Zusan Read online

  Zusan

  by Hannah Blume (as Alicorn)

  When Chudara took over, they installed a county governor. He ruled over every village Zusan had ever heard of, and then some. He had a house built for him and his household in the foothills overlooking Quan, where she lived, and when the house was built, he announced that he meant to take a local wife.

  Zusan had seen Chudaran men seldom, in the past. Mostly soldiers, and those only peeking through the neighbor’s shutters. When there was fighting near Quan, sometimes one army, or the other, would come through and ransack the village for provisions, kicking half the families into the homes of the other half so they could sleep in their houses, and leave the next morning, all chaos. The Chudaran men were darker, and cut their hair short, and of course spoke only Chudaran, communicating their demands with gestures.

  But other than that, they weren’t much different from the emperor’s army. The emperor’s army was made up of men who could have been Zusan’s older brother, himself a soldier, but his division never passed through Quan. He was a real archer, snapped up by the army for his telltale ability to hit a bird in flight with a thrown stone, and they kept the archers in action. There was no sparing someone who could place an arrow like her brother could. When the war ended, the money stopped, and when he still didn’t come home she thought probably he was dead.

  Regardless of who won, the people of Quan, Zusan included, were glad the war was over. Some of them grumbled, of course. The governor’s house up in their hills was both good and bad: good, because it would soon be easy to get all kinds of things he’d have brought to his home, and he would have to hire locals for servants sooner or later, and this would make all the families of Quan richer. Bad, because with the governor right there, they would have a lot of trouble holding back anything he wanted to tax without being noticed, and if he were a bad governor, it would go badly for them to be right under his eye. Not just his eye, even; everyone knew that Chudarans could sometimes read minds.

  Most everyone felt it was encouraging that he did not mean to install a wife from Chudara. Zusan heard people gossipping - this means he wishes to rule gently, they said, this means he will learn our ways before he lays down Chudaran laws.

  He had some requirements for his wife. He wanted a girl old enough to bear children, but not older than himself at twenty-two winters. He wanted her fresh, not a widow or one with a baby pretending to be her little brother mixed into the jumble of her family. He wanted her pretty - actually, the rumors Zusan heard suggested that, if you spoke Chudaran, he’d meant something like “not disfigured”, but everyone assumed that he meant pretty. He wanted her not already promised to some boy, presumably so the boy would not try to assassinate him for the slight.

  Now, there were plenty of pretty young girls, but most of them were promised. Most particularly the pretty ones were. Elders noticed which little cousins played nicely together, threw them into pairs whenever circumstance permitted to confirm their amiability, and formally sewed things up by the time they had thirty winters between them. The occasional alliance between families was usually even more premeditated. Zusan’s mother, in the general sense if not as an individual, had been intended for Zusan’s father before either of them were born.

  Zusan herself was the only girl born to her parents. Their match was a great success, yielding eight living sons including an archer, and just the one girl. The seven brothers who hadn’t been snapped up by the army to pincushion the enemy were all paired off with girl-cousins already, of whom Zusan had many.

  Actually, there were very few boy-cousins her age in her family, and those were all promised to better-suited girls. It had seemed likely as not that she’d step into the place of an older relative when someone died giving birth or caught the flu, but all the likeliest someones had been rather fortunate in recent years.

  All of which meant that when the governor announced that whichever family produced his bride would be exempt from taxes for as long as she lived, her family put her in the family’s finery and packed her off.

  Zusan did not want to be an aging spinster, waiting for the death of an auntie who’d brushed her hair and teased her and snuck her sweets, so she could marry the poor woman’s husband. But, as alternatives went, this was intimidating. She walked with a brother along to chaperone, up the hill, and he presented her, asserted that she was unattached and as young as she looked and hiding no hideous malformation.

  The governor from Chudara did not really speak Quan’s dialect, nor the city tongue that traders and travelers spoke. When he came to have a look at her he uttered just a couple of words, so thick with accent that she had to guess from context that he meant “thank you, welcome” and not “a green cow dances”. When he pointed at himself and said “Siandar”, Zusan presumed that was his name. She made her prettiest bow, pointed at herself, and said, “Zusan,” in return. Properly it would have been Nian Zusan but she didn’t want him to call her Nian, like he was a stranger from the next village who recognized her only as specifically as which house she lived in. Either he’d marry her, in which case he’d have the right to her personal name, or he wouldn’t, and they would never speak again.

  He didn’t seem to know how to signal to her that she’d bowed for long enough. That, or he thought a county governor warranted as much backache as a king. When he started to reach for her as though to tip up her chin she straightened of her own accord and his hand fell. “Zusan,” he repeated carefully, as she looked him in the eye.

  She nodded. “Yes, my lord.” Probably he knew those words. They were what she’d prioritize if she were a governor.

  Siandar looked her over, assessing. Looked over at one of the men in his livery and said something in Chudaran. The man said to Zusan’s brother in his choking accent, “His lordship accepts. They will be married before the gods of Chudara. Please give me the name of the family.”

  “Nian,” said Zusan’s brother, and he accepted the papers that exempted her family from taxation as long as she lived.

  Zusan hugged her brother goodbye, and he told her that he could see her new home from his window, it wasn’t so far after all. And down he went.

  “Zusan,” said Siandar, and he held out his hand.

  Zusan placed her palm in his.

  * * *

  In Quan, a wedding was done in the family’s ancestral chapel, but while Siandar probably had ancestors, they were not in attendance. Instead his house had a roomful of little statues, some the size of Zusan’s thumb lined up on shelves, some nearly as tall as she was, made of stone or wood or metal. One looked like it was solid gold, though it was a smaller one. The servant who spoke city tongue explained to her that the figurines were gods, those favored by his lordship’s line - which implied that these dozens weren’t even all of them. Zusan, in fairness, had more ancestors than Siandar had gods, but at least all of her ancestors had had two arms, two legs, zero tails, and completely human heads. Though perhaps the queer features helped him tell them apart.

  A different servant was called in to perform a ceremony, entirely in Chudaran. Zusan studied her husband-to-be while the words washed over her. He wore blue, embroidered in more blue, trimmed in gold. It must have taken someone a year to make - someone skilled. And he hadn’t even known someone would come bringing him a wife today! Zusan’s family could have dithered for a week. He could have rejected her. It had to be that he dressed like this all the time. He must put an apron on just to eat his breakfast, and sleep naked to avoid rumpling it -

  Zusan’s thoughts skipped like a lost heartbeat for a moment before she caught up with the relevance of his possible tendency to sleep naked. He might sleep naked next to her, as soon as that night, and most likely only after he benefitted from having married her. Perhaps if she had known since she was eight that she was going to marry her second cousin once removed when they were both grown she would have gotten used to the idea gently. As it was she would have to accustom herself very fast. She had looked at the swirls sewn into his exotic outfit enough - it was blue and gold, fine - she looked at the rest of him, attempted to rehearse her best guess of events to follow in her head so she would not be caught too much by surprise.

  Siandar started kissing the various gods after what felt like an hour of ritual had gone by, and gestured for her to do the same - she wasn’t sure, at first, that this was what he meant, but when she leaned toward the first one he smiled and waved encouragingly. And so she planted her lips on the little ones in gold and jade and amethyst, and the medium-sized ones in quartz and marble and iron, and the big ones made of wood, just like he did, till every god had been visited. The celebrant droned on. Zusan’s lips were chilly from the cold smooth sculptures, but soon - or not soon, she did not know how long Chudaran weddings took -

  Not too much longer, it turned out, and then he did kiss her, cupping her face in his hands and waiting for her to look up at him before he leaned in to close the distance. Zusan was not sure what she had been expecting. In hindsight of course if a person put his lips on her lips it would feel just like so: what, had she thought he would be some inhuman temperature? Be made of wood, like the god-statues? That he would bite? No.

  He took her hand and tugged her out of the room of gods. The celebrant bowed, a tassel on his hat bobbing, and departed. The translator followed, but Siandar waved him away before they went through any doors, and then they were alone. Siandar found the room he wanted, and pulled it open.

  It was, Zusan concluded immediately, his bedroom. She had a moment to look around - the bed itself was bigger than the o
ne she shared with her favorite cousin at home, and there were two fireplaces, both empty at the moment in the summer warmth but ready to keep even such a large space toasty when winter came. There were more doors, implying a whole suite sectioned off here for him, separate from the god-room and the receiving hall and the servants’ quarters and the places he’d do his governing and entertaining and dining. She hadn’t been sure if she’d get a separate room, as some rich people were understood to do for their wives. She supposed, as he tugged her toward the bed, that she still was not sure. He might shoo her off to another part of his enormous house after - this train of thought was not going to keep her from making embarrassing noises of startlement, she decided -

  He sat her down, and sat beside her, and said her name, looking in her eyes again. “Zusan?” he said.

  “Siandar?” she replied. He couldn’t ask her any questions and if he did he wouldn’t understand the answers. Presumably they would learn each other’s languages eventually but for the time being she was just coasting on the assumption that a marriage was a marriage and she was here having married him with the hopefully mutual understanding that they would then do marital things.

  Whatever he derived from looking at her eyes like that satisfied him, it seemed, because he kissed her again and peeled off all her pretty wedding clothes and, when she made embarrassing noises, Siandar did not seem in the least troubled about them.

  * * *

  Zusan woke in her marriage bed alone, sunshine streaming through the windows. Siandar was an early riser, it seemed, and without anyone knocking on her forehead to remind her to feed the chickens, she was not. She got up and put back on her wedding clothes. She would need to find a servant at some point and have her normal dress brought up the hill so the wedding things could be brought down for the next Nian girl to be married. But there was no urgency, because the cousin she’d shared her bed with would be the next in line and was not yet fifteen, so for the time being she’d wear them for everyday. She got up and went to explore her new home.

  He had a lot of people in his house. They were mostly staff, men and women both in the same uniform, distinguishable by how recently they’d chopped off all their hair and by whether they were a little or a lot taller than her, bustling around with papers and trays and cleaning-rags. They all nodded to her politely when she went by and didn’t try to steer her away from her gradual mapping of the house: here was where she’d come in, there was the gods’ room, there a closet, there a guest room mid-sweep. There was a courtyard, there the stable, there the dining room - when she stepped in a maid asked her “Breakfast, lady?” in paint-peelingly awful renderings of consonants, turning into six syllables what should have been three. It was like Chudarans didn’t have voices, just accents.

  “Yes, thank you,” Zusan replied, without trying to correct her pronunciation, and she was presented with some strange variant on congee, which looked as though there were milk in it and tasted spicy and tart, and she discovered that it had nuts in it by nearly swallowing one unchewed. Once she was used to the flavor it was delicious, if foreign.

  She was halfway through her bowl when someone not in servant’s livery entered the room. He was dressed in a green Chudaran-style tunic, black on green, as fine as Siandar’s blue, and spoke to the servants and got his own bowl of congee just like hers. Sitting down across from her, he smiled, said, “Zusan” and something in his own language. Maybe it was “good morning”.

  Zusan repeated it back, the presumable good morning, and his smile broadened and he nodded at her, so probably she’d gotten it right. He pointed at things, at the food and the spoons and the table and chairs, and told her their names. A voice called what must be his title, from another room, and he looked at her apologetically and left without even finishing his serving. He’d taught her a dozen words but she hadn’t learned his name.

  Oh, well. Most likely he lived in the house she now called home. She would learn the names of all of her brothers-in-law (or whoever that was) in time.

  She spent the day practicing the words, self-conscious that her accent in Chudaran was quite as bad as the one that encrusted everything the Chudarans said. But if she could understand them when they ventured to speak her language they’d probably do just as well the opposite way. She learned all the corridors and poked around in the suite she was apparently meant to share with Siandar. It had a little dining nook, in case he ever preferred to take his meals in more privacy than the dining hall, and she also found a bathtub and a sitting room with plush chairs and some books.

  Zusan could write her name, but not read fluently, and she certainly couldn’t decipher Chudaran. She took down a book and paged through it anyway, pretending, looking at the woodcut illustrations and maps tucked in between the mesmerizingly opaque characters.

  When she was sure she’d been to every room in the house, she asked servants for the translator - she would have to learn his name - until, whether due to their understanding or their incomprehension, she was ushered to his office.

  “I need to send for my clothes,” she told him, “and then return these - they’re my family’s wedding things.”

  He puzzled over the sentence a bit, and replied, “I’ll send someone down.”

  “I may not go?”

  “I’ve had no word about it. You can ask, of course.”

  “Thank you,” Zusan said, bowing, and the translator did know how to tell her that was enough. She straightened while he summoned up a runner to make the exchange of outfits.

  “Is that all?” he asked her.

  “Do you know when I will next see my husband?”

  “I will not - presume,” he replied, with a great pause before “presume” as he fished for the word.

  “Do I have - duties, chores -”

  “I have not been told of any. Some ladies take up instruments,” he added, helpfully, “until there are children.”

  “Instruments,” said Zusan. Everyone sang, sometimes, while they were working, and her family owned a drum that some of her relatives tapped out rhythms on in idle moments, but no one in Quan was a musician.

  “I believe there is a flute somewhere in your chambers.”

  “I see. I should - learn more Chudaran,” she said, “how shall I do that?”

  The translator sighed. “I can send one of the maids to try to instruct you. I do not have the time.”

  So Zusan went back to her room, and looked around until she found the flute in a drawer. She made clumsy sounds with it till a maid came by, introduced herself as Jaruti, and began to offer Chudaran words. They began with the ones the maid could render into the local tongue, which Zusan appreciated, since it was impossible to point at a “hello” or a “thank you”.

  Eventually the girl ducked out to fetch Zusan lunch. She didn’t bring any for herself, and Zusan reflected that having servants might have some drawbacks, like the fact that now she had to interrupt her language lesson to try to convey across the remaining gulf that Jaruti was free to go have her own meal. It took nearly ten minutes before Jaruti managed to get across that she’d eaten already and would stay, by which time Zusan’s flat bread and sauced meat were getting cold. But Zusan did feel some of her new words solidifying in place as they were used in terrible awkward strings to try to have an actual conversation, so she accounted for that as a positive.

  Jaruti stayed all afternoon. She knew the numbers one to ten, and yes and no, and “my lord”, which suggested Siandar meant to be addressed in local parlance rather than importing whatever the Chudaran title would be. Zusan drilled and drilled and made silly little phrases with the words her brother-in-law had taught her over breakfast - two spoons, thank you for the chair, good morning my lord. Jaruti suppressed giggles, but Zusan could hardly hold it against her.

  Zusan’s clothes arrived right before she meant to go to the dining room for supper. She shooed Jaruti and the runner who’d brought them, changed into her comfortable old blue hemp, and folded up the bridal things to be toted back down the hill for the next Nian girl’s wedding. Siandar ought to have no trouble recognizing her, even having known her for only a day, since she was the only non-Chudaran who’d be eating with him unless he’d invited guests.