The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [210]
Room after room: there was nothing straight that could be made curved, nothing plain that could be given a pattern, nothing white that could be brilliant. The very air was embellished! Everywhere, there was scent: a hundred fragrances and odors he could not name or recognize.
It was, he thought crazily, the most spectacularly vulgar place he’d ever been in. It looked and smelled like a cheap whorehouse, except the jewels were real and each dram of perfume probably cost a village corporation’s yearly earnings.
He tried both Ruanja and K’San each time they encountered someone new, but no one would respond and he thought at first that all the servants were mutes. As the day wore on, he was given short orders in a form of K’San that was unfamiliar to him, as High German might be unfamiliar to someone who spoke Low. Go there. Sit here. Wait. He did his best to comply; he was cuffed when he got something wrong. It was he who became mute.
In the days that followed, he was held with an odd mixture of freedom and constraint. There were others kept, as he was, in subtle but effective cages. They were able to move from cage to cage but not inside the palace proper. A zoo, he thought, trying to make sense of all this. I am in some kind of private zoo.
The others were a bizarre but beautiful group of Runa and some Jana’ata, and there were a few individuals whose species he was unsure of. The Runa who shared his cushioned captivity came to his assistance when he needed help because of his hands. They were extraordinarily affectionate and friendly and tried to make him feel a part of whatever odd society existed within the ornate and costly walls of Galatna Palace. In their way, they were kind, but they seemed almost stupid, as though bred for looks alone, with coats of unusual color, brindled or pied, one striped like a zebra. Most had fine-boned and overbred faces, a few had manes, several even approached taillessness. None spoke the dialect of Ruanja he’d learned in Kashan.
The captive Jana’ata were kept in a separate enclosure and paid him no attention, even though he could not detect any difference in their status within the zoo. They were heavily robed, with headdresses that covered their faces, smaller than Supaari. Later he found out they were females, and still later he realized that they must be the kind of sterile partners Supaari had told him about. He called to them in K’San, asked them to explain to him what this place was, but they kept to themselves. He was never able to get them to speak to him in any language.
He had been fed irregularly but well in Supaari’s household, like the pet of a small child who’d wanted a puppy but then lost interest. Here the food was provided ad libitum because, he supposed, so many of the others were Runa, who required more constant meals. It was an improvement in theory, but he had no appetite. The Runa always seemed touchingly pleased when he accepted food from them. So he ate, to repay their kindness.
It came to him that he was now perfectly useless, probably kept as a curiosity, as unique and odd as the gaudy trinkets he’d seen stuffing the alcoves and jamming the shelves of Galatna that first day. And then he was fitted with a jeweled collar, and his humiliation seemed complete. He was, he thought, the exact counterpart of a capuchin monkey kept on a golden chain by some sixteenth-century European aristocrat.
Supaari, however cool and perplexing, had at least been an intellectual companion. Now he tried to steel himself for the predictable effects of utter loneliness, to be patient with the hollow unreality he felt. He did sums and sang songs in his head and tried to pray but stopped when he realized that he was mixing the languages up. He was no longer certain of the differences between Spanish and Ruanja, and that frightened him as much as anything that had happened to him so far. The worst moment came when he realized that he couldn’t remember the name of his neighborhood back in Puerto Rico. I am losing my mind, he thought, one word at a time.