Cordelia's Honor - Lois McMaster Bujold [203]
"They didn't fast-penta that child, did they?"
"Oh, yes."
"They dared!"
Kly's black-stained lips compressed in sympathy with her outrage. "If he can't get hold of Gregor, Vordarian's coup is likely doomed. And he knows it. There's not much he wouldn't dare to do, at this point." He paused. "You can be glad fast-penta has replaced torture, eh?"
Kly's nephew-in-law helped him saddle up the sorrel, and buckle on the mailbags. The mailman adjusted his hat, and climbed up.
"If I don't keep my schedule, it will be near-impossible for the Gen'ral to contact me," he explained. "Got to go, I'm late already. I'll be back. You and the boy stay inside, out of sight, as much as you can, m'lady." He turned his horse toward the bare-branched woods. The animal blended quickly into the red-brown native scrub.
Cordelia found Kly's last advice all too easy to follow. She spent most of the next four days in her cot-bed. The dull silence of hours went by in a fog, a relapse into the frightening fatigue she'd experienced after the placental transfer operation and its near-lethal complications. Conversation provided no diversion. The hill-folk were as laconic as Bothari. It was the threat of fast-penta, Cordelia thought. The less you knew, the less you could tell. The old woman Sonia's eyes probed Cordelia curiously, but she never asked anything beyond, "You hungry?" Cordelia didn't even know her last name.
Baths. After the first one, Cordelia did not ask again. The old couple worked all afternoon to haul and heat enough water for herself and Gregor. Their simple meals were nearly as much labor. No Pull Tab To Heat Contents up here. Technology, a woman's best friend. Unless the technology appeared in the form of a nerve disruptor in the hand of some dead-eyed soldier hunting you down carelessly as an animal.
Cordelia counted over the days since the coup, since all hell had broken loose. What was happening in the larger world? What response from the space forces, from planetary embassies, from conquered Komarr? Would Komarr seize the chaos to revolt, or had Vordarian taken them by surprise too? Aral, what are you doing out there?
Sonia, though she asked no questions, would now and then return from outings and drop bits of local news. Vordarian's troops, headquartered in Piotr's residence, were close to abandoning the search of the lake bottom. Hassadar was sealed, but refugees escaped in a trickle; someone's children, smuggled out, had arrived to stay with relatives nearby. At Vorkosigan Surleau most of Piotr's armsmen's families had escaped except Armsman Vogti's wife and very aged mother, who had been taken away in a groundcar, no one knew where.
"And, oh yes, very strange," Sonia added. "They took Karla Hysopi. That hardly makes sense. She was only the widow of a retired regular Service sergeant, what use do they expect to make of her?"
Cordelia froze. "Did they take the baby, too?"
"Baby? Donnia didn't say about a baby. Grandchild, was it?"
Bothari was sitting by the window sharpening his knife on Sonia's kitchen whetstone. His hand paused in mid-stroke. He looked up to meet Cordelia's alarmed eyes. Beyond a tightening of his jaw his face did not change expression, yet the sudden increase of tension in his body made Cordelia's stomach knot. He looked back down at what he was doing, and took a longer, firmer stroke that hissed along the whetstone like water on coals.
"Maybe . . . Kly will know something more, when he comes back," Cordelia quavered.
"Belike," said Sonia doubtfully.
* * *
At last, on schedule, on the evening of the seventh day, Kly rode into the clearing on his sorrel horse. A few minutes later Armsman Esterhazy rode in behind him. He was dressed in hillman's togs, and his mount was a lean and spindle-shanked hill horse, not one of Piotr's big glossy beasts. They put their horses away and came in to a dinner Sonia had apparently fixed this night of Kly's rounds