Citizen Fosyf, sitting at one end of the table, said, “This actually used to be storage and administration. The main building was a guesthouse, you know. Before the annexation.”
“All the bedrooms in the main house exit onto the balconies,” said Raughd. Who had maneuvered to sit beside me, was now leaning close with head tilted and a knowing smile. “Very convenient for assignations.” She was, I realized, trying to flirt with me. Even though I was in mourning and so her pursuit of me would be highly improper in the best of situations.
“Ha-ha!” laughed Citizen Fosyf. “Raughd has always found those outer stairs useful. I did myself when I was that age.”
The nearest town was an hour away by flier. There was no one here to have assignations with except household members—over in the main house, I assumed, would be cousins and clients. Not everyone in a household was always related in a way that made sex off-limits, so there might well have been allowable relationships here that didn’t involve intimidating the servants.
Captain Hetnys sat across the table from me, Sword of Atagaris standing stiff scant meters behind her, waiting in case it should be needed. As an ancillary, it wasn’t required to observe mourning customs. Kalr Five stood behind me, having apparently convinced everyone here that she, also, was an ancillary.
Citizen Sirix sat silent beside me. The house servants I’d seen appeared to mostly be Samirend with a few Xhais, though I’d seen a few Valskaayans working on the grounds outside. There had been a small, nearly undetectable hesitation on the part of the servants that had shown us to our rooms—I suspected that they would have sent Sirix to servants’ quarters if they’d not been given other instructions. It was possible someone here would recognize her, even though she’d last been downwell twenty years ago and wasn’t from this estate, but another one a hundred or more kilometers away.
“Raughd’s tutors always found it dull here,” said Fosyf.
“They were dull!” exclaimed Raughd. In a singsong, nasal voice, she declaimed, “Citizen! In third meter and Acute mode, tell us how God is like a duck.” Captain Hetnys laughed. “I always tried to make life more amusing for them,” Raughd went on, “but they never seemed to appreciate it.”
Citizen Fosyf laughed as well. I did not. I had heard about such amusements from my lieutenants in the past, and had already seen Raughd’s tendency toward cruelty. “Can you?” I asked. “Tell us in verse, I mean, how God is like a duck?”
“I shouldn’t think God was anything like a duck,” said Captain Hetnys, emboldened by my past few days of outward calm. “Honestly. A duck!”
“But surely,” I admonished, “God is a duck.” God was the universe, and the universe was God.
Fosyf waved my objection away. “Yes, yes, Fleet Captain, but surely one can say that quite simply without all the fussing over meters and proper diction and whatnot.”
“And why choose something so ridiculous?” asked Captain Hetnys. “Why not ask how God is like… rubies or stars or”—she gestured vaguely around—“even tea? Something valuable. Something vast. It would be much more proper.”
“A question,” I replied, “that might reward close consideration. Citizen Fosyf, I gather the tea here is entirely handpicked and processed by hand.”
“It is!” Fosyf beamed. This was, clearly, one of the centers of her pride. “Handpicked—you can see it whenever you like. The manufactory is nearby, very easy to visit. Should you find that proper.” A brief pause, as she blinked, someone nearby having apparently sent her a message. “The section just over the ridge is due to be picked tomorrow. And of course the making of the leaves into tea—the crafting of it—goes on all day and night. The leaves must be withered and stirred, till they reach just the right point, and then dry-cooked and rolled until just the right moment. Then they’re graded and have the final drying. You can do all those things by machine, of course, some do, and it’s perfectly acceptable tea.” The smallest hint of contempt and dismissal behind that perfectly acceptable. “The sort of thing you’d get good value for in a shop. But this tea isn’t available in shops.”
Fosyf’s tea, Daughter of Fishes, would only be available as a gift. Or—maybe—bought directly from Citizen Fosyf to be given as a gift. The Radch used money, but a staggering amount of exchanges were not money for goods, but gift for gift. Citizen Fosyf was not paid much, if anything, for her tea. Not technically. Those green fields we’d flown over, all that tea, the complicated production, was not a matter of maximizing cost efficiency—no, the point of Daughter of Fishes was prestige.
Which explained why, though there were doubtless larger plantations on Athoek, that likely pulled in profits that at first glance looked much more impressive, the only grower who’d felt competent to approach me so openly was the one who did not sell her tea at all.
“It must take a delicate touch,” I observed. “The picking, and the processing. Your workers must be tremendously skilled.” Beside me, Citizen Sirix gave an almost inaudible cough, choking slightly on her last mouthful of soup.
“They are, Fleet Captain, they are! You see why I would never treat them badly, I need them too much! In fact, they live in an old guesthouse themselves, a few kilometers away, over the ridge.” Rain spattered against the small windows. It only ever rained at night, Athoek Station had told me, and the rain always ended in time for the leaves to dry for the morning picking.
“How nice,” I replied, my voice bland.
I rose before the sun, when the sky was a pearled pink and pale blue, and the lake and its valley still shadowed. The air was cool but not chill, and I had not had enough space to run for more than a year. It had been a habit when I had been in the Itran Tetrarchy, a place where sport was a matter of religious devotion, exercises for their ball game were a prayer and a meditation. It felt good to return to it, even though no one here played the game or even knew it existed. I took the road toward the low ridge at an easy jog, wary of my right hip, which I had injured a year ago and which hadn’t healed quite right.
As I came over the ridge, I heard singing. One strong voice, pitched to echo off the stony outcrops and across the field where workers with baskets slung over their shoulders rapidly plucked leaves from the waist-high bushes. At least half of those workers were children. The song was in Delsig, a lament by the singer that someone she loved was committed exclusively to someone else. It was a distinctively Valskaayan subject, not the sort of thing that would come up in a typical Radchaai relationship. And it was a song I’d heard before. Hearing it now raised a sharp memory of Valskaay, of the smell of wet limestone in the cave-riddled district I’d last been in, there.
The singer was apparently a lookout. As I drew nearer, the words changed. Still Delsig, largely incomprehensible, I knew, to the overseers.
Here is the soldier
So greedy, so hungry for songs.
So many she’s swallowed, they leak out,
They spill out of the corners of her mouth
And fly away, desperate for freedom.
I was glad my facial expressions weren’t at all involuntary. It was cleverly done, fitting exactly into the meter of the song, and I wouldn’t have been able to help smiling, thus betraying the fact that I’d understood. As it was, I ran on, apparently oblivious. But watching the workers. Every single one of them appeared to be Valskaayan. The singer’s satire on me had been intended for these people, and it had been sung in a Valskaayan language. On Athoek Station, I had been told that all Fosyf’s field workers were Valskaayan, and at the time it had struck me as odd. Not that some of them might be, but that all of them would be. Seeing confirmation of it, now, the wrongness of it struck me afresh.