Fifteen minutes later the chief cook arrived, the Sister in charge of the kitchen, a large, strong-looking woman, handsome instead of pretty. Arrived well ahead of her usual hours, and came out to the woodpile to peer at Varia in the darkness. The woman’s lips were as thin and twisted as Sarkia’s had been at Varia’s delivery.
Her voice was rough. “What’s wrong with you?” she demanded.
Voice dead, face wooden, Varia told her, and began shivering again, violently. The woman took her arm and steered her brusquely into the kitchen where there was light, squinted at the black eye, the split and swollen lips. “Take off your shift,” she ordered.
Varia did, without emotion.
“Good God!” The cook looked at the myriad black bruises and bloody spots on thighs and buttocks, arms and breasts, for when Varia had gone into shock, the Tigers had pinched and struck her, even jabbed her with knife tips, trying to elicit movement. “Here, girl,” the woman said, and helped her onto a table. There, by the light of an oil lamp, she examined her as a gynecologist might have. Varia was literally raw, fore and aft, despite being slimed with semen, and undoubtedly had vaginal and rectal lesions that could become infected. Swearing, the woman turned to the now-shivering girl who’d fetched her.
“Go outside and bring me the guard.”
The girl ran, and the guard came in, looking worried.
“Where did you get her?” the cook demanded.
He told her.
“That clone! Go back there and wake up the sergeant.” The guard blanched; he was scarcely out of adolescence himself. “Tell that pile of shit his mother wants him in this kitchen within ten minutes, or I’ll see his balls on my butcher block.”
She hadn’t raised her voice, but the intensity behind it allowed no noncompliance. As the guard reached the door, she shouted after him, “Make sure you tell him exactly what I said.”
Then she sent Varia with the adolescent girl, hobbling off barefoot to the infirmary.
She was in the infirmary for three days. On the second, the chief cook came to see her. “I talked to the sergeant,” the woman said. “He’s one of my sons. He said Idri told him they should do whatever they wanted with you, the rougher the better. So when Idri came in to breakfast, I was waiting for her. I took her to the woodpile and shook hell out of her. She took it, too.” The woman’s smile was grim. “I was bred to produce Tigers. I could twist her head off if I wanted, and she knew I was on the edge. All she could say was, she was going to report me to the Dynast.”
The cook laughed, a dry bark. “I’m eighty-eight years old, girl. At my age you don’t have many years left before decline, and you think a bit, some of us, most of us, of how your points will balance after death; what penalties and penances might await you. Makes it easier to take the bull by the horns. In midmorning the Dynast called me to her. I told her what you’d looked like, and what my son had said.
“She didn’t say a thing, but I saw her jaw tighten. Later her secretary stopped to tell me not to worry about anything Idri might want to do.” Again she snorted. “As if I would. Sarkia told her she’d wanted you punished, not killed. And ordered her to latrine detail for a week; she’ll love that, high and mighty as she sees herself.
“Then she had your sergeant in. Not that she raked him over the coals like I did; he’s just a Tiger, the way she designed him. But she set him straight. You’ll find things better when you go back.”
The cook left then. And of all she’d said, the words that stuck in Varia’s mind were four: “When you go back.” She’d have to go back to that place.
8: A Plan Enacted
When Varia left the infirmary at the end of the third day, she was in better condition physically than she’d expected to be. She’d been enough years on Farside that she’d come to judge healing by the standards there. In the Cloister, what they lacked in science, they more than made up for with healing touches, and formulas spoken instead of manufactured.