The Stone Dogs (3 page)

"Neither have yo'," he said. Not
quite
true: the full breasts no longer stood out without benefit of buoyancy, and there was a little gray in the strong coarse black hair. And genuine friendliness in the curve-nosed, roundly pretty face. More warming than any number of younger and more comely bodies, when you could not know the thoughts behind the eyes. "I means up here," she said, touching him on the forehead. "Yaz still thinks too much, Mastah. Hurts yaz inside." She grinned, slow and insolent, and the hand stroked teasingly down to grip him below the water and knead. He put his hands around her waist, and she swung to face him, knees astride his waist. "And I knows how to make yaz stop thinkin',f whiles," she whispered.

They nearly heard us
, Yolande thought, forcing herself not to shake. She had been glued to the hedge while they spoke; this was great stuff, about
spaceships
—and then Lele had nearly spoiled things by trying to crawl away too soon.
I'm going to
switch her
, Yolande decided, glaring at the abashed half-Chinese serf. She had never actually beaten Lele, but…
Oh. I'd have to tell
Ma or Tantie Rahksan
why
I wanted to switch her
. Children had no disciplinary authority over servants, even their own, until well into their teenage years.
I'll just yell at her
.

She put her eye back to the hole in the hedge. Tantie Rahksan and Uncle Eric were face to face, moving. Just then the serf gave a cry, and her feet came out of the water, locking around the man's lower back. He stood, water cascading off the linked bodies, and Tantie Rahksan had her hands dug into his shoulders and her head right back…
I had
really
better go
, Yolande decided. This wasn't at all like the pictures.
It's
confusing and scary and their faces look so… fierce
, she thought, squirming back.

Below the lower terrace, they rested for a moment. Yolande looked up, through the moving leaves.
Stars
, she thought.
That
would be
something.

From: CLAESTUM PLANTATION DISTRICT OF Tuscany TO: BAIAE SCHOOL DISTRICT OF CAMPANIA

PROVINCE OF ITALY

DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA

SEPTEMBER 1, 1968

It's too crowded in here
, Yolande Ingolfsson thought irritably.

The crowding was not physical. The van was an Angers-Kellerman autosteamer from the Trevithick Combine's works in Milan, a big six-wheeler plantation sedan like a slope-fronted box with slab sides. There were five serfs and one young lady of landholding Citizen family in the roomy cabin; the muted sound of the engine was lost in the rush of wind and whine of the tires. None of them had been this way before.

Young Marco the driver was chattering with excitement, with stolid Deng sitting beside him giving an occasional snarl when the Italian's hands swooped off the wheel. The Oriental was a stocky grizzle-haired man of fifty, his face round and ruddy. He had been the House foreman since forever; Father had brought him from China when he and Mother came to set up the plantation, after the War. Saved him from an impaling stake, the rebel's fate, or so the rumor went, but neither of them would talk about it. Bianca and Lele were bouncing about on the benches running along either side of the vehicle, giggling and pointing out the sights to each other.

Not to me
, Yolande thought with a slight sadness. Well, she was fourteen, that was getting far too grown-up to talk that way with servants.

The van had the highway mostly to itself on the drive down from Tuscany, past Rome and through the plantations of Campania; Italy was something of a backwater these days, and what industry there was clustered in the north. There was the odd passenger steamer, a few electric runabouts, drags hauling linked flats of produce or goods. Nevertheless the road was just as every other Class II way in the Domination of the Draka, an asphalt surface eight meters broad with a graveled verge and rows of trees on either side; cypress or eucalyptus here, but that varied with the climate.

Fields passed, seen through a flicker of trunks and latticed shadow slanting back from westering sun, big square plots edged with shaggy hedges of multiflora. Fields of trellised vines, purple grapes peering out from the tattered autumnal lushness of their leaves; orchards of silvery gray olives, fruit trees, hard glossy citrus, and sere yellow-brown grain stubble. Fields of alfalfa under whirling sprinklers, circles of spray that filled the air with miniature rainbows and a heavy green smell that cut the hot dust scent. Melons lying like ruins of streaked green-and-white marble tumbled among vines, and strawberries starred red through the velvet plush of their beds.

Arch-and-pillar gateways marked the turnoffs to the estate manors, hints of colored roofs amid the treetops of their gardens.

Yolande felt what she always did when she saw a gate: an impulse to open it. Like an itch in the head, to follow and see what was there, who the people were, and what their lives were like. Make up stories about them, or poems.

Silly
, she thought. People were people; plantations were plantations, not much different from the one she grew up on.

Words and surfaces, hard shiny shells, that was all you could know of people. Yet the itch would not go away. You thought that you knew what they were like, especially when you were little; then a thing would happen that showed you were wrong. She shivered. Like that time years ago at the party; she had been peeking down through the banisters when Mother and the stranger began quarreling. Their voices had gone hard, then very quiet. The man began a motion to hit Mother, and the slap of her hand on his forearm was very loud.

A second before the main hall had been noisy with talk and music, then quiet had gone over it, rippling the way wind did through ripe wheat. Yolande had watched her mother's face go strange, very still and smiling. Not moving at all, even when the others talked and then some houseserfs came with her gunbelt and the man's. The two of them had walked out the French doors into the garden, Pa and a friend with Mother, two guests with the one who had tried to hit her. Two shots, so quick, before she had time even to be afraid, to think that Mother might be
dead
.

Then she and Pa had come walking back through from the garden; Mother was laughing, and she had her arm around his waist. Some of the house servants had come in carrying the stranger on a folding garden chair; there was blood glistening and seeping from a pressure-bandage on his stomach, and his face looked yellow and waxy.

Yolande shook the memory aside.
It was just because it was
so sudden
, she reminded herself. Duels were-not that common—years could go by without one—and the insult had been gross.
I was too young to understand
.

The senior maidservant Angelica was sulking, but she was quite old, twenty at least, probably missing somebody back home. It would have been good to have someone to talk to, reading in a car had always made her nauseated. Lele gave a giggle that was almost a squeal at something the other maidservant, Bianca, said, and Deng turned back to scowl at
her
.

Lele stuck out her tongue at him, but lowered her voice. Lele was Deng's get; usually it was anybody's guess who fathered a housegirl's children, but the foreman was the only Oriental on the estate. You could see it in the saffron-brown tint of her skin, the delicate bones and the folds at the corners of her hazel-tinted eyes.

The Draka girl leaned back with a sigh, feeling heavy and a little tired from the going-away party last night. She had the rear of the autosteamer to herself, a semicircle couch like the fantail of a small yacht.
Nearly
to herself: her Persian cat Machiavelli was curled up beside her. He always tried to sleep through an auto drive; at least he didn't hide under a seat and puke anymore… The windows slanted over her head, up to the roof of the auto, open a little to let in a rush of warm dry afternoon air.

She let her head fall back, looking through the glass up into the cloudless bowl of the sky, just beginning to darken at the zenith.

Her face looked back at her, transparent against the sky, centered in a fan of pale silky hair that rippled in the breeze.

Like a ghost
, she thought. Her mind could fill in the tinting, summer's olive tan, hair and brows faded to white-gold, Mother's coloring. Eyes the shade of granulated silver, rimmed with dark blue, a mixture from both her parents. Face her own, oval, high cheekbones and a short straight nose, wide full-lipped mouth, squared chin with a cleft; Pa was always saying there must be elf somewhere in the bloodlines. She turned her head and sucked in her cheeks; the puppyfat was definitely going, at long last. She was still obstinately short and slight-built, however much she tried to force growth with willpower.

At least I don't have spots
, she mused with relief. Her first year at the new school, and her first in the Senior Section, as well.

"Bianca, get me a drink, please," Yolande said, shifting restlessly and stretching. The drive had been a long one, and she felt grubby and dusty and sticky; the silk of her blouse was clinging to her back, and she could feel how it had wrinkled.

The air had a spicy-dry scent, like the idea of a sneeze.

Yolande sipped moodily at the orange juice and watched as the auto turned south and east to skirt the fringe of Naples: just a small town now, badly damaged in the War, and afterward most of the non-historic sections had been torn down. The low bulk of Vesuvius was ahead of them, twin peaks notching the broad cone of the volcano, and the road swung west toward the impossible azure blue of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Her mouth was dry despite the cold drink. She handed the glass back to the servant girl and wiped her palms down the sides of her jodhpurs, hitched at her gunbelt, ran fingers through the tangled mass of her hair, adjusted her cravat.

"Bianca, Lele, my hair's a mess," she said. "Fix it." There was a sour taste at the back of her mouth, and a feeling like hard fluttering in her stomach.

The two servants quieted immediately and knelt on the cushions to either side of her. The feeling of their fingers and brushes was familiar and comforting, even if it hurt when they tugged at the snarls. Yolande used the forced immobility to practice the breathing exercises, driving calm up from the body into the mind. There was something oddly soothing about having your hair combed, a childlike feeling of trust.

Don't fidget
, she told herself as the tense muscles of her shoulders and neck eased.
It's serfish
. It was emotional to be frightened of going to a new school; they weren't going to hurt her, after all. Children and serfs were expected to be emotional; a Citizen ruled herself with the mind. Bianca was humming as she used the pick on the end of her comb to untangle a knot.

Yolande's hair had always been feather-soft and flyaway.

The school was on the Bay itself, surrounded by a thousand hectares of grounds. A chest-high wall of whitewashed stone marked the boundary, overshadowed by tall dark cypresses; the van slowed as they passed through the open wrought-iron gates and past the gatekeeper, bowing with hands over his eyes as the law commanded. Then the wheels were crunching and popping on the gravel of the internal road. Lawns like green-velvet plush spread around them, flowerbanks, clusters of stone-pine, oak, clipped hedges of box and yew. A herd of ibex raised their scimitar-homed heads from a pool, muzzles trailing drops that sparkled as they fell among the purple-and-white bowls of the water lilies.

"Turn right," Yolande said, unnecessarily; there was a servant in the checkered livery of the school directing traffic.

The sun had sunk until it nearly touched the horizon, and the light-wand in the serfs hand glowed translucent white. More servants waited at the brick-paved parking lot, a broad expanse of tessellated red and black divided by stone planters with miniature trees. The van eased into place, guided by a wench with a light-wand who walked backwards before them, and stopped; Yolande felt the dryness suddenly return to her mouth as she rose.

"Well," she said into air that felt somehow motionless after the unvarying rush of wind on the road. "Let's go."

Deng pushed the driver back into his seat. "Not you, Marco,"

he said.

The younger man gave him a resentful glare but sank down again. Deng was not like some bossboys, he did not use the strap or rubber hose all the time, but he was obeyed just the same. He flicked a match-head alight between thumb and forefinger as he climbed down from the cab, lighting a cigarette and puffing with grateful speed, then undamped the stairs beneath the side door.

Yolande ignored the acrid smoke and the stairs as well, stepping out and taking the chest-high drop with a flex of her knees. The servants followed more cautiously, passing the parcels and baggage out to Deng and taking his offered hand as they clambered down the metal treads. The Draka girl stood looking about as the pile of luggage grew. There was activity enough, but nobody seemed particularly concerned with her. An eight-wheeler articulated steamer was unloading a stream of girls; that must be a shuttle from Naples, the ones coming in from the train and dirigible havens.

They
were all dressed in the school uniform, a knee length belted tunic of Egyptian linen dyed indigo blue, and sandals that strapped up the calf. She felt suddenly self-conscious in her young-planter outfit, even with the Togren 10mm and fighting-knife she had been so proud of. They were mostly older than her; all the Junior Section would have arrived yesterday.

Their friends were there to greet them, hugs and wristshakes and flower-wreaths for their hair…

Yolande swallowed and forced herself to ignore them, the laughter and the shouts. A few private autos were unloading as well, sleek low-slung sports steamers, and two light aircraft in an empty field to the east. Tilt-rotor craft, civilianized assault-transports; as she watched one seemed to tense in place, the motors at the ends of the wings swinging up to the vertical.