Fic a Week 7 - The Happy Slaves
May. 2nd, 2009 01:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pauraque_bkThis is revised material from my Nano from last year, which took place in a world where humans have genetically engineered anthropomorphic animals, and sort of reflected my opinions about how horrible that would be for everyone involved if it actually happened. This particular section was written late in the month, when I was going on a lot of loony tangents. It provides background on one of the antagonists of the main plot -- I think it could fairly be characterized as fanfic of the actual novel I was trying to write. Yvega is the antagonist in question, and as an adult is a very scary and fucked-up person that you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley.
I dunno man, this was a rough week. I started a lot of shit and couldn't finish it. This is what I got.
The Happy Slaves is the title of an opera by Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga.
++
The Happy Slaves
Basie sat in a plastic airport waiting-chair that had no room for his tail.
His wife was on one side of him, his son on the other. He gave no outward sign of it, but he was terrified. He had never been in an airport before, nor did he want to be now. Things like airplanes had always been fantastical things to him, nothing he would ever have to worry about. Basie didn't know it, but there were far more dogs in Heathrow at this moment than there ever had been before.
The animals were leaving England.
Basie had the letter in the pocket of his jacket. He could not read, but he had begged help from the deacon at the church in town, who told him that the letter said it was from Auster, and explained that he was in Los Angeles and wanted Basie and his family to come and join him there. Fortunately the deacon was kind and gave Basie a great deal of help accomplishing this, for he had no money save what Auster had sent him in the envelope, and had no knowledge of how to book a flight on an airplane. The deacon had flown on airplanes before, he said. He put his hand on Basie's paw. It would not be so very bad, he assured him.
*
Basie was born on the Master's estate in the cold and desolate northern country of England, upon which lay a quite large and antique mansion, and until that time he had never left there except to go to the village below. His breed was called the Belgian Shepherd Dog, after the type of little-dog upon which they were modelled. All the dogs on the estate were of this breed, as the Mistress was a great fancier of them, and bred them on the property. They were elegant black dogs, said to be intelligent and loyal. These were not beasts for work, being sensitive and intolerant of repetitive tasks. Basie had heard the Mistress say often to visitors that one did not play fetch with a Belgian -- he would be bored after one had thrown the stick three times. She laughed, and so did her visitors.
The Mistress concerned herself only with the breeding of the dogs; the training of them was left to trainers she employed. Basie was trained in cleaning and serving, in drawing baths, in folding clothes. He was to become, perhaps, the most important dog on the estate, as the Master's personal attendant. He took this quite seriously, as everyone around him took it seriously, and he had nothing to compare against.
It seemed the Master had avoided employing a valet for some time, which caused a great deal of dismay among the maids who had to pick up after him, and the household in general as having to do everything himself put the Master in a terrible temperament.
Basie was trained in the art of servitude. He was told this, and never forgot it: The proper servant is always present when wanted, always absent when not, and never allows his master to think about which is currently the case.
The Master was aloof to Basie for some time, but at last relented. Basie watched, learnt his master's every movement, every twitch, every emotion. The Mistress as well, and the nanny. It was not important to know the children; the nanny took care of them.
"So you've stopped complaining about the dog," the Mistress said one morning at breakfast in a smug tone.
"Well," rumbled the Master from behind his newspaper, "it's simply begun to seem ordinary to have him about."
To Basie it seemed ordinary too, laying out the Master's clothes, bringing his newspaper for him, drawing his bath, helping him dress and undress. The Master did not mind being naked in front of him; he was only a dog after all.
The Master of the house had inherited his fortune, or so Basie had learnt from gossip among the dogs. Not truly old money, but old enough. His great-grandfather, the Old Master, had made the money as the author of children's books, and he had invested wisely.
Being an author meant that the Old Master made books and many people bought them, and so he had money. Of course Basie could not read, none of the dogs could, let alone write. But he understood the value of telling stories. To him stories were things you plucked out of the air, things told over and shared and elaborated on. Parents knew how to catch them. They didn't belong to anyone, though. He learnt that humans could trap stories in a book, and then the stories belonged to them, and no one else could tell them again. Then if other people wanted the story they had to pay money for it.
It struck him that humans were very good at owning things. That came naturally to them.
As for investing, this had something to do with the newspaper. A boy on a bicycle brought the newspaper to the house every morning, and Basie brought it to the Master, and the Master read the tiny little Welsh codes in the back of it. If they were favourable, he was merry. If they were not, he became dark and irritable. Basie wondered what it would be like to have one's moods dictated by a piece of paper that a boy on a bicycle brought from somewhere.
The Master was married to the Mistress, who was lovely and thin and fragile as a teacup, and must always be catered to lest she have one of her spells. At least this is what Basie had come to understand. Personally he could not see how she was lovely; she wore fancy clothes certainly enough, which dragged and rustled on the floor, but she stank of perfume and had a very pinched appearance about her naked pinkish face. She was the only grown woman on the estate, so aside from the occasional visitor from far away, usually Basie only saw the women of the town as his examples of the human women to whom the Mistress was considered superior. Not that he had interest in looking at women. Many of them looked and smelled more pleasant to him than the Mistress, but they held up their noses at him and avoided him in the street when he went into town for any reason.
The Mistress, on the other hand, was a great animal lover. The Master was not that interested in the dogs or the horses or the little-dogs, and so that was all left to the Mistress, who appeared to do nothing else. The Mistress decided whom all the horses and little-dogs would breed with, and whom all the dogs would marry, and it seemed to Basie that she based her decisions about the latter mostly on the pecking order below stairs.
When they were both young, the Mistress married Basie to the children's nanny, whose name was Tess. Tess was an exquisitely beautiful and cold bitch who was very important and knew it. As the queen among dog kind, it seemed fit that he should marry her. She kept the children in line like puppies, by nipping them. Not with her teeth, but with her sharp tongue. Her neck was long and slender, as was her face, and her eyes seemed always to be half closed in contempt. Her fur was smooth and glossy like obsidian. Unusually among the dogs of the estate, she had lop ears, spaniel ears they were called. In Belgians it was acceptable (though not preferred) for females to have such ears, but in males it was a fault. Basie could not say it seemed a fault in Tess, who could not have been more perfect no matter what was written in the Mistress's books. She almost never spoke to Basie if she could help it.
Basie learnt of fucking and procreating from the other young dogs, though he didn't remember the exact times he learned of them, he didn't remember the words. Just one of the things one absorbs, like learning to speak. It was quite crucial for him to absorb things this way, for he had not the education that the humans had, but had to fake it enough to be acceptable, to smooth things over for them. He had to speak as they did, not as the kitchen dogs, and not as the stable boys. So he knew of fucking.
He had never quite understood it, though, until Stella looked over her shoulder.
Stella was one of the kitchen dogs, she washed and chopped and boiled. She was heavier than most of them, and had rougher fur that formed a sort of mane around her neck, above the collar of her dress. She took the Master's breakfast plates away when he would not come out to breakfast in the dining room, so Basie knew who she was.
One morning she took the plates from his hands, and he caught her scent. It was warm and feminine, and spoke of needs he had never considered. Surprised, he looked up and met her eyes. She looked away first, and then turned to take the plates back down to the kitchens.
And she paused, and looked over her shoulder at him, once, and then looked away in embarrassment and hurried away. But she must have known despite her embarrassment that Basie would not have seen her look back if he had not been looking after her too.
And so Basie was in love with a kitchen maid, or at least in lust with her. In the house, up tairs, he was absolutely perfect in his bearing and demeanor at all times. He had been trained that way.
There is a saying among dog trainers: A dog that is well trained will always do as you tell him; a dog that is well raised will always do the right thing, whether or not you are there to tell him so.
In the night, out in the garden, they came together. Her arse in the air, her rough tail held aside for him. He licked her cunt and she trembled and whined, and when he could not bear it any longer he mounted and fucked her with abandon, and she fucked him back, and they were animals together.
They lay on the grass at night and gazed up at the thousands upon thousands of stars. The Milky Way blazed bright through the sky. Basie had once heard the Mistress telling a visitor that the ancients believed the Milky Way was the path into heaven. Basie could see that now; he could see it as the slit of his lover's cunt, a glistening way into the sky between curtains of heavy dark fur.
Stella became pregnant. The Mistress thought nothing of it, believing that the father was Stella's husband, the chef's assistant. If anything it made Basie want her even more, added a strange new exciting scent to her.
Tess became pregnant as well, though it was not Basie's doing. Once, before Stella, he had tried to fuck her. She was willing to do it, but she wanted him to fuck her like a human, face to face, and she would not let him get his knot inside her. She said it was animal, it was dirty, they were not little-dogs and should not behave so. But he couldn't perform like that, he couldn't come. He could only fuck like a dog.
Stella's puppy was born. It was a boy. The Mistress gave him the name Yvega, which she got out of an astronomy book that she liked to look at in the night. She preferred to curl up with a book of stars rather than go out onto the landing and look at them.
"His name ought to be Gamma Vega, rightly," the Master said gruffly when he found this out. He normally did not care about the matters of the dogs, but left it to his wife, so Basie was surprised to hear him comment on it. "That thing she thinks is a Y is a Greek letter."
Basie nodded. "Sir," he said, as he usually did to acknowledge one of the Master's non sequiturs that required no reply.
Tess's pregnancy became enormous, and it was apparent that she was bearing twins. She was so large that she could no longer carry out her duties as the children's nanny, which left the task to the maids, who could not control the children at all. Without Tess's iron fist they ran wild. It was a chaotic time in the household.
It was late in the night when one of the Mistress's servants came and woke Basie, saying she required to speak with him.
"She?" he echoed, surprised. Rarely did the Mistress direct any comment to him.
He dressed and came upstairs to where Tess had given birth. The Mistress looked sad and disheveled.
"Madam," he said.
"I haven't any idea how this happened," she said miserably. "It shouldn't have, the genotyping was fine! The father was double dominant, it ought to have been quite impossible..."
She may as well have been speaking Welsh for all Basie understood. He waited patiently for her to come round to English again.
"Well... there must have been a mistake in the records, that's all," she said at last. Then, as if finally noticing him: "Basie. They're lop eared. Both of them boys, I'm afraid. If you would be so good."
It was very cold out as Basie took the sack to the river; his hands were numb, his face was numb. He had done this before. It would not be long before the little wisps of life inside were cold and still.
As he waited for the infant puppies to drown, Basie breathed out clouds in the cold. He looked up at the stars and pulled his coat closer around him. Perhaps they were better off. It would have been a sweet life, existing for only a few months in the absolute comfort of their mother's womb, the child's palace.
He recalled a day when the Mistress had the Deacon over for lunch, and they talked of Heaven. Basie had learnt before that this was the place good humans went when they were dead. She had asked the Deacon whether he thought dogs went there too.
"It would be no paradise at all without them," she had said.
*
It was about this time that Auster ran away. He was a kitchen dog and Stella's friend; it was said that he was Tess's lover. He was easygoing with a ready smile, often he and Stella would laugh together as they worked. And one morning he was simply gone.
Stella told everyone else she didn't know anything, but she whispered in Basie's ear in the dark that Auster had talked of going to America, where the world is strange and animals are masters. Basie held this secret close, as he always did.
As for Tess, she grew more cold than before, even sharper with the children. She was the only dog who could speak to humans that way, and she made the most of it. She called them names, dirty children -- and to think your mother gets to keep you -- dirty children with sticky hands.
*
Yvega -- for that remained his name, despite the Master's objection -- Yvega grew up lean and elegant, looking more like Tess than like Stella or Basie or anyone else. Basie thought privately that perhaps it was his own guilt that made the child look that way, his own adultery. To a dog, infidelity is the greatest sin.
Yvega was quiet and queer, and too watchful by half. You did not know he was watching you until you began to feel it, his silent gaze upon you. Basie had to plug up the keyhole of his bedroom because the child would not stop peeking in on them while they were fucking. The first few times Basie found him crouching there outside the door and shouted at him, and he just looked up at Basie with clear hazel eyes, neither laughing nor embarrassed nor chastised. So Basie plugged up the key hole. It was all he could do.
He also watched the stable boys out in the yard. The stable boys and the head groom and his assistant were the only human servants on the estate, which was necessitated by the instinctual hatred all horses had of dogs. It was quite impossible for any of the dogs to get near the horses without them spooking. When they went out shooting, Basie was brought along, but he had to walk while the humans rode, and a fair distance away at that.
There was a time they went shooting partridge on a misty day, and Basie brought Yvega along too; he was quite young then. They trudged through the sticky mud while the humans rode along on their tall, nervous horses. Yvega kept hanging far back, such that Basie had to go back and drag him forward again.
One of the little-dogs could perhaps sense Yvega's discomfort, and barked at him and worried him every chance he got. Yvega was terrified by this, which the humans found funny. The Master's friend said the young little-dog only wanted to play, and recognized Yvega as a fellow puppy. Yvega cowered and shook and shivered in the cold. Basie never brought him shooting again.
There was at this time a new little stable boy whose name was Timothy. The young boy was lame in the leg, and limped around the stable yard barely able to do the work they gave him. The older boys laughed at him and excluded him. Yvega seemed to find him fascinating, and hid for hours in the shrubbery watching him limp around the yard carrying heavy buckets of water for the horses. Basie told Yvega to leave off it, but the boy always went back.
One day Yvega and the little stable boy disappeared. They searched the woods, Basie easily imagining the boy's throat torn out-- he was sure the humans imagined the same thing. But he also thought forward a step further to Yvega hanging bloody and dead from a tree.
At last Yvega and Timothy came back, saying they had got hungry.
"Where did you go? What did you do?" Basie stood over his son, wondering when he had grown so tall. Being much shorter than the Master, he often forgot he was tall for a dog.
"We went to the town," Yvega whispered, after his usual fashion.
"And what did you do there?"
Yvega pulled back into himself. "We went to the cinema."
"What do you mean?" Basie demanded, getting flustered now. "What's that?" He only faintly knew what the cinema was; he had seen the building but had never been inside.
"It's a place where there's light," Yvega said in a faint tremor, seeming to look through Basie. "There are lights..." As though repeating fragments of something he had heard, unable to really understand it.
Basie turned and walked away in disgust, and left the boys to close around him.
*
The Master and the Mistress had dinner together that night, which they did not normally do, and conversed with each other, which was not ordinary either.
"So pay them, darling. They'll stay. You already feed them. They're practically members of the family as it is," the Mistress said lightly.
Basie could see the word 'idiot' in his Master's face as he looked at his wife.
"They won't stay, and even if they did, we couldn't afford to pay them."
She laughed, a high pitched titter, and put her napkin to her mouth. "Paying dogs to work! What an idea. This world really has gone topsy turvy, hasn't it. Like a fairy tale."
"The world is not like a fairy tale," the Master snapped, and got up and left the table.
*
When Basie went back below stairs, he found that Yvega had not come back.
He ran to the stable yard with his heart pounding in his throat, certain he was dead, berating himself for letting the boys rough him up. He looked around wildly in every area of the stable, ignoring the braying and whinnying of the tortured horses tied in their stalls.
He found him at last in an unoccupied stall in the hay, naked together with the little stable boy. Timothy's body was bruised and white; he had been roughed up too for his crimes.
Timothy's blue eyes were wide with shock and fear and humiliation.
Yvega simply looked at his father with a level, neutral, serious gaze.
Basie found he was not angry, but felt strangely hollow and afraid. He turned quickly and walked away, his whole body taut with fear, pressing very heavy on him like someone was creeping up to stab him in the back.
*
"Basie," the Master said. (Basie was already at his side as he said it.) "Do you know what this says?"
He pointed at the Welsh glyphs on the news paper's front page. Basie had no idea. The Master usually only read the small things in the back of the news paper.
"No, sir," said Basie patiently. He had not slept last night, and his eyes felt dry.
The Master looked at Basie levelly. "This says they've had a vote in Parliament, and they've decided we can't keep all you dogs any longer. We've got to let you all go free. You're the first one I've told."
Basie had not been asked a question, so he said nothing. He stood attentively, as he had been taught.
To his shock, the Master got angry then. "Can you even understand what I've just said to you? You're being set free." He put the paper down with a snap and stalked out of the room, muttering, "Madness."
Basie picked up the newspaper and put it back in its place. One did not leave things lying about.
*
And so, they got the letter from Auster, and so he went to the Deacon to read it, and they went to the airport to go to Los Angeles.
The airport was terrifying, though Basie did everything in his power to keep a calm front. They had to go through security and frightening machines, and police who looked at them harshly. Many people looked at Basie's tickets and told him where to go, directed from one point to another, slave-like.
At last they found the place one waited for the airplane that went to Los Angeles, which was full of rows of plastic chairs. They all sat down there to wait.
The voice boomed over the loudspeaker and said the flight for Los Angeles was leaving. An over-amplified robotic voice that frightened Basie and made him put his ears back. They got into line and were searched again, their bags opened. They didn't really have anything but clothes, since everything belonged to the Master and the Mistress.
They made them go into a tunnel that was cold and the air was stale and rushed about them. It was like going into Hell. Stella was clinging desperately to his hand. Yvega simply walked on. They got into the airplane which was unbelievably tiny inside, considering the tin gray monster it was outside. A dragon that blew white smoke trails backwards across the sky, that was all Basie knew of airplanes before. The impatient woman made them go into their seats and showed them how to buckle the straps -- in fact she buckled them into their seats for them, which was the first time Basie had ever been tied up in his life.
The idling engine of the airplane was loud, and Basie was just thinking he might get used to the white noise of it when the plane's engines really started and they began to move. He had ridden in cars before but this was nothing like that. He was in the belly of a tin dragon and being taken away. The movement was more like pressure than real movement, he was being pressed back into his seat, and thought to himself that the straps were not necessary to hold him there. The pressure would keep him equally restrained.
And then the ground came away and Basie felt the pressure on his feet and his legs, and they went up and up, and his ears popped and hurt. It was not flight like the flight of birds, which was violent and fast. He had dreamed before that he was flying on the back of an eagle, and it was terrifying and precipitous, darting and flapping and diving and swooping. The airplane was like being in suspended animation, suspended and held aloft in the air, not really moving at all. A crawl.
Basie and Stella and Yvega were strapped into those airplane seats for what seemed like several life times. At times he wondered if this was Hell, if he was finally being punished for his infidelity, and for ever. He stared at the seat in front of him, at the rough plastic there.
When they were let out and went back through the tunnel, Auster was there. He went and hugged Basie.
"So you made it," he said. "You're free."
*
Los Angeles turned out to be a dismal, busy place. The air stank and was hard to breathe, and the water that came from the taps was brown and no good for drinking. One had to buy bottles of water that was presumably brought from someplace else.
It was so different from home. He rarely saw other kinds of animals there, but here his prick was tempted by the exotic cats and the elegant pet bunnies on leashes walking beside their human masters.
No one had any manners, least of all the other animals, who liked to be called morphics, after the strange way of Americans. Basie thought little of it, except that it was one of those strange things Americans said, like calling the boot of a car the trunk.
They found work in a restaurant. It was not so utterly different from what they had known, but Basie felt strange with how everyone seemed equal, yet unequal. It was too hard to tell who was who. There was no upstairs and below stairs. They just said everyone was equal and you were meant to figure it out on your own. Basie felt blind in this world, felt like a slow child where previously he had been sharp and considered the smartest of the dogs in the house. They found his ways strange and laughable, his accent.
Not everyone even spoke English here at all, they spoke strange languages that he had never even heard of. He was shocked at how many different languages there were; the only one he knew of was Welsh. The farrier was Welsh and so was his assistant, and when they came and talked their strange language, none of the dogs could understand him. So to him any foreign thing was Welsh, but apparently there was more to it.
Their apartment was small and dingy. The walls were mildewed at the top near the ceiling. Neither Basie nor Stella had ever lived in such an unfine place. Below stairs it had not been luxurious, but it was neat and well kept and comfortable. It had always been taken care of by someone. Their apartment in Los Angeles was nothing like that at all. Basie had been a slave all his life, but he had never felt like one until he was freed.
It was hard to sleep in this dingy little place that smelled all wrong, full of the noises of other animals who might do anything. He had to bury his face in Stella's fur, not out of love, which had faded long before, but out of need for a familiar scent to fill his nose. He could close his eyes and pretend they were back home.
The summer was the worst, when it became incredibly hot and wet, and he was tempted to shave off his thick black fur. His palms were so sweaty it was difficult to hold things. There were crisp bright days in the winter when it was almost pleasant out, and that was nearly worse for when he came inside their dingy dim apartment, he just wanted to go back outside again.
There were many cinemas in Los Angeles, a few of which allowed free dogs. Basie and Stella tried it once. Neither of them cared for it really. Stella particularly found it too loud and overwhelming, and buried her face in Basie's shoulder.
But that was where Yvega would go, he would go to the cinema with the other rough boys who lived on that street. Basie did not worry for him; he never worried for him anymore. He went where he would go. In truth Basie preferred to have him out of the apartment, to escape from his strange quiet gaze.
Stella had become closed in, drawn into herself. She had blended in so much more easily than Basie. She even started to sound Californian. She looked exhausted at the end of each day. He looked into the sky at night and could only see a few stars in the dull orange Los Angeles haze; he could not see Stella's body in the stars any longer.
She became pregnant again. They couldn't afford it -- they could not even afford themselves and the child they had -- but at home it was unheard of for a bitch to stop from becoming pregnant, it simply was not done.
They had told Yvega he was going to have a little sister or brother, and the strange quiet child had seemed cautiously pleased, asking repeatedly if this sister or brother would play with him, if he would walk and talk, if he would be his friend. Yes, they told him, of course.
Basie should not have been surprised. He had felt cursed for years, since Yvega was born, and even before.
But he was surprised, oh God, he was surprised when he held the baby in his arms, when he saw his son's spaniel ears through the uterine mucous that coated his black fur.
For a week, Basie did not do anything. He let Stella nurse the child, he let Yvega look at it. That week seemed like a dark and hot year. Basie understood the mistake later: He should not have waited so long. If he had simply done what had to be done straight away, if he hadn't been so soft hearted, neither of them would have grown attached. But because he waited, because he struggled, because there was a shadow between the knowledge that the thing had to be done, and the doing of the thing...
On the beach, late on a humid night, he looked out over the water. On the island out there, there were the lit-up edges of alien trees, like they were on the moon. The baby was gone already, it had been so fast. He often felt here that he moved in a dream, that some time soon he would wake up in his bed at home, and that he could do things over, and rightly.
Basie's ears pricked up straight; he sensed something behind him, something looking at his back, pressing into him. He waited for a long time, breathing softly, wishing it away. But it stayed.
He turned, and Yvega's eyes were on him, very still, sober, and bright.
.
I dunno man, this was a rough week. I started a lot of shit and couldn't finish it. This is what I got.
The Happy Slaves is the title of an opera by Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga.
++
The Happy Slaves
Basie sat in a plastic airport waiting-chair that had no room for his tail.
His wife was on one side of him, his son on the other. He gave no outward sign of it, but he was terrified. He had never been in an airport before, nor did he want to be now. Things like airplanes had always been fantastical things to him, nothing he would ever have to worry about. Basie didn't know it, but there were far more dogs in Heathrow at this moment than there ever had been before.
The animals were leaving England.
Basie had the letter in the pocket of his jacket. He could not read, but he had begged help from the deacon at the church in town, who told him that the letter said it was from Auster, and explained that he was in Los Angeles and wanted Basie and his family to come and join him there. Fortunately the deacon was kind and gave Basie a great deal of help accomplishing this, for he had no money save what Auster had sent him in the envelope, and had no knowledge of how to book a flight on an airplane. The deacon had flown on airplanes before, he said. He put his hand on Basie's paw. It would not be so very bad, he assured him.
*
Basie was born on the Master's estate in the cold and desolate northern country of England, upon which lay a quite large and antique mansion, and until that time he had never left there except to go to the village below. His breed was called the Belgian Shepherd Dog, after the type of little-dog upon which they were modelled. All the dogs on the estate were of this breed, as the Mistress was a great fancier of them, and bred them on the property. They were elegant black dogs, said to be intelligent and loyal. These were not beasts for work, being sensitive and intolerant of repetitive tasks. Basie had heard the Mistress say often to visitors that one did not play fetch with a Belgian -- he would be bored after one had thrown the stick three times. She laughed, and so did her visitors.
The Mistress concerned herself only with the breeding of the dogs; the training of them was left to trainers she employed. Basie was trained in cleaning and serving, in drawing baths, in folding clothes. He was to become, perhaps, the most important dog on the estate, as the Master's personal attendant. He took this quite seriously, as everyone around him took it seriously, and he had nothing to compare against.
It seemed the Master had avoided employing a valet for some time, which caused a great deal of dismay among the maids who had to pick up after him, and the household in general as having to do everything himself put the Master in a terrible temperament.
Basie was trained in the art of servitude. He was told this, and never forgot it: The proper servant is always present when wanted, always absent when not, and never allows his master to think about which is currently the case.
The Master was aloof to Basie for some time, but at last relented. Basie watched, learnt his master's every movement, every twitch, every emotion. The Mistress as well, and the nanny. It was not important to know the children; the nanny took care of them.
"So you've stopped complaining about the dog," the Mistress said one morning at breakfast in a smug tone.
"Well," rumbled the Master from behind his newspaper, "it's simply begun to seem ordinary to have him about."
To Basie it seemed ordinary too, laying out the Master's clothes, bringing his newspaper for him, drawing his bath, helping him dress and undress. The Master did not mind being naked in front of him; he was only a dog after all.
The Master of the house had inherited his fortune, or so Basie had learnt from gossip among the dogs. Not truly old money, but old enough. His great-grandfather, the Old Master, had made the money as the author of children's books, and he had invested wisely.
Being an author meant that the Old Master made books and many people bought them, and so he had money. Of course Basie could not read, none of the dogs could, let alone write. But he understood the value of telling stories. To him stories were things you plucked out of the air, things told over and shared and elaborated on. Parents knew how to catch them. They didn't belong to anyone, though. He learnt that humans could trap stories in a book, and then the stories belonged to them, and no one else could tell them again. Then if other people wanted the story they had to pay money for it.
It struck him that humans were very good at owning things. That came naturally to them.
As for investing, this had something to do with the newspaper. A boy on a bicycle brought the newspaper to the house every morning, and Basie brought it to the Master, and the Master read the tiny little Welsh codes in the back of it. If they were favourable, he was merry. If they were not, he became dark and irritable. Basie wondered what it would be like to have one's moods dictated by a piece of paper that a boy on a bicycle brought from somewhere.
The Master was married to the Mistress, who was lovely and thin and fragile as a teacup, and must always be catered to lest she have one of her spells. At least this is what Basie had come to understand. Personally he could not see how she was lovely; she wore fancy clothes certainly enough, which dragged and rustled on the floor, but she stank of perfume and had a very pinched appearance about her naked pinkish face. She was the only grown woman on the estate, so aside from the occasional visitor from far away, usually Basie only saw the women of the town as his examples of the human women to whom the Mistress was considered superior. Not that he had interest in looking at women. Many of them looked and smelled more pleasant to him than the Mistress, but they held up their noses at him and avoided him in the street when he went into town for any reason.
The Mistress, on the other hand, was a great animal lover. The Master was not that interested in the dogs or the horses or the little-dogs, and so that was all left to the Mistress, who appeared to do nothing else. The Mistress decided whom all the horses and little-dogs would breed with, and whom all the dogs would marry, and it seemed to Basie that she based her decisions about the latter mostly on the pecking order below stairs.
When they were both young, the Mistress married Basie to the children's nanny, whose name was Tess. Tess was an exquisitely beautiful and cold bitch who was very important and knew it. As the queen among dog kind, it seemed fit that he should marry her. She kept the children in line like puppies, by nipping them. Not with her teeth, but with her sharp tongue. Her neck was long and slender, as was her face, and her eyes seemed always to be half closed in contempt. Her fur was smooth and glossy like obsidian. Unusually among the dogs of the estate, she had lop ears, spaniel ears they were called. In Belgians it was acceptable (though not preferred) for females to have such ears, but in males it was a fault. Basie could not say it seemed a fault in Tess, who could not have been more perfect no matter what was written in the Mistress's books. She almost never spoke to Basie if she could help it.
Basie learnt of fucking and procreating from the other young dogs, though he didn't remember the exact times he learned of them, he didn't remember the words. Just one of the things one absorbs, like learning to speak. It was quite crucial for him to absorb things this way, for he had not the education that the humans had, but had to fake it enough to be acceptable, to smooth things over for them. He had to speak as they did, not as the kitchen dogs, and not as the stable boys. So he knew of fucking.
He had never quite understood it, though, until Stella looked over her shoulder.
Stella was one of the kitchen dogs, she washed and chopped and boiled. She was heavier than most of them, and had rougher fur that formed a sort of mane around her neck, above the collar of her dress. She took the Master's breakfast plates away when he would not come out to breakfast in the dining room, so Basie knew who she was.
One morning she took the plates from his hands, and he caught her scent. It was warm and feminine, and spoke of needs he had never considered. Surprised, he looked up and met her eyes. She looked away first, and then turned to take the plates back down to the kitchens.
And she paused, and looked over her shoulder at him, once, and then looked away in embarrassment and hurried away. But she must have known despite her embarrassment that Basie would not have seen her look back if he had not been looking after her too.
And so Basie was in love with a kitchen maid, or at least in lust with her. In the house, up tairs, he was absolutely perfect in his bearing and demeanor at all times. He had been trained that way.
There is a saying among dog trainers: A dog that is well trained will always do as you tell him; a dog that is well raised will always do the right thing, whether or not you are there to tell him so.
In the night, out in the garden, they came together. Her arse in the air, her rough tail held aside for him. He licked her cunt and she trembled and whined, and when he could not bear it any longer he mounted and fucked her with abandon, and she fucked him back, and they were animals together.
They lay on the grass at night and gazed up at the thousands upon thousands of stars. The Milky Way blazed bright through the sky. Basie had once heard the Mistress telling a visitor that the ancients believed the Milky Way was the path into heaven. Basie could see that now; he could see it as the slit of his lover's cunt, a glistening way into the sky between curtains of heavy dark fur.
Stella became pregnant. The Mistress thought nothing of it, believing that the father was Stella's husband, the chef's assistant. If anything it made Basie want her even more, added a strange new exciting scent to her.
Tess became pregnant as well, though it was not Basie's doing. Once, before Stella, he had tried to fuck her. She was willing to do it, but she wanted him to fuck her like a human, face to face, and she would not let him get his knot inside her. She said it was animal, it was dirty, they were not little-dogs and should not behave so. But he couldn't perform like that, he couldn't come. He could only fuck like a dog.
Stella's puppy was born. It was a boy. The Mistress gave him the name Yvega, which she got out of an astronomy book that she liked to look at in the night. She preferred to curl up with a book of stars rather than go out onto the landing and look at them.
"His name ought to be Gamma Vega, rightly," the Master said gruffly when he found this out. He normally did not care about the matters of the dogs, but left it to his wife, so Basie was surprised to hear him comment on it. "That thing she thinks is a Y is a Greek letter."
Basie nodded. "Sir," he said, as he usually did to acknowledge one of the Master's non sequiturs that required no reply.
Tess's pregnancy became enormous, and it was apparent that she was bearing twins. She was so large that she could no longer carry out her duties as the children's nanny, which left the task to the maids, who could not control the children at all. Without Tess's iron fist they ran wild. It was a chaotic time in the household.
It was late in the night when one of the Mistress's servants came and woke Basie, saying she required to speak with him.
"She?" he echoed, surprised. Rarely did the Mistress direct any comment to him.
He dressed and came upstairs to where Tess had given birth. The Mistress looked sad and disheveled.
"Madam," he said.
"I haven't any idea how this happened," she said miserably. "It shouldn't have, the genotyping was fine! The father was double dominant, it ought to have been quite impossible..."
She may as well have been speaking Welsh for all Basie understood. He waited patiently for her to come round to English again.
"Well... there must have been a mistake in the records, that's all," she said at last. Then, as if finally noticing him: "Basie. They're lop eared. Both of them boys, I'm afraid. If you would be so good."
It was very cold out as Basie took the sack to the river; his hands were numb, his face was numb. He had done this before. It would not be long before the little wisps of life inside were cold and still.
As he waited for the infant puppies to drown, Basie breathed out clouds in the cold. He looked up at the stars and pulled his coat closer around him. Perhaps they were better off. It would have been a sweet life, existing for only a few months in the absolute comfort of their mother's womb, the child's palace.
He recalled a day when the Mistress had the Deacon over for lunch, and they talked of Heaven. Basie had learnt before that this was the place good humans went when they were dead. She had asked the Deacon whether he thought dogs went there too.
"It would be no paradise at all without them," she had said.
*
It was about this time that Auster ran away. He was a kitchen dog and Stella's friend; it was said that he was Tess's lover. He was easygoing with a ready smile, often he and Stella would laugh together as they worked. And one morning he was simply gone.
Stella told everyone else she didn't know anything, but she whispered in Basie's ear in the dark that Auster had talked of going to America, where the world is strange and animals are masters. Basie held this secret close, as he always did.
As for Tess, she grew more cold than before, even sharper with the children. She was the only dog who could speak to humans that way, and she made the most of it. She called them names, dirty children -- and to think your mother gets to keep you -- dirty children with sticky hands.
*
Yvega -- for that remained his name, despite the Master's objection -- Yvega grew up lean and elegant, looking more like Tess than like Stella or Basie or anyone else. Basie thought privately that perhaps it was his own guilt that made the child look that way, his own adultery. To a dog, infidelity is the greatest sin.
Yvega was quiet and queer, and too watchful by half. You did not know he was watching you until you began to feel it, his silent gaze upon you. Basie had to plug up the keyhole of his bedroom because the child would not stop peeking in on them while they were fucking. The first few times Basie found him crouching there outside the door and shouted at him, and he just looked up at Basie with clear hazel eyes, neither laughing nor embarrassed nor chastised. So Basie plugged up the key hole. It was all he could do.
He also watched the stable boys out in the yard. The stable boys and the head groom and his assistant were the only human servants on the estate, which was necessitated by the instinctual hatred all horses had of dogs. It was quite impossible for any of the dogs to get near the horses without them spooking. When they went out shooting, Basie was brought along, but he had to walk while the humans rode, and a fair distance away at that.
There was a time they went shooting partridge on a misty day, and Basie brought Yvega along too; he was quite young then. They trudged through the sticky mud while the humans rode along on their tall, nervous horses. Yvega kept hanging far back, such that Basie had to go back and drag him forward again.
One of the little-dogs could perhaps sense Yvega's discomfort, and barked at him and worried him every chance he got. Yvega was terrified by this, which the humans found funny. The Master's friend said the young little-dog only wanted to play, and recognized Yvega as a fellow puppy. Yvega cowered and shook and shivered in the cold. Basie never brought him shooting again.
There was at this time a new little stable boy whose name was Timothy. The young boy was lame in the leg, and limped around the stable yard barely able to do the work they gave him. The older boys laughed at him and excluded him. Yvega seemed to find him fascinating, and hid for hours in the shrubbery watching him limp around the yard carrying heavy buckets of water for the horses. Basie told Yvega to leave off it, but the boy always went back.
One day Yvega and the little stable boy disappeared. They searched the woods, Basie easily imagining the boy's throat torn out-- he was sure the humans imagined the same thing. But he also thought forward a step further to Yvega hanging bloody and dead from a tree.
At last Yvega and Timothy came back, saying they had got hungry.
"Where did you go? What did you do?" Basie stood over his son, wondering when he had grown so tall. Being much shorter than the Master, he often forgot he was tall for a dog.
"We went to the town," Yvega whispered, after his usual fashion.
"And what did you do there?"
Yvega pulled back into himself. "We went to the cinema."
"What do you mean?" Basie demanded, getting flustered now. "What's that?" He only faintly knew what the cinema was; he had seen the building but had never been inside.
"It's a place where there's light," Yvega said in a faint tremor, seeming to look through Basie. "There are lights..." As though repeating fragments of something he had heard, unable to really understand it.
Basie turned and walked away in disgust, and left the boys to close around him.
*
The Master and the Mistress had dinner together that night, which they did not normally do, and conversed with each other, which was not ordinary either.
"So pay them, darling. They'll stay. You already feed them. They're practically members of the family as it is," the Mistress said lightly.
Basie could see the word 'idiot' in his Master's face as he looked at his wife.
"They won't stay, and even if they did, we couldn't afford to pay them."
She laughed, a high pitched titter, and put her napkin to her mouth. "Paying dogs to work! What an idea. This world really has gone topsy turvy, hasn't it. Like a fairy tale."
"The world is not like a fairy tale," the Master snapped, and got up and left the table.
*
When Basie went back below stairs, he found that Yvega had not come back.
He ran to the stable yard with his heart pounding in his throat, certain he was dead, berating himself for letting the boys rough him up. He looked around wildly in every area of the stable, ignoring the braying and whinnying of the tortured horses tied in their stalls.
He found him at last in an unoccupied stall in the hay, naked together with the little stable boy. Timothy's body was bruised and white; he had been roughed up too for his crimes.
Timothy's blue eyes were wide with shock and fear and humiliation.
Yvega simply looked at his father with a level, neutral, serious gaze.
Basie found he was not angry, but felt strangely hollow and afraid. He turned quickly and walked away, his whole body taut with fear, pressing very heavy on him like someone was creeping up to stab him in the back.
*
"Basie," the Master said. (Basie was already at his side as he said it.) "Do you know what this says?"
He pointed at the Welsh glyphs on the news paper's front page. Basie had no idea. The Master usually only read the small things in the back of the news paper.
"No, sir," said Basie patiently. He had not slept last night, and his eyes felt dry.
The Master looked at Basie levelly. "This says they've had a vote in Parliament, and they've decided we can't keep all you dogs any longer. We've got to let you all go free. You're the first one I've told."
Basie had not been asked a question, so he said nothing. He stood attentively, as he had been taught.
To his shock, the Master got angry then. "Can you even understand what I've just said to you? You're being set free." He put the paper down with a snap and stalked out of the room, muttering, "Madness."
Basie picked up the newspaper and put it back in its place. One did not leave things lying about.
*
And so, they got the letter from Auster, and so he went to the Deacon to read it, and they went to the airport to go to Los Angeles.
The airport was terrifying, though Basie did everything in his power to keep a calm front. They had to go through security and frightening machines, and police who looked at them harshly. Many people looked at Basie's tickets and told him where to go, directed from one point to another, slave-like.
At last they found the place one waited for the airplane that went to Los Angeles, which was full of rows of plastic chairs. They all sat down there to wait.
The voice boomed over the loudspeaker and said the flight for Los Angeles was leaving. An over-amplified robotic voice that frightened Basie and made him put his ears back. They got into line and were searched again, their bags opened. They didn't really have anything but clothes, since everything belonged to the Master and the Mistress.
They made them go into a tunnel that was cold and the air was stale and rushed about them. It was like going into Hell. Stella was clinging desperately to his hand. Yvega simply walked on. They got into the airplane which was unbelievably tiny inside, considering the tin gray monster it was outside. A dragon that blew white smoke trails backwards across the sky, that was all Basie knew of airplanes before. The impatient woman made them go into their seats and showed them how to buckle the straps -- in fact she buckled them into their seats for them, which was the first time Basie had ever been tied up in his life.
The idling engine of the airplane was loud, and Basie was just thinking he might get used to the white noise of it when the plane's engines really started and they began to move. He had ridden in cars before but this was nothing like that. He was in the belly of a tin dragon and being taken away. The movement was more like pressure than real movement, he was being pressed back into his seat, and thought to himself that the straps were not necessary to hold him there. The pressure would keep him equally restrained.
And then the ground came away and Basie felt the pressure on his feet and his legs, and they went up and up, and his ears popped and hurt. It was not flight like the flight of birds, which was violent and fast. He had dreamed before that he was flying on the back of an eagle, and it was terrifying and precipitous, darting and flapping and diving and swooping. The airplane was like being in suspended animation, suspended and held aloft in the air, not really moving at all. A crawl.
Basie and Stella and Yvega were strapped into those airplane seats for what seemed like several life times. At times he wondered if this was Hell, if he was finally being punished for his infidelity, and for ever. He stared at the seat in front of him, at the rough plastic there.
When they were let out and went back through the tunnel, Auster was there. He went and hugged Basie.
"So you made it," he said. "You're free."
*
Los Angeles turned out to be a dismal, busy place. The air stank and was hard to breathe, and the water that came from the taps was brown and no good for drinking. One had to buy bottles of water that was presumably brought from someplace else.
It was so different from home. He rarely saw other kinds of animals there, but here his prick was tempted by the exotic cats and the elegant pet bunnies on leashes walking beside their human masters.
No one had any manners, least of all the other animals, who liked to be called morphics, after the strange way of Americans. Basie thought little of it, except that it was one of those strange things Americans said, like calling the boot of a car the trunk.
They found work in a restaurant. It was not so utterly different from what they had known, but Basie felt strange with how everyone seemed equal, yet unequal. It was too hard to tell who was who. There was no upstairs and below stairs. They just said everyone was equal and you were meant to figure it out on your own. Basie felt blind in this world, felt like a slow child where previously he had been sharp and considered the smartest of the dogs in the house. They found his ways strange and laughable, his accent.
Not everyone even spoke English here at all, they spoke strange languages that he had never even heard of. He was shocked at how many different languages there were; the only one he knew of was Welsh. The farrier was Welsh and so was his assistant, and when they came and talked their strange language, none of the dogs could understand him. So to him any foreign thing was Welsh, but apparently there was more to it.
Their apartment was small and dingy. The walls were mildewed at the top near the ceiling. Neither Basie nor Stella had ever lived in such an unfine place. Below stairs it had not been luxurious, but it was neat and well kept and comfortable. It had always been taken care of by someone. Their apartment in Los Angeles was nothing like that at all. Basie had been a slave all his life, but he had never felt like one until he was freed.
It was hard to sleep in this dingy little place that smelled all wrong, full of the noises of other animals who might do anything. He had to bury his face in Stella's fur, not out of love, which had faded long before, but out of need for a familiar scent to fill his nose. He could close his eyes and pretend they were back home.
The summer was the worst, when it became incredibly hot and wet, and he was tempted to shave off his thick black fur. His palms were so sweaty it was difficult to hold things. There were crisp bright days in the winter when it was almost pleasant out, and that was nearly worse for when he came inside their dingy dim apartment, he just wanted to go back outside again.
There were many cinemas in Los Angeles, a few of which allowed free dogs. Basie and Stella tried it once. Neither of them cared for it really. Stella particularly found it too loud and overwhelming, and buried her face in Basie's shoulder.
But that was where Yvega would go, he would go to the cinema with the other rough boys who lived on that street. Basie did not worry for him; he never worried for him anymore. He went where he would go. In truth Basie preferred to have him out of the apartment, to escape from his strange quiet gaze.
Stella had become closed in, drawn into herself. She had blended in so much more easily than Basie. She even started to sound Californian. She looked exhausted at the end of each day. He looked into the sky at night and could only see a few stars in the dull orange Los Angeles haze; he could not see Stella's body in the stars any longer.
She became pregnant again. They couldn't afford it -- they could not even afford themselves and the child they had -- but at home it was unheard of for a bitch to stop from becoming pregnant, it simply was not done.
They had told Yvega he was going to have a little sister or brother, and the strange quiet child had seemed cautiously pleased, asking repeatedly if this sister or brother would play with him, if he would walk and talk, if he would be his friend. Yes, they told him, of course.
Basie should not have been surprised. He had felt cursed for years, since Yvega was born, and even before.
But he was surprised, oh God, he was surprised when he held the baby in his arms, when he saw his son's spaniel ears through the uterine mucous that coated his black fur.
For a week, Basie did not do anything. He let Stella nurse the child, he let Yvega look at it. That week seemed like a dark and hot year. Basie understood the mistake later: He should not have waited so long. If he had simply done what had to be done straight away, if he hadn't been so soft hearted, neither of them would have grown attached. But because he waited, because he struggled, because there was a shadow between the knowledge that the thing had to be done, and the doing of the thing...
On the beach, late on a humid night, he looked out over the water. On the island out there, there were the lit-up edges of alien trees, like they were on the moon. The baby was gone already, it had been so fast. He often felt here that he moved in a dream, that some time soon he would wake up in his bed at home, and that he could do things over, and rightly.
Basie's ears pricked up straight; he sensed something behind him, something looking at his back, pressing into him. He waited for a long time, breathing softly, wishing it away. But it stayed.
He turned, and Yvega's eyes were on him, very still, sober, and bright.
.
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no subject
Date: 2009-05-02 09:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-02 09:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-02 03:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-02 06:39 pm (UTC)There is more, it was my 2008 Nano. I did write 50,000 words, but I didn't finish it, and I still want to do that. Right now it's all in pieces and a lot of things aren't written yet.
The way I got to 50,000 words was to intersperse the main narrative with interludes about some past events and side-characters, of which this was the most elaborate and complete. In the main part of the story, grown-up Yvega is basically the bad guy (sad to say he doesn't grow up and get lots of therapy and lead a happy life...), and does stuff that causes the two main characters to meet and other plot events to unfold.
So yes, I want to finish this, and I want to sell it. I'm not there yet but I guess I made some progress this week. :)
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Date: 2009-05-03 12:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-03 02:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-02 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-03 02:44 am (UTC)