Master of None (29 page)
“I would dance for you, esteemed brothers, had I not so stupidly injured my left ankle, which would, of course, only spoil your enjoyment. My most humble apologies.” Aelgar himself had suggested this pretext, promising him that, if put properly, it might be enough to get him out of having to lumber about the room like a lobotomized ox. But he held his breath, waiting for Ukul’s response. The weasel-faced man would get more satisfaction out of forcing him into an absurd performance than from watching a good one, Nathan instinctively knew. But he tried to keep his relief off his face when Ukul expressed his regret.
Then Nathan had begun the tedious coffee ceremony, reciting the poetry in proper order as he went through the praising of the earth, the praising of the coffee bush, the blessing of the beans, the grinding, the sifting, the spicing, the boiling of the water, the blessing of the sugar, the blessing of the sand, the hammered copper pot, the tiny porcelain cups, heating the coffee to a boil exactly three times before he poured it out with absolute precision. He’d almost finished, his back hurting from the continuous bowing, his cheeks numbed from his frozen smile, his knees throbbing from kneeling long hours on the floor, grateful to be nearing the end of an extremely unpleasant day, when disaster struck.
As he held out the steaming cup of black coffee for Ukul, his mind went suddenly blank. His mouth hung slack and he couldn’t remember the damned script. Ukul stared back at him, narrowed eyes as black as the coffee as he waited unrelentingly. Frozen, Nathan groped for the words, the cup rattling ominously in his hand.
“May the perfume of this offering...,” he suddenly heard Raetha whisper. The large man was gazing up obliviously over Nathan’s shoulder, as if unaware of anything wrong.
Ukul flicked an angry slit-eyed glance toward his junior.
His memory jolted, Nathan babbled quickly, “May the perfume of this offering be as fresh to your nose as the morning sun on the grass, may it be pleasant to your tongue, sweet as honey . . .” The words were unintelligible sounds, learned by rote, Nathan too rattled to remember their meaning.
Raetha hazarded a friendly smile as they each drank the coffee in turn, although Nathan could barely taste his. Then, thankfully, the ordeal was over. They bobbed and waved and sent him home, the sun already beginning to set. The two men would discuss his various merits and defects, and give their verdict to their wife before each of them sent gifts to him, to be examined closely by Aelgar as an indication of how well or how poorly he’d done. Who would then report to Yronae, who would then consult Yaenida, who would then invite Eraelin for a similar private women’s ceremony. It all seemed very mind-numbingly tedious.
He took the underground train back to the edge of the Nga’esha Estate, having to wait on the platform as three trains went by before one with a men’s car stopped. His feet hurt, his back hurt, his ego hurt, and, he thought ruefully, the fun was just beginning. . . .
H
E HAD THOUGHT
P
RATIMA WOULD WANT TO BE GONE BEFORE THE ACTUAL
marriage and was baffled and uneasy when she announced her decision to attend the ceremony. Three days before the wedding, they escaped to their favorite rendezvous, down by the river in the copse with the old split tree. Pratima lay in the tree’s hollow, playfully dropping leaves on him while he leaned against the trunk below.
“It’s not that I want you to leave,” he tried to explain, hoping to convince her without hurting her feelings, “but there’s no reason you have to attend.”
“Of course there is,” she replied serenely. “It’s a Nga’esha wedding, and Pilot or no, I’m still Nga’esha. It would be rude for me not to attend. Besides, it’s not every day that a son of the Nga’esha pratha h’máy is married, you know. The celebration should be quite something to see.”
He twisted around to gaze up at her, perplexed by her calmness. “Pratima, doesn’t it bother you, my marrying someone else?”
“No. Why should it?”
He stood up and hauled himself into the tree, crowding her in the hollow. “Because it’s to someone else. Aren’t you the least bit jealous?”
She ran light fingers across his cheek. “Do you love her?”
“Who, Kallah?” He laughed. “I don’t even
know
her.”
“Then why should I be jealous?”
“Because one of my principal duties once I’m married,” he explained with the patience he’d use with a dull child, “is to do my best to get her pregnant.”
“Naturally.”
“That means I’ll have to have sex with her.”
She smiled impishly. “That’s the usual way it’s done.”
“Pratima,” he said, exasperated, “you’re not this dense. You know what I’m saying.”
“Yes, of course I do. You’re the one making the mistake of confusing love with sex.”
That stung. “I know the difference, Pratima. Maybe you can convince yourself this was all nothing more than a passing fling, but I’m not ashamed to admit I love you more than anyone I’ve ever loved in my life.”
Frowning, she sat upright and placed her hands on his face, her palms cool against his skin. “I wish you spoke better Vanar, Nate. It would be easier to explain. I never said I thought what has happened between us isn’t important; it is. Which is going to give you problems with your new wife. She’s the one who will be jealous, not me. Vanar women would like to believe men are emotionally stunted animals whose only desire is for sex. It would make life so much simpler if that were true. Kallah doesn’t love you any more than you love her. But her pride would be wounded if she thought you incapable of ever caring for her. It’s emotional infidelity that threatens us, Nathan, not physical. Vanar men are allowed all the sex they want...as long as they don’t ever fall in love. That’s the one betrayal women can’t endure, in any culture.”
“But Kallah doesn’t love me, and she’s got two other kharvah as well. Why should she be jealous of you?”
Pratima shrugged. “True, I’m no real danger to her, since you and I could never marry or have children, and I’ll be leaving Vanar soon enough. She knows about us, of course. Everyone does. But it must be disconcerting for her. In her mind she’ll be worrying that you’re comparing her with me, that she’ll be competing with a beloved memory she can never hope to surpass. Which isn’t the best way to start off a new marriage.”
With consummate suppleness, she did a leisurely backward flip out of the bole to land as softly as a cat on her feet. He wasn’t quite as graceful clambering down out of the tree himself. “Be cautious about revealing your feelings quite so openly, Nathan. It can be dangerous, as you saw in Dravyam. Be careful of her other two kharvah, especially Ukul Daharanan. Ukul has not yet been able to father a child, and worries his position is threatened. He is truly devoted to Kallah, and isn’t happy about her choice in you.”
“How do you know all this?”
She shrugged. “Pilots love gossip. It amuses us.” She didn’t look amused. “Kallah may not love you, but she is certainly fascinated by the exotic. Let’s just hope the novelty wears off before his tolerance wears out.”
She laced her hands behind his neck, leaning back on her arms as he held her waist. “And I want to be there, Nathan, not just because I’m Nga’esha and it’s my duty, but because I do love you. You will need someone there who does. But I will say good-bye to you now, because once you are married, we won’t have the time later. I’m leaving as soon as it’s over.”
His heart thudded dully, and he felt suddenly ill. “How the hell am
I going to survive here without you?”
She smiled wistfully. “You will. Your heart beats, your lungs breathe, and somehow you’ll manage to live from one day to the next. We all do.”
He took a ragged breath. “Give me something to look forward to, Pratima. I’ll wait fifteen years for you, if that’s what it takes. Promise you’ll come back to me, for a month, for two, I don’t care. Just come back to me.”
She stared at him for a long moment, her pale eyes wary. He watched her internal debate, emotions flickering across her face before she kissed him gently. “Have many children. Be happy. And I promise, I’ll come back,” she whispered against his cheek, her breath warm on his skin.
They made love gently, almost without passion. By an unspoken agreement, she waited until he’d fallen asleep before she left as if evaporating into thin air. When he woke, he wrapped his arms around his knees and wept.
A
S WEDDINGS GO,
N
ATHAN LATER THOUGHT WRYLY, HE’D BEEN TO BETTER
. He wasn’t even sure at which part of the ceremony he actually became a married man. Not that he’d seen much of it, either.
The basics had been described to him, and he knew somewhat of what to expect. But the reality was far worse than the anticipation. He’d spent the previous day being soaked, washed, scraped, massaged, oiled, polished, painted, and purged until he’d gone to bed with every inch of his skin tender, the bedclothes nearly painful. Shortly before daybreak, he was rudely woken from a sound sleep by a cacophonous chorus of the Nga’esha men singing loudly while bashing hand drums and cymbals. With Aelgar directing the action, he was seized and lifted bodily out of bed, carried off to the main atrium of the men’s courtyard. There, a canopied sedan chair had been elaborately decorated with hundreds of bright silk streamers and brass bells. The men carried him around it three times before setting him on his feet in front of it.
Where he stood for the next three hours while Nga’esha men decorated him even more elaborately than the sedan chair. The weight of gold bracelets from wrist to elbow, and more on his legs from ankle to knee, dragged on him uncomfortably, making him wonder how he was going to walk with all this metal. The conventional sati had been dispensed with, and he was outfitted in a glittering costume not designed for the normal human male body. The exaggerated shoulders were settled onto him like a yoke for an ox, and someone cinched in his waist with such an abrupt jerk he gasped as the breath was knocked out of him. Once he was fastened into the rest of the costume, his thighs were squeezed together so tightly he could barely shuffle along by moving his knees.
Huge headgear completely covered his face with a garish curtain of beads, and he wondered how he was expected to even be able to
see
to walk. The answer, he discovered when he was picked up like an oversized doll and installed standing in the sedan chair, was that he wasn’t expected to do anything at all.
He clung to the canopy supports to keep from being pitched out, swaying dangerously as the chair was lifted onto as many shoulders as could be wedged under it and carried out of the men’s house to be paraded through the women’s half of the estate. Judging by the cheering as he was conveyed lurching through the halls, every Nga’esha female relative had come for the wedding, his already diminished sight further hampered by a shower of paper streamers and confetti flung over him.
Although it was still early morning, half of Sabtú seemed to be crowded into the expansive women’s gardens. Pratha Yaenida sat enthroned on a portable dais even larger and grander than his sedan chair. She, he would notice, spent most of the festivities dozing, comfortably snuggled into her nest of cushions. They set him down in the middle of the garden as the main exhibit. Long tables groaned under the weight of the food. The aroma made his mouth water, but he knew he wouldn’t be given any.
His role in the ceremony was a test of endurance. He would remain on display while the party went on around him. The Changriti guests arrived a few hours after the celebration had begun, when the drinking began in earnest as the level of boisterous revelry escalated. If Kallah was among them, he never saw her.
When his part in the ceremonies had been explained, his only worry was that he’d be bored stiff and hungry. He hadn’t grasped how excruciating the torture of simply standing upright for hours on end would be with the burden of the heavy jewel-encrusted costume and gold metal weighing him down. By midafternoon, the vague headache he’d had since early morning blossomed into a thumping migraine. By sunset, the small of his back ached and his ankles had begun swelling, the heavy gold squeezing them painfully.
At one point, he reeled precariously and begged as politely as he could to be allowed out of the chair. Many pairs of hands pushed him back upright. Someone used the long sleeves of his costume to tie his wrists to the sedan chair’s posts to keep him from falling. He felt as if he were being crucified.
“Drink this,” a male voice murmured, and poked something up under the headgear toward his face. He nearly gagged on the stem of a squeezebulb shoved between his lips, the burning liquid forced into his mouth. He managed to swallow most of it, the rest dribbling down his chin. Pinioned as he was, and burdened by the awkward headgear, he couldn’t even wipe his mouth.
But it helped to clear his head. The quivering muscles in his legs steadied, and the headache lessened. It lasted about an hour, when another dose was thrust into his face. The intervals between doses became shorter and his agony more intense as night dragged on, the party still in full swing and showing no signs of subsiding any time soon.
Eventually whatever was in the burning liquid had no effect on him at all. His head spun, his vision black-specked as he fought to stay conscious. He blacked out several times, the relief fleeting as the weight pulled his arms out of their swollen joints. Searing pain forced him back to consciousness. The sky had lightened to a deep indigo, sunrise still an hour or so off, when he sagged against his silk restraints, weeping helplessly from the pain. He seriously wondered if they intended to kill him.
“I can’t take this,” he shouted, but his voice came out in a hoarse croak, lost in the music and laughter around him. He wasn’t even aware he spoke in Hengeli, unable to think in Vanar at all. “For god-sake, please, I can’t take any more!”
“Then don’t.” He heard Pratima’s voice and wondered where it came from. Through his tears, he saw the gleam of a knife slash at his bonds, and heard the silk rip as his weight tore the sleeves from his costume. He collapsed, plunging out of the sedan chair headfirst. He never felt himself hit the ground, only remotely aware of the cheer that went up as many gentle hands lifted his body to carry him off.