Modh did not say, “But-"
It was perfectly clear to her that the system was in fact one of exchange, and that it was not fair exchange. She came from just far enough outside it to be able to look at it. And, being excluded from reciprocity, any slave can see the system with an undeluded eye. But Modh did not know of any other system, any possibility of another system, which would have allowed her to say “But.” Neither did Nata know of that alternative, that possible even when unattainable space in which there is room for justice, in which the word “But” can be spoken usefully.
Nata had undertaken to teach the Tullu girls how to live in the City, and she did so with honest care. She taught them the rules. She taught them what was believed. The rules did not include justice, so she did not teach them justice. If she did not herself believe what was believed, yet she taught them how to live with those who did. Modh was wild and bold when she came, and Nata could easily have let her think she had rights, encouraged her to rebel, and then watched her be whipped or mutilated or sent to the fields to be worked to death. Some slave women would have done so. Nata, kindly treated most of her life, treated others kindly. Warm-hearted, she took the girls to her heart. Her own baby boy was a Crown, she was proud of her godling, but she loved the wild girls too. She liked to hear Bedh and Modh talk in the language of the nomads, as they did sometimes. Mal had forgotten it by then.
Mal soon grew out of her plumpness and became as thin as Modh. After a couple of years in the City both girls were very different from the tough little wildcats Bela ten Belen had caught. They were slender, delicate-looking. They ate well, but lived soft. Indeed, these days they might not have been able to keep up the cruel pace of their captors’ flight to the City. They got little exercise but dancing, and had no work to do. Conservative Crown families like the Belens did not let their slave wives do work that was beneath them; and all work was beneath a Crown. Modh would have gone mad with boredom if the grandmother had not let her run and play in the courtyard of the compound, and if Tudju had not taught her to sword-dance and to fence. Tudju loved her sword and the art of using it, which she studied daily with an older priestess. Equipping Modh with a blunted bronze practice sword, she passed along all she learned, so as to have a partner to practice with. Tudju's sword was extremely sharp, but she already used it skillfully, and never once hurt Modh.
Tudju had not yet accepted any of the suitors who came and murmured at the yellow curtain of the hanan. She imitated them mercilessly after they left, so that the hanan rocked with laughter. She claimed she could smell each one coming-the one that smelled like boiled chard, the one that smelled like cat-dung, the one that smelled like old men's feet. She told Modh, in secret, that she did not intend to marry, but to be a priestess and a judge-councilor. But she did not tell her brothers that. They were expecting to make a good profit in food-supply or clothing from Tudju's marriage; they lived expensively, as Crowns should, and the Belen larders and clothes-chests had been supplied too long by bartering rentals for goods. Nata alone had cost twenty years’ rent on their best property.
Modh had friends among the Belenda slaves and was very fond of Tudju, Nata, and old Hehum, but loved no one as she loved Mal. Mal was all she had left of her old life, and she loved in her all that she had lost for her. Perhaps Mal had always been the only thing she had: her sister, her child, her charge, her soul.
She knew now that most of her people had not been killed, that her father and the rest of them were no doubt following their annual round across the plains and hills and waterlands; but she never seriously thought of trying to escape and find them. Mal had been taken, she had followed Mal. There was no going back. And as Bedh had said to them, it was a big, rich life here.
She did not think of the grandmothers and grandfathers lying slaughtered or Dua's Daughter who had been beheaded. She had seen all that yet not seen it; it was her sister she had seen. Her father and the others would have buried all those people and sung the songs for them. They were here no longer. They were going on the bright roads and the dark roads of the sky, dancing in the bright hut-circles up there.
She did not hate Bela ten Belen for leading the raid, killing Dua's Daughter, stealing her and Mal and the others. Men did that, nomads as well as City men. They raided, killed people, took food, took slaves. That was the way men were. It would be as useless to hate them for it as to love them for it.
But there was one thing that should not have been, that should not be, and yet continued endlessly to be, the small thing, the nothing that when she remembered it made the rest, all the bigness and richness of life, shrink up into the shriveled meat of a bad walnut, the yellow smear of a crushed fly.
It was at night that she knew it, she and Mal, in their soft bed with cobweb sheets, in the safe darkness of the warm, high-walled house: Mal's indrawn breath, the cold chill down her own arms, do you hear it?
They clung together, listening, hearing.
Then in the morning Mal would be heavy-eyed and listless, and if Modh tried to make her talk or play she would begin to cry, and Modh would sit down at last and hold her and cry with her, endless, useless, dry, silent weeping. There was nothing they could do. The baby followed them because she did not know who else to follow.
Neither of them spoke of this to anyone in the household. It had nothing to do with these women. It was theirs. Their ghost.
Sometimes Modh would sit up in the dark and whisper aloud, “Hush, Groda! Hush, be still!” And there might be silence for a while. But the thin wailing would begin again.
Modh had not seen Vui since they came to the City. Vui belonged to the Hans, but she had not been treated as Modh and Mal had. Dos ten Han bargained for a pretty girl from a Root wife-broker, and Vui was one of the slaves he bartered for that wife. If she were still alive, she did not live where Modh could reach her or hear of her. Seen from the hills, as she had seen it that one time, the City did not look very big in the great slant and distance of the plowlands and meadows and forests stretching on to the west; but if you lived in it, it was as endless as the plains. You could be lost in it. Vui was lost in it.
Modh was late coming to womanhood, by City standards: fourteen. Hehum and Tudju held the ceremony for her in the worship-room of the house, a full day of rituals and singing. She was given new clothes. When it was over Bedh came to the yellow curtain, called to her, and put into her hands a little deerskin pouch, crudely stitched.
She looked at it, puzzled. Bedh said, “You know, in the village, a girl's uncle gives her a delu ,” and turned away. She caught his hand and thanked him, touched, half-remembering the custom and fully knowing the risk he had run in making his gift. Dirt people were forbidden to do any sewing; it was a Root prerogative. A slave found with a needle and thread could have a hand cut off. Like his sister Nata, Bedh was warm-hearted. Modh and Mal had called him Uncle for years now.
Alo ten Belen had three sons from Nata by now to be priests and soldiers of the House of Belen. Alo came most nights to play with the little boys and take Nata off to his rooms, but they saw little of Bela in the hanan. His friend Dos ten Han had given him a concubine, a pretty, teasing, experienced woman who kept him satisfied for a long time. He had forgotten about the nomad sisters, lost interest in his plans of educating them. Their days passed peacefully and cheerfully. As the years went by, their nights too grew more peaceful. The crying now came seldom to Modh, and only in a dream, from which she could waken.
But always, when she wakened so, she saw Mal's eyes wide in the darkness. They said nothing, but held each other till they slept again.