Sheri Tepper - Grass

“It pounds as though you have things well in hand.” She sighed, her weariness and hunger suddenly heavier than she could gracefully bear. “Would you have any idea where Anthony might be?”

“If he’s where I told him to be, he’s with Stella up in the summer quarters, making a rough floor plan of the place for me. We’ll have to furnish it rather quickly, I’m afraid. Asmir tells me there’s a craftsmen’s area in Commoner Town. A place called, unimaginatively enough, Newroad. Lord knows where the old road was.”

“Terra, maybe.”

“Or any of half a hundred other places. Well, it doesn’t matter where it was, so long as we know where this one is. According to Asmir, we can get very acceptable stuff built there within two or three weeks — long Grassian weeks — and he’s already sent word on what he calls the tell-me for some kind of craftsmen’s delegation to come call on us.”

“By acceptable, does he mean to the bons, Rigo? I have a feeling everything we do will be measured and weighed by the bons. I think our poor horses were not revived because the bons did not know whether they would accept them or not, here on Grass. They have creatures of their own.”

“Hippae.”

“Exactly. Who are never kept in stalls, so the Obermun told me.”

“Where in the devil are they kept, then?”

“I have serious question as to whether they are ‘kept’ at all. Rigo, though they live in something not called stables. Why don’t we collect Anthony and Stella and go explore them together?”

The places not called stables were cavernous halls dug into the side of a hill, lined and pillared with stone. A rock-lined, spring-filled tank at the back cast a wavery luminescence across the low-arched ceiling. Half a dozen tall slits in the hillside were the only entrances.

“We could put the stallions and the mares in here and all their foals for the next hundred years,” Stella observed with brooding annoyance, taking a large bite from the apple she had brought with her. “And it would still be blasted inconvenient.” Stella, with her black hair and eyes and passionate disposition, resembled her father. Like him, she moved as a whip cracks, always seeming to arrive wherever she was going with considerable noise but without having bothered to travel the intervening distance. She shouted now, listening to the echo of her own voice as it rattled back into blackness among stout pillars. “Hallooooo,” a hunting halloo, as one sighting a fox might cry “Grass stinks!” she cried, with the echo coming back, “ ing, ing, ing, ing"

Anthony made no comment but merely looked around himself with dismay, trying not to let it show through the calm demeanor he had determined upon as appropriate for the son of an ambassador. He had carefully thought out what his role should be, and prayed hourly for the fortitude to continue in it. He was the one who resembled Marjorie. He had her wheat-colored hair and hazel eyes, her cool, white skin, her sapling-slender body, her placid appearance and equable temperament. Like her, he was prey to a thousand inner doubts and horrors he never let show on the surface. Like her, he was thought beautiful, was passionately admired even by unlikely people. At nineteen he was almost of his father’s height, though not yet of a man’s bulk.

A stripling, his mother thought, admiring him. A mere boy, his father thought to himself, wishing Tony were older so that he could be told why they had come, older so he could be of more help.

“A social problem of some dimension,” Obermun bon Haunser was at that moment remarking to some of his fellow bons. “And so is the daughter, Stella. We’ll have to warn off our own young ones,” he said. Sooner or later the Yrariers would learn of this opinion, and he wondered what he would say then. He did not like the idea of being looked at angrily by Lady Westriding. Her look had a quality of knives about it. Knives which cut deeply.

Currently, however, Marjorie was cutting only into the structure of the stables, carving one part mentally from the whole. “We can partition this part of the cavern off,” she offered. “Make half a dozen nice box stalls along this side with an opening from outside into each one and build a little paddock out there. Later, when winter comes…” She stopped in dismay, remembering what winters here were said to be like, wondering what they would do with the horses when winter came.

“We won’t still be here, surely?” Anthony said, his own apprehension coming through. He heard it and amended himself more calmly. “Will the mission last that long?”

His father shook his head. “We don’t know, Tony.”

“What kind of horses can these Hippae be?” Marjorie mused, turning to look into the shadowy corners of the vast, low space. “This looks like some great burrow Like the meeting hall of a badger’s set.”

“The meeting hall of a badger’s set?” her daughter mocked. “Mother, you amaze me.” She shook her hair over her shoulders, the depthless black silk of it flowing down over her back like lightless water. Her seventeen-year-old body was still slight, and the beauty which would be ravishing was only beginning to emerge. Now she smiled a siren’s smile and sulked at her parents out of deeply fringed eyes. “When were you last in a badger’s set?” It was not said lovingly. Stella had not wanted to come to Grass. They had insisted that she come, but they had been unable to tell her why. To Stella, the journey had been a violation of her person. With maximum drama, she likened it to rape and let them know it as often as possible. “In some other life?” she mocked now. “In some other time?”

“When I was a changeling,” her mother answered firmly. “Long and long ago, when I was unconscious of my dignity. As I am about to be again. I am going to change into some nice old robe and become sedentary. I need food, a lot of food, and then some familiar book and sleep. There is too much that is strange here. Even the colors of things aren’t right.”

And they weren’t. Her words brought it to all their attention as they left the caverns to walk through a bleached alley of imported trees toward the residence. The colors weren’t right. The sky should be blue and was not. The prairie should be the color of dried grass, but their eyes insisted upon making it pale mauve and paler sapphire, as though under a stage-light moon.

“It’s only that it’s foreign to us,” Tony said, trying to comfort her, wanting to be comforted himself. He had left things behind, too. A girl who mattered to him. Friends he cared about. Plans for education and life. He wanted the sacrifice to have been for something, for some reason, not merely to exist for a time in this chill discomfort amid strange colors. Tony had not been told why, either, but he trusted Marjorie when she told him it was important. It was Tony’s nature to trust, as it had been Marjorie’s at his age, when she married.

“We will ride to the Hunt,” Rigo said firmly. “The horses will be recovered by then.”

“No,” Marjorie said, shaking her head. “Apparently we mustn’t.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” He said it, as he often did, without thinking, and was immediately annoyed as he saw the pain in her face.

“Rigo, my dear, surely you don’t think it’s my idea not to ride.” She laughed, a light little laugh which said in the only way she could that he was being obtuse and unpleasant. “Obermun bon Haunser almost came apart at his impeccable seams when I suggested we would merely join the field on horseback. Apparently arrangements have been made otherwise.”

“Damn it, Marjorie. Why was I sent here? Why were you? Except for the horses?”

She didn’t try to answer him. It was not a question which could be answered. He glared at her. Stella stared, giggling a little, enjoying this discord. Tony made uncomfortable little hrnching sounds in his throat as he did when caught in some seeming conflict between them. “Surely,” he said softly, “surely…”