Rift (38 page)

Nerys emerged from her room, groggy with sleep. By the slant of light from the ceiling, she knew the morning was well along. Odel was just heading down the passageway, securing her long gray hair at the back of her neck with a clasp.

Odel smiled as Nerys caught up. “I’m an old woman. What’s your excuse for sleeping late?”

They all wondered what she did, coming home late each night from Salidifor’s compound.

“No reason to rise early without work to do.” She kept her tone friendly; Odel seemed accepting of her, and it was a surprising comfort.

They walked into the tea room, as the women called the front area. Here they gathered for talk and tea, especially in the cool mornings when the heat of the berms was most welcome. As Haval and several others glanced up, conversation ceased. Nerys was getting used to this cool reception. In a friendly overture, Galen patted the cushion next to her and Nerys sat down, reaching for the shiny pot of tea and a palm-sized cup. Before long the women would scurry into the outfold
to share breakfast with their lords at their respective habitations. For now, though, there was excruciating human conversation.

“Luce has gone to bring forth her pup,” Odel said. This, everyone knew. Luce was fairly bursting with her pregnancy, and was looking forward to having it done with. “We should do something special for her when they bring her back.”

“A bath and a massage,” Haval suggested. She looked at Luce’s partner, Callie.

Callie grinned. She could hardly wait to have Luce back in sensual trim again.

“Last night,” Mave piped up, “Himirinan brought me a dish of custard laced with nutmeg.”

Haval moaned. “My favorite. Your lord seems to be coming around.”
Coming around
was the term the women had for a lord’s becoming more personal with one of them.

“I was almost asleep. But I didn’t turn it down!”

Pila, the youngest of the group, said: “It took them forever to learn how to make custard. It used to taste like glue.”

Mave went on: “He even told me that his work involved patrolling the eastern perimeter. So that fits in with the idea that they work the defenses in quadrants. Since he reports to Salidifor, that would make Salidifor the eastern chief.”

At the mention of Nerys’ lord, the conversation trickled away. They hadn’t forgiven her for snatching up an orthong of consequence.

Nerys took her tea and went out to sit on the steps. The morning mist had cooked up a spicy, aromatic stew in the outfold, and she breathed in deeply, thinking of Anar, and how Anar would have delighted in this place of mysteries. Up in the swaying second story of outfold on a narrow, suspended bridge, orthong pups could sometimes be seen scampering and playing, a secure upper layer where they apparently
roamed with impunity, oblivious to the women in their compound below.

Anar would have loved to see such a sight, and to hear how the outfold sang with birds in the mornings. Massing in the columnar growths the women called trees, the birds pecked at unseen delicacies. Perhaps, Nerys mused, the orthong engineered delights to attract birds as they did to attract human women.

Since coming to the orthong habitation ten days ago, Nerys had tasted foods that she had known only in stories and myths. How the orthong acquired and prepared this food, the women had yet to discover. But they brought the women rich cream soups, cuts of tender meat, berry compotes, vegetables simmered in gravy, crusty breads, salted butters, and fruits called melons, grapes, tangerines, and pears. Once when Salidifor urged her to eat a bowl of red strawberries, for a moment she thought he meant to poison her. Though the crimson bauble was achingly pleasurable, Nerys stopped after tasting just one. If he wanted her to eat, he would have to first teach her something. She put her spoon down on the mat, signaling her demand. Eventually she finished all the strawberries, but it was very late before she got home that night.

Odel came outside to sit with her. “Want some company?” Seeing Nerys nod, she settled onto the step, elbows on knees, and gazed out on the orthong forest. “Sorry about that nonsense back there,” she said. “It’ll get better once they get to know you.”

“Sometimes the more people know me, the less they like me.”

Odel laughed. “Well, you can make waves. But some of us enjoy the shaking up. We’re too set in our ways.” She looked sideways at Nerys. “Do you suppose the thongs planned this? Put you in number two position just to test us?”

Nerys’ position of number two woman in the compound came from Salidifor’s being second in rank to
Haval’s lord, Simeranan. Though Lord Simeranan had recently died, his status still clung to Haval. Nerys had assumed that the orthong couldn’t care less about the women’s hierarchy, but it was an intriguing thought.

The older woman cocked her head. “Maybe they’re studying our reactions to this little upset in the routine.”

“So they secretly watch us?”

“Maybe not spying, but perhaps noting our reactions in the larger sense. Don’t you suppose they’re curious about us?”

Nerys wondered. She scanned the jumbled outfold that stopped just short of their courtyard, looking for orthong, perhaps camouflaged. Who knew whether the orthong hides might change color in this place? Who knew much of anything about the orthong?

“Seems to me we’d do better to learn about
them
. We have more to lose by ignorance than they do. They’re already in charge.”

Odel inhaled the fragrant wisps of her hot tea. “We’re always learning about them.”

By pooling information with women from other compounds, they estimated there were at least four hundred other human women in the forest, which stretched for at least ten miles east to west and in places filled out to three miles wide. The women lived in groups of thirty or so, and were free to walk and visit between berms, but not to change berms, a thing that could inconvenience their orthong lords. Clear of outfold growths, the paths through this place were sometimes edged with high-growth walls, effectively blocking intrusion. Behind these walls might be anything the orthong wished to hide, and if women had penetrated these areas, they weren’t talking openly about it.

Though unnaturally colorful, the outfold was apparently composed of cultivated plants, but since orthong didn’t ingest food, its exact function wasn’t understood.
Climate control was the best current guess. For its latitude, the outfold was relatively warm, despite being close to the Galilean glacier—a location the orthong liked, it was rumored, because the retreating ice sheet left rocks behind that they prized. When the women asked their lords about these kinds of things, the answers were often unintelligible, and many tea talks revolved around trying to decipher the answers.

Orthong females—usually distinguished by their sleeveless apparel—were often seen in the public compounds and occasionally in the outfold, but they never interacted with the human women. The freewomen argued whether their female orthongs’ status was high or low. Most guessed high, since they were rumored to participate at the top level of the orthong hierarchy. The orthong lords preferred that the freewomen call the orthong females
weavers
, a term the orthong had selected when they’d observed the human women with their looms.

Tempering the imperious nature of the orthong males were their frequent gifts of food and queries after the women’s happiness; some lords were known to be exceptionally solicitous, sometimes visiting the women’s berms to bring a food delicacy.

Yet none of this had a sexual motivation. The women were incubators, receiving what were assumed to be fertilized embryos from their respective lords. The procedure was quick and impersonal. A woman reported to a berm off the central plaza and, as she lay on a platform, an orthong performed the operation with help of a device that arched over her belly. The woman felt a sharp thud on her skin, and it was over. So much for Galen’s lurid imaginings. Then it was up to the orthong lord to look after the woman’s welfare for the two months of gestation. Every woman was expected to bear three pups a year, but a lord could impose less, if the woman wanted to rest. Most didn’t. They had known when they came what the deal was,
and those who had courted starvation before entering the outfold counted it handsome payment. And they could look forward to nonbearing years as well. Women of Odel’s age were retired from bearing, yet they ate as well as anyone.

Young Pila came out to the steps with the pot of tea and poured out another cup for Nerys. As second woman in the berm, Nerys had certain privileges, but she would rather have had a friend or two than her tea poured. “Join us, Pila,” she said. Pila looked back at the others, still chatting around the table, then shrugged and sat down.

She patted her stomach. “Soon.” She smiled halfheartedly.

Odel put her arm around the girl, barely seventeen years old. Pila’s yellow braids hung like old washrags down her back, giving her a tomboy look.

“He’s going to be a great lord,” Pila said.

Nerys clamped her mouth down, trying to be nice. Pila was young, after all.

“I think he’ll be a leader, because he kicks like someone who wants to be noticed!”

“Oh, they all kick,” Odel said.

“Not like my baby, they don’t.”

Nerys couldn’t help it. “
Baby
?”

Pila’s face crumpled. “Did I say baby? I didn’t mean baby. Pup.” She looked in consternation at the other two women. “Honestly.” At the women’s stony silence, Pila fled down the stairs in tears.

Nerys went after her. “It’s all right, Pila. Who cares what we call them?”

“No! I’m supposed to say pup, I know that. It’s just that—I don’t like to think that way.”

Nerys smiled. “Then don’t. But be ready when people frown at you. It’s the price you pay for breaking the rules. Usually, I find it’s worth it.”

Pila was looking behind Nerys. “Haval wants you.”

At the edge of the compound, an orthong stood,
talking to Haval. Nerys was learning to distinguish one orthong from another by the subtle hints of gray streaking on hands and head. This one, by the flush of silver circling his neck like a collar, was Mave’s lord, Hamirinan.

“Are you all right?” Nerys helped Pila to sit on the bottom step. She looked like a child, despite the protruding belly.

“You better go,” Pila said.

The other women were standing as Hamirinan made his way toward the stairs where Pila and Nerys were. The women clapped as he came by, in one of their revolting customs. He carried a packet of food, which, by its fragrance, was venison stew. As he came closer the women stepped back to give him room, but Nerys misjudged, and found herself close enough to him that he brushed her arm as he went by.

In an instant, he swung around, and with his free hand he slapped her on the collarbone so hard she sprawled into the courtyard. She hit her tailbone painfully and would have cried out, but the wind had gone out of her. As she tried to move a stab of pain warned her to be still.

The orthong turned with something like nonchalance and continued up the stairs, amid the frozen women. When he disappeared into the berm, Pila ran to her. Nerys’ collarbone hurt so badly she had to pant. Between breaths she considered how to kill this orthong. They said the place to kill them was on the back of the neck.

Odel and Pila helped her to her feet, where she came face-to-face with Haval.

“When an orthong comes to the compound, you stand with me to greet him. And you get out of his way when he walks.”

Callie and Galen were smirking in a cluster of their friends. When Nerys fixed them with her gaze, they turned away, but someone laughed. In a rage, Nerys
shook off Odel’s and Pila’s hands. The exertion brought her to her knees.

Haval crouched down beside her, opening Nerys’ shirt to inspect the injury. “Your collarbone may be broken.” She rose, telling Odel and Pila to help Nerys inside.

“He touched
me
. I didn’t touch him,” Nerys whispered through her gritted teeth as they helped her to climb the stairs.

“When this starts hurting like hell, I hope that comforts you.” Haval stomped up the stairs ahead of them, while Nerys took the steps one at a time.

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