CHAPTER SEVEN
COLE
It was starting to get dark by the time I made it back to the house.
During the afternoon feeding, I’d found a loose fence post in the camel paddock.
Thankfully we only had one camel, and I had an interested farmer who was going to come and look at him next week, but I’d known that if I didn’t fix it, by morning I would likely have a hole in the fence and a camel on the loose.
Jeffery was a docile creature, but also one prone to mischief, so I’d spent the better part of an hour replacing the post and repairing the wire.
I hoped Xel had had some time to look around the house and garden, and to settle things in his mind a bit.
It must have been a hell of a shock to lose his master, and I’d taken my cue from the way I let new animals settle into the sanctuary; put them somewhere safe and then leave them alone for a couple of hours to calm down.
I hoped the idea had been as effective with Xel.
But at the same time, it had occurred to me while I’d been working that he hadn’t seemed anywhere near as upset as I’d expected.
He’d been quiet and a little anxious, but based on the reports I’d read, a dimari who lost their master should have been absolutely devastated.
But Xel was still speaking, he was asking questions, he’d said he would be happy to cook for me.
That hardly sounded like a man in the throes of despair.
So was I missing something, or was Xel just really good at pretending nothing was wrong?
But the idea also occurred to me that perhaps I didn’t know as much about dimari as I thought I did.
The dimari were all Vangravians, sold at birth to another species called the Eumadians, who trained them through to adulthood as slaves, then sold them to a variety of species who had far less of an aversion to slavery than the Alliance did.
Most of what I’d learned had come from a variety of news articles, but since we had very few dimari on Rendol 4, a lot of the journalists had had to reach out to other species to learn more about how the dimari were trained or how they reacted to various situations.
But that did create a certain amount of room for error in their research.
In which case, I really needed to read that instruction manual Aiden had given me.
Inside the house, I scrubbed the dirt off my hands and face in the bathroom, then stuck my head into Xel’s room, not having seen any sign of him in the kitchen or living room.
He was sitting on his bed, staring out the window at the darkening garden…
and I noticed that his bag was sitting on the bed beside him, open, but not unpacked.
Had he been sitting here all afternoon?
Well, that was more like the display of grief I’d been expecting, and I instantly felt the urge to comfort him. As well as I could, at least. I was never going to grieve for my uncle, no matter how much empathy I wanted to show Xel.
“Xel?” I said, taking another step into the room. “How are you doing? Is everything okay?”
He stood up abruptly and turned to face me, plastering a smile to his face. “Yes, Master. Is there anything you need help with?”
That, at least, was an act put on to appease me.
But would it be more helpful to call him out on it, or to play along?
I wanted to help him deal with all the startling changes in his life…
but based on what I’d learned from working with animals, sometimes they needed to feel safe and secure before they could start learning to trust their owner.
So maybe Xel needed a sense of routine and security before I could start probing the deeper workings of his brain.
I thought back over what Aiden had said.
Dimari needed to be praised for doing their work well.
Okay, so in order to have something to praise him for, I needed to give him something to do.
“Would you like to come and help me make dinner?” I asked him. As soon as the words left my mouth, I felt like kicking myself. One of the key things Aiden had told me earlier was to not ask a dimari what they wanted. I was to tell him, not ask him.
“I’d like you to chop some vegetables for me,” I amended my previous statement, expecting Xel to perk up at being given something to do.
But his carefully neutral expression stayed exactly the same. “Yes, Master,” he said, with a studious nod. That was not what I’d expected.
But at the same time, I didn’t know what else to try. I couldn’t just keep changing my mind until I found something he liked.
Xel followed me to the kitchen, then set about chopping the carrots and potatoes I set out for him. I was intending to make a fairly simple casserole.
“Do you have any objections to eating meat?” I asked Xel, as I prepared the camel meat.
Given that large portions of the planet were still not terraformed, camels had been brought here by the early human settlers, to be used both as working animals and a source of food.
And while their meat was a bit on the tough side, it was still good enough to make soups and stews, or it could be slow-cooked if it needed to be more tender.
“No, Master,” Xel said simply.
Okay, so that wasn’t exactly a conversation starter.
“Did you do anything interesting this afternoon? Look around the garden, maybe?”
Xel looked sharply in my direction, before turning his attention back to the vegetables just as abruptly. “No, Master,” he said. I once again ignored the title. I was going to have to ask Aiden about that the next time I saw him – unless there was anything useful about it in the instruction manual.
Hell, what was I supposed to say to him now?
For the past five years – ever since the fire – I’d been doing my level best to avoid people.
I talked to the other staff here, but that was about it, so I was well out of practice at idle conversation.
I thought about asking him if he’d liked working at the hotel, but nope, that fell into the ‘things that you like’ category, which was currently off limits.
I thought about asking him if he had any experience working with animals.
But knowing my uncle, he wouldn’t have allowed pets anywhere on the hotel grounds.
“Did you have a wall screen at the hotel?” I asked, grasping at even the most banal of conversation topics. “Did you get to watch any shows?” If he named one that I was even vaguely familiar with, it would give us something to discuss, even if only for a few minutes.
“No, Master,” Xel said again.
I gave up. We finished the preparations for dinner in silence.
An hour later, with the dishwasher running and the leftovers stored in the fridge, I settled on the sofa in the living room with a cup of herbal tea and pulled up the document Aiden had given me on my comm.
Right. Time to get a handle on whatever the heck dimari psychology was all about.
In the first part, Aiden said a lot of reassuring things about how it could be overwhelming to find yourself owning a dimari and how it really wasn’t that hard, once you knew how the basics worked.
I skimmed over most of that section, since I needed real answers, not fuzzy reassurances.
Then there was a section about how dimari weren’t trained to understand many of the nuances of Alliance culture, and all the various misunderstandings that could result.
I resolved to read that section in more detail later.
But what I needed right now was to understand the basics, the surface-level dynamics of the master-slave relationship.
How did I treat a slave with respect, and give him things to do without overworking him or exploiting him?
What forms of feedback could he give me, and how did I go about interpreting each one?
I turned back to the contents page, scanning down the topics to see if there was one that could help.
And thankfully, there was a chapter about the easy first steps to take in rearranging daily life, designed to make things more comfortable in the short term for both owner and dimari.
I scrolled down to that section, then spotted a heading halfway down the page that read ‘Forms of Address’. Yes! That was what I needed.
Two minutes later, I was sighing with relief.
It all sounded so thoroughly simple. I turned to look for Xel, somewhat surprised when I saw that he wasn’t sitting on the other sofa.
I craned my neck to look behind me, across the hall into the kitchen.
But he wasn’t sitting at the table. Had he just gone back to his room?
“Xel? Are you there?” I called, feeling a little baffled. He’d rather sit alone in his room than with me? That didn’t bode well for our future.
The pad of soft footfalls came down the hallway, then Xel appeared in the doorway. “Yes, Master?”
“Come in, sit down,” I said, feeling concerned about his reticence.
Was this a symptom of grief, or an aversion to me?
My right hand fisted as the thought occurred to me, and I fought the urge to hide it under one of the cushions.
Xel hadn’t even blinked when I’d first met him, and he’d given me no reason since then to think he disliked the way I looked.
Steeling myself, I patted the sofa beside me, then shifted over to make more room for him. He sat down stiffly. “I’ve been reading the instruction manual Aiden gave me earlier,” I told him. “And I found something very helpful. You’ve been trained to call me master, correct?”
“Yes, Master,” Xel said, a wary tone in his voice.
And he once again mumbled the word ‘master’, as he had been for much of the afternoon.
But now, I understood why. I’d told him that I was unhappy with what he was calling me, despite the fact that he’d had two decades of intensive training conditioning him to call me that.