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affirmative and replied with as much timidity as I could contrive: “He sometimes looks mad, sometimes acts mad. Perhaps he is mad?”
“What’s wrong with your eyes?”
“I was ill as a child. The illness marked them.”
“Did the illness change your skin that color, too?”
How unusual, to be singled out because of my color. It was not a situation I was used to. I replied slowly. “Where I come from, most rishi look like me. Aosogi, some call this, though bayen with the same pigment like to lighten their skin and make it more fa-pim by calling it fawn.”
“Fa-pim, gah! Who wants to be like the Emperor? Bayen are yolkbrained.”
Fwipi clucked her disapproval but the girl ignored her, then crouched down beside me. She studied me a moment, frowned, then pointed at the worn garment she was wear ing.
“This is a yungshmi.” She spoke with exaggerated care, as if I were from the north and spoke Xxelteker. “Yungshmi, yungshmi. You shouldn’t hide in that ugly sack, no, no.”
“I prefer my bitoo,” I replied, lips slightly numb from the root I chewed, the pain in my ribs turning sludgy and dull.
She shook her head as if I were simple.
“Yungshmi,” she slowly enunciated. “I’ll help you change into a yungshmi.”
She leaned forward and shyly touched my hand. Her teeth were not yet chipped and pitted from sucking slii, though her lips bore the telltale black stains. “You don’t want to look like an Emperor’s woman, hey-hey.”
She got to her feet, thrust out her potbelly, and strutted about, feet splayed.
“I Emperor!” she boomed in imitation of the Archi pelagic warlord. “I big fat Emperor! I hide my women in sacks, like eels in baskets.”
The children around her giggled. She turned, waggled a finger at me, and, crossing her eyes, announced, “To my eyes, you look good in eel sack. Good, good! Tasty eel!”
“Enough, Savga,” Fwipi said sharply. “Tansan, you tell this greatchild of mine to guard her tongue. A reckless mouth breaks bones.”
Murmurs of agreement from the elders of the clan. I looked to where Tansan sat on the barracks stairs, nursing her babe. Three young men were crouched about her feet.
She lifted her chin. “Let her speak the truth, hey.”
Anger spurted through me. I couldn’t help it. Tansan was my age, had a healthy babe pulling at her breast, and was the mother of the precocious six-year-old beside me; she had a prudent mother, a clan, and not one admirer but three, and there she sat, above and separate from the rest of us, slighting the possibility of danger that might come be cause of her daughter’s words. Tansan had things I had lost or never had, and might never have, and that, along with the memory of her condemnation of my life, stung.
Too late, my emotions went straight to my tongue. “You would let your girl speak and risk her being punished for it?”
Tansan looked at me with an expression of maddening amusement. “I think it was you who were comparing the Emperor to your piss just now.”
“I’m an adult; I know the consequences of what I say if I’m overheard. Children are vulnerable—” My throat was suddenly thick. I continued hoarsely. “A good mother gives her child guidance, protects her.”
Tansan’s dark eyes flashed. “You think her tongue isn’t at risk of being split with a holy warden’s ax when you speak ill of the Emperor? I don’t know where you come from, Secondgirl, but here, any within earshot of perfidy share the slanderer’s punishment.”
An uncomfortable silence settled over my new clan. Tansan and I were staring each other down . . . but I was having difficulty not being distracted by the wet sounds of the babe suckling at her breast.
A small hand tentatively touched my shoulder, and I al lowed my attention to turn from Tansan to Savga.
“You’re angry at me?” the young girl asked, sloe eyes dark beneath a furrowed brow.
“No.” And then, fully aware of the effect my actions would have on Tansan, I gripped Savga’s