11. N #4
Triana let the last bit of her fantasy go. Nora would not be coming to free her from this place. Nora had completed her task, and had gone on to her next assignment. Still, Triana felt hurt … she should have known better, that this was just a job for Nora … but at least she could have said good-bye.
She rubbed the heel of her hand against her eyes, dashing away tears.
What happened? Why now? She thought back over, and recalled the Overseer’s words.
It seemed she had been detected at some point as she had been sneaking out and searching Haldeen’s rooms for clues on how to get home.
Why hadn’t they confronted her immediately?
She pondered that for a while but drew no conclusions.
She blinked back more sudden tears. If the Overseer was to be taken at face value, then she had violated her guest-right, and was now …
what was she? She wished she had asked Nora more questions about how this city worked.
In truth, she had let Nora steer the conversation, answering her questions and asking few of her own.
Triana’s best assessment was that she had trapped herself into some kind of debt-bond.
She wasn’t really familiar with the details, but the rough contours seemed unpleasant enough.
She would owe a sum, and would have to work to pay it off.
As she did, then other charges would accrue and the debt would get bigger …
but if she just worked a little bit harder then she could work that down as well.
She had a sinking feeling she could guess how that song ended, with some new debt piled on, so that she never paid it off.
She wondered whether the debt was as real as it had been presented to her.
Perhaps Haldeen wanted her out of sight for some scheme he had in mind, and this was convenient …
and when he was ready, perhaps her circumstances would improve.
She frowned at that. As tired as she was, she had no intention of sitting here and rotting while she waited for Haldeen’s goodwill to turn up.
She licked her fingertips and pressed them to her eyelids to try and cool them a bit, to little effect.
It had taken every particle of energy she had to make a mere six bricks today.
Would it get easier with practice? But how?
Using magical energy wasn’t like using your muscles.
There was only so much a person could produce, and no more.
As far as she knew, you couldn’t “exercise” your way into becoming a stronger mage.
If that had been true, there were plenty of low-status elves back home that would have been Lords within a few decades.
Her mind continued to whirl, disjoined and overtired, jumping from topic to topic. She circled back around to wondering what had become of Nora, and fell asleep at some point while brooding about her sudden change in circumstances.
Movement close beside her awoke her. She thought she had been asleep for about five minutes, and felt disoriented when she awoke in the near-dark.
She heard murmurs and movements all around and she realized it was the collective rustling of the dormitory’s inhabitants as they rose to start their day.
She had no idea what to do. She looked around for the fox-faced woman …
what was her name … Triana knew she had been told, but couldn’t recall.
No luck, so she looked to see what the others did.
They all had towels and some kind of rough soap, and went trooping to a room with stone basins where cold water came sluicing in.
She didn’t have soap or a towel, but she followed.
Triana froze at the door to the washing room, her stomach convulsing. She had a similar arrangement at her estate. For. The. Slaves.
The reality of the washing room, so like the one she had for her property, brought her situation crashing down on her.
It might be debt bondage under some odd local law, but functionally it amounted to …
she still couldn’t bring herself to accept it.
Debt bondage. Not slavery. Not a slave. Not a slave.
At some point she had frozen and slid down the wall, with her back against the cold stone.
Women entering the washing room looked curiously at her before stepping around to go to the stone basins, where they made their morning ablutions.
Triana heard their murmurs, the occasional soft laugh, and felt their eyes on her, curious and staring.
She felt very alone, and very, very lost.
Finally one of them stopped and looked down at her, eyes cold. “Get up, girly. You ain’t allowed to work if you ain’t washed, and if you don’t work, we got to make up the slack, and that’ll get you a beat-down from us.” She looked around at the others. “Ain’t that right, ladies?”
Murmurs of assent came from the others. Triana felt cold all over, and not because her back was against the cold stone wall.
She inched her way upwards. She stripped …
slowly, aware that now she was the focus of all eyes.
She had never been shy … quite the contrary, actually, when it came to being seen by appreciative eyes …
but these silent stares made her feel quite self-conscious.
Still cold, she washed, and when she came out of the room, a new set of tunic and trews got shoved at her by a woman at the door.
She dressed in a kind of fugue state, put on the flimsy little cloth slippers the others picked up on their way out of the dormitory, and followed them to a room with benches and tables.
There, they all lined up to accept a flimsy paper plate with one third of one of those bricks on it.
Each woman was somehow matched to a particular brick, because as soon as a third was sliced off, a brick was wrapped up and stowed in a box under the table.
So, it was true. They only ate what they themselves produced.
She wondered what would happen when her turn came. She still felt ill and tired, and not especially hungry. She had made the number of ration bricks requested of her the previous day, but it had not been her full quota … and she did not want to add to what she owed.
When her turn came, the man gave her a plate and slid a brick towards her marked for cutting and weighing. She made a gesture, trying to refuse.
He frowned at her. “Do as you please. Eat it or give it away. That’s up to you. You draw one third in the morning, one at mid, and one when you turn in your box. You get charged for one brick a day, regardless of what you do with it. If you don’t want it, someone will eat it right fast enough.
Nobody here gets enough to eat as it is.”
She took the plate with the cut portion of ration brick, and went to sit by herself on a bench.
Her stomach responded with mingled hunger and nausea.
She hesitated a moment longer, and the hunger won out.
She broke a corner off the brick and ate it.
Sweet, nutty, with a hint of bitterness underneath, some base note she couldn’t place.
Is that the … what was the word … algae …
they used? The first taste broke open her hunger, and though she still felt unwell, her body knew what it needed.
She demolished her ration, breaking it apart and eating it quickly, then dabbed her fingertip with her tongue to pick up the tiniest crumbs off of the plate.
She still felt hungry when it was done, though the restorative value of food pushed the weariness back a bit.
She followed one of the women to where a man ladled out some kind of hot brown water into wooden cups.
She initially mistook it for some kind of tea, but it had a rough and bitter flavor.
She made a face at the taste, strange and astringent, which drew a half smile from another one of the women, followed by a similar grimace.
“It really is vile,” the woman said, “but it keeps the hungries away while you work.”
Triana said nothing, but took another hot, unpleasant sip. The others, she saw, gulped theirs, so she tried to copy them, wincing at the bite as she swallowed.
“I saw you in there,” the other woman said, “your ribs. Were you injured?”
It took Triana a moment to understand the question.
The accent marked her as the city– a mid-born as Nora had described it.
For a moment, Triana felt embarrassed. She was careful not to show it.
“No,” she said. “My ribs were removed to lengthen my waist. I have to be careful, I don’t have the same protection for my insides that you do.”
The woman looked as though she expected Triana to be making a joke, some kind of Ha Ha … got you ….” Triana let the moment lengthen. “Where I was born, it’s what was expected of my station.”
The woman replied with a puzzled expression.
It took Triana a moment to realize she was working through Triana’s accent and her words, puzzling through them both.
The woman lifted her chin a bit, and her speech became a bit more clipped …
higher speaking to lower. Triana’s accent here marked her as little better than the gutter, far below the standing of a mid-born.
“Ah, yes, well, that explains it.” said the woman.
Triana recognized that now that the woman had placed her in the pecking order, the informal ranking used by ration makers.
Triana had experience with this type of sorting, but from the standpoint of doing the sorting.
Having it done to her left her feeling anxious and uncertain.
She wondered if it might be possible to retrieve this situation, and gave it up as a bad job.
First rule of holes she said to herself is that when you are in one, stop digging.
A distant bell chimed. Time to work.