don't want this opportunity. Thank you. You must know I would never deface my body by piercing an ear to wear that. I would rather be a priest of Sa. I believe it is my true calling. I know you believe you are offering me a —”
“Shut up!” There was deep hurt beneath the anger in his father's voice. “Just shut up.” As the boy clenched his jaws and forced himself to look only at the table, his father spoke on to himself. “I'd rather hear anything from you than your mealy-mouthed prattle about being a priest of Sa. Say you hate me, tell me you can't take the work, and I'll know I can change your mind. But when you hide behind this priest nonsense… Are you afraid? Afraid of having your ear pierced, afraid of an unknown life?” His father's question was almost desperate. The man grasped after ways he could persuade Wintrow to his side.
“I am not afraid. I simply don't want this. Why don't you offer it to the person who truly hungers for it? Why don't you make this offer to Althea?” Wintrow asked quietly. The very softness of his words cut through his father's diatribe.
His father's eyes glinted like blue stone. He pointed his finger at Wintrow as if it were a weapon. “It's simple. She's a woman. And you, damn you, are going to be a man. For years it stuck in my craw to see Ephron Vestrit dragging his daughter after him, treating her like a son. And when you came back and stood before me in those brown skirts with your soft voice and softer body, with your mild manners and rabbitty ways, I had to ask myself, am I any better? For here before me stands my son, acting more like a woman than Althea ever has. It came to me like that. That it was time for this family —”
“You speak like a Chalcedean,” Wintrow observed. “There, I am told, to be a woman is but little better than to be a slave. I think it is born of their long acceptance of slavery there. If you can believe that another human can be your possession, it is but a step to saying your wife and your daughter are also possessions, and relegate them to lives convenient to one's own. But in Jamaillia and in Bingtown, we used to take pride in what our women could do. I have studied the histories. Consider the Satrap Malowda, who reigned consortless for a score of years, and was responsible for the setting down of the Rights of Self and Property, the foundation of all our laws. For that matter, consider our religion. Sa, who we men worship as father of all, is still Sa when women call on her as mother of all. Only in Union is there Continuity. The very first precept of Sa says it all. It is only in the last few generations that we have begun to separate the halves of our whole, and divide the —”
“I didn't bring you hear to listen to your priestly clap-trap,” Kyle Haven declared abruptly. He pushed himself away from the table so violently that it would have overturned if it had not been so securely fastened down. He paced a turn around the room. “You may not recall her, but your grandmother, my mother, was from Chalced. And yes, my mother behaved as was proper for a woman to behave, and my father kept to a man's ways. And I took no harm from such an upbringing. Look at your grandmother and mother! Do they seem happy and content to you? Burdened with decisions and duties that take them out into the harshness of the world, subjected to dealing with all sorts of low characters, forced to worry constantly about accounts and credits and debts? That isn't the life I swore I'd provide for your mother, Wintrow, or your sister. I won't see your mother grow old and burdened as your Grandmother Vestrit has. Not while I'm a man. And not while I can make you a man to follow after me and uphold the duties of a man in this family.” Kyle Haven returned and slapped his hand firmly against the table and gave a sharp nod of his head, as if his words had determined the future of his entire family.
Words deserted Wintrow. He stared at his father and floundered through his thoughts, trying to find some common ground where he could begin reasoning with him. He could not. Despite the blood bond between them, this man was a stranger, and his beliefs were so utterly different from all Wintrow had embraced that he felt no hope of reaching him. Finally he said quietly, “Sa teaches us that no one may determine the life path of another. Even if you cage his flesh and forbid him to utter his thoughts, even to cutting out his tongue, you cannot still a man's soul.”
For a moment, his father just looked at him. He, too, sees a stranger, Wintrow thought to himself. When he spoke, his voice was thick. “You're a coward. A craven coward.” Then his father strode past him. It took all of Wintrow's nerve to keep from cowering as his sire passed him. But Kyle only threw open the door of his cabin and bellowed for Torg. The man appeared so promptly that Wintrow knew he must have been loitering nearby, perhaps eavesdropping. Kyle Haven either did not notice this or did not care.
“Take the ship's boy back to his quarters,” his father ordered Torg abruptly. “Keep a good watch on him and see he learns all his duties before we sail. And keep him out of my sight.” This last he uttered with great feeling, as if wronged by the world.
Torg gave a jerk of his head and Wintrow rose silently to follow him. With a sinking heart, he recognized the smirk on Torg's face. His father had given him over completely into this wretch's hands, and the man knew it.
For now the man seemed content to shepherd him forward to his miserable dungeon. Wintrow just managed to duck his head before the man pushed him across the threshold. He stumbled, but caught himself before he fell. He was too deep in despair to even pay attention to whatever mocking comment it was that Torg threw after him before slamming the door shut. He heard the man work the crude latch and knew he was shut in for the next six hours at least.
Torg hadn't even left him a candle. Wintrow groped through the darkness until his hands encountered the webbing of the hammock. Awkwardly he hauled his stiff body up into it and tried to arrange himself comfortably. Then he lay still. About him the ship moved gently on the waters of the harbor. The only sounds that reached him were muffled. He yawned hugely, the effects of his large meal and long day's work overwhelming both his anger and his despair. Out of long habit, he prepared both body and mind for rest. As much as the hammock would permit, he did the stretches of the large and small muscles of his body, striving to bring all back into alignment before rest.
The mental exercises were more difficult. Back when he had first come to the monastery, they had given him a very simple ritual called Forgiving the Day. Even the youngest child could do this; all it required was looking back over the day and dismissing the day's pains as a thing that were past while choosing to remember as gains lessons learned or moments of insight. As initiates grew in the ways of Sa, it was expected they would grow more sophisticated in this exercise, learning to balance the day, taking responsibility for their own actions and learning from them without indulging in either guilt or regrets. Wintrow did not think he was up to that tonight.
Odd. How easy it had been to love Sa's way and master the meditations in the quietly structured days of the monastery. Within the massive stone walls, it had been easy to discern the underlying order in the world, easy to look at the lives of the farmers and shepherds and merchants and see how much of their misery was self- generated. Now that he was out in the midst of it, he could still see some of that pattern, but he felt too weary to examine it and see how he could change it. He was tangled in the threads of his own tapestry. “I don't know how to make it stop,” he said softly to the darkness. Doleful as an abandoned child, he wondered if any of his teachers missed him.
He recalled his final morning at the monastery, and the tree that had come to him out of the shards of stained glass. He had always taken a secret pride in his ability to summon beauty and hold it. But had it been his skill at all? Or had it been something created instead by the teachers who insulated him from the world and provided both a place and a time in which he might work? Perhaps, given the right atmosphere, anyone could do it. Perhaps the only thing about him that had been remarkable was that he had been given a chance. For an instant, he was overwhelmed by his own ordinariness. Nothing remarkable about Wintrow. An indifferent ship's boy, a clumsy sailor. Not even worth mentioning. He would disappear into time as if he had never been born. He could almost feel himself unraveling into darkness.
No. No! He would not let go. He would hang on to himself, and fight and something would happen. Something. Would the monastery send anyone to inquire after him when he did not return? “I think I'm hoping to be rescued,” he observed wearily to himself. There. That was a high ambition. To stay alive and remain himself until someone else could save him. He was not sure if… if… if… There had been the beginning of a thought there, but the upsurging blackness of sleep drowned it.
In the dark of the harbor, Vivacia sighed. She crossed her slender arms over her breasts and stared up at the bright lights of the night market. So engrossed was she in her own thoughts that she startled to the soft touch of a hand against her planking. She looked down. “Ronica!” she exclaimed in gentle surprise.
“Yes. Hush. I would speak quietly with you.”
“If you wish,” Vivacia replied softly, intrigued.
“I need to know… that is, Althea sent me a message. She feared all was not well with you.” The woman's voice faltered. “The message actually came some days ago. A servant, thinking it unimportant, had set it in
