Master of None (2 page)

She frowned, her thin mouth marked by deep fissures in her skin. He sat very still, knowing he was taking a huge risk by speaking to her with such intimacy. Once she had found his naive familiarity with her charming. He remembered how amused she had been by his shock once he realized the depth of his ignorance. Now he had no excuses to forget exactly who and what she was. Or who and what he was now.

Vanar was a closed world with only one major corporate interest: interstellar Worms, the lifeline linking over three hundred systems with Vanar at their core like a tiny spider in a giant web. No one owned the Worms; they were simply a mysterious artifact of space. But only Vanar Pilots were capable of flying ships in and, more importantly, out again at another part of the universe in one piece. Since the secretive Vanar Pilots were the only creatures who could guide the luxury liners and cargo freighters safely across the huge expanse of space, Vanar maintained its monopoly on not just interstellar trade but on
all
travel between solar systems.

Vanar charged a moderate sum for each Worm transfer, affordable to each individual shipper, and service remained cheap and reliable. But the traffic added up to an enormous fortune for the Nine High Vanar Families who controlled the Worms.

Hundreds of thousands of people outside Vanar were directly employed by her companies; millions more worked for companies servicing other Vanar corporations. The Nga’esha Corporation owned half the stations in the known star systems, which comprised all of the systems under Hengeli sovereignty. The politics of a hundred planets were shaped and moved by Vanar corporate interests. He could almost feel the weight of that enormous wealth around him, channeled through the High Families into the hands of the few great l’amae like the pratha h’máy Yaenida dva Darahanan ek Qarshatha Nga’esha, quite likely the most powerful being in all the inhabited systems. His chest began to ache as he realized he’d been holding his breath.

“All right,” she conceded, breaking the tension, and waited for him to speak.

He exhaled and tried to keep his relief off his face. “I asked to see you exactly because I am having a lot of trouble with both your language and your culture. I’m a botanist...I was a botanist,” he corrected himself. “I was never very good at xenosociology.”

She brought the tip of the water pipe to her mouth, sucking it thoughtfully. Turning her head, she blew a thin stream of pungent smoke away from him out the side of her mouth, keeping her eyes on him. They glittered in her cavernous sockets. “I take it you are dissatisfied with your current tutor?”

“No,” he said hastily, “absolutely not.” At their last meeting, he’d had to abjectly beg for help to get even the sullen elderly woman the Nga’esha family paid to coach him in Vanar language and protocol. He wasn’t about to jeopardize even that small benefit by criticizing his tutor to her employer. “Any fault or misunderstanding is entirely mine—”

Yaenida chuckled. “Oh, do stop it, Nathan, and get to the point. What is it you want from me?”

“Be my teacher again, just for a few minutes.” He waited, and when she inclined her head, he said, “What does it mean when a woman gives a man three shafts of grain?”

Her eyebrows raised in surprise, making her look owlish. “What kind of grain? What color?”

“Thin yellow stalks, so high.” He measured with his hands. “Multiple heads of grain, reddish, definitely nothing native, but not in the
Triticum
or
Oryza
genera, either. Possibly a hybrid variant of some monocotyledonous grass related to the Avena family.” He saw her draw on her pipe to hide her mirth. Bubbles sputtered in the pipe through a cloud of thick liquid. The smell of the drugged smoke cloyed the back of his throat. “I think the common name is
muhdgae
. Dark brown color. Seed pods are already open. They’re tied together with two pieces of ribbon—one a burgundy color, the other a sort of pale purple.”

“Ah,” she said, knowingly. “A young lady from the Changriti motherline?”

He nodded.

She looked out the window at the scuttling clouds. “How interesting. Is the young woman’s name Kallah, by any chance?”

“Yes,” he said, his stomach sour.

“Did she offer it to you personally?”

“Yes.”

“Did you take it directly from her hands? Publicly, in front of witnesses?
Female
witnesses?” Yaenida was grinning.

“Yes,” he said. He had bumped into Kallah Changriti, quite literally, when she passed him while in the company of another young Changriti woman. She had acknowledged his halting apology and bow with an arrogant nod of her head, but her shy smile completely spoiled the effect. She’d said nothing to him, but when she glanced back, he impulsively winked at her. Her eyes had widened and she’d clamped a hand over her mouth to stop the laugh, then disappeared in the crowd still clutching the arm of her companion. That one friendly gesture had been his fatal mistake. A week later, he had unwittingly accepted her strange gift—a gift that had nearly gotten him killed.

“She just walked up to me with a couple of her friends and shoved it in my face without a word. I didn’t know what else to do, so I took it. I didn’t want to be impolite.”

She laughed, leaning back into the thick cushions. “Impolite!” Her laughter came from deep in her chest, rumbling and wet.

His face prickled with alarm. “But what does it mean, exactly?” he pressed as her laughter subsided.

She laboriously dragged in another lungful of pungent smoke. Smiling broadly, she shook her head in amazed disbelief. “It means, my poor ignorant child, you are both astoundingly lucky and standing nose deep in a large pond of watery pigshit. Or have I confused another of your colloquial expressions?”

“L’amae, please,” he persisted. “Have I screwed up again?”

“Not at all. You’ve been offered a proposal, sweet boy—and may I point out an extraordinary but favorable one—for matrimonial union with a High Family. By taking Kallah’s symbolic gift from her own hand, you’ve accepted. May I have the honor to be the first to offer you my sincere congratulations.”

“Oh God,” he breathed, his fears confirmed. “Kallah is the daughter of Pratha Eraelin Changriti.”

Yaenida reclined even deeper into the pillows, obviously amused by his situation. “Quite so,” she admitted.

“The Changriti pratha h’máy hates me,” he said, pronouncing the words with the distinctness he would use for a child. “Two days after that, she tried to have me murdered!”

The healing gash in his side twinged with the memory of the frantic struggle in the dark, the choking smell of bitter cinnamon in the cloth clamped over his nose, the blade scraping by his ear to impale the sleeping mat. Only the advantage of his size and strength as well as the skills learned as a boy growing up hard had saved him. The would-be assassin had vaulted through the small half-moon window, vanishing like a cat over the rooftops, leaving him crumpled on the floor and bleeding more from his nose than from the wound along his ribs. The
pahlaqu
guardian where he lived had been summoned by the hospital, and viewed the torn scrap of dark burgundy silk in his fist with zealous indifference, strongly advising him to forget the incident had ever happened. Yaenida echoed that opinion.

“An accusation I should be careful to speak of very discreetly, were I you,” she warned him. “If Pratha Eraelin dva Hadatha Changriti wanted you dead, you would
be
dead, and she would not appreciate your slanderous allegations of incompetence.”

“Then she was quite competent in scaring the hell out of me. I can’t marry her daughter. I would be living in the household of a woman who would make my life nothing
but
a large pond of watery pigshit.”

“But, Nathan,” she chided, nearly laughing, “you did accept.”

“I didn’t know what I was doing!”
he protested, his hands gesturing for emphasis, breaking strict Vanar convention. The women in the corner looked up sharply. As two stood, Yaenida waved them away impatiently. He forced down his anxiety. Never show anger,
never
. He knew better. “How was I supposed to know what she was offering?” Nathan continued, keeping his voice low and his sweating palms on his thighs. “Isn’t there some way of explaining this to her? I can’t legally be held to agreements I didn’t know were being made, can I?”

She smiled at him pityingly, and he bit his lip to shut up. Ignorance of Vanar law, he’d already been well taught, was no excuse.

“Nate,” she said, using the intimate name he hadn’t heard from her since his imprisonment. The unexpected familiarity made his throat hurt. “Kallah is a respectable and influential member of a High Family, and you are in no position to be choosy. Believe me, you could do a lot worse.”

“I don’t have anything against Kallah Changriti, although she’s probably more interested in me because I’m ‘exotic’ rather than from any real affection. Surely it’s not my sparkling wit and charm. Come on, Yaenida, I can barely even talk with the girl!”

Yaenida raised one eyebrow, which he took for concurrence. “Isn’t there some way around this without breaking protocol or upsetting her? You’re the Nga’esha pratha h’máy, can’t you explain to her I didn’t understand what life would be like for me in Pratha Eraelin’s House?”

“The pratha h’máy of a High Family does not involve herself with the problems of
naekulam
,” she said ironically. “That would be too far beneath my dignity.”

He stared at her in disbelief.

She sighed. “Nobody cares about how unpleasant your life would be in the Changriti House, and I’m sure Kallah is well aware of what her mother is like. No doubt part of her reason for making such an absurd offer in the first place was to antagonize Eraelin. But
your
feelings are not important, and would not be of interest to anyone.”

Nathan closed his eyes for a moment, fighting the impulse to ball his hands into fists.

“It is a remarkable development, however,” Yaenida mused thoughtfully, speaking more to herself. “Although on reflection, not that absurd. You wouldn’t be any liability to business alliances. Kallah already has two kharvah from favorably positioned Families as well as a houseful of excellent sahakharae.”

“But I’m not a kharvah or a sahakharae.”

“Ah, but you are the irresistible combination of both!” she said, her eyes lighting up. “What is more tempting and seductive than the unique, especially when it’s safe? If she couldn’t acquire you as sahakharae, her only other option is marriage. There’s certainly nothing wrong with your seed, wonderfully exotic as it is, Nathan, but you are still naekulam, without Family. It is not unheard-of, but rare, for such an offer to be made to someone with so little to bring into a union. You should be delighted.”

“What if,” he said carefully, “it was explained to Kallah that I am only a stupid foreigner, that not only had I misunderstood but that I was already committed to marrying someone else?”

Her eyes were bird bright, sparkling in the sunlight. “I had forgotten about your sort, Nathan,” she said softly. “So very . . . passionate. A flair for the dramatic. Well, well, you have fallen in love with yet another of our fair young maidens, and are now trapped in the timeless predicament of love and rivalry? How entertaining.”

He held himself as rigorously erect as possible. “It is not a question of love, l’amae Yaenida. But if I am to ‘unite,’ if that’s the word for it, I would prefer doing so with a different House.”

“Tell me, dear boy,” she said, smiling broadly. Her teeth were smoke stained, the gums atrophied away from the roots. “Just to satisfy an old woman’s curiosity, who is this charming maiden who has warmed your blood and stolen your heart? Who is it you wish to wed?”

He sat back on his heels and hoped his face was unreadable. “You.” It took her a moment to react, then her eyes widened. She started to cough violently, strangling on the smoke and laughter competing for control of her lungs. The younger women stood, distrustful and alarmed, to be waved back by Yaenida’s impatient arm, bone-thin wrist snapping in the air, the bracelets jingling. She continued to laugh for a long minute, her eyes streaming, until Nathan flushed and looked down. The three slowly retook their seats, glaring suspiciously at him.

“Oh, Sweet Lady Mother!” Yaenida gasped, setting off another round of laughter, then wiped away the tears from her wizened cheeks. “Thank you, Nathan, I haven’t had such a thrill in years.”

He kept silent, his jaw clenched. She coughed lengthily, a deep, wet, chronic congestion, still chuckling.

She spoke in rapid Vanar, and one of the younger women left long enough to return with a glass of green-tinted water as another two knelt by her side. One fanned her face anxiously as the other tucked the fingers of one hand around Yaenida’s wrist while she studied the medical scanner in her other. Yaenida submitted impassively without even acknowledging her presence as the women loaded a medgun and pressed the muzzle against her upper arm. It hissed as Yaenida gulped the water noisily to ease her cough. He could smell the delicate scent of mint and medicinal bitters. Within a few minutes, her cough had eased and the color returned to her face.

“Come now, my love,” she finally rasped out, handing the empty glass back without looking at the women and waving them away imperiously. Her attendants withdrew to the window reluctantly, hovering like flies around a corpse. “Am I supposed to believe you prefer these ancient bones to Kallah’s supple young flesh?”

She drew the edge of her embroidered tasmai away from her body, holding the elegant folds of cloth open just far enough to reveal the shadows of her slack breasts, the dry skin hanging in folds from brittle ribs, the glint of gray hair in the bony recess of her groin. The women around her murmured, puzzled. “Tell me you find me irresistible,” she said softly. “Tell me your blood runs hot with desire at the sight of this body. Could you really perform your duty as a kharvah on this worn carcass?” Her face was contorted in a smile of scorn and resigned loss.

He swallowed hard, and raised his head to stare unblinkingly into her eyes in clear breach of protocol. “Pratha Yaenida, were you to honor me as a member of your House, I would perform my duty in any manner you required, and would do so with pride and pleasure.” He hoped he sounded far more confident than he felt.