The Beggar And The Merchant's Daughter

The boy is always hungry.

It's a reliable part of Aza's life, the boy's hunger, like the alarm's oh-six-hundred chirruping that wakes her for morning prayer, or her father's daily grumbling at the unfairness of the circumstances that left a faithful, pious family stranded here, at the mercy of the godless brutes who owned Sahtogas, now.

Aza taps the alarm button without looking at it, nods agreement to her father without listening to him, hides a thick slice of bread and a hunk of casein protein in her pocket to slip to the boy when she sees him without thinking too hard about the fact that she's taking food from her family's table when she does it.

Her father never spends enough time in the kitchen to know how much food there should be; her mother, Aza thinks, must at least suspect.  Still, her mother keeps her eyes on the soapy dishes in the basin every morning as Aza's hand steals into the 'chiller, and there's always just a little bit extra there on the shelves.

Usually, Aza sees the boy when she steps out the back door of her father's shop to pile the empty boxes from the day's delivery in the service corridor for reclamation to pick up.  He waits for her, these days, lurking just far enough away to escape if it's Aza's father instead who opens that door. Her father threw a shoe at the boy, once, with the strong arm and good aim of a man who played daz-ball for his town in his youth, and the boy is rightfully wary.

When he sees it's Aza, the boy scoots closer, snatches the food from her outstretched hand with an expression that manages to combine hunger and disdain.  He never says thank you. Indeed, Aza thinks his manner is more that of a holder deigning to lower himself to accept a gift from an eager supplicant.   It offended her, at first, that lack of becoming gratitude, until she realized that even a poor scrap of a tunnel urchin has his dignity: acknowledging his dependence on her charity is more than he can bear.

If he has a name, he isn't willing to tell her what it is.  Aza passes idle moments in the shop speculating what it might be, or what she'd name him if it was up to her. Some days he looks like a Jered to her, especially if one of her father's occasional absences from the shop has let her sneak the boy inside to wash himself at the basin in the comfort room. A little soap and water quickly reveals the pallor of Sebiestor heritage.  Other times, sitting on the pile of boxes outside the back door with one foot tucked up, rolling a cigarette out of stubs he's scavenged, he looks exactly like a smaller, dirtier version of the portraits of Khanid the Second, and she can't think of him as anything other than Ishuniel.

He never uses her name, either, even though she's told it to him. One more way he insists on their equal footing, in those few minutes of snatched conversation in the narrow corridor, the beggar boy and the merchant's daughter.

He told her once that his father is a capsuleer. It's clearly a lie: he's not nearly young enough, for one thing, and for another, even a well-brought-up Amarr girl knows pod-pilots are infertile. Aza's mother says it's because God won't permit the abominable living dead to reproduce. Aza herself has done some reading and suspects it has something to do with the technology.

God permits a great deal, in her experience. She can't imagine He'd draw the line at capsuleers breeding like fedos.

The boy's podder paternity is, Aza suspects, like her own fervent conviction at the age of fourteen that she had been adopted and any day now her rich, beautiful, and most definitely not store-keeper real parents would appear and whisk her away from a life which already promised to have little room for anything outside cranky customers, dilatory suppliers and a dutiful marriage to a suitable boy.

The boy is not suitable, would not be even if a capsuleer father did show up to shower him with wealth. He is not pious, for one thing, and Aza suspects from his wry sideways grin when one of her mother's platitudes trips off her tongue that he's not likely to become so. And even if God filled his heart with the light of revelation, he still wouldn't be Amarr: Sebiestor and something is Aza's best guess.

The something could be pure House Sarum, and it still wouldn't change Aza's father's mind. Filthy animals is the kindest thing she's ever heard him say about the Minmatar, even before the Tribal Liberation Fleet swept through the Bleak Lands, rolled up the Crusade's resistance and became the new rulers of this and countless other systems.  Amarr bowing to Brutor, to Vherokior, to Sebiestor? It's more than just offensive to Aza's father: it breaks the rules of Divine order.

No, the boy is not and never will be suitable.  Aza knows it. The boy knows it too, legging it along the cramped corridor if a noise inside heralds interruption.  

He's always there the next day, though, with his stories of parts of the station Aza's never been, will never be.

The docks, where great pressure doors hide the vast ships of the capsuleers, where the bustling throng of crew and dockhands, people and vehicles, weave around and past each other in a chaotic dance, only to part miraculously when a man or woman with metal plugs at the back of their neck and a distant, dead-eyed stare strides through.

The euphemistically-named 'Recreation Row', a tangle of tunnels not far from the docks where scantily-clad men and women lean seductively in doorways, where fourteen different songs can be heard all at once blaring from bars, and the unwary passer-by can find themselves flattened by an unwanted customer sent flying by the impassive thugs who keep order where station security won't go.

The hollow at the station's heart where the rules of God and gravity do not run, where a single step can send you soaring through the air in a tumbling arc.

The wide corridor close to the reactors where the heat all but makes the walls themselves sweat, where the shaman on the station gather their people together for the prayers and rituals of their people, handed down through generations of exile.

Or made up on the spot, the boy says with a matter-of-factness that horrifies Aza.

No, he is not pious, even by the standards of his own heretic people.

He goes on being impious and grimy, Sebiestor and something, and always, always hungry, day after day, until the day Aza opens the back door to the shop with her foot, arms full of boxes now empty of their electronic gadgets and her pocket full of food, and he is not there.

She waits for him, as long as she dares, that day, the next, the day after.

The day after that.

It's a dangerous life, in the tunnels, living off-register. She's seen the boy's bruises, from time to time, lips cut by a fist crushing them against his teeth, eye swollen and purple and the white turned bright red from leaking blood.

It's a dangerous life, in the tunnels, and he's just a boy, not much older than she is.

She goes on taking food every morning, although her heart gives a painful shiver every time she closes her fingers around a lump of chilled protein. She goes on waiting for him, every day.

He might come back, she thinks. And if I'm not here, he'll think I've forgotten him.


And never come again.

She cries every night, in the darkness of her bedroom, face pressed to the pillow to muffle the shuddering gasp of her sobs, fists clenched so tightly her nails score bloody marks in the palms of her hands.

She keeps the face she turns to her parents carefully blank.

Her mother tells her, one day, that they have found a husband for her. Morabah Hiela, his name is, a good match, and most importantly he's from Ahala. Aza will go to live with him there. Unspoken is the fact that after a little while, she will be able to prevail on her just a little bit older new husband to bring her parents to join them.  

Yes, Mater, Aza says. Her mother takes indifference to be obedience, and kisses the top of her head. You've always been a good girl.

Aza makes herself smile, and when her mother turns back to the dishes, tucks a hunk of bread in her pocket.

The boy doesn't come for it that day, either. 

She waits for him until her father's raised voice summons her back inside.  They have customers, which is good, but these are not ones her father wants to deal with himself.  Half of them are Brutor, each Brutor taking up twice as much space as an ordinary person, heads brushing the ceiling, shoulders so wide it seems a deep breath would see them burst the walls. They loom over her father, trying to buy something in a language her father has always called jibber-jabber and refused to learn.  Aza has to take a second glance to realize there are others there as well, Sebiestor, a Vherokior, almost invisible among their giant comrades. 

All their jackets have the logo of the TLF.

It's less shameful for a girl to deal with Minmatar as equals than it is for a man, in Aza's father's way of reasoning, so as always when they have that kind of customers, Aza's father lets Aza serve them.   They want data-pads, mostly, the bulk of the family's business: it's cheaper to buy them here in the Bleaks than in more civilized places and ships' crews can be very popular with friends and family with a bag full of electronics.    Aza shows them the different types, letting her nose wrinkle with confected disdain when she takes the cheaper models out from the display case. As usual, they opt for their best-selling, mid-range model. She puts through the sales and wraps up the boxes for them, keeping her eyes on her busy hands as one particularly tall Brutor tries to get her comm ID and suggests dinner at The Mexallon Meal. 

"Leave her alone,  Alger," one of the Sebbies says. "Can't you see she's Amarr?"

Aza does look up at that, a hot retort almost on her lips. 

It dies when the young Sebiestor man with capsuleer implants on his neck smiles, and adds, "Besides, if she's hungry, I bet she has a slice of bread in her pocket."

Not Sebiestor, at that, Aza can see now. Sebiestor and something.

Her hand moves without her conscious thought, slipping into her pocket and taking out the crumbling, slightly warm hunk of bread, and she holds it out to him, to her boy, a beggar no longer.

His hand closes around hers, not to take the bread, his fingers pale and soft with clean and shining nails, and he smiles.

"This is Aza," he says, not to her, because after all she knows her own name.  "I told you about her, father."

Someone is saying something about Thank you and trying to get back here for a long time and the war. Aza thinks it must be the father, must be one of the other Sebiestor, one who also wears the mark of capsuleers on his neck. After all, he never claimed his father was a capsuleer when he was born. And they say the aptitude runs in the genes. 

She cannot tear her gaze away to turn and see, can't stop looking at the boy, her boy, taller than she'd last seen him, cleaner, too, smiling at her with his warm hand still closed around hers.

My boy. My unsuitable, beautiful boy.

For all the times she's thought about what she'd say to him if he ever came back, the words that come out of her mouth are ones she'd never planned. 

"I'm getting married," she tells him.

She doesn't expect him to smile at that, but he does. "Then you're not married yet?" he says.

Aza smiles back, shaking her head, scattering tears over the top of the display case. "No," she says. "I'm not married yet."

"I have to go back to Ammold," he tells her. "I've only just started my training. I have to go back tomorrow."

She wants to die, then, wants the station to explode, wants the sun to go nova, wants the whole Cluster to convulse and suck itself through a wormhole into the impossible space beyond. The bread crumbles in her hand, and she takes a deep breath and manages to say on a rush of tears, "I will miss you."

His hand tightens on hers. "Come with me."

To Ammold, deep in Republic space.  With a capsuleer, damned for eternity.  "I can't."

"Aza," he says, with that familiar, sideways grin. "I can steer ships with my thoughts. You can do anything, if you put your mind to it."

The last crumbs slip from her fingers and patter gently to the floor.

"Goodbye," she says, and the boy's smile fades, and then returns at full wattage when she adds, "Pater. I'll write."

Aza steps around the counter, holding the boy's hand tightly in hers. Her father's protest dies away half-spoken as the hulking Brutor close around her.

"Don't be frightened," the boy says to her. "It'll be fine, I promise."

It will be many things, Aza knows already. Terrifying, dangerous, wonderful, lonely, exciting, nerve-wracking, amazing  ...

It will not be fine.

They are outside the shop. 

They are walking down the corridor in the direction of the docks. 

They are already further from home than Aza has ever been. 

Aza holds the hand of her beautiful boy and goes into exile without looking back.