The next instalment of Esha Ex, a novel-length work of new fiction, updated daily. For more details click here.
The guests were moving towards the boar run. The guests gathered close against the ropes, protected by a single line of workers. On the other side were the Family, smiling generously.
The guests were moving towards the boar run. The guests gathered close against the ropes, protected by a single line of workers. On the other side were the Family, smiling generously.
The other workers were further back, straining to see, while I was sure there were still dozens in the kitchens, preparing for the midnight feast. All the lights on the second floor were off, apart from a couple – Raed’s room, I supposed, and maybe a security room, a place to monitor everything from.
One of the Family members, a young man who looked a bit like Raed – but then, they all resembled each other somewhat – got between the ropes and swaggered onto the run. He had something in his hand. It looked like a small crossbow but I saw that at the end of it was a dart, some kind of tranquiliser to quell the animal.
Two men in brightly coloured waistcoats appeared in front of the flaps of the bull pen and bowed. The crowd clapped and cheered. The flaps of the bull pen burst open and out ran Opal, screaming. The crowd gave a gasp of shock and delight, urging her on as she ran from post to post. Immediately after her thundered the boar, all shoulders and prow, jaw and brow. This was the Family’s warning, to me, to her. The worker next to me said,
“Don’t worry, they never let them die. Although they usually get a guy to do it,” he looked envious and flexed his chest muscles inside his shirt, “not someone like that.”
The boar caught up with Opal and butted her with the top of its head. She fell on the ground and it ran close past her, stamping its hooves. She got up and ran back to the pen but the men in waistcoats, still smiling, wouldn’t let her go in. The Family man with the dart gun was pacing at the end of the run. Opal’s job, I assumed, was to coax the boar down that way. The boar paced between her and the Family man. Whichever way she went, the boar would head her off, and it had her in its sights now. Its eye rolled and fixed on her, rolled and fixed.
Opal was clinging to one of the posts. The crowd on the other side prised her hands off the wood, just as the boar leapt forward. Its tusk pierced the post. Opal lurched forward and ran desperately to the end of the run. I climbed up on the first two frets of the poles, reached over the ropes and caught Opal. The crowd bellowed at me, riled and admonishing. The faces of the Family began turning towards me, one by one. I helped Opal climb over and we pushed through the people and went straight inside, up to the top floor. Opal sat on the floor in the corner with her arms around her knees.
“Let’s see if Sheba can make you some tea.”
“Sheba’s down there. They’re all down there.”
“Did you know that was going to happen?”
Opal shook her head. Her eyes were getting bigger and bigger and I was beginning to worry. I had to find Jacir, or Nikko.
“I was washing the tea glasses. They came and got me. They said, Don’t ask questions.”
“It’s my fault. I had an argument with Sahar. It’s because was talking in an indiscreet way with you and Jacir. You did warn me. You were right.”
Outside, music had started up and the there was a thick, jolly sound of talking and drinking as well as an indefinable, bloody, musky smell.
“What’s that stench?” I asked.
“They’re skinning the boar. They’ve shot it. They drain the blood off and clean the pelt. They’ll roast it. You’ll hear when the fire goes up. They always cheer.”
“What happens between now and when the boar’s ready?”
“Food. Drink. Performances. They party through the night and lie in the next day.” She got up, sighing. “We should go back to work.”
We went down the stairs slowly, back to the central passageway.
“Opal, don’t you want to leave?” I asked as we approached the second floor landing.
“Where?”
“Here.”
“To go where?”
“Anywhere.”
“Like where?”
“Where do you come from?”
“I’ve always been here. I was born here. I mean, on the Family’s property.”
We passed the door to the second floor and I heard shouting and familiar voices on the other side.
“That’s Nikko,” I said.
“Don’t go in there. We’re not supposed to go in there.”
I hesitated, my hand on the handle. It was funny, they made our status so clear: the handle on the servants’ side was a thin strip of blackened iron, but on the Family’s side of exactly the same door it was a globe of polished brass. I couldn’t get Opal into yet more trouble – but I heard something break on the second floor.
“Nikko’s in trouble,” I said.
“Don’t! Don’t!”
“Can you get yourself to the kitchen?”
“Ye-es,” she said unwillingly.
“Go to the yard and find someone to sit with but don’t go back out there again. See if you can find Jacir.”
“I haven’t seen her all night.”
“If she didn’t see you in that ‘game’, tell her what happened.”
She nodded, although I didn’t quite believe she would tell, and disappeared out of sight as the staircase turned.
I pushed the door open slowly. It wasn’t locked, and that in itself was strange. The corridor was empty and all the staff had clearly been dismissed. The argument was coming from Raed’s room. I went towards it, keeping my footfalls soft, expecting to see a fight. Raed and Nikko were locked in an embrace, hands in each other’s hair.
“Don’t do it. You can’t let them do it,” Nikko was saying urgently to Raed, who refused to look at him.
“I have to. It’s set for the end of the summer.”
“You can’t marry those people! You don’t like them! You don’t know them! They’re nothing to you!”
“But I do know them….I dolike them….they’re from my world, you know that,” said Raed. “What do you want me to do?”
“Tell them… just tell them…Tell them about me,” said Nikko, and his voice broke.
“It’s illegal,” said Raed coolly.
“What! Everyone does it, everyone, everyone.”
“In private. Not in public, in the face of the decency laws.”
“Your family owns the courts! All your uncles are in the Supreme Council! Change the laws.”
“That’s not how it works. Your version of ‘everyone’ is just the people you see around us. Miriadh is huge. And, Nikko, ask yourself: is that what you really want?” said Raed, and now his handsome face was soft and cunning like his voice. “You’d be known as my ‘friend’ – and everyone would laugh when they saw you, just for that one little thing - when you’re so much more.”
I was watching it all, gripping the doorframe, not knowing what to do. I desperately wanted to announce myself – but also, my heart was breaking for my friend.
“Why did you call me here if that’s all you wanted to say? Isn’t there – something else you want to tell me?” pled Nikko.
“Something else?” Raed asked blandly.
“Yes – isn’t there anything you want to say to me?”
“I don’t know what you mean. What would you like me to say?”
“Tell them you know me. Tell them you … like me,” Nikko beseeched him. “I am your friend. I’m a… a person.”
Now Raed grew disgusted. He pushed Nikko away from him.
“But they know!” he said. “Did you think it’s just me and you and Sahar that know? Do you think you’re the only one? I’m Prince Raed – I have lots of friends. I can’t risk everything to be associated in public with one person, with you.”
Nikko sat swaying at the edge of the sofa. I could tell, just from looking at the back of his neck, that he had turned brick red, and then it drained away. His humiliation rose out of him like a steam.
I couldn’t stand it any more. I knocked hard on the side of the door. Neither of them turned around, so muffling was the atmosphere.
“Raed. Nikko,” I said loudly.
Nikko whirled round and cried out “Oh!” and his face was so raw with misery and pain that I was almost scalded when he looked at me. He got up and rushed past me, back to the stairs.
Raed was sitting up, hands clasped on his lap. He was calm.
“How dare you?” I said to him, but my voice sounded silly and I felt weak in the room.
“Wha-a-at?” he said, bewildered, looking up at me through his sleek brows and ruffled curls.
“How dare you hurt my friend?”
“Friend? You barely know him. You arrived two days ago.”
He was not afraid of me. He picked his phone off the side table and scrolled down the screen with his thumb. Texting Sahar, probably. I left, feeling his little smirk behind me.
Nikko was sitting at the bottom of the servants’ steps. He wasn’t crying. His hands hung down between his knees.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” I said, sitting down next to him.
He said nothing.
“The Family are not nice people,” I said.
“You don’t know anything about it.”
“I know enough to see what’s happening right in front of my eyes. I see a spoilt young man amusing himself. Why do you love him?”
That almost got a rise out of Nikko, but not quite. Instead he flushed dark red again.
“We should leave,” I said. “There’s no rule saying we have to stay here.”
“Yes there is. I mean, it’s fine,” he said. “It’ll just carry on.”
“Just what is it that keeps you and Opal and Jacir in this place?”
“We’re all related.”
“But you’re not. You could get a job anywhere, with the experience you’ve got from here.”
“No. I mean it. We’re related to them. We’re the children and grandchildren of the concubines. The concubine system was only made illegal twenty years ago. We’re all part Family.”
I was too shocked to say anything. My stomach turned.
“They keep their children close,” said Nikko bitterly. “We’re their chattel.”
“Even… someone like Sahar?”
“Beautiful Sahar. Her mother was a secretary for one of the Family’s women. But they say her grandmother was the biggest whore on earth. She should be ashamed.”
“Why should she be ashamed? The Family should be ashamed. Instead, they transfer their shame onto us. And the perverse sense of loyalty that keeps you here for some reason.”
“It’s not loyalty, it’s law. When you’re born here, you don’t leave.”
“Raed used you,” I began.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“He’s not your friend.”
“Yes he is!” Nikko sprang up, his eyes wet. “I’m going somewhere else, don’t follow me,” he said, and went off, stiff as a tin soldier, to do his grieving in private.
I went out to the front again. The boar-run had been cleared away and the boar was roasting on the spit, dripping, peeling and turning black, oozing a fatty, flavoursome smell. I turned the corner to see acrobats, jugglers, contortionists and fire-breathers. In a tiny striped tent sat a woman casting I Ching and reading palms. There was an instant photo booth with a box of accessories – silly hats and fake moustaches – outside it. Innocent amusements, for children, but by now half the party was steaming drunk and having the time of their lives. I lingered for a moment in front of a dance-theatre production, the beautiful dancers painted gold, in head-dresses and animal masks.
A few of the guests clicked their fingers at me for attention but I ignored them.
As I walked I noticed a bright light dancing on the ground a few inches in front of my feet, as if guiding me. Someone nudged me. It was Jacir, walking past me, eyes forward.
“Watch out,” she said into my ear, and peeled away before I could answer.
The light at my feet hopped closer, zigzagged, lit my toes.
“Freeze,” shouted a man.
I turned and saw the silhouette of a group of bulky, black-clad men, Family security, one of them holding a torch, coming straight for me.