The Serrano Connection

by Elizabeth Moon

  "I brought you something," the man said. "Looky there." Hazel could feel, as if it were sunlight, their gazes on her and the littles. "Found them on a merchanter we captured. The girlie's a bit old, but biddable. Been no trouble. The two little uns . . . well, one of 'em's too talkative. We'll just have to see." He swallowed again. "You take 'em on back and get 'em settled. Girlie's a virgin all right. Doc checked."

  The woman's shoes clicked, closer and closer. Hazel saw the wide skirt . . . a wife's skirt? . . . and then a firm hand on her shoulder, pushing. She obeyed, walking ahead of the woman, bringing the littles with her. She had no idea what was coming, but . . .

  "You kin look at me," the woman said. "In here." Hazel looked up. The woman had a broad, peaceful-looking face, with a crown of gray-brown hair in a braid above it. She had big broad hands, and a big broad body. "Let's see you, honey . . . that's the ugliest dress I ever did see."

  Hazel said nothing. She wasn't about to get into trouble if she could help it.

  "Didn't your folks teach you anything about sewing?" the woman asked.

  Hazel shook her head.

  "You kin talk, too," the woman said. "As long as you keep it low. No hollerin'."

  "I . . . don't know how to sew," Hazel said softly. Her voice felt stiff, it had been so long since she said a whole sentence.

  "Well, you'll just have to learn. You can't go around lookin' like that. Not in this family."

  Hazel bobbed her head. Brandy tugged on her hand.

  "Hungry," she said.

  The woman looked down at the littles, her face creased with something Hazel could not read. "These littl'uns yours?" she asked. "Sisters?"

  "No," Hazel said.

  "No, ma'am," the woman said sharply. "Didn't your folks teach you any manners?"

  "No . . . ma'am," Hazel said.

  "Well, I sure will," the woman said. "Now let me think. You littl'uns will fit into Marylou and Sallyann's things, but you, Girlie . . . and we have to find a name for you, too."

  "My name's Hazel," Hazel said.

  "Not anymore," the woman said. "Your old life is gone, and your old name with it. You put off the works of the devil and the devil's name. You will put on a godly name. When we find the right one."

  In the next weeks, Hazel settled into a life as unlike that she'd known as the raider's ship had been. She slept in a room with ten other girls, all near or just past puberty but unmarried: the virgins' bower. Their room opened onto a tiny courtyard separated from the main garden by a stone screen and walled off from anything but their room. The room's other entrance was to a long corridor that led back to the main house without passing any other door.

  "So we're safe," one of the other girls had explained the first evening. She had helped Hazel unroll her bedding onto a wooden bunk, helped her straighten the cover properly. These were all, she discovered, daughters of the man who had brought her here . . . daughters of four wives, who had produced all the other children in the house. Only the children of his first wife were permitted in the great room . . . and only when he summoned them. The others, when he wanted to see them, went to the second parlor.

  "Y'all are the first outlanders in our household," one of the other girls said.

  "Can't no one have outlanders unless they've got enough children to dilute the influence of y'all's heathen ways," another girl said.

  "So we can teach you right from wrong," yet another said.

  In short order, Hazel was clad in the same snug long skirt and long-sleeved top as the others. She learned to shuffle in quick steps . . . she learned how to navigate the corridors and rooms of the big house, that seemed to sprawl on forever. She learned to stand aside respectfully when the boys ran down the hall, to duck her chin so that even the little boys, looking up, did not meet her gaze.

  Once a day, she was allowed to sit with Brandy and Stassi, if all her work was done. At first they ran to her and clung, silent, crying into her shoulder. But as the days passed, they adjusted to whatever their life was like. She had asked, but they found it hard to tell her . . . and no wonder. They had been hardly able to talk clearly when the ship was taken, and too many things had happened. They had eaten honeycakes, or they had new dresses, was all they could say. At least they were being fed and cared for, and they had a little time each day to play in the garden. She saw them with the other small girls, tossing back and forth weighted streamers of bright colors.

  Her work was hard—the other girls her age were accomplished seamstresses, able to produce long, smooth straight seams. They all knew how to cut cloth and shape garments . . . now they were learning embroidery, cutwork, lacework, and other fine needlework. Hazel had to master plain knitting, crochet, and spend hours hemming bedsheets and bath towels. Besides sewing, she was taught cooking—to the wives' horror, she did not even know how to peel potatoes or chop carrots.

  "Imagine!" said Secunda, the master's second wife. "Letting a poor girl grow up knowing so little. What did they expect you to do, child? Marry a man so rich and dissolute he would expect your servants to do everything?"

  "We had machines," Hazel said.

  "Oh, machines," Prima said. She shook a finger at Hazel. "Best forget about machines, girl. The devil's ways, making idle hands and giving women ideas. No machines here, just honest women doing women's work the way it should be done."

  "Prima, would you taste this sauce?" Tertia bowed as she offered it.

  "Ah. A touch more potherb, m'dear, but otherwise quite satisfactory."

  Hazel sniffed. She had to admit that the kitchen smelled better than any ship's galley she'd ever been in. Every day, fresh bread from the big brick ovens; every day, fresh food prepared from the produce of the garden. And she liked chopping carrots—even onions—better than those long, straight seams. The women even laughed—here, by themselves, and softly—but they laughed. Never at the men, though. None of the jokes she'd heard all her life, bantering between the men and women of the crew. She wanted to ask why; she had a thousand questions, a million. But she'd already noticed that girls didn't ask questions except about their work—how to do this, when to do that—and even then were often told to pay better attention.

  She did her best, struggling to earn her daily visit with Brandy and Stassi. The women were quick to correct her mistakes, but she sensed that they were not hostile. They liked her as well as they could have liked any stranger thrust into their closed society, and they were as kind as custom allowed.

  The closed car had gone an unknowable distance—far enough for Brun to feel mildly nauseated—when it stopped finally. Someone outside opened the door; a tall woman—the first woman she had seen on this world—reached in and grabbed her arm.

  "Come on, you," she said. After so long in the ship, the accent was understandable, if still strange. "Get out of that."

  Brun struggled up and out of the car with difficulty, not helped by the woman's hard grip. She looked around. The groundcar looked like an illustration out of one of her father's oldest books, high and boxy. The street on which it had driven was wide, brick-paved, and edged with low stone and brick buildings, none more than three stories tall. The woman yanked at her arm, and Brun nearly staggered.

  "No time for lollygagging," the woman said. "You don't need to be sightseeing; get yourself inside the house like the decent woman you aren't." Brun could not move fast enough to satisfy the woman, even with one of the men helping—she was too big, too awkward, and the stones of the front walk hurt her feet. She glanced up at the building they were urging her towards and nearly fell up a stone step. But she had seen it—made of heavy stone blocks, it had no windows on this side, and beside the heavy door was a tall stout man who had the body language of every door guard Brun had ever seen. A prison?

  It might as well have been, she found when she was inside and the matron was listing the rules in a harsh voice. Here she would stay until her baby was born, and a few weeks after, with the other sluts—unmarried pregnant women. She would cook, clean, and s
ew. She would be silent, like all the others; she was there to listen, not to talk. If the matron caught her whispering or lipspeaking with the other women, she'd be locked in her room for a day. With that, the matron pushed her into a narrow room with a bed and a small cabinet beside it, and shut the door on her.

  Brun sagged onto the bed.

  "And no sitting on the bed during work hours!" the matron said, flinging open the door with a bang. "We don't put up with laziness here. Get your sewing basket; you have plenty to do." She pointed at the cabinet. Brun heaved herself up and opened the door; inside was a round basket and a pile of folded cloth. "Decent clothes for yourself, first of all," the woman grumbled. "Now come along to the sewing room."

  She led the way along a stone-floored corridor to a room that opened on an interior court; five pregnant women sat busy at their handwork. None of them looked up; Brun could not see their faces until she was sitting down herself. One had a wry face, pulled to the right by some damage; Brun could see no scar, and wondered what had caused it. But the warden tapped her head with a hard finger. "Get busy, you. Less lookin', more sewin'."

  "You did what?" Pete Robertson's voice rose sharply.

  The Ranger Captain looked even more like a sick turkey gobbler, Mitch thought.

  "We captured the trader without any trouble; the crew and captain lied, and the females was all using abominations, so we killed 'em. There were five children aboard, though: three girls and two boys, and those we brought home. They're in my household now. We were still in the system, learning the big ship's control systems before taking it through jump, when this little yacht came in—"

  "And you couldn't let it go—"

  "Not after it slowed down and was sneakin' up on us, no. It would've got all our IDs. They might've traced back to where we got the ships from. So we grabbed it, and found a mighty important passenger, so she thought herself." Mitch grinned at the memory of that arrogant face.

  "Abomination!" Sam Dubois hissed.

  "She's a female, like any other," Mitch said. "I had her gagged, and muted her without letting her speak—she can't have contaminated any of us. Our medico said she was pure in blood, and after he took out her implants and made her a natural woman again—"

  "She's one of them Registered Embryos," Sam said. "And you call that pure in blood?"

  "Mixing genes from more'n one person—she might as well be a bastard—" Pete added. "You know what the parsons say about them."

  "She's a strong, healthy young female who's now pregnant with twins," Mitch said firmly. "And she's mute, and she's safely in a muted maternity home. She's not going to cause any trouble. You better believe I was firm with her—she's quiet and obedient now."

  "But why did you send the yacht back?" asked Pete.

  If they were asking questions and not yelling at him, he was over the hump.

  "Because it's about time we got a little respect, that's why. The talk on the docks is that we're just a bunch of pirates like any others. Common criminals. That's what the Guernesi are sayin' in their own papers; they're not tellin' the truth about us. So we make it clear we aren't goin' to put up with it—they can't just ignore us. God's plan isn't goin' to be held back by such as them. Besides that, once they started lookin' for that female—and they would look, considerin' who her father is—they could've found things we don't want them to know."

  "And you bring the whole Familias down on us," Sam hissed. "Biggest power in this part of the galaxy and you have to make them mad—"

  "I'm not afraid of anything but God Almighty," Mitch said. "That's what we all swear to, 'fore we're sworn in as Rangers. Fear God but fear no man—that's what we say. You goin' back on that, Sam?" He felt strong, exultant. New children in the home, shaping well. That yellow-haired slut carrying twins—God was on his side for sure.

  "There's still no sense leadin' trouble home," Pete said.

  "I didn't," Mitch said. "Sure, I claimed what we did for the whole Militia—but I didn't leave one scrap of evidence which branch it was. By the time they figure it out—if they figure it out, which I doubt—we'll be raisin' enough hell right there in Familias space that they won't have time to bother us. If they make one move against us, we blow a station or two—they'll back off. I told 'em that. Nobody goes to war for one female."

  Brun fretted in the confines of the maternity home. She was allowed to go into the walled courtyard, hobbling around the brick paths on her swollen, sore feet. In fact, she was required to walk five circuits each day. She was allowed to go from her dormitory to the kitchen, to the dining hall, to the bathing room or toilet, to the sewing room. But the only door out was locked—and more than locked, guarded by a stout man a head taller than she was. The other occupants, all five of them, were as mute as she. The woman in charge—Brun could not think of any word that fit her position—was not mute, but all too verbal. She ordered the pregnant women around as if she were the warden in a prison. Perhaps she was; it felt like a prison to Brun. She had to spend so much time a day sewing: clothes for herself, clothes for the baby to come, clothes for herself after the birth. She had to help in the kitchen. She had to clean, struggling to push a heavy wet mop across the floor, to scrub out the toilets and sinks and shower stalls.

  What kept her going was the thought of Hazel, somewhere with those two small girls. What was happening to Hazel? Nothing good. She promised Hazel—she promised herself—that she would somehow get Hazel out of this.

  She was examined every day . . . and as her time came nearer, she found a whole new source of fear. One of the other women, cutting carrots beside her in the kitchen, suddenly bent and pressed a hand to her side. Her mouth opened in a silent yell. Brun could see the hardening under her maternity shift.

  "Come along, you," the warden said. She glared at Brun. "You help her, you." Brun took the woman's other arm, and helped her stumble down the corridor, into rooms Brun had not yet seen. Tiled floor . . . narrow bed, too short to lie on . . . as the woman in labor heaved herself onto it, she realized that this—this utterly inadequate ramshackle arrangement—was where women gave birth. Where she would give birth. The woman writhed, and a gush of fluid wet the bed and splashed onto the floor.

  "Get basins, you!" the warden said to Brun, pointing. Brun brought them. When was the warden going to call the doctor? The nurses?

  There were no doctors, no nurses. The warden was the only attendant, along with whatever women were in the house. The others edged in—some of them had done this before, clearly. Brun, forbidden to leave, stood against the wall, alternately faint and nauseated. When she sagged, one of the others slapped her face with a wet rag until she stood straight again.

  She had known the facts of human reproduction since childhood. In books. In instructional cubes. And she knew—or she had known—that no one who had access to modern methods still gave birth in the old way. And certainly no one, no one in the whole civilized universe, gave birth like this, without medical care, without life support, without anything but a grim old woman and other pregnant women, in a room with unscreened windows, with the blood and fluids splashing onto the bare floor, splashing onto the women's bare feet. Her father's horses had better care; the hounds had cleaner kennels for whelping.

  She tried not to look, but they grabbed her, forced her to look, to see the baby's head pushing, pushing . . . her body ached already in sympathy.

  The baby's first cry expressed her own rage and fear exactly.

  She could not do it. She would die.

  She could not die; she had to live . . . for Hazel. To keep Hazel from this horror, she would live.

  Chapter Eleven

  Castle Rock

  Lord Thornbuckle, Speaker of the Table of Ministers and the Grand Council of the Familias Regnant, successor to the abdicated king, had spent the morning working on the new Regular Space Service budget proposal with his friend—now the Grand Council's legal advisor—Kevil Starbridge Mahoney. All morning a succession of ministers and accountants had bombarded
them with inconvenient facts that cluttered what should have been—Lord Thornbuckle thought—a fairly simple matter of financing replacements for the ships lost at Xavier. They had decided to lunch privately, in the small green dining room with its view of the circular pond in which long-finned fish swam lazily, in the hope that the peaceful spring garden would restore their equanimity. A spicy soup and slices of lemon-and-garlic roasted chicken had helped, and now they toyed with salad of mixed spring greens, putting off the inevitable return to columns of numbers.

  "Heard from Brun lately?" Kevil asked, after reporting on his son George, now in law school.

  "Not for several weeks," Thornbuckle said. "I expect she's in jumpspace somewhere; she wanted to visit Cecelia's stud before coming home for the hunt opening day."

  "You don't worry?"

  "Of course I worry. But what can I do about it? If she doesn't show up soon, I'll put someone on her tail—the problem is that as soon as I do, the newsflash shooters will know where to look, and the real sharks follow the bait."

  Kevil nodded. They had both been targets of political and private violence, as well as intrusive newsflash stories. "You could always use Fleet resources," he suggested, not for the first time.

  "I could—except that after Copper Mountain I'm not at all sure it's safe to do so. First she's nearly killed right on the base—they still haven't figured out who was shooting at her—and then the heroic Lieutenant Suiza takes it upon herself to question Brun's morality."

  Kevil held his silence but one eyebrow went up. Thornbuckle glared at him.

  "I know—you think she's—"

  "I didn't say a word," Kevil said. "But there are two sides or more to any quarrel."