The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [209]
"How long were you with him?" Giuliani asked.
"I’m not really sure. Six to eight months, perhaps? I learned K’San during that time. Appalling language. The hardest I’ve ever learned. Part of the joke, I suppose," he said, inexplicably. He stood up and began to walk around the room, jumpy and distractible.
"Did you hear anything of the violence that Wu and Isley reported?" Giuliani asked, watching him move from place to place.
"No. I was quite isolated, I assure you. I imagine, however, that with characteristic creativity, the Runa were beginning to expand on Sofia’s suggestion that they were many and the Jana’ata were few."
"Wu and Isley asked after you as soon as Askama brought them to Supaari’s compound," Giuliani said, pausing when he saw Sandoz flinch. "Supaari told them that he had made other arrangements for you. What was the phrase he used? Ah. Here: ’more suited to his nature.’ Can you tell us why you were removed from the household?"
There was an ugly laugh. "Do you know what I said to Anne Edwards once? God is in the why." He would not look at anyone now. He stood with his back to them and stared out the window, holding the gauzy curtain aside, careful with the hardware of his brace, so as not to snag the fabric. Finally, they heard him say, "No. I don’t know what he meant by that, except that somehow he believed he was justified in what he did."
"In what he did," Giuliani repeated quietly. "You did nothing to cause your removal?"
"Oh, Christ!" Sandoz spun to face him. "Even now? After all this?"
He walked to his place at the table and sat down, shaking with anger. When he spoke again, his voice was very soft, but he was obviously fighting rage, braced hands rigid in his lap, eyes on the table. "My position in the household of Supaari VaGayjur was that of a crippled dependent. Supaari was not a flighty person, but I believe he must have tired of me. Or perhaps he simply felt that I had fulfilled my role as a language tutor when he became competent in English and that it was time for me to take up another position, so to speak." He looked directly at Giuliani then. "My residential and occupational preferences were not inquired into at any time. How explicit am I required to be?"
HE WAS ASLEEP when they came for him, just past dawn. Caught in the web of a dream, he was at first unsure if the hands were real or imagined, and by the time he knew, their grip was unbreakable. Later on, when he asked himself if there might have been some way to escape, he knew the question was folly. Where could he have gone? What shelter would he have found? Equally pointless: the struggle, the demands for an explanation. The first blow drove the air from his lungs, the second knocked him nearly senseless. Efficient, they wasted no additional time in beating him. Half-dragged, half-carried, he tried to memorize the streets and had an impression that the route was fairly consistently uphill. By the time they arrived at Galatna Palace, his head was clear and he was able to breathe without pain.
Arms pinioned, he was escorted past the fountains he’d seen from Supaari’s compound and taken through a side entrance to the palace, down hallways bright with colored tiles and floored with marble and jasper, past internal courtyards, under vaulted, ribbed ceilings. The simplest aspects of the interior were gilded, walls overlaid by silver-wire trellis, each diagonal defined and sparkling with a jewel: emerald and ruby and amethyst and diamond. He saw, in passing, a formal room of ecclesiastical proportions fitted out with a wide indoor canopy in a yellow silken fabric figured and embroidered in turquoise and carmine and spring green, tasseled and fringed with gold thread, its richness echoed by the piles of cushions, ivory and red and blue, their plush fabric creased and divided