Outside the city, the grasslands surged up to the mountains, as always. Esmay looked out the window, relaxing into that familiar view. The Black Teeth, between which dark spires lay the legendary lair of the Great Wyrm. As a child, she’d believed the dragon stories were about her own world; she had believed the lair was stuffed with dragon’s treasure. She’d been bitterly disappointed to find out that the Great Wyrm was the code name of the rebel alliance that had (so legend went) massacred the original owner of Altiplano and all his family. A school field trip to the “lair” showed it to be a perfectly ordinary bunker built into the cliff on one side of a canyon.
South of the Black Teeth were other peaks of the Romilo Escarpment, lesser only by contrast to the Teeth. Esmay squinted across the kilometers of shimmering light, looking for the gap in the line, the grassy embayment of her family’s estancia. There—the trees marked it out, the long lines of formal plantings along the road and the drives.
The car slowed, pulling off the road. Her father leaned closer. “I don’t know if you still observe,” he said. “But it’s customary, when someone returns from a long journey . . . and anyway, I’m going to light a candle.”
Esmay felt the heat rise to her face. Bad enough to forget, but to have her father suspect she’d forgotten was worse. “I, too,” she said. She clambered out of the car, stiff and feeling even more awkward than stiffness would explain. She hadn’t thought of the ceremonies since she left home; she wasn’t sure she remembered the words.
The shrine, built into the estancia gate wall, had a row of fresh flower wreaths laid out below the niche. She could smell the faint sweet scent of the wreaths, and the stronger aroma of the great trees that loomed above. Even as an imaginative child, Esmay had never been able to see any meaning in the blurred shape of the statue in the niche. She had once been unwise enough to say it looked like a melted blob. She had never said it again, but she’d thought it often enough. Now, she saw with fresh eyes, and it still looked like a grayish, shiny melted blob, taller than it was wide. Around its base, the candle cups were clean as always, the little white candles in a box to one side.
Her father took one, set it in the green glass cup, and lit it. Esmay took another, lit it from her father’s flame, and got it into a cup without burning her fingers. Her father said nothing, and neither did she; they stood side by side, watching the flames writhe in the breeze. Then he plucked a needle from one of the trees, and laid it in the flame. Blue smoke swirled up. Esmay remembered to stoop and find a pebble to lay in the wax of her candle.
Back in the car, with the windows now open to the steady breeze, her father still said nothing. Esmay leaned back, enjoying the many shades of green and gold. The drive, bordered with rows of narrow conifers, ran straight for a kilometer. On the right were the orchards, past blooming now. She could just see knots of green fruit on some limbs . . . on the far side, the first plums should be ripening. On the left, the family polo fields, mown in crisscross patterns . . . someone was out there, stooping, stamping divots back in. Nearer the house, flower gardens burst into riotous color. The car swept around the front, into the wide gravelled space large enough to review a mounted troop. It had been used for that, years back. A broad portico, shaded by tangled vines thick as trees at the root . . . two steps up to the wide double-door . . . home.
Not home now.
Nothing had changed . . . at least on the surface. Her room, with its narrow white bed, its shelves full of old books, its cube racks full of familiar cubes. Her old clothes had been removed, but by the time she came upstairs, someone had unpacked her luggage. She knew, without asking, what would be in each drawer. She undressed, hanging her uniform on the left end of the pole: it would be taken away and cleaned, returned to the right end of the pole. Presently the right end of the pole had two outfits she did not own—someone’s suggestion of what to wear to the family dinner. She had to admit they looked more comfortable than anything she had bought off-planet. Down the familiar hall to the big square bathroom, with its two shower stalls and its vast tub . . . after shipboard accommodations, it seemed impossibly large. But just this once . . . she slid the door marker to “long bath” and grinned to herself. She did like long hot baths.
When she came downstairs, in the long cream-colored tunic over soft loose brown slacks, her father and step-mother were waiting. Her stepmother, born elegant, gave an approving nod, which for some reason made Esmay furious. No doubt she had chosen that tunic, had it put in Esmay’s closet . . . for a moment Esmay thought of ripping it off and throwing it . . . but R.S.S. officers did not behave like that. And her half-brothers were watching, and others coming into the hall. She smiled at her step-mother, and shook the offered hand.
“Welcome home, Esmaya,” her stepmother said. “I hope you will like dinner . . .”
“Of course she will,” her father said.
Dinner was in the informal dining hall, its wide windows opening on a tiled courtyard with a pool . . . Esmay could hear the gentle splash of the fountain even over the murmur of voices, the scraping of feet on the tiled floor.
She started toward her old place out of habit, but someone sat there already—a cousin no doubt—and her father was leading her up the table, to sit at Papa Stefan’s left hand. Great-grandmother was not at the table; she would be waiting to receive Esmay afterwards, in her own parlor.
“Here she is, at last,” her father said.
Papa Stefan had aged; he was thinner, the skin looser over his bones. But his eyes were still sharp; his mouth, even as he smiled at her, still firm.
“Your father tells me you remembered the proper offering for return,” he said. “Do you also remember the proper blessing of food?”
Esmay blinked. Once away from Altiplano, she had shed all concern about clean and unclean foods, blessings and cursings, as happily as she’d shed the traditional undergarments considered appropriate for a virtuous daughter. She had not expected this honor . . . as much test as honor, as everyone knew. Ordinarily only sons and sons of sons asked blessings on the food at dinner; daughters and daughters of daughters asked the morning grace at the breaking of the night’s fast, and at the noon meal everyone held silence.
She looked down the table to see what was on the great platters . . . it made a difference . . . and was even more surprised to see the five platters that meant a whole calf had been butchered in her honor.
She had never heard of a woman speaking at such a time, but she knew the words.
“Back from the waste . . .” she began, and continued through the whole, stumbling only momentarily over the nested clauses where the prayer expected a male speaker and she had either to speak of herself in the masculine or change the words. “From father to son it came to me, and so I send it on . . .” She had not thought about her own culture in any detailed way after the first year or so in the Fleet prep schools; she had not noticed how confining the language really was. Fleet had shocked her at first, with its assumption of easy relationships between the sexes, with “sir” used for both men and women. In Fleet, the important terms for parents distinguished between gene-parents and life-parents, not between mothers and fathers. On Altiplano, they had no word for “parents,” and while they knew of modern methods of reproduction, very few would ever use them.
She finished the blessing, still thinking of the differences, and Papa Stefan sighed. Esmay glanced at him; his eyes twinkled.