Old Music and the Slave Women

by

Ursula K. Le Guin

The Chief Intelligence Officer of the Ekumenical Embassy toWerrel, a man who on his home world had the name Sohikelwenyanmurkeres Esdan, and who in Voe Deo was known by a nickname, Esdardon Aya or Old Music, was bored.

It had taken a civil war and three years to bore him, but he had got to the point where he referred to himself in ansible reports to the Stabiles on Hain as the Embassy’s chief stupidity officer.

He had been able, however, to retain a few clandestine links with friends in the Free City even after the Legitimate Government sealed the Embassy, allowing no one and no information to enter or leave it. In the third summer of the war, he came to the Ambassador with a request. Cut off from reliable communication with the Embassy, Liberation Command had asked him (how? asked the Ambassador; through one of the men who delivered groceries, he explained) if the Embassy would let one or two of its people slip across the lines and talk with them, be seen with them, offer proof that despite propaganda and disinformation, and though the Embassy was stuck in Jit City, its staff had not been co-opted into supporting the Legitimates, but remained neutral and ready to deal with rightful authority on either side.

“Jit City?” said the Ambassador. “Never mind. But how do you get there?”

“Always the problem with Utopia,” Esdan said. “Well, I can pass with contact lenses, if nobody’s looking closely.

Crossing the Divide is the tricky bit.”

Most of the great city was still physically there, the government buildings, factories and warehouses, the university, the tourist attractions: the Great Shrine of Tual, Theater Street, the Old Market with its interesting display rooms and lofty Hall of Auction, disused since the sale and rental of assets had been shifted to the electronic marketplace; the numberless streets, avenues, and boulevards, the dusty parks shaded by purple-flowered beya trees, the miles and miles of shops, sheds, mills, tracks, stations, apartment buildings, houses, compounds, the neighborhoods, the suburbs, and exurbs. Most of it still stood, most of its fifteen million people were still there, but its deep complexity was gone. Connections were broken. Interactions did not take place. A brain after a stroke.

The greatest break was a brutal one, an ax-blow right through the pons, a kilo-wide no-man’s-land of blown-up buildings and blocked streets, wreckage and rubble. East of the Divide was Legitimate territory: downtown, government offices, embassies, banks, communications towers, the university, the great parks and wealthy neighborhoods, the roads out to the armory, barracks, airports, and spaceport. West of the Divide was Free City, Dustyville, Liberation territory: factories, union compounds, the rentspeople’s quarters, the old gareot residential neighborhoods, endless miles of little streets petering out into the plains at last. Through both ran the great East-West highways, empty.

The Liberation people smuggled him out of the Embassy and almost across the Divide successfully. He and they had had a lot of practice in the old days getting runaway assets out to Yeowe and freedom. He found it interesting to be the one smuggled instead of one of the smugglers, finding it far more frightening yet less stressful, since he was not responsible, the package not the postman. But somewhere in the connection there had been a bad link.

They made it on foot into the Divide and partway through it and stopped at a little derelict truck sitting on its wheel rims under a gutted apartment house. A driver sat at the wheel behind the cracked, crazed windshield, and grinned at him. His guide gestured him into the back. The truck took off like a hunting cat, following a crazy route, zigzagging through the ruins.

They were nearly across the Divide, jolting across a rubbled stretch which might have been a street or a marketplace, when the truck veered, stopped, there were shouts, shots, the van back was flung open and men plunged in at him. “Easy,” he said,

“go easy,” for they were manhandling him, hauling him, twisting his arm behind his back. They yanked him out of the truck, pulled off his coat and slapped him down searching for weapons, frog-marched him to a car waiting beside the truck. He tried to see if his driver was dead but could not look around before they shoved him into the car.

It was an old government state-coach, dark red, wide, and long, made for parades, for carrying great estate owners to the Council and ambassadors from the spaceport. Its main section could be curtained to separate men from women passengers, and the driver’s compartment was sealed off so the passengers wouldn’t be breathing in what a slave breathed out.

One of the men had kept his arm twisted up his back until he shoved him headfirst into the car, and all he thought as he found himself sitting between two men and facing three others and the car starting up was, I’m getting too old for this.

He held still, letting his fear and pain subside, not ready yet to move even to rub his sharply hurting shoulder, not looking into faces nor too obviously at the streets. Two glances told him they were passing Rei Street, going east, out of the city. He realised then he had been hoping they were taking him back to the Embassy. What a fool.

They had the streets to themselves, except for the startled gaze of people on foot as they flashed by. Now they were on a wide boulevard, going very fast, still going east. Although he was in a very bad situation, he still found it absolutely exhilarating just to be out of the Embassy, out in the air, in the world, and moving, going fast.

Cautiously he raised his hand and massaged his shoulder. As cautiously, he glanced at the men beside him and facing him.

All were dark-skinned, two blue-black. Two of the men facing him were young. Fresh, stolid faces. The third was a veot of the third rank, an oga. His face had the quiet inexpressiveness in which his caste was trained. Looking at him, Esdan caught his eye. Each looked away instantly.

Esdan liked veots. He saw them, soldiers as well as slaveholders, as part of the old Voe Deo, members of a doomed species. Businessmen and bureaucrats would survive and thrive in the Liberation and no doubt find soldiers to fight for them, but the military caste would not. Their code of loyalty, honor, and austerity was too like that of their slaves, with whom they shared the worship of Kamye, the Swordsman, the Bondsman. How long would that mysticism of suffering survive the Liberation? Veots were intransigent vestiges of an intolerable order. He trusted them, and had seldom been disappointed in his trust.

The oga was very black, very handsome, like Teyeo, a veot Esdan had particularly liked. He had left Werel long before the war, off to Terra and Hain with his wife, who would be a Mobile of the Ekumen one of these days. In a few centuries.

Long after the war was over, long after Esdan was dead. Unless he chose to follow them, went back, went home.

Idle thoughts. During a revolution you don’t choose. You’re carried, a bubble in a cataract, a spark in a bonfire, an unarmed man in a car with seven armed men driving very fast down the broad, blank East Arterial Highway… . They were leaving the city. Heading for the East Provinces. The Legitimate Government of Voe Deo was now reduced to half the capital city and two provinces, in which seven out of eight people were what the eighth person, their owner, called assets.

The two men up in the front compartment were talking, though they couldn’t be heard in the owner compartment. Now the bullet-headed man to Esdan’s right asked a muttered question to the oga facing him, who nodded.

“Oga,” Esdan said.

The veot’s expressionless eyes met his.

“I need to piss.”

The man said nothing and looked away. None of them said anything for a while. They were on a bad stretch of the highway, torn up by fighting during the first summer of the Uprising or merely not maintained since. The jolts and shocks were hard on Esdan’s bladder.

“Let the fucking white-eyes piss himself,” said one of the two young men facing him to the other, who smiled tightly.

Esdan considered possible replies, good-humored, joking, not offensive, not provocative, and kept his mouth shut. They only wanted an excuse, those two. He closed his eyes and tried to relax, to be aware of the pain in his shoulder, the pain in his bladder, merely aware.

The man to his left, whom he could not see clearly, spoke: “Driver. Pull off up there.” He used a speakerphone. The driver nodded. The car slowed, pulled off the road, jolting horribly. They all got out of the car. Esdan saw that the man to his left was also a veot, of the second rank, a zadyo. One of the young men grabbed Esdan’s arm as he got out, another shoved a gun against his liver. The others all stood on the dusty roadside and pissed variously on the dust, the gravel, the roots of a row of scruffy trees. Esdan managed to get his fly open but his legs were so cramped and shaky he could barely stand, and the young man with the gun had come around and now stood directly in front of him with the gun aimed at his penis. There was a knot of pain somewhere between his bladder and his cock. “Back up a little,” he said with plaintive irritability. “I don’t want to wet your shoes.” The young man stepped forward instead, bringing his gun right against Esdan’s groin.

The zadyo made a slight gesture. The young man backed off a step. Esdan shuddered and suddenly pissed out a fountain.

He was pleased, even in the agony of relief, to see he’d driven the young man back two more steps.

“Looks almost human,” the young man said.

Esdan tucked his brown alien cock away with discreet promptness and slapped his trousers shut. He was still wearing lenses that hid the whites of his eyes, and was dressed as a rentsman in loose, coarse clothes of dull yellow, the only dye color that had been permitted to urban slaves. The banner of the Liberation was that same dull yellow. The wrong color, here. The body inside the clothes was the wrong color, too.

Having lived on Werel for thirty-three years, Esdan was used to being feared and hated, but he had never before been entirely at the mercy of those who feared and hated him. The aegis of the Ekumen had sheltered him. What a fool, to leave the Embassy, where at least he’d been harmless, and let himself be got hold of by these desperate defenders of a lost cause, who might do a good deal of harm not only to but with him. How much resistance, how much endurance, was he capable of?

Fortunately they couldn’t torture any information about Liberation plans from him, since he didn’t know a damned thing about what his friends were doing. But still, what a fool.

Back in the car, sandwiched in the seat with nothing to see but the young men’s scowls and the oga’s watchful nonexpression, he shut his eyes again. The highway was smooth here. Rocked in speed and silence, he slipped into a postadrenaline doze.

When he came fully awake the sky was gold, two of the little moons glittering above a cloudless sunset. They were jolting along on a side road, a driveway that wound past fields, orchards, plantations of trees and building-cane, a huge field-worker compound, more fields, another compound. They stopped at a checkpoint guarded by a single armed man, were checked briefly and waved through. The road went through an immense, open, rolling park. Its familiarity troubled him. Lacework of trees against the sky, the swing of the road among groves and glades. He knew the river was over that long hill.

“This is Yaramera,” he said aloud.

None of the men spoke.

Years ago, decades ago, when he’d been on Werel only a year or so, they’d invited a party from the Embassy down to Yaramera, the greatest estate in Voe Deo. The Jewel of the East. The model of efficient slavery. Thousands of assets working the fields, mills, factories of the estate, living in enormous compounds, walled towns. Everything clean, orderly, industrious, peaceful. And the house on the hill above the river, a palace, three hundred rooms, priceless furnishings, paintings, sculptures, musical instruments—he remembered a private concert hall with walls of gold-backed glass mosaic, a Tualite shrine-room that was one huge flower carved of scented wood.

They were driving up to that house now. The car turned. He caught only a glimpse, jagged black spars against the sky.

The two young men were allowed to handle him again, haul him out of the car, twist his arm, push and shove him up the steps. Trying not to resist, not to feel what they were doing to him, he kept looking about him. The center and the south wing of the immense house were roofless, ruinous. Through the black outline of a window shone the blank clear yellow of the sky.

Even here in the heartland of the Law, the slaves had risen. Three years ago, now, in that first terrible summer when thousands of houses had burned, compounds, towns, cities. Four million dead. He had not known the Uprising had reached even to Yaramera. No news came up the river. What toll among the Jewel’s slaves for that night of burning? Had the owners been slaughtered, or had they survived to deal out punishment? No news came up the river.

All this went through his mind with unnatural rapidity and clarity as they crowded him up the shallow steps towards the north wing of the house, guarding him with drawn guns as if they thought a man of sixty-two with severe leg cramps from sitting motionless for hours was going to break and run for it, here, three hundred kilos inside their own territory. He thought fast and noticed everything.

This part of the house, joined to the central house by a long arcade, had not burned down. The walls still bore up the roof, but he saw as they came into the front hall that they were bare stone, their carved paneling burnt away. Dirty sheetflooring replaced parquet or covered painted tile. There was no furniture at all. In its ruin and dirt the high hall was beautiful, bare, full of clear evening light. Both veots had left his group and were reporting to some men in the doorway of what had been a reception room. He felt the veots as safeguard and hoped they would come back, but they did not. One of the young men kept his arm twisted up his back. A heavyset man came towards him, staring at him.

“You’re the alien called Old Music?”

“I am Hainish, and use that name here.”

“Mr. Old Music, you’re to understand that by leaving your embassy in violation of the protection agreement between your ambassador and the Government of Voe Deo, you’ve forfeited diplomatic immunity. You may be held in custody, interrogated, and duly punished for any infractions of civil law or crimes of collusion with insurgents and enemies of the State you’re found to have committed.”

“I understood that this is your statement of my position,” Esdan said. “But you should know, sir, that the Ambassador and the Stabiles of the Ekumen of the Worlds consider me protected both by diplomatic immunity and the laws of the Ekumen.”

No harm trying, but his wordy lies weren’t listened to. Having recited his litany, the man turned away, and the young men grabbed Esdan again. He was hustled through doorways and corridors that he was now in too much pain to see, down stone stairs, across a wide, cobbled courtyard, and into a room where, with a final agonising jerk on his arm and his feet knocked from under him so that he fell sprawling, they slammed the door and left him belly-down on stone in darkness.

He dropped his forehead onto his arm and lay shivering, hearing his breath catch in a whimper again and again.

Later on he remembered that night, and other things from the next days and nights. He did not know, then or later, if he was tortured in order to break him down or was merely the handy object of aimless brutality and spite, a sort of plaything for the boys. There were kicks, beatings, a great deal of pain, but none of it was clear in his memory later except the crouchcage.

He had heard of such things, read about them. He had never seen one. He had never been inside a compound.

Foreigners, visitors, were not taken into slave quarters on the estates of Voe Deo. They were served by house-slaves in the houses of the owners.

This was a small compound, not more than twenty huts on the women’s side, three longhouses on the gate side. It had housed the staff of a couple of hundred slaves who looked after the house and the immense gardens of Yaramera. They would have been a privileged set compared to the field hands. But not exempt from punishment. The whipping post still stood near the high gate that sagged open in the high walls.

“There?” said Nemeo, the one who always twisted his arm, but the other one, Alatual, said, “No, come on, it’s over here,” and ran ahead, excited, to winch the crouchcage down from where it hung below the main sentry station, high up on the inside of the wall.

It was a tube of coarse, rusty steel mesh sealed at one end and closable at the other. It hung suspended by a single hook from a chain. Lying on the ground it looked like a trap for an animal, not a very big animal. The two young men stripped off his clothes and goaded him to crawl into it headfirst, using the fieldhandlers, electric prods to stir up lazy slaves, which they had been playing with the last couple of days. They screamed with laughter, pushing him and jabbing the prods in his anus and scrotum. He writhed into the cage until he was crouching in it head down, his arms and legs bent and jammed up into his body. They slammed the trap end shut, catching his naked foot between the wires and causing a pain that blinded him while they hoisted the cage back up. It swung about wildly, and he clung to the wires with his cramped hands. When he opened his eyes he saw the ground swinging about seven or eight meters below him. After a while the lurching and circling stopped. He could not move his head at all. He could see what was below the crouchcage, and by straining his eyes round he could see most of the inside of the compound.

In the old days there had been people down there to see the moral spectacle, a slave in the crouchcage. There had been children to learn the lesson of what happens to a housemaid who shirked a job, a gardener who spoiled a cutting, a hand who talked back to a boss. Nobody was there now. The dusty ground was bare. The dried-up garden plots, the little graveyard at the far edge of a woman’s side, the ditch between the two sides, the pathways, a vague circle of greener grass right underneath him, all were deserted. His torturers stood around for a while laughing and talking, got bored, went off.

He tried to ease his position but could move only very slightly. Any motion made the cage rock and swing so that he grew sick and increasingly fearful of falling. He did not know how securely the cage was balanced on that single hook. His foot, caught in the cage closure, hurt so sharply that he longed to faint, but though his head swam he remained conscious. He tried to breathe as he had learned how to breathe a long time ago on another world, quietly, easily. He could not do it here now in this world in this cage. His lungs were squeezed in his rib cage so that each breath was extremely difficult. He tried not to suffocate. He tried not to panic. He tried to be aware, only to be aware, but awareness was unendurable.

When the sun came round to that side of the compound and shone full on him the dizziness turned to sickness. Sometimes then he fainted for a while.

There was night and cold and he tried to imagine water, but there was no water.

He thought later he had been in the crouchcage two days. He could remember the scraping of the wires on his sunburned naked flesh when they pulled him out, the shock of cold water played over him from a hose. He had been fully aware for a moment then, aware of himself, like a doll, lying small, limp, on dirt, while men above him talked and shouted about something. Then he must have been carried back to the cell or stable where he was kept, for there was dark and silence, but also he was still hanging in the crouchcage roasting in the icy fire of the sun, freezing in his burning body, fitted tighter and tighter into the exact mesh of the wires of pain.

At some point he was taken to a bed in a room with a window, but he was still in the crouchcage, swinging high above the dusty ground, the dusties’ ground, the circle of green grass.

The zadyo and the heavyset man were there, were not there. A bondswoman, whey-faced, crouching and trembling, hurt him trying to put salve on his burned arm and leg and back. She was there and not there. The sun shone in the window. He felt the wire snap down on his foot again, and again.

Darkness eased him. He slept most of the time. After a couple of days he could sit up and eat what the scared bondswoman brought him. His sunburn was healing, and most of his aches and pains were milder. His foot was swollen hugely; bones were broken; that didn’t matter till he had to get up. He dozed, drifted. When Rayaye walked into the room, he recognised him at once.

They had met several times, before the Uprising. Rayaye had been Minister of Foreign Affairs under President Oyo.

What position he had now, in the Legitimate Government, Esdan did not know. Rayaye was short for a Werelian but broad and solid, with a blue-black polished-looking face and greying hair, a striking man, a politician.

“Minister Rayaye,” Esdan said.

“Mr. Old Music. How kind of you to recall me! I’m sorry you’ve been unwell. I hope the people here are looking after you satisfactorily?”

“Thank you.”

“When I heard you were unwell I inquired for a doctor, but there’s no one here but a veterinarian. No staff at all. Not like the old days! What a change! I wish you’d seen Yaramera in its glory.”

“I did.” His voice was rather weak, but sounded quite natural. “Thirty-two or -three years ago. Lord and Lady Aneo entertained a party from our embassy.”

“Really? Then you know what it was,” said Rayaye, sitting down in the one chair, a fine old piece missing one arm.

“Painful to see it like this, isn’t it! The worst of the destruction was here in the house. The whole women’s wing and the great rooms burned. But the gardens were spared, may the Lady be praised. Laid out by Meneya himself, you know, four hundred years ago. And the fields are still being worked. I’m told there are still nearly three thousand assets attached to the property.

When the trouble’s over, it’ll be far easier to restore Yaramera than many of the great estates.” He gazed out the window.

“Beautiful, beautiful. And Aneos’ housepeople were famous for their beauty, you know. And training. It’ll take a long time to build up to that kind of standard again.”

“No doubt.”

The Werelian looked at him with bland attentiveness. “I expect you’re wondering why you’re here.”

“Not particularly,” Esdan said pleasantly.

“Oh?”

“Since I left the Embassy without permission, I suppose the Government wanted to keep an eye on me.”

“Some of us were glad to hear you’d left the Embassy. Shut up there—a waste of your talents.”

“Oh, my talents,” Esdan said with a deprecatory shrug, which hurt his shoulder. He would wince later. Just now he was enjoying himself. He liked fencing.

“You’re a very talented man, Mr. Old Music. The wisest, canniest alien on Werel, Lord Mehao called you once. You’ve worked with us—and against us, yes—more effectively than any other offworlder. We understand one another. We can talk.

It’s my belief that you genuinely wish my people well, and that if I offered you a way of serving them—a hope of bringing this terrible conflict to an end—you’d take it.”

“I would hope to be able to.”

“Is it important to you that you be identified as a supporter of one side of the conflict, or would you prefer to remain neutral?”

“Any action can bring neutrality into question.”

“To have been kidnapped from the Embassy by the rebels is no evidence of your sympathy for them.”

“It would seem not.”

“Rather the opposite.”

“It would be so perceived.”

“It can be. If you like.”

“My preferences are of no weight, Minister.”

“They’re of very great weight, Mr. Old Music. But here. You’ve been ill, I’m tiring you. We’ll continue our conversation tomorrow, eh? If you like.”

“Of course, Minister,” Esdan said, with a politeness edging on submissiveness, a tone that he knew suited men like this one, more accustomed to the attention of slaves than the company of equals. Never having equated incivility with pride, Esdan, like most of his people, was disposed to be polite in any circumstance that allowed it, and disliked circumstances that did not. Mere hypocrisy did not trouble him. He was perfectly capable of it himself. If Rayaye’s men had tortured him and Rayaye pretended ignorance of the fact, Esdan had nothing to gain by insisting on it.

He was glad, indeed, not to be obliged to talk about it, and hoped not to think about it. His body thought about it for him, remembered it precisely, in every joint and muscle, now. The rest of his thinking about it he would do as long as he lived. He had learned things he had not known. He had thought he understood what it was to be helpless. Now he knew he had not understood.

When the scared woman came in, he asked her to send for the veterinarian. “I need a cast on my foot,” he said.

“He does mend the hands, the bondsfolk, master,” the woman whispered, shrinking. The assets here spoke an archaic-sounding dialect that was sometimes hard to follow.

“Can he come into the house?”

She shook her head.

“Is there anybody here who can look after it?”

“I will ask, master,” she whispered.

An old bondswoman came in that night. She had a wrinkled, seared, stern face, and none of the crouching manner of the other. When she first saw him, she whispered, “Mighty Lord!” But she performed the reverence stiffly, and then examined his swollen foot, impersonal as any doctor. She said, “If you do let me bind that, master, it will heal.”

“What’s broken?”

“These toes. There. Maybe a little bone in here, too. Lotsalot bones in feet.”

“Please bind it for me.”

She did so, firmly, binding cloths round and round until the wrapping was quite thick and kept his foot immobile at one angle. She said, “You do walk, then you use a stick, sir. You put down only that heel to the ground.”

He asked her name.

“Gana,” she said. Saying her name, she shot a sharp glance right at him, full face, a daring thing for a slave to do. She probably wanted to get a good look at his alien eyes, having found the rest of him, though a strange color, pretty commonplace, bones in the feet and all.

“Thank you, Gana. I’m grateful for your skill and kindness.”

She bobbed, but did not reverence, and left the room. She herself walked lame, but upright. “All the grandmothers are rebels,” somebody had told him long ago, before the Uprising.

The next day he was able to get up and hobble to the broken-armed chair. He sat for a while looking out the window.

The room looked out from the second floor over the gardens of Yaramera, terraced slopes and flowerbeds, walks, lawns, and a series of ornamental lakes and pools that descended gradually to the river: a vast pattern of curves and planes, plants and paths, earth and still water, embraced by the broad living curve of the river. All the plots and walks and terraces formed a soft geometry centered very subtly on an enormous tree down at the riverside. It must have been a great tree when the garden was laid out four hundred years ago. It stood above and well back from the bank, but its branches reached far out over the water, and a village could have been built in its shade. The grass of the terraces had dried to soft gold. The river and the lakes and pools were all the misty blue of the summer sky. The flowerbeds and shrubberies were untended, overgrown, but not yet gone wild. The gardens of Yaramera were utterly beautiful in their desolation. Desolate, forlorn, forsaken, all such romantic words befitted them, yet they were also rational and noble, full of peace. They had been built by the labor slaves.

Their dignity and peace were founded on cruelty, misery, pain. Esdan was Hainish, from a very old people, people who had built and destroyed Yaramera a thousand times. His mind contained the beauty and the terrible grief of the place, assured that the existence of one cannot justify the other, the destruction of one cannot destroy the other. He was aware of both, only aware.

And aware also, sitting in some comfort of body at last, that the lovely sorrowful terraces of Yaramera might contain within them the terraces of Darranda on Hain, roof below red roof, garden below green garden, dropping steep down to the shining harbor, the promenades and piers and sailboats. Out past the harbor the sea rises up, stands up as high as his house, as high as his eyes. Esi knows that books say the sea lies down. “The sea lies calm tonight,” says the poem, but he knows better. The sea stands, a wall, the blue-grey wall at the end of the world. If you sail out on it, it will seem flat, but if you see it truly, it’s as tall as the hills of Darranda, and if you sail truly on it, you will sail through that wall to the other side, beyond the end of the world.

The sky is the roof that wall holds up. At night the stars shine through the glass air roof. You can sail to them, too, to the worlds beyond the world.

“Esi,” somebody calls from indoors, and he turns away from the sea and the sky, leaves the balcony, goes in to meet the guests, or for his music lesson, or to have lunch with the family. He’s a nice little boy, Esi: obedient, cheerful, not talkative but quite sociable, interested in people. With very good manners, of course; after all, he’s a Kelwen and the older generation wouldn’t stand for anything less in a child of the family, but good manners come easy to him, perhaps because he’s never seen any bad ones. Not a dreamy child. Alert, present, noticing. But thoughtful, and given to explaining things to himself, such as the wall of the sea and the roof of the air. Esi isn’t as clear and close to Esdan as he used to be; he’s a little boy a long time ago and very far away, left behind, left at home. Only rarely now does Esdan see through his eyes, or breathe the marvelous intricate smell of the house in Darranda—wood, the resinous oil used to polish the wood, sweetgrass matting, fresh flowers, kitchen herbs, the sea wind—or hear his mother’s voice: “Esi? Come on in now, love. The cousins are here from Dorased!”

Esi runs in to meet the cousins, old Iliawad with crazy eyebrows and hair in his nostrils, who can do magic with bits of sticky tape, and Tuitui who’s better at catch than Esi even though she’s younger, while Esdan falls asleep in the broken chair by the window looking out on the terrible, beautiful gardens.

Further conversations with Bayaye were deferred. The zadyo came with his apologies. The Minister had been called back to speak with the President, would return within three or four days. Esdan realised he had heard a flyer take off early in the morning, not far away. It was a reprieve. He enjoyed fencing, but was still very tired, very shaken, and welcomed the rest. No one came into his room but the scared woman, Heo, and the zadyo who came once a day to ask if he had all he needed.

When he could he was permitted to leave his room, go outside if he wished. By using a stick and strapping his bound foot onto a stiff old sandal-sole Gana brought him, he could walk, and so get out into the gardens and sit in the sun, which was growing milder daily as the summer grew old. The two veots were his guards, or more exactly guardians. He saw the two young men who had tortured him; they kept at a distance, evidently under orders not to approach him. One of the veots was usually in view, but never crowded him.

He could not go far. Sometimes he felt like a bug on a beach. The part of the house that was still usable was huge, the gardens were vast, the people were very few. There were the six men who had brought him, and five or six more who had been here, commanded by the heavyset man Tualenem. Of the original asset population of the house and estate there were ten or twelve, a tiny remnant of the house-staff of cooks, cooks’ helpers, washwomen, chambermaids, ladies’ maids, bodyservants, shoe-polishers, window-cleaners, gardeners, path-rakers, waiters, footmen, errandboys, stablemen, drivers, usewomen and useboys who had served the owners and their guests in the old days. These few were no longer locked up at night in the old house-asset compound where the crouchcage was, but slept in the courtyard warren of stables for horses and people where he had been kept at first, or in the complex of rooms around the kitchens. Most of these remaining few were women, two of them young, and two or three old, frail-looking men.

He was cautious of speaking to any of them at first lest he get them into trouble, but his captors ignored them except to give orders, evidently considering them trustworthy, with good reason. Troublemakers, the assets who had broken out of the compounds, burned the great house, killed the bosses and owners, were long gone: dead, escaped, or reenslaved with a cross branded deep on both cheeks. These were good dusties. Very likely they had been loyal all along. Many bondspeople, especially personal slaves, as terrified by the Uprising as their owners, had tried to defend them or had fled with them. They were no more traitors than were owners who had freed their assets and fought on the Liberation side. As much, and no more.

Girls, young field hands, were brought in one at a time as usewomen for the men. Every day or two the two young men who had tortured him drove a landcar off in the morning with a used girl and came back with a new one.

Of the two younger house bondswomen, one called Kamsa always carried her little baby around with her, and the men ignored her. The other, Heo, was the scared one who had waited on him. Tualenem used her every night. The other men kept hands off.

When they or any of the bondspeople passed Esdan in the house or outdoors they dropped their hands to their sides, chin to the chest, looked down, and stood still: the formal reverence expected of personal assets facing an owner.

“Good morning, Kamsa.”

Her reply was the reverence.

It had been years now since he had been with the finished product of generations of slavery, the kind of slave described as “perfectly trained, obedient, selfless, loyal, the ideal personal asset,” when they were put up for sale. Most of the assets he had known, his friends and colleagues, had been city rentspeople, hired out by their owners to companies and corporations to work in factories or shops or at skilled trades. He had also known a good many field hands. Field hands seldom had any contact with their owners; they worked under gareot bosses, and their compounds were run by cutfrees, eunuch assets. The ones he knew had mostly been runaways protected by the Hame, the underground railroad, on their way to independence in Yeowe. None of them had been utterly deprived of education, options, any imagination of freedom, as these bondspeople were. He had forgotten what a good dusty was like. He had forgotten the utter impenetrability of the person who has no private life, the intactness of the wholly vulnerable.

Kamsa’s face was smooth, serene, and showed no feeling, though he heard her sometimes talking and singing very softly to her baby, a joyful, merry little noise. It drew him. He saw her one afternoon sitting at work on the coping of the great terrace, the baby in its sling on her back. He limped over and sat down nearby. He could not prevent her from setting her knife and board aside and standing head and hands and eyes down in reverence as he came near.

“Please sit down, please go on with your work,” he said. She obeyed. “What’s that you’re cutting up?”

“Dueli, master,” she whispered.

It was a vegetable he had often eaten and enjoyed. He watched her work. Each big, woody pod had to be split along a sealed seam, not an easy trick; it took a careful search for the opening point and hard, repeated twists of the blade to open the pod. Then the fat edible seeds had to be removed one by one and scraped free of a stringy, clinging matrix.

“Does that part taste bad?” he asked.

“Yes, master.”

It was a laborious process, requiring strength, skill, and patience. He was ashamed. “I never saw raw dueli before,” he said.

“No, master.”

“What a good baby,” he said, a little at random. The tiny creature in its sling, its head lying on her shoulder, had opened large bluish-black eyes and was gazing vaguely at the world. He had never heard it cry. It seemed rather unearthly to him, but he had not had much to do with babies.

She smiled.

“A boy?”

“Yes, master.”

He said, “Please, Kamsa, my name is Esdan. I’m not a master. I’m a prisoner. Your masters are my masters. Will you call me by my name?”

She did not answer.

“Our masters would disapprove.”

She nodded. The Werelian nod was a tip-back of the head, not a bob down. He was completely used to it after all these years. It was the way he nodded himself. He noticed himself noticing it now. His captivity, his treatment here, had displaced, disoriented him. These last few days he had thought more about Hain than he had for years, decades. He had been at home on Werel, and now was not. Inappropriate comparisons, irrelevant memories. Alienated.

“They put me in the cage,” he said, speaking as low as she did and hesitating on the last word. He could not say the whole word, crouchcage.

Again the nod. This time, for the first time, she looked up at him, the flick of a glance. She said soundlessly, “I know,” and went on with her work.

He found nothing more to say.

“I was a pup, then I did live there,” she said, with a glance in the direction of the compound where the cage was. Her murmuring voice was profoundly controlled, as were all her gestures and movements. “Before that time the house burned.

When the masters did live here. They did often hang up the cage. Once, a man for until he did die there. In that. I saw that.”

Silence between them.

“We pups never did go under that. Never did run there.”

“I saw the … the ground was different, underneath,” Esdan said, speaking as softly and with a dry mouth, his breath coming short. “I saw, looking down. The grass. I thought maybe … where they …” His voice dried up entirely.

“One grandmother did take a stick, long, a cloth on the end of that, and wet it, and hold it up to him. The cutfrees did look away. But he did die. And rot some time.”

“What had he done?”

“Enna,” she said, the one-word denial he’d often heard assets use—i don’t know, I didn’t do it, I wasn’t there, it’s not my fault, who knows… .

He’d seen an owner’s child who said “enna” be slapped, not for the cup she broke but for using a slave word.

“A useful lesson,” he said. He knew she’d understand him. Underdogs know irony like they know air and water.

“They did put you in that, then I did fear,” she said.

“The lesson was for me, not you, this time,” he said.

She worked, carefully, ceaselessly. He watched her work. Her downcast face, clay-color with bluish shadows, was composed, peaceful. The baby was darker-skinned than she. She had not been bred to a bondsman, but used by an owner.

They called rape use. The baby’s eyes closed slowly, translucent bluish lids like little shells. It was small and delicate, probably only a month or two old. Its head lay with infinite patience on her stooping shoulder.

No one else was out on the terraces. A slight wind stirred in the flowering trees behind them, streaked the distant river with silver.

“Your baby, Kamsa, you know, he will be free,” Esdan said.

She looked up, not at him, but at the river and across it. She said, “Yes. He will be free.” She went on working.

It heartened him, her saying that to him. It did him good to know she trusted him. He needed someone to trust him, for since the cage he could not trust himself. With Rayaye he was all right; he could still fence; that wasn’t the trouble. It was when he was alone, thinking, sleeping. He was alone most of the time. Something in his mind, deep in him, was injured, broken, had not mended, could not be trusted to bear his weight.

He heard the flyer come down in the morning. That night Rayaye invited him down to dinner. Tualenem and the two veots ate with them and excused themselves, leaving him and Rayaye with a half bottle of wine at the makeshift table set up in one of the least damaged downstairs rooms. It had been a hunting lodge or trophy room, here in this wing of the house that had been the azade, the men’s side, where no women would ever have come; female assets, servants, and usewomen did not count as women. The head of a huge packdog snarled above the mantel, its fur singed and dusty and its glass eyes gone dull.

Crossbows had been mounted on the facing wall. Their pale shadows were clear on the dark wood. The electric chandelier flickered and dimmed. The generator was uncertain. One of the old bondsmen was always tinkering at it.

“Going off to his usewoman,” Rayaye said, nodding towards the door Tualenem had just closed with assiduous wishes for the Minister to have a good night. “Fucking a white. Like fucking turds. Makes my skin crawl. Sticking his cock into a slave cunt. When the war’s over there’ll be no more of that kind of thing. Halfbreeds are the root of this revolution. Keep the races separate. Keep the ruler blood clean. It’s the only answer.” He spoke as if expecting complete accord, but did not wait to receive any sign of it. He poured Esdan’s glass full and went on in his resonant politician’s voice, kind host, lord of the manor,

“Well, Mr. Old Music, I hope you’ve been having a pleasant stay at Yaramera, and that your health’s improved.”

A civil murmur.

“President Oyo was sorry to hear you’d been unwell and sends his wishes for your full recovery. He’s glad to know you’re safe from any further mistreatment by the insurgents. You can stay here in safety as long as you like. However, when the time is right, the president and his cabinet are looking forward to having you in Bellen.”

Civil murmur.

Long habit prevented Esdan from asking questions that would reveal the extent of his ignorance. Rayaye like most politicians loved his own voice, and as he talked Esdan tried to piece together a rough sketch of the current situation. It appeared that the legitimate government had moved from the city to a town, Bellen, northeast of Yaramera, near the eastern coast. Some kind of command had been left in the city. Rayaye’s references to it made Esdan wonder if the city was in fact semi-independent of the Oyo government, governed by a faction, perhaps a military faction.

When the Uprising began, Oyo had at once been given extraordinary powers; but the Legitimate Army of Voe Deo, after their stunning defeats in the west, had been restive under his command, wanting more autonomy in the field. The civilian government had demanded retaliation, attack, and victory. The army wanted to contain the insurrection. Rega-General Aydan had established the Divide in the city and tried to establish and hold a border between the new Free State and the Legitimate Provinces. Veots who had gone over to the Uprising with their asset troops had similarly urged a border truce to the Liberation Command. The army sought armistice, the warriors sought peace. But “So long as there is one slave I am not free,” cried Nekam-Anna, Leader of the Free State, and President Oyo thundered, “The nation will not be divided! We will defend legitimate property with the last drop of blood in our veins!” The Rega-General had suddenly been replaced by a new commander in chief. Very soon after that the Embassy was sealed, its access to information cut.

Esdan could only guess what had happened in the half year since. Rayaye talked of “our victories in the south” as if the Legitimate Army had been on the attack, pushing back into the Free State across the Devan River, south of the city. If so, if they had regained territory, why had the government pulled out of the city and dug in down at Bellen? Rayaye’s talk of victories might be translated to mean that the Army of the Liberation had been trying to cross the river in the south and the Legitimates had been successful in holding them off. If they were willing to call that a victory, had they finally given up the dream of reversing the revolution, retaking the whole country, and decided to cut their losses?

“A divided nation is not an option,” Rayaye said, squashing that hope. “You understand that, I think.”

Civil assent.

Rayaye poured out the last of the wine. “But peace is our goal. Our very strong and urgent goal. Our unhappy country has suffered enough.”

Definite assent.

“I know you to be a man of peace, Mr. Old Music. We know the Ekumen fosters harmony among and within its member states. Peace is what we all desire with all our hearts.”

Assent, plus faint indication of inquiry.

“As you know, the Government of Voe Deo has always had the power to end the insurrection. The means to end it quickly and completely.”

No response but alert attention.

“And I think you know that it is only our respect for the policies of the Ekumen, of which my nation is a member, that has prevented us from using that means.”

Absolutely no response or acknowledgment.

“You do know that, Mr. Old Music.”

“I assumed you had a natural wish to survive.”

Rayaye shook his head as if bothered by an insect. “Since we joined the Ekumen—and long before we joined it, Mr. Old Music—we have loyally followed its policies and bowed to its theories. And so we lost Yeowe! And so we lost the West!

Four million dead, Mr. Old Music. Four million in the first Uprising. Millions since. Millions. If we had contained it then, many fewer would have died. Assets as well as owners.”

“Suicide,” Esdan said in a soft mild voice, the way assets spoke.

“The pacifist sees all weapons as evil, disastrous, suicidal. For all the age-old wisdom of your people, Mr. Old Music, you have not the experiential perspective on matters of war we younger, cruder peoples are forced to have. Believe me, we are not suicidal. We want our people, our nation, to survive. We are determined that it shall. The bibo was fully tested, long before we joined the Ekumen. It is controllable, targetable, containable. It is an exact weapon, a precise tool of war. Rumor and fear have wildly exaggerated its capacities and nature. We know how to use it, how to limit its effects. Nothing but the response of the Stabiles through your ambassador prevented us from selective deployment in the first summer of the insurrection.”

“I had the impression the high command of the Army of Voe Deo was also opposed to deploying that weapon.”

“Some generals were. Many veots are rigid in their thinking, as you know.”

“That decision has been changed?”

“President Oyo has authorised deployment of the bibo against forces massing to invade this province from the west.”

Such a cute word, “bibo.” Esdan closed his eyes for a moment.

“The destruction will be appalling,” Rayaye said.

Assent.

“It is possible,” Rayaye said, leaning forward, black eyes in black face, intense as a hunting cat, “that if the insurgents were warned, they might withdraw. Be willing to discuss terms. If they withdraw, we will not attack. If they will talk, we will talk. A holocaust can be prevented. They respect the Ekumen. They respect you personally, Mr. Old Music. They trust you.

If you were to speak to them on the net, or if their leaders will agree to a meeting, they will listen to you, not as their enemy, their oppressor, but as the voice of a benevolent, peace-loving neutrality, the voice of wisdom, urging them to save themselves While there is yet time. This is the opportunity I offer you, and the Ekumen. To spare your friends among the rebels, to spare this world untold suffering. To open the way to lasting peace.”

“I am not authorised to speak for the Ekumen. The Ambassador—”

“Will not. Cannot. Is not free to. You are. You are a free agent, Mr. Old Music. Your position on Werel is unique. Both sides respect you. Trust you. And your voice carries infinitely more weight among the whites than his. He came only a year before the insurrection. You are, I may say, one of us.”

“I am not one of you. I neither own nor am owned. You must redefine yourselves to include me.”

Rayaye, for a moment, had nothing to say. He was taken aback, and would be angry. Fool, Esdan said to himself, old fool, to take the moral high ground! But he did not know what ground to stand on.

It was true that his word would carry more weight than the Ambassador’s. Nothing else Rayaye had said made sense. If President Oyo wanted the Ekumen’s blessing on his use of this weapon and seriously thought Esdan would give it, why was he working through Rayaye, and keeping Esdan hidden at Yaramera? Was Rayaye working with Oyo, or was he working for a faction that favored using the bibo, while Oyo still refused?

Most likely the whole thing was a bluff. There was no weapon. Esdan’s pleading was to lend credibility to it, while leaving Oyo out of the loop if the bluff failed.

The biobomb, the bibo, had been a curse on Voe Deo for decades, centuries. In panic fear of alien invasion after the Ekumen first contacted them almost four hundred years ago, the Werelians had put all their resources into developing space flight and weaponry. The scientists who invented this particular device repudiated it, informing their government that it could not be contained; it would destroy all human and animal life over an enormous area and cause profound and permanent genetic damage worldwide as it spread throughout the water and the atmosphere. The government never used the weapon but was never willing to destroy it, and its existence had kept Werel from membership in the Ekumen as long as the Embargo was in force. Voe Deo insisted it was their guarantee against extraterrestrial invasion and perhaps believed it would prevent revolution. Yet they had not used it when their slave-planet Yeowe rebelled. Then, after the Ekumen no longer observed the Embargo, they announced that they had destroyed the stockpiles. Werel joined the Ekumen. Voe Deo invited inspection of the weapon sites. The Ambassador politely declined, citing the Ekumenical policy of trust. Now the bibo existed again. In fact? In Rayaye’s mind? Was he desperate? A hoax, an attempt to use the Ekumen to back a bogey threat to scare off an invasion: the likeliest scenario, yet it was not quite convincing.

“This war must end,” Rayaye said.

“I agree.”

“We will never surrender. You must understand that.” Rayaye had dropped his blandishing, reasonable tone. “We will restore the holy order of the world,” he said, and now he was fully credible. His eyes, the dark Werelian eyes that had no whites, were fathomless in the dim light. He drank down his wine. “You think we fight for our property. To keep what we own. But I tell you, we fight to defend our Lady. In that fight is no surrender. And no compromise.”

“Your Lady is merciful.”

“The Law is her mercy.”

Esdan was silent.

“I must go again tomorrow to Bellen,” Rayaye said after a while, resuming his masterful, easy tone. “Our plans for moving on the southern front must be fully coordinated. When I come back, I’ll need to know if you will give us the help I’ve asked you for. Our response will depend largely on that. On your voice. It is known that you’re here in the East Provinces—known to the insurgents, I mean, as well as our people—though your exact location is of course kept hidden for your own safety. It is known that you may be preparing a statement of a change in the Ekumen’s attitude toward the conduct of the civil war. A change that could save millions of lives and bring a just peace to our land. I hope you’ll employ your time here in doing so.”

He is a factionalist, Esdan thought. He’s not going to Bellen, or if he is, that’s not where Oyo’s government is. This is some scheme of his own. Crackbrained. It won’t work. He doesn’t have the bibo. But he has a gun. And he’ll shoot me.

“Thank you for a pleasant dinner, Minister,” he said.

Next morning he heard the flyer leave at dawn. He limped out into the morning sunshine after breakfast. One of his veot guards watched him from a window and then turned away. In a sheltered nook just under the balustrade of the south terrace, near a planting of great bushes with big, blowsy, sweet-smelling white flowers, he saw Kamsa and her baby and Heo. He made his way to them, dot-and-go-one. The distances at Yaramera, even inside the house, were daunting to a lamed man.

When he finally got there, he said, “I am lonely. May I sit with you?”

The women were afoot, of course, reverencing, though Kamsa’s reverence had become pretty sketchy. He sat on a curved bench splotched all over with fallen flowers. They sat back down on the flagstone path with the baby. They had unwrapped the little body to the mild sunshine. It was a very thin baby, Esdan thought. The joints in the bluish-dark arms and legs were like the joints in flower stems, translucent knobs. The baby was moving more than he had ever seen it move, stretching its arms and turning its head as if enjoying the feel of the air. The head was large for the neck, again like a flower, too large on too thin a stalk. Kamsa dangled one of the real flowers over the baby. His dark eyes gazed up at it. His eyelids and eyebrows were exquisitely delicate. The sunlight shone through his fingers. He smiled. Esdan caught his breath. The baby’s smile at the flower was the beauty of the flower, the beauty of the world.

“What is his name?”

“Rekam.”

Grandson of Kamye. Kamye the Lord and slave, huntsman and husbandman, warrior and peacemaker.

“A beautiful name. How old is he?”

In the language they spoke that was, “How long has he lived?” Kamsa’s answer was strange. “As long as his life,” she said, or so he understood her whisper and her dialect. Maybe it was bad manners or bad luck to ask a child’s age.

He sat back on the bench. “I feel very old,” he said. “I haven’t seen a baby for a hundred years.”

Heo sat hunched over, her back to him; he felt that she wanted to cover her ears. She was terrified of him, the alien. Life had not left much to Heo but fear, he guessed. Was she twenty, twenty-five? She looked forty. Maybe she was seventeen.

Usewomen, ill-used, aged fast. Kamsa he guessed to be not much over twenty. She was thin and plain, but there was bloom and juice in her as there was not in Heo.

“Master did have children?” Kamsa asked, lifting up her baby to her breast with a certain discreet pride, shyly flaunting.

“No.”

“A yera yera,” she murmured, another slave word he had often heard in the urban compounds: 0 pity, pity.

“How you get to the center of things, Kamsa,” he said. She glanced his way and smiled. Her teeth were bad, but it was a good smile. He thought the baby was not sucking. It lay peacefully in the crook of her arm. Heo remained tense and jumped whenever he spoke, so he said no more. He looked away from them, past the bushes, out over the wonderful view that arranged itself, whenever you walked or sat, into a perfect balance: the levels of flagstone, of dun grass and blue water, the curves of the avenues, the masses and lines of shrubbery, the great old tree, the misty river and its green far bank. Presently the women began talking softly again. He did not listen to what they said. He was aware of their voices, aware of sunlight, aware of peace.

Old Gana came stumping across the upper terrace towards them, bobbed to him, said to Kamsa and Heo, “Choyo does want you. Leave me that baby.” Kamsa set the baby down on the warm stone again. She and Heo sprang up and went off, thin, light women moving with easy haste. The old woman settled down piece by piece and with groans and grimaces onto the path beside Rekam. She immediately covered him up with a fold of his swaddling cloth, frowning and muttering at the foolishness of his mother. Esdan watched her careful movements, her gentleness when she picked the child up, supporting that heavy head and tiny limbs, her tenderness cradling him, rocking her body to rock him.

She looked up at Esdan. She smiled, her face wrinkling up into a thousand wrinkles. “He is my great gift,” she said.

He whispered, “Your grandson?”

The backward nod. She kept rocking gently. The baby’s eyes were closed, his head lay softly on her thin, dry beast. “I think now he’ll die not long now.”

After a while Esdan said, “Die?”

The nod. She still smiled. Gently, gently rocking. “He is two years of age, master.”

“I thought he was born this summer,” Esdan said in a whisper.

The old woman said, “He did come to stay a little while with us.”

“What is wrong?”

“The wasting.”

Esdan had heard the term. He said, “Avo?” the name he knew for it, a systemic viral infection common among Werelian children, frequently epidemic in the asset compounds of the cities.

She nodded.

“But it’s curable!”

The old woman said nothing.

Avo was completely curable. Where there were doctors. Where there was medicine. Avo was curable in the city not the country. In the great house not the asset quarters. In peacetime not in wartime. Fool!

Maybe she knew it was curable, maybe she did not, maybe she did not know what the word meant. She rocked the baby, crooning in a whisper, paying no attention to the fool. But she had heard him, and answered him at last, not looking at him, watching the baby’s sleeping face.

“I was born owned,” she said, “and my daughters. But he was not. He is the gift. To us. Nobody can own him. The gift of the Lord Kamye of himself. Who could keep that gift?”

Esdan bowed his head down.

He had said to the mother, “He will be free.” And she had said, “Yes.”

He said at last, “May I hold him?”

The grandmother stopped rocking and held still a while. “Yes,” she said. She raised herself up and very carefully transferred the sleeping baby into Esdan’s arms, onto his lap.

“You do hold my joy,” she said.

The child weighed nothing—six or seven pounds. It was like holding a warm flower, a tiny animal, a bird. The swaddling cloth trailed down across the stones. Gana gathered it up and laid it softly around the baby, hiding his face. Tense and nervous, jealous, full of pride, she knelt there. Before long she took the baby back against her heart. “There,” she said, and her face softened into happiness.

That night Esdan, sleeping in the room that looked out over the terraces of Yaramera, dreamed that he had lost a little round, flat stone that he always carried with him in a pouch. The stone was from the pueblo. When he held it in his palm and warmed it, it was able to speak, to talk with him. But he had not talked with it for a long time. Now he realised he did not have it. He had lost it, left it somewhere. He thought it was in the basement of the Embassy. He tried to get into the basement, but the door was locked, and he could not find the other door.

He woke. Early morning. No need to get up. He should think about what to do, what to say, when Rayaye came back.

He could not. He thought about the dream, the stone that talked. He wished he had heard what it said. He thought about the pueblo. His father’s brother’s family had lived in Arkanan Pueblo in the Far South Highlands. In his boyhood, every year in the heart of the northern winter, Esi had flown down there for forty days of summer. With his parents at first, later on alone.

His uncle and aunt had grown up in Darranda and were not pueblo people. Their children were. They had grown up in Arkanan and belonged to it entirely. The eldest, Suhan, fourteen years older than Esdan, had been born with irreparable brain and neural defects, and it was for his sake that his parents had settled in a pueblo. There was a place for him there. He became a herdsman. He went up on the mountains with the yama, animals the South Hainish had brought over from 0 a millennium or so ago. He looked after the animals. He came back to live in the pueblo only in winter. Esi saw him seldom, and was glad of it, finding Suhan a fearful figure— big, shambling, foul-smelling, with a loud braying voice, mouthing incomprehensible words. Esi could not understand why Suhan’s parents and sisters loved him. He thought they pretended to.

No one could love him.

To adolescent Esdan it was still a problem. His cousin Noy, Suhan’s sister, who had become the Water Chief of Arkanan, told him it was not a problem but a mystery. “You see how Suhan is our guide?” she said. “Look at it. He led my parents here to live. So my sister and I were born here. So you come to stay with us here. So you’ve learned to live in the pueblo. You’ll never be just a city man. Because Suhan guided you here. Guided us all. Into the mountains.”

“He didn’t really guide us,” the fourteen-year-old argued.

“Yes, he did. We followed his weakness. His incompleteness. Failure’s open. Look at water, Esi. It finds the weak places in the rock, the openings, the hollows, the absences. Following water we come where we belong.” Then she had gone off to arbitrate a dispute over the usage rights to an irrigation system outside town, for the east side of the mountains was very dry country, and the people of Arkanan were contentious, though hospitable, and the Water Chief stayed busy.

But Suhan’s condition had been irreparable, his weakness inaccessible even to the wondrous medical skills of Hain. This baby was dying of a disease that could be cured by a mere series of injections. It was wrong to accept his illness, his death. It was wrong to let him be cheated out of his life by circumstance, bad luck, an unjust society, a fatalistic religion. A religion that fostered and encouraged the terrible passivity of the slaves, that told these women to do nothing, to let the child waste away and die.

He should interfere, he should do something, what could be done?

“How long has he lived?”

“As long as his life.”

There was nothing they could do. Nowhere to go. No one to turn to. A cure for avo existed, in some places, for some children. Not in this place, not for this child. Neither anger nor hope served any purpose. Nor grief. It was not the time for grief yet. Rekam was here with them, and they would delight in him as long as he was here. As long as his life. He is my great gift. You do hold my joy.

This was a strange place to come to learn the quality of joy. Water is my guide, he thought. His hands still felt what it had been like to hold the child, the light weight, the brief warmth.

He was out on the terrace late the next morning, waiting for Kamsa and the baby to come out as they usually did, but the older veot came instead. “Mr. Old Music, I must ask you to stay indoors for a time,” he said.

“Zadyo, I’m not going to run away,” Esdan said, sticking out his swathed lump of a foot.

“I’m sorry, sir.”

He stumped crossly indoors after the veot and was locked into a downstairs room, a windowless storage space behind the kitchens. They had fixed it up with a cot, a table and chair, a pisspot, and a battery lamp for when the generator failed, as it did for a while most days. “Are you expecting an attack, then?” he said when he saw these preparations, but the veot replied only by locking the door. Esdan sat on the cot and meditated, as he had learned to do in Arkanan Pueblo. He cleared distress and anger from his mind by going through the long repetitions: health and good work, courage, patience, peace, for himself, health and good work, courage, patience, peace for the zadyo … for Kamsa, for baby Rekam, for Rayaye, for Heo, for Taulenem, for the oga, for Nemeo who had put him in the crouchcage, for Alatual who had put him in the crouchcage, for Gana who had bound his foot and blessed him, for people he knew in the Embassy, in the city, health and good work, courage, patience, peace… . That went well, but the meditation itself was a failure. He could not stop thinking. So he thought. He thought about what he could do. He found nothing. He was weak as water, helpless as the baby. He imagined himself speaking on a holonet with a script saying that the Ekumen reluctantly approved the limited use of biological weapons in order to end the civil war. He imagined himself on the holonet dropping the script and saying that the Ekumen would never approve the use of biological weapons for any reason. Both imaginings were fantasies. Rayaye’s schemes were fantasies.

Seeing that his hostage was useless, Rayaye would have him shot. How long has he lived? As long as sixty-two years. A much fairer share of time than Rekam was getting. His mind went on past thinking.

The zadyo opened the door and told him he could come out.

“How close is the Liberation Army, zadyo?” he asked. He expected no answer. He went out onto the terrace. It was late afternoon. Kamsa was there, sitting with the baby at her breast. Her nipple was in his mouth, but he was not sucking. She covered her breast. Her face as she did so looked sad for the first time.

“Is he asleep? May I hold him?” Esdan said, sitting by her.

She shifted the little bundle over to his lap. Her face was still troubled. Esdan thought the child’s breathing was more difficult, harder work. But he was awake, and looked up into Esdan’s face with his big eyes. Esdan made faces, sticking out his lips and blinking. He won a soft little smile.

“The hands say, that army do come,” Kamsa said in her very soft voice.

“The Liberation?”

“Enna. Some army.”

“From across the river?”

“I think.”

“They’re assets—freedmen. They’re your own people. They won’t hurt you.” Maybe.

She was frightened. Her control was perfect, but she was frightened. She had seen the Uprising, here. And the reprisals.

“Hide out, if you can, if there’s bombing or fighting,” he said. “Underground. There must be hiding places here.”

She thought and said, “Yes.”

It was peaceful in the gardens of Yaramera. No sound but the wind rustling leaves and the faint buzz of the generator.

Even the burned, jagged ruins of the house looked mellowed, ageless. The worst has happened, said the ruins. To them.

Maybe not to Kamsa and Heo, Gana and Esdan. But there was no hint of violence in the summer air. The baby smiled its vague smile again, nestling in Esdan’s arms. He thought of the stone he had lost in his dream.

He was locked into the windowless room for the night. He had no way to know what time it was when he was roused by noise, brought stark awake by a series of shots and explosions, gunfire or handbombs. There was silence, then a second series of bangs and cracks, fainter. Silence again, stretching on and on. Then he heard a flyer right over the house as if circling, sounds inside the house: a shout, running. He lighted the lamp, struggled into his trousers, hard to pull on over the swathed foot. When he heard the flyer coming back and an explosion, he leapt in panic for the door, knowing nothing but that he had to get out of this deathtrap room. He had always feared fire, dying in fire. The door was solid wood, solidly bolted into its solid frame. He had no hope at all of breaking it down and knew it even in his panic. He shouted once, “Let me out of here!” then got control of himself, returned to the cot, and after a minute sat down on the floor between the cot and the wall, as sheltered a place as the room afforded, trying to imagine what was going on. A Liberation raid and Rayaye’s men shooting back, trying to bring the flyer down, was what he imagined.

Dead silence. It went on and on.

His lamp flickered.

He got up and stood at the door.

“Let me out!”

No sound.

A single shot. Voices again, running feet again, shouting, calling. After another long silence, distant voices, the sound of men coming down the corridor outside the room. A man said, “Keep them out there for now,” a flat, harsh voice. He hesitated and nerved himself and shouted out, “I’m a prisoner! In here!”

A pause.

“Who’s in there?”

It was no voice he had heard. He was good at voices, faces, names, intentions.

“Esdardon Aya of the Embassy of the Ekumen.”

“Mighty Lord!” the voice said.

“Get me out of here, will you?”

There was no reply, but the door was rattled vainly on its massive hinges, was thumped; more voices outside, more thumping and banging. “Ax,” somebody said, “Find the key,” somebody else said; they went off. Esdan waited. He fought down a repeated impulse to laugh, afraid of hysteria, but it was funny, stupidly funny, all the shouting through the door and seeking keys and axes, a farce in the middle of a battle. What battle?

He had had it backwards. Liberation men had entered the house and killed Rayaye’s men, taking most of them by surprise. They had been waiting for Rayaye’s flyer when it came. They must have had contacts among the field hands, informers, guides. Sealed in his room, he had heard only the noisy end of the business. When he was let out, they were dragging out the dead. He saw the horribly maimed body of one of the young men, Alatual or Nemeo, come apart as they dragged it, ropy blood and entrails stretching out along the floor, the legs left behind. The man dragging the corpse was nonplussed and stood there holding the shoulders of the torso. “Well, shit,” he said, and Esdan stood gasping, again trying not to laugh, not to vomit.

“Come on,” said the men with him, and he came on.

Early-morning light slanted through broken windows. Esdan kept looking around, seeing none of the housepeople. The men took him into the room with the packdog head over the mantel. Six or seven men were gathered around the table there.

They wore no uniforms, though some had the yellow knot or ribbon of the Liberation on their cap or sleeve. They were ragged, though, hard. Some were dark, some had beige or clayey or bluish skin, all of them looked edgy and dangerous.

One of those with him, a thin, tall man, said in the harsh voice that had said “Mighty Lord” outside the door: “This is him.”

“I’m Esdardon Aya, Old Music, of the Embassy of the Ekumen,” he said again, as easily as he could. “I was being held here. Thank you for liberating me.”

Several of them stared at him the way people who had never seen an alien stared, taking in his red-brown skin and deep-set, white-cornered eyes and the subtler differences of skull structure and features. One or two stared more aggressively, as if to test his assertion, show they’d believe he was what he said he was when he proved it. A big, broad-shouldered man, white-skinned and with brownish hair, pure dusty, pure blood of the ancient conquered race, looked at Esdan a long time. “We came to do that,” he said.

He spoke softly, the asset voice. It might take them a generation or more to learn to raise their voices, to speak free.

“How did you know I was here? The fieldnet?”

It was what they had called the clandestine system of information passed from voice to ear, field to compound to city and back again, long before there was a holonet. The Hame had used the fieldnet and it had been the chief instrument of the Uprising.

A short, dark man smiled and nodded slightly, then froze his nod as he saw that the others weren’t giving out any information.

“You know who brought me here, then—Rayaye. I don’t know who he was acting for. What I can tell you, I will.” Relief had made him stupid, he was talking too much, playing hands-around-the-flowerbed while they played tough guy. “I have friends here,” he went on in a more neutral voice, looking at each of their faces in turn, direct but civil. “Bondswomen, house people. I hope they’re all right.”

“Depends,” said a grey-haired, slight man who looked very tired.

“A woman with a baby, Kamsa. An old woman, Gana.”

A couple of them shook their heads to signify ignorance or indifference. Most made no response at all. He looked around at them again, repressing anger and irritation at this pomposity, this tight-lipped stuff.

“We need to know what you were doing here,” the brown-haired man said.

“A Liberation Army contact in the city was taking me from the Embassy to Liberation Command, about fifteen days ago.

We were intercepted in the Divide by Rayaye’s men. They brought me here. I spent some time in a crouchcage,” Esdan said in the same neutral voice. “My foot was hurt, and I can’t walk much. I talked twice with Rayaye. Before I say anything else I think you can understand that I need to know who I’m talking to.”

The tall thin man who had released him from the locked room went round the table and conferred briefly with the grey-haired man. The brown-haired one listened, consented. The tall thin one spoke to Esdan in his uncharacteristically harsh, flat voice: “We are a special mission of the Advance Army of the World Liberation. I am Marshal Metoy.” The others all said their names. The big brown-haired man was General Banarkamye, the tired older man was General Tueyo. They said their rank with their name, but didn’t use it addressing one another, nor did they call him Mister. Before Liberation, rentspeople had seldom used any titles to one another but those of parentage: father, sister, aunty. Titles were something that went in front of an owner’s name: Lord, Master, Mister, Boss. Evidently the Liberation had decided to do without them. It pleased him to find an army that didn’t click its heels and shout Sir! But he wasn’t certain what army he’d found.

“They kept you in that room?” Metoy asked him. He was a strange man, a flat, cold voice, a pale, cold face, but he wasn’t as jumpy as the others. He seemed sure of himself, used to being in charge.

“They locked me in there last night. As if they’d had some kind of warning of trouble coming. Usually I had a room upstairs.”

“You may go there now,” Metoy said. “Stay indoors.”

“I will. Thank you again,” he said to them all. “Please, when you have word of Kamsa and Gana—?” He did not wait to be snubbed, but turned and went out.

One of the younger men went with him. He had named himself Zadyo Tema. The Army of the Liberation was using the old veot ranks, then. There were veots among them, Esdan knew, but Tema was not one. He was light-skinned and had the city-dusty accent, soft, dry, clipped. Esdan did not try to talk to him. Tema was extremely nervous, spooked by the night’s work of killing at close quarters or by something else; there was an almost constant tremor in his shoulders, arms, and hands, and his pale face was set in a painful scowl. He was not in a mood for chitchat with an elderly civilian alien prisoner.

In war everybody is a prisoner, the historian Henennemores had written.

Esdan had thanked his new captors for liberating him, but he knew where, at the moment, he stood. It was still Yaramera.

But there was some relief in seeing his room again, sitting down in the one-armed chair by the window to look out at the early sunlight, the long shadows of trees across the lawns and terraces.

None of the housepeople came out as usual to go about their work or take a break from it. Nobody came to his room.

The morning wore on. He did what exercises of the tanhai he could do with his foot as it was. He sat aware, dozed off, woke up, tried to sit aware, sat restless, anxious, working over words: A special mission of the Advance Army of World Liberation.

The Legitimate Government called the enemy army “insurgent forces” or “rebel hordes” on the holonews. It had started out calling itself the Army of the Liberation, nothing about World Liberation; but he had been cut off from any coherent contact with the freedom fighters ever since the Uprising, and cut off from all information of any kind since the Embassy was sealed—except for information from other worlds light-years away, of course, there’d been no end of that, the ansible was full of it, but of what was going on two streets away, nothing, not a word. In the Embassy he’d been ignorant, useless, helpless, passive. Exactly as he was here. Since the war began he’d been, as Henennemores had said, a prisoner. Along with everybody else on Werel. A prisoner in the cause of liberty.

He feared that he would come to accept his helplessness, that it would persuade his soul. He must remember what this war was about. But let the liberation come soon, he thought, come set me free!

In the middle of the afternoon the young zadyo brought him a plate of cold food, obviously scraps of leftovers they’d found in the kitchens, and a bottle of beer. He ate and drank gratefully. But it was clear that they had not released the housepeople. Or had killed them. He would not let his mind stay on that.

After sunset the zadyo came back and brought him downstairs to the packdog room. The generator was off, of course; nothing had kept it going but old Saka’s eternal tinkering. Men carried electric torches, and in the packdog room a couple of big oil lamps burned on the table, putting a romantic, golden light on the faces round it, throwing deep shadows behind them.

“Sit down,” said the brown-haired general, Banarkamye—Readbible, his name could be translated. “We have some questions to ask you.”

Silent but civil assent.

They asked how he had got out of the Embassy, who his contacts with the Liberation had been, where he had been going, why he had tried to go, what happened during the kidnapping, who had brought him here, what they had asked him, what they had wanted from him. Having decided during the afternoon that candor would serve him best, he answered all the questions directly and briefly until the last one.

“I personally am on your side of this war,” he said, “but the Ekumen is necessarily neutral. Since at the moment I’m the only alien on Werel free to speak, whatever I say may be taken, or mistaken, as coming from the Embassy and the Stabiles.

That was my value to Rayaye. It may be my value to you. But it’s a false value. I can’t speak for the Ekumen. I have no authority.”

“They wanted you to say the Ekumen supports the Jits,” the tired man, Tueyo, said.

Esdan nodded.

“Did they talk about using any special tactics, weapons?” That was Banarkamye, grim, trying not to weight the question.

“I’d rather answer that question when I’m behind your lines, General, talking to people I know in Liberation Command.”

“You’re talking to the World Liberation Army command. Refusal to answer can be taken as evidence of complicity with the enemy.” That was Metoy, glib, hard, harsh-voiced.

“I know that, Marshal.”

They exchanged a glance. Despite his open threat, Metoy was the one Esdan felt inclined to trust. He was solid. The others were nervy, unsteady. He was sure now that they were factionalists. How big their faction was, how much at odds with Liberation Command it was, he could learn only by what they might let slip.

“Listen, Mr. Old Music,” Tueyo said. Old habits die hard. “We know you worked for the Hame. You helped send people to Yeowe. You backed us then.” Esdan nodded. “You must back us now. We are speaking to you frankly. We have information that the Jits are planning a counterattack. What that means, now, it means that they’re going to use the bibo. It can’t mean anything else. That can’t happen. They can’t be let do that. They have to be stopped.”

“You say the Ekumen is neutral,” Banarkamye said. “That is a lie. A hundred years the Ekumen wouldn’t let this world join them, because we had the bibo. Had it, didn’t use it, just had it was enough. Now they say they’re neutral. Now when it matters! Now when this world is part of them! They have got to act. To act against that weapon. They have got to stop the Jits from using it.”

“If the Legitimates did have it, if they did plan to use it, and if I could get word to the Ekumen—what could they do?”

“You speak. You tell the Jit President: the Ekumen says stop there. The Ekumen will send ships, send troops. You back us! If you aren’t with us, you are with them!”

“General, the nearest ship is light-years away. The Legitimates know that.”

“But you can call them, you have the transmitter.”

“The ansible in the Embassy?”

“The Jits have one of them, too.”

“The ansible in the Foreign Ministry was destroyed in the Uprising. In the first attack on the government buildings. They blew the whole block up.”

“How do we know that?”

“Your own forces did it. General, do you think the Legitimates have an ansible link with the Ekumen that you don’t have?

They don’t. They could have taken over the Embassy and its ansible, but in so doing they’d have lost what credibility they have with the Ekumen. And what good would it have done them? The Ekumen has no troops to send,” and he added, because he was suddenly not sure Banarkamye knew it, “as you know. If it did, it would take them years to get here. For that reason and many others, the Ekumen has no army and fights no wars.”

He was deeply alarmed by their ignorance, their amateurishness, their fear. He kept alarm and impatience out of his voice, speaking quietly and looking at them unworriedly, as if expecting understanding and agreement. The mere appearance of such confidence sometimes fulfills itself. Unfortunately, from the looks of their faces, he was telling the two generals they’d been wrong and telling Metoy he’d been right. He was taking sides in a disagreement.

Banarkamye said, “Keep all that a while yet,” and went back over the first interrogation, recreating questions, asking for more details, listening to them expressionlessly. Saving face. Showing he distrusted the hostage. He kept pressing for anything Rayaye had said concerning an invasion or a counterattack in the south. Esdan repeated several times that Rayaye had said President Oyo was expecting a Liberation invasion of this province, downriver from here. Each time he added, “I have no idea whether anything Rayaye told me was the truth.” The fourth or fifth time round he said, “Excuse me, General. I must ask again for some word about the people here—”

“Did you know anybody at this place before you came here?” a younger man asked sharply.

“No. I’m asking about house people. They were kind to me. Kamsa’s baby is sick, it needs care. I’d like to know they’re being looked after.”

The generals were conferring with each other, paying no attention to this diversion.

“Anybody stayed here, a place like this, after the Uprising, is a collaborator,” said the zadyo, Tema.

“Where were they supposed to go?” Esdan asked, trying to keep his tone easy. “This isn’t liberated country. The bosses still work these fields with slaves. They still use the crouchcage here.” His voice shook a little on the last words, and he cursed himself for it.

Banarkamye and Tueyo were still conferring, ignoring his question. Metoy stood up and said, “Enough for tonight. Come with me.”

Esdan limped after him across the hall, up the stairs. The young zadyo followed, hurrying, evidently sent by Banarkamye.

No private conversations allowed. Metoy, however, stopped at the door of Esdan’s room and said, looking down at him,

“The house people will be looked after.”

“Thank you,” Esdan said with warmth. He added, “Gana was caring for this injury. I need to see her.” If they wanted him alive and undamaged, no harm using his ailments as leverage. If they didn’t, no use in anything much.

He slept little and badly. He had always thrived on information and action. It was exhausting to be kept both ignorant and helpless, crippled mentally and physically. And he was hungry.

Soon after sunrise he tried his door and found it locked. He knocked and shouted a while before anybody came, a young fellow looking scared, probably a sentry, and then Tema, sleepy and scowling, with the door key.

“I want to see Gana,” Esdan said, fairly peremptory. “She looks after this,” gesturing to his saddled foot. Tema shut the door without saying anything. After an hour or so, the key rattled in the lock again and Gana came in. Metoy followed her.

Tema followed him.

Gana stood in the reverence to Esdan. He came forward quickly and put his hands on her arms and laid his cheek against hers. “Lord Kamye be praised I see you well!” he said, words that had often been said to him by people like her. “Kamsa, the baby, how are they?”

She was scared, shaky, her hair unkempt, her eyelids red, but she recovered herself pretty well from his utterly unexpected brotherly greeting. “They are in the kitchen now, sir,” she said. “The army men, they said that foot do pain you.”

“That’s what I said to them. Maybe you’d re-bandage it for me.”

He sat down on the bed and she got to work unwrapping the cloths.

“Are the other people all right? Heo? Choyo?”

She shook her head once.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He could not ask her more.

She did not do as good a job bandaging his foot as before. She had little strength in her hands to pull the wrappings tight, and she hurried her work, unnerved by the strangers watching.

“I hope Choyo’s back in the kitchen,” he said, half to her, half to them. “Somebody’s got to do some cooking here.”

‘Yes, sir,” she whispered.

Not sir, not master! he wanted to warn her, fearing for her. He looked up at Metoy, trying to judge his attitude, and could not.

Gana finished her job. Metoy sent her off with a word, and sent the zadyo after her. Gana went gladly, Tema resisted.

“General Banarkamye—” he began. Metoy looked at him. The young man hesitated, scowled, obeyed.

“I will look after these people,” Metoy said. “I always have. I was a compound boss.” He gazed at Esdan with his cold black eyes. “I’m a cutfree. Not many like me left, these days.”

Esdan said after a moment, “Thanks, Metoy. They need help. They don’t understand.”

Metoy nodded.

“I don’t understand either,” Esdan said. “Does the Liberation plan to invade? Or did Rayaye invent that as an excuse for talking about deploying the bibo? Does Oyo believe it? Do you believe it? Is the Liberation Army across the river there? Did you come from it? Who are you? I don’t expect you to answer.”

“I won’t,” the enunch said.

If he was a double agent, Esdan thought after he left, he was working for Liberation Command. Or he hoped so. Metoy was a man he wanted on his side.

But I don’t know what my side is, he thought, as he went back to his chair by the window. The Liberation, of course, yes, but what is the Liberation? Not an ideal, the freedom of the enslaved. Not now. Never again. Since the Uprising, the Liberation is an army, a political body, a great number of people and leaders and would-be leaders, ambitions and greed clogging hopes and strength, a clumsy amateur semi-government lurching from violence to compromise, ever more complicated, never again to know the beautiful simplicity of the ideal, the pure idea of liberty. And that’s what I wanted, what I worked for, all these years. To muddle the nobly simple structure of the hierarchy of caste by infecting it with the idea of justice. And then to confuse the nobly simple structure of the ideal of human equality by trying to make it real. The monolithic lie frays out into a thousand incompatible truths, and that’s what I wanted. But I am caught in the insanity, the stupidity, the meaningless brutality of the event.

They all want to use me, but I’ve outlived my usefulness, he thought; and the thought went through him like a shaft of clear light. He had kept thinking there was something he could do. There wasn’t.

It was a kind of freedom.

No wonder he and Metoy had understood each other wordlessly and at once.

The zadyo Tema came to his door to conduct him downstairs. Back to the packdog room. All the leader-types were drawn to that room, its dour masculinity. Only five men were there this time, Metoy, the two generals, the two who used the rank of rega. Banarkamye dominated them all. He was through asking questions and was in the order-giving vein. “We leave here tomorrow,” he said to Esdan. “You with us. We will have access to the Liberation holonet. You will speak for us. You will tell the Jit government that the Ekumen knows they are planning to deploy banned weapons and warns them that if they do, there will be instant and terrible retaliation.”

Esdan was light-headed with hunger and sleeplessness. He stood still—he had not been invited to sit down—and looked down at the floor, his hand at his sides. He murmured barely audibly, “Yes, master.”

Banarkamye’s head snapped up, his eyes flashed. “What did you say?”

“Enna.”

“Who do you think you are?”

“A prisoner of war.”

“You can go.”

Esdan left. Tema followed him but did not stop or direct him. He made his way straight to the kitchen, where he heard the rattle of pans, and said, “Choyo, please, give me something to eat!” The old man, cowed and shaky, mumbled and apologised and fretted, but produced some fruit and stale bread. Esdan sat at the worktable and devoured it. He offered some to Tema, who refused stiffly. Esdan ate it all. When he was done he limped on out through the kitchen exitways to a side door leading to the great terrace. He hoped to see Kamsa there, but none of the house people were out. He sat on a bench in the balustrade that looked down on the long reflecting pool. Tema stood nearby, on duty.

“You said the bondspeople on a place like this, if they didn’t join the Uprising, were collaborators,” Esdan said.

Tema was motionless, but listening.

“You don’t think any of them might just not have understood what was going on? And still don’t understand? This is a benighted place, zadyo. Hard to even imagine freedom, here.”

The young man resisted answering for a while, but Esdan talked on, trying to make some contact with him, get through to him. Suddenly something he said popped the lid.

“Usewomen,” Tema said. “Get fucked by blacks, every night. All they are, fucks. Jits’ whores. Bearing their black brats, yesmaster yesmaster. You said it, they don’t know what freedom is. Never will. Can’t liberate anybody lets a black fuck ‘em.

They’re foul. Dirty, can’t get clean. They got black jizz through and through ‘em. Jit-jizz!” He spat on the terrace and wiped his mouth.

Esdan sat still, looking down over the still water of the pool to the lower terraces, the big tree, the misty river, the far green shore. May he be well and work well, have patience, compassion, peace. What use was I, ever? All I did. It never was any use. Patience, compassion, peace. They are your own people. … He looked down at the thick blob of spittle on the yellow sandstone of the terrace. Fool, to leave his own people a lifetime behind him and come to meddle with another world. Fool, to think you could give anybody freedom. That was what death was for. To get us out of the crouchcage.

He got up and limped towards the house in silence. The young man followed him.

The lights came back on just as it was getting dark. They must have let old Saka go back to his tinkering. Preferring twilight, Esdan turned the room light off. He was lying on his bed when Kamsa knocked and came in, carrying a tray.

“Kamsa!” he said, struggling up, and would have hugged her, but the tray prevented him. “Rekam is—?”

“With my mother,” she murmured.

“He’s all right?”

The backward nod. She set the tray down on the bed, as there was no table.

“You’re all right? Be careful, Kamsa. I wish I— They’re leaving tomorrow, they say. Stay out of their way if you can.”

“I do. Do you be safe, sir,” she said in her soft voice. He did not know if it was a question or a wish. He made a little rueful gesture, smiling. She turned to leave.

“Kamsa, is Heo—?”

“She was with that one. In his bed.”

After a pause he said, “Is there anywhere you can hide out?” He was afraid that Banarkamye’s men might execute these people when they left, as “collaborators” or to hide their own tracks.

“We got a hole to go to, like you said,” she said.

“Good. Go there, if you can. Vanish! Stay out of sight.”

She said, “I will hold fast, sir.”

She was closing the door behind her when the sound of a flyer approaching buzzed the windows. They both stood still, she in the doorway, he near the window. Shouts downstairs, outside, men running. There was more than one flyer, approaching from the southeast. “Kill the lights!” somebody shouted. Men were running out to the flyers parked on the lawn and terrace. The window flared up with light, the air with a shattering explosion.

“Come with me,” Kamsa said, and took his hand and pulled him after her, out the door, down the hall and through a service door he had never even seen. He hobbled with her as fast as he could down ladderlike stone stairs, through a back passage, out into the stable warren. They came outdoors just as a series of explosions rocked everything around them. They hurried across the courtyard through overwhelming noise and the leap of fire, Kamsa still pulling him along with complete sureness of where she was going, and ducked into one of the storerooms at the end of the stables. Gana was there and one of the old bondsmen, opening up a trapdoor in the floor. They went down, Kamsa with a leap, the others slow and awkward on the wooden ladder. Esdan most awkward, landing badly on his broken foot. The old man came last and pulled the trap shut over them. Gana had a battery lamp, but kept it on only briefly, showing a big, low, dirt-floored cellar, shelves, an archway to another room, a heap of wooden crates, five faces: the baby awake, gazing silent as ever from its sling on Gana’s shoulder. Then darkness. And for some time silence.

They groped at the crates, set them down for seats at random in the darkness.

A new series of explosions, seeming far away, but the ground and the darkness shivered. They shivered in it. “0 Kamye,”

one of them whispered.

Esdan sat on the shaky crate and let the jab and stab of pain in his foot sink into a burning throb.

Explosions: three, four.

Darkness was a substance, like thick water.

“Kamsa,” he murmured.

She made some sound that located her near him.

“Thank you.”

“You said hide, then we did talk of this place,” she whispered.

The old man breathed wheezily and cleared his throat often. The baby’s breathing was also audible, a small uneven sound, almost panting.

“Give me him.” That was Gana. She must have transferred the baby to his mother.

Kamsa whispered, “Not now.”

The old man spoke suddenly and loudly, startling them all: “No water in this!”

Kamsa shushed him and Gana hissed, “Don’t shout, fool man!”

“Deaf,” Kamsa murmured to Esdan, with a hint of laughter.

If they had no water, their hiding time was limited; the night, the next day; even that might be too long for a woman nursing a baby. Kamsa’s mind was running on the same track as Esdan’s. She said, “How do we know, should we come out?”

“Chance it, when we have to.”

There was a long silence. It was hard to accept that one’s eyes did not adjust to the darkness, that however long one waited one would see nothing. It was cave-cool. Esdan wished his shirt were warmer.

“You keep him warm,” Gana said.

“I do,” Kamsa murmured.

“Those men, they were bondsfolk?” That was Kamsa whispering to him. She was quite near him, to his left.

“Yes. Freed bondsfolk. From the north.”

She said, “Lotsalot different men come here, since the old Owner did die. Army soldiers, some. But no bondsfolk before.

They shot Heo. They shot Vey and old Seneo. He didn’t die, but he’s shot.”

“Somebody from the field compound must have led them, showed them where the guards were posted. But they couldn’t tell the bondsfolk from the soldiers. Where were you when they came?”

“Sleeping, back of the kitchen. All us housefolk. Six. That man did stand there like a risen dead. He said, ‘Lie down there! Don’t stir a hair!’ So we did that. Heard them shooting and shouting all over the house. Oh, mighty Lord! I did fear!

Then no more shooting, and that man did come back to us and hold his gun at us and take us out to the old house-compound. They did get that old gate shut on us. Like old days.”

“For what did they do that if they are bondsfolk?” Gana’s voice said from the darkness.

“Trying to get free,” Esdan said dutifully.

“How free? Shooting and killing? Kill a girl in the bed?”

“They do all fight all the others, mama,” Kamsa said.

“I thought all that was done, back three years,” the old woman said. Her voice sounded strange. She was in tears. “I thought that was freedom then.”

“They did kill the master in his bed!” the old man shouted out at the top of his voice, shrill, piercing. “What can come of that!”

There was a bit of a scuffle in the darkness. Gana was shaking the old fellow, hissing at him to shut up. He cried, “Let me go!” but quieted down, wheezing and muttering.

“Mighty Lord,” Kamsa murmured, with that desperate laughter in her voice.

The crate was increasingly uncomfortable, and Esdan wanted to get his aching foot up or at least level. He lowered himself to the ground. It was cold, gritty, unpleasant to the hands. There was nothing to lean against. “If you make a light for a minute, Gana,” he said, “we might find sacks, something to lie down on.”

The world of the cellar flashed into being around them, amazing in its intricate precision. They found nothing to use but the loose board shelves. They set down several of these, making a kind of platform, and crept onto it as Gana switched them back into formless simple night. They were all cold. They huddled up against one another, side to side, back to back.

After a long time, an hour or more, in which the utter silence of the cellar was unbroken by any noise, Gana said in an impatient whisper, “Everybody up there did die, I think.”

“That would simplify things for us,” Esdan murmured.

“But we are the buried ones,” said Kamsa.

Their voices roused the baby and he whimpered, the first complaint Esdan had ever heard him make. It was a tiny, weary grizzling or fretting, not a cry. It roughened his breathing and he gasped between his frettings. “Oh, baby, baby, hush now, hush,” the mother murmured, and Esdan felt her rocking her body, cradling the baby close to keep him warm. She sang almost inaudibly, “Suna meya, suna na … Sura rena, sura na …” Monotonous, rhythmic, buzzy, purring, the sound made warmth, made comfort.

He must have dozed. He was lying curled up on the planks. He had no idea how long they had been in the cellar.

I have lived here forty years desiring freedom, his mind said to him. That desire brought me here. It will bring me out of here. I will hold fast.

He asked the others if they had heard anything since the bombing raid. They all whispered no.

He rubbed his head. “What do you think, Gana?” he said.

“I think the cold air does harm that baby,” she said in almost her normal voice, which was always low.

“You do talk? What do you say?” the old man shouted. Kamsa, next to him, patted him and quieted him.

“I’ll go look,” Gana said.

“I’ll go.”

“You got one foot on you,” the old woman said in a disgusted tone. She grunted and leaned hard on Esdan’s shoulder as she stood up. “Now be still.” She did not turn on the light, but felt her way over to the ladder and climbed it, with a little whuff of breath at each step. She pushed, heaved at the trapdoor. An edge of light showed. They could dimly see the cellar and each other and the dark blob of Gana’s head up in the light. She stood there a long time, then let the trap down. “Nobody,”

she whispered from the ladder. “No noise. Looks like first morning.”

“Better wait,” Esdan said.

She came back and lowered herself down among them again. After a time she said, “We go out, it’s strangers in the house, some other army soldiers. Then where?”

“Can you get to the field compound?” Esdan suggested.

“It’s a long road.”

After a while he said, “Can’t know what to do till we know who’s up there. All right. But let me go out, Gana.”

“For what?”

“Because I’ll know who they are,” he said, hoping he was right.

“And they, too,” Kamsa said, with that strange little edge of laughter. “No mistaking you, I guess.”

“Right,” he said. He struggled to his feet, found his way to the ladder, and climbed it laboriously. I’m too old for this, he thought again. He pushed up the trap and looked out. He listened for a long time. At last he whispered to those below him in the dark, “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” and crawled out, scrambling awkwardly to his feet. He caught his breath: the air of the place was thick with burning. The light was strange, dim. He followed the wall till he could peer out of the storeroom doorway.

What had been left of the old house was down like the rest of it, blown open, smouldering and masked in stinking smoke.

Black embers and broken glass covered the cobbled yard. Nothing moved except the smoke. Yellow smoke, grey smoke.

Above it all was the even, clear blue of dawn.

He went round onto the terrace, limping and stumbling, for his foot shot blinding pains up his leg. Coming to the balustrade he saw the blackened wrecks of the two flyers. Half the upper terrace was a raw crater. Below it the gardens of Yaramera stretched beautiful and serene as ever, level below level, to the old tree and the river. A man lay across the steps that went down to the lower terrace; he lay easily, restfully, his arms outflung. Nothing moved but the creeping smoke and the white-flowered bushes nodding in a breath of wind.

The sense of being watched from behind, from the blank windows of the fragments of the house that still stood, was intolerable. “Is anybody here?” Esdan suddenly called out.

Silence.

He shouted again, louder.

There was an answer, a distant call, from around in front of the house. He limped his way down onto the path, out in the open, not seeking to conceal himself; what was the use? Men came around from the front of the house, three men, then a fourth—a woman. They were assets, roughly clothed, field hands they must be, come down from their compound. “I’m with some of the housepeople,” he said, stopping when they stopped, ten meters apart. “We hid out in a cellar. Is anybody else around?”

“Who are you?” one of them said, coming closer, peering, seeing the wrong color skin, the wrong kind of eyes.

“I’ll tell you who I am. But is it safe for us to come out? There’s old people, a baby. Are the soldiers gone?”

“They are dead,” the woman said, a tall, pale-skinned, bony-faced woman.

“One we found hurt,” said one of the men. “All the housepeople dead. Who did throw those bombs? What army?”

“I don’t know what army,” Esdan said. “Please, go tell my people they can come up. Back there, in the stables. Call out to them. Tell them who you are. I can’t walk.” The wrappings on his foot had worked loose, and the fractures had moved; the pain began to take away his breath. He sat down on the path, gasping. His head swam. The gardens of Yaramera grew very bright and very small and drew away and away from him, farther away than home.

He did not quite lose consciousness, but things were confused in his mind for a good while. There were a lot of people around, and they were outdoors, and everything stank of burnt meat, a smell that clung in the back of his mouth and made him retch. There was Kamsa, the tiny bluish shadowy sleeping face of the baby on her shoulder. There was Gana, saying to other people, “He did befriend us.” A young man with big hands talked to him and did something to his foot, bound it up again, tighter, causing terrible pain and then the beginning of relief.

He was lying down on his back on grass. Beside him a man was lying down on his back on grass. It was Metoy, the eunuch. Metoy’s scalp was bloody, the black hair burned short and brown. The dust-colored skin of his face was pale, bluish, like the baby’s. He lay quietly, blinking sometimes.

The sun shone down. People were talking, a lot of people, somewhere nearby, but he and Metoy were lying on the grass, and nobody bothered them.

“Were the flyers from Bellen, Metoy?” Esdan said.

“Came from the east.” Metoy’s harsh voice was weak and hoarse. “I guess they were.” After a while he said, “They want to cross the river.”

Esdan thought about this for a while. His mind still did not work well at all. “Who does?” he said finally.

“These people. The field hands. The assets of Yaramera. They want to go meet the Army.”

“The invasion?”

“The liberation.”

Esdan propped himself up on his elbows. Raising his head seemed to clear it, and he sat up. He looked over at Metoy.

“Will they find them?” he asked.

“If the Lord so wills,” said the eunuch.

Presently Metoy tried to prop himself up like Esdan, but failed. “I got blown up,” he said, short of breath. “Something hit my head. I see two for one.”

“Probably a concussion. Lie still. Stay awake. Were you with Banarkamye, or observing?”

“I’m in your line of work.”

Esdan nodded, the backward nod.

“Factions will be the death of us,” Metoy said faintly.

Kamsa came and squatted down beside Esdan. “They say we must go cross the river,” she told him in her soft voice. “To where the people-army will keep us safe. I don’t know.”

“Nobody knows, Kamsa.”

“I can’t take Rekam cross a river,” she whispered. Her face clenched up, her lips drawing back, her brows down. She wept, without tears and in silence. “The water is cold.”

“They’ll have boats, Kamsa. They’ll look after you and Rekam. Don’t worry. It’ll be all right.” He knew his words were meaningless.

“I can’t go,” she whispered.

“Stay here then,” Metoy said.

“They said that other army will come here.”

“It might. More likely ours will.”

She looked at Metoy. “You are the cutfree,” she said. “With those others.” She looked back at Esdan. “Choyo got killed.

All the kitchen is blown in pieces burning.” She hid her face in her arms.

Esdan sat up and reached out to her, stroking her shoulder and arm. He touched the baby’s fragile head with its thin, dry hair.

Gana came and stood over them. “All the field hands are going cross the river,” she said. “To be safe.”

“You’ll be safer here. Where there’s food and shelter.” Metoy spoke in short bursts, his eyes closed. “Than walking to meet an invasion.”

“I can’t take him, mama,” Kamsa whispered. “He has got to be warm. I can’t, I can’t take him.”

Gana stooped and looked into the baby’s face, touching it very softly with one finger. Her wrinkled face closed like a fist.

She straightened up, but not erect as she used to stand. She stood bowed. “All right,” she said. “We’ll stay.”

She sat down on the grass beside Kamsa. People were on the move around them. The woman Esdan had seen on the terrace stopped by Gana and said, “Come on, grandmother. Time to go. The boats are ready waiting.”

“Staying,” Gana said.

“Why? Can’t leave that old house you worked in?” the woman said, jeering, humoring. “It’s all burned up, grandmother!

Come on now. Bring that girl and her baby.” She looked at Esdan and Metoy, a flick-glance. They were not her concern.

“Come on,” she repeated. “Get up now.”

“Staying,” Gana said.

“You crazy housefolk,” the woman said, turned away, turned back, gave it up with a shrug, and went on.

A few others stopped, but none for more than a question, a moment. They streamed on down the terraces, the sunlit paths beside the quiet pools, down towards the boathouses beyond the great tree. After a while they were all gone.

The sun had grown hot. It must be near noon. Metoy was whiter than ever, but he sat up, saying he could see single, most of the time.

“We should get into the shade, Gana,” Esdan said. “Metoy, can you get up?”

He staggered and shambled, but walked without help, and they got to the shade of a garden wall. Gana went off to look for water. Kamsa was carrying Rekam in her arms, close against her chest, sheltered from the sun. She had not spoken for a long time. When they had settled down she said, half questioning, looking around dully, “We are all alone here.”

“There’ll be others stayed. In the compounds,” Metoy said. “They’ll turn up.”

Gana came back; she had no vessel to carry water in, but had soaked her scarf, and laid the cold wet cloth on Metoy’s head. He shuddered. “You can walk better, then we can go to the house-compound, cutfree,” she said. “Places we can live in, there.”

“House-compound is where I grew up, grandmother,” he said.

And presently, when he said he could walk, they made their halt and lame way down a road which Esdan vaguely remembered, the road to the crouchcage. It seemed a long road. They came to the high compound wall and the gate standing open.

Esdan turned to look back at the ruins of the great house for a moment. Gana stopped beside him.

“Rekam died,” she said under her breath.

He caught his breath. “When?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. She wants to hold him. She’s done with holding him, then she will let him go.” She looked in the open gateway at the rows of huts and longhouses, the dried-up garden patches, the dusty ground. “Lotsalot little babies are in there,” she said. “In that ground. Two of my own. Her sisters.” She went in, following Kamsa. Esdan stood a while longer in the gateway, and then he went in to do what there was for him to do: dig a grave for the child, and wait with the others for the Liberation.

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