Master of None (12 page)

Underneath her mild tone, Nathan sensed the edge in Yaenida’s voice. “She has suggested it might be better for all concerned if you were to become sahakharae, and has offered you a modest place as such within the Changriti House.” Before he could object, she continued in the same, mild voice, “I have already pointed out that this is not a fitting option for the son of the Nga’esha pratha h’máy.”

Nathan sat back on his heels. Warily, he glanced at Eraelin.
“Jah’-nari l’amae, may’m Vanarha sihtay hmah,”
he said firmly.
I will learn Vanar.
The woman scowled, irritated as Yaenida smiled faintly.

He kept his eyes meticulously averted as the two women argued in heated, clipped Vanar too fast for him to follow, trying to read from their gestures and expressions what he couldn’t understand. His legs began to cramp, but any shifting to ease his position would be a sign of boredom. The argument seesawed back and forth for several minutes, their rising voices punctuated with several slaps against the table, palm cupped for the maximum effect. Each time it happened, he jumped, unable to keep his nerves steady. They stopped speaking as if switched off. In the sudden quiet, he looked up.

“Remove your clothes, please, Nathan,” Yaenida said.

Taken aback, he stared at her. “Excuse me?”

“Remove your clothes, please,” she repeated.

Slowly, he stood and pulled the length of cloth from where it draped over his head, and unclipped it to let it unwind from his shoulders and torso. As he loosened the sati from his waist, the intricate folds around his legs came apart, spilling into a pile at his feet. He stood in only the short mati, and glanced at her questioningly, uncomfortable.

She nodded, and he pulled the mati over his head, leaving him nude but for his ridiculous gold anklet. As his flush spread down his face and reddened his chest, he glared up at the two women defiantly.

But neither Eraelin nor Yaenida seemed to be enjoying his humiliation. Yaenida had her cheek propped up on one hand, not even looking at him as she traced her finger in an idle pattern on the tabletop finish. Eraelin was gazing at him with the same detached indifference as the medical crew at public service. Her gaze lingered for a moment on the still-healing jagged gash down his left side, a permanent memento of Changriti displeasure. He resisted the urge to hide the scar protectively, then straightened to display it to her with perverse defiance. Her eyes narrowed, flicking briefly to his face in anger. Then she spoke, and he understood what she wanted by the motion of her hand before Yaenida translated.

“Turn around, Nathan.”

He did, and the lack of any erotic interest, or even any evidence they meant to degrade him, made him feel all the more naked and objectified. And infuriated.

“Thank you,” Yaenida said. “You may dress now.”

He turned around, unable to hide his resentment. “Don’t you want to examine my teeth?” he said sarcastically.

Eraelin could not understand what he said, but surprise shot across her face before she glared at Yaenida and asked an annoyed question. Obviously he was objecting to something considered perfectly normal and reasonable, his reaction out of place. His hands shook as he snatched the sati from the floor, winding it sloppily around himself before looping the bulk of it over his shoulder.

Yaenida did not change expression. “That won’t be necessary,” she said in a carefully neutral tone. “Your medical files cover that area. Aesthetics, however, is a subjective judgment.” She waved a hand at him, shooing him off. “You may go now.”

Stunned, he left without a word. As soon as the door closed behind him, several sahakharae grabbed his arms to hustle him into the men’s quarters. He knew he was in trouble by their nervous looks at each other as they rearranged his sati in silence. He removed the gold anklet and handed it firmly back to its owner.

This time, Yaenida did not make him wait long.

Eraelin was gone, and Yaenida had been moved to the mountain of pillows, her water pipe already stoked and bubbling. He bowed and knelt patiently. Yaenida let him sit for several minutes, scowling moodily. Yronae and her eldest daughter watched him skeptically from the side, no doubt expecting him to screw up and breach protocol. He wondered sourly if they’d placed bets on him.

“If you have any questions, you have permission to ask them now,” Yaenida said brittlely.

“Thank you,” he said with exaggerated politeness. “May I ask what that was all about?”

“That—”
she leaned forward, her eyes glittering with restrained anger—“was a financial negotiation, and none of your damned business.”

It would have been easy to let his anger explode, regardless of the cost. It would have been equally as easy to curl up into a ball, back down, and crawl away. He forced himself to do neither, desperately balancing his reaction. “It is my business when you drag me in front of someone who would like nothing better than to see me dead and force me to strip so she can look me over like a slab of meat. I’m only asking you to explain why.”

She brought the tip of the pipe to her mouth. To his amazement, her hand was shaking. She drew in a long breath of smoke, watching him silently past heavy-lidded eyes clouded behind the haze.

“Nathan, you get away with a lot more than you should simply because you’re Hengeli, not Vanar. I’ve allowed it because you amuse me. But it isn’t wise to push your luck.” She leaned back, coughing gently, a deep wet sound. “Defiance is not only unseemly, it will also get you nothing but into trouble. You can’t afford it with the Changriti.”

Blowing a stream of smoke into the air, she jabbed the pipe in his direction for emphasis, her voice dangerously flat. “And I assure you, you truly
don’t
want to jack too far with me.”

He swallowed his anger and lowered his eyes. “Humblest of apologies, jah’nari Pratha Yaenida,” he said in formalistic Vanar. He hoped it sounded as sincere as he could make it.

She coughed again, a long, rumbling sound that gradually died away, leaving her slightly flushed and a sheen of sweat on her forehead. “But as you are unfamiliar with our customs, I suppose you are owed some explanation,” she said, not the least fooled by his act of contrition.

He kept his mouth shut and waited.

“You are now my son. You might consider that just strategy in some complicated game, but in Vanar eyes, you are legally and factually Nga’esha, the youngest son of Pratha Yaenida. That does more than simply protect you, it also makes you highly valuable.”

“Despite my genetic defects,” he couldn’t help saying, then bit his lip. To his relief, she chuckled. The danger was not yet past, but it had lessened palpably.

“That was only the usual barter nonsense, Nathan. She may detest you personally, but she wants this marriage, very much so. She has not been the Changriti pratha h’máy that long, and her authority is still somewhat uncertain. She has many sisters and cousins quite willing to replace her if the opportunity arises. She needs this alliance with the Nga’esha. I am old, and all of my first-rank sons were married off long ago. We will need time and a good tutor to train you properly before you are fit to marry anyone, but as a new Nga’esha
umdhae putrah
, you have gone overnight from being naeqili to the most eligible bachelor on all of Vanar.” She laughed at his astonishment. “If this marriage falls through, there will be hundreds more suitors who suddenly find you irresistible, properly educated or not. I’ll have to place guards on you to prevent you from being kidnapped.”

He hadn’t expected that, nor did he much like the prospect. “The Changriti are strict isolationists: they believe not a single foreigner should ever be tolerated on our sacred soil.” She snorted her contempt. “That such stringent restrictions would make it near impossible for the Nga’esha to negotiate contracts with many of our off-Station clients is not a valid objection, naturally. What is the loss of Nga’esha revenues when compared to the Changriti ideal of cultural purity?” Her mocking tone evaporated. “But involving myself in your personal troubles has provoked substantial controversy within other Families. It’s even been suggested that the so-called attempt on your life as well as her daughter’s proposal was a deliberate maneuver, using my personal interest in you as a weakness to force my hand, hoping I would bow to pressure and get rid of you one way or the other.”

“But that’s not true. Is it?” He couldn’t believe the assassin in the night had deliberately spared him. Or that Kallah’s proposal had been her mother’s idea.

She shrugged eloquently. “I am not quite so naive, nor is Eraelin quite so cunning. But I’ll neither confirm nor deny it. Adopting you as my son was a countermove no one expected, least of all Eraelin. The Changriti are no friends of the Nga’esha, but instead of forcing me to dispose of you, she’s now in a position where she has no choice but to accept you into her Family.” She smiled coldly. “The irony does amuse me.”

He felt less like her son than a pawn in a chess game, and wondered how she treated her own children.

“My reputation is secure, so it makes little difference to me what story the Changriti put forward to save face.” Her glacial smile widened. “As long as they pay well enough for the privilege. With Kallah married to you, it contractually joins her Family and mine. There are considerable legal and financial obligations involved. These terms must be negotiated, and she will do what she can to get the best deal for the Changriti. How many shares against my Family is she entitled to, how many of hers can we demand liens on, termination clauses and quit claims in case of death, dissolution of the marriage contract or amount of damages if you should prove sterile, and so on.”

“How romantic. I’m flattered,” he said, deadpan. His mouth might get him into trouble, but he knew Yaenida well enough to know it often could get him out of trouble as well. It was the tightrope walk between the two fraying his nerves.

She tried unsuccessfully to hide her mirth. “We are a business people. Families are everything. There is no business without Family, and there are no Families without business. You either marry or are born into it. It’s a closed union, Nathan. And I have brought you into my Family and made you Nga’esha. Yes, it might have been the whim of an eccentric old woman.” She waved a careless hand as if brushing away gnats. “Because I’m bored and you amuse me. Because I enjoy injecting a bit of farce to irritate my overly dignified daughters. Because I’m dying and I don’t give a damn. It doesn’t matter what my reasons are.”

Her humor faded. “But my whims are not trivial, not for you. Do try to keep that small fact in mind,” she said quietly. “Here, without Family, you have nothing. You are nothing. You are
naekulam
, an outsider, unimportant, without value or rights or future. It is the worst thing that can happen to you, to lose your Family.”

A bad morning, scorched bread for breakfast or spilled tea, a snap of her fingers and the lives and fortunes of billions on a hundred planets would feel the aftershocks. A world cut off from the rest of civilization would be economically ruined and left to wither, all on the caprice of a fragile, eccentric old woman. He felt light-headed.

“Remember you are Vanar now as well, not Hengeli. That part of your life is over. You are entitled to all the rights of a member of any other Vanar family. And as my son, all the responsibility of a High Family. Don’t
ever
make me feel I’ve made a mistake.”

“Ahsmee qhinnah,”
he said softly.
I am sorry.
He meant it.

She inclined her head and looked away, indicating the talk was over. He numbly bowed and got to his feet, following Yronae toward the door. As she slid it open, Yaenida spoke, and he paused to look back at her.

“I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised at the terms of your marriage contract I finally managed to squeeze out of that stingy Changriti bich’chú,” she said with a sly smile. “I’m lucky you have such remarkably attractive legs, Nate.”

VIII

A
TIGHT BAND OF PRESSURE SNEAKING AROUND THE BACKSIDE OF HIS
eyeballs threatened to squeeze his brain into yet another bad headache. But this had nothing to do with too much to drink, no such pleasure before the pain.

Articles had been hard enough to memorize, nouns with their three genders divided into four categories of usage depending on social ranking, then everything shifted one more place to the left depending on singular, diplic, or plural forms. Then, of course, each form had its own multitude of declensions to memorize.

“Knife,” for example,
churiqa
, was masculine, while “spoon,”
qa’archa
, was feminine. That was easy enough to remember, even making a bizarre kind of sense, while “plate,”
thaeli
, was neuter. But anything more complicated than “the plate is blue” became a nightmare.

Something as simple as “Please give me your spoons” was loaded with hidden traps. First, there were three different variations of “please,” depending on who the speaker was and to whom he was speaking. There were two verbs for “to give,” one employed for concrete objects, and the other for abstract ideas.

Then “give me” presumed who was doing the giving, which modified the verb “to give,” depending on who exactly was the person being requested to perform the action, and further modified by the status of the “me” who would be the receiver of this action. Also, the verb tense had to be considered, and he had already lost more sleep than he could afford worrying over the various permutations of present tense, imperfect tense, past and future and subjective tenses, and his personal favorite, the ever-popular immediate-conditional-future-first-common-person-second-formal-polite tense.

Once this part of the sentence was properly assembled, “your” and “spoons” amplified his growing headache. The proper form of “your” depended not only on the number of people being addressed—one person, two people, or more than two—but on their relative social positions and what kind of noun the possessive pronoun was being glued on to. He calculated there were approximately seventy-three different ways this sentence could be constructed, and he knew seventy-two of them would be wrong.