“He’s well enough.” Max threw himself into a chair. “You do realize how badly you hurt him, don’t you?”
I wasn’t sure what he meant. “I’m sorry if I hurt Hobart’s feelings—”
Max snorted before I could finish. “Hurt his feelings? Hobart’s daughters have had their futures put on hold.” His volume rose with every word, and his face was turning red. “Adeola locks Hobart and his boys up much more securely now. In fact, every senior wife in Egume is looking closely at security in her household because of you.”
It was hard to believe a guy had never escaped from a household before. But then I thought about all the things that had happened to me since I left Hobart’s house, and I understood why it was likely to be a rare event.
I thought about Teleza and our one time in bed. I had liked her a lot, but not enough to stick around and become another Hobart.
Max was glaring at me like he expected me to answer him.
It made me damn mad that he was so angry at me. “Look, I didn’t ask to come to Egume. I didn’t even ask to go to Hobart’s house.”
Max jumped out of his chair. “None of us asked to come here, but we’re here and we have to make the best of it.”
“I don’t want to make the best of it.”
He held both hands up like he was fed up. “It doesn’t matter what you want.”
“I know that.” I had found it out the hard way. “That’s why I hate it here, because it doesn’t matter what I want.” I got to my feet so I was looking down at him and not up. “Ten women tied me down in the dirt and tried to rape me just because I was the only man available. Maybe you’re prepared to go along with that, but I’m not.”
He flinched and turned his head away. When he turned back toward me he looked calmer. “What happened?”
I told him about Marjani and Esi kidnapping me—without using their names—and about the Kabaregas catching me.
“Kabaregas?” He said the clan name with distaste. “Was the senior wife named Dorscha?”
I blinked. How had he known that? “Yes.”
A look of revulsion crossed his face. “You won’t have to worry about her again. She’s just been arrested for killing another Kabarega.”
For a second I thought I’d heard him wrong. Dorscha had seemed fanatical but not homicidal. Had she snapped and turned on Oni for arguing with her? “Who was it?”
Max cleared his throat. “It wasn’t anyone from her own household,” he said, as if that somehow made the crime less horrible. “It was some homeless Kabarega who lived nearby. She had been injured already and couldn’t run away.”
Esi! Dorscha had killed Esi! But why?
Because of me. Dorscha must have found the cave and killed Esi, maybe because Esi told her I was out of her reach forever, or maybe just because I wasn’t there.
“Are you all right?”
Max sounded worried so I must have looked as sick as I felt. I couldn’t believe Esi was dead. I had seen her—spoken with her—less than twenty-four hours before, and now she was dead. It seemed impossible. “Yeah.” I sank down onto the edge of the bed. “I’m fine.”
Except I still felt like I’d been hit by a truck. Poor Esi! And poor Marjani. I thought about Marjani heading back to the cave with the reward money, ready to carry Esi all the way into the city for medical care. Had Esi been dead already when we climbed the steps of the Ocan Garun’s Palace? It was hard to believe Dorscha could have succeeded if Marjani had been there. “When did this happen?”
“Early this morning.” He cleared his throat. “Apparently her haru were horrified. They turned her in themselves.”
Oni would certainly be able to take Dorscha in a fight, and she must have had help. So Marjani would have arrived back at the cave to find Esi dead or dying, or maybe missing altogether if they had already moved the body. I swallowed hard and tasted bile. Esi had been a good person. Compared to most of Egume, she’d been remarkably sensitive and kindhearted. She hadn’t deserved what had happened to her. I remembered how happy she had been at the idea of having a baby. She would never have that chance now. My eyes welled up.
“Maybe you should eat something?” Max nodded at the door. “You can ask the guards for food anytime. You’re not being punished—not that way, anyway.”
I was ravenous, but his comment brought to mind a further question. Max was married to the Ocan Garun. “Where are they going to send me? Do you know?”
His face looked glum. “Not back to Hobart’s. I tried arguing, but I got nowhere. Right now it’s still undecided, but you’re definitely not going there.”
It looked like Teleza and her sisters would have to find someone else. I hoped it was someone they liked. And I hoped Teleza didn’t hate me. I wasn’t at all worried about what Zuwina thought.
A knock on the door signaled an end to Max’s visit. I asked him to tell Hobart I was okay, and to give him and everyone else at the house my thanks for everything they had done for me. Max nodded, shook my hand, and left.
The guards brought me dinner, and I ate it. Even hungry as I was, it was hard to enjoy the food. I knew how a prisoner on trial felt waiting for the jury to come back in.
After a woman took the tray away, I lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling until I fell asleep again.
When I woke up, morning light streamed in the windows. The woman who had worn the bathrobe stood beside my bed, except now she wore a uniform.
“Get up,” she said in Neluan. She nodded at a chair where some clothes were laid out. “Get dressed. You’re leaving today.”
I scrambled to my feet and looked at the clothes—underclothes, gray button-up trousers, a white shirt, and a red thrya. “Where am I going.”
She grinned without a trace of humor. “You’ll find out when you get there.”
Sixteen
Whoever the woman who had worn the bathrobe was, she was efficient and short-tempered. When I came out of the bathroom wearing the Makoron clothes she had brought me, I found her waiting, all but tapping her foot. My jeans, tee shirt, and jacket had disappeared.
“Where are my clothes?” I asked.
She frowned. “They’ve been disposed of. You don’t need them anymore, and they were in bad shape.”
Maybe they were worn and grubby, but they were also mine. Before I could protest, she called in the guards from the corridor.
Four women came in carrying the same sort of straitjacket affair that I had been wrapped up in when I first arrived.
“What’s going on?” I said.
Bathrobe Woman just smiled. “The Ocan Garun doesn’t care to take any chances during your journey to your new home.”
I tried to put up a fight, but those four women knew what they were doing. The shortest of them got my wrist in a grip that hurt like hell.
“Ow!”
“Hold still, then,” Shortie said.
They had me trussed up in seconds.
“He’s ready, madam,” Shortie said, pulling the last strap tight.
Bathrobe Woman nodded. “Let’s go.”
She led the way, and my guards pushed me along behind her. We went out into a huge courtyard where what looked like an armored truck waited; it ran partly on wheels and partly on tracks like a tank. I had never seen a vehicle like it before except in old war movies.
Shortie shoved me into the back seat and then got in beside me and yanked me upright. Another guard got in on the other side, and then Bathrobe Woman opened the front passenger door and sat down next to the driver.
Bathrobe Woman took a quick glance at me and then spoke to the driver. “We’re ready. Let’s go.”
The truck started up, and then I had my second ride through the streets of Egume. The blocks and blocks that Marjani and I had trudged through sped past at a high rate. I noted that the truck had little banners flying from both the front bumpers. They flapped briskly as we whizzed along, but I could see they included the green, gold, and red pattern that made up the Omdur flag, along with th
e Egume seal.
Other traffic made way for us, as if we had been an ambulance or a motorcade, so I figured the banners were the Ocan Garun’s personal flag. We left the downtown area quickly and entered a suburban neighborhood much like the one where Hobart’s house was, except these houses were even bigger—mostly three stories high and a full city block on a side—each with a tall janullo flying a clan banner above it. All the houses were built around squares, with a small garden or park in the center of each square.
“Where are we?” I asked.
Shortie looked to Bathrobe Woman, who glanced over her shoulder at me.
Bathrobe Woman lifted her brows. “If it matters to you, we just came into the Rufaro Grove area.”
I glanced at the flags flying above the houses. I didn’t know the Rufaro clan symbol, but all the nearby janullos flew the same flag, a blue field with a black border and some kind of gold emblem in the middle.
Shortly after that the hovercar pulled up at a huge, block-like house with almost no windows. The gate didn’t swing open like the double gate on Monica’s grandfather’s estate, or like the single gates at Hobart’s house. Instead a spiked steel grid, rather like the portcullis in a medieval castle, rose up into the roof of the tunnel that went through the wall. We drove past that and stopped. The first portcullis lowered to the ground with a clang before a second one lifted and we could drive into the courtyard.
If Hobart’s house had been a minimum security prison, I was in maximum security now. I wondered what the guys in this place had done to deserve such treatment, and then I saw a whole cluster of boys—eight of them, aged three to nine or so—running from the doorway into the courtyard.
That explained it.
FOR a few minutes I thought it might have been a school for boys or something, but a bunch of women and girls joined the boys, and then the one adult guy, just like the day I had met Hobart and his family.
This man was much younger than Hobart, and both stockier and taller. He looked liked he worked out. He wore his black hair in that same Mr. Spock pointy sideburns haircut that Hobart had worn, but he also had a slight beard—more of a 5:00 shadow than a real beard.
They all waited for me, mimicking the welcome I had gotten from Adeola’s household, but this time Shortie had to drag me out of the truck because I couldn’t climb out myself. Once they got me out and standing, Bathrobe Woman waited while Shortie and the others undid the straps and set me loose.
“Why is he all tied up, Daida?” one of the younger boys asked.
“Hush!” The man bent down and said something else, and the boy ducked his head like he had been scolded.
“Welcome, madam,” a woman in a green and brown suit said to Bathrobe Woman. She looked about thirty-five or so, only a couple years older than the man, and she had a pleasant expression. “We’re happy to be able to oblige the Ocan Garun.”
Bathrobe Woman nodded and glanced up at the blue flag flying at the top of the janullo. “Hopefully, we will do a better job of keeping the boy safe than the Omdur did.”
I figured that meant she was in the same clan as this household. How did everyone know what clan someone was in? Or did it only matter in marriages and stuff like that?
The woman in the green and brown suit smiled at me. “Welcome, Jayzoon. My name is Lisha Rufaro Vai, and I’m the senior wife here.” She indicated the man next to her. “And this is our husband, David Rufaro Medwar.”
The first name caught my attention at once. “Are you—”
He shook his head even while he held out his hand. “I was born here in Egume. But my father was keesai.”
I shook hands with a weird sense of deja vu. It felt like I should know the guy, which was impossible. And then the name clicked in my memory. “What was your father’s name?” I asked.
“Edward Rufaro Kowalski.”
I was shaking hands with Marjani’s brother.
MY first day at the Rufaro house was a lot like my first day at Hobart’s house except this time I could talk to everyone, and I wasn’t as homesick. I was even more depressed, though, because I didn’t get a room of my own. Except for David’s suite, the men’s space was like a dorm at a boarding school. All but the two youngest of David’s eight sons lived there. The little ones slept in their mothers’ rooms, but the six older ones shared two rooms on the ground floor, below David’s suite. David explained I would have a lower bunk in the room occupied by his three oldest boys. When David and I walked into the room, the radio console was tuned to a station that sounded like someone was torturing small animals while thumping a steel drum with a stick.
Even David winced. “I’m sorry you have to share, but at least you won’t be lonely.”
But I was lonely. And I was also damn mad. I was fed up with being treated like a criminal or a mental patient. And I was really peeved that none of David’s ten daughters was older than eleven.
David, on the other hand, seemed glad to have me there. He fell all over himself offering fencing lessons and jin-weh lessons. I took him up on it, partly for something to do, and partly because I figured either skill could come in handy.
I found out with my first lesson that David had Hobart beat at both fencing and jin-weh. He could disarm me in seconds or toss me to the floor at the same rate, even though I was two inches taller and had a longer reach. Usually, though, David let me stay armed or upright so I could practice. I noticed he did the same with his sons, and his daughters, too, when they joined us. Even the little ones could disarm me in fencing, so they all had fun at my expense.
In addition to PE, I spent a few hours each day in the family school—two rooms in the main part of the house. While one of David’s wives taught the younger children, the family had hired a professional teacher for the older boys. Her name was Irna. I liked her because she was twenty-six and hot, and she was kind to me. David’s seven wives treated me like I was a parolee on work release, but Irna seemed to see me more as a special needs kid who could be helped by extra attention.
“You need to read more, Jayzoon,” she said on my third day in her class. “When you meet prospective brides, you need to be able to converse about history and current events.”
“I don’t think that’s much of a consideration here,” I said. “It seems to me all I have to be is male.”
She shook her head as if despairing my attitude, and reached across the hi-tech desk, which was part furniture and part computer, to change the monitor so it displayed the local news. “Read!” she said, and then she moved off to deal with the other boys.
I did read, but mostly it was because I saw a familiar face. Dorscha had been arraigned for killing Esi. A picture showed her standing in the same kind of straitjacket I had worn, outside an official-looking building. Several uniformed women marched her along and kept back a crowd of onlookers.
I tapped the screen and the still photo moved, showing Dorscha flinching as the women in the crowd shouted at her, her guards pushing her to keep walking. I saw Oni waiting, not shouting, not moving at all, just watching, and a couple other faces familiar from the Kabarega camp. I didn’t see Marjani anywhere.
The clip ended, and I read the article posted with it. Esi had been beaten to death, battered with a heavy flashlight until it cracked her skull. The report mentioned the cause of Dorscha’s rage as her attempt to marry a young escaped keesai whom Esi and a companion had captured. It didn’t give my name, just ‘a young escaped keesai.’ It reported that Marjani had properly turned me in for the reward, and described Dorscha’s attempt at marriage as ‘an example of the desperation the current economic climate has created, where unemployed and underemployed women don’t have the means to form viable households.’
I wondered if they would call me as a witness at the trial, which was set to start in a week. It seemed incredibly quick compared to the U.S., but maybe Makoron courts were more efficient. On a hunch, I searched through the news database. I found only twelve murders reported over the past year in Egume. It seemed
a low number for a city that size, and then it occurred to me that that might have been because the men were all locked up. The thought depressed me even further.
When class ended, I tried hanging around to talk to Irna, but Lisha showed up and took her off for a conversation about the boys’ progress in social studies. Unlike Adeola, Lisha seemed to be home all the time. She also watched me a lot, which creeped me out. Since even the oldest girl in the house couldn’t marry for several years, I was pretty sure Lisha wasn’t sizing me up as a prospective son-in-law.
I walked into the courtyard and looked up at the sky. This courtyard wasn’t completely open like the one in Hobart’s house. A giant spider web of steel cables covered the entire opening. The hummingbirds that flitted and zoomed around the giant red flowers got through just fine, but I’d have a hard time. And even the attic windows were just narrow slits, too skinny for me to ever get out that way.
I let out a ragged sigh, half despair and half anger.
“You sound like you could use some exercise?”
I turned and found David standing there wearing white, loose-fitting jin-weh workout clothes, almost like they wore for karate back home.
“All right,” I said, without any real enthusiasm. I didn’t want that kind of exercise—jumping around a big empty room or even lifting weights. What I really wanted was to start walking to the bus stop and find Ryan waiting to give me a ride; I wanted to do pushups in my room and have my little sister burst in to call me to breakfast; I even wanted to help Mom with the laundry.
As we started for the men’s quarters, it occurred to me that Marjani had said her brothers knew English.
“Is your father still alive?” I asked in that language.
David turned his head, an astonished look on his face, and answered in passable English. “No. He died several years ago, from—from bad lungs. He said that when he was young he had too many bad habits.”
Probably smoking, which no one seemed to do on Makoro. “But he taught you his language?”
“Yes, but I have not spoken it since he died, except a few times to my brothers.” He cocked his head. “How did you know I speak it?”
Turnabout Page 19
