The Stone Dogs (5 page)

Yolande sniffed deeply, sighing with pleasure. The scent of the brewing pot mingled with the delicate sweetness of the flowers over their heads and the hot breads under their covers, iodine and seaweed from the ocean beneath their feet, and suddenly she was hungry. For food, for the day, for things that she could not know or name, except that they made her happy. She looked around at the faces of the others, and everything seemed clear and beautiful, everyone her friend. Even the serf, a swarthy thick-set woman with a long coil of strong black hair; the identity number tattoo below her ear showed orange as she bent to fill the cup, and the coffee made an arc of dark-brown from the silver spout to the pure cream color of the porcelain.

"Thank yo'," she said to the servant, with a bright smile. "I'll have some of those—" she pointed to a mound of biscuits, brown-topped and baked with walnuts —and the fruit, and some of those egg pies."

"Grapefruit," Muriel said sourly, watching with envy as the others gave their orders and Yolande broke a roll. It steamed gently, and the soft yellow butter melted and sank in as soon as it was off the knife. The plump girl had lagged badly when they sprinted the last half-kilometer of the run, and bruised herself doing a front-flip over one of the obstacles. The wench put two neatly sectioned halves before her. "I loathe grapefruit."

"Then don't be such a slug, Muri," Myfwany said ruthlessly, looking up from a clipboard. "You were doing quite well last year, and then spent all summer lolling about stuffin' yo'self with ricotta and noodle pie."

Somebody else giggled, and Muriel's face went scarlet; her expression went from sullen to angry, and then her eyes starred with unshed tears.

"Honest, Muri, everyone's just tryin' to help—" one girl began.

There was a rattle of crockery as Muriel pushed her half-eaten plate away, rose, and left at a quick walk that was almost a run.

Myfwany scowled at the girl who had tittered.

"Veronica Adams, that was
mean
."

"Well, I didn't call her a
slug
, anyway."

"An'I didn't laugh at her. Are we her friends, or not? I thought yo' two were close."

Veronica frowned and pushed strips of chicken breast and orange around her plate. "Oh, all right." she muttered. A moment later: "I'll tell her I'm sorry." A sigh. "It's just… all the trouble we went to, an' she slides back down the hill when we stop pushin'."

"Things aren't easy fo' her," Myfwany continued, expertly filleting her grilled trout. Aside, to Yolande: "Her parents are religious."

Yolande kept silent for a moment, biting into the biscuit and catching a crumble beneath her chin with the other. Myfwany was obviously the leader of the group, and it would not do to offend… not while she was on probation.

There was a slight taste of honey and cinnamon to the pastry, blending with the richness of the butter and the hot morsels of nut. The egg pies looked good, too, baked in fluffy pastry shells with bits of bacon and scallion; she ate one in three swallows, feeling virtuous satisfaction. Her body felt good and strong and loose, warmed from the run and the swim, relaxed by the masseur's fingers.

It would not do to look tongue-tied, either. She swallowed, looked up and raised a brow. Religious… That
was
unusual, these days. "Aesirtru?" she asked. You still found a scattering of neopagans about, though even in her grandfather's time it had been mostly a fad.

"No, worse. Christians."

Yolande made a small shocked sound, one hand going unconsciously to her mouth.
Very
unusual, and not altogether safe. Not forbidden, precisely. After all, only a few generations ago most Draka had been at least nominal Christians. But now…

it was enough to attract the attention of the Security Directorate. Believers were tolerated, no more, provided they kept quiet and out of the way and gave no whisper of socially dangerous opinions; the secret police took the implications of the New Testament seriously, more so than most of its followers ever had. And it could kill any chances of a commission when you did your military service, even if the
krypteia
could do no more to you than that.

She felt the eyes of the others on her. "Well, she's a Citizen,"

she said with renewed calm, undoing her hair and shaking it out over her shoulders. The sea breeze caught it and threw it back, trailing ends across her eyes. "She's got a right to it, if she wants to."

Myfwany smiled with approval. "Oh, it didn't take," she said, waving her fork. "That's part of the problem, we talked her out of it last year—partly us, some of the teachers helped— and then when she went home it was one quarrel with her parents after another, and she was gloomin' all the time. She'll snap out of it."

Another hard look at Veronica. "
If
we help her."

"I
said
I'd say I was sorry," the girl snapped back, then bridled herself with a visible effort. Softly: "I
am
sorry." She was broad-shouldered, with a mane of curly dark-brown hair and the sharp flat accent of Alexandria and the Egyptian provinces.

"What's today?"

"Intro Secondary Math 8:00 to 10:30," Myfwany said, glancing back at the clipboard. "Classical Lit from 10:45 to 12:15.

Historical Geography till lunch, rest period, and then we're back to Bruiser and The Beak. Shouldn't be too bad, Beak's givin' us a familiarization lecture on rocket-launchers today."

"Moo," the third girl said. "Secondary Math." Yolande fought to remember the name.
Mandy Slauter
. Tall and lanky and with hair sun-faded to white, pointed chin propped in one hand.

"Tensor calculus, an' Ah had trouble enough with basic. Euurg, yuk,
moo
."

"Y'can't make flying school without good math," Myfwany said, reaching for a bunch of grapes from the bowl in the center of the table. She stripped one free, flicked it up between finger and thumb and caught it out of the air with a flash of white teeth. To Yolande: "Yo've fallen in among a nest of would-be spacers."

They all gave an unconscious glance upward. It had only been a few years since the first flights to orbit, but that was a strong dream. Only a few thousand Draka had made the journey beyond Earth's atmosphere as yet, and rather more Americans, but it was obvious that the two power blocs who dominated the planet were moving their rivalry into space. There would be thousands needed when the time came for their call-up in half a decade.

Yolande flushed. "Me, too," she said. "Both my parents were pilots in the War." With shy pride: "Pa was an ace. Twelve kills."

Some of the others looked impressed.
Thank you, Pa
, she thought. Well, it was impressive.

Mandy shrugged. "But tensor calculus… Sometimes Ah'd rather just settle fo' the infantry. Not so much like school, anyway." She reached for a passionfruit, cracked the mottled egg-shaped shell, and dumped the speckled greyish contents into her mouth.

"How can yo' eat those things with your eyes open?" Veronica said. "They look like a double tablespoon of tadpoles glued together with snot." In an aside to Yolande: "Mandy's boy-crazy already, that's why she's considerin' the infantry." The pilot corps was two-thirds female, while the ground combat arms had a slight majority of men.

Mandy laughed and raised the fruit rind threateningly. "Ah am
not
boy-crazy—"

"Aren't we all a little old fo' food-fights?" Myfwany said, looking at her watch. "Class time."

… sorry it took so long to write but it's been a bit of a whirl.

The school is very pretty here on the bay, and my rooms are fine.

I checked on the servants' quarters and food and everything, like you said. Bianca complains about the cooking but that's just because it's Neapolitan, and they all have trouble understanding the Italian around here (so do I) which isn't like Tuscan at all.

The school servants can mostly speak English anyway, since they come from all over. A lot of them can read, too. The classes are about like the old school on Elba, but we've got a really tough Unarmed Instructor and I'm learning a lot. You have to or she thumps you, which I suppose is fair.

The other girls are mostly nice and I've made some friends
already
, especially Myfwany and Muriel and Veronica and Mandy. People are calling us the Fearsome Five, and we're all going to try for pilot training and the space program. Can I invite them up to home for the Novembers?

Anyway, I miss you all the time. Mother, and Pa, too, and Edwina and Dionysia and even John but don't tell him or he'll be even worse than he usually is. And Tantie Rahksan and Deng, too, and the house and everything.

Love,

Yolande

P.S. The stables are pretty good here, so could you send down Foamfoot? The school hacks have all got mouths like saddle leather.

Letter from Yolande Ingolfsson to her parents
Dated: October 21st, 1968

From Contemporary Poets Series

Trackways of the Heart

Archona Press, Archona, 1991

BAIAE SCHOOL

DISTRICT OF CAMPANIA

PROVINCE OF ITALY

DOMIMATIOTI OF THE DRAKA

SEPTEMBER 18, 1968

The classroom was comfortably cool, even though the day was growing sultry in the hours after noon. Half the frosted-glass panels of the inner wall were folded away, leaving gaps between the slender pillars of white-streaked rose marble; beyond was the shade of the inner colonnade, and hot white light on the courtyard's gardens and fountains. Yolande still fought to stifle a yawn; there was a feeling of drowsiness to the hot air. It smelled of cool stone, seawater, and the summer-scent of pine resin baking out under the unmerciful sun. Her eyelids fluttered down, and she brought herself back up with a jerk. It had been like that since her periods started a year before. Wild energy, and then sleepiness in the middle of the day; despair and happiness switching on and off like a light-switch.

And I don't even have breasts yet
, she thought resentfully, looking down at a chest still almost as flat as a boy's. She looked over at Mandy, in the next desk.
She already looks like a woman
and she's
tall,
too. It isn't fair
!

Myfwany hissed at her and she rose as the teacher walked briskly through the colonnade, followed by a serf with a double armful of books and papers.

"Make yo'selfs comfortable, girls," the instructor said. There was a rustle as they sat again. "Just leave it all, Helga," she added to the servant.

How elegant she looks
, Yolande thought, watching the teacher as she arranged the materials.
Sort of distinguished
.

Sixtyish, with graying brown curls cropped close to her head; slender, with a scholar's well-kept hands and an athlete's tan, dressed in a long gray robe with a belt of worked silver vine-leaves. And a miniature gold circlet pinned over her heart; the
corona aurea
, the Archon's highest award. Awed, Yolande wondered what it was for. Usually for

bravery-above-and-beyond, or some really important accomplishment for the Race.

"Service to the State," the teacher said formally.

"Glory to the Race," the students murmured in perfunctory unison.

The class was a little over average size, twelve pupils seated at desks of African flame-cedar in irregular clumps across a floor tiled in geometric patterns of blue and green, facing the rear wall and the teacher's station.

"I'm Catherine Harris," she said, sitting with one hip on the edge of the green malachite slab that was her desk.

There was a big display-screen on the wall behind her, one of the new crystal-sandwich types; she touched a control on the desk and it lit with a world map in outline. The smaller screens on the students' desks came alive as well, slaved to the master control. Countries were shown in block colors: black for the Domination, with the Draka firelizard sprawled across it, and shades of green for the nations of the Alliance.

"Well start with a regression. This is the situation today, with more than half the world under the Yoke." All Africa, all Europe, all of mainland Asia except the southern peninsulas running India-Malaysia-Indochina. "Now before the Eurasian War, in 1940." The area of black shrank; now the Domination was mostly Africa, with the Middle East and Central Asia and only a toehold in the eastern Balkans. The names of vanished lands reappeared on the screen: Germany, France, Russia, China.

"Now 1914, before the Great War. Which, difficult as it may be to imagine, infants, I can remember." Muffled laughter, and the screens showed Africa alone in black, with outliers in Crete and Cyprus and Ceylon. "Ten-year intervals back to the beginning." The dark tide receded, from the western bulge of the continent and from the interior. 1800, and Egypt went pale. Two decades more, and there was nothing but a tiny black spot around Cape Town in the extreme south.

Yolande stirred uneasily at the sight. The sequence was familiar, but showing it in reverse was not. Usually the maps
started
with the tiny speck, and then it flowed irresistably forward. Doing it this way seemed vaguely… improper, somehow.

She glanced at the servant, who was sitting on her heels by the side of the desk, hands folded neatly in her lap and eyes cast down. A wench in her twenties, blond and with a Germanic-looking pallor, very pretty—what Pa would call a hundred-auric item—with the serf-number standing out orange beneath her ear.

I wonder what
she
thinks of the course
, the Draka girl thought suddenly.
The wench must have heard it dozens of
times
. Some people said serfs didn't think at all, except about things like food and sex and their work, but that wasn't true. Serf children played quite freely with the offspring of the Great House when they were young, and Yolande had learned all their gossip; the stories, whose mother yelled and hit, and whose father drank too much smuggled
grappa
. Deng thought a lot, he was really smart even if he wasn't very talkative. Rakhsan, Mother's Afghan maidservant, she could tell you things about times way back before the War. It was the older fieldhands who kept so quiet, never speaking unless you asked them something, the ones old enough to remember the War and the times right after it, the purges and the camps.