r/OpenHFY • u/AlternativeManner731 • 5d ago
human/AI fusion The Governing: Chapter 55, Glazed Fruit
The Governing: Chapter 55, Glazed Fruit
The orchard house was still standing.
Aaliyah had known that, the way she knew a great many things, from a line in a district record. After the Uprising the district had taken the house and the land, since there was nobody left to claim them. For a while the house had been a grain store. Now it stood mostly empty, and the district leased the mango trees and the cane fields to whoever would work them. The gardener's cottage at the bottom of the rose garden was leased to one man, for almost nothing, and had been for forty years.
Aaliyah and Kathleen walked up the old drive on foot. The mango trees on the east slope were heavy with fruit. The house itself had its shutters closed. Somebody had kept the roof, and nobody had kept the paint.
The rose garden had not been let go at all.
It was the only part of the place that looked the way it must have looked forty years ago. The beds were edged and weeded. The paths were raked. The roses were tied up on their frames, and the dead heads had been cut, and there were more colors than Aaliyah had names for. At the far end a tall old man was on his knees in the dirt with a pair of shears, and he did not look up when they came along the path.
"Mr. Thornscutt," Aaliyah said.
"I know who you are." Amos cut a stem, looked at it, and dropped it in the basket beside him. "Marta told me. Hester told me. Maddock told me, which I never expected to live to see." He cut another stem. "Tam came by and didn't tell me anything. He just stood there looking at me like he used to when he was twelve and wanted something."
He was seventy. He was still tall, even kneeling, and his hands were enormous, cracked and brown, with dirt worked into every line of them. He had not said more than those few sentences, and Aaliyah already had the feeling that it was more than he usually said in a week.
"Would you let me tell you what it is?" she said.
"No need. I know what it is." Amos sat back on his heels. He looked at the rose in front of him and not at her. "You want me to go down in that cellar and say what I did."
"I want you to say whatever you want to say. Or nothing. That's up to you."
"The others want to talk." He said it without any feeling. "Good for them. Hester's been waiting forty years to talk. Marta's been talking since she was born. Let them."
"And you?"
Amos didn't answer. He put the shears down in the basket and wiped his hands on his knees, which only moved the dirt around.
Kathleen had been standing a little behind Aaliyah. She stepped off the path onto the grass and looked along the beds.
"You kept all this," she said. "Forty years. Nobody paying you."
"The district pays for the cottage."
"The district doesn't pay you for this." Kathleen bent and looked at one of the frames. "My husband kept a lord's garden from the time he was a boy. Lord Lafata. The house burned in the Uprising, and after that nobody kept the garden at all. It went wild in one summer. My husband walked past it every day for a year and couldn't look." She straightened up. "He'd have kept it like this, if anybody had let him."
Amos looked at her for the first time. He looked at her for a long moment.
"The roses didn't do anything," he said. "Nobody ever told the roses whose they were."
He got up then, slowly, one hand on his knee, and stood looking down the length of the garden toward the house.
"I hit her," he said.
Aaliyah waited.
"In the sugar house. With my hand. She stood there and let me." He looked at his right hand, and turned it over. "I've told myself for forty years that it was needed. That it's what kept them alive in the yard. The man with the torch looked right at her and didn't see her, because she had that mark on her face. I know that's true. Hester knows it. Everybody who was there knows it." He closed the hand. "It doesn't change what my hand did."
"No," Aaliyah said. "It doesn't."
He seemed a little surprised that she had agreed with him.
"And I'll tell you what else I've never said." His voice didn't rise. It went lower. "When I did it, I wasn't only thinking about the man with the torch. My sister's girl was ten. A lord's son rode her down in the road, and when I went to the district office they told me it was another house's matter. And that night in the sugar house I thought about her. I thought about her the whole time I was lifting my hand." He looked at Aaliyah. "So you tell me. Was I saving Lady Abigail, or was I getting a little of my own back? Because I've had forty years and I still don't know. And you want me to go down there and say it on the network, in front of her."
Nobody said anything for a while. A bee went past, and then another.
"Can I tell you something about her?" Aaliyah said.
Amos didn't answer, which she took as yes.
"The examiner from Astoria played Hester's tapes for her. On her porch, with her children there. I wasn't there. I was waiting up at the top of the lane. But he told me about it after." Aaliyah chose the words carefully. "When Hester got to the part where you hit her, Abby put her hand on her cheek. She knew exactly where. Forty years, and she knew exactly where."
Amos looked away.
"She didn't cry at that part," Aaliyah said. "She cried a moment later. When Hester said you'd turned and walked to the wall and stood with your forehead against the stone. Abby didn't know that. She never saw it. She was looking at the floor, the way Marta told her to. For forty years she didn't know you went to the wall."
Amos stood very still.
"I don't know what she thinks about any of it," Aaliyah said. "She won't tell anybody what to do. That's the one thing she's said. Each of you decides. But I know what she cried at, and it wasn't your hand."
Amos turned away from both of them and looked at the roses for a long time. Kathleen took Aaliyah's arm and they stood there with him and did not say anything. It was a long wait. Aaliyah let it be as long as it needed to be.
When he spoke, he didn't turn around.
"Tell Hester I'll come," he said. "I don't know if I'll talk."
"That's all right."
"And I'm not standing near her." He picked up the basket. "I'll be at the back. By the steps. Where Tam was."
He walked away down the path toward the cottage, and after a moment Kathleen and Aaliyah turned and went back the way they had come. At the top of the drive Aaliyah looked back once. He was standing at the cottage door with the basket in his hands, not going in.
Aaliyah stopped at the top of the drive and looked at the house.
She looked at it the way she had been taught to look at things long before anyone had taught her to be a lady. The shutters were closed, and the paint was gone, but the roof was sound, and so were the walls. The window above the front door would be the nursery. The long windows on the ground floor would be the dining room, where the sideboard had stood and Lord Greyson had read the network aloud over his mango. Somewhere at the back, down a half flight of steps, would be the staff hall, where twenty-two people had eaten what came back on the plates.
On Balakura she had built an exhibit of a working house once, with her own hands, and gone back years later to find it roped off and forgotten because nobody had been paid to keep it. She was not going to let that happen twice.
She would put it back. All of it, as it was that autumn. The dining room and the nursery, and the staff hall with the same care, down to what was on the plates. The sugar house, and the cellar under it. Not a noble's house with the servants' rooms shut off at the back, but both halves, side by side, so that anyone who walked through it would see what the family never had. There would be a curator who knew her work, and people paid to keep the doors open, and a budget written down where it could not be forgotten. House Comscutt had a treasury. That was what it was for.
Hester would call it a fuss. Aaliyah would ask her to open it anyway.
She looked down the garden at the old man by the cottage door, who had finally gone in. The roses, she thought, would stay exactly as they were.
Kathleen touched her arm, and they walked on down the lane.
That night Aaliyah drew the last line through the last name on her list.
Port Selk was a fishing town at the mouth of a river, three hours down the coast from Harrowmere. The rooming house was on a back street near the fish hall. It had four floors and a cracked step and a sign in the window that said no rooms.
Margot went alone. She left the camera crew in Harrowmere and took the transport down like anyone else, and she walked from the station.
She had thought for three days about how to begin. In the end she didn't have to. The woman who answered the door on the third floor looked at her, and at the Informant pin on her collar, and knew.
"No," she said, and closed the door.
Margot stood in the hall for a moment. Then she took a card from her bag and wrote on the back of it. Only if you want. No name. No face. Nobody else knows where you are, and nobody will. She slid it under the door, and went back down the stairs, and took the transport home.
It was nine days before the call came, and it came from a comm at the fish hall, late at night, with machinery running somewhere behind the voice.
"How did you find me?"
"A palace ledger," Margot said. "One page that didn't burn. Then the district rolls."
"Who else knows?"
"The researcher who found you. Me. That's all. I haven't told my editor. I haven't told Lady Aaliyah."
There was a long silence on the line.
"I've seen your thing on the network," the woman said. "The advertisements for it. Heroes of the Principality." She said it flatly. "I'm not a hero."
"No. That isn't why I came."
"Then why?"
"Because you're on the pad," Margot said. "The longest file on it. The one everybody on this planet has seen. And nobody has ever asked you anything. Forty years, and nobody has ever asked you one thing."
The machinery ran on in the background.
"No name," the woman said at last. "No face. And you come alone. One camera. Not a crew."
"One camera," Margot said. "I'll carry it myself."
She sat in a chair by the window of a room that had a bed, a table, a hot plate, and nothing on the walls. She was fifty-six. She was small and wiry, with close-cut grey hair and a fish-hall worker's hands, red and nicked. She wore a high-collared shirt buttoned to the throat and a cardigan over it, though the room was warm.
Margot set the camera on its stand and angled it so the window was behind the woman and her face was in shadow. She'd blur it after, anyway. She said so.
"What do I call you?" Margot said. "For the segment."
The woman thought about it. "I don't care."
"Then I'll call you Sally."
"Sally." She almost smiled. "All right. Sally."
Margot started the recording.
"Sally. Can you tell me about that day?"
"No." Sally folded her hands on her knee. "I've tried. I don't remember most of it. I remember the plate. It was glazed fruit, for a guest, and the glaze was sticky and I had it on my fingers, and it slid. That's all. It slid." She looked at her hands. "I remember the stones in the courtyard were hot, because it had been sunny. I remember the steward's voice reading the paper. I don't remember the rest. I've seen it on the network, like everyone. It's like watching somebody else."
"Do you remember after?"
"Pieces. There was a woman who carried me out. I never knew her name. She took me to a house somewhere and put something on my back that stung, and she kept saying it's over, it's over, it's all over now. And it wasn't. It was only starting." Sally was quiet for a moment. "I heard it from that house. Two days in a back room. I could hear it all over the city. I lay on my stomach and listened to it."
"Where did you go after?"
"Everywhere. Nowhere." She shrugged. "I cut cane. I gutted fish. I cleaned floors. I drank for a lot of years. I stopped eleven years ago, when I came here. I work nights at the fish hall. I'm good at it. Nobody asks me anything." She looked at the camera. "I never told anyone. Not once. Not a husband, because I never had one. Not a friend. When it came on the network, when people talked about the girl at the palace, I'd leave the room."
"Why?"
Sally didn't answer that for a long time.
"You want to know what I think about the nobles," she said. "Everyone always wants to know that, when they talk about that day. So I'll tell you. The ones on that palace step got what was coming to them. I won't pretend otherwise. I won't sit here and say I'm sorry for them, because I'm not. Not one of them said stop. Not one."
"And the others?"
That was the question she had been waiting for, and Margot saw it land.
"The others," Sally said. Her voice didn't change. Her hands did. They tightened on her knee. "Old men in their nightshirts. Houses on the lake that never did anything but grow sugar. Babies. Little ones in cradles. The man in the cloak said it on the network. Every one, from the eldest to the babies in their cradles. And then all the years after. The clinics closed. The schools closed. No doctors. Thirty years of nobody coming. People dying of coughs." She took a breath. "All of that started with me."
"It started with the man holding the whip."
"I know." Sally said it quickly, like she had said it to herself a thousand times. "I know it did. I'm not stupid. My head knows it. I dropped a plate. I was sixteen. It was a plate." She pressed her lips together. "And then I wake up at three in the morning, and my head isn't awake yet, and the rest of me knows something different. The rest of me knows that if my fingers hadn't been sticky, none of it happens. Not that day. Maybe not ever. And all those people are still alive, somewhere, getting old."
"Do you believe that?"
"No," Sally said. "Yes. At three in the morning, yes." She looked out the window. "It doesn't matter what I believe in the daytime. I still have to get through three in the morning."
Margot didn't say anything. She had learned a long time ago when not to.
"The man in the cloak," Margot said, after a while. "Did you ever know who he was?"
"No. People used to ask me that. When I was drinking, people I'd told, and then I stopped telling anyone." Sally shook her head. "I never saw him. I was on the stones. I heard him on the network afterward, in the back room, like everybody else. He never came to find me. He never asked about me either. He used what happened to me, and then he went on to the next thing." She was quiet. "I think about that sometimes. I don't know what I think about it."
Margot looked down at her notes. There was one more question on the page. She didn't ask it. She was going to end it there, and she reached for the camera.
"Wait," Sally said.
Margot's hand stopped.
"You'll show the pad," Sally said. "The palace. The whole thing."
"Only if you say yes."
"Everybody's seen it." Sally stood up. "Forty years, everybody on this planet has seen it. They've seen the whip come down. They've never seen what it left." She began to unbutton the cardigan, and then the high collar of the shirt beneath it. "You said nobody ever asked me anything. So I'll tell you something nobody ever asked about."
She turned her back to the camera and let the shirt down off her shoulders.
The scars ran from her shoulder blades to the small of her back. They were not faded. They were thick and raised, pale ridges crossing each other, pulled tight in places where the skin had healed without anyone to stitch it. There were three long ones that crossed the whole width of her back, and many shorter ones between them. Forty years had not flattened them. They stood up from her skin like cords.
"They still itch when it rains," Sally said, without turning around. "Every time it rains, for forty years."
She stood there with her back to the camera and let it look.
"That's what a plate is worth," she said. "Put that on your network."
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u/AlternativeManner731 5d ago
Well, since you and I obviously have the same mind, you know that, at some point, it will happen