Lois Bujold: The Flowers of Vashnoi

It was Enrique who broke the spell, looking up and asking in perfect earnest, “Really? How would that work, precisely?” His other auditors might imagine he was challenging them, or maybe mocking them; Ekaterin expected he was mentally devising a double-blind study.

Ma Roga stared back, nonplussed, in profound mutual incomprehension.

Now or never . Ekaterin stripped off her right glove and held out her hand. “Are you Ma Roga? I’m Lady Ekaterin Vorkosigan. And lifting old curses is just what we’re here for. Ma, we need to talk.”

Briefly, Ekaterin was afraid the woman did not comprehend the gesture at all, and Jadwiga rather confused the moment by chirping, “Her fella’s a sorcerer, Ma! He makes magic bugs!”

“Scientist,” Enrique corrected glumly from his seat on the ground, as if he’d given up on being listened to.

Yes, much more dangerous .

Ekaterin held her extended hand steady. She wondered if the other woman was going to knock it away, but instead, staring at it, Ma Roga said, ” ‘T mutie lord your husband, then?” She glanced up, sharp eyes glittering through her brow-thatch.

Ekaterin thought about Miles’s weary teratogenic spiel, so often repeated and so seldom believed, and said only, “Yes.”

The old woman neither slapped away the hand nor took it, instead tucking both her own behind her back in a weirdly childish gesture of withholding. Ekaterin let her arm drift down, neither shoved out in insistence nor withdrawn as an option. The stalemate couldn’t last, but at least the upraised log, too, drooped as if in echo.

Keep talking . Miles could do this sort of thing in his sleep, and actually did, come to think, if mumbled and surreal. More surreal than this? Ekaterin inhaled. “I expect it’s going to be a long talk. Why don’t we all go sit someplace more comfortable?”

Especially Boris. Boris, still hovering in anxious menace, definitely needed to sit comfortably. Real son …? Maybe there was some faint resemblance between the pair in their bones and coloration. Boris’s da was notably not in evidence, so likely a grim tale there, too.

“And maybe,” Ekaterin added, “a long listening.”

Ma Roga just said, “Huh.” But one hand came out of hiding, if only to motion toward the hut.

Under Ma Roga’s barked directions, the children were set to unlading the pony, and Boris to lugging the armchair around front, where tall Enrique was drafted to help boost it up onto the porch. Spoils of a shopping trip to some zone rubbish tip, apparently. After sending Ingi to round up the goats and contain them in their pen, Ma took the new seat as a rightful throne. She did not invite the interlopers inside, though Jadwiga darted within and returned clutching a couple of musty cushions for their visitors’ behinds. Having captured her own princess, or at least real lady, the girl seemed as loth to let her go as her beloved flower bugs. The youngsters—all three of them, since despite his size Ekaterin was not at all sure Boris counted as a functional grownup—sat with their legs dangling over the edge.

The radbug project took a lot of explaining, not necessarily helped by Enrique’s technical corrections. Ingi at last fetched a bug for an illustrative sample, which led to the whole lot of them dismounting again from the porch and trooping around to the shed. Boris left his log behind; progress?

This was clearly the first Ma had learned of Ingi’s thefts, or gifts, as he insisted. She cuffed him, though not Jadwiga, hard on the head, and snapped, “Idiot. This led them here.” It was hard to read her expression through her smoldering stare—heartbreak, fury, despair? Nothing like hope or relief, anyway.

“Yes,” agreed Ekaterin, “but it was going to happen soon regardless. If the project works, changes are coming for the whole zone.” This can’t go on might pass unsaid, since it was plainly understood.

There was plenty to take its place. “How long have you lived here?” Ekaterin’s wave around took in the whole encampment. And the graveyard. “Because I think Vadim is going to have a whole lot of explaining to do.” And his supervisor, and whatever other of his fellow rangers had colluded in this concealment.

Jadwiga, not really following all this but sensing threat, defended hotly. “Vadim’s all right! He’s my big brother! He takes care of us all.”

A little silence followed this damning praise, till Ma Roga jerked her head at Ekaterin. “You and me. Let’s take a walk.”

Ekaterin quashed any hint of hesitation. “Very well.”

Enrique, waved off, turned instead to conscripting the youngsters to helping him capture, count, and contain his stray bugs, science lecture thrown in gratis. Ekaterin followed Ma Roga out of earshot into the woods, where the old woman pointed to a couple of stumps. Ekaterin sank onto one, reflecting on the quip, You can turn a tragedy into a comedy just by sitting down . She had a feeling it wouldn’t prove true here.

Ma Roga sat opposite, seeming to turn thoughts over in her mind. Ekaterin waited.

She finally leaned forward, hands clasped between her skirted knees, gaze on the ground, and said, “You ever hear of the Vashnoi marauders?”

“If it’s that bandit gang that plagued these parts thirty years ago, and hid out in the zone, yes.” Theft had led to more daring theft, then, inevitably, murder by accident, then by design. The pointless torture-murders of all the inhabitants of a poor outlying homestead had brought down fully-equipped retribution from the district, zone or no zone.

A short nod. “Old Count Piotr hanged the lot of us, in the end.”

Galactic-style therapy and criminal rehabilitation not being even on the horizon, at that point. From the nightmarish bits she’d heard about the case, Ekaterin could scarcely regret this.

“Save one. I pleaded my belly.” A sharp look upward.

Ekaterin blinked. Right. Back in the Time of Isolation, pregnant women were never executed, a custom that had lingered right into times that made more modern provisions for crime. And Piotr had certainly been Old Vor, or at least had been made so by the passage of his many decades. Most of the marauders’ case would have been handled at a lower district judicial level, but execution orders would have been sent up to the Count’s Court for final review.

“Old Piotr gave me a choice of hanging or prison. I asked to come back to the zone, instead. And he said, So be it , and the bailiff-boy banged his spear-butt in the clacker. And so I did.”

All the gruesome details were doubtless available in court records in Hassadar, should Ekaterin muster the nerve to feed her curiosity. No need to make the old woman— old , hell, she could scarcely be done with her fifties, but she looked a proper ancient hag—relive that in her memory now, or re-confess it all either. Ekaterin’s rightful business was with what had happened next. She mustered a Go on nod.

“I liked it here. Everyone finally left me alone. Didn’t know how much I’d like that, till I had it to try, for the first time in my stupid young life. Piotr’s old ranger fellows kept an eye. They’d have scorned those dosimeter-hickeys that Vadim frets about so, in those days. Boris was about three when I first found the clearing in the woods, and the secrets that were left there.” Her gaze flicked up at last. “It wasn’t only muties exposed, you know. Back in the Time of Isolation, there was starvation, or just one baby too many to deal with. Or no man, though I’d say a girl could be better off without one of those. I sure was.”

Ekaterin said, “I understand.” Partly to indicate she was still listening. Mostly because it was true.