"D'accord, maîtresse!" Solange said.
"Did I tell yo' Jimbob Claremont tried to buy yo' again? Offered two thousand aurics."
"It is a great deal?" she said, propping her chin on a palm.
"Unheard of, sweet. Especially these days; it'd be extravagant fo' a racehorse, much less a wench. Forty times what a fieldhand costs."
"Ah. Pleasant, to be appreciated."
"That's not the half of it; he offered to throw in an original Degas when I turned him down."
"A temptation, certainement."
Tanya laughed and fed the serf a berry between thumb and forefinger. "Not much. Besides, he has hairy fingers. Couldn't bear to think of it."
Marya cleared her throat, and the Draka looked up.
"Patience. There are cushions over there, pull some up an' we'll go over the figures."
"… and these are the estimates from the League for the construction crew, Mistress," Marya finished. A team of specialists, hired out for heavy building work; they had left last week, and the nun was glad of it; they had created no end of noise and confusion.
"Hmmmm." Tanya flipped through the last of the account sheets. "Excellent work, Marya, yo've got a talent fo' administration… ouch." She folded the contractor's bill. "Piracy, even if everybody does need them. Oh, well, we can always take out anothah loan. Anythin' else?"
"A circular from the Transportation Directorate. They are moving one of their labor camps into the area, the gauge-standardization project." The Domination's railways ran on a 1.75-meter gauge, wider than the European system, and tens of thousands of kilometers had to be relaid. "They would appreciate any bulk foodstuffs available, to save transport. We have several thousand kilograms of potatoes surplus to projected requirements, mistress."
"By all means, sell 'em."
"And a cablegram for you in this morning's mail, I think concerning the naming-day celebrations for your children."
Tanya ripped open the flimsy. "Probably Tom and Johanna," she said. To Marya: "Third an' first cousins, respectively; they have a place down in Tuscany." A snort of laughter. "Johanna, all right. Askin' why I've had the infernal bad manners to pup at such an inconvenient time, with grape-harvest comin' on. Says can't I count to nine, or have I jus' forgotten what activity results in babies? Hmmm, that's them, their two children an' six staff. Flyin' up in their Cub. How many so fer?"
"Thirty-seven Citizens who will be staying at least overnight, mistress, with about twice that number of servants. Where are we going to put them all, mistress? The new wing is just a shell."
"Pavilions, of course. We have a couple around somewheres. We'll set them up in the cherry-orchard just south. Serfs can double-up. Then we'll have to find room for the namin'-gifts, as well." A sigh. "Just because I paint pictures, everyone assumes I want pictures, 'sides everyone havin' loot comin' out they ears. I'm goin' to have to open a gallery." She reread the cablegram. "Ahhh, no, second thoughts—Tom and Johanna are comin' up in two Cubs. They two were in the Air Corps, they've got pull, an' I suspect they're goin' to be giving one to us. We'll have to buy another mechanic. Hmmm, we might be able to pick up an ex-Auxiliary from the Forces."
"I will make a note of it, Mistress." A piece of meadow had been marked off as a grass-strip runway for those guests flying in, but she supposed something more permanent would be needed if the plantation was to have an aircraft of its own. Cubs were small six-seater runabouts, but the waiting-list was long. "And I've received a telephone message from Tours, the thousand kilos of oranges you ordered have arrived, the steamtruck will be here Thursday."
Tanya opened her eyes in alarm. "Wait a minute, isn't the cold-storage room out of order?"
"Yes, mistress; Josef tells me it will take a week to repair once the parts arrive… and they are overdue." The Landholder's League had just established a schedule of per-capita citrus consumption, to get the export trade from the Domination's old territories going again. It was more convenient to buy in bulk and issue from storage, but the oranges would not keep without refrigeration.
"Shit. Burn up the wire, try an' get the parts. Issue every household a big sack, an' hunt up mason-jars, we'll put up preserves an' marmalade. No use tryin' to send them back, those League bureaucrats would rather eat their children than muss the paperwork. Damn waste."
Tanya rose, yawned, put her hands together back-to-back above her head, linked the fingers and bent backward. She was not bulky, but for an instant the long smooth swellings of muscle jumped out into high definition, like a standing wave beneath her skin. Frowning, she probed at the curve of her stomach where it scalloped in under her ribs. "Damn, bettah put in another couple of hours, today; still too slack. Last thing we need is fo' me to get six months punitive callup fo' bein' unfit-for-service."
Solange rose and slid the Draka's white-striped black caftan over her head, tied the belt and knelt to fasten her sandals. The wetnurse had taken the infant from her breast and had it on her shoulder, patting gently at its back until a small, surprised belch indicated success. She wiped up the results and Tanya held out her hands for the wiggling pink form, taking it in an experienced head-and-fundament grip. -
"They always look like piglets at this age, don't they?" she asked the air, chuckling and swooping the child around in a circle. It gurgled and waved its arms and legs with a gum-baring smile; Tanya brought it close and fluttered her lips against its stomach. A hand stuck tiny fingers into her nose as wide infant eyes looked down uncertainly, deciding whether to laugh or bawl. They settled on sleep instead; heavy eyelids blinked down, and the Draka settled her child in the stroller beside its twin.
"Hush now," she murmured, pulling up the light coverlet. "You two don' know it, but the whole clan, the neighbors an' half o'creation are comin' to give you toys." A smile, soft and amused. "Give yo' momma and poppa toys in your name, really." The baby gave a small half-cry and then dropped off with the abrupt collapse-in-place finality of infant sleep. "Don" you worry though, little ones. Momma an' poppa are goin' give yo' the whole world fo' a toy."
"Come on, Marya," she said as she straightened. "Few mo' things we need to talk about, might as well do it on the way to the palaestra."
Chantal sat staring dully as the Draka left, watching with blank indifference as Solange hopped up onto the lounger and leaned over to pour herself a cup of coffee.
"A cup, Chantal?" she said, using the silver tongs to drop two of the triangular lumps into her own. "Or some of these strawberries? Really, they are very good, just picked. One doesn't appreciate what freshness is until one lives in the country; a shame to waste them." Sighing with contentment, she spooned some of the cream over the fruit and sank back against the rear of the lounger, cross-legged with the bowl in her lap.
The other woman looked up, the blank apathy leaving her narrowing eyes. "You are disgusting," she hissed. "A disgusting whore."
"Ah." Solange dipped the long slender spoon into the bowl, picked up a berry and considered it a moment before eating. "I will spare you, cherie, the obvious retort that far from being disgusting, I am a beautiful and accomplished whore… and instead merely point out that nobody is paying money for my favors; one should use words with precision, no? 'Kept woman,' perhaps, or 'concubine.' Furthermore, you have been called to the master's room fairly often of late. In fact, last night—he was with the Mistress, you understand, and I sleep at the foot of her bed—I heard him express great satisfaction with you. Particularly the way you squeeze your—"
The other jumped to her feet with a strangled sound; Solange dropped the spoon and spread her hands in a placatory gesture.
"I am sorry. Truly, that was cruel, and I should not have said it. Accept my apologies, ma soeur."
Chantal dropped back to the stool, let her face fall forward into her hands and wept with a grinding sound, hopeless and disconsolate, misery past all thought of privacy or control. Solange turned on one side, busying herself with the cup and saucer in embarrassment until the other woman had com
mand of herself once more.
"I suppose I deserved it," Chantal said at last, blowing her nose and wiping at her eyes with a handkerchief. "I am no better than you, after all."
The serf on the lounger sighed in exasperation and clinked the stoneware down on the marble table slightly harder than necessary.
"LeFarge, it is not a matter of better or worse, but of less or more foolish. This grows rapidly more tiresome, my old, this martyred pose of yours. If the von Shrakenbergs took you seriously, there might already have been grave happenings. Some… friends have asked me to speak with you." She shook her head at Chantal's quick suspicion. "No, not the masters; Mistress Tanya does not, I fear, think of me in connection with such practical matters. Some of the other servants; you are becoming a somewhat dangerous person to be about. Not Sister Marya either…" A pause.
"The good Sister is, as one might expect, something of an innocent. She would sympathize, but say you have nothing to reproach yourself for, as one who submits passively to superior force." She kept her eyes on Chantal's, until they dropped again. "Which we both know is not entirely the case, n'est-ce pas?"
"Say what you have to," Chantal replied in a mumble.
A sigh. "Did you ever see the Bastille Day parade in Paris, Chantal?"
"No," she replied with surprise, startled out of her thoughts. "May Day only."
"A great pity, the spectacle was beautiful. I remember well, I was about six, so this must have been '32 or '33, the first time my father took me. He was just back from a field trip, burned dark as an Arab, with a most dashing beard; he held my hand as we walked to our seats in the reviewing stand where others with the Croix du Guerre would sit, and I was very proud of him. Maman," she continued, smiling dreamily, "Maman had the most lovely hat, with flowers; she put it on my head and it fell right over my eyes and I pushed it off again because it was very important to see everything. Poppa put me on his shoulder when the soldiers went by; there were hussars in red cloaks, and cuirassiers in shiny breastplates, and Foreign Legionnaires in white kepis and epaulets.
"I was a little frightened, they looked so fierce and the horses were so large. But Poppa explained that these were men from all over France, who would fight to keep bad men from coming and hurting me, as he had fought the Germans in the Great War; he showed me the President of the Republic, who I could tell was very important because of his frock-coat and sash, and told me how he would command them. I felt very safe, then; my Maman was with me, and Poppa was the strongest and handsomest man in the world, and now there were all these others who would look after me, so there was nothing that could hurt me."
Chantal blinked at her, astonished and sadly envious. Remembered her father stumbling home smelling of cheap sour Midi wine, and his fumbling hands; remembered hiding in the closet too frightened to cry while her parents screamed at each other outside and then the slap of a fist on a face and the tinny crash of kitchenware. Wondering, she studied Solange, trying to see the child with the starched pinafore and the ribbons in her hair, perched on the laughing bronzed explorer's shoulder. Watching the soldiers, she thought bemusedly. For her, soldiers were the men who came and broke strikes, or the way her eldest sister picked up a little extra cash for drink after the bottle got to her.
Solange was frowning slightly in concentration, her lower lip caught between her teeth. Well, I'll listen, Chantal thought resignedly. My god, how did the little princess end up here? Perhaps I was wrong to envy; at least I was never allowed to think I could rely on anyone but myself.
"There is a point?" she said.
"Well, we're neither of us little girls any more, are we, Chantal? Nor are you the only one to have suffered," Solange said with a shrug. "The past is gone, and everything it held, as well. Why should we fight, you and I? Because of things from before the War, politics, classes? It's absurd; that world is gone and this one of ours is all we have.
"I remember the War," she continued. "Better, because I was old enough to understand and be frightened. We stayed in Paris when the government fled to Bordeaux. Maman wanted to go but Poppa said it would be safer staying than on the roads. When the Germans came, my father went out to watch them parade down the Champs Elysées. Then he came home and got drunk, the first time I can remember that happening, he was already ill and his hands trembled, he just kept raising the glass and wouldn't listen to me, as if Maman and I weren't there, that frightened me even more. Later, we'd be crouching in the cellar of our building with the other families, listening to the English robot bombs overhead like… like bees in the sky, waiting for the engine to stop and the bomb to come down and kill us with nerve gas, and he was afraid too, there was nothing he could do."
"Then the Draka came?" Chantal asked gently. A corner of her mind noted how much of a relief it was, to have the arrow of attention dragged around from its unrelenting focus on the pain at the center of herself.
"Yes." Solange looked down at her hands. "You heard?" The other woman nodded. "The Janissaries picked my father up and threw him into the glass shelves with his souvenirs and kicked him and kicked him, and they… they were killing me, there were too many. Big men, crazy drunk, stronger than horses, I knew I was dying, could feel my life flowing away, I was only eighteen and I didn't want to die—"
She stopped for a moment, dabbed at her cheeks with the back of her hand, took a deep breath. "Then Mistress Tanya came in, I could see a little still. They had guns, they were many; she just told them they were baboons out of… order, I think, and to go. Stared at them, and they shuffled their feet and went away, she picked me up and"—a shrug—"I woke up in a hospital, swathed like an Egyptian mummy. It gave me a great deal of time to think. The mistress came and visited once or twice, but I had a good deal of time, once the pain was less. Time to consider my decisions carefully.'
"Decisions?" Chantal asked. "You weren't in a position to make choices, surely?"
"Oh, one always has some choices to make. Par example, the mistress offered to find me another owner, if I would rather not stay with her. My decision… I decided to give up, Chantal. To surrender absolutely, to submit, to make the best of whatever came. Which, you must admit, could be much worse. We could be whoring in a Janissary brothel, or spending the rest of our lives between a factory and a concrete barracks. Or anonymous lobotomized lumps of flesh in a labor camp. Instead…" She waved a hand around at the pergola.
"Actually, I find myself unable to complain even a little," Solange continued more brightly. "Here I am, safe, after all. Protected. Unless the Americans drop their atomic on us, or the world ends, of course. Safe, pampered, given every luxury and pleasure, hardly required to work at all, indulged, treated—"
"—like a pet animal!" Chantal snapped.
"No, like a pet human, cherie. With affection, valued for my talents and beauty and skills; the mistress is quite proud of me. I'm not treated as an equal, of course, but then we aren't their equals, are we?'
"Are you so convinced of their superiority, then, this master race?" Chantal said, quietly but with an ugly rasp below the surface of her voice.
"Superiority?" Solange made a moue. "Is the wolf superior to the deer? Superior at what, my dear… singing, perhaps? By that standard, I am the superior one on this estate; except perhaps for Yasmin, and she is stronger on the instrumental side. Mistress can paint in a superior fashion; you are superior to me in mathematics. Master race? They are a race of masters, that is plain fact, Chantal. Also that they are stronger than we; that is a better word than 'superior.' Stronger in their armies, of course; stronger in their wills and bodies, as well. They are here, are they not?
"That," she continued, lying back and linking her hands behind her head, "is what I meant when I said that I had surrendered, Chantal. I don't try to fight, or pit my pride against theirs… There's a curious freedom to it, really. No more tension, no more struggle or fear. Like stepping off the high diving board, everything's out of your hands and all you have to do is… let go. I just let…" She paused
, quirked her lips. "No, I helped them change me, inside." She tapped her temple. "Like surgery in here, you see? The scars still ache a little, now and then, but that is fading. Once you've stepped through that wall you find they're not so bad. Even kind."
"Kind?" Chantal came to her feet. "Leaving aside the War— "
"—which they did not start," Solange interjected.
"—Leaving that aside, I said, leaving aside what is happening to me, what about the people they killed? Here, on this land they call theirs."
Solange sighed. "A pity, but those three attempted armed revolt, Chantal. If you lift your hand to the masters, you die. Everyone knows that."
"What about Bernard, then? In the stables? They cut off his balls. And made everyone watch!"
"Chantal, he tried to burn down the house"—she jerked her head back at the towers of the chateau—"at night, with forty people inside, most of them locked in their rooms! I would not have been so merciful." She cocked an eyebrow. "We become somewhat abstract, my dear. Let it suffice to say these people suffered because they resisted. Once you have said in your own heart, 'do with me as you will,' the suffering ends, n'est-ce pas?" Her tone became dry. "One might add, at least you are not required to learn a whole new set of… ah, habits, shall we say." Chantal flushed, and Solange giggled again.
"Actually, it's a bit like those revolting-sounding Normandy dishes we ate in Montparnasse when I was a student, you know, tripe cooked in cream with calfs brains. Horrible to think about, you have to close your eyes the first time, quite nice once you're used to them." A smile. "She could see I was trying hard, and was very… patient with me, very gentle. Besides, there is a certain enjoyment to be had from making another happy, is there not?" She sat up on the lounger and moved down, closer to the other serf.
"Let's get to the heart of it, Chantal. You feel that you are a person, and are being used like a… like a convenience, isn't that it?"