Elizabeth Moon - Once a Hero

She looked down the table to see what was on the great platters . . . it made a difference . . . and was even more surprised to see the five platters that meant a whole calf had been butchered in her honor.

She had never heard of a woman speaking at such a time, but she knew the words.

“Back from the waste . . .” she began, and continued through the whole, stumbling only momentarily over the nested clauses where the prayer expected a male speaker and she had either to speak of herself in the masculine or change the words. “From father to son it came to me, and so I send it on . . .” She had not thought about her own culture in any detailed way after the first year or so in the Fleet prep schools; she had not noticed how confining the language really was. Fleet had shocked her at first, with its assumption of easy relationships between the sexes, with “sir” used for both men and women. In Fleet, the important terms for parents distinguished between gene-parents and life-parents, not between mothers and fathers. On Altiplano, they had no word for “parents,” and while they knew of modern methods of reproduction, very few would ever use them.

She finished the blessing, still thinking of the differences, and Papa Stefan sighed. Esmay glanced at him; his eyes twinkled.

“You didn’t forget . . . you always had a good memory, Esmaya.” He nodded. The servants stepped forward; the great platters were shifted to the sideboards for carving, while bowls of soup were offered.

Fleet food had been good enough, but this was the food of her childhood. The thick blue bowl with the creamy corn soup, garnished with green and red . . . Esmay’s stomach rumbled at the familiar aroma. The spoon she lifted had her family’s crest on it; it fit her fingers as if it had grown there.

The first salad followed the corn soup, and by then the meat had been sliced and layered on blue platters swirled with white. Esmay accepted three slices, a mound of the little yellow potatoes that were a family specialty, a scoopful of carrots. It was worth the long wait to have food like this.

Around her, the family carried on soft-voiced conversations; she didn’t listen. Right now all she wanted was the food, the food she had not let herself realize she missed. Puffy rolls that could have floated up into the sky as clouds . . . butter molded into the shapes of heraldic beasts. She remembered those molds, hanging in a row in the kitchen. She remembered the rolls, too—no use letting them get cold, when they were dry and tasteless. They deserved to be soaked in new butter or drenched in honey.

When she came up for air, no one seemed to be paying attention to her anyway. They had finished eating; servants were taking the plates away.

“It’s a matter of pride,” Papa Stefan was saying to her cousin Luci. “Esmaya would not fail in anything that touched the family honor.” Esmay blinked; Papa Stefan’s notion of family honor had wildernesses no one had ever explored fully. She hoped he wasn’t hatching up one of his plots with her assigned the role of heroine.

Luci, the age Esmay had been when she left, looked much as Esmay remembered herself. Tall, gangling, soft brown hair pulled back severely, with escaping wisps that ruined the intended effect, clothes that were obviously intended for a special occasion, but looked rumpled and dowdy instead. Luci looked up, met Esmay’s eyes, and flushed. That made her look sulky as well as unkempt.

“Hi, Luci,” Esmay said. She had already greeted Papa Stefan and the elders; the cousins were far down the list of obligatory greetings. She wanted to say something helpful, but after ten years she had no idea what Luci’s enthusiasms were—and a very clear memory of how embarrassing it was when elders assumed you still liked the dolls you’d played with at five or seven.

Papa Stefan grinned at her and patted Luci’s arm. “Esmaya, you will not know that Luci is the best polo player in her class.”

“I’m not that good,” Luci muttered. Her ears looked even redder.

“You probably are,” Esmay said. “I’m sure you’re better than I am.” She had never seen the point of milling about chasing a ball on horseback. A horse was mobility, a way to get off by herself, into places vehicles couldn’t go, faster than anyone could follow on foot. “Are you playing on the school team, or the family team?”

“Both,” Papa Stefan said. “We’re looking for championships this year.”

“If we’re lucky,” Luci said. “And speaking of that, I wanted to ask about that mare Olin showed me.”

“Ask Esmay. Her father bought a string for her to put out on the grant, and that mare was one of them.”

A flash of anger from Luci’s eyes; Esmay was startled both by the gift of horses, and her cousin’s unexpected reaction.

“I didn’t know about that,” Esmay said. “He hadn’t mentioned anything.” She looked at Luci. “If there’s one you wanted in particular, I’m sure—”

“Never mind,” Luci said, standing up. “I wouldn’t want to deprive the returning hero of her loot.” She tried to say it lightly, but the underlying bitterness cut through.

“Luci!” Papa Stefan glared, but Luci was already out the door. She didn’t reappear that evening. No one commented, but they were already drifting from the table . . . she remembered from her own adolescence that such a thing would not be spoken of in company. She did not envy Luci the rough side of Sanni’s tongue that would no doubt work her over in private very shortly.

After dinner, Esmay went to the private apartment where her great-grandmother waited. Ten years ago, the old lady had still lived apart, refusing to inhabit the main house because of some quarrel that no one would explain. Esmay had tried to wheedle it out of her, unsuccessfully. She had not been the kind of great-grandmother who encouraged the sharing of secrets; Esmay had been scared of her, of the sharp glance that could silence even Papa Stefan. Ten years had thinned the silver hair, and dimmed the once-bright eyes.

“Welcome, Esmaya.” The voice was unchanged, the voice of a matriarch who expected reverence from all her kin. “Are you well?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And they feed you decently?”

“Yes . . . but I was glad to taste our food again.”

“Of course. The stomach cannot be easy when the heart is uncertain.” Great-grandmother belonged to the last generation which adhered almost universally to the old prohibitions and requirements. Immigrants and trade, the usual means of fraying the edges of cultures, had brought changes that seemed great to her, though to Esmay hardly significant compared to Altiplano’s difference from the cosmopolitan casualness of Fleet. “I do not approve of your gallivanting around the galaxy, but you have brought us honor, and for that I am pleased.”

“Thank you,” Esmay said.

“Considering your disadvantages, you have done very well.”

Disadvantages? What disadvantages? Esmay wondered if the old woman’s mind was slipping a bit after all.

“I suppose it means your father was right, though I am loathe to agree, even now.”

Esmay had no idea what Great-grandmother was talking about. The old lady changed topics abruptly, as she always had. “I hope you will choose to remain, Esmay. Your father has chosen for you the reward of bloodstock and land; you would not be as a beggar among us—” That was a dig; she had complained, just before she left, that she had nothing of her own, that she might as well be a poor beggar living here on sufferance. Great-grandmother’s memory had not slipped at all.

“I had hoped you might forget those rash words,” she said. “I was very young.”

“But not untruthful, Esmaya; the young speak the truth they see, however limited it is, and you were always a truthful child.” That had some emphasis she could not interpret. “You saw no future here; you saw it among the stars. Now that you have seen them, I hope you can find one here.”