The Serrano Connection (10 page)

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.

"You didn't forget . . . you always had a good memory, Esmaya." He nodded. The servants stepped forward; the great platters were shifted to the sideboards for carving, while bowls of soup were offered.

Fleet food had been good enough, but this was the food of her childhood. The thick blue bowl with the creamy corn soup, garnished with green and red . . . Esmay's stomach rumbled at the familiar aroma. The spoon she lifted had her family's crest on it; it fit her fingers as if it had grown there.

The first salad followed the corn soup, and by then the meat had been sliced and layered on blue platters swirled with white. Esmay accepted three slices, a mound of the little yellow potatoes that were a family specialty, a scoopful of carrots. It was worth the long wait to have food like this.

Around her, the family carried on soft-voiced conversations; she didn't listen. Right now all she wanted was the food, the food she had not let herself realize she missed. Puffy rolls that could have floated up into the sky as clouds . . . butter molded into the shapes of heraldic beasts. She remembered those molds, hanging in a row in the kitchen. She remembered the rolls, too—no use letting them get cold, when they were dry and tasteless. They deserved to be soaked in new butter or drenched in honey.

When she came up for air, no one seemed to be paying attention to her anyway. They had finished eating; servants were taking the plates away.

"It's a matter of pride," Papa Stefan was saying to her cousin Luci. "Esmaya would not fail in anything that touched the family honor." Esmay blinked; Papa Stefan's notion of family honor had wildernesses no one had ever explored fully. She hoped he wasn't hatching up one of his plots with her assigned the role of heroine.

Luci, the age Esmay had been when she left, looked much as Esmay remembered herself. Tall, gangling, soft brown hair pulled back severely, with escaping wisps that ruined the intended effect, clothes that were obviously intended for a special occasion, but looked rumpled and dowdy instead. Luci looked up, met Esmay's eyes, and flushed. That made her look sulky as well as unkempt.

"Hi, Luci," Esmay said. She had already greeted Papa Stefan and the elders; the cousins were far down the list of obligatory greetings. She wanted to say something helpful, but after ten years she had no idea what Luci's enthusiasms were—and a very clear memory of how embarrassing it was when elders assumed you still liked the dolls you'd played with at five or seven.

Papa Stefan grinned at her and patted Luci's arm. "Esmaya, you will not know that Luci is the best polo player in her class."

"I'm not that good," Luci muttered. Her ears looked even redder.

"You probably are," Esmay said. "I'm sure you're better than I am." She had never seen the point of milling about chasing a ball on horseback. A horse was mobility, a way to get off by herself, into places vehicles couldn't go, faster than anyone could follow on foot. "Are you playing on the school team, or the family team?"

"Both," Papa Stefan said. "We're looking for championships this year."

"If we're lucky," Luci said. "And speaking of that, I wanted to ask about that mare Olin showed me."

"Ask Esmay. Her father bought a string for her to put out on the grant, and that mare was one of them."

A flash of anger from Luci's eyes; Esmay was startled both by the gift of horses, and her cousin's unexpected reaction.

"I didn't know about that," Esmay said. "He hadn't mentioned anything." She looked at Luci. "If there's one you wanted in particular, I'm sure—"

"Never mind," Luci said, standing up. "I wouldn't want to deprive the returning hero of her loot." She tried to say it lightly, but the underlying bitterness cut through.

"Luci!" Papa Stefan glared, but Luci was already out the door. She didn't reappear that evening. No one commented, but they were already drifting from the table . . . she remembered from her own adolescence that such a thing would not be spoken of in company. She did not envy Luci the rough side of Sanni's tongue that would no doubt work her over in private very shortly.

After dinner, Esmay went to the private apartment where her great-grandmother waited. Ten years ago, the old lady had still lived apart, refusing to inhabit the main house because of some quarrel that no one would explain. Esmay had tried to wheedle it out of her, unsuccessfully. She had not been the kind of great-grandmother who encouraged the sharing of secrets; Esmay had been scared of her, of the sharp glance that could silence even Papa Stefan. Ten years had thinned the silver hair, and dimmed the once-bright eyes.

"Welcome, Esmaya." The voice was unchanged, the voice of a matriarch who expected reverence from all her kin. "Are you well?"

"Yes, of course."

"And they feed you decently?"

"Yes . . . but I was glad to taste our food again."

"Of course. The stomach cannot be easy when the heart is uncertain." Great-grandmother belonged to the last generation which adhered almost universally to the old prohibitions and requirements. Immigrants and trade, the usual means of fraying the edges of cultures, had brought changes that seemed great to her, though to Esmay hardly significant compared to Altiplano's difference from the cosmopolitan casualness of Fleet. "I do not approve of your gallivanting around the galaxy, but you have brought us honor, and for that I am pleased."

"Thank you," Esmay said.

"Considering your disadvantages, you have done very well."

Disadvantages? What disadvantages? Esmay wondered if the old woman's mind was slipping a bit after all.

"I suppose it means your father was right, though I am loathe to agree, even now."