Foreigner

  “You’re …” He struggled with titles and politics—different honorifics, when one was face to face with an atevi lord. “The esteemed aiji-dowager.”

  “Esteemed, hell. Tell that to the hasdrawad.” She beckoned with a thin, wrinkled hand. “Come here.”

  He moved without even thinking to move. That was the command in Ilisidi. Her finger indicated the spot in front of her chair, and he moved there and stood while she looked him up and down, with pale yellow eyes that had to be a family trait. They made the recipient of that stare think of everything he’d done in the last thirty hours.

  “Puny sort,” she said.

  People didn’t cross the dowager. That was well reputed.

  “Not for my species, nand’ dowager.”

  “Machines to open doors. Machines to climb stairs. Small wonder.”

  “Machines to fly. Machines to fly between stars.” Maybe she reminded him of Tabini. He was suddenly over the edge of courtesy between strangers. He had forgotten the honorifics and argued with her. He found no way back from his position. Tabini would never respect a retreat. Neither would Ilisidi, he was convinced of that in the instant he saw the tightening of the jaw, the spark of fire in the eyes that were Tabini’s own.

  “And you let us have what suits our backward selves.”

  Gave him back the direct retort, indeed. He bowed.

  “I recall you won the War, nand’ dowager.”

  “Did we?”

  Those yellow, pale eyes were quick, the wrinkles around her mouth all said decisiveness. She shot at him. He shot back,

  “Tabini-aiji also says it’s questionable. We argue.”

  “Sit down!”

  It was progress, of a kind. He bowed, and drew up the convenient footstool rather than fuss with a chair, which he didn’t think would further his case with the old lady.

  “I’m dying,” Ilisidi snapped. “Do you know that?”

  “Everyone is dying, nand’ dowager. I know that.”

  Yellow eyes still held his, cruel and cold, and the aiji-dowager’s mouth drew down at the corners. “Impudent whelp.”

  “Respectful, nand’ dowager, of one who has survived.”

  The flesh at the corner of the eyes crinkled. The chin lifted, stern and square. “Cheap philosophy.”

  “Not for your enemies, nand’ dowager.”

  “How is my grandson’s health?”

  Almost she shook him. Almost. “As well as it deserves to be, nand’ dowager.”

  “How well does it deserve to be?” She seized the cane beside her chair in a knobby hand and banged the ferule against the floor, once, twice, three times. “Damn you!” she shouted at no one in particular. “Where’s the tea?”

  The conversation was over, evidently. He was glad to find it was her servants who had trespassed her good will. “I’m sorry to have bothered you,” he began to say, and began to get up.

  The cane hammered the stones. She swung her scowl on him. “Sit down!”

  “I beg the dowager’s pardon, I—” Have a pressing engagement, he wanted to say, but he didn’t. In this place the lie was impossible.

  Bang! went the cane. Bang! “Damnable layabouts! Cenedi! The tea!”

  Was she sane? he asked himself. He sat. He didn’t know what else he could do, but sit. He wasn’t even sure there were servants, or that tea had been in the equation until it crossed her mind, but he supposed the aiji-dowager’s personal staff knew what to do with her.

  Old staffers, Jago had said. Dangerous, Banichi had hinted.

  Bang! Bang! “Cenedi! Do you hear me?”

  Cenedi might be twenty years dead for all he knew. He sat frozen like a child on a footstool, arms about his knees, ready to defend his head and shoulders if Ilisidi’s whim turned the cane on him.

  But to his relief, someone did show up, an atevi servant he took at first glance for Banichi, but it clearly wasn’t, on the second look. The same black uniform. But the face was lined with time and the hair was streaked liberally with gray.

  “Two cups,” Ilisidi snapped.

  “Easily, nand’ dowager,” the servant said.

  Cenedi, Bren supposed, and he didn’t want tea, he had had his breakfast, all four courses of it. He was anxious to escape Ilisidi’s company and her hostile questions before he said or did something to cause trouble for Banichi, wherever Banichi was.

  Or for Tabini.

  If Tabini’s grandmother was, as she claimed, dying … she was possibly out of reasons to be patient with the world, which in Ilisidi’s declared opinion, had not done wisely to pass over her. This could be a dangerous and angry woman.

  But a tea service regularly had six cups, and Cenedi set one filled cup in the dowager’s hand, and offered another to him, a cup which clearly he was to drink, and for a moment he could hear what wise atevi adults told every toddling child, don’t take, don’t touch, don’t talk with strangers—

  Ilisidi took a delicate sip, and her implacable stare was on him. She was amused, he was sure. Perhaps she thought him a fool that he didn’t set down the cup at once and run for Banichi’s advice, or that he’d gotten himself this far in over his head, arguing with a woman no few atevi feared, and not for her insanity.

  He took the sip. He found no other choice but abject flight, and that wasn’t the course the paidhi ever had open to him. He stared Ilisidi in the eyes when he did drink, and when he didn’t feel any strangeness from the cup or the tea, he took a second sip.

  A web of wrinkles tightened about Ilisidi’s eyelids as she drank. He couldn’t see her mouth behind her hand and the cup, and when she lowered that cup, the web had all relaxed, leaving only the unrealized map of her years and her intentions, a maze of lines in the firelit black gloss of her skin.

  “So what vices does the paidhi have in his spare time? Gambling? Sex with the servants?”

  “It’s the paidhi’s business to be circumspect.”

  “And celibate?”

  It wasn’t a polite question. Nor politely meant, he feared. “Mospheira is an easy flight away, nand’ dowager. When I have the time to go home, I do. The last time …” He didn’t feel invited to chatter. But he preferred it to Ilisidi’s interrogation.” … was the 28th Madara.”

  “So.” Another sip of tea. A flick of long, thin fingers. “Doubtless a tale of perversions.”

  “I paid respects to my mother and brother.”

  “And your father?”

  A more difficult question. “Estranged.”

  “On an island?”

  “The aiji-dowager may know, we don’t pursue blood-feud. Only law.”

  “A cold-blooded lot.”

  “Historically, we practiced feud.”

  “Ah. And is this another thing your great wisdom found unwise?”

  He sensed, perhaps, the core of her resentments. He wasn’t sure. But he had trod that minefield before—it was known territory, and he looked her straight in the face. “The paidhi’s job is to advise. If the aiji rejects our advice …”

  “You wait,” she finished for him, “for another aiji, another paidhi. But you expect to get your way.”

  No one had ever put it so bluntly to him. He had wondered if the atevi did understand, though he had thought they had.

  “Situations change, nand’ dowager.”

  “Your tea’s getting cold.” He sipped it. It was indeed cold, quickly chilled, in the small cups. He wondered if she knew what had brought him to Malguri. He had had the image of an old woman out of touch with the world, and now he thought not. He emptied the cup.

  Ilisidi emptied hers, and flung it at the fire. Porcelain shattered. He jumped—shaken by the violence, asking himself again if Ilisidi was mad.

  “I never favored that tea service,” Ilisidi said.

  He had the momentary impulse to send his cup after it. If Tabini had said the like, Tabini would have been testing him, and he would have thrown it. But he didn’t know Ilisidi. He had to take that into account for good and all. He rose
and handed his cup to Cenedi, who waited with the tray.

  Cenedi hurled the whole set at the fireplace. Tea hissed in the coals. Porcelain lay shattered.

  Bren bowed, as if he had received a compliment, and saw an old woman who, dying, sitting in the midst of this prized antiquity, destroyed what offended her preferences, broke what was ancient and priceless, because she didn’t like it. He looked for escape, murmured, “I thank the aiji-dowager for her attention,” and got two steps away before bang! went the cane on the stones, and he stopped and faced back again, constrained by atevi custom—and the suspicion what service Cenedi was to her.

  He had amused the aiji-dowager. She was grinning, laughing with a humor that shook her thin body, as she leaned both hands on the cane. “Run,” she said. “Run, nand’ paidhi. But where’s safe? Do you know?”

  “This place,” he shot back. One didn’t retreat from direct challenges—not if one wasn’t a child, and wasn’t anyone’s servant. “Your residence. The aiji thought so.”

  She didn’t say a thing, just grinned and laughed and rocked back and forth on the pivot of the cane. After an anxious moment he decided he was dismissed, and bowed, and headed away, hoping she was through with jokes, and asking himself was Ilisidi sane, or had Tabini known, or why had she destroyed the tea service?

  Because a human had profaned it?

  Or because there was something in the tea, that now was vapor on the winds above the chimney? His stomach was upset. He told himself it was suggestion. He reminded himself there were some teas humans shouldn’t drink.

  His pulse was hammering as he walked the hall and climbed the stairs, and he wondered if he should try to throw up, or where, or if he could get to his own bathroom to do it … not to upset the staff … or lose his dignity …

  Which was stupid, if he was poisoned. Possibly it was fear that was making his heart race. Possibly it was one of those stimulants like midarga, which in overdoses could put a human in the emergency room, and he should find Banichi or Jago and tell them what he’d done, and what he’d drunk, that was already making its way into his bloodstream.

  A clammy sweat was on his skin as he reached the upper hall. It might be nothing more than fear, and suggestion, but he couldn’t get air enough, and there was a darkening around the edges of his vision. The hall became a nightmare, echoing with his steps on the wooden floor. He put out a hand to the wall to steady himself and his hand vanished into a strange dark nowhere at the side of his vision.

  I’m in serious trouble, he thought. I have to get to the door. I mustn’t fall in the hallway. I mustn’t make it obvious I’m reacting to the stuff … never show fear, never show discomfort.…

  The door wobbled closer and larger in the midst of the dark tunnel. He had a blurred view of the latch, pushed down on it. The door opened and let him into the blinding glare of the windows, white as molten metal.

  Close the door, he thought. Lock it. I’m going to bed. I might fall asleep awhile. Can’t sleep with the door unlocked.

  The latch caught. He was sure of that. He faced the glare of the windows, staggered a few steps and then found he was going the wrong way, into the light.

  “Nadi Bren!”

  He swung around, frightened by the echoing sound, frightened by the darkness that loomed up on every side of him, around the edges and now in the center of his vision, darkness that reached out arms and caught him and swept him off his feet in a whirling of all his concept of up and down.

  Then it was white, white, until the vision went gray again and violent, and he was bent over a stone edge, with someone shouting orders that echoed in his ears, and peeling his sweater off over his head.

  Water blasted the back of his head, then, cold water, a battering flood that rattled his brain in his skull. He sucked in an involuntary, watery gasp of air, and tried to fight against drowning, but an iron grip held his arms and another—whoever it was had too many hands—gripped the back of his neck and kept him where he was. If he tried to turn his head, he choked. If he stayed where he was, head down to the torrent, he could breathe, between spasms of a gut that couldn’t get rid of any more than it had.

  A pain stung his arm. Someone had stuck him and he was bleeding, or his arm was swelling, and whoever was holding him was still bent on drowning him. Waves of nausea rolled through his gut, he could feel the burning of tides in his blood that didn’t have anything to do with this world’s moons. They weren’t human, the things that surrounded him and constrained him, and they didn’t like him—even at best, atevi wished humanity had never been, never come here … there’d been so much blood, holding on to Mospheira, and they were guilty, but what else could they have done?

  He began to chill. The cold of the water went deeper and deeper into his skull, until the dark began to go away, and he could see the gray stone, and the water in the tub, and feel the grip on his neck and his arms as painful. His knees hurt, on the stones. His arms were numb.

  And his head began to feel light and strange. Is this dying? he wondered. Am I dying? Banichi’s going to be mad if that’s the case.

  “Cut the water,” Banichi said, and of a sudden Bren found himself hauled over onto his back, dumped into what he vaguely decided was a lap, and felt a blanket, a very welcome but inadequate blanket, thrown over his chilled skin. Sight came and went. He thought it was a yellow blanket, he didn’t know why it mattered. He was scared as someone picked him up like a child and carried him, that that person was going to try to carry him down the stairs, which were somewhere about, the last he remembered. He didn’t feel at all secure, being carried.

  The arms gave way and dumped him.

  He yelled. His back and shoulders hit a mattress, and the rest of him followed.

  Then someone rolled him roughly onto his face on silken, skidding furs, and pulled off his blanket, his boots and his trousers, while he just lay there, paralyzed, aware of all of it, but aware too of a pain in his temples that forecast a very bad headache. He heard Banichi’s voice out of the general murmur in the room, so it was all right now. It would be all right, since Banichi was here. He said, to help Banichi,

  “I drank the tea.”

  A blow exploded across his ear. “Fool!” Banichi said, from above him, and flung him over onto his back and covered him with furs.

  It didn’t help the headache, which was rising at a rate that scared him and made his heart race. He thought of stroke, or aneurism, or an impending heart attack. Only where Banichi had hit his ear was hot and halfway numb. Banichi grabbed his arm and stuck him with a needle—it hurt, but not near the pain his head was beginning to have.

  After that, he just wanted to lie there submerged in dead animal skins, and breathe. He listened to his own heartbeat, he timed his breaths, he found troughs between the waves of pain, and lived in those, while his eyes ran tears from the daylight and he wished he was sane enough to tell Banichi to draw the drapes.

  “This isn’t Shejidan!” Banichi railed at him. “Things don’t come in plastic packages!”

  He knew that. He wasn’t stupid. He remembered where he was, though he wasn’t sure what plastic packages had to do with anything. The headache reached a point he thought he was going to die and he wanted to have it over with—

  But you didn’t say that to atevi, who didn’t think the same as humans, and Banichi was already mad at him.

  Justifiably. This was the second time in a week Banichi had had to rescue him. He kept asking himself had the aiji-dowager tried to kill him, and tried to warn Banichi that Cenedi was an assassin—he was sure he was. He looked like Banichi—he wasn’t sure that was a compelling logic, but he tried to structure his arguments so Banichi wouldn’t think he was a total fool.

  “Cenedi did this?”

  He thought he’d said so. He wasn’t sure. His head hurt too much. He just wanted to lie there in the warm furs and go to sleep and not have it hurt when and if he woke up, but he was scared to let go, because he might never wake up and he hadn’t called
Hanks.

  Banichi crossed the room and talked to someone. He wasn’t sure, but he thought it was Jago. He hoped there wasn’t going to be trouble, and that they weren’t under attack of some kind. He wished he could follow what they were saying.

  He shut his eyes. The light hurt them too much. Someone asked if he was all right, and he decided if he weren’t all right, Banichi would call doctors or something, so he nodded that he was, and slid off into the dark, thinking maybe he had called Hanks, or maybe just thought about calling Hanks. He wasn’t sure.

  V

  Light hurt. Moving hurt. There wasn’t any part of him that didn’t hurt once he tried to move, particularly his head, and the smell of food wasn’t at all attractive. But a second shake came at his shoulder, and Tano leaned over him, he was sure it was Tano, though his eyes wouldn’t focus, quite, and light hurt.

  “You’d better eat, nand’ paidhi.”

  “God.”

  “Come on.” Pitilessly, Tano began plumping up the cushions about his head and shoulders—which made his head ache and made him uncertain about his stomach.

  He rested there, figuring that for enough cooperation to satisfy his tormentors, and saw Algini in the doorway to the bath and the servants’ quarters, talking to Jago, the two of them speaking very quietly, in voices that echoed and distorted. Tano came back with a bowl of soup and some meal wafers. “Eat,” Tano told him, and he didn’t want it. He wanted to tell Tano go away, but his servants didn’t go away, Tabini hired them, and he had to do what they said.

  Besides, white wafers was what you ate when your stomach was upset and you wanted not to be sick—he flashed on Mospheira, on his own bedroom, and his mother—but it was Tano holding his head, Tano insisting he have at least half of it, and he nibbled a crumb at a time, while the room and everything tilted on him, and kept trying to slide off into the echoing edges of the world.

  He rested his eyes after that, and waked to the smell of soup. He didn’t want it, but he took a sip of it, when Tano put the cup to his lips, and burned his mouth. It tasted like the tea. He wanted to stop right there, but Tano kept trying to feed it to him, insisting he had to, that it was the only way to flush the tea out of his system. So he put an arm into the cold air, located the cup handle with his own hand, let Tano prop his head with pillows, and drank at the cup without dropping it, until his stomach decided it absolutely couldn’t tolerate any more.