Vorkosiverse: Mutie Lord

[laleia]

Title: Mutie Lord
Fandom: Vorkosiverse
Rating: PG, gen
Summary: Silvy Vale reflects on the Mutie Lord
A/N: Written for the 2008 Bujold Fest for the prompt: "Someone's point of view on Miles during the 'Mountains of Mourning.'"



When word trickled down to Silvy Vale about the mutie lord, well, we didn’t believe it at first. A mutie? For a lord? Surely it wouldn’t be allowed. And then, we didn’t know what to think. We didn’t know what to believe. The off-worlder Lady had her hand in it, no doubt.

Y’see, it wasn’t so long ago that we, my generation, the one before mine, were … dealing with mutie babies. It wasn’t so long ago that dealing with mutie babies, ensuring the purity of the genome, all that was done by the mother and wife. And it was normal, the entire dealing business.

It wasn’t so long ago that muties were hated, and feared. And even when you dealt with your mutie problem, people might look at your family askance – nobody knew which one of you passed on the mutie gene, after all.

And you expect us to believe that a right proper Vor lord, of our generation, and surely our beliefs, Count Piotr who fought so hard with and for us during the Cetagandan War, that he accepted a mutie as heir?

We learned, eventually, that the Count hadn’t, that he would not accept a spineless, bodiless, brainless, legless (what the mutie lacked, exactly, changed from story to story) in the Vorkosigan line. So even though we were proud of Lord Vorkosigan, who was Regent to the Emperor and all that, we, or at least some of the older ones, spat every time the mutie lord came up.

But then it came about that Count Piotr had accepted the mutie after all, and none of us knew what to think. It was about this time that muties were no longer … well, everyone still hated them, and everyone was still verbal about despising them, but it was no longer exactly acceptable to act on that hate.

I saw the mutie lord, once, the only one from Silvy Vale to, at the time. He wasn’t lord then, just a mutie boy who might one day be lord, and he wasn’t yet ten, and I only saw him from a distance, chattering away at the Count. He didn’t seem like some mutie, just small, and undersized, and though I knew he was ten, he didn’t look much older than six. Or at least, not much taller than six.

He was a mutie, maybe, but he was a child first, and even from far away I could see the genuine joy on his face when the Count patted him on the head, no doubt with some word of approval.

I went back to Silvy Vale and told them all, because I felt a little sorry for the boy, and told them the truth, that he was just a boy who was small for his age. But most preferred the stories with jars and tubes and perverted off-world things. No wonder, if we had such in Silvy Vale like Mara or her Ma, who I was grateful had died before she could personally march up to Vorkosigan Surleau herself and “deal” with the mutie problem.

But then I thought it all was behind us, because when it comes down to the bones of the thing, what does it matter to some poor backwater folk in hills of the Dendarii, to the hillfolk of Silvy Vale, if some mutie becomes lord or not. It wouldn’t affect us in any form more than rumors and gossip.

Then when Harra’s babe died, well, we older ones who knew Mara and knew Mara’s Ma had our guesses, and I’m sure Lem had a seed of an idea too, what kind of thing was afoot. It seemed, sometimes, only Harra didn’t, when she came to me demanding that I arrest Lem, when she surely must know deep down it wasn’t him.

Harra had been a sweet child, everyone said so, and not just because they were glad Mara had finally … had finally come up with a clean one. And maybe everyone spoiled Harra a little bit for it, out of happiness and relief and so on. Harra had never had to face certain … certain realities that her Ma had, and so when she came to me with her dead babe, I believed in my heart that the best thing to do was to lie to her. Because innocence like Harra’s is rare, and her genuine will to go out of Silvy Vale, which she had never done, to fix her babe’s mutation, that was precious and well … I didn’t want to see that innocence spoiled.

And then when she disappeared, we searched for days because we were afraid she might have gone crazy with grief and done something to herself. Lem was so distraught, and Mara I carefully watched, and everyone worried.

And then Harra came back, her eyes hard and her lips tight, and she seemed older and more pained, and she brought at her back none other than the mutie lord. The mutie lord who seemed blazing with desire for vengeance, to catch a murderer, like it was some sort of personal affront.

What would a Vor lordling like him know about the day-to-day lives of hillfolk like us, who scrape out our living from the land and live in almost squalor compared to what he gets. Even if he was a mutie, he’d probably never starved a day in his life, never watched someone die of an illness whose cure was too far away. He’d never lived our life, and yet he came to judge, to accuse us of underestimating poor Harra as if he knew anything about her and her life.

He came with his fancy horses and his fancy clothes, his hunched back and sickly size. He came as the Count’s Voice, with all that weight behind him. And on him too, I’m sure.

He came and he expected us to change, and he expected us to obey, and he expected things to be easy, because all he’d need was to find his murderer and order an execution, and it wasn’t like he’d ever have to come back again and live with the consequences of what he’d done.

This mutie lord came and we rearranged our lives for him. Or rather, he came and turned our lives upside down. He issued his orders, and watched with his glittering eyes, and dug up the poor babe’s corpse, and accused me, though not outright, of neglecting my duties. He was right.

I could not hate him, though, nor fear him. He may have been a mutie, but so far it seemed to me like that just meant he was shorter, and odder-looking, but no more odd-looking then a man shrunken with age. It was as I had seen before, but he was older now, and firmer, and seemed to bear tides and tidings of change with him.

Because I could see him trying to change us, trying to change our nature. He tried to explain, so many times, to people who would not understand this chemical interrogation stuff, how fast-penta meant he would only catch the person who had actually done it. He tried to convince Zed, who doesn’t think at all if he can help it, or at least he didn’t at age 12, to think about implications and consequences and effects, something boys rarely do until they’re men. (And sometimes not even then.)

I watched him as he reacted to everything Silvy Vale had to throw at him, from Ma Mattulich, to burning tents, to injured horses, to innocent suspects. He was Vor, through and through, genuinely concerned for the safety of my sons with one breath, and using expensive, life-saving technology all for the sake of a horse with another.

But he did something I had not thought, had never thought, possible, especially not of a not-so-mutie lord. He caught Lem Csurik, and then let him go, and then caught Ma Mattulich, and bore it all.

He kept his word when asked, and showed mercy when important. He fished out of Mara the truth the village had been keeping secret for her, and managed to coax from her a little of the younger, sweeter Mara I knew before she had been forced to kill her own children by a cruel, hard woman of a mother.

Because say what you will about fast-penta, what I saw during that interrogation was the force of the young lord’s personality at work. I watched as he forced out of Mara her confession of past crimes, past murders, past babies; watched as he tore from her what she truly thought and felt and not just what was instilled in her; watched as he made it all work through sheer force of will.

And then, in the end, when he could have had Mara killed, and been well within his rights to do so, he chose such a more elegant way.

Our new lord, he may not be as tall as some folk, or as strong as others, but he seems to do all right. Others may whisper about his mutie background, but we in Silvy Vale, we have a powersat and we have a school, and we have a daily reminder of what the new lord has done for us, has taught us.

He may be a mutie lord, I guess, but he’s our mutie lord.

Comments

[a-boleyn.livejournal.com]

A powerful, sophisticated story told from the blunt point of view of a simple man. Even in such a brief form you get the emotional impact of hearing about women forced to kill their own imperfect children and go on living each day.