5. N #4
or merely sold to someone else who will use them for something much less desirable. I am known for being harsh, but fair, and my slaves were treated better than those of many, many of the elven lords.”
She shrugged. “It only takes a generation, and the rest learn to hear better. If I buy new slaves, the old ones make sure that the new ones know what is expected of them. It’s not as if the individuals matter; they’re not people, after all, they’re slaves.”
Nora considered that for a long time, still playing with the stones. “Your world is very strange … and remember … it’s ‘I am,’ and not ‘I being.’” She smiled at Triana, changing the subject. “And profanity is generally not regarded as punctuation.”
“Damn right,” replied Triana.
They took several turns around the garden, talking about plants and trees and animals, and naming the names for useful plants, and their applications.
Triana enjoyed this more than the focused work of the day before, though in many cases, she simply didn’t know how to respond.
Nora kept the tone light and bantering, and Triana waited for the moment to get her own question in.
“The book you gave me to study,” she said, “with the creatures. What was that?”
Nora looked at her. “Before the cities had the protections of today, the spell-walls primarily, the larger Predators were kept at bay, but other things, lots of small things could … and did … get in. Just about all of them would hurt or kill you,
so children had to learn from an early age what to do when faced with something from ….”
Nora gestured out past the city’s outer wall.
Triana could just make out the soft green glow of the shield above the thick stone wall.
“Children needed to be able describe what they saw so adults could respond. Sometimes … usually … what they needed to do meant running away. Sometimes calling specialists to remove whatever had gotten in. Sometimes, rarely, especially if you were cornered, you fought.”
“And won?” asked Triana.
“No,” Nora replied, in a tight voice “but it gave you something to do while they were killing you.”
Triana shivered in the warm morning. “Sounds bleak.”
Nora grinned. “Being a slave sounds pretty bleak as well.”
For that, Triana could only shrug. She had hoped Nora would leave it.
She really didn’t want an argument, especially when Nora controlled whether she left her room.
She tried to respond matter-of-factly. “They’re one step up from animals, and a short one at that. No one asks a riding beast what it thinks about being mounted. They’re not us. They’re not people. Crude brains and crude emotions,
and you can be fooled for a little while into thinking they’re something more, but you are always eventually disappointed. I discovered that as a child; I tried to make a little one into a companion, and I learned they are fine as pets, but don’t think they have the capability to be more than that.
Plus, they’re very short-lived, there is no point in getting fond of one because it’s going to be too old to be of service or dead soon enough, and there you are, your heart breaking over something that was always going to be ephemeral.”
Nora looked as though she were going to reply. She clearly thought better of it, shaking her head just a tiny bit. Triana noted that she worked to move the talk back onto safer ground.
“Here is a nice warm spot,” Nora said, pointing to a patch of sunny grass near a water feature. “Let’s sit for a minute, and work on your vowel transitions … more practice and the easier it gets.”
They practiced for a good while, with Nora slowly building the complexity, then circling back to reinforce places where Triana struggled.
Triana let it lie for a time, but she could see a thought lingering behind Nora’s eyes.
If it was to be a row, best to have it out.
“We were discussing the slaves,” she said.
“Animals. Animals that we don’t eat, but animals nevertheless. They can be trained to carry out orders, but the moment you leave them to themselves, they revert to their basic nature, and believe me, it is very basic indeed. You have never seen them and have no experience in dealing with them.
How can you possibly understand what you have no experience with?”
Nora looked uncomfortable.
Triana bored in. Best get it over with. “Is that a problem?”
“No, dear,” Nora said after a very long pause, “It’s just that from the histories. The low-borns. The ones who were to be sent through the Gate first … that is how you were described. As little better than animals. Disposable. We used exactly those same terms for you.”
Triana uttered a humorless little laugh.
“Believe me, if you had seen these hoomans, you would understand how wrong you are. Even the lowliest of the Elvenborn is a thousand times more intelligent than one of these.”
She shrugged, realizing an unbridgeable gulf.
“I understand. It is perfectly natural to look for comparisons. But there is no comparison.”
Nora frowned, still clearly uncomfortable. “Then … let’s work more on your vocabulary. So that no one makes a … comparison.”
Triana let her change the subject, but had found the first gap in Nora’s facade, the tendency to avoid conflict, and to try and slip the topic away from difficult subjects.
Probably a result of having to correct and instruct those who were superior to her in status without offending them.
She smiled. In the end, a servant remained a servant, subject to the will of her betters.
Triana didn’t drag Nora back into those rocky shoals for the rest of the day, and remained content to let Nora lead the conversation.
They settled into a rough pattern. Pieces of intense work, pushing Triana’s knowledge and requiring all of her thought, with lighter segments, where she could gossip about the elven lords back home while drilling on some task that Nora set.
The guard remained some distance away, clearly bored, and at one point whacking the tips off of flower buds with his truncheon, until a glare from Nora made him stop.