Master of None (30 page)

His vision clouded, he saw only a blur of white rather than her face, and felt her lips brush his cheek. “Now aren’t you glad I came?” he heard her whisper in his ear, and she was gone.

He passed out. When he roused from the black stupor, he lay naked in a massive bed while Raetha Avachi dabbed his forehead with a warm wet cloth. He groaned, pain shooting through his joints as he struggled to sit up.

“Where am I?”

“Kallah’s private apartments,” another voice said.

Ukul Daharanan appeared behind Raetha, scowling down at him. How had he gotten from the Nga’esha women’s gardens to the Changriti Estate clear on the other side of Sabtú? He hissed as Raetha patted the wet cloth against his cheek, then touched the swollen bruise under his eye with inquisitive fingers.

“Where’s Kallah?”

“Still at the marriage celebration,” Ukul said with unmistakable contempt. “Where you should be, had you any real stamina.
I
didn’t break until well after the second evening at my wedding.”

Nathan thought to say something on the lines of Ukul being the better man, but couldn’t muster the energy to find the words in Vanar. The effort would have been wasted, he suspected. Raetha smiled wryly, glancing over his shoulder briefly as his surly partner stalked away. He leaned closer to Nathan and said softly, “But you did better than I did. I didn’t last even until sundown, quite a scandal that was.”

The stamina of Vanar women was apparently vigorous as well. Nathan spent the next three days in bed, recovering from his ordeal. Until Kallah staggered home to welcome him to his new life as a married man.

PART TWO

XXVI

A
T SOME POINT, THE WALL IN HIS MIND CRACKED
. H
E HAD FOUGHT THE
Vanar language like a crippled man trying to scale a mountain, struggling between ambition and despair. One night, he had gone to sleep, his head aching with complex syntax, abstract nouns and gerund verbs tattooing a frustrated beat in his nerves. His dreams were vague, restless, resisting his attempt to impose enough order and logic on them to let him sleep in peace. Toward morning, they’d exhausted him and he let himself sink into the morass of the bizarre.

He dreamed in Vanar. He’d dreamt in Vanar before, of course, but in remembering the dream the next morning, the words had only been gibberish, a product of wishful thinking, as if hoping by magic the language would simply embed itself into his brain and stop torturing him. But this morning, when he awoke, he knew,
knew
the Vanar in his dreams had been correct, had been
real
.

He stopped having to translate every word he heard into its Hengeli counterpart, the sounds taking on their own meanings for him. The rat’s-nest curling of Vanar calligraphy began to make sense, all one hundred and fifty-three letters and the innumerable underlying ideograms unraveling into their separate parts so that he could see the whole.

His command of Vanar tripled in a week, and at one point, when Yaenida had asked him for the Hengeli translation for a word, he found himself groping for it, astonished and even alarmed that he could so easily forget bits and pieces of his own language.

He only wished Pratima could have been there to congratulate him. Maybe she knew, anyway; there had to be some kind of communication possible between Pilots and their Nga’esha controllers, but none that would ever be permitted to him.

He also knew he would never be completely fluent, never master the nuances various pronunciations could spin on a single word, would always miss half the jokes, the puns, the innuendoes, the double-edged double entendres. But the block was gone, and his awareness of the conversations around him had given him new insights, the first being that the Vanar had become accustomed to his incomprehension, talking amongst themselves as if he weren’t there. Many things were said in his presence that might have been wiser to say elsewhere, and he quickly decided not to educate his Vanar companions to his sudden perception. Where once he had pretended to understand when he didn’t, now he pretended not to understand when he did. He kept his face neutral, silent and seemingly disinterested in the conversation around him. Only Yaenida knew, and she had promised to keep his secret. At least for a while.

Only once had he slipped, laughing unexpectedly at a joke he’d overheard between two women. Startled, they had stared at him, and when they spoke again, it was as if he had suddenly lost all his newfound understanding, their conversation unintelligible babble. Then he realized it was a
second
language, a language he thought he’d never heard before until he remembered the unfamiliar dialect Pratima had used with the Ushahayam Pilot Bralin. When he asked Yaenida, she merely nodded and said, yes, it was a woman’s language, spoken for privacy, and not to concern himself with it, as it was nothing he would be expected to learn or would ever be taught.

The year after Pratima’s departure went by quickly enough. After his marriage, he saw little enough of his new wife, and then only when he was summoned to her personal rooms for an intimate little soiree with only himself and a dozen sahakharae, three or four taemora, a pair of the omnipresent Dhikar, and one or the other, or sometimes both, of his fellow kharvah.

The sahakharae provided most of the entertainment, dancing or playing music, while Ukul scowled sullenly and Raetha smoked himself into a stupor, smiling absentmindedly into space. What the taemora were there for, Nathan never could figure out. Once the evening’s festivities had finished, everyone but the Dhikar left. He’d found it difficult to keep his mind on his more private obligations with two Dhikar behind the sheer linen bed curtains listening to their every grunt and moan, but somehow he managed it. To his astonishment, and Ukul’s open bitterness, Kallah became pregnant with her first child four months after the wedding, and his nocturnal visits to his wife’s bed came to an abrupt end. Instead, the three kharvah were forced to endure each other’s company for the next eight months as they catered to Kallah’s every demand.

Pregnancy didn’t agree with her, her moods swinging from irrational hostility to maudlin weeping as her belly slowly inflated. Even the medical taemora lost patience with her whining, and had to be replaced after she tactlessly suggested that Kallah’s problems were more mental than physiological. Pratha Eraelin stormed into her daughter’s quarters one afternoon, ignoring the three kharvah scattering out of her way as she and her daughter engaged in a ferocious argument. The two women screamed furiously at each other in the impenetrable language of women until the pratha Eraelin kicked over a table and stalked out, leaving Kallah still shrieking and smashing anything breakable in her mother’s wake. The three men spent the next several hours placating their wife, Ukul murmuring to her consolingly while Raetha poured an endless river of herbal tea and Nathan kneaded her tense shoulders until his fingers cramped in agony.

Raetha Avachi had come from a large Middle Family where daughters and sons mixed with far more familiarity and affection. There he’d learned more practical ways of attending to women than the traditional songs and dance at which he was nearly as inadequate as Nathan. He taught Nathan how to cradle her against his chest to use his own body heat to warm her back, and caress her swollen belly with soothing fingers. In her fifth month, the four had been out in Kallah’s private courtyard, the heat of the sun making them all lethargic. Kallah sprawled against him, her abdomen bare under his hands, while Raetha sat behind them both, kneading Nathan’s neck gently. Ukul paid meticulous care to the pressure points in the soles of his wife’s feet. Kallah dozed, half asleep and her head nodding, waking her every time her chin dipped. Nathan had his eyes closed, leaning back into Raetha’s hands contentedly.

Then he stiffened, his eyes opened wide as he sat upright, startling his companions.

“What is it?” Ukul demanded.

“Hey,” Nathan breathed, and spread his fingers firmly against her sides. “Feel this....”

Uncertain, Ukul placed his palm against Kallah’s exposed flesh to feel the outline of the child moving underneath. Kallah smiled as serenely as a cat, pleased, as Raetha reached down to explore the unseen baby kicking within her. For a brief moment, Ukul and Nathan grinned at each other before Ukul remembered who had fathered this child and his scowl returned.

As soon as Kallah knew she had conceived she had taken each of her three kharvah to bed, including poor Raetha, whose sexual orientation had not been taken into consideration when the Changriti had hammered out a favorable marriage contract with the wealthy Avachi. He had dutifully struggled to manage his end of it, as Vanar custom dictated, so that each man could share equally in the honor of her child. However, from the first moment Aenanda arrived in the world with her mass of bright red hair and green eyes, it was impossible to pretend she could ever have been anyone’s child other than Nathan’s.

To his own astonishment, he’d fallen in love with the squalling, red-faced infant the moment he first held her in his arms, and he spent every moment allowed to him playing and laughing with her, another Hengeli peculiarity barely tolerated by the Vanar women and baffling to their men. Sons were deposited into the men’s care as soon as they could be weaned, to be taught what skills they’d need in later life, while daughters, regarded as a valuable Family resource, were raised by their mothers and various female relatives. Kallah seemed perplexed by his adoration of their child, although she didn’t attempt to discourage it.

Although Aenanda’s birth secured both Ukul’s and Raetha’s political position in the Changriti household as fathers, the tension between Ukul and himself grew ever more acrimomous. By the time Aenanda was nearly a year old, the senior kharvah spent most of his waking hours conspiring with his coterie of sahakharae to devise malicious ways of making Nathan suffer. Most of the sly snubs or taunts that might have infuriated the ordinary Vanar made little impact on him, and his tormentors were reduced to more adolescent forms of persecution: wrigglies in his food, minor vandalism to his property, schoolboy pranks Nathan had outgrown before puberty.

More annoyed than angry, Nathan first tried to appease the disgruntled Changriti kharvah with the same sort of ritualistic deference and tedious groveling he’d perfected within the Nga’esha House. Unfortunately, the harder he tried, the worse the torment became. He knew enough not to complain to his wife, or worse, to Eraelin’s senior husband, as the chief kharvah was one of the leading bullies in Ukul’s clique. Finally, he gave it up.

Kallah granted his request to reside at the Nga’esha House without even a token objection. Nor did anyone from the Changriti House seem unhappy to see the back of him, with the possible exception of Raetha, who spent more and more of his time in a drug-induced trance. The traditional despotism of the Changriti House was hard on a boy torn away from the more free-spirited life of his Middle Family. Nor did Ukul ever pass up an opportunity to berate Raetha for his ungratefulness, marriage to a dalhitri of one of the Nine Families an incredible honor for someone of his modest caste. Raetha would simply agree with him, apologize, and smile vaguely into space. Nathan made the trip across the city once a week to visit both his daughter and Raetha, his concern growing for the gentle man.

Returning to the Nga’esha House felt like a welcome breath of fresh air after the oppressive atmosphere of despair and hostility with the Changriti. To his immense delight, Yaenida finally gave him a room of his own, an almost unheard-of luxury. He needed the space for his work, and had complained that the children in the boys’ dormitory couldn’t resist poking about into his possessions, baffled and hurt at his selfishness when he repeatedly scolded them.

The sahakharae were almost as bad, and
they
had complained about
him
when Yaenida attempted to move him into their quarters. As Nathan had no uncles or nephews willing to sponsor him, Aelgar attempted to fob off the worst corner of the men’s quarters on him; when it rained, a leak soaked his sleeping mat and the smell of mold was faint but tenacious. Nathan chose to protest this indignity by stringing up a makeshift hammock between two trees in the garden to sleep in at night, which had the desired effect of the senior kharvah pleading with Yronae to please speak with her mother to do something about that impossible
aevaesah jaelmah
, wretched troublemaker.

He simply didn’t fit in anywhere, and the rest of Yaenida’s male relatives were happy with the solution rather than envious. They were used to communal living, and viewed his private room as punitive isolation, quite fitting for the foreigner dropped in their midst.

Tensions between him and the Nga’esha men eased considerably after that. Often, he would look up from his reader and find one of the lower-status members, usually a younger second cousin or brother-inlaw’s son, waiting politely in his open doorway for him to notice their presence, bringing him a late-night snack, or offers for a friendly drink of tea or alcohol, or simply a social visit required to keep the fabric of Family relations close-knit.

He’d been struggling with translating a difficult Vanar passage from an historical treatise Yaenida had assigned him, baffled how the hell he would ever be able to explain in Hengeli terms concepts completely unknown outside Vanar, when a silhouette fell over his reader. To his surprise, Yinanq hovered at the edge of the open doorway, nervous and unsmiling.

“Yahaem ayo,”
Nathan called out quietly.

Yinanq came in, his entire posture rigidly correct as he greeted Nathan, bowed, and knelt on the proffered floor pillow. Nathan had seen little of the young man since his near-fatal trial, both of them careful to avoid the other. Nathan offered him coffee, which was politely declined, then a fruit brandy, which was reluctantly accepted.

After a great deal of gracious compliments on the brandy, the room’s furnishings, speculations on the antiquity of the carvings on the window screen, predictions on the ceaseless rainy weather and other such inconsequential murmurings, Nathan knew the young man was nearing the purpose of his visit. “I am getting married,” Yinanq announced finally.