Everyone looked up. Saw the attendant, whose trembling only increased, who began, now, to open her mouth as though she was about to speak, or possibly vomit, and then closed it again, over and over. “It’s too late!” someone else said, and the second assistant cook said, panic in her voice, “I used all the honey in the cakes for this afternoon!”
“Oh, shit!” said a servant who had just come into the kitchen with dirty teabowls, and I knew from the way no one turned to admonish her that whatever this was, it was serious business.
Someone dragged in a chair, and three servants took hold of Raughd’s attendant and lowered her into it, still shaking, still opening and closing her mouth. The first assistant cook came running with a honey-soaked cake and broke a piece off, put it into the attendant’s gaping mouth. It tumbled out onto the floor, to cries of dismay. The attendant looked more and more as though she were going to throw up, but instead she made a long, low moan.
“Oh, do something! Do something!” begged the servant with the dirty dishes. Lunch was entirely forgotten.
By this time I had begun to have some idea of what was happening. I had seen things something like this before, though not this particular reaction to it.
“Are you all right, Fleet Captain?” Sirix, in the other building, in the hallway outside both our rooms. She must have come out while I was absorbed by the goings-on in the main building’s kitchen.
I blinked the vision away, so that I could see Sirix and answer. “I didn’t realize the Samirend practiced spirit possession.”
Sirix did not attempt to hide her expression of distaste at my words. But then she turned her face away, as though she was ashamed to meet my gaze, and made a disgusted noise. “What must you think of us, Fleet Captain?”
Us. Of course. Sirix was Samirend.
“It’s the kind of thing someone does,” she continued, “when they’re feeling ignored or put out. Everyone rushes to give them sweets and say kind things to them.”
The whole thing seemed less like something the attendant was doing than something that was happening to her. And I hadn’t noticed anyone saying kind things to her. But my attention had strayed from the kitchen, and now I saw that one of the field overseers, the one who had met us the day we’d arrived and had seemed completely oblivious to the field workers’ ability to speak and understand Radchaai, was now kneeling next to the chair where the still trembling, moaning attendant sat. “You should have called me sooner!” the overseer said sharply, and someone else said, “We only just saw her!”
“It’s all to stop the spirit speaking,” said Sirix, still standing beside me in the corridor, still disgusted and, I was certain now, ashamed. “If it speaks, likely it’ll curse someone. People will do anything to stop it. One petulant person can hold an entire household hostage for days that way.”
I didn’t believe in spirits or gods to possess anyone, but I doubted this was something the attendant had done consciously, or without a true need of whatever the reaction of the other servants might provide for her. And she was, after all, constantly subject to Raughd Denche with very little real respite. “Sweets?” I asked Sirix. “Not just honey?”
Sirix blinked once, twice. A stillness came over her that I’d seen before, when she was angry or offended. It was as though my question had been a personal insult. “I don’t think I’m interested in lunch,” she said coldly, and turned and went back into her room.
In the main kitchen, the head cook, clearly relieved by the presence of the overseer, took firm charge of the dismayed, staring servants and managed to admonish and cajole the rest of the work from them. Meanwhile the overseer put fragments of honey cake into the attendant’s mouth. Each one fell out onto her lap, but the overseer doggedly replaced them. As she worked, she intoned words in Liost, from the sound of it. From the context, it must have been a prayer.
Eventually, the attendant’s moans and shaking stopped, whatever curse she might have uttered unspoken. She pled exhaustion for the rest of the day, which no one, servants or family, seemed to question, at least not in Eight’s hearing. The next morning she was back at her post, and the household staff was noticeably kinder to her after that.
Raughd avoided me. I saw her only rarely, in the late afternoon or early evening, on her way to the bathhouse. If we crossed paths she pointedly did not speak to me. She spent much of her time either in the nearby town or, more disturbingly, over the ridge at the field workers’ house.
I considered leaving, but we still had more than a week of full mourning to go. An interruption like this would only appear ill-omened, the proper execution of the funeral rites compromised. Perhaps the Presger, or their translators, wouldn’t understand, or care. Still. Twice I had seen the Presger underestimated with disastrous results—once by Governor Giarod and Captain Hetnys, and once by Anaander Mianaai herself, when she had thought she had the power to destroy them and in response they had put those invisible, all-piercing guns in the hands of the Garseddai the Lord of the Radch thought she had so easily conquered. The Presger had not done it to save the Garseddai, who had in the event been completely destroyed, every one of them dead, every planet and station in their home system burned and lifeless, with no action, no protest from the Presger. No, they had done it, I was sure, to send a message to Anaander Mianaai: Don’t even think about it. I would not underestimate them in my turn.
Fosyf still visited our small house daily, and treated me with her usual jovial obliviousness. I came to see her strangely serene manner as both a sign of just how much she expected to get whatever she wanted, and also an instrument by which she managed to do that, plain persistent saying what she wanted to be true in the expectation that it would eventually become so. It’s a method I’d found worked best for those who are already positioned to mostly get what they want. Obviously Fosyf had found it worked for her.
Above, on Athoek Station, even with Lieutenant Tisarwat’s push, with Station Administrator Celar’s involvement, a thorough inspection of the Gardens’ supports wouldn’t happen for more than a week. “To be entirely honest,” Tisarwat explained to Basnaaid one afternoon, in my sitting room on the station, “there are so many things that need urgent attention that it keeps getting pushed back.” I read her determination, her continuing thrill at being able to help Basnaaid. But also an undercurrent of unhappiness. “I’m sure if the fleet captain were here she’d find some way to just… make it happen.”
“I’m impressed that it seems likely to happen at all,” said Basnaaid, with a smile that left Tisarwat momentarily, speechlessly, pleased with herself.
Recovering her self-possession, Tisarwat said, “It’s not anything urgent, but I was wondering if Horticulture could provide some plants for public areas here.”
“It can’t help but improve the air quality!” Basnaaid laughed. “There might not be enough light yet, though.” And then, at another thought, still amused, “Maybe they could put some of those mushrooms out.”
“The mushrooms!” exclaimed Tisarwat, in frustration. “Nobody will tell me where they’re growing them. I’m not sure what they’re afraid of. Sometimes I think everyone here must be growing them in a box under their beds or something, and that’s why they’re so anxious about Station Maintenance coming into their quarters.”
“They make money off the mushrooms, don’t they? And if the chief of Horticulture got her hands on them, you know she’d figure out a way to keep them in the Gardens and charge outrageous prices for them.”