The Margarets

by Sheri S. Tepper

  The Frossian spoke in his own language. “You are responsible for feeding them, and watering them, and cleaning up after them and taking them to pasture and bringing them back. Any one of them gets hurt or dies, you get hurt or die. You stupid humans don’t understand anything Frossians say, but the whip will teach you.”

  “On the contrary,” I said in only slightly halting Frossian, “I understand very well.”

  The Frossian’s eyes widened momentarily, before his arm lashed out, clubbing me across the face as he hissed, “I explain! We don’t talk to slaves, and we don’t want them talking to us, especially if they contradict what we say!”

  He left me lying in the straw, facedown, half-stunned, realizing suddenly that the word for contradict in Frossian was the same word as insult, that the word for explain was from the same root as the word demean oneself. From the umox nearest me, a strange, whistling call rose up. Still dazed, I looked at the creature and saw that it fluted the sound through its nose. Within moments, I was surrounded by a group of people who looked so like me, I would have sworn they were family. They were Ghoss, they said, speaking to me in Frossian.

  “Oh, girl, umox say you spoke to overseer. Such a bad idea to speak where any overseer can hear you!”

  “Why did you do such a thing?”

  “Didn’t they warn you. The doctors? Didn’t they say not to speak? Not to move or speak? Surely they warned you!”

  “Ummm? Here, let us see your eyes, let us see your arms.”

  “Not too bad. You’ll have a strange-colored face for a few days.”

  “Now you can count on that one’s enmity so long as you are here.”

  Finally, then, I remembered the doctor telling me not to speak, and I cursed myself silently. So proud of my ability to speak, I had to do it! Pride. Rotten pride. Obviously, pride was something to be forgotten.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  One of the women spoke. “I am Deen. We are Ghoss, dear girl, as you no doubt are yourself.”

  “I’m not Ghoss, whatever. I’m human.”

  “Well, of course, Ghoss are human. Tsk. Here, let me put some salve on that. Don’t worry, the doctors gave it to us. It won’t harm you.”

  And so my servitude began with the first lesson: Do not speak unless among the Ghoss and where no Frossian could hear. With the Ghoss I spoke Frossian while I learned their own language, one with strangely familiar words in it, an old language, they said, dating back to the time they had been brought from Earth by the Gentherans and given to the Gibbekot, the indigenes of Fajnard.

  “The indigenous race? You mean, this isn’t a Frossian home planet?”

  “The Frossians have no home planet except one place where the queens live. Frossians eat up planets as a plether of umoxen eat a field of hay.” Deen snorted her derision.

  “What’s a plether?”

  “So many as will fit into a pen, Mar-agern. A plether of umoxen is fewer than a plether of Gnar, but both take the same barn space. As I was saying, the Frossians take everything they can take without triggering action by ISTO, then they go ruin some other world. When they came here, our Gibbekot friends went into the mountains, but some of us…well, let us say we do not hide as well as they. The Frossians forced us to stay here and work for them.”

  I thought this last was less than truthful. The Ghoss had nothing about them of abasement or servitude. I conjectured that they might be here for some other reason. What that reason might be, I had no idea, and it wasn’t explained, even though I became woven into the life of the Ghoss, almost one of them.

  I would have been quite content to be Ghoss if I could have managed it, for they had invisible networks of solidarity and succor that prevented even the least among them from being trod upon and broken. If you were Ghoss, you just knew when help was needed, but I had no such connection. For me, help did not come unless some Ghoss actually saw my trouble or the umoxen let them know. Either way, they would arrive with salve for the welts, with painkiller, with soft words, with behind-the-scenes string-pulling to save me further punishment. They claimed me in kinship, even though I knew I was not kin.

  “You always claim not to be Ghoss, but you obviously are!” said Rei-agern, a middling old one, with an interestingly ugly face.

  “I am a bondservant from Earth. None of my family ever were Ghoss, there are no Ghoss on Earth.”

  “Well, there obviously were sometime, because that’s where we came from originally, some thousands of years ago.”

  “Captured and enslaved,” said I sympathetically. “I’m sorry.”

  “No such thing,” cried the other. “We were never slaves of the Gibbekot! We were their friends, their coworkers. We stayed at their invitation, true, but it was not into slavery! Many of us went with them when the Frossians came, and those who did are still with the Gibbekot, back in the hills.”

  I thought the talent they had might have been a gift from the Gibbekot, for they were something other than merely human now. Perhaps they had mutated, or evolved.

  I soon learned the routine. Rise early, go to the privy, wash in the bucket, go to the kitchen, take whatever food was offered, return to the barn, open the big door, and urge the plether to get up and move. The umoxen seemed to take a perverse pleasure in being difficult to rouse, and it was days before I realized they were playing with me. When I stopped chivvying them and took to leaning on the doorpost, chewing a straw, careless of whether they moved or not, they moved. The same ones always led, the others followed with one small, brown one at the rear, and I walked by that one, soon enough with my arm across the creature’s shoulder, feeling through the wool for any sharp seed or spine that might fret an umox.

  As I walked I watched everything, looked at everything, attentive to the presence of continuous miracle. There had been no grass, no fog on Earth. I had suppose these things to be of one kind. Grass was green. Fog was gray. Instead, neither was ever a single color, ever a single thing. The umoxen relished the fog, murmuring their way through it, the moisture condensing on their wool so that when the sun broke through, it lit a procession of jeweled chimeras, garbed in rainbow.

  Sometimes an umox would come up behind me, so softly I did not hear it, then suddenly whuff at me from behind, frightening a yelp from my throat, and at that they laughed. I knew it was laughter, though silent, for their shoulders shook with it.

  “You are naughty animals,” I told them. “Shame on you.” At which they laughed the harder. They had voices that ranged from that same high, fluting call I had heard the first time I met them to a low, satisfied rumble I could hear through the soles of my feet.

  “Can you get me some brushes?” I asked the Ghoss. “Some brushes, a pair of pliers, maybe a large comb.”

  “We can,” they said. “But the herdsman won’t let you keep them.”

  “I’m going to hide them in the pasture,” I confessed. “In a hollow fence post.”

  So equipped, I began grooming my charges. First the little brown one that I walked with to the pasture each day. I worked the comb through its wool, slowly, carefully. I brushed the long wool of its tail, strand by strand, not hurrying. It was a way to pass the time, not something I had been told to do. Soon the little umox began to rumble-hum, the sound of a deep-toned stringed instrument, stroked with an endless bow. The next umox added a tone, then the one next to it, and soon there were twenty humming, one vast, endless harmonic chord that sounded upward, through my bones.

  When I had finished with the little brown one, I turned to find my next victim and was confronted by the leader of the plether, who looked at me significantly and turned, offering its tail. From that day on, I spent my days grooming the plether, two days per umox, strictly in rotation. I hid my implements in the hollow post each night. Before long, I was telling them stories of Queen Wilvia and the nazeemi and the yaboons while they rumble-hummed along, not only my own plether but all those within hearing, a vast harmonic sound that continued until my brain sang with them, and time we
nt by without my noticing it.

  The pliers the Ghoss had found for me were useful in reaching seeds that had worked their way back inside the long, sensitive ears or pulling thorns from their strange feet: an almost complete circle of hoof surrounding a soft center made up of four stubby fingers that curled up, out of the way. Usually they could pull thorns from one foot with the fingers of another, but sometimes, especially among the old ones, their ankles had stiffened, and they could no longer do it for themselves. They came to me from all the plethers around, flopping down on their sides with a great whoosh of expelled air, holding up the painful hooves. Sometimes, also, they caught something in their teeth that their long, flexible tongues could not retrieve: a piece of fencing wire or a short length of the cord used to bind the hay. I asked the Ghoss to get me scissors and pliers that were more pointed. Time went on as I told endless stories of my worlds, of Naumi the warrior, and Margy the shaman, of the nameless spy and of Queen Wilvia, who ruled a far and wondrous land.

  It had been summer when I arrived, and I had slept on a pile of hay beneath the shelf where the water buckets were kept. When the nights grew colder, the overseer told me I was to sleep in the same place, though he knew it was exposed to every current of air from above and below, a place where it was impossible to stay warm.

  “The better to keep her wakeful,” the overseer laughed to his cronies. Since the Frossian knew well I was always wakeful from first light until the night bell, expecting me to remain wakeful through the night was mere persecution.

  Deen-agern said so. “Mere persecution, Mar.”

  “What’s mere about persecution, Deen? If you live under it, it’s not mere, believe me.”

  “Well,” the older woman huffed, “we all live under it. All us Ghoss.”

  “They don’t treat you like this, and I’m not Ghoss.” By this time, I spoke in the language of the Ghoss, not fluently, but understandably.

  “The overseers think you are.”

  “Well, they’re wrong, and so are you.”

  The Ghoss had been right, however, about the enmity of the Frossian herdsman. He remained implacably hostile. He began by stealing my clothes, piece by piece, until I had only one set of trousers and shirt to cover me. In the summer, it didn’t matter, but now that it was winter, the absence of cover was long torture through every night. The Frossians didn’t like the cold. According to the Ghoss, the Frossians preferred warm planets with high heat and humidity. In summertime, there were often only a few guards left on the place; their overlords were somewhere wet, basking in the sun.

  The first wintry night below the bucket shelf, I stayed awake while cold breezes caressed my backside through the cracks and another ice-wind hand played its fingers over the rest of me. My second night, I dreamed of fire. Fire on hearths, fire in forges with hammers ringing, bonfire on the heath with people dancing, fire on eastern mountains glowing against the clouds in a false dawn more feverish than rosy. Fire anywhere, anytime, so long as it was warm.

  During the day that followed, I decided to weave a thick blanket for myself from discarded rags, all wound about with tail wool from the umoxen themselves, tail wool I gathered from hedges and fences about the place. I would have to hide it somehow, so the overseer didn’t take it. If I had been Ghoss, the overlords would have been more cautious with me, but evidently they knew I was not, even though I looked just like them. No true Ghoss would have been ordered to sleep below the bucket shelf, so someone, or some set of someones, obviously regarded me as neither one thing nor the other. I myself had heard the least overlord, him of the twisty mouth, with nasty words dropping from it like spit, describing me:

  “She’s an abomination, a Mar. The frumdalt want to get rid of Mar. We should get rid of it now.”

  “Merely an aberration,” the middle overlord had replied on hearing this muck. “We haven’t enough bodies to do the work, surely not enough to go about killing this one and that one until nearer their time. We can get rid of it later, but not now. It still has work years in it.”

  The word the least overlord had used, frumdalt, was unfamiliar to me. Fruma was the name of the carrion birds who frequented the river bottom. Dalt was one word used for a hilltop or tower. I asked the Ghoss.

  “Frumdalt?” said Rei-agern. “I think it means ‘god,’ or perhaps something else to do with their religion, but we don’t pay attention to their religion.”

  “A frumdalt might be something on high that eats dead things,” I suggested.

  “Ah,” said Rei-agern with a puzzled look. “On Cantardene they have a god called Eater of the Dead.”

  Next night I lay down on my bucket shelf, curled into a tight ball, waiting for the herdsman to make his last inspection, which he did, coming in to poke me in the process, to be sure I wasn’t asleep. Then, he went off to his warm bed in the snug quarters in the loft, leaving me to stand shivering by the shelf, pulling my scant wrappings around me. I dozed, fretfully, coming fully awake to find the little brown umox lying next to me, warm as a little furnace.

  “Don’t,” I told it, looking into its eyes, deep and dark as those forest pools I had dreamed of as a child. “The herdsman will take it out on you. He wants me to suffer here. He mustn’t see you here, he might do something dreadful to you.”

  The little one went back to the other umoxen where they lay tightly together in deep bedding, covered with their great, fluffy tails. It took a lot of cold to chill even one umox, much less a plether. I sat shivering as I heard the little one talking to the others, knowing its voice, slightly higher than the big ones, slightly sweeter.

  “Mar-mar,” said a large umox, one or several of them. “Come here.”

  “I’m dreaming,” I thought to myself. “I’ve been frozen under the damned shelf and now I’m dreaming.”

  “Here,” said a deeper voice, joined by several others to make a low, harmonic sound in my head, as though great chimes were ringing there. “Here, young one.”

  I rose like a puppet and staggered toward the plether bedded in the hay. As I came near, one shifted, then another, letting me fumble my way to the center of the plether, where a nest of hay was waiting, already warmed by the huge body that had lain there. “No need to go to the cold far,” whispered the voices. “Warm is here. Lay self down…”

  Which I did, though it was more a stumble-flop than a graceful recline. The warm tails of half a dozen umoxen moved slightly to cover me from head to toe, leaving only a little space around my nose and mouth so I could breathe. “I’m dreaming,” I advised myself. “I’m in my own hay nest, and I’m dreaming.”

  “Dream then,” whispered the umox. “Dream a thing we have meant for you and made for you. Dream what you will do when you wake.”

  For the first time since winter came, I was comfortable. The thick tails of the umox were blanket-warm though light as air, feathered from tip to rump with the finest wool in any world known to man or Ghoss.

  “Why didn’t you invite me before?” I murmured, half asleep.

  “Why didn’t you tell us you were cold before?” the umox murmured in return. “You tell us stories of Queen Wilvia, you tell us about the nazeemi, you tell us many things we already know very well, but you do not mention to us that you are cold. If you cannot tell the whole world simply by being, as the Ghoss do, then you must tell us. Little one saw you shivering and went to warm you. You feared for her. She came and told us. We do not let those who care for us come to harm.”

  “I’m sorry,” I murmured drowsily. “I’m sorry I’m not Ghoss.”

  “Even if you are not Ghoss, you are quite likely our good friend.”

  I did not try to decipher this, for I was already asleep. In my dream, I wandered with umoxen, walking beside them as they trekked over vast green plains below ranges of snowcapped mountains, while high above us a golden bird cried strange words from the roof of the sky. I knew I was in an umox dream and had no wish to leave it.

  Early in the morning, the herdsman came through with his
staff, prepared to poke me again, but he found my space already empty. I, meantime, peered at the taskmaster through a fringe of tail wool that hung over my eyes. When the man moved away, gone to breakfast, the great bodies shifted again, making a way out. By the time he and I encountered one another, I was on my way back from the privies.

  He stared at me with some suspicion, noting, perhaps, a certain unwarranted rosiness in my cheeks, a certain rested look around my eyes. “Cold last night,” he muttered in an evil tone, obviously hoping I would answer.

  I pretended not to hear him, merely standing where I was with my jaw sagging witlessly until he moved away.

  He said nothing more, though I noted several questioning glances during breakfast lineup. When I had eaten, I returned to the barn and my winter chores, forking down the fragrant hay into the long troughs that lined the day barn before letting the umox into the day barn and starting the long job of cleaning out the night barn. Fine, rich hay for eating was the guarantee of high prices on the wool market, and there was plenty of it to be had on Fajnard. All the lowlands were grassland, all edible, sweet-smelling, and useful, and it never rained during haying season—so said the Ghoss.

  As I had begun to do on my first day in the barns, I accompanied the rhythm of the pitchfork with a silent chant that kept my mind away from the past as the doctor had suggested. “Fifteen” pitchfork into the haystack, “more” pitchfork raising hay, “years” pitchfork tossing hay, one step along the road to understanding how I had come here and what it all meant. One step, then another, and another, and another, three steps more along the road to discernment. Fifteen long, long years.

  Eventually, it was spring. Fourteen…more…years, I chanted to the pitchfork. And then fall, winter, and spring again. Thirteen…more…years. And so on, and so on, and only a few more years.