There was no one to deny her this, no bar to her ambition except the powerful drowsiness of childhood and of species. It was as frightening as anything a Jana’ata could do, but Srokan was there in the courtyard with her, telling stories and sharing gossip, her fine hands stroking Jholaa: calming the girl as she lost sight first of blues and next of yellows, contrast fading to a gray lightlessness and then to a dense darkness as confining as an aristocratic woman’s life. The only things that staved off blind panic were Srokan’s voice and the comforting familiar scents of nursery bedding and incense, and the aroma of roasted meat lingering in the air.
Suddenly, Srokan gripped Jholaa’s arms and lifted her to her feet. "There! The clouds have run away and there they are!" she whispered urgently, holding Jholaa’s head so that the girl would look in the right direction—so she could see, like small cold suns, the glowing disks: moons in inky blackness, beautiful and remote as mountain snow.
"There are other things in the night sky," Srokan told her. "Daughters of the moons! Tiny sparkling babies." Jana’ata eyes were not made to see such things and Jholaa could only accept her nurse’s word that this was so, and not some silly Runa story.
This was the only memorable event of her childhood.
For a time, Jholaa shared isolation with the Kitheri Reshtar, her third-born brother, Hlavin. His title meant "spare," and like Jholaa, Hlavin’s purpose was simply to exist, ready to transmit the patrimony should either of their elder brothers come to nothing. Hlavin was the only one aside from Srokan who noticed Jholaa, telling her stories and amusing her with secret songs, even though he was beaten for singing when his tutor caught him at it. Who but Hlavin could have made her laugh as the wives of Dherai and Bhansaar filled nurseries with children who displaced Hlavin and Jholaa in the Kitheri succession? Who but Hlavin would have cried out for her, moved to keening by her story of the moons, and by her confession that as each new niece and nephew was born, Jholaa herself felt more and more like a moon child: invisible to her own people, sparkling, undreamt of, in the darkness.
Then Dherai’s own Reshtar was born, and then Bhansaar’s; the succession was deemed stable, and Hlavin was taken from her, exiled to the port of Gayjur to safeguard his nephews’ lives from a young uncle’s frustrated ambition. Even in exile, Hlavin found a way to sing to her, and sent Jholaa a radio receiver so that she could hear her own words about the moons’ daughters, riding on waves as invisible as stars, woven into a transcendent cantata sung during his first broadcast from Galatna Palace, which was allowed because he did not sing the traditional chants that belonged to those born first or second, but something new and wholly other.
The concert left Jholaa angry, somehow, as if her words had been stolen from her, not given as a gift. When the music ended, she swept the radio from its pedestal, as though it were to blame. "Where is Galatna?" she de- manded as Srokan bent to gather the wreckage.
"It is set like a jewel, on a mountain above the city of Gayjur, and that is by an ocean, my lady," Srokan told her. Srokan looked up, her blue eyes wide. "So much water, you can stand on its edge and look-look as far as you can, but there’s no end to it!"
"You lie. There’s no such thing as water like that. All Runa lie. You’d kill us if you could," Jholaa said with flat contempt, old enough, by then, to know a master’s fear.
"Nonsense, little one!" Srokan cried with good-natured surprise. "Why, Jana’ata sleep away the red sun’s time and true night, and no one harms you! This devoted one does not lie to her darling mistress. The moons were real, my lady. The ocean is real! Its water tastes of salt, and its air is of a scent no landsman knows!"
Resentment was, by then, the only leavening that could lift Jholaa from the torpor that immobilized her for days at a time. She had come to hate the luckless Runa domestics who were her only companions, despising their ability to go into the world, the shameless sluts, unveiled and unguarded, to see oceans and breathe scents Jholaa would never know. Holding an elegant claw to Srokan’s ear, Jholaa began to peel it from the woman’s head, relenting only when the Runao admitted she had not seen or tasted this ocean herself and had only heard stories from the kitchen help, who came from the south. Hlavin would have told her the truth of the ocean, but he was lost to her, so Jholaa allowed her nursemaid’s shaking hands to stroke and soothe her, and breathed in the salt scent of blood, not ocean.
Later that night, as Jholaa lay blind in the dark, useless light of Rakhat’s small, red sun, she decided to execute Srokan for thinking how she might murder Jana’ata in their sleep, and to have the woman’s children killed as well, to clear the line.
Srokan was old anyway. Stew meat, Jholaa thought dismissively.
Which was why there was no one to warn Jholaa or to prepare her for what would happen after her wedding: her domestics were frightened of her and none had the courage to explain why they were dressing her for a state ceremony. But Jholaa was used to being displayed on such occasions, and was not surprised to find herself taken to a stateroom filled with dazzlingly decorated officials and all her male relatives, who continued to chant, as though she were not there.
She stood quietly through the endless ceremonial declamations; these events tended to go on for days, and she had long since given up listening carefully. But when she heard her own name sung, she began to pay attention, and then she recognized the melody that sealed a marriage, and realized that she’d just been legally bound to a man whose lineal name she’d never heard before. Eyes wide behind her jewel-encrusted veil of gold mesh, she turned to ask someone—anyone—if she were being sent to another country, but before she could speak, her father and brothers surrounded her and moved Jholaa to the center of the room.
Her Runa maids reappeared and, when they began to remove her robes, Jholaa spoke up, demanding to know what was happening, but the men only laughed. Furious now and frightened, she tried to cover herself, but then the man whose name she could not quite remember came so close she could smell him, and dropped his own robe off his shoulders and he—. He did not merely look at her, but moved behind her and gripped her ankles and—
She fought, but her screams and struggle were drowned by the wedding guests’ roars of amusement and approval. Afterward, she heard her father comment with chuckling pride to the others, "A virgin! No one could deny it after all that!" To which her eldest brother replied, "Almost as much of a fighter as that outlandish foreigner Hlavin and his friends use…"
When it was over, she was taken through a courtyard made festive for the occasion to a small shuttered room where she sat, ripped and bewildered, and listened to poetry sung in honor of the fourth-born Jholaa Kitheri u Darjan: against all odds, bred to a third-born merchant who would never have sired a child at all but for the foreign servant Sandoz. And when at last Jholaa bore that child, its lineage was unquestionable; this was, she came to understand, the only reason for her own existence.
A similar fate, she believed, was all that awaited her daughter. The lady Jholaa never looked at her infant, after the first moments of its life, when she got a hand loose from the midwife’s grip and tried to slash the child’s throat, from pity and disgust. Later, when her brother Dherai appeared briefly in her room to tell her that the infant was deformed, Jholaa did not care.
"Kill it then," was all she said, and wished someone had done the same for her.
6
Naples