Solo Things in the wall.

[Maore]

18 spring 520

In the time that Maore had been with Ennoia in his house, she’d learned that her situation was a little unusual compared to that of other slaves belonging to his family. Her function seemed more like a house slave; she cleaned rooms for him, folded his clothes, kept his desk in order, tried to keep up with his wants and desires even when she wanted nothing more than to lay in bed and wish she were elsewhere.

Other slaves seemed to be able to work like their keepers as couriers for their business or front of house faces for greeting prospective customers. On the few occasions she’d been let out of the house to run a package for Ennoia, she’d ended up at the business of one of his unblooded relatives and been startled to recognize a slave from just down the hall managing the money.

When she’d gotten home that day, Maore asked Ennoia about it and he’d kindly told her of the family’s arrangement with their slaves; most were allowed to work, though for reduced wages, with their owners. When she had asked why she didn’t work with him, Ennoia had laughed his deriding laugh and told her that she wouldn’t want to. He worked at the building she’d been kept and she had sworn she would never return through the last quarter of winter as she settled into her new home.

That was a good point on Ennoia’s behalf. Maore definitely did not want to return to the KRI. She didn’t want to feel the itch on her palm that meant something dead was nearby. She didn’t want to see the rooms she’d been thrown into the mercy of strange men. She didn’t want to cross the lake.

Maore had a lot of didn’ts. She had one did and it was that she wanted to work. Maore wanted to not be trapped in this house anymore, stuck cleaning after Ennoia’s neices and nephews as they pulled her hair, stuck in a room with a woman who annoyed her with every spoken word, stuck with his chain around her wrists denoting her a slave of his household. When it came down to it, Maore’s greatest desire was one of escape.

However, she would accept work, if it didn’t entail being at the KRI with her keeper.

x

Maore was at work on that balmy spring day turning over the blankets in an underused room far from her own living quarters. She was trying to do it as instructed by the first woman slave she’d met upon arrival; toss them, beat them, lay them back over the bed once you’re sure they are clean, and make it look nice.

It wasn’t that great of an explanation, when Maore had first heard it repeated from Ennoia’s laughing mouth, so the old woman had shown her. She took Maore to another room, one currently being swept through by a male slave with a feather duster and a soaked rag, and had her participate in working over the bed. Maore had learned that it was probably best to do this work in pairs. The heavy quilts on the beds she’d ‘straighten’ up strained her arms and upset her already poor attitude, allowing her emotions to blaze into a tumult of constrained anger and spite and red hot embarrassment for having to do something so trivial for a group of people who could have done it themselves.

Just thinking about that instructive period was enough to set her heart to pounding a furious tempo, so Maore simply pushed the feelings back down, under an already too-full container of forced calm, and continued to work. She was alone today, her first day being so, and she was trying to obtain the same rhythm she’d seen other slaves, the lifelong ones, using.

637

[Maore]

It wasn’t as if the ethaefal had never folded a blanket before. She’d done it many times and for many years. The difference was in the mass; it felt like this thing was leadened with goose down and caribou pelt or something. It could have even just been the strength in her arms, her inexperience with manual labour, her unwillingness to participate, or any other just cause. Maybe she just didn’t like taking care of the perfumed linens of her captors.

She finished the bedding and moved on, collecting a pail of water from just outside the gaping door and returning to the room. The ethaefal had a few cloth rags in the loop of her belt for the purpose of cleaning the hard surfaces, and she got right to work doing so.

The first thing the ethaefal had learned about cleaning hardwood floors, when she’d never cleaned any wood but the pavilion poles or the bed of a cart in her memory, was that she ought to start high, on the walls and shelves, and then work her way down to the floor.

With that in mind, Maore placed her pail of water at a poorly stocked bookcase and began to remove the books to lay them aside on the nearby desk. As she worked she thought about who may have lived in this room; it seemed fairly uninhabited, though it was frequently turned over by the housekeepers to prevent rodents from moving in and dust from settling--both fairly impossible standards, in her opinion. Rats were going to do as rats were prone to do, and if the Nitrozians weren’t using the room frequently, then cleaning alone wasn’t going to remove the dust. It was something she’d seen before in other buildings; poorly kept altars with a centimetre of accumulated dust, old rooms where your footprints stuck to the floor days after you’d left, and here a shelf of books with dusty, illegible spines and yellow paper.

Frankly, it was a bit too much for Maore. This was an affluent lifestyle she’d never experienced--and may never experience--and to see so much waste, so much excess, was a hard standard to come to terms with. What did they need so many rooms for? Why did they have so many belongings left to be forgotten?

What were these people?

The ethaefal huffed out a curse under her tongue, placing it on Rhysol’s name, because she thought he may like that sort of thing, and finished clearing out the shelves. It must have taken her ten chimes to empty it of belongings. As she’d worked, she’d experienced the occasional discomforting sense that she was being watched, a sense that checked out one time when she found her roommate sister-slave standing there. At that point they’d had a signed out conversation entirely built around miscommunication leaving Maore frustrated when she returned to work. Every other time was blamed on the same woman coming back to try and tell the ethaefal whatever she was desperate to relay, and Maore steadfastly ignored her. That could have spelled death on the Sea of Grass but in this household it was significantly less fatal. Also, it fed her petty grudge against humans.

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