“I’m hungry now. Come on. Let’s eat. They’ll be barbieing up by now.”
Under the ribs of a lone umbrella tree the Surveyors had dug firepits and slung spits. The flee-kills were being gutted, skinned, skewered. Cracks and flares of burning fat sent spirals of aromatic black smoke through the leaves of the shade tree. There were three barbecue pits under the tree. At one the Waymender bike girls were gathered, roasting bustards. They greeted Serpio with a toss of the chin, Sweetness with a suspicious glance over their goggles. Sweetness admired and envied their bike gear, the amount of dusty muscle it showed, the casual toughness with which they wore it.
“Anything going?”
The girl with the biggest muscles spoke. “Might be. Who’s that you’re with?”
“Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.”
The leader tried the name out on her tongue, twice.
“So. Nice hair. You with Squint?”
“I’ve been talking to him.”
“Well, I suppose someone needs to. There’s rail-rabbit if you want some.”
They took the charred haunch wrapped in old survey charts to the trunk. It tasted to Sweetness like hamadryad thigh. A bike wireless burbled New School Deuteronomy flute-and-tabla and Sweetness thought, In this place, at this moment, I am perfectly happy. It could not last. The ending was exactly as Sweetness had seen in too many incarriage Range-rider movies. The cool touch of shadow, the boots foursquare on the earth, the silhouette blocking out the sun. Three of them, in classic vee-formation. Each could have taken Serpio like a haunch of rabbit in two hands and bitten him in half. And they wanted to. The bike girls’ gruffness had fronted a sororal affection. These Waymender boys hated him.
“You don’t eat that, Squint.”
A heavy-soled boot kicked the meat from Serpio’s grip. As he reached for it, a lieutenant pushed him over on his side down into the dust and twisted his spine until he was looking up at his chief tormentor.
“Breakfast, boy.”
The leader carried meat: a roasted pigling penis, smoking hot. Serpio struggled and spat but the two lieutenants had him held firm.
“This is what you eat, Squint.”
They pried his mouth open with sharp fingers pressed hard into the angle of the jaw. Serpio kicked and thrashed against the big boy’s attempt to shove the pig’s penis into his mouth.
“Hold him still.”
They did and it went in. Serpio choked and spat.
“Eat it up now.”
The lieutenants moved his jaw, mocking mastication.
I know why you are doing this, Sweetness thought. You see him with someone, doing a thing your rules for him do not allow, you see him doing a thing for himself and not asking it from you, and you hate that. She wanted to speak out. She wanted to kick them hard in the balls, go for their eyes. She wanted to stop them doing the thing to Serpio that was for her benefit. But she was off-territory, out-clan. Amongst aliens.
“Salp, let him be.”
The leader twisted his mouth in a moue of disappointment but the girls had spoken. They were not impressed. It was over. The boys left without a word. Serpio flung the foul pig-thing away from him, spat and spat and spat again. Sweetness went to him but she was afraid to touch him. She did not know the decorum of the Waymender Domiety. To offer a hand in comfort might be a worse insult than that done to him by the bike boys.
“I’m sorry,” she said, feeling how lame the words were on her lips.
“Sorry?” Serpio struggled to his feet. “What are you sorry about? What have you done?”
“Sorry,” she said again, no better than before.
Serpio flung soil, kicked grass, dry-spat after his persecutors.
“Bastards! Bastards! You think you’re something, Salpinge, well, you’re nothing! You are nothing!”
He settled into a damaged, trembling sulk. His world-eye glowed dark.
“It’s over. They’re gone.” Sweetness knelt, carefully putting herself between Serpio and his bullies.
“Harx,” Serpio whispered, so quiet and venomous Sweetness almost mistook it for a natural phenomenon.
“What?”
“He’ll show you,” Serpio muttered. “He’ll show everyone. You’ll all see!”
“What is, who is, Harx?” Sweetness asked but he did not hear and she knew the words were not for her. She saw a reflection in Serpio’s angel-eye where the sun was not; a glint of silver.
Serpio stood up. He balled his fists and roared at his tormentors, a howl of energy that drew years of shame and rage and alienation like a vacuum in the soul. Sweetness was not sure she liked boys who howled. Serpio gasped into a hunch of humiliation, but the howl roared on, changing shape and tone, becoming something other, a note, a whistle, a train whistle, coming up the track. She knew that song. She knew the song of every train on the Southern Grand Trunk. An ear within had been listening for it since Little Pretty One told her in the night the name and nature of her intended. The song of the Class 44 single-tokamak fusion hauler Ninth Avata.
11
Funny, she was to think kilometres later, how simply these things are decided. In all this piece of the Great Oxus there was one upswelling—a shallow, egg-shaped mound a spit or two long and less high, a flaw in the world-making like a bull’s-eye in cheap glass—and Sweetness and Serpio were hiding behind it. They lay side by side, belly-flat on the grass, passing a stolen pair of Surveyor’s glasses between them.
“What are they doing now?” Sweetness demanded. She was a poor passive listener. She was eye that looked, not ear that heard. Thus, from childhood she had had a fear of going blind, perhaps in whimsical divine punishment.
“They’re processing,” Serpio said.
Too much. She snatched the binoculars from his grasp, almost throttling Serpio with the thong. The hillock lay a kay and a half west of the mainline—so the ranging equipment on the glasses told her. Good little glasses, light, clever: they focused automatically. She turned them on the twin ant-trains mutually approaching against a backdrop of colossal engineering. Asiim Engineers to the right, Stuards to the left. They leaped into resolution: first Naon Engineer, sweating but superb in the robe, hat and gloves of his mystery. A pace behind him: Child’a’grace, heartbreakingly elegant in her Susquavanna marriage gown, unfaded, unshrunken and unpatched. Like her. So precise were the survey-glasses that Sweetness could even make out her smirk of small pride at her husband’s splendour—knowing full he would never see it. Then came brother Sle, sulky still, with the casket that held the bank draft for three thousand dollars; Rother’am, sulkier still. Behind him came a Hire-priest—a spotty adolescent in rented regalia. Sweetness watched his lips move as he rehearsed the sentences and responses. His inexperience would have been inaudible over the sound of the Catherine of Tharsis Inter-Domiety band immediately following. Sweetness could hear them parping and cracking notes all the way from her grassy knoll. Non-wedding party, non-musicians straggled after, minor Domiety members and important Septs, the curious, those who liked a bit of a cry, those who wanted any distraction from the mundane nomadism of life on the line. The sides of the waiting trains were hung with religious banners, good-luck ribbons and the faces of those who loved a good wedding. Sweetness swung the glasses widdershins.
Narob Stuard strode well ahead of his people. It showed nuptial eagerness. He held his chin up, and kept his eyes steely-slitted. The wind rustled the banknotes stapled to his waistcoat and tousled the tassels of his wedding shirt. Every few paces he touched his hand to his wedding hat to steady it against the rising high-plains wind. It seemed to irritate him. He is good-looking, Sweetness thought. But then many men look good walking into the wind, and that’s no reason to marry them.