Master of None (45 page)

Flow into it, all the way to the center of the world.
Concentrate
Nathan...

He didn’t know if this was what the others in the clearing had felt, and at this moment, he didn’t care. He only knew that he had found something in the music,
this
music, and he grabbed hold of it tightly to let it drive his feet, his body. He didn’t need to see any longer to keep his balance, he had found it outside of vision. He danced not with the expert, fluid gestures of the slender trained acrobats with their ritualized movements, but with all the energy and freedom of his private rapture.

He could see in his memory’s eye the dancers in the clearing, turned when they turned, raised his arms when they did, felt the drums lifting him up until it filled his ears, pressed away all other thought. He danced past time, past knowing how long he had been dancing in the catch of the melody, heard the song building for its own end. He felt it in the movement of the earth, felt the mantle slide around the core, found it in the dance of molecules in his blood that gave him the illusion he was solid, found it in the spaces between mass and energy where time was hidden.

The thunder of the drums rolled as his pulse kept rhythm, his body knowing where to go, where to be, felt the finish approach like a sexual climax building, let it hook him in its jaws. He heard his own breath whistling in his throat, let it go, until it was almost unbearable, the drums crushing him, the music hurled up wailing.

He let his anger out, let out the frustration and the pain, let out all the despair, let the
fear
out. He wasn’t dancing for Yronae any longer, he was dancing for himself, for his life. He heard the end, it was the end, he was the end, and he shouted with the drums, hands in the air, body rigid, as the last of the music rolled away like spent thunder echoing through the mountains. He stood with his arms up in the sudden silence, his head thrown back, his sati unbound and disheveled. His braid had loosened. Sweat dripped from the ends of his hair into his eyes, running down his face and chest like the rain above him tapping against the roof.

Will it make me into a Pilot?
he had asked her in jest.

No, but it might make you a better dancer.

Thank you, Pratima. Thank you, my lost love.

Slowly, panting, he lowered his arms and caught Qim staring at him, a mirror of his own emotions. The two men smiled at one another, fleeting, feral, before Nathan turned toward the women.

“Leaving Vanar would make me more than naekulam, older sister,” he said, still out of breath, his words hoarse. “It would make me maenavah qili, a nonperson. It would
not
be as if I’d never been here at all. I am different. I am
Nga’esha
. And I have worked too hard for too long to throw everything away now.”

Yronae listened, stoic, but her eyes flickered. Around her, he caught the expressions of other women—some of alarm, some of curiosity, some even of hatred—but he kept his attention focused on the Nga’esha pratha h’máy. He wiped his arm across his wet forehead, his eyes stinging with more than sweat.

“I will not leave Vanar. The price of the freedom you offer me is too high. It is true, I cannot play pretty songs for you, I cannot write pretty poems. I will never be able to perform pretty dances to make women smile for me.” He was still out of breath, his legs feeling rubbery as the high dissipated. “But if you wish I should dance for you, I will do so because it is my duty even when I know it will not please you. This dance, it may be a man’s dance. But it is also a
Vanar
dance. As I am Vanar. And unless you wish to repudiate me, I will speak in the Assembly of Families because it is my right as a Vanar and Nga’esha. It does not matter to me if I win or lose. It should not matter to the honor of this House. I will not be silenced, not by the Changriti, not by you. Not at any price.”

Slowly, Yronae shook her head in disbelief. “That is your right,” she said, her tone flat, unemotional. “You are Nga’esha.”

He listened, hearing something he didn’t quite understand in her voice, his ears still burning with the music. But for some reason, all he felt was overwhelming relief.

XXXVIII

N
ATHAN LOOKED UP AS
M
ARGASIR TAPPED GENTLY AGAINST THE GLASS.
His fingers in the soil, he nodded for him to enter. The big sahakharae had to duck his head to get through the greenhouse door and grimaced in the humid heat. “It’s boiling in here.”

“It’s supposed to be.”

The older man grunted, unconvinced as Nathan potted up the last of the few surviving svapnah seedlings, their forked roots snaking like corkscrews into the carefully prepared compost.

“I take it you’re not here because you’ve missed my company,” Nathan said.

“Aelgar sent me. Pratha Yronae requests your presence,” he said, eying Nathan’s gardening overalls skeptically. “But I think she might be willing to wait long enough for you to bathe and change into something more suitable.” He
tsk
ed as he looked at the dirt under Nathan’s ragged nails. “And do something about your hands.”

Nathan slumped over his potting shelf, exasperated. “Oh, God,” he muttered. “
Now
what have I done?”

“You are becoming paranoid, Nathan Nga’esha,” the older man chided.

“It isn’t paranoia when they really are out to get you, Margasir.” He brushed his palms off on the cloth of the overalls before leaving the greenhouse and locking the door. It wasn’t to prevent theft, since stealing was a crime nearly unheard-of on Vanar, but to keep the more inquisitive boys from constantly opening the door to see what strange and wonderful things the yepoqioh could be doing inside and disrupting the greenhouse’s meticulously maintained climate.

He hadn’t seen Pratha Yronae since the night he danced for her, several months before. Nor had he been to the Assembly. Namasi Sahmudrah had come by only once to apprise him of the delay; the Assembly of Families were conferring in a special session to discuss his petition to speak again, which might be good, or it might be bad. They were using delaying tactics hoping to wear him down, but there was little other choice. He would have to wait and see, but soon, soon, she assured him.

He showered quickly, sitting impatiently as Margasir combed out and braided his hair with quick, practiced fingers, working in a sprig of crimson penstemon. The sahakharae tugged the elaborate folds of Nathan’s sati into place and secured the end with the red beetle pin. The older man looked him over critically, then rooted in a coffer for several gold anklets. “Wear these,” he insisted. Nathan stooped to fasten the heavy anklets. “Daughter’s father, right foot,” Margasir corrected him wearily.

“You enjoy this, don’t you?” Nathan grumbled.

“Of course, Nathan Nga’esha. It was always my childhood dream to oversee a scrawny ugly ajnyaenam bah’chae who can’t be trusted to find his ass with both hands.”

His práhsaedam walked with him to the connecting doors between houses, stopping at a distance from the waiting Dhikar to fret with Nathan’s sati pin like a mother hen. Nathan brushed his hands away irritably. “If you’re this nervous, I must be in serious trouble,” Nathan said in an undertone, his back to the Dhikar.

“Not this time, Nathan, miraculously enough,” Margasir ducked his head to mutter discreetly with a wary glance at the waiting Dhikar. “But please try your very best not to fuck this one up,” he said, using the Hengeli expletive perfectly. He winked slyly and walked away before Nathan had a chance to say another word.

The Dhikar escorted Nathan to Yronae’s private rooms and stood on either side of the door, his cue to enter. He paused, taking a deep breath to compose himself, preparing for the role of a compliant Vanar man, pasted on his best smile, and walked in.

The effort was wasted. Several taemorae attended to Pratha Yronae, dressing her in an exquisite Nga’esha kirtiya belted over baggy saekah, blue birdsilk shot through with gold filigree. Another taemora organized the pratha h’máy’s jewelry, clipping several strands of gold chain from one ear, under the chin, to the other. Yet a third knelt to add the finishing touches to the intricate painting on the skin of her bare feet. Yronae barely glanced over her shoulder at him, said curtly, “Good, you’re here,” and motioned with her chin for him to stand out of the way.

“You are aware that the Nga’esha are receiving a delegation from your home world?” Yronae asked, shifting her head to allow the taemora to anchor the weight-bearing support in her hair.

“Hae’m, jah’nari l’amae.”

“The ambassador is a woman named Suzenne Rashir, as I’m sure you already know.”

“Of course, Pratha Yronae.” Everyone in the Nga’esha House knew. There had been many other Hengeli delegations on Vanar since his arrival, none of which he had ever been allowed to meet. But while he didn’t expect to see another Hengeli again in his life, he kept up with the gossip as well as the next.

The Hengeli had obviously looked into what little Vanar history they could find and rooted around for someone they felt the Nga’esha would respect, someone descended from the same ancient rootstock. Rashir was proud of being from a traditional matrilineal Khasi clan, almost pureblooded and actually born in Shillong.

Nathan knew the pratha h’máy Yronae dva Ushahayam ek Daharanan traeyah Nga’esha could not possibly have cared less; the descendant of the ancestor who had settled Vanar and founded the Nga’esha branch of the Nine Families did not consider tenuous blood connections to modern Khasi relevant. In her eyes, Rashir was as Hengeli as any other of the women in her entourage.

The taemora finished fiddling with her jewelry and stepped away. Yronae turned to him.

“You will attend the conference.”

He nodded, wondering how many figs he’d have to poke back onto the tray this time.

“Just you.”

Baffled, he momentarily forgot his manners and looked at her directly. “Excuse me, pratha h’máy?”

“This isn’t a social reception, it’s a business meeting. You are to listen and say nothing. You are to react to nothing that is said. You will conduct yourself with the utmost propriety at all times, is that understood?”

He was nearly breathless with astonishment. “Hae’m, jah’nari l’amae.” He was about to meet the first Hengeli he’d seen in over five years. “Thank you.”

Yronae snorted. “You don’t sing, you don’t dance, you’re not even pleasurable to look at. If you insist on remaining here, I must find some use for you. My mother understood these Hengeli in a way I would be foolish not to admit I never can. I want you there to listen and observe. You know the language, the culture, the way they think, how their hands move, all the unspoken significances. When it’s over, you and I will go over every word together, and you will clarify for me whatever we as Vanar might have missed.”

“Hae’m, jah’nari l’amae.”

She finally smiled grimly. “So, Nathan Crewe Nga’esha, shall we go see just how Vanar you really are?” She snapped her fingers, and he fell behind the entourage following her into the great hall.

The ambassador and her interpreter had already taken their seats when they arrived. Yronae settled as leisurely as a cat onto a thick floor cushion, facing the ambassador. With one leg under her, the other knee up in a formal pose, Yronae looked impressive and arrogant and uncompromising as hell.

Removing the edge of the sati from over his head, Nathan took his place beside Yronae’s left shoulder, kneeling smoothly onto the hard floor, no cushion to ease his legs. The pratha h’máy ignored him as thoroughly as furniture, although he bowed politely before he sat back on his heels, palms on his thighs. Yronae’s interpreter sat at her right hand, while Suryah, as her senior daughter and heir apparent, observed from the sidelines. Several taemorae hovered unobtrusively to keep water glasses filled and small sweetmeats on hand, while an impressive number of household Dhikar stood sentry, as immobile as statues.

Although he kept his eyes properly averted, the habit of watching but not looking now ingrained in him, he was aware of the Hengelis’ surprise at his presence. As soon as the Hengeli ambassador began to speak, he looked up and kept his attention steadily on the delegation. The interpreter murmured quietly beside Yronae, an odd echo in his own mind. When Yronae spoke, he noted the ambassador’s interpreter had to struggle to keep up with the flow, stumbling over words, often missing the nuances completely. He had some sympathy for her; Vanar was a damned difficult language to learn, particularly for someone without the benefit of living for years within the culture.

The Hengeli ambassador was a stout, dark woman obviously ill at ease. Her autocratic bearing and square-shouldered dress were a shade too formal to be anything less than military. She fidgeted slightly, trying to ease her legs under her on her floor cushion, unused to anything other than sitting in chairs. After half an hour of polite overtures and allusions to their common genealogy, Rashir began to realize, to her obvious irritation, that being Khasi gave her absolutely no advantage whatsoever.

Two other Hengeli officials flanked her, one of them the ambassador’s own interpreter, completing the delegation. The other, her assistant, Heloise Ruuspoelk, a freckled woman with frizzy mud-colored hair and sharp green eyes, sat respectfully behind her. Even kneeling, Nathan was a head taller than Yronae, his light hair and pale eyes in his round Caucasian face in stark contrast to the normal dark Vanar features. As silent an observer as he was, she studied him with a puzzled expression; then her face cleared. He kept himself from reacting to her shrewd smile.

“The fact remains,” the ambassador was saying with frustration, “there seems little point in ‘negotiating’ if the results are preordained.”

Yronae’s interpreter translated flawlessly, but Nathan listened to the emotions behind the words: anger, tension, repressed desperation. Emotions he was all too familiar with himself.

Yronae nodded gravely. “We Vanar have no reason to pretend to a position of weakness,” she said levelly. “But we do not believe this makes us tyrants. The Systems do concern us, even if that concern merely is one of self-interest. Vanar has always remained neutral in the affairs of outsiders.”