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She moved through the narrow rusty hallways, feet clopping slowly and steadily against the pig-iron floor. Sibylla Rodoreamon, a fortnight worried and tired, harried by the incessant patrols and by Dominura’s movements in the background of whatever it was they were trying to do and by Aaeru’s inability to make her words sensible or kind, was looking for something to eat, even something that the kitchen might have in bulk. It was dark except for the maintenance lights and she felt bad; dinner should have been sufficient. There really wasn’t much reason for her to be hungry like this.
How strange. This shouldn’t have been the sort of thing she was able to do on the Messis. She hadn’t got, for one thing, her own room.
Strange. She came into the kitchen. One light was on, casting down a little lit penumbra that sprawled out across the floor towards her in a pointed oblong spread, grey against a darker grey with blue-black deepness up in the high small windows. Rodoreamon walked and stumbled across the floor.
‘Rodore. Well this is certainly unexpected.’
‘Mamiina, it’s late. What are you doing out here?’
‘They got a new bag of barley flour the last time we landed. We roasted it for the porridge that we had this evening. I know the porridge wasn’t very good but I was hoping that I could come and look at the recipes we have on board to see if there are any that are better.’ Mamiina held up a little tin box. It had in it what looked in the low light like small square cards. More cards were spread across the counter between the kitchen and the mess hall, where the light was hanging. ‘Unfortunately most of these call for corn meal but corn meal is being rationed these days and apparently if you go and say that it’s for sibyllae it’s still…’ She shook her head. ‘Never mind.’
‘Why are you doing that at two o’ clock in the morning, Mamiina?’
‘And why is Her Little Ladyship awake at two o’ clock in the morning?’
‘Well…’ Rodoreamon, honestly, could not remember why exactly she was awake or since when it had been, when she’d awoken. She had slept. Her recollection of that was clear. ‘I was hungry,’ she said.
‘Well I’m afraid we’re out of luck unless you want the same stuff we had for dinner.’
The porridge that they had had for dinner had not been very good. It had been a while and most of the Messis’s ingredients were starting to go bad. What meat was left they had to conserve and Rodoreamon would imagine it had become very tempting to try to rely on this barley flour. She had eaten the porridge mainly to protect Mamiina’s feelings.
‘The porridge was good, Mamiina!’
‘No it wasn’t. That’s crap. Stop lying.’
Rodoreamon shrunk away. She had never been good at lying, had always worn her true meanings clearly on her sleeve. She knew it. Mamiina knew it.
‘Is this the sort of thing you have to do at home, Mamiina?’
‘What, cooking? Yes. Not having any ingredients except low-grade barley flour and some unidentifiable pickled vegetables? No. No, this is all new to me.’
‘I…how is…?’
‘Why do you want to know this?’
Mamiina standing halfway in the shadows in her nightgown with her hair pulled up into a loose ponytail rather than in her daytime braided bun looked vaguely alluring in the night. Rodoreamon eyes forward. She came forward. Mamiina smiled.
‘What is…’ Rodoreamon said.
‘You want to have this talk?’ asked Mamiina. ‘I’ll tell you.’ She laughed. ‘I’m sorry. Can we go out into the mess hall?’
‘All right.’
They moved out into the mess hall and sat down at one of the tables in the darkness. Mamiina folded her hands over each other on the table and looked up haughtily; Rodoreamon was conscious of her own hands, held together on her lap.
‘In some ways,’ said Mamiina, ‘I thought it would be better if after my father had died my mother and I had kept serving your family rather than returning to our village.’
‘Really?’ Rodoreamon smiled.
‘It’s not only because of you, Rodore.’
‘Then—’ Only. Well that was nice of her!
‘You know, if you are farming,’ said Mamiina, ‘you get up early in the morning and work all day, but by the end of the day you have nothing else to do and you can relax. Just sleep, or just relax. Even if you are a Simile cadet or a servant to some high lord you can do that. What if you’re one of the oh-so-great captains and movers of society though, one of the so-called noble leaders or something?’
Rodoreamon thought of her own father. He was a kindly man, relying mainly on the kindness of the men around him to run their estates and tell him how to vote in the Council when he went. He would get up every morning at around ten and take some quinine from the plantation in the southern uplands and spend the rest of the day listening to music and reading papers and having others write them. And he would do it long into the night and frequently complain about being tired. Looking across at Mamiina who slept when she was tired and was done with her work when it was finished there was something…
‘But you know,’ said Rodoreamon, ‘when you were with us, you were working for us…or your parents were, so how was that better?’
‘Because if you’re paying us and we’re earning our living from you it makes sense that you would get the lion’s share of the respect,’ snapped Mamiina. ‘I don’t like it and I don’t agree with it but it makes sense. What about when we lose that, though, what about when we live exactly as we will according only to ourselves and it’s still the same? What makes what my uncle does any less important? Nobody else is having him do it and he’s not doing it on anybody else’s behalf.’
Rodoreamon thought for a minute and then said ‘The only thing that I can think of, Mamiina, is that…maybe, what we do and how much what we do is worth isn’t based on who we’re doing it for.’
‘No. Of course not. Who am I even fighting for?’
‘We’re offering prayers to Tempus Spatium. That’s all.’
‘That’s all that you’re doing, and I’m amazed that you can see it that way. I am only here because of this whole sorry situation and because I called dibs on some shady left-wing politician before anybody could stand up and say ‘Of what account is this crazy person, or worse, this lower-class Sibylla Mamiina doing all this and how can we get her to…?’ But never mind. That’s practically ancient history, now.’
‘I would have said that you should fly,’ Rodoreamon said.
‘Yes.’ Mamiina smiled. ‘I know you would have. Thank you. But I don’t like the war. Let me be a sibylla, for the honour of my family? Congratulations, treat all the sibyllae like crap. I lost my hope that this was—I mean, what is there to fight for? I barely even feel Tempus Spatium touching my life and that’s still far more than anything else. So maybe it would be better.’
‘I think it would,’ said Rodoreamon. ‘Mamiina, you know, when I was little, my parents would read to me from this book called Revelations of Sixteen Other Worlds. It was a religious book for children.’
‘I’ve heard the title.’
‘It tells us that we don’t really know the will of Tempus Spatium. We assume it and we say that what we put together for ourselves in society is that.’
‘I think it sounds like a way of your parents telling you to listen to them.’
‘No, it’s more than that! It’s not just a religious ‘because I said so’! Mamiina, we don’t have to think that the way things are is the way that God wants them to be just because they are that way! We don’t have to keep our eyes shut if we don’t like the world around us.’
‘They’re not letting us do much else.’
‘No, and they might not.’ Rodoreamon stood up. ‘This is just one world, though.’ Mamiina brought her lips together in a pained smiled and followed Rodoreamon out into the partial light. ‘Do you want to cook something?’ Rodoreamon was asking.
‘What, right now?’
‘Maybe, if you want to…I mean…I want to…!’
‘Why do you want to cook now of all times?’
Rodoreamon, in truth, wanted very much to do much more than this together, to fly higher someday if they could, if ever they again found themselves in the same Simoun. With all that Dominura had been doing lately that might come to be the case. It somehow felt wrong to just ask, or force the issue. It felt wrong to really consider it a usual issue at all. But for now the Simouns were up in their hangar and they had access to some roasted barley flour, pickled vegetables, a little meat of dubious provenance, and the whole range of kitchen implements.
‘All right,’ Mamiina said.
Rodoreamon went into the kitchen and turned on one more light, then looked around until she found a large blue-grey sack of treated fabric. Pulling it open at one end she found an enormous quantity of dreary-smelling tan powder. ‘This cost us how much?’ she asked.
‘It wasn’t expensive,’ said Mamiina. ‘Corn meal would have been but this stuff is ten a penny around here. I can’t vouch for this but in the stories I’ve heard about this region it’s said they send their maidens to the Spring with little sacks of barleycorn hanging from their necks as a charm. Or at least they did until all this whole mess started.’
‘Where are the, uh…things…?’
‘Measuring cups? My, my, Rodore.’ Mamiina shook her head and started rummaging around in one of the cupboards that, with Rodoreamon crouching, loomed far above her head. ‘Measuring cups should be…let’s see now…here!’ She took down two tin measuring cups with indented fill lines and a ring of old metal measuring spoons. ‘What would you like to do with the flour?’
‘Well I don’t know. What recipes are there?’
‘Nothing good. Rodore, I think maybe we should do this some other time.’
‘If we do it some other time then we might not ever do it. When did you start caring about what the others will think of us, Mamiina?’
‘No, it’s that I don’t want to introduce Little Ladyship to cooking for the first time with poorly-prepared ingredients for low-income earners.’
‘I thought you said this was a traditional food around here.’
‘That doesn’t mean that you and I will like it. Know what Yun says she read one of the traditional staple foods in the People’s Republic of Aurum is?’
‘No. What?’ Rodoreamon when she was little had liked looking at the globe in her father’s study but she did not remember which continent Aurum was even on, just that it was not this one. The people in other continents used sortation and treated or trafficked water for their springs and kept other gods for the most part, some of them many at once. Scoffing at foreigners was something that Rodoreamon’s grandfather had been very good at. She had mostly happy memories of him but he had smiled at her more than he had hugged her.
‘Boiled squid.’
‘Broiled?’
‘Boiled.’
‘How would that be a staple?’
‘I don’t know. Here—apparently we can do something with this with tea.’ Mamiina handed her a card. ‘Do you ever wish that we had been born in another country, Rodore?’
‘I’m not sure there are any other countries I would rather have been born in.’
‘Not any particular other country; just some other country in general.’ Mamiina shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s just me.’
‘I like having the Spring, and Tempus Spatium, and the Simoun!’
‘So do I. I mean I wish our country could be—well, different, obviously. That would be why I fell in with Sibylla Aurea’s father. We’re at war; it’s a question of after the war, if we make it out of it, what we want to do with this country?’
Rodoreamon turned to say something and spilled about three cups (she would guess; she was probably wrong by some) of the roasted barley flour over her hands and nightgown and face.
‘It’s much better to just let the world be what it is, and have our own lives,’ Rodoreamon said, laughing.
Mamiina crouched down with her and they laughed there on the floor. Mamiina was laughing at her, just a little, but it did not strike Rodoreamon as mean-spirited. Neither did the pathways of the wind when she woke up and she was old again.
‘Mamiina, I dreamed that we had one of our talks,’ she who was old and grey said into her pillow. The sun was shining and it was time to work. She was doing what her father and her grandfather had done before her. She would try hard not to scoff at any foreigners to-day, and when the sun was setting, may her work be done.