(no subject)
Title: Gemwings among Orchids, Part 1
Email: tori.siikanen@gmail.com
Fandom: Tanith Lee's Biting the Sun
Rating: PG
Content: Parties in books are never successful - anyone ever notice that?
Disclaimer: This is fanfic. You should read the original books. They're good. This post is a glossary to the slang, and this post is the first chapter.
12.
Gemwings among Orchids, Part 1
Junaya throws groshing parties. Actually they're so popular that she doesn't flash or announce them - she picks a partner to host a party with her and they each tell one person, and let the wandering tracks of rumour do it for them.
I hosted a party with her once, but I can't ever remember her doing it with someone she'd married. Obviously sharing ten rings with Argent was insumatt. There could be twelve people there, or thousands - it wouldn't do to underestimate.
So I spent between second and fourth meal stealing jewellery and ornaments-I managed to steal a filigreed groin-shield, and I'm afraid there was no stopping my larceny after that, and then I settled down to a five course feast in Blue Sky, since I'd missed so many meals - good solid nut steak and toasted potato root flavoured with some kind of green herb and spicy oil, and soufflé--light as clouds, lightly spiced, and oily with melted rella. I'd be dumping Joyousness on that by evening, so I ate generously, resting between courses to eat a little more. I practically waddled off the platform, and glided back to House.
I should have checked the recluse switch, but I really was too busy looking at all the changes to House - I wandered this way and that, eyeing every single shade of the colour change (I know the renovators use computers to make sure everything coordinates correctly, but I still have to judge it with my own flawed optics) and scuffing my bare feet through the new carpets when Fisk appeared, standing right in the middle of the bath-room where I had been drawing up a bath.
"Going somewhere tonight?" she asked, eyeing the heap of jewels on the counter. Really, what a question. Junaya's giving a party - of course I'm going somewhere tonight. But her image looked faintly disappointed, with that you're the sixth person I've tried expression.
"Of course I am, you promok," I said breezily, dropping my robe and getting in the bath. Fisk leered, but it was just for show. "Junaya's giving a party tonight."
Her image flinched. "No one told me."
"I just told you," I said, just a little exasperated. "I only found out this morning, myself."
"Who's helping her?"
I selected scents from the bathing array. Honey, and osmanthus, rose, and…too feminine. "Argent." I touched on vetiver smoke, considered patchouli.
"What? Farathoom, what a floop-show. She's hosting a party with someone out-circle?"
"Her husband," I pointed out, and let the bath massage my limbs with scented oil. "and that out-circle is looking to become in-circle."
"Yes, I know you've made friends with that half-masked male," Fisk grumbled. "And Kina came round blabbing about lightswords and the Adventure Palace. All so groshingly cozy."
"Have you met any of them yet?" I asked, as the bath wound heated linen over my oiled flesh.
"No."
"You'll like Bel, I think." Or hate her, since Bel had a nasty streak to match Fisk any unit of the vrek.
"How many Jang will be there?"
"Who knows? The only thing we know is that the Jang who weren't there will kick themselves for not being there when they hear about it in the morning." The bath smoothed massaging fingers over my brow, and Fisk was interfering with my calming vetiver treatment. "So put on your best jewels and I'll see you tonight."
I disengaged the call and ordered the recluse switch.
*
The first room I walked into at Junaya's house had a violet floor; I caught glimpses of it between the bodies. Nude, half dressed, re-dressed, writhing and rolling together in the center, not knowing who was touching who and not caring. on the edges, people rested in pairs and trios, smoking and watching the flesh before them.
One of them looked at me.
"Junaya and her friends are downstairs, dear," the male said.
"Onk, silly me." I backed out of the threshold, pressing cool hands to my face. Junaya's makers were giving a party too, apparently, an orgy that was the core of the private celebrations of Older People. All that crawling around on the floor and all of them unmarried... it was more than a little kinky to me. Did all Older People do that? Better to stay Jang.
I padded down the stairway to the lower floor, and got halfway down before upper-tonal drilled between my ears. I giggled and bent over the railing, peering at the crowd of groshing Jang, enamelled and bejewelled in their finest, swaying to music and laughter, drinks clasped in their pretty paws, some of them apologetically licking spilled droplets off a handsome or beautiful shoulder.
The ecstasy, apparently, had been layered pretty thick in the wine. I burbled with mirth as I slid down the railing, caught up a goblet brimmed with sapphire wine and quaffed half of it at a go before raising it in salute to the crowd. Many of the females recognized me and raised theirs back. Most of the males I saw were lightsword fighters, and shunned or nodded, depending on their affiliation.
I crossed through that room and went out into the garden dome, relieved of the pressure of upper-ear hilarity. Junaya and Argent were holding court, seated on a garden bench within the halo of gemwings, painted to glow blue or green or golden, chasing each other in puzzlement and attraction. I gasped like a child to see them rioting among the orchid-trees, lighting occasionally on someone's hair - the Jang had made a game of it, and the one who had a gemwing land was usually promptly kissed by a nearby observer, to gather up some of their luck.
A Jang girl in cloud-pink and sunrise bronze offered me a tray of sweets, and I took it from her. She selected a few niceties and walked away, leaving me with the burden. No Q-R servants, then? I moved through the crowd, hoping to catch someone's eye so they could take the tray and I could pick some of that Toasted Angelfood, and then keep my eyes down until I felt like being of service.
Fisk caught my eye, and I smiled extra-widely as I moved toward her, giving her the tray and a kiss on the cheek. "You came after all."
"I did. There's quite a crowd here, wouldn't you say? I don't know a tenth of them. Word must have really gotten around."
Farathoom, not this again. "It seems. Obviously we've got to come out of hiding more often, or else we'll miss all the news."
"I'm not glamorous enough to hide and have people wonder after me," she said, and thankfully I'd just stuffed a pine-apple cactus tart into my mouth so I didn't have to answer, just waggle my eyebrows in frowning disapproval. She waited until I'd gulped it down, and while I sipped more wine.
"There's a male over there with cinnamon hair," I murmured low, "and he's eyeing you."
"Probably he'd like something to eat," she gruffed, but turned to search for whoever it was. Really, if Fisk had been acting like this it's no wonder no one had told her about the party. Nobody likes a thralldrap.
Maybe I shouldn't have told her, either...
But I couldn't betray a circle mate like that.
I turned around, surveying the crowd for a familiar face, but this was one of those parties where every Jang in Four-BEE managed to hear about it. I made my way across the garden, dodging a gang of males who were enthusiastically shoving everyone into the serpent pool, and Jang were shrieking with glee as the current carried them to a water-fall to land in a deeper pool made up to be like a lagoon. I followed the switching pathway, inhaling the orchid-trees, mixed with the diabolical smoke scent of my bath.
"Attlevey," came a feminine voice from beneath the trees.
"Er, Attlevey," I said, and watched a moonlight pale girl slide out from the shadows. Was her hair blue? It shone blue, under the floating lights. She smiled at me and took my arm, since of course I would escort her down the path, and of course be absolutely gallant to her. Really, the fashionable mannerisms give females all sorts of advantage - they can act like they're spun of ice of crystal one second, and trounce you around the ears the next.
I certainly had taken advantage of it in the past.
I covered her hand with mine and slowed my pace to one she could navigate in a glittering sheath and gemmed sandals, the heels raised on a slender spire. The very edge of fashion, that--and her body was just groshing. She'd opted, I could see, for eyes in Opal Dawn - I approved that choice, but who could resist those eyes once they saw them in the design catalogue?
A small buffet spread on the clearing below us, and mellower Jang lounged and smoked, their clothes drying under puffs of warm air. Yana swivelled his head around, looked at me, looked at her.
"I see they got you moving again," he greeted, all bluff and hearty.
"I see your arm's working fine," I returned, smiling only slightly.
"Who's your derisann friend?" he asked, ogling her openly now.
"I met her on the path," I said.
"He was kind enough to help me get down," she said, and swayed ever so gently away from me. I slipped back as they started a circling dance of flirtation, and wound my way further down the path, away from that crowd to another, gathered around something that filled them with fascination.
"It's drumdik," one of them declared. "That you can stand around and watch that--you're zaradann, all of you. Gone completely round the point."
"It's History," one of them protested. "This really happened."
"That's what makes it so awful," the first one said.
I stepped right in the middle of this dalika and asked, "What is?"
"Here." A portable picture-vision was thrust in my hands, torpid and silver. I touched a button, and the scene sprang up and played.
Purple grass, and jade trees - Ilex park? And a duel, surrounded by a ring of watching Jang - look at their clothes, the cut, the flares around the ankles on the trousers of the males, the long nails and spangled tunics of the females - this was rorls out of date.
But I knew those trees. And I knew that circling dance.
The matchup was completely unfair. One of the males was completely enormous, wielding a gigantic axe. His opponent was slight, pale, with curling black hair, and dressed so outlandishly - so covered - that I couldn't believe it. He was a misfit, all right, first class abnormal. His weapon was a slender, light blade.
Power-Axe struck, and a line of red blossomed across Rapier's chest. I blinked. Harnesses didn't do that. But the rapier fighter took on an expression of such rage and ferocity that my hands tightened on the display table in the instant that I realized--
The rapier struck, and entered the muscular giant's body. The rapier fighter stepped back, and red dripped from his blade--
Those weapons. Were real.
I'd just watched a man killed by another. Killed by violence.
The display froze on the final tableaux - the rapier fighter, frozen in berserker's fury, the crowd, surging forward in a lust of victory, his victim, staring at his hand and the blood there as if he couldn't quite make sense of it.
"What is this?" I asked.
"That is the origin of lightsword-duels," The angry male said, "And Four-BEE's only killing, recorded by the Flash center. The winner was exiled. The loser was the star witness in his trial."
"Of course, because no one actually dies--"
But this jade-haired male would brook no interruption from a gang of apologists. "The Jang demanded that they be allowed to duel, after that, to make it legal. Nobody could really die, after all." His tone soured the first rationalization our minds had grasped, once we had seen the blood, that blade stabbed into flesh. "The Committee chose the path of lesser hypocrisy and invented the lightswords as a substitute, so you apes can jolly about pretending to kill each other. But that's the truth of the game. Blood," he said, stabbing the display to run the sequence again, "and exile."
I watched it again. The fight was over in just a few seconds. The smaller one, the one with the rapier - he knew what he was doing. The hulking axe-fighter didn't have a chance, really.
I gave the display back and walked away, taking the first path I could find.
Email: tori.siikanen@gmail.com
Fandom: Tanith Lee's Biting the Sun
Rating: PG
Content: Parties in books are never successful - anyone ever notice that?
Disclaimer: This is fanfic. You should read the original books. They're good. This post is a glossary to the slang, and this post is the first chapter.
12.
Gemwings among Orchids, Part 1
Junaya throws groshing parties. Actually they're so popular that she doesn't flash or announce them - she picks a partner to host a party with her and they each tell one person, and let the wandering tracks of rumour do it for them.
I hosted a party with her once, but I can't ever remember her doing it with someone she'd married. Obviously sharing ten rings with Argent was insumatt. There could be twelve people there, or thousands - it wouldn't do to underestimate.
So I spent between second and fourth meal stealing jewellery and ornaments-I managed to steal a filigreed groin-shield, and I'm afraid there was no stopping my larceny after that, and then I settled down to a five course feast in Blue Sky, since I'd missed so many meals - good solid nut steak and toasted potato root flavoured with some kind of green herb and spicy oil, and soufflé--light as clouds, lightly spiced, and oily with melted rella. I'd be dumping Joyousness on that by evening, so I ate generously, resting between courses to eat a little more. I practically waddled off the platform, and glided back to House.
I should have checked the recluse switch, but I really was too busy looking at all the changes to House - I wandered this way and that, eyeing every single shade of the colour change (I know the renovators use computers to make sure everything coordinates correctly, but I still have to judge it with my own flawed optics) and scuffing my bare feet through the new carpets when Fisk appeared, standing right in the middle of the bath-room where I had been drawing up a bath.
"Going somewhere tonight?" she asked, eyeing the heap of jewels on the counter. Really, what a question. Junaya's giving a party - of course I'm going somewhere tonight. But her image looked faintly disappointed, with that you're the sixth person I've tried expression.
"Of course I am, you promok," I said breezily, dropping my robe and getting in the bath. Fisk leered, but it was just for show. "Junaya's giving a party tonight."
Her image flinched. "No one told me."
"I just told you," I said, just a little exasperated. "I only found out this morning, myself."
"Who's helping her?"
I selected scents from the bathing array. Honey, and osmanthus, rose, and…too feminine. "Argent." I touched on vetiver smoke, considered patchouli.
"What? Farathoom, what a floop-show. She's hosting a party with someone out-circle?"
"Her husband," I pointed out, and let the bath massage my limbs with scented oil. "and that out-circle is looking to become in-circle."
"Yes, I know you've made friends with that half-masked male," Fisk grumbled. "And Kina came round blabbing about lightswords and the Adventure Palace. All so groshingly cozy."
"Have you met any of them yet?" I asked, as the bath wound heated linen over my oiled flesh.
"No."
"You'll like Bel, I think." Or hate her, since Bel had a nasty streak to match Fisk any unit of the vrek.
"How many Jang will be there?"
"Who knows? The only thing we know is that the Jang who weren't there will kick themselves for not being there when they hear about it in the morning." The bath smoothed massaging fingers over my brow, and Fisk was interfering with my calming vetiver treatment. "So put on your best jewels and I'll see you tonight."
I disengaged the call and ordered the recluse switch.
*
The first room I walked into at Junaya's house had a violet floor; I caught glimpses of it between the bodies. Nude, half dressed, re-dressed, writhing and rolling together in the center, not knowing who was touching who and not caring. on the edges, people rested in pairs and trios, smoking and watching the flesh before them.
One of them looked at me.
"Junaya and her friends are downstairs, dear," the male said.
"Onk, silly me." I backed out of the threshold, pressing cool hands to my face. Junaya's makers were giving a party too, apparently, an orgy that was the core of the private celebrations of Older People. All that crawling around on the floor and all of them unmarried... it was more than a little kinky to me. Did all Older People do that? Better to stay Jang.
I padded down the stairway to the lower floor, and got halfway down before upper-tonal drilled between my ears. I giggled and bent over the railing, peering at the crowd of groshing Jang, enamelled and bejewelled in their finest, swaying to music and laughter, drinks clasped in their pretty paws, some of them apologetically licking spilled droplets off a handsome or beautiful shoulder.
The ecstasy, apparently, had been layered pretty thick in the wine. I burbled with mirth as I slid down the railing, caught up a goblet brimmed with sapphire wine and quaffed half of it at a go before raising it in salute to the crowd. Many of the females recognized me and raised theirs back. Most of the males I saw were lightsword fighters, and shunned or nodded, depending on their affiliation.
I crossed through that room and went out into the garden dome, relieved of the pressure of upper-ear hilarity. Junaya and Argent were holding court, seated on a garden bench within the halo of gemwings, painted to glow blue or green or golden, chasing each other in puzzlement and attraction. I gasped like a child to see them rioting among the orchid-trees, lighting occasionally on someone's hair - the Jang had made a game of it, and the one who had a gemwing land was usually promptly kissed by a nearby observer, to gather up some of their luck.
A Jang girl in cloud-pink and sunrise bronze offered me a tray of sweets, and I took it from her. She selected a few niceties and walked away, leaving me with the burden. No Q-R servants, then? I moved through the crowd, hoping to catch someone's eye so they could take the tray and I could pick some of that Toasted Angelfood, and then keep my eyes down until I felt like being of service.
Fisk caught my eye, and I smiled extra-widely as I moved toward her, giving her the tray and a kiss on the cheek. "You came after all."
"I did. There's quite a crowd here, wouldn't you say? I don't know a tenth of them. Word must have really gotten around."
Farathoom, not this again. "It seems. Obviously we've got to come out of hiding more often, or else we'll miss all the news."
"I'm not glamorous enough to hide and have people wonder after me," she said, and thankfully I'd just stuffed a pine-apple cactus tart into my mouth so I didn't have to answer, just waggle my eyebrows in frowning disapproval. She waited until I'd gulped it down, and while I sipped more wine.
"There's a male over there with cinnamon hair," I murmured low, "and he's eyeing you."
"Probably he'd like something to eat," she gruffed, but turned to search for whoever it was. Really, if Fisk had been acting like this it's no wonder no one had told her about the party. Nobody likes a thralldrap.
Maybe I shouldn't have told her, either...
But I couldn't betray a circle mate like that.
I turned around, surveying the crowd for a familiar face, but this was one of those parties where every Jang in Four-BEE managed to hear about it. I made my way across the garden, dodging a gang of males who were enthusiastically shoving everyone into the serpent pool, and Jang were shrieking with glee as the current carried them to a water-fall to land in a deeper pool made up to be like a lagoon. I followed the switching pathway, inhaling the orchid-trees, mixed with the diabolical smoke scent of my bath.
"Attlevey," came a feminine voice from beneath the trees.
"Er, Attlevey," I said, and watched a moonlight pale girl slide out from the shadows. Was her hair blue? It shone blue, under the floating lights. She smiled at me and took my arm, since of course I would escort her down the path, and of course be absolutely gallant to her. Really, the fashionable mannerisms give females all sorts of advantage - they can act like they're spun of ice of crystal one second, and trounce you around the ears the next.
I certainly had taken advantage of it in the past.
I covered her hand with mine and slowed my pace to one she could navigate in a glittering sheath and gemmed sandals, the heels raised on a slender spire. The very edge of fashion, that--and her body was just groshing. She'd opted, I could see, for eyes in Opal Dawn - I approved that choice, but who could resist those eyes once they saw them in the design catalogue?
A small buffet spread on the clearing below us, and mellower Jang lounged and smoked, their clothes drying under puffs of warm air. Yana swivelled his head around, looked at me, looked at her.
"I see they got you moving again," he greeted, all bluff and hearty.
"I see your arm's working fine," I returned, smiling only slightly.
"Who's your derisann friend?" he asked, ogling her openly now.
"I met her on the path," I said.
"He was kind enough to help me get down," she said, and swayed ever so gently away from me. I slipped back as they started a circling dance of flirtation, and wound my way further down the path, away from that crowd to another, gathered around something that filled them with fascination.
"It's drumdik," one of them declared. "That you can stand around and watch that--you're zaradann, all of you. Gone completely round the point."
"It's History," one of them protested. "This really happened."
"That's what makes it so awful," the first one said.
I stepped right in the middle of this dalika and asked, "What is?"
"Here." A portable picture-vision was thrust in my hands, torpid and silver. I touched a button, and the scene sprang up and played.
Purple grass, and jade trees - Ilex park? And a duel, surrounded by a ring of watching Jang - look at their clothes, the cut, the flares around the ankles on the trousers of the males, the long nails and spangled tunics of the females - this was rorls out of date.
But I knew those trees. And I knew that circling dance.
The matchup was completely unfair. One of the males was completely enormous, wielding a gigantic axe. His opponent was slight, pale, with curling black hair, and dressed so outlandishly - so covered - that I couldn't believe it. He was a misfit, all right, first class abnormal. His weapon was a slender, light blade.
Power-Axe struck, and a line of red blossomed across Rapier's chest. I blinked. Harnesses didn't do that. But the rapier fighter took on an expression of such rage and ferocity that my hands tightened on the display table in the instant that I realized--
The rapier struck, and entered the muscular giant's body. The rapier fighter stepped back, and red dripped from his blade--
Those weapons. Were real.
I'd just watched a man killed by another. Killed by violence.
The display froze on the final tableaux - the rapier fighter, frozen in berserker's fury, the crowd, surging forward in a lust of victory, his victim, staring at his hand and the blood there as if he couldn't quite make sense of it.
"What is this?" I asked.
"That is the origin of lightsword-duels," The angry male said, "And Four-BEE's only killing, recorded by the Flash center. The winner was exiled. The loser was the star witness in his trial."
"Of course, because no one actually dies--"
But this jade-haired male would brook no interruption from a gang of apologists. "The Jang demanded that they be allowed to duel, after that, to make it legal. Nobody could really die, after all." His tone soured the first rationalization our minds had grasped, once we had seen the blood, that blade stabbed into flesh. "The Committee chose the path of lesser hypocrisy and invented the lightswords as a substitute, so you apes can jolly about pretending to kill each other. But that's the truth of the game. Blood," he said, stabbing the display to run the sequence again, "and exile."
I watched it again. The fight was over in just a few seconds. The smaller one, the one with the rapier - he knew what he was doing. The hulking axe-fighter didn't have a chance, really.
I gave the display back and walked away, taking the first path I could find.