Papa had warned Mouche about this, but he still turned red from embarrassment. He took everything off but his crotcher and his sandals, which seemed to make him bare enough for her purposes when she came poking at him, like a farmer judging a pig.
“Your hands and feet are in terrible condition,” she said. “Your hair is marvelous in color and fairly good in shape. Your eyes and face are good. The leg and back muscles are all wrong, of course. Farm work does not create a balanced body.”
“As Madame says,” Papa murmured, while Mouche shifted from foot to foot and tried to figure out what to do with his hands.
Madame jerked her head, a quick nod. “Well, all in all, I will stick to my bargain. The hands and feet will be soaked and scrubbed and brought into good appearance. The muscles will yield to proper exercise. A score ten vobati, I said, did I not? A score for the wife, ten in keeping for the boy.”
“As Madame recalls,” Papa murmured again.
“And is his mother prepared to leave him now?”
Papa looked up then, his eyes filling. He had not planned on this, and Mouche pitied him even more than he pitied himself.
“Can I not have time to say good-bye, Madame?” he begged.
“If your mother allows, of course, boy. Take two days. Be here first thing in the morning on fifthday. First thing, now.”
She unbuttoned her wrists and rolled up her sleeves once more, giving him a look that was almost kindly as he struggled into his clothes.
“You’re coming into good hands, Mouche. We honor our annuities, which some Houses only claim to provide. We don’t sell to sadists. And you won’t hate the life. You’ll miss Mama and Papa, yes, but you’ll get on.” She turned away, then back, to add, “No pets, boy. You know that.”
“Yes, Madame.” He gulped a little. He no longer had a pet, though the thought of Duster could still make him cry.
She asked, almost as an afterthought, “Can you read, Mouche?”
“Yes, Madame.” The village school wasn’t much, but he had gone every evening after chores, for five long years. That was when he was expected to be the heir, of course. Heirs went to school, though supernumes often didn’t. Mouche could read and print a good hand and do his numbers well enough not to mistake four vibela for a vobati.
“Good. That will shorten your training by a good deal.”
Then she was gone from them, and they too were gone from her, and soon they were alone and Papa had dropped his veil and the dust of the road was puffing up between their toes as they walked the long way south, on the west side of River Giles, to the tributary stream that tumbled down from the western terraces through their own farm. All the long valley of the Giles was farmland. On the east, where the grain and pasture farmers held the land, ancient lava tubes lay side by side, lined up north and south like straws in a broom, their tops worn away, their sides rasped into mere welts by the windblown soil, each tube eastward a bit higher than the last, making a shallow flight that climbed all the way to the Ratback Range at the foot of the scarp. On the west, where the g’Darbos farm was, the terraces stepped steeply up to the mountains, and the fields were small and flinty, good for olives and grapes.
“Why are girls worth so much, Papa?” asked Mouche, who had always known they were but had never wondered over the whys of it until now.
“Because they are more capable than men,” said Papa.
“Why are they?”
“It’s their hormones. They have hormones that change, day to day, so that for some parts of every month they are emotional and for some parts they are coldly logical, and for some parts they are intuitive, and they may bring all these various sensitivities to meet any problem. We poor fellows, Mouche, we have hormones that are pretty much the same all the time. We push along steadily enough, often in a fine frenzy, but we haven’t the flexibility of women.”