Jo Clayton - Shadow of the Warmaster

“Oh?”

“Is that all you’re going to say?”

“Yes.”

The Ommar leaned forward again, her eyes fixed on him, trying to get past the face he presented to her. After a minute she sucked at her teeth, shook her head. “This can’t go on,” she said.

He looked up, startled by the echo of what he’d been thinking; then he realized that she meant something far different.

“Inci is better off than most from what I hear, but give her another few months and she’ll be burning down around us. Before Herk lets that happen, he’ll call on the stingers and blast those lunatic children out of the air and he won’t care what else he levels. I’m telling you, Kar, you tell her and the rest of them. Do something. If her lot won’t or can’t, then we crawl to Herk and lick his toes. We’ve got no time left for playing hero games.”

He got heavily to his feet; it was more difficult than he’d expected. The comfort of that chair, the warmth of the room, the soothing fragrance of the chamwood burning on the hearth, these things were like chains on his arms and legs. At the door he turned. “I will pass your message on, Hanifa Ommar, but I will say this, though I probably am talking too much, this is not a good time to insult her.” He went out.

Zaraiz Memeli was a small youth, black hair curling tightly about a face sharp enough to cut wood. He was digging without enthusiasm at a tuber bed, leaning on his spading fork whenever the harassed middler girl turned her back on him to deal with some especially egregious idiocy of another of her punishment detail. She had to keep watch on the garden, the laundry room and a workshed where three girls were sorting rags and stripping discards of reusable parts. Usually there would be several middlers acting as overseers. Karrel Goza found this lone harried girl even more disturbing than the aberration he was supposed to deal with this morning. Why was she alone? Was the Ommar losing her grip, letting work details fall apart? Was she letting favorites play on pride and refuse such work? He didn’t know his home any longer. His fault. The Ommar was right that far. So busy saving the world he forgot about his Family; he was almost a stranger here. For the past year anyway. Up at dawn, hasty breakfast, toast and a cup of tea, maybe a sausage if he could force it down, then the retting shed, work there till the second shift came on, midafternoon, scrub the chemical stink off his body, try to get the taint of it out of his lungs, eat if he could, tumble into bed for a restless nightmare-ridden nap; dark come down, off to the taverns for carousing or conspiring or out to the Mines to fly for Elmas Ofka, his attention turned outward always, the House too familiar for him to see it; he simply assumed that it continued to exist as it existed in his memory. By the time he reached the tuber patch off the Memeli Court, he was in no mood to put up with sass from a know-nothing bebek who was setting the House in danger with no purpose except to tickle his urges.

“Zaraiz Memeli.”

The boy looked up after a deliberate pause, his face guarded. Custom and courtesy required a response; he leaned on his fork in a silence more insolent than words.

Karrel Goza swallowed bile and kept his temper. “Come,” he said. This wasn’t starting out well and he didn’t see how he could improve things, but he slogged stubbornly on. The young overseer came at a quick trot, questions on her lips. He silenced her with the Ommar’s order, took the fork from Zaraiz Memeli and gave it to her. He tapped Zaraiz on the shoulder and pointed toward the Memeli court. “We’ll talk there.”

Eyes like obsidian, wrapped in a resistant silence, the boy strolled along, refusing to recognize the compulsion put on him. A sly scornful smile sneaked onto his face as Karrel pushed through the wicket and stopped, the noise and clutter of the busy enclosure breaking around him. Crawlers and pre-youngers littered the flags, crying, yelling, playing slap-and-punch games; older prees chased each other around the baby herds and their mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, cousins who were working, singing, cross-talking in endless antiphon, a tapestry of sound.

Karrel Goza glanced at the boy, watched his bony unfinished face go wooden and unresponsive. For a moment he felt like strangling the pest, then, abruptly, he didn’t know why then or later, the absurdity of the whole thing hit him and he laughed. “Not here, obviously,” he said and backed out. He frowned at Zaraiz. There was always the Ommar’s garden, but instinct and intellect told him that would be a very bad idea; the peace and lushness of that pocket paradise was too stark a contrast to the Memeli Court, it would exacerbate the boy’s disaffection. He thought about leaving the House and walking out to the wharves, but he was supposed to be down sick and it would be stupid to confirm the Sech’s suspicions. Problem was, except for the Ommar’s quarters, there wasn’t much privacy, Gozas and Duvvars and Memelis working everywhere, even the oldest doing handcraft and repair, and those who weren’t working were talking and watching, gossiping and prying into other folk’s business. He dug deep into memory for the places he went when he was a younger and wanted to get away from the soup of life simmering inside the Housewalls. He didn’t feel like climbing a tree or burrowing into a dust-saturated attic; he smiled, didn’t suit the dignity of the moment. It was a gray day with rain threatening; yes, the clotheslines on the roof of the weaving shed, there wouldn’t be anyone hanging out clothes today.

The lines were humming softly as the chill wind swept over the roof; it wasn’t the most comfortable place for a prolonged chat, but it was private. Karrel Goza kicked a basket of clothespegs out of a fairly sheltered corner and settled himself with his back against the waist-high wall. “Sit.”

Zaraiz Memeli dropped with the boneless awkward grace of his age, drew his thin legs up and wrapped thin arms about them. He said nothing. His attitude proclaimed he intended to keep on saying nothing.

“You don’t have to tell me why,” Karrel Goza said. “I know why.” He smiled with satisfaction as he saw the boy’s rage flare, then vanish behind the shutters he’d had too much practice raising between himself and the rest of the world. He did not want to be understood, Karrel Goza’s words were both a challenge and an insult. “Dalliss,” Karrel said. “The Ommar; arrogant, bigoted, makes you want to kick her face in, but she’s good at her job.” He pushed aside his unease; this was no time for doubt. “Within her limits there’s no one big enough to take her place. Not you, my little friend, no matter what you think. She’s got her toadies, yes. Gozas, all of them. You think I like that? I’d drop the lot in Saader’s Cleft if it was up to me. They stand in her shadow and steal her authority and tramp on the rest of us and she’s blind to it. Yes. I know. I’m Goza and I’m here, running errands for her, so you think I’m one of them, tonguing her toes and begging her to walk on me.” He shrugged, his shoulders scraping against the whitened roughcast. “I had it easier than you. I got out. When I was a few years older than you, I got out. Not divorced, just out. They tried bullocking me, sure they did, but most of the time I wasn’t here and when I was I had the clout to tell them to go suck. As long as I was flying.” He felt the jolt again, the whole-body ache that came when he was grounded, the loss he couldn’t put behind him except when he was flying for Elmas Ofka. An obsession can be a gift, giving point to an otherwise pointless life; it can be a torment when there’s a wall in the way. He glanced at Zaraiz. The boy was blank as an empty page, refusing to hear any of this. What do you want, Zaraiz Memeli, do you know? He tried feeling his way back to that time around puberty when all his certainties melted like taffy left in the sun. No. He knew too much about surviving now. The years had made him intimately acquainted with gray, the middler world of crisp unchanging black-and-white wasn’t available to him any longer. Those were shifts so fundamental that it was impossible to recapture the angst of that world. It also made it difficult to judge what the boy was thinking, what he was feeling. “Do you extend your loathing to your parents? Your brothers and sisters?”