Spirit

by Gwyneth Jones

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

As the sole survivor of a massacre, Bibi was only saved from a life as a concubine when Lady Nef, the General's wife, intervened, earning Bibi's undying loyalty. When a diplomatic mission turns sour, Bibi is imprisoned with her saviour, and through her learns of the greatest treasure imaginable: an uninhabited, unspoiled, perfect planet. When Lady Nef dies and bequeaths Bibi her rank and power, Bibi steals Spirit, an instantaneous-transit space pod, and runs with nothing other than a set of coordinates. Twenty years after Lady Nef's capture, the Princess of Bois Dormant debuts in capital Speranza and dazzles high society. No-one could imagine this diamond of the Diaspora had an ulterior motive, forged in the darkness of a prison cell. But revenge isn't simple when more than one person pulled a trigger. Bibi must decide what's more important - personal vendettas, or uncovering a conspiracy that reaches far beyond just her. A twisty tale of murder, betrayal, and revenge served ice cold, the sequel to Gwyneth Jones' critically acclaimed Aleutians Trilogy, set in the same universe, is an epic story of intergalatic high society and the complex webs it weaves. You can find more information about Spirit at http://www.gwynethjones.uk/SPIRIT.htm

Release date: April 13, 2021

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 400

Sample

The rebels had used the White Rock caves as a refuge from time immemorial, the core families sometimes retreating there for decades to sit out a prolonged police action. They believed they were invincible in their mountain fastness. They were not: it was just that digging them out had never been worth the trouble, the loss of life; the inevitable human rights violations. Then one day, in the tumultuous years of the Young Emperor, General Yu arrived. He offered surrender terms. The rebels, who had lost all sight of the bigger picture, proudly refused: so the General moved in and destroyed them, by the book. His soldiers used no bombing raids and only commensurate weaponry. They relied on discipline, superior intelligence, and an overwhelming force of numbers. Resistance burned fiercely as a straw fire, but in a few weeks it was all over. The caves were penetrated, and almost every man, woman and child was either killed in action or put to death.

The little girl, Gwibiwr, was believed to have been the daughter of one of the chieftains. She’d survived because she’d been found hiding in a tunnel, still alive, after the ceasefire order. General Yu’s soldiers had had no qualms about the massacre. Far from home, faced with the bewildering, confident ferocity of these savages, they’d become convinced that the rebels had a terrible secret weapon, and deserved no mercy. But they’d been shocked at themselves afterwards, and incapable of killing a child in cold blood. Perhaps their superiors felt the same—and so a life was spared.

Lady Nef’s servants had reproduced, as best they could, in the south west quadrant of the camp, the same order and calm that the Lady expected at home. The bare-earth alleys and squares were swept and raked. The household troops, housed separately from the domestic staff now that the action was over, had a spruce parade ground for their daily drill; the admin tents were hives of brisk activity. Corralled satellite dishes shone, their great silver faces turned up to the sky; the sleek, mettlesome armoured cars were groomed and exercised every morning.

The servants’ own quarters were set on three sides of a military-issue potager, a flourishing vegetable garden which had been brought to the mountains dehydrated and flatpacked, and would leave the same way. The fourth side was a passage-tent, flanked by fish tanks and poultry houses, leading to Lady Nef’s own domain. The little girl, Gwibiwr, was brought to this small world: where she was given a place to sleep, a quilt and a head-rest; two uniforms, underclothes, and shoes. She cried when they took her battered and bloodstained native clothes away from her, but otherwise showed no marked signs of distress.

The servants had been told to give her a chance to settle in, and then find her some light duties. In effect this meant that she was left completely alone. After a few days the team-leader of the junior domestics, Ogul Merdov, realised that the little girl was neither eating nor sleeping. At this point Gwibiwr was offered trauma removal, which she refused.

No one knew what to do. None of the servants spoke the child’s language, and though she seemed to understand English she didn’t speak. They offered her the veil, because the rebels had been Traditionalists (ironically, this was also the General’s own party). She showed no interest. Soon she’d stopped responding to anything. She lay curled on her mat, dark eyes wide open and seeming to grow larger by the hour, eating away at her small, pale face. During the day she whimpered a little. At night she’d cry out, loudly and painfully, at random intervals: as if somebody was hitting her. It got everyone down. On the seventh day Rohan Aswad, a sergeant from Orange Company, one of the soldiers who’d brought Bibi out of the caves, remembered the orphan and came to see what had happened to her. He was horrified to find the child sunk in a coma, and more than half dead.

‘You must send for Lady Nef,’ he told Ogul.

Ogul was amazed. ‘For the lady? For this native? But why?’

‘Because she’s the only person who can call a lost soul back.’

The caves were squalid, warm and crowded. There were too many children, their noise got on top of Bibi and stopped her from thinking. Whenever she could she escaped up the choke-tunnel, a ventilation shaft that a child could use as a secret passage. She was in the mouth of the shaft, clinging like a bat, looking out on a vista of crag and scree and rock. The morning sun bathed her bare face, and flashed on the silvery granite that gave the refuge its name. To her left and below she had a perfect view of the Ledge, and the teenage boy on look-out, hugging his rifle. He didn’t know she was there, which gave Bibi great satisfaction. The older boys thought they were so wonderful, just because they had guns—

She had no sense of danger, although she knew there was trouble going on. The men would deal with it. She saw a handful of dots, high in the sky, coming up the Rift, and thought it was the swifts. It was a moment she waited for, every year: always afraid that her shrilling, dashing, daredevil friends wouldn’t return to brighten this prison. ‘Oh, grandpapa,’ she whispered, joy bursting through every vein. Her grandfather, who had only one arm and was nearly blind, loved the swifts too. ‘The swifts! They’re back!’

She saw the boy below scramble to his feet. His jaw fell slack, as if he was struggling to believe something forbidden by nature.

Bibi remembered nothing between. It was as if she scrabbled and fell down the choke-tunnel straight into the last hour: when the men were back, although not Bibi’s father, and the fighting was in the caves. She lay curled up, a burning tremor that never reached her outer flesh running through her, thrown again and again from that moment of light to the sight of her mother, niqab askew, lying in a trail of blood; to the deafening gunfire and her little brother’s screams. She could not move, time didn’t pass. She was terrified that she was losing her mind, but unable to save herself.

Someone brought a light. Faces swam dim between her and the dreadful images, something wrong with one of them. Maybe it was a dead person, come to fetch her to hell. She heard voices, distantly.

‘We can’t rescue her from the mental injury that will ruin her young life, if not drive her insane,’ said one of them. ‘We can tear her screaming from her dead mother, we can force her to watch as her grandfather, her brothers, sisters, die in welter of blood, but we can’t violate her rights—’

‘Is that what happened?’

‘Of course. I imagine she is watching the replay now.’

‘War is ugly: he does his best,’ murmured the second speaker, a voice Bibi felt that she recognised. ‘Clear the room. Francois, you too.’

Alone with the General’s wife, Bibi struggled respectfully to sit up, frightened at how weak and dazed she felt. She was dying, and what if she died, and still it didn’t stop—?

‘You have refused to have trauma treatment, now why is that?’

‘If I take that medicine I’ll go to hell.’

‘You don’t care about that,’ said Lady Nef. ‘Tell the truth.’

Bibi looked into the lady’s eyes, impressed. The truth was that she was frightened to go to hell, but she’d often been told she’d end up there. Love and grief, loyalty and honour were much stronger bonds.

‘I can’t,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t leave them. They would be all alone.’

‘I see.’ Lady Nef was silent for a moment. ‘You love your family?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you want them to live in your mind the way they are now? To hold them imprisoned in horror? You know that things of the mind are real.’

This was technically heresy, but Bibi’s people believed it.

‘No! I don’t want them to suffer.’

‘Well then. Will you let us drain the poison of those memories?’

The child shook her head. The dark eyes that were eating her face grew even larger. Perhaps she was hoping for the decision to be taken out of her hands, but she would not consent. Lady Nef saw the creature struggling to be born, rising from the fragile, obdurate matrix of suffering, and was moved by a fugitive sense of kinship.

‘Then you will have to take the hard way out of the place you are in,’ she said. ‘You must forbid the hateful images to possess you. You’ll have to take control of your own mind, Bibi. We all have the ability to do that, without any outside aid, but few have the need or the courage to achieve the task. One must have a compelling reason.’ The General’s wife took the little girl’s hands. ‘Believe me, this is the greatest secret I know. Rule your own mind, and you may rule the world. Far more important, you will be happy, no matter what comes. And happiness is all that matters, in the end.’

Lady Nef’s words were simple, but they went straight to Bibi’s heart. The grip of the lady’s hands seemed to be drawing her out of a black, fanged pit that had almost swallowed her. In her light-headed state she thought something genuinely supernatural was happening: a belief that would never quite leave her. Later, when she heard that Lady Nef was destined to be one of the Emperor’s immortals, she was not surprised.

The General’s wife had someone bring a cup of warm milk, which Bibi drank; then she fell asleep. The next morning she asked for the clothes that had been taken from her. Unfortunately they’d been destroyed: but the girl was not dismayed by this news. She was seen searching around the vegetable garden (she was not allowed to leave the servants’ square), making a small collection of pebbles. Gwibiwr named these fragments of her native land after the family members she had lost, dug a little grave and buried them lovingly.

She had taken Lady Nef’s advice to heart. She would rule herself.

When the time came for them all to return to the Great House in Kirgiziya, her fellow-servants feared for Bibi. How would the little savage cope with that journey; or the final loss of her homeland? But the girl showed no regrets, and accepted the sub-orbital journey as if she’d always travelled that way. She was installed in the girls’ dorm, Juniper Square.

One afternoon Col Ben Phu and Drez Doyle, two private soldiers from Orange Company, who’d befriended her in Cymru along with Sergeant Aswad, arrived. Bibi was glad to see them. The servants who’d been together on campaign had been dispersed. The only familiar face in Juniper was Ogul Merdov, proud possessor of a family name (although she had no actual family living): and she had no time for the ‘savage’. Col and Drez took Bibi off with them—ignoring the protests of Serenity, the Han woman who was warden of the girls’ dorm: through squares and gardens, over bridges, past many handsome buildings, to a guardhouse in the perimeter wall. Sergeant Aswad looked the other way, while they smuggled her up to the walkway.

The ancient di underfoot glowed indigo and stirred with movement, as if the stone were made of millions of little living snakes. A glittering disturbance in the air (which Bibi had thought was a natural feature of the sky in Kirgiziya) came down meet the battlements. She realised for the first time that the Great House was enclosed: she was living inside a huge transparent tent, a big fantastical soap bubble. Col lifted the little girl by the armpits and sat her on the parapet. She wiped a hand across the shimmer, like someone clearing condensation from a windowpane. ‘That’s a boundary,’ she said. ‘That stuff. It’s made of microbes or something, and it’s tech the Aleutians gave us, it’s around every city too. It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s going to keep you indoors, forever. Now look. See what’s outside your world.’

Bibi saw the golden-green plain, the silver streams, the birchwoods, the distant ragged line of rust-red mountains. Col kept a tight hold, her muscular arm a band of warm steel across Bibi’s chest, and pointed around.

‘That’s our market town, where we spend our pay. It’s grey area, you’ll never go there. The white flame is the Plasma Plant, you can see it in daylight because it’s hot as a star. Far away over that way, where you can’t see it, is Baykonur in Khazakh. That’s where you came in. It’s where the suborbitals take off, and you can get the space shuttle to the Elevator.’

‘Keep hold of her,’ warned Drez. ‘She might be desperate.’

Bibi nodded, wondering if there would be swifts here.

The brief window closed itself. Drez took her from Col, and set her on the pavement again. The soldiers glanced to and fro. They were not afraid of the ever-present surveillance. The Great House AI was fair and forbearing: it wouldn’t turn you in for nothing much. But the sentries could be officious.

‘Now listen,’ said Col. ‘Orange Company’s been assigned to the Lady’s service. The old man wants to keep us lot close to his chest, on account of services rendered: that’s a good thing for you, because we’re your friends.’

‘You’ll never get out,’ said Drez, earnestly, ‘That’s what you got to understand, Bibi. Say you got out, where are you going to go? The town belongs to the Great House. You’d just be brought back, and you’d be in dead trouble.’

‘Don’t ever, ever try it,’ growled Col. ‘Promise us. No matter how bad things get. We’ll be looking out for you, Drez, me, an’ the Sarge. If someone’s picking on you, you come to us. We’ll sort them out.’

‘Don’t fight it, kid,’ insisted Drez. ‘You were born free, but you’re going to live inside, you’ll never be free again. Believe that.’

Col was a muscular, sturdy, sallow-skinned woman with a cropped skull and a lot of tattoos. Drez Doyle had grey eyes, very bright in his dark face; with darker freckles just visible across his cheeks and nose, and a top-knot of reddish-black ringlets, which only appeared on feast-days: on duty he kept them stuck down under a little round skullcap. They always looked cheerful and confident: Col especially had a swagger that pleased Bibi. ‘The Sarge’ was a different character, he had a long chin, solemn eyes, and hooked nose: he could have been one of Bibi’s uncles.

Bibi’s heart still held, sealed off and almost harmless, the poison memories. She’d first seen these three faces distorted in battle: Drez and Col and Sergeant Aswad had been among the soldiers who killed her mother, her sisters, her little brother, her grandfather. It was Col Ben Phu who had tracked her down, and dragged her from the choke tunnel. Yet they were now her best friends, and truly wished her well. She accepted the paradox with a child’s resignation.

‘It’s all right. I promise I won’t try to escape.’

‘That’s a good girl.’

The soldiers hugged her, their arms hard and greasy, their warm skin smelling of sweat and anise, and took her back to the guardroom; where Sergeant Aswad gravely offered her a sweet, and told her that she didn’t have to be a servant. When she was old enough, she should apply to be a soldier.

It was close to two years before Bibi saw Lady Nef again, in person. It was the fifth month, Yang Calendar; or Maytime, as Bibi the child would have known it. The House was preparing for Lady Nef’s summer exodus to the mountains, and for the Summer Lists, the prelude to that great adventure. Even Juniper Square had been rife with speculation and competition. On the day of the Lists all juniors who were not eligible were released, after schoolroom and drill, for a half-holiday. Bibi went with her friends to the water garden on East Avenue, where they’d have a good chance of seeing the Family go by. They’d just been issued with their summer uniforms, which made a delicious change, because the weather was already very warm.

The youngest children ran around chasing the doves, between huge glazed pots of pomegranate and peach in bloom. Bibi was with some older girls from Juniper, clustered along the rim of one of the water basins. Team-leader Ogul had taken off her slippers and was bathing her bare feet. Bibi’s friends, Honesty and Nightingale, the Han Chinese who slept on either side of her, had brought their work with them. The Han were never idle. Honesty had her embroidery: Nightingale, a promising student, had extra coding homework on a tablet. Bibi lay on her stomach and stared into the water, where the stems of the pink lotus flowers took on unlikely angles.

‘You’ll never be eligible Bibi,’ said Honesty. ‘Someone with your background couldn’t get the security clearance. That’s very sad.’

Bibi didn’t think so. She’d liked seeing the mountains, when Col and Drez had smuggled her up to the top of the Wall. She had a sense, deeper than memory, that all proper horizons should have that ragged trim, like a brush stroke seeping upward into the pale fibre of the sky. But she never wanted to be among them again.

‘I don’t mind.’ She leaned down, perilously, to feel the cool breath of the water on her face. ‘I like the heat. It makes coolness sweeter.’

‘What are you doing? You’re going to fall in, you baby.’

‘No I’m not… I’m looking for tadpoles.’

Honesty bit her thread, and selected another shade of peach for the fruit she was stitching. ‘Maybe she wants to eat them. She’s such a savage.’

‘Town people eat dragonflies,’ said Nightingale. ‘Cook’s assistant Chu told me. You can buy strings of them, fried. So why not tadpoles?’

Nobody answered her, because the Family had been spotted. The children abandoned their games of chase mid-flight, the teenagers stood to attention. Lady Nef, familiar to them as a distant figure in uniform on the Assembly Hall screens, was far more beautiful and awe-inspiring in the flesh. In a green and white gown over green trousers, she strolled down the central walk, talking to her secretary, Francois the Aleutian (never far from her side): surrounded by her son, her daughters, her two sons-in-law, her two brothers-in-law, and General Yu’s middle-aged sisters, the formidable Ladies Yu. Young hands swept up in salute, in a complex wave that rippled through the flowery grove. A steward, hurrying ahead of the Family, darted about correcting the over-enthusiastic, who’d fallen to their knees and started banging heads on the ground.

‘Up! Up! No bottoms in the air! Behave naturally!’

Bibi was not one of those offenders—but she was transfixed. She suddenly remembered the stark military tent, the horror from which she’d been rescued. The pit opened again in all its fanged despair, and the sunlight and flowers, the affection of her friends, seemed like ropes of liquid gold flowing from the Lady’s hands, drawing her up into safety. In that moment, she fully realised, for the first time, what she owed to her mistress. Reverence and gratitude pierced her through—

I live only to serve you, she vowed, in her passionate heart.

The steward smacked her on the back of the head. ‘SALUTE, stupid girl! “Behave naturally” does not mean showing the Family no respect!’

At the next New Year Honours Bibi was promoted to Grade Seven with a Commendation, and told she could prepare for her career assessment. She was still a minor apprentice in the myriad tasks of the Household: but it was an important step up. The service squares of the Great House were full of people who would reach Grade Seven just before they retired; or who would never have a chance of attaining that first rung on the ladder of success.

Inevitably, Honesty told her she had probably reached her plateau.

After Evening Dance she was given the honour of taking Juniper Square’s treasures, the silver-chased Salt-Horn and the brass Pepper Mill, to the scullery to be replenished. She took her time on the return, not from laziness but from a sense of ceremony. It was February, by her old calendar. Above the Perimeter Walkway, where the soldiers had once taken her, the boundary of the House’s microclimate met freezing air in a cascade of heat-exchange diamonds. On the corridors of Juniper landscape screens showed the gold-green plain lost in snow, the Plasma Plant flaring blue in frosty night; a cluster of tiny red stars that marked the grey-area town. There’s the world I will never see, thought Bibi, as she passed. I shall live and die within these walls, and why not?

The Dining Hall was empty and already chill, Autonomous Systems had shifted the warmth elsewhere. She carried the Salt and Pepper to the lacquer stand under the Imperial Shrine, set down the Peacock Tray, and reverently replaced the Salt—a wild cattle horn in a silver cradle, hundreds of years’ old—on its proper shelf. The Pepper Mill had been made in Istanbul, before the Aleutian Invasion; it had a band of acanthus leaves, chased around its fat belly. Bibi never thought about her childhood, but at moments like this perhaps she felt a link with the White Rock, a world left behind by time. The Great House was old, too. It had stood, here in Kirgiziya, almost as long as Bibi’s people had been rebels. She set the treasures down, each exactly on its accustomed spot, stood back and bowed three times to the cartouche that held a portrait of the First Emperor: forever young, forever beautiful. Below Li Xifeng, in diptych, were portraits of the shadowy Second Emperor, who had never attained immortality; and of the Third Emperor, whose present status was unclear. Maybe he’d retired, maybe he’d abdicated.

The World State had been a Republic since the Aleutians left, but veneration of the Emperors was not a crime: it was encouraged. They represented the proud past. Followers of the ‘Young Emperor’, the leader Lady Nef and General Yu served, were on more delicate ground. The Young Emperor’s campaigns were making the tattered unity of the World State a fact, rather than a pious fiction—but if the Republican Government accepted him as Head of State (as it seemed they might), what would that mean? What about the Third Emperor? Where did he fit in, if the Empire was restored? This was a question that worried Bibi sometimes, when she heard the older servants gossiping. She didn’t want to think that Lady Nef was disloyal, and, besides, she knew what happens to rebels—

Below the portraits was a row of eight much smaller tablets, inscribed in scarlet. One day, one of those names might be Lady Nef’s, and then she’d live forever. Some people in the Great House ‘didn’t believe in’ Imperial Immortality, a scepticism Bibi found puzzling. She’d been told, when she arrived here, that Lady Nef was a Senior. The lady she’d taken to be about thirty-five years’ old, in Cymru, was actually closer to a hundred and thirty—she had been a young woman when the Aleutians left. If that sort of thing was possible, (and nobody seemed to doubt it) actual immortality didn’t seem much of a stretch, to the child of White Rock.

The disbelievers said that the rank was simply a cunning trap. Immortals-designate could hold no public or private office: Lady Nef had been sidelined, prevented from rising, by jealousy and spite. She should be on Speranza, holding high office in the Hegemony, instead of trailing around after the Young Emperor. And if she was out there she’d be looking after the interests of the Blue Planet (as Earth was known)—instead of letting aliens run the show, the way the Republicans did. Others said that Lady Nef’s marriage had been her big mistake. Married for love, and disappointed, she stuck by her handsome, philandering soldier out of the kindness of her heart, forever rescuing him from his mediocre plots. It was a shame.

Buonarotti, Speranza, Blue Planet, ‘The Hegemony’, were empty words to Bibi, but she felt that everyone was wrong. Immortal designate was exactly the rank her mistress should hold, and the life she’d chosen, on campaign and in Kirgiz, was the best life possible. Great souls don’t lust for power. They serve and guide, they are never the slaves of ambition.

‘Those others don’t know,’ murmured Bibi. ‘But I do.’

In the spring the General came to visit, after a busy winter season politicking in the city. He was feeling slighted because Lady Nef had declined to play his hostess in Baykonur—but their relationship remained on its usual calm and affectionate terms. He filled his wing of the Great House with friends and useful contacts—all of them either male, or else Reformers; of the undecided gender. Wives were not invited, the few female servants in the party were elderly. His approved concubines aside, he never brought women to Kirgiz: it was a point of honour.

There were hunting expeditions, there were banquets. There were concerts, archery meets; a soccer tournament. The General declared that he would dine at each of the Squares in turn, as a compliment to his wife’s household; which caused a flurry of excitement. A Topaz Square chef had to be hospitalized, vomiting blood, from pure anxiety. The Cypress vs Juniper game of the tournament was abandoned after a general fight broke out, over a slighting remark about a sauce glacé… Only Lady Nef and her secretary had any inkling of what was behind this tour of the regions: and stood ready to intervene. General Yu had never once asked after the survivor of White Rock, or shown a hint of interest in her progress. But he could be stubborn, and he could be devious when he felt he’d been outmanoeuvred. Bibi was about thirteen years old, and her body had begun to change. Since this was a liberal household, without a menstrual hormone mix in the air, she would never ‘see blood’—but by many standards she was already a nubile young woman.

On the night that the General and his friends honoured Juniper Square the juniors were sent to bed early, with strict instructions to stay out of sight. Bibi was woken very late in the evening by the warden of the girls’ dorm, the snappish Han woman inappropriately named Serenity.

‘You’re to get dressed and go to the Dining Hall.’

‘But why? I thought we were supposed to stay in our dorms.’

‘How should I know? I was told I was going to get reinforcements, knowing what you girls are like. Instead I have two soldiers from the General at my gates, asking for you in particular. Get dressed quickly. You’d better go and see what he wants.’

‘I don’t want to go.’

‘It’s not for me to refuse him,’ snapped Serenity. ‘This is what comes of being a foreigner. You must have brought it on yourself. Hurry up.’

When Bibi reached the Hall the General was alone. He dismissed her escort and suggested that she join him for a nightcap, a cup of warm wine for a chilly spring evening. His intentions could not have been more plain. Bibi had never seen the General in the flesh before. She kept her eyes lowered, and hardly saw him now: a glimpse of a broad chest, thick curling hair and beard, light-coloured little eyes glinting cheerily from a craggy face. She’d expected him to be better looking, but she didn’t care. She was terrified.

‘No thank you, please sir. I don’t drink wine.’

‘Come and sit by me, in any case.’

Bibi didn’t have the slightest right to refuse him. She didn’t have a weapon either. She scanned the tablecloth for a knife, but then had a better idea. Much better. One can’t hope to stab a General and get away with it.

‘Yes sir, I’m coming.’

She walked carefully, with timid glances and small steps, to one of the Dining Rooms’ carved pillars. She’d almost reached it when General Yu burst out laughing and leapt to his feet. He pounced like a tiger, but Bibi was faster. She shot up into the polished foliage, leaving one of her slippers and a fragment of trouser hem in his grip.

‘You little monkey!’ roared the General. ‘Do you think I can’t climb!’

Bibi had swarmed up to the cross-beams. It was dark up there, and she was afraid of spiders. In the corners of the great room the roof timbers came down like mighty basket weave. If she could squeeze her way between them into the air cavity, he wouldn’t be able to follow. Would he? She closed her eyes, and prayed for the House AI to do something, give the General an electric shock, save her, somehow—

The double doors of the Hall opened. A slim figure entered, his curious face—glimmering, pale-skinned, dark at the centre—alight with amusement.

‘General!’ exclaimed the Aleutian. ‘Are you admiring our carvings?’

‘They’re very fine,’ growled the General, backing off from the pillar.

‘But we can’t have this!’ Francois advanced, and slipped his arm into the crook of General Yu’s handsomely clad elbow. ‘You’re all alone. Come along to my humble abode, I have some of your friends there, wondering where you are at—’

Bibi spent the night on her roof-beam. She crawled down at dawn, frozen stiff and covered with dust. Of course everyone knew what had happened. Some of her fellow servants believed she’d preserved her virtue by her antics (and thought this was hilarious). Most thought she couldn’t have done, the General always got his way. Nobody had much sympathy.

‘You could take the veil,’ suggested Ogul. ‘It isn’t forbidden in Kirgiz, it just means you can’t ever be a citizen. But with you, noble born, well—’

Less forthright than Honesty, who would have explained exactly why Bibi needn’t worry, the team-leader shook her head with a smile of syrupy pity. She laid the dark folds of her suggestion on Bibi’s mat and crept away, with dainty, girlish steps.

Bibi drew up her knees to her chin, and brooded.

The term ‘noble born’ grated. It was