Leeltick, at sixteen suns, found herself beginning to do the real work of being Sho-Cheet’s primary servant: getting for Sho-Cheet what Sho-Cheet couldn’t get for herself. It wasn’t just that Sho-Cheet didn’t deign to; it was that she, as the daughter of Lord General Ashaya, was not allowed to go to the market, to the zocalo, for a walk on the street, to an ulama game.
“Calmecac, calmecac, calmecac!” Sho-Cheet whined one day after school, yanking off her uniform tunic of hand-embroidered cotton in her school’s colors of emerald green and hot pink on black. “I’m so tired of school. I don’t care! I want to go somewhere—anywhere besides calmecac and my father’s campaign dinners!” She hurled the uniform into a corner, where Leeltick would pick it up after waiting for a few minutes out of respect for the anger that put it there.
Leeltick, who went only to telpochally school, knew that a better lady-in-waiting might tell her mistress, “You are not a lowly masewally like me, so you have stricter obligations,” or “Your schooling is only fitting for someone of your position.” But she didn’t, she just nodded.
There was a particular tone Sho-Cheet normally used when speaking to her, Leeltick had noticed: a confessor’s whisper, a barely intoned mumble, as if she were talking to herself. And since Leeltick never looked her in the eye, the mood of their conversations had become one prayer: unfettered, one-sided, revealing. “What about boys? Will I never even meet one until I get matched up with the one I’m going to marry? At least you get to date.”
Leeltick picked up the uniform and folded it neatly over her arm. This last statement was technically true, but Leeltick hadn’t tried, hadn’t bothered to think of boys or what she wanted from them, and hadn’t taken advantage of her free time or comparative freedom to get herself into trouble. She could have taken more time for herself, run errands, see someone, but she didn’t.
Sho-Cheet walked out onto the deck in only her camisole and skirt, and Leeltick followed, pausing to flick a glance at the little Weetzylopochly relief she loved above the door. “See it all out there?” Sho-Cheet asked her, sweeping her hand across the grand view of the city below, and beyond it, the jungle, the ocean. Her frosted hair was blowing back, and her fish eyes snapped with anger. “The world is out there! Boys are out there, doing whatever they want with masewally girls! Look at my brother, doing whatever he wants. And my father keeps me trapped in here!”
Leeltick was standing a half a step behind her, prepared to nod as usual, when Sho-Cheet paused and turned to look at her. “What’s it like?” she asked.
The personal tone startled Leeltick, and her mouth hung open for a minute. She saw the crowds of masewallies every full moon. Felt the press of fans in the bleachers at an ulama game. Heard and saw sunken-eyed drug vendors chattering in her ear, too close, as she moved through the crowd. Car horns blaring. “Loud,” is all she said.
“Sex is loud?” Sho-Cheet asked, her eyebrows knitted.
Despite herself, Leeltick laughed. “The streets are loud.”
Clearly, this wasn’t what Sho-Cheet wanted to know, and she tossed her head and looked out over the city again. “Take me with you,” she said after a minute.
The small of Leeltick’s back began to sweat. “A woman of your standing may be greatly offended, and surely deserves more than dirty streets and crass masewallies.”
The look on Sho-Cheet’s face was devilish. “Enough of those stupid sayings. Let’s find out how unworthy of my standing I am.”
The whole time Sho-Cheet outlined the plan, Leeltick’s heart was throbbing in her throat. Lord General Ashaya could have Leeltick fired for sneaking his only daughter out to the streets, and Sho-Cheet could be whipped and locked in her room for a week. But if Leeltcik refused and Sho-Cheet fired her, it would be the worst thing that could happen to her—she would have had to find a new life and a new job, make friends, manage her money, make decisions in every aspect of her life. As Sho-Cheet’s girl, the work of life had been taken care of, not of her concern, and as long as Sho-Cheet was pleased with her work, she would remain by her side for life. Unless, of course, Lord General Ashaya were to fire her.
The next day, Leeltick stopped on the way home from school to buy white slave’s clothes in Sho-Cheet’s large size. Sho-Cheet tried them on in front of the mirror in her room and smiled, then frowned. “Whoops. Better not wear this,” she said, working off the expensive jade bracelet she always wore and tossing it onto the hand-carved dresser. She put on her usual designer sunglasses, then took them back off. “Or these,” she added. “Get me some cheap ones at the gas station. Like yours.” Unoffended, Leeltick took the folded bills Sho-Cheet handed her, ran off again and returned a half-hour later, breathless, with a pair of black-framed, plastic sunglasses that made Sho-Cheet smile. She put them on and strutted around the room, casting a glance back at herself in the mirror every now and then. “Sure, you can buy me a drink,” she says, peering over the lenses at an imaginary man next to her reflection. “I’m not in a hurry.”
Following Sho-Cheet’s orders, Leeltick took Sho-Cheet’s book and laptop out of her backpack and replaced them with the white clothes and sunglasses. The next morning, they walked down the stairs together as usual, dressed in their school uniforms, and Leeltick left through the side entrance to walk to her bus stop just as the Mercedes rolled through the gate with Sho-Cheet to take her to calmecac. But instead of taking her usual bus, Leeltick walked another block and jumped on the line that would take her uptown, to Sho-Cheet’s calmecac, and waited for her behind a clump of philodendrons near the gate, sweating in the humidity and with fear for what she was about to do. But it wasn’t necessary to hide; the driver wouldn’t have noticed her—she was only a slave in white, invisible to anyone looking for something important, and Leeltick saw for the first time that Sho-Cheet was right: she had a freedom her patron did not.
Several other European cars with tinted windows were in line in front of the school, each carrying the daughter of one of the empire’s men of power, and Lord General Ashaya’s driver rolled to the front and let Sho-Cheet out just as the bell to her school rang. She slammed the door with a heavy thunk, and dawdled as the car glided away, then rushed to Leeltick. “Go! Before someone sees me!” she said, and Leeltick did as Sho-Cheet had instructed her the day before and rushed down the block in the opposite direction to hail a taxi while Sho-Cheet waited behind the philodendron leaves. When she opened the door, Sho-Cheet dove in headfirst, and the taxi sped away with Sho-Cheet’s head in her lap.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
Sho-Cheet was busy wrestling off the uniform tunic, and for the first time, she looked at Leeltick for an answer.
“Um, the market?” Leeltick guessed, and Sho-Cheet grinned. The taxi driver, oblivious to the momentousness of this decision, drummed his fingers on the steering wheel to the music he was playing quietly and took off toward the market, weaving at top speed through streets lined with buildings of brushed concrete painted in every color of the rainbow, below billboards printed with icons advertising rock bands and cell phone plans, through smog-gray air, while Sho-Cheet changed and Leeltick folded Sho-Cheet’s clothes and put them into her backpack. When the driver leaned on his horn because he had encountered a traffic jam a ten-minute walk from the market, Sho-Cheet told the hiim, “This is good. We’ll walk from here,” handed him the fare, and bolted out of the car, with Leeltick struggling to put on her backpack and keep up.
“The market!” Sho-Cheet was saying as Leeltick caught up to her, the backpack having already stamped a sweaty square on her back. Ahead of them was a mini-city of outrageously clashing, brightly colored plastic awnings and EZ-Ups that clung to the outside of the main building like a termite nest to a tree.
At first, Leeltick didn’t know which direction to head, what Sho-Cheet might like, but when she turned her head to look at Sho-Cheet for guidance, she saw her patron’s bass-fish mouth agape and her big eyes bobbing back and forth in their sockets to take in all the sights, and for a second, the loss of perspective on Sho-Cheet’s behalf overwhelmed Leeltick, too, and she took Sho-Cheet by the hand and led her into the main building.
Most of what was for sale was food. There was food ready-made—stands that had tamals steaming in pots as tall as the girls’ torsos and that sent up clouds of steam around the vendor, who wore a long oven mitt and pulled the tamales out with tongs, there were racks upon racks of sweet breads with Technicolor frosting, vats of cheely sauce in clay pots with hand-lettered signs clipped to the handles to warn customers of the particular brand of fire to which they would be exposing themselves upon sampling them—and booth after booth hawking the ingredients of stellar meals. There were butchers cutting steaks from sides of beef with a ring of their blades, there were stacks of stunned-faced fish on ice, mounds of mangoes, nopal leaves with the spines trimmed off, clumps of radishes, there were braids of garlic and dried cheelies, stacks of squash in every shape and hue, there were bottles of cream covered with plastic wrap and sealed with rubberbands, there were burlap sacks of pecans and almonds that Sho-Cheet sighed and sunk her hands into before Leeltick could pull her back, there were bunches of wilting herbs tied with string and displayed on plastic tarps, and Sho-Cheet saw it all, stumbling like a toddler, staring and plodding first in one direction and then the next. She gobbled the sight of booths selling hand-tooled leather purses, cheap featherwork in frames, toy guitars hanging from the rafters, fluorescent candies, fresh-pressed corncakes, jerseys from the local ulama teams.
Two men struggling under the weight of cardboard boxes filled with watermelons waited politely for them to pass, and an old woman in a ratty shawl huffed and veered around them, so Leeltick finally took Sho-Cheet by the arm and steered her toward a corner booth selling shell jewelry, where there was less traffic.
“It just goes on forever,” Sho-Cheet gasped, then seemed to realize that Leeltick had all but disciplined her, and took a deep breath. “Right. OK, what do we, uh, do here? Buy some food?”
“That’s a great idea,” Leeltick said. “Buy some food, maybe some jewelry. Then we can come out this door here, and hail you a cab back to school.”
With that, Sho-Cheet took charge again and stalked to the nearest bakery stall, where she bought three of her favorite pecan cakes, handed one to Leeltick, and scarfed the other two herself in a few large bites. Before she was done with the second one, she had walked to another booth, bought a large bag of fried pork rinds, and was chomping and crunching on them when she happened upon a man selling birds in cages, so she bought a cockatiel in a wire cage and handed the whole thing to Leeltick, who, shocked, took it, trying to avoid the claws and beak that grasped at the tiny bars near her face, clearly looking for something to munch on.
Next was a taco stand, where Sho-Cheet ordered a duck taco, a venison taco, and a fried fish taco with lime and onions and herbs and cheely sauce, and Leeltick ate one venison taco, knowing it was street food that would make most nobles sick, and wondering how her patron would fare. The cockatiel chirped and chattered, and the cage wobbled on the small table, but Leeltick managed to keep it steady with one hand while she ate. Sho-Cheet wolfed her food down, her head swiveling as she stared at the crowds streaming back and forth. Then Leeltick folded her pecan cake up into a paper napkin and put it into her backpack for later, but she was still holding the rest of the pork rinds when Sho-Cheet, wild-eyed, wadded up her napkin and stormed down the aisle yet again, stopping this time in front of a meshkal booth.
Even though she was large and ugly, Sho-Cheet was young, and a girl her age, if she knew how to flirt with the vendor, could get drunk for free under the guise of tasting and shopping. But Sho-Cheet didn’t know how to flirt. Instead, she walked up to the vendor, placed her money on the counter, and pointed to a bottle of meshkal with a fancy gold label. And because she was in slave’s white, presumably out to run the errands of her master, the vendor didn’t bat an eye, but performed the transaction just as mechanically as Sho-Cheet had.
“That was so easy!” Sho-Cheet blurted, giggling and inspecting the bottle.
“You can’t drink that in here,” Leeltick hissed as they walk away.
Sho-Cheet was already trying to pry at the lid as she walked. “What?” she asked with a frown.
“You can’t do that. You can’t just walk around the market swigging from a bottle of meshkal; they’ll kick you out.”
Sho-Cheet sneered and looked around. “Where are the bathrooms, then?”
“Mistress, I’m certainly not one to presume I know what is best,” Leeltick began, “but in this situation, I must—I must, uh, suggest…crap.” Sho-Cheet had swaggered off down the aisle, and Leeltick took off after her, keeping an eye on her mistress through the bars of the birdcage as the cockatiel chirruped and squawked, trying to center itself on the little stick in the middle of the moving cage for balance.
The bathrooms were around the corner, at the end of one side of the market, and Leeltick set down the bird and the bag of pork rinds and readjusted her backpack. She could hear her mistress’s swallows and gasps from inside one of the stalls. “One must drink only a small amount of meshkal to begin with,” Leeltick started to say, then gave up. A few minutes later, Sho-Cheet unlocked the stall door and lumbered out, red-eyed. “Let’s go,” she slurred, laughing, giving up on screwing the lid back onto the bottle and handing it to Leeltick, who struggled to close it properly and cram it into her backpack and follow Sho-Cheet, this time to the booth of an artisan selling figurines of the gods, where Sho-Cheet bought a small shrine the star demons, which she handed to Leeltick in a plastic bag without noticing that Leeltick’s arms were already full, and the vendor laughed and said, “It’s almost like one of you is the slave and the other is the master!” but Sho-Cheet didn’t seem to hear him and staggered down the aisle again to stop, feet apart and hands on hips, in front of a booth that made Leeltick’s heart sink.
It was a warrior recruitment booth. Two young masewally men with topknots, wearing informal fatigue pants and armbands, stood in front of it, bare, tattooed arms folded, beneath a banner that Leeltick could read between the bars of the birdcage: “I am Weetzylopochly, the young warrior. There is no one else like me. I wear my feathers for a reason, for thanks to me, the sun is risen.” They looked over their shoulders to see what Sho-Cheet could be grinning at, then met her gaze quizzically.
“Hello, warriors,” she said, and Leeltick’s heart began to pound.
“Hello, miss,” they answered, very politely, their arms still folded, but now they were smiling just the faintest bit. Leeltick felt uneasy—Sho-Cheet may have been in disguise, but consorting with warriors was something she was not allowed to do, ever, and Leeltick was definitely within range of being fired for what Sho-Cheet was now doing. She shifted the packages in her arms, and the cockatiel squawked again.
Sho-Cheet was used to getting her way, so she had never had to do more than ask for what she wants. “Where can I—where can I see you later?” she asked one of them, her voice husky, putting her hand on his bicep, right where it bulged against his chest, her lids dropped as if parroting some vampy character from a movie. Leeltick cringed as the man frowned and stepped back and his companion stifled a chuckle.
“We are here to serve, uh, the empire and Weetzylopochly,” the put-upon warrior stammered. “The battlefield is where you will find us.”
“Oh, now…” Sho-Cheet chided, taking another step toward him and trailing her finger along his forearm, “I don’t think I’m really looking to get involved in all that…war stuff.”
“Well, um, actually,” the man said, taking a step behind a table of pamphlets and propaganda, “all Nawas are born to fight, so I have no doubt that you will, uh, do just fine.” He handed her a glossy brochure with “Serve the sun. Serve the empire. Live forever.” emblazoned on the front, and she immediately set it down and grabbed his hand instead.
“Listen, you sugar skull,” she said, “I’m not here to sign up for marching and work. I want to have fun.”
The two warriors suddenly glanced to one side, and Leeltick and Sho-Cheet wheeled around to see a stern-faced officer, also in uniform and wearing a headdress, who walked up to Sho-Cheet, put his face three inches from hers, and growled, “If you’re not out of here in two seconds, I’ll force your hand onto the fingerprint ink so fast I’ll break your fingers.”
Sho-Cheet bolted, and Leeltick hustled after her, backpack slapping her rear, cockatiel squawking, plastic bags crackling and whacking her in the knees, around the corner and out into the checkerboarded sunlight, racing along the sidewalk under hawkers’ intermittent canopies, her legs wobbly with fear. But when she finally caught up to Sho-Cheet, who was leaning against a shoeshiner’s chair, her patron was gasping with laughter, not from running.
“Did you see?” she shrieked, letting out a cloud of meshkal vapor. “Did you see the look on his face?”
“He was scary,” Leeltick agreed, flinching as the cockatiel’s beak grasped the bars near her face.
“Huh?” Sho-Cheet asked. “Oh, you mean the officer?”
Leeltick nodded, shaking, but Sho-Cheet waved her hand.
“No, he’s just an old blowhard. I meant the warrior. He looked terrified of me! Can you imagine how he’d be in bed? He’d be a mouse!” She threw her head back and laughed.
“Um, maybe we should go hail you a cab now,” Leeltick suggested.
“No way! I’m not going back to calmecac school when there’s all this to be had!” Sho-Cheet threw her arm out, almost hitting a peasant woman carrying a basket of vegetables on her head. The basket teetered as the woman lost her balance and the vegetables and newspaper-wrapped packages of meat toppled out. Leeltick set down her things to help, but Sho-Cheet had blundered on, so she quickly apologized and took off after Sho-Cheet again, scared and praying to the gods that Sho-Cheet’s rampage would end soon.
And it did: her need to see, taste, buy, and touch everything in the market suddenly ended an hour later. “This is boring,” she announced. “Take those things home and organize them the way I like them. Give me my uniform so I can go back in the bathroom and change. Here’s money for the cab.”
“Where are you going?” Leeltick asked.
“I’ll text our driver to pick me up near the school. I’ll say I had to stay late or something.”
Leeltick swallowed and did as she was told. No one ever looked askance at what comes through the servants’ entrance to the house, so the bird entered easily, and she cataloged and organized for Sho-Cheet to suit her obsessive nature. She hung the cage near the window of Sho-Cheet’s room and went on an errand to pick up birdseed, then waited apprehensively for her patron to come home, lying on her back in the doorway between the bedroom and the patio, talking to the Weetzylopochly relief and praying to him that Sho-Cheet would come home before she could get hurt or get into real trouble.
Before long, Sho-Cheet sauntered in, wearing her calmecac tunic, and sat down at her laptop as if nothing unusual had happened that day. The normalcy calmed Leeltick, and life went on as usual for a few days. Then one day Sho-Cheet told her, “I have an idea for how I’m going to meet men.”
And that was the end of Leeltick’s life as a normal slave.
