Ancillary Sword (22 page)

The person who had come out of the tea shop laughed, short and bitter. I knew from long experience with this sort of confrontation that she was likely afraid herself. “We’ve gotten along fine here all this time. Now, suddenly, you’re concerned about us.” Tisarwat said nothing, suppressed a frown. She didn’t understand. The person in front of her continued, “Now when a rich fleet captain wants rooms, suddenly you care how things are in the Undergarden. And we’re cut off from any way to appeal to the palace. Where are we supposed to go, when you kick us out of here? The Xhai won’t live by us. Why do you think we’re here?” She stopped, waited for Tisarwat to say something. When Tisarwat remained silent (baffled, confused), she continued. “Did you expect us to be grateful? This isn’t about us. You didn’t even take a moment to stop and ask what
we
wanted. So what were you planning to do with us? Reeducate us all? Kill us? Make us into ancillaries?”

“No!” cried Tisarwat. Indignant. And also ashamed—because she knew as well as I did that there had been times
and places where such a concern would have been well founded. And from what we’d seen when we arrived, with the painter and
Sword of Atagaris
, there was some reason to suspect that this was one of those times and places. “The plan is to confirm existing housing arrangements.” A few people scoffed. “And you’re right,” Tisarwat went on, “Station Administration should be hearing your concerns. We can talk about them right now if you like. And then you”—she gestured at the person standing in front of her—“and I can take those concerns directly to Station Administrator Celar. In fact, we could set up an office on level four where anyone could come and talk about problems with the repairs, or things that you want, and we could make sure that gets to Administration.”

“Level four?” someone cried. “Not all of us can get up and down those ladders!”

“I don’t think there’s room on level one, Citizen,” said Tisarwat. “Except maybe right here, but that would be very inconvenient for Citizen Emer’s customers, or anyone who walks through here.” Which was nearly everyone in the Undergarden. “So maybe when this good citizen and I”—she gestured toward the person in front of her—“visit Administration today, after we talk here, we’ll let them know that repairing the lifts needs to be a priority.”

Silence. People had begun to come, slowly, cautiously, out of the shop and into the tiny, makeshift concourse. Now one of them said, “The way we usually do this sort of thing, Lieutenant, is we all sit down, and whoever is speaking stands up.” In a tone that was almost a challenge. “We leave the bench for those who can’t sit on the ground.”

Tisarwat looked down at the bench she was standing on. Looked out at the people before her—a good fifty or sixty,
and more still coming out of the tea shop. “Right,” she said. “Then I’ll get down.”

As Sirix and I returned to the house, Fleet Captain Uemi’s message reached
Mercy of Kalr
. Medic was on watch. “All respect to Fleet Captain Breq,” came the words into Medic’s ear. “Does she desire some sort of firsthand or personal information? I assure you that I was the only person on
Sword of Inil
to spend more than a few minutes on Omaugh.”

Medic, unlike Seivarden or Ekalu, understood the import of the questions I had been asking of Fleet Captain Uemi. And so she was horrified rather than puzzled when she spoke the reply I’d left, in case the answers to my questions had been what they were. “Fleet Captain Breq begs Fleet Captain Uemi’s very generous indulgence and would like to know if Fleet Captain Uemi is feeling quite entirely herself lately.”

I didn’t expect a reply to that, and never did receive one.

Fosyf’s servants spoke quite freely in the presence of my silent and expressionless Kalrs. Raughd had not, in fact, gone immediately to her mother, as she had threatened, but ordered a servant to pack her things and fly her to the elevator that would take her upwell, to a shuttle that would bring her to Athoek Station.

Most of the servants did not like me, and said so outside the house where we were staying, or in the kitchen of the main building, where Five and Six went on various errands. I was arrogant and cold. The humming would drive anyone to distraction, and I was lucky my personal attendants were ancillaries (that always gave Five and Eight a little frisson of satisfaction) who didn’t care about such things. My bringing Sirix Odela here could be nothing but a calculated insult—they knew who she was, knew her history. And I had been cruel to the daughter of the house. None of them knew exactly what had happened, but they understood the outlines of it.

Some of the servants went silent hearing such opinions
expressed, their faces nearly masks, the twitch of an eyebrow or the corner of a mouth betraying what they’d have liked to say. A few of the more forthcoming pointed out (very quietly) that Raughd herself had a history of cruelty, of rages when she didn’t get what she wanted.
Like her mother that way
, muttered one of the dissenters, where only Kalr Five could hear it.

“The nurse left when Raughd was only three,” Five told Eight, while I was out on one of my walks and Sirix still slept. “Couldn’t take the mother any longer.”

“Where were the other parents?” asked Eight.

“Oh, the mother wouldn’t have any other parents. Or
they
wouldn’t have
her
. The daughter of the house is a clone. She’s meant to be
exactly
like the mother. And hears about it when she isn’t, I gather. That’s why they feel so sorry for her, some of them.”

“The mother doesn’t like children very much, does she?” observed Eight, who had noticed that the household’s children were kept well away from Fosyf and her guests.

“
I
don’t like children very much, to be honest,” replied Five. “Well, no. Children are all sorts of people, aren’t they, and I suppose if I knew more I’d find some I like and some I don’t, just like everyone else. But I’m glad nobody’s depending on me to have any, and I don’t really know what to
do
with them, if you know what I mean. Still, I know not to do things like
that
.”

Two days after she’d left, Raughd was back. When she’d arrived at the foot of the elevator, she hadn’t been allowed to board. She’d insisted that she always had permission to travel to the station, but in vain. She was not on the list, did not have a permit, and her messages to the station administrator
went unanswered. Citizen Piat was similarly unresponsive. Security arrived, suggested with extreme courtesy and deference that perhaps Raughd might want to return to the house by the lake.

Somewhat surprisingly, that was exactly what she’d done. I would have guessed she’d have stayed in the city at the foot of the elevator, where surely she’d have found company for the sort of games she enjoyed, but instead she returned to the mountains.

She arrived in the middle of the night. Just before breakfast, while the account of her fruitless attempt to leave the planet was only just beginning to reach the servants outside the kitchen in the main building, Raughd ordered her personal attendant to go to Fosyf as soon as she woke and demand a meeting. Most of the kitchen servants didn’t like Raughd’s personal attendant much—she derived, they felt, a bit too much satisfaction from her status as the personal servant of the daughter of the house. Still (one assistant cook said to another, in the hearing of Kalr Five), her worst enemies would not have wished to force her to confront Fosyf Denche with such a message.

The subsequent meeting was private. Which in that household meant in earshot of only three or four servants. Or, when Fosyf shouted, half a dozen. And shout she did. This entire situation was of Raughd’s making. In attempting to remedy it, she had only made it worse, had set out to make me an ally but through her own ineptness had made me an enemy instead. It was no wonder I had turned Raughd down flat, inadequate and worthless as she was. Fosyf was ashamed to admit that they had even the slightest relationship to each other. Raughd had clearly also mishandled Station Administrator Celar. Fosyf herself would never have made such
mistakes, and clearly there had been some sort of flaw in the cloning process because no one with Fosyf’s DNA could possibly be such a useless waste of food and air. One word, one
breath
from Raughd in protest of these obvious truths, and she would be cast out of the house. There was time yet to grow a new, better heir. Hearing this, Raughd did not protest, but returned, silent, to her room.

Just before lunch, as I was leaving my own room in our smaller house, Raughd’s personal attendant walked into the middle of the main kitchen and stood, silent and trembling, her gaze fixed, off somewhere distant and overhead. Eight was there seeing after something for Sirix. At first no one noticed the attendant, everyone was working busily on getting the last of the food prepared, but after a few moments one of the assistant cooks looked up, saw the attendant standing there shaking, and gave a loud gasp. “The honey!” the assistant cook cried. “Where’s the honey?”

Everyone looked up. Saw the attendant, whose trembling only increased, who began, now, to open her mouth as though she was about to speak, or possibly vomit, and then closed it again, over and over. “It’s too late!” someone else said, and the second assistant cook said, panic in her voice, “I used all the honey in the cakes for this afternoon!”

“Oh,
shit
!” said a servant who had just come into the kitchen with dirty teabowls, and I knew from the way no one turned to admonish her that whatever this was, it was serious business.

Someone dragged in a chair, and three servants took hold of Raughd’s attendant and lowered her into it, still shaking, still opening and closing her mouth. The first assistant cook came running with a honey-soaked cake and broke a piece off, put it into the attendant’s gaping mouth. It tumbled out
onto the floor, to cries of dismay. The attendant looked more and more as though she were going to throw up, but instead she made a long, low moan.

“Oh, do something! Do something!” begged the servant with the dirty dishes. Lunch was entirely forgotten.

By this time I had begun to have some idea of what was happening. I had seen things something like this before, though not this particular reaction to it.

“Are you all right, Fleet Captain?” Sirix, in the other building, in the hallway outside both our rooms. She must have come out while I was absorbed by the goings-on in the main building’s kitchen.

I blinked the vision away, so that I could see Sirix and answer. “I didn’t realize the Samirend practiced spirit possession.”

Sirix did not attempt to hide her expression of distaste at my words. But then she turned her face away, as though she was ashamed to meet my gaze, and made a disgusted noise. “What must you think of us, Fleet Captain?”

Us. Of course. Sirix was Samirend.

“It’s the kind of thing someone does,” she continued, “when they’re feeling ignored or put out. Everyone rushes to give them sweets and say kind things to them.”

The whole thing seemed less like something the attendant was
doing
than something that was happening
to
her. And I hadn’t noticed anyone saying kind things to her. But my attention had strayed from the kitchen, and now I saw that one of the field overseers, the one who had met us the day we’d arrived and had seemed completely oblivious to the field workers’ ability to speak and understand Radchaai, was now kneeling next to the chair where the still trembling, moaning attendant sat. “You should have called me sooner!” the
overseer said sharply, and someone else said, “We only just saw her!”

“It’s all to stop the spirit speaking,” said Sirix, still standing beside me in the corridor, still disgusted and, I was certain now, ashamed. “If it speaks, likely it’ll curse someone. People will do anything to stop it. One petulant person can hold an entire household hostage for days that way.”

I didn’t believe in spirits or gods to possess anyone, but I doubted this was something the attendant had done consciously, or without a true need of whatever the reaction of the other servants might provide for her. And she was, after all, constantly subject to Raughd Denche with very little real respite. “Sweets?” I asked Sirix. “Not just honey?”

Sirix blinked once, twice. A stillness came over her that I’d seen before, when she was angry or offended. It was as though my question had been a personal insult. “I don’t think I’m interested in lunch,” she said coldly, and turned and went back into her room.

In the main kitchen, the head cook, clearly relieved by the presence of the overseer, took firm charge of the dismayed, staring servants and managed to admonish and cajole the rest of the work from them. Meanwhile the overseer put fragments of honey cake into the attendant’s mouth. Each one fell out onto her lap, but the overseer doggedly replaced them. As she worked, she intoned words in Liost, from the sound of it. From the context, it must have been a prayer.

Eventually, the attendant’s moans and shaking stopped, whatever curse she might have uttered unspoken. She pled exhaustion for the rest of the day, which no one, servants or family, seemed to question, at least not in Eight’s hearing. The next morning she was back at her post, and the household staff was noticeably kinder to her after that.

Raughd avoided me. I saw her only rarely, in the late afternoon or early evening, on her way to the bathhouse. If we crossed paths she pointedly did not speak to me. She spent much of her time either in the nearby town or, more disturbingly, over the ridge at the field workers’ house.

I considered leaving, but we still had more than a week of full mourning to go. An interruption like this would only appear ill-omened, the proper execution of the funeral rites compromised. Perhaps the Presger, or their translators, wouldn’t understand, or care. Still. Twice I had seen the Presger underestimated with disastrous results—once by Governor Giarod and Captain Hetnys, and once by Anaander Mianaai herself, when she had thought she had the power to destroy them and in response they had put those invisible, all-piercing guns in the hands of the Garseddai the Lord of the Radch thought she had so easily conquered. The Presger had not done it to save the Garseddai, who had in the event been completely destroyed, every one of them dead, every planet and station in their home system burned and lifeless, with no action, no protest from the Presger. No, they had done it, I was sure, to send a message to Anaander Mianaai:
Don’t even think about it
. I would not underestimate them in my turn.

Fosyf still visited our small house daily, and treated me with her usual jovial obliviousness. I came to see her strangely serene manner as both a sign of just how much she expected to get whatever she wanted, and also an instrument by which she managed to do that, plain persistent saying what she wanted to be true in the expectation that it would eventually become so. It’s a method I’d found worked best for those who are already positioned to mostly get what they want. Obviously Fosyf had found it worked for her.

Above, on Athoek Station, even with Lieutenant Tisarwat’s push, with Station Administrator Celar’s involvement, a thorough inspection of the Gardens’ supports wouldn’t happen for more than a week. “To be entirely honest,” Tisarwat explained to Basnaaid one afternoon, in my sitting room on the station, “there are so many things that need urgent attention that it keeps getting pushed back.” I read her determination, her continuing thrill at being able to help Basnaaid. But also an undercurrent of unhappiness. “I’m sure if the fleet captain were here she’d find some way to just… make it happen.”

“I’m impressed that it seems likely to happen at all,” said Basnaaid, with a smile that left Tisarwat momentarily, speechlessly, pleased with herself.

Recovering her self-possession, Tisarwat said, “It’s not anything urgent, but I was wondering if Horticulture could provide some plants for public areas here.”

“It can’t help but improve the air quality!” Basnaaid laughed. “There might not be enough light yet, though.” And then, at another thought, still amused, “Maybe they could put some of those mushrooms out.”

“The mushrooms!” exclaimed Tisarwat, in frustration. “Nobody will tell me where they’re growing them. I’m not sure what they’re afraid of. Sometimes I think everyone here must be growing them in a box under their beds or something, and that’s why they’re so anxious about Station Maintenance coming into their quarters.”

“They make money off the mushrooms, don’t they? And if the chief of Horticulture got her hands on them, you know she’d figure out a way to keep them in the Gardens and charge outrageous prices for them.”

“But they could still grow them here,” Tisarwat argued,
“and still sell them themselves. So I don’t know what the problem is.” She gestured dismissal of her irritation. “Speaking of mushrooms. Shall I send Nine out for something to eat?”

On
Mercy of Kalr
, Seivarden sat in the decade room with
Sword of Atagaris
’s Amaat lieutenant.
Sword of Atagaris
’s lieutenant had brought a bottle of arrack. “Very kind,” Seivarden said, with barely detectable condescension. The other lieutenant did not seem to see it at all. “With your pardon, I won’t have any. I’ve taken a vow.” It was the sort of thing someone might do for penance, or just an occasional spiritual practice. She handed the bottle to Amaat Three, who took it and set it on the decade room counter, and then went to stand by the
Sword of Atagaris
ancillary that had accompanied its officer.

“Very admirable!” replied the
Sword of Atagaris
Amaat lieutenant. “And better you than me.” She picked up her bowl of tea. Three had begged Kalr Five for permission to use the best porcelain—still packed away in my own quarters on the ship, because Five hadn’t wanted anything to happen to it—and thus humiliate the
Sword of Atagaris
lieutenant with an obvious show of my status. Five had refused, and suggested instead that Amaat Three come around from the other direction and serve the lieutenants from my old, chipped enamel set. Three had been briefly tempted, remembering, as the entire crew did,
Sword of Atagaris
’s threat when we’d entered the system. But propriety had won out, and so the
Sword of Atagaris
lieutenant drank her tea unconscious of her narrow escape from insult. “Seivarden is a very old-fashioned name,” she said, with a joviality that struck me as false. “Your parents must have loved history.” One of Anaander Mianaai’s allies, before she had grown beyond the confines of the Radch itself, had been named Seivarden.