Pathways - Jeri Taylor [191]
She had lost the ability to cry. At first she wept constantly, until Jabin’s vicious slaps conditioned her not to, and eventually, even when she was alone, she couldn’t summon tears as a release for her misery. It was as though she were inert, not dead but not living either, a husk that moved through the parching days by rote, trying not to do anything that might ignite Jabin’s temper.
Only one triumph was hers, and she clung to it desperately, determined not to relinquish it for it had cost her a great deal of pain and she refused to have suffered like that for nothing.
She had not revealed the place of her emergence from underground.
Jabin had taken her to the place where his men had discovered her, and she poked in a desultory fashion around the rocks, but insisted to the Maje that everything all looked alike to her and she didn’t know where the entrance to the tunnel was. She was thankful she had thought to conceal it when she first stepped out into the desert.
Jabin beat her then, assuming she was lying, but even then she insisted she didn’t know where it was. Jabin’s men didn’t find it either, for all the searching and kicking and jabbing with sticks they did. It occurred to Kes at one point that perhaps it didn’t exist, that the dimly remembered past was a fantasy and that she had lived in this hard servitude forever.
Finally, Jabin gave up the search, but denied her food and water for the rest of the day.
She was constantly thirsty. Water was doled out by the tiniest of cupfuls, and she was the last to drink; often there were only drops left for her. She tried to remember the gushing waterfalls that ringed her city, as though the thought might quench her thirst, but they, too, seemed impossibly unreal.
But the worst of times came when Jabin indulged in a drink called gannit, a strong, foul-smelling liquor that he fortunately didn’t imbibe often, as it dried the mouth and produced a thirst which couldn’t be quenched with limited water supplies. He’d have been better off to leave it alone entirely, but he couldn’t seem to do that.
The first time she saw him drink gannit was a week after she arrived in the Ogla camp. She was lying, exhausted, on her pallet when she heard him bellowing her name. She jumped up and ran into the room that served as his “office.”
“Yes, Maje?” she offered as she entered the room. He was standing up, but he seemed uncertain on his feet. His eyes were red-rimmed and when he spoke, he words weren’t uttered crisply.
“Little Ocampa,” he began, and then seemed to lose track of what he wanted to say next. He sat down heavily on a long, low bench that stood against one wall of the cluttered room. He raised one hand and gestured vaguely with it, and she surmised that he was telling her to sit opposite him. She did.
“Didn’t . . . feel like being . . . alone. Tonight.” His words were halting and slurred. She was astonished; she had never seen him—never seen anyone—behave like this. Was he ill?
“A woman . . . understands. You understand. Don’t you?” He sounded like a confused child, and had she not hated him so much she might have felt sorry for him.
“I hope so, Maje,” she said neutrally. She hoped only to escape this encounter without his hitting her, and carefully edited her words and her demeanor not to set off his volatile temper.
But Jabin was in another mood entirely, morose and self-pitying. “Should have . . . been the most powerful of Majes . . . why am I here, on this cursed planet with no water . . . no family . . . I had a family once . . . did you know that?”
“No, Maje.”
“A woman . . . two sons . . . killed by the Nistrim. Butchered. I still dream of them.”
“I’m sorry.”
He grunted at this and rose, proceeded unsteadily to a table that was piled with various artifacts, and picked up a dark glass bottle. He drank from it briefly, then stoppered it and put it down again. He looked at her with a rueful smile. “I’ll pay for this tomorrow. My mouth . . . will be drier than the sands . . . but sometimes . . .” He trailed off and went back to the bench, where