Master of None (39 page)

Before she could object, or Rulayi could react, he had the broom in his hands and swept the remainder of the damp leaves quickly and competently into the gutter. He handed her the broom, slightly out of breath and sweating, keeping his eyes properly averted. “As you can see, nidhih l’amae”—he made sure to use a flatteringly high salutation, one he was sure they both knew she didn’t merit—“your path is clean. If you will now pay my naeqili brother, we will leave in peace.”

She stood without speaking for so long, Nathan finally glanced up. “I didn’t hire you,” she said calculatingly.

“I didn’t ask you for payment,” he said, still using as high-low a terminology as he could. Rulayi stood impassively, hands dangling beside him. “I merely wished to help my friend.”

The shopkeeper held out her hand imperiously, frowning with barely suppressed impatience as Rulayi fumbled with his card. As she noted the money into his account, she said, “You only did half.
He
did the rest, and I didn’t hire him. I’ll only pay you for the work you did.” She looked up with a malicious smile, as if inviting argument, obviously enjoying being able to insult a famous Nga’esha, if only a male.

When she held the card out arrogantly, Rulayi took it back without protest. Nathan quickly bowed to hide his reaction. When he straightened, he had managed to mask his anger.

“May the Goddess who is the Mother of us all reward you as you deserve for your compassion, l’amae,” he said innocently, gratified by the flush of color on her face. Keeping a straight face, he grabbed Rulayi by the arm and tugged him away.

“Don’t worry,” he said under his breath, “I’ll give you the difference myself.” The only response Rulayi made was an apathetic nod. Nathan spotted an open cafe at the corner of the square. Usually, men could eat in the farthest back room, behind the shop, out of sight. “Are you hungry?”

It took Rulayi a few minutes to sort through the slowed responses of his brain to answer. “Yes. Always.”

The expression on Rulayi’s face didn’t change as the woman stopped them at the men’s door at the rear of the cafe and refused to serve them. “Not with
him
,” she said firmly. She nodded her head toward the lajjae bracelet fastened to Rulayi’s wrist. She wasn’t hostile, and shook her head reproachfully. “Surely you knew that,” she said at his surprise. He hadn’t known, never having had enough money when he had lived as a rhowghá outcast to have afforded even the dingy, windowless rooms in the back.

He held his hands together, his fingertips touching loosely in the respectful gesture reserved for strangers. “Would it be possible then, l’amae, to buy a few things and take it away with us?”

For a moment, he was afraid she would refuse, looking over his shoulder stonily into the distance as she considered. Then her eyes slid to Rulayi, standing silently with his head bowed. She sucked air in between her front teeth, frowning, and said, “How much?”

Quickly, Nathan pulled his card from the pouch and scribbled his finger across the surface before he handed it to her. “As much as this amount will buy, l’amae.”

She glanced at it and chuckled. “You must be very hungry.” “Very,” he said steadily, keeping his eyes lowered.

She smiled and pocketed his card. “Go to the kitchen door. Let no one see you there.” Nathan had to pull Rulayi with him, and they waited in the alley for several long minutes. About the time he was sure she was not going to return and give back his card, the beaded netting defending the interior from prying eyes was pulled back. The woman handed his card and a heavy grass-weave sack bulging with far more foodstuffs than the amount he had given her could have bought. The smell of hot, spicy food made his mouth water.

“Thank you,” Nathan said, and stumbled over the ritual expression wishing her the Goddess’s blessing. Rulayi waited as silently as a shadow behind him.

“My neighbors tend to think of this alley as a place to dump their own rubbish,” the woman said. “Every morning, I find someone has crept into the alley and left their litter. Every afternoon, the cleaners charge my business more than my share to take it away. I am the head of my Family, but it is small, and I cannot spare extra daughters to come that early in the morning to remove it before the cleaners come.” Again, her eyes flicked toward Rulayi. “If someone were to take care of this problem, I’m sure there would be enough left over from the night before to repay him for the work. Perhaps you have a distant cousin...?”

Both men knew what she was saying. As long as she didn’t see Rulayi, she didn’t have to acknowledge his presence. Scavenging was legal for the rhowghá. He nodded, both grateful and angry. “I will ask around, l’amae.”

He started to turn and stopped when she touched his forearm. Startled, he looked directly at her, his arms full.

“You have eyes like a summer sky just before the sunset,” she said quietly. “I have never seen eyes that color before.” He didn’t know whether it was a proposition or not, so he stood mutely. For a married man of High Family to be out on his own and speaking to a strange woman was considered highly unsuitable conduct, while even more scandalous to be in the company of a naeqili te rhowghá.

Then she smiled kindly and closed the door.

As it was, when he returned the next week to check how Rulayi was doing, she was less pleased to see him. Rulayi had never shown up. Nathan futilely searched for him at every charity shelter in the city, looked in every alley, asked every slow-witted or surly rhowghá he saw.

But no one was either able or willing to tell him where Rulayi had gone.

XXXIV

“W
HEN YOU WERE MY AGE
, N
ATHAN,”
R
AEMIK ASKED, “WHAT WERE
you doing?”

They faced one another across the huge table in the library, which at the moment was being used as a lab to prick out fragile svapnah seedlings from the gel trays to transplant into individual growing plugs. These would be carefully labeled and transferred back into Nathan’s little greenhouse at the bottom end of the men’s garden. Most of them, Nathan suspected, would be dead inside two days, but he was determined to discover the secret to cultivating the native plant.

“Getting the hell out of Westcastle,” Nathan said.

“Why?”

“Because we were in the middle of a civil war and I was tired of people trying to shoot my ass.”

“Why? What were people fighting about?”

“Water.”

“Water?”

“Water.” On a planet with as much constant rainfall as Vanar, he could well understand how insignificant that must have seemed to Raemik. He didn’t attempt to explain.

“How did you do it, then, leave Hengeli?”

Nathan concentrated on his work, trying to work the dials on the tweezers under the magnifying glass without jostling the brittle cotyledons on the root apex. He listened with only half an ear, but the boy’s transparency was glaring. “Not in any way that you could ever leave Vanar, Raemik, or I’d have been long gone myself by now. Would you hand me another set of plugs, please?”

The boy flushed, and silently passed him the plugs he’d filled with the special rooting medium Nathan had devised. After an interim, he asked, “What was it like where you lived?”

“Dry. Very, very dry.”

“Were there many plants there?”

“No.”

“Then how did you know you wanted to study them?”

“I met someone.” Fat Ivan. “He was a terraform technician.”

“Is that like a botanist?”

“A bit.”

Silence.

“Did he train you to be a botanist?”

“No.”

“Then where did you learn so much about plants?”

“I went to university.”

“Did that take a long time?”

“Raemik...”

“Sorry.”

Nathan grimaced as yet another frail quasi-proembrionic meristem snapped in two, the microscopic seedling destroyed. “Damn,” he muttered. He sighed and sat back, his eyes aching, and rubbed his stiff neck. Once he’d had to struggle to get two coherent sentences out of the boy. Now he couldn’t get him to shut up.

“It took me seven years to earn my degree, in answer to your question. Why, do you want to be a botanist?”

“I don’t know, maybe.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I cannot go to university.”

“That’s not true. There are Vanar universities even for men, very good ones. If you can pass the entrance exams, there’s no reason you can’t go.”

“I could pass the exams, Nathan,” Raemik said quietly.

“Then figure out something you want to do with your life and go.” “
They
will never let me go to university.”

Although they were in the library, where Raemik felt safe to speak his mind, the habitual shutters had closed over his face.

“The Nga’esha?” He took Raemik’s silence as an affirmation. “Why not?”

“
They
are already angry enough with me as it is. Making Pratima wait another year.”

“And fifteen for you. You’ll be a fully adult man when she comes back. You have plenty of time to go to university and study while you wait. Then, when Pratima comes”—he cleared his throat, finding the words difficult—“once you’ve fulfilled your obligations, I’m sure Pratha Yronae will permit you to do whatever it is you decide you would like to do.”

“No,” Raemik insisted grimly. “She won’t.”

The boy’s pessimism irritated him. “Pratha Yronae is strict, but she isn’t unjust. If you presented your request in a respectful way, I’m sure she would listen to you.” The boy remained stubbornly silent. He frowned. “If you prefer, I’ll make the request for you.”

“No. It won’t do any good and will just get you into trouble.” “I’ve been in trouble before,” Nathan said, trying to lighten the atmosphere. “I’m probably due about now anyway. If I don’t get into trouble regularly, they think something is wrong with me.”

His joke did nothing to appease the boy. Raemik blinked, his pale face as rigid as stone, and to Nathan’s concern, a tear slid down his cheek. Nathan came around the table and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“Raemik, what is it?”

For a long moment, he didn’t think the boy would answer. “I hate them,” he finally said so quietly Nathan almost couldn’t hear him.

“Who? The Nga’esha?”

Raemik swallowed, his throat flexing as another tear spilled down his cheek. “All of them. All the women. I hate them.”

“Raemik...”

The boy looked at him, his face distorted in a snarl of repressed fury, teeth clenched with the effort to speak. “You don’t know. You don’t know
anything
, Nathan Nga’esha. Women are evil, they don’t care about anyone but themselves.”

“Not all of them. Pratima isn’t like that—”

“I hate her most of all.” Raemik shook off his hand, pulling away from him. “She claims to be my sister, my
friend
, but she doesn’t care what happens to me. She doesn’t care at all.” He ran the back of his arm across his eyes angrily to wipe away the tears. Fresh ones poured down his face.

“You feel sorry for her because she’s a Pilot, don’t you? She’s just Nga’esha property, poor Pratima. But do you know what I am, Nathan? I’m just seed, like those things.” His hand gestured fiercely at the pale red svapnah seedlings. “Pratima goes anywhere she wants on Vanar, and I’m not even allowed to set foot off the Nga’esha Estate. When Pratima comes back,
they
won’t allow me to refuse her another year. I’ll be too old by then. They’ll take what they want from me, and my purpose is over. I won’t even be Nga’esha anymore. Do you know what happens to Pilot males? We get castrated and sent away to serve in the temple, forever and ever. So no university for me. No being a botanist or anything else for me. And why? So Nga’esha women can get rich from the Worm.”

Raemik suddenly whirled and snatched the gel tray of seedlings from the table, hurling it away toward the shelves. It hit the floor and splattered, Nathan’s entire reserve of seedlings in ruins. It didn’t matter anyway, he was distantly aware, as the boy turned back to him seething with rage and despair.

“I hate
all
women. I wish they would all die!” he sobbed, his voice no more than a strangled whisper, and fled the library.

Nathan didn’t stop him, his own breath difficult in his chest. He thought of the bhaqdah temple disciple—a man with green eyes and red hair, like that of Bralin Ushahayam—who had mistaken him for another. He thought of Rulayi, the once robust man turned to a lifeless automaton, locked into a permanent stupor by the lajjae imprisoning his mind. He thought of the young Pakaran twins, compelled into a trade they had no say in. He thought of the long rows of white-wombs with the opaque shadows of inmates moving lethargically inside. Men without futures, boys without hope.

“This is wrong,” he said finally. “This is so wrong.”

He left the gel tray where it had been thrown, abandoning his work and the library. Walking through the men’s garden, he surveyed the men relaxing in the sun, small groups chatting idly, Qim bent over his lute picking out a new melody. Under a tree, Baelam stroked a slender cat, the animal’s natural instinct to hunt bred out of it to leave nothing more than a docile, pretty plaything. Aware Nathan was staring, Baelam looked up, puzzled. “Are you feeling well,
shaelah
?”

“No.”

He couldn’t stand to be in the Nga’esha House a minute longer. He pulled the end of his sati over his head as he left by the men’s gate to take the first train he could into the city. He walked along the wide boulevards and down narrow streets, as if he’d never seen them before.

Cafe tables littered the sidewalks, filled with confident, lively people. Customers came and went from teeming shops, laden with shopping. A pair of sahakharae stepped off the men’s section of a transit bus, cheerfully gossiping as they passed a group of women, keeping their eyes respectfully averted with habitual decorum, bobbing a quick bow that wasn’t even acknowledged. An elderly Middle Family kharvah carefully scrutinized vegetables on offer at the men’s end of the market, testing the ripeness of melons with discerning fingers while the merchant waited patiently for him to make his selection, her arms crossed over her formidable bosom. A thin woman endeavored to keep a small horde of spirited little girls in grass-stained kirtiya from straying outside their play area in the city park. A young man from a Common Family squatted next to a small boy howling for sympathy and gravely studied the scuffed elbow held up for his inspection before dispensing medicinal kisses and hugs. Clean, safe, bustling, the perfect picture of an ideal society.