In the predawn light, Shara waits for sleep, and remembers.
It was toward the middle part of their relationship, though neither she nor Vohannes knew it then. She had found him sitting beneath a tree, watching the rowing team practicing in the Khamarda River, next to the academy. The girls’ team had just set their shell in the water and was climbing in. When Shara joined him and sat in his lap, as she often did, she felt a soft lump pressing into her lower back.
“Should I be worried?” she asked.
“About what?” he said.
“What do you think?”
“I try not to think at all when outdoors, dear. It tends to ruin things so.”
“Should I be worried,” she said, “that your favor might one day wander to another girl?”
Vohannes laughed, surprised. “I didn’t know you were so jealous, my battle-ax!”
“No one is jealous until they have reason to be.” She reached around, grabbed the lump. “And that seems like a reason.”
He grunts, not displeased. “I hadn’t realized we were quite so formal.”
“Formal? This is an issue of formality?”
“It is to me. So, what is it to be, then? Are you saying you assume you are mine, and I yours, dear? Are you sure you wish to be my girl, forever and ever, and belong only to me?”
Shara was silent. She looked away.
“What?” said Vohannes.
“Nothing.”
“What?” he said again, frustrated. “What have I said now?”
“It’s nothing!”
“It’s obviously not nothing. The very air has just turned colder.”
“It should be nothing. It’s … it’s my thing. A … Saypuri thing.”
“Oh, just say it already, Shara. Let me learn it, at least.”
“I suppose it doesn’t mean anything to you, does it? Calling someone yours. Saying they belong to you. Me being your girl. But we don’t say things like that here. And you might not understand … but then, your people have never been owned. And it sounds very different coming out of your mouth, Vo.”
Vohannes took in a sharp breath. “Oh, gods, Shara, you know I didn’t mean to—”
“I know you didn’t. I know that to you, it was a perfectly innocent thing to say. But being owned, and making someone yours—they have different meanings here. We don’t say them. People still remember what it was like, before.”
“Well,” said Vohannes, suddenly bitter, “we don’t. We lost that. It was taken from us. By your damn great-grandfather, or whatever.”
“I hate it when you talk about tha—”
“Oh, I know you do. But at least your people have your memories, however unpleasant they are. You’re allowed to read about my history here. Hells, this school’s library has more information on us than we do! But if I tried to bring any of it home, I’d be fined or jailed or worse, by your people.”
Shara, abashed, did not answer. Both of them turned to the river. A cygnet stabbed its dark bill down among the reeds; its long white neck came thrashing up with the pumping, panicked legs of a tiny white frog trapped in its mouth.
“I hate this,” said Vohannes.
“What?”
“I hate feeling we are different.” A long pause. “And feeling, I suppose, that we do not really know each other.”
Shara watched as the rowing teams did sprints across the water, triceps and quadriceps rippling in the morning light. First the girls’ team passed, followed by the boys, dressed in considerably less clothing and showing quite a bit more muscle.
And was it her imagination, but did the lump in her back move just a little as the boys’ team emerged from the shadow of a willow and broke into sunlight?
He sighed. “What a day.”
We are not ourselves. We are not allowed to be ourselves. To be ourselves is a crime, to be ourselves is a sin. To be ourselves is theft.
We are work, only work. We are the wood we tear from our country’s trees, the ore we dig from our country’s bones, the corn and wheat and grain we grow in her fields.
Yet we shall never taste it. We shall not live in houses made of the wood we cut. We shall not hammer and forge our metals into tools for ourselves. These things are not meant for us.
We are not meant for ourselves.
We are meant for the people across the water. We are meant for the children of the gods. We are as metal and stone and wood for their purposes.
We do not protest because we have no voice to protest with. To have a voice is a crime.
We cannot think to protest. To think these things is a crime. These words—these words you hear—they are stolen from myself.
We are not chosen. We are not the children of the gods. We are the soulless, we are ash-children, we are as mud and dirt.
But if this is so, why did the gods make us at all? And if we were meant only to labor, why give us minds, why give us desires? Why can we not be as cattle in the field, or chickens in their coops?