Captivity (12 page)

The ruse worked. Jana strove to imitate her
beloved papa in every way, and although she was torn between her
babyish desire to nurse and her papa’s example, he soon won her
over. Before long she was shaking her head at my offered nipple,
demanding a cup like Papa.

Val was another story. He had never warmed to
Dominic as Jana did, was just as likely to cry or turn away when
Dominic approached him or picked him up. When Dominic tried the
same line on his son that had worked so well with his daughter, Val
had rejected such idiocy. “You’re a grown-up,” he informed Dominic,
surprised that his father appeared to be unaware of the fact. “You
drink whisky.” Dominic often enjoyed a drink or two before supper,
had let the children sniff it to convince them it was disagreeable
and that they weren’t being deprived of a treat. As Dominic and I
laughed in spite of ourselves, Val said, “I drink milk,” then
turned back to his interrupted feeding, snuggling his face into my
open dress. For him, milk came from only one source, my
breasts.

It was not all Val’s stubbornness. I enjoyed
nursing my children, had been thrilled by the way it connected me
with them, no longer inside me, but still drawing nourishment from
my body. I had found the touch of the soft little mouth when they
were infants as sensuous, in a different way, as Dominic’s
lovemaking, and had not minded the stronger pull of the older
child. “Careful with those fangs,” I had teased Jana when her first
teeth began to show. But she had never really hurt me. I had weaned
her more because I knew it had to be done eventually, and for
Dominic’s sake, than for my own need.

Dominic accepted the fact that children must
be nursed. His pleasure in his new family, with Jana’s birth coming
six months after our wedding, had survived all the hardships of
parenthood, the nighttime disruptions and the changes in sleeping
arrangements. He had never grudged Jana her monopoly on my
attention. He had even sampled my milk himself, drinking from me
one night before I knew what he was up to, smacking his lips and
working his mouth as if tasting wine. “Fragrant and earthy,” he
said, “a rich bouquet with an unusual aftertaste.” My tolerant
smile only encouraged him. “I’m beginning to see why my daughter is
so addicted.” He dipped his head for a second helping, his deep
voice purring with low laughter when I slapped him away from
me.

But eighteen months is a long time, and
Dominic’s patience had worn thin this second time around. He was
resentful of Val’s constant demands on me, sick of the smell of
sour milk that clung to me despite regular laundering and bathing.
He could not squeeze my breast in a moment of passion, could not
take my nipple in his mouth, without producing a stream of the
fluid that no longer appealed to him. He was spending fewer nights
with me, and there were not so many attempts to make up for it
during the day, as there would have been in the past.

Shortly before we visited Stefan, Dominic had
come into my room as I was nursing Val at bedtime. My husband had
been aroused for me, his thoughts already in my mind, so that I
felt my body melting in response before the door completely opened.
Dominic had taken in the familiar scene and his desire had died. “I
wonder,” he said, “if my son intends to keep that privilege all to
himself, or if he will allow his father an occasional share of
pleasure in the next ten years.” He had slammed the door and spent
the night with Niall.

If we ever got out of here– no, I told
myself,
when
we get out of here– there will be a lot of work
undoing the bad effects of our imprisonment. Val was well on the
way to nursing constantly; my nipples were becoming cracked and
sore from such heavy use. He nursed as much from fear and
unhappiness as hunger, swallowing the milk as a consequence of his
innate need to suck. He was young enough that although I was dirty
and I stank, and wore a scratchy dress that irritated Val’s skin
where he touched it in the same way it did mine, yet his craving
for his mother’s arms overcame every other discomfort. The
frightening changes in his life, coupled with the lack of his usual
balanced diet, had started him on the retrogression to infancy.

It was the same for me. My desire to protect
my son, combined with my own worries, made me hold onto him like a
fearful child at bedtime with a familiar toy. Val’s mouth on my
breast reassured me as much as him. It meant we were together and
that I was doing everything in my power to keep him safe and
well.

Once we were home, I told myself, things
would be different. How wonderful it appeared now, the work of
weaning, of caring for my two children. Home again, rested and fed,
bathed, in my own comfortable clothes, with Dominic’s love and
support, how could anything be a problem?
The women of the
household will help, as always,
I thought dreamily,
Isobel
and Magali and
–

I sat up suddenly, drenched with
panic-induced sweat. Reynaldo had
read
me just now, studied
my memories. He had called me “Lady Amalie,” the name my household
uses, a custom that began before I was married, when the people I
would spend the rest of my life among had wished to show their
acceptance of the woman who could not yet be called ‘Gravina
Aranyi. Surely, I argued hopelessly with my fear, the man might
simply believe that was a proper way to address me, like Lady
Melanie, the unmarried daughter of a noble family. Then I
remembered the moment on the trail when we were captured, when I
had realized the bandits were not overawed or impressed by the
announcement of my identity, but had
expected
‘Gravina
Aranyi to walk into their trap.

Reynaldo
knew me
, I felt certain, knew
me and Dominic. My kidnapping was not random, not simply the result
of traveling with few guards in deep forest. If another party had
preceded us down that lonely trail, I suspected the bandits would
not have accosted them, not if it meant alerting their intended
victim to the danger she was nearing. Baffled, too tired to think
clearly, I slept.

By morning I felt feverish and sick, too weak to
rise. The rough fabric of my hand-me-down dress had been irritating
my skin all night, as if those biting insects I had killed were
resurrected and crawling all over my body. Eclipsis’s best
protection against the cold climate, the durable, water-resistant
wool from the hardy mountain-bred sheep, produces a kind of
allergic reaction in the mostly red-haired ‘Graven. Gifted men and
women, both, wear soft undergarments next to our tender skin.
Pink skin, red hair, silk and linen must she wear.
An
Eclipsian nursery rhyme ran in my head, detailing the
sensitivities, physical and emotional, of the sibyl. Had Michaela
known this when she exchanged her daughter’s clothes for mine, she
would have been unable to contain her delight.

I watched Jana use the pot, my outer eyelids
swollen half-shut with fever or allergy. In the permanent twilight
of the unlighted cell, something about Jana looked different, but I
forgot it as I crawled to the pot myself and sank back in the straw
again. Faint and sick, my heart pounding with the exertion, my
blood wheezing a dreary song in my ears as it struggled up through
my neck, I had reached a new depth of suffering.

Val struggled with his filthy diaper. “Come
here, love,” I called, removing the impediment, letting him relieve
himself on the pot.

“I went all by myself,” he said when he had
finished.

Jana would have none of it. “A boy pees
standing up,” she told him. “Only a baby sits down to pee.”

Val’s face crumpled to cry. Then he saw the
flaw in her dismissal. “You sit,” he said. “You’re a baby too.”

Jana’s eyebrows rose in a frightening parody
of Dominic’s enraged look. “I’m a girl,” she said. “You’re supposed
to be a boy, but you act like a baby.”

“Stop it,” I said. “Stop it, stop it,
stop
it!
” I was losing control, of myself and of the impossible
situation. At home, with boundless space and many willing helpers,
the children never spent so long in each other’s unwelcome
company.

Jana turned her back on her brother. “I’m
sorry, Mama,” she said with genuine sadness. “But he’s so useless.”
She spoke as one adult to another, regretful but honest, ignoring
my feeble objections. A brilliant thought struck her, giving her
face the wary, wide-eyed stare of a feral cat. She leaned beside me
to whisper. As Val approached, wondering what he was missing, Jana
tried to drive him off. “Go away, baby. It’s private.” She pushed
him hard with the flat of her palms against his chest.

Val stumbled, fell on his bare backside, and
cried with the abandoned misery of unrequited love.

Jana knew she had crossed a line and
prepared, from bitter experience, to bear the explosion of my
parental temper. Like the warrior-heroes of legend, she stood her
ground, eyes defiant in the face of doom.

The harsh words didn’t come. My new weakness
extended as much to verbal exertions as to physical ones. I found
just enough energy to stand, but not to speak. Grimly silent, I
lifted Val, stumbling myself with the weight of him, sat back down
hard on the straw, and rocked him in my lap.

Jana watched me with a mixture of surprise
and worry, grateful at first, if puzzled, to have escaped scolding
or punishment. As my attention remained fixed on Val, she began to
fidget and sulk with annoyance, not at her own act, but at mine,
for prolonging the interruption.

Michaela entered with breakfast. By now Jana
knew the routine. Crouching near the door under Michaela’s watchful
gaze, she ate swiftly and methodically through the food, swallowing
every edible scrap. This morning she made no attempt to offer Val a
share, nor did I prompt her. He was suckling again for comfort
after his recent sorrow, his eyes and runny nose dripping liquids
onto my breast. Even oatmeal and cloudberries wouldn’t have tempted
him now.

The sickness I had awakened to made me
superstitious and despondent. I would gladly nurse Val another
year, I thought, a kind of sacrificial offering to the gods, if I
could be sure of our safe return to Aranyi.
Dominic would have
something to say about that
, I reflected dreamily. My scalp
tingled with a palpable thrill as I imagined Dominic’s language
were I to propose such a thing.

Something jumped out of my hair and skittered
down my face. I screamed, brushing at my head and face, squirming
three ways at once as another one crawled around between my dress
and my ribs. Val, startled by my sudden movement and the loud
noise, stopped nursing and joined me in companionable howls.

Michaela laughed so hard tears ran down her
weathered cheeks. “Lice!” she said when she could spare breath for
speech. “My fine lady has met her first louse. I bet he didn’t like
what he saw any more than you did!” She shook with paroxysms of
exaggerated laughter at yet another example of my sheltered life,
and watched my contortions with contemptuous amusement.

The joke was soon over. Michaela had
something on her mind, something more important than my
introduction to lice. Although Jana had finished eating, the woman
left the plate on the floor, in no hurry to leave, while she
considered me carefully, her eyes cold, an executioner measuring
the victim’s neck. She scratched at her own head until she found a
victim to crush between two long dirty fingernails. “When did your
man say he was coming?” she asked, as if we were neighbors
gossiping over the backyard fence.

“Two days.” I answered honestly. Reynaldo had
heard it; there was nothing I could accomplish by lying. “He said
he’d be here tomorrow night.”

“I wonder how he’ll like you when he finds
you?” Michaela said. The words were taunting, pointed. I stared
back at her, probing in her thoughts. The ragged dress, of course,
and the lice, the starving and the dirt were all in her mind, the
contrast with the clean, plump, healthy ‘Gravina who had arrived
here. But something else, something she didn’t dare think all the
way even to herself.

I shivered in fear. The wool from the dress
had combined with the bites from the lice to cover me in a rash,
little red welts that bubbled and oozed with clear liquid. I
scratched and picked, not caring if I made things worse or rubbed
my skin raw, wanting only the relief.

When Michaela had gone I beckoned Jana over
to me. Perhaps I could reflect some of the faint light coming
through the grate off the blade of my little dagger and into my
eyes, a crude simulation of the effect of light bent by a prism. I
could delouse us all, at least temporarily. Everyone here must be
crawling with lice, fleas, who knew what forms of mutant Eclipsian
life. My last reserves of energy could all be spent on killing
bugs, I thought, hopelessness leading to paralysis. I slumped back
down without an attempt at action, without saying a word.

Jana, sensing it was safe, persisted in her
earlier attempt to share a secret. “I need to tell you something.”
She spoke in Terran. Glad of a distraction, I nodded
encouragement.

Jana looked at her brother in my arms. “I
don’t want him to hear.” Terran was her least favorite of the three
languages, ordinary Eclipsian, formal, court speech, and Terran,
she had grown up hearing and speaking. She hoped Val shared her
dislike.

Val looked up. “Hear what?” he asked in
Terran.

Jana groaned and switched to formal speech
with its cumbersome, elaborate phraseology. “My lady mother, you
could bestow on the outlaw Captain Reynaldo my brother, Valentine.”
She was proud of her brainstorm, this ingenious way for us to buy
our way out of captivity, but she tried to speak modestly, as
befits the address of dutiful daughter to revered parent.
“Valentine is the true-born heir to the Aranyi Realm. Reynaldo
might keep him and allow you and me to return home with my lord
father.” She could see already that I wasn’t best pleased with the
idea so far, and hastened to counter my most obvious objection.
“Papa wouldn’t mind,” she said, reverting to ordinary speech.