Black Wine, page 16
“You are already big,” says Fierce-frightened impertinently, smirking a little at the boy.
=You are just as bad. Fighting in the hall over gossip and boasting. Why didn’t you ask me?=
“I got angry.”
=So what? And you … = he looms at the boy again = … someday I will test your technique. If you want a proper lesson. Come and ask me. Your choice. Do you understand?=
The boy nods. Escape-from-bondage grabs him again, shakes him harder this time, until his head snaps back and forth once, then drops him again.
=I thought you figured out it was stupid to lie. Every time I catch you lying I’ll shake you harder. Either your neck will break or the habit. I think you like your neck better. Then when we’ve got the lying taken care of, we’ll work on the blow job. Right?=
The boy backs away, and Escape-from-bondage lets him go. When he is out of arm’s reach, he spits dry in the waif’s direction, flips his fingers at Escape-from-bondage, and runs.
The rough shout is laughter, the waif knows. She smiles in relief, but the face he turns to her is angry. =You were jealous.=
=Jealous?= She doesn’t know how to say it, so she signs. He spells it, and through her headache she sounds out the letters, him prompting her with words it sounds like until she has it about right. =Yes. Jealous. Stupid. Ownership. Like slaves. I hate that. Who cares about blow jobs? Is it a trophy? Am I your trophy?=
He starts to walk away. “You’re the only thing I’ve ever had!” she shouts at his back. “Not even a name of my own! No body! Nothing! And then, you here. Giving me something. He wanted to take that away, say it was just fucking!”
=Clever Fierce-frightened,= he says. =Fast-thinking Fierce-frightened.=
“Don’t pretend to be such a boss. You aren’t so perfect yourself, to pretend to be so good.”
He comes and takes her by the shoulders and she thinks he will shake her too. But instead he lets her go with an impatient gesture and that “tscha!” and signs, =If you are so concerned about the quality of your blow jobs go give one to the regent. You’ll find out soon enough if he thinks yours are as good as his favorite fancy boy’s.=
“You are ‘jealous’ too!” she says, amazed, then backs away from his furious face. “But not of me, right? You were the fancy boy once, weren’t you? You want to be him, with your tongue back so you can give good head. Don’t you? Don’t you?”
The growl low in his throat is a voice she has never heard from him, but the sign is clear enough. =You are a pain in the ass,= he says with one harsh sharp chop of a hand, and stalks off. Fierce-frightened stands looking after him. She doesn’t know what to think, so, economically, she doesn’t. She goes into the lavatory to wash the blood out from under her nails and off her arms and face. She can’t do much about the mess on her tunic. Then she goes back to work.
Life in the zone of control (4)
This day the regent wants to go out. She helps him dress and then he insists she come up with him. He makes her take off the simple tunic she wears and dress in the complex bodysuit of a court attendant. Seeing her in the form-fitting scarlet-and-gray seems to amuse him. His smile is three-cornered and unpleasant. She doesn’t want anything to do with it. She looks away into the mirror, to see what she has done wrong to make him smile, but nothing looks awry.
She does not like the implications of this new gear—despite her ambition, she knows how promotions in this place come with their disadvantages—but she likes the suit. It covers her up, and is hard to get into from the outside.
In the bar, the seats are comfortable crescents facing wide vistas of the sea, the sky, the landscape, all screen copies of reality. Why didn’t they just make holes in the walls and look at the real thing? She must ask Escape-from-bondage, she thinks. The bar is full of courtiers, laughing and betting on some slave game going on behind one of the screens.
Recognizing him, the men leave their seats and urge him to sit. She is seated too, beside him, despite the fact that she is a slave. He insists on it. He smiles at some of the young men with that barbed grin that implies they have failed tests they didn’t know they were being given. They jump to get him a drink, counters for the game, a sweet snack, as if they were slaves themselves.
And she supposes they are, at that. She has never thought of such a thing before.
She looks at the urbane, smoothly-clad prince beside her and wonders what has become of the palsied, urine-smelling, attenuated weakling of time before. He does not have the strength of Escape-from-bondage, she thinks, but he has much more power. Don’t fuck the regent, the madwoman said, but she lives in a cage. And Escape-from-bondage has no tongue. This man plays these others like counters on that slavegame board, and disdains to look sidelong at the screens while he does so.
Eventually, however, he turns directly to the ocean scene spread across three or more meters of wall and says:
“Look. Look at that sea. I grew up by that sea, they’re playing this particular coastline just for me,” and he puts his arm about her shoulders and draws her close to his side. She is terrified, looking into the great eye sloshing with surf, knowing it looks back at them. She cannot speak to him, dares not move in case she draws the screens’ attention. He is the despot. It all belongs to him. But she has to go back below-stairs when he is done with her, and answer to the jealousies and hierarchies there. She will be punished tonight unless she can find Escape-from-bondage and hide behind him.
“Let’s go outside,” he says, and standing, keeping her clamped to his side with one strong arm, walks toward the blackness between the seacoast screen and the prairie with the blue sky full of clouds. She is brave enough to look unconcerned although one hand clenches the inside of her pocket with sweaty desperation. Behind the bar, the young catamite is polishing glasses. She straightens a little, contrives to look content, thinking, this must mean I win. With him, anyway.
In the darkness a door. He punches the escape bar, the latch springs, and they walk out into the light. She blinks furiously in the unexpected glare, brighter by far than the screens’ rendition of nature which had seemed vivid but hardly cast light into that dark club. Here she is blinded. He walks surely toward what seems to be the glowing edge of the world, drawing her with him. She sees nothing, is sure she is walking into death. She is sure she will die. She even thinks perhaps she will not mind: it had not been so bad the last time. On the other hand, there is Escape-from-bondage—she doesn’t want to lose that.
But she can’t stop; he puts his hand into the middle of her back and pushes her ahead.
Shockingly, she feels cold flatness against her belly. She recoils and looks down. They have come to a railing which fences what she sees, now her eyes are starting to adjust, is a terrace. He smiles coolly and gives her his sunglasses. She puts them on and sees first, directly ahead of her with no indication of distance, the true horizon. It is when she tries to understand the distance that she looks down and sees the sheer jumble of rocks end at the sea fifty meters below. The sea breaking on a rocky shore with a few sandy crescents strewn with drift. The sea stretching to the horizon, spotted with a few sailing vessels and above one ship a mirage—he points to it without speaking; it is the same ship sailing upside down. To the left the cliff curves into a headland, to the right she can see islands in the distance.
Ahead, for the first time in her short life, nothing but air until the earth curve makes a horizon. Clouds above, great cumulonimbus towers with the sun shining them to whiteness that glares even more into her eyes. The distance is awesome. And it is real.
She looks covertly at him. He sees her look, and laughs; he laughs and he lifts her chin with his hand, and holds her head while he kisses her. He squeezes her cheeks roughly until she opens her mouth. She hopes he does not hear the working of the machinery of her thoughts. He lets her go and laughs again.
“You will learn,” he says. “And maybe you will even learn to like it. I can teach you to ask for it, like it or not.” She can’t understand why he would want her, the slaves’ rags-to-catamite story coming true around her if she could believe it. She looks at him with a mixture of calculation and terror.
“It’s all right,” he says inexplicably, “we’ll use each other.” And there they stand at the edge of the world, regent she is not supposed to fuck, but supposes she will have to, like it or not, and frightened, power-hungry waif from the south. It is rather peaceful, really. She has no experience of peace, nor of how to stand in the same relationship to sky and sea as the most powerful being in her world. But she has gotten used to other terrors in her short life. She expects she can get used to this too. She will never mistake it, though they stand thus side by side, for anything safe. They stand side by side, yes, and watch the waves crash on the rocks far below; then they lift their eyes in eerie, accidental unison to the decorated sky above the far flat horizon.
As they look, she becomes Essa all in a great wash, a tsunami, Essa who remembers that first day she came down to the shore, down from the Remarkable Mountains her home—all the memory comes then, and washes away almost all traces of the last two years of truncated life. There is hardly any waif left when that wave recedes. She does not know any more exactly why she stands, wearing odd clothing, on this puny cliff with this strange and unpleasant man beside her, but she remembers just enough to get by on.
She laughs aloud, and turns to the autocrat beside her.
“I am from the Fjord of Tears,” she says, “and I think you are my mother’s husband.”
“Too bad you remembered,” he says. “I was looking forward to kissing you again.”
To be a slave who becomes the princess is another cliche of fantasy stories which are told to keep teenagers happy in the Fjord of Tears. Or anywhere, Essa supposes, that teenagers want more than just the life their parents show them every day. When Essa remembers, she takes the calculator out of her turban, remembering how to use it now, and begins to count what they say is hers. All of it from her mysterious mother who here, like in the mountains of home, had lived, made a home, had a family—only here, it was her birth-family, they called it a dynasty, and it was already corrupt.
Essa stops counting when she realizes she is going to keep very little of this wealth, and starts a new counting, a list of what she can safely carry away.
Life as an aristocrat is as truncated as life as a slave, but her pockets are smaller and she no longer thinks that her mother’s husband is a god. She still wonders, however, about her mother.
To celebrate the return of the heir to the throne, though apparently not to invest her with the actual title of queen—there seems to be no hint of that, which makes Essa laugh to herself—the prince is throwing a party.
I suppose they don’t “throw” parties here, thinks Essa. Probably they proclaim their intentions or something. The invitation she has received is certainly a master work of diplomatic language.
The regent has been planning the event for some time, which Essa, invested as she is with only the haziest of memories of her amnesiac self, thinks rather odd: if he knew that the slave was Essa, why had he not had her examined by doctors, helped? Yet she can’t remember this having happened—and when the regent with his oily good manners talks of the party, he says, “But my dear, you were always the guest of honor. It was only a matter of time before you caught on.”
Essa then begins to make a point of telling everyone she meets how amazing it is to regain one’s memory and discover one is not a servant but in fact part of the family. “What a pity,” she says, “that after all this I did not find my mother here to welcome me.” The listeners hear her with a variety of reactions from controlled outrage to amusement. She keeps track of who says what. No-one, of course, says anything useful; they are all still alive after twenty-five or more years with the prince, after all.
After she has been doing this for a while, the regent comes to her with a rather set smile and begins one of his flowery speeches.
“I am looking forward to introducing you to the company,” says the regent. “I wonder how many of them will have noticed by now that you are the same waif I brought from the south?”
“Probably they will not have to notice,” says Essa, “since I have told a great many of them the circumstances in which you, shall we say, rescued me.” She wonders if he wears make-up, to make himself look younger, or if it is an odd gift, like the gift of light she had inherited in so much greater strength (until her injury, that is) from her mother.
“They will, of course, see my great pleasure in having you here,” he continues, irritated, “and wish to celebrate with us the existence of a direct heir, for which possibility I have acted as regent for so long.”
“And for which, I am sure, my mother will be grateful. When I find her.”
“We will have the celebration at the full of the moon …”
“Convenient for romantic trysts on the balcony among lesser lights of the nobility.”
“… entirely suitable to the solemnity of the occasion.”
“You were much more fun when I didn’t know who I was.”
He glares at her, and she laughs. It takes an effort, but she has decided that whatever age she is, she is too old to be cowed.
The memories of the waif from the south are struggling to get out. Essa has nightmares every night. She understands the hand signs of the servants and slaves who clean the fireplaces and the corridors. She stops the big, kindly-looking mute one and says, in the hand language, help me. Help me.
He tilts his head to the left and looks at her, his hand on his throat. She thinks he might mean, why don’t you speak?
=Help me,= she signs. =I have been someone else and I don’t know who. Please. I don’t know the rules.=
=You’re not supposed to know this language, either,= he signs, hands close to his chest, his back to the screen at the end of the corridor. Are they surveillance screens? It has not occurred to her until this moment, though now it seems it should have been obvious. She moves closer to him so that the screen cannot see her hands either.
=Why not?=
=It is the secret talk of slaves,= he replies.
=I understand why you need a secret talk in this bizarre place,= she says, making up a sign for “bizarre.” Still, he looks quizzical at it.
“Bizarre place,” she says.
He makes a tiny grunt of laughter. His voice sounds pitiful to her.
=What made you mute?= she says.
He opens his mouth to show her the scar where his tongue has been cut out. She feels her gorge rise, has to cover her own mouth and gulp to prevent herself from vomiting.
=I liked you better before,= he signs.
=I’m sorry,= she says. =I don’t know who I was.=
=You were my friend,= he replies. She feels tears start, and brushes them away angrily.
=I could be your friend now,= she signs back. =Maybe,= he says, with a sign that assumes the negative, and laughs shortly again.
=I can’t help it!= she says, her hands chopping the air.
=I know,= he says. =But it doesn’t help to know things, sometimes.= His hands, making the equivocal sign for “sometimes,” hang in the air. They are big and she feels like she wants to hold them.
=You remind me of my father,= she signs.
He glares, and now it is time for his hands to shout. =I was your lover,= he storms at her, =and you liked it.= Then he pushes past her and, grabbing the ash bucket and the broom, runs away down the long corridor, his great form light on soft-shod feet, and silent.
She looks after him, crying for memory she doesn’t have, angry and hurt and sad. And, she realizes, very lonely.
She can’t leave it—him—alone. She calls him into her room, where she has now hung an embroidered bedspread over the wall with the screens, shuts the door behind him, and comes at him with hands flying. He grabs her wrists gently, but his face is angry.
“Uh!” he shouts, his harsh voice like a crow’s.
He lets go and =Talk!= his hands push at her. =You can talk. She could talk. Talk. Don’t patronize me.=
“Patronize” is a sign from top down, and his face imitates the regent’s.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “You are my only friend here.”
=If I’m your friend, what’s my name?= he says angrily.
She closes her eyes in despair. Her hands come up, and move, but she can’t look to see what they say or she will stop it coming. She feels his hands take hers. She opens her eyes.
“What did I say?” she says up to him, where he stands so close he casts a shadow over her.
“Lowlyn,” she says. “You’re not like my father at all. You’re as big as Lowlyn.” His question. “A lover I was handfasted to in Sailor Town. What did I say?”
He lets go and makes a sign. Fist opens, flies up.
“Fly up from captivity,” she says. He laughs again, that bitter sound. =You used different words before,= he says, and spells them out.
“Escape … from … bondage?”
=That’s what you said. You couldn’t spell very well, though. That’s new. You can call me whatever you like, now. You’re the princess.=
She begins to shake her head and the motion becomes violent, her head exploding with pain, the world streaking by until she closes her eyes. “No! No!” she says, her voice rising. “I am not the princess. No! I am Essa!” His hands imprisoning her head firmly wake her from what has seemed, suddenly, like a terrible dream.
“What was that?” she says, weakly, her own hands coming up to clutch her temples where a ferocious headache rages, trying to gnaw its way out.
=She used to get bad dreams,= he signs. =Her head would split like that, suddenly.=
“She?”
=You, but she wasn’t you and you aren’t her. Maybe you will join her someday.= She gets the impression he thinks that will be an improvement.
