: dead, escaped, or reenslaved with a cross branded deep on both cheeks. These were good dusties. Very likely they had been loyal all along. Many bondspeople, especially personal slaves, as terrified by the Uprising as their owners, had tried to defend them or had fled with them. They were no more traitors than were owners who had freed their assets and fought on the Liberation side. As much, and no more.

  Girls, young field hands, were brought in one at a time as use-women for the men. Every day or two the two young who had tortured him drove a landcar off in the morning with a used girl and came back with a new one.

  Of the two younger house bondswomen, one called Kamsa always carried her little baby around with her, and the men ignored her. The other, Heo, was the scared one who had waited on him. Tualenem used her every night. The other men kept hands off.

  When they or any of the bondspeople passed Esdan in the house or outdoors they dropped their hands to their sides, chin to the chest, looked down, and stood still: the formal reverence expected of personal assets facing an owner.

  "Good morning, Kamsa."

  Her reply was the reverence.

  It had been years now since he had been with the finished product of generations of slavery, the kind of slave described as "perfectly trained, obedient, selfless, loyal, the ideal personal asset," when they were put up for sale. Most of the assets had known, his friends and colleagues, had been city rentspeople, hired out by their owners to companies and corporations to work in factories or shops or at skilled trades. He had also known a good many field hands. Field hands seldom had contact with their owners; they worked under gareot bosses, and their compounds were run by cutfrees, eunuch assets. ones he knew had mostly been runaways protected by the Hame, the underground railroad, on their way to independence Yeowe. None of them had been utterly deprived of education, options, any imagination of freedom, as these bondspeople were. He had forgotten what a good dusty was like. He had forgotten the utter impenetrability of the person who has no private life, the intactness of the wholly vulnerable.

  "Please sit down, please go on with your work," he said. She obeyed. "What's that you're cutting up?"

  "Dueli, master," she whispered.

  It was a vegetable he had often eaten and enjoyed. He watched her work. Each big, woody pod had to be split along sealed seam, not an easy trick; it took a careful search for the opening point and hard, repeated twists of the blade to open the pod. Then the fat edible seeds had to be removed one by one and scraped free of a stringy, clinging matrix.

  "Does that part taste bad?" he asked.

  "Yes, master."

  It was a laborious process, requiring strength, skill, and patience. He was ashamed. "I never saw raw dueli before," said.

  "No, master."

  "What a good baby," he said, a little at random. The tiny creature in its sling, its head lying on her shoulder, had opened large bluish-black eyes and was gazing vaguely at the world. He had never heard it cry. It seemed rather unearthly to him, he had not had much to do with babies.

  She smiled.

  "A boy?"

  "Yes, master."

  He said, "Please, Kamsa, my name is Esdan. I'm not a master. I'm a prisoner. Your masters are my masters. Will you me by my name?"

  She did not answer.

  "Our masters would disapprove."

  She nodded. The Werelian nod was a tip-back of the head, not a bob down. He was completely used to it after all years. It was the way he nodded himself. He noticed himself noticing it now. His captivity, his treatment here, had displaced, disoriented him. These last few days he had thought more about Hain than he had for years, decades. He had been at home on Werel, and now was not. Inappropriate comparisons, irrelevant memories. Alienated.

  "They put me in the cage," he said, speaking as low as she did and hesitating on the last word. He could not say the whole word, crouchcage.

  Again the nod. This time, for the first time, she looked up at him, the flick of a glance. She said soundlessly, "I know," went on with her work.

  He found nothing more to say.

  "I was a pup, then I did live there," she said, with a glance in the direction of the compound where the cage was. Her murmuring voice was profoundly controlled, as were all her gestures and movements. "Be
fore that time the house burned. When the masters did live here. They did often hang up the cage. Once, a man for until he did die there. In that. I saw that."

  Silence between them.

  "We pups never did go under that. Never did run there."

  "I saw the ... the ground was different, underneath," Esdan said, speaking as softly and with a dry mouth, his breath coming short. "I saw, looking down. The grass. I thought maybe ... where they ..." His voice dried up entirely.

  "One grandmother did take a stick, long, a cloth on the end of that, and wet it, and hold it up to him. The cutfrees did look away. But he did die. And rot some time."

  "What had he done?"

  "Enna," she said, the one-word denial he'd often heard assets use—i don't know, I didn't do it, I wasn't there, it's not my fault, who knows... .

  He'd seen an owner's child who said "enna" be slapped, not for the cup she broke but for using a slave word.

  "A useful lesson," he said. He knew she'd understand him. Underdogs know irony like they know air and water.

  "They did put you in that, then I did fear," she said. "The lesson was for me, not you, this time," he said.

  No one else was out on the terraces. A slight wind stirred in the flowering trees behind them, streaked the distant river with silver.

  "Your baby, Kamsa, you know, he will be free," Esdan said.

  She looked up, not at him, but at the river and across it. She said, "Yes. He will be free." She went on working.

  It heartened him, her saying that to him. It did him good to know she trusted him. He needed someone to trust him, since the cage he could not trust himself. With Rayaye he was all right; he could still fence; that wasn't the trouble. It was when he was alone, thinking, sleeping. He was alone most of the time. Something in his mind, deep in him, was injured, broken, had not mended, could not be trusted to bear his weight.