Chapter 94:
“Stop! Halt! Stay where you are!”
Mayah froze. Her heart was racing – her palms felt slick – her glasses were sliding down her nose – oh Sarana – her glasses – serfs didn’t wear glasses – and the men who had called out to her were coming closer –
As quickly and quietly as she could, Mayah pulled her glasses off her face and stuffed them into the top of her village suit. It wasn’t the most secure location, but it was better than leaving them on. Now all she could see were blurred man-shapes approaching her. Which made it better, somehow. Her hands were still trembling, but not being able to watch them corner her made it easier to wait.
In the end it was six men, all in the same uniforms. Four were Xhota, two were Eenta. One of the Xhota was carrying a capacitor lamp. He held it in her face. “Show us your classification card,” he said in the castle serf pidgin.
Mayah stared at him. Some instinct was telling her to pretend not to understand him. Then she realized it was because she was wearing a village suit. Her clothes marked her as either an Eenta or Chenta village serf girl. Neither would know the castle serf pidgin.
“I’m sorry,” she stammered in Eenma. “I don’t know – I’m not –”
Mayah barely knew what she was saying. Her mind was too busy trying to find a story to explain who she was. “Please – I don’t know –”
One of the Eenta pushed the Xhota man aside. “What’s your name?” he asked Mayah.
Against her will, Mayah felt gratitude rush through her for Sukren. It was he who had insisted that she learn the names of all the serf birth sites. “My name is Tiri DipperToo,” she replied.
The man didn’t reply. Mayah could see the confusion in his face. Eenma name, Eenma tongue, yes, but her hair was too short to tell if it was curly, and her skin, golden, like a Rajas...
“Who were your parents?” he asked.
Vek’s story about serf marriages burst into Mayah’s mind. All at once she knew what to say. “My mother was an Eenta village serf. I don’t know who my father was.”
With that, the man relaxed. “I thought so,” he murmured. “And your mother, she took you across the shelterbelt to live with the Cursed?”
Mayah nodded. “She took me there about a year ago. She died shortly afterwards. I’ve been with the Cursed by myself ever since.”
The Eenta man conferred with the others. “Ask her how she evaded our raid,” one of the Xhota men said, glancing at her. Mayah kept her face blank until the Eenta man translated the words into Eenma. “How did you manage to evade the Xhota raid?”
“I hid.”
The two Eenta men chuckled. “A job well done by the Xhota,” the shorter one joked. The Xhota who had asked the question glowered at Mayah. She ducked her head. Would they take her to the Cursed now? Mayah hoped they would.
“Let’s take her to the penned row, up by the castle,” one of the Xhota said. “That’s where the Cursed are being held.”
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“But she’s not Cursed,” the taller Eenta objected.
“She’s from across the shelterbelt. That’s Cursed enough to be sent to the pens. The bosses can decide whether she should stay there or be sent elsewhere.”
Because the conversation was in the castle serf pidgin, Mayah couldn’t weigh in on it. She waited, head bowed, for the men to decide where she would go. To her disappointment, the taller Eenta won out. “We’re taking her to LakeCentral Castle to be classified,” he insisted. “Along with all the others we found today.”
“You just want to keep your patrol numbers up,” one of the Xhota men accused.
“Our patrol numbers,” the Eenta man responded. “You get credit for this catch too, you know.”
The Xhota man persisted. “Queen Dasgu promised us local autonomy. If we had known that Eenta would be coming over to our quinter to tell us what to do, we would have never agreed to the alliance. No Eenta soldiers on Xhota land!”
“We’re not soldiers,” came the response. “We’re here to help, that’s all.”
Only then did anyone turn to Mayah. “Come,” one of them said in Eenma. They began walking back towards the Xhota urb. Mayah followed their blurry figures. She felt uneasy when one of them fell into step beside her. A glance confirmed it was the shorter Eenta. Now that he was within her range of vision, however, Mayah was able to see that he was around Vek’s age, younger than she had first thought.
“I wonder what your classification will be,” he said to her. “Mine’s most trusted.”
“What’s classification?” she asked.
The Eenta boy didn’t seem to be listening to her. “And I know who my father is,” he said with a smirk. “He’s a guard at LakeCentral Castle. Both my parents are. Both of them are Eenta too.”
Mayah didn’t know what to say. It sounded like the boy was bragging. She supposed that meant having mixed heritage was a shameful thing among the serfs. She wondered if it had always been that way. In her Chenta village there had been only Chenta, and they had never spoken of miscegenation. Mayah wondered if she should take advantage of the Eenta boy’s presence to ask for information but decided against it. She didn’t want to mistakenly ask something an Eenta serf girl should already know. Besides, Mayah got the sense that he was speaking to her more for his sake than for hers.
“Mmm,” Mayah murmured. She wondered how she was going to find Sukren. She was beginning to realize that her plan of “cross the shelterbelt and start looking” had already failed.
***
By the time the blurry rows of Xhota huts on stilts gave way to blurry greenhouses all pressed up against each other, Mayah had long since begun wondering when she would be allowed to sleep. She listened quietly as the Eenta boy pointed out every capacitor lamp hanging outside a greenhouse gate. “It’s because we Eenta hold Industrilia,” he said. “The Chenta don’t have half the electricity we do.”
“Mmm.”
“And they only have two quinters, while we have three!” A pool of light lit up his face as they entered a blue-roofed and blue-walled greenhouse. “Now that the Rajas are defeated, it’s time for the Eenta to rise. We were always meant to rule. The Chenta act like they’re the true inheritors of the Uprising, but if that were true, why did they let us tyrannize them for so long?”
Mayah didn’t like the way the Eenta boy was looking at her. She could feel the difference in power between them, and she could tell the Eenta boy felt it too. She turned her face away and looked out over the rows of rectangular meres that filled the greenhouse. Then Mayah frowned. The meres were all empty. Without any water inside them, they looked like shallow graves dug out of bare rock. The entire greenhouse, in fact, was nothing but blue-lit stone. Was this a rockmine greenhouse, then, and not a fishing greenhouse as Mayah’d first thought?
Something in the corner of her eye caught her attention. One of the meres looked different. She took a step towards it, squinting to see better, then gasped. Were those humans? Yes, yes, they were, bound and slumped up against each other and the sides of the drained pond, those were humans.
“Get up!” one of the patrol members was saying. “Time to go! Get up!”
Mayah watched as the prisoners inside the mere were roused. They were dragged and prodded into a line, a line she herself was then pushed into by the Eenta boy. Too frightened to resist, Mayah tried to listen in on what the patrol members were now saying to each other. When she realized they intended to march them all the way to LakeCentral Castle that night, she swallowed.
If Mayah hadn’t spent the last few days resting, she would have never made it. Even as it was, when they arrived at LakeCentral Castle after hours of trudging through Earth grasses and around Eenta water-sites, she was exhausted. She wanted nothing more than to fling herself into bed. But the line she was in was halted in a hallway. Her vision was too blurred for her to be able to tell where inside the castle they were, but Mayah thought they were near the kitchens. One of the patrol members was talking with a guard up by the front of the line. On and on they went.
Mayah touched her head. It was starting to ache.
Finally they began moving again. A door was pushed open, and bunks swam into Mayah’s vision. She was in a serf barracks. When someone pointed her to a bunk, she almost wept from relief. There were no sheets or pillows but Mayah didn’t care. It was enough to close her eyes against the shifting lights and shadows that her world now was. It was enough to rest her body.
I wonder where the Rajas are now, Mayah thought to herself as she drifted off to sleep. I hope nobody finds out I’m one of them…