Free Treason by Orson Scott Card Page A

realized it was late, and went. So you could sleep.”
    She went to a corner, dipped her hand into a barrel, and drank.
    I would have done the same, but as I thought of water a horrible realization came over me. In prison I had had privacy to eliminate wastes, and while traveling with Teacher he had delicately let me take care of those needs on the other side of the carriage, forbidding anyone to watch. But alone here in the house with another—another?—woman, there might be no such fastidiousness.
    “Is there a room particularly for—” For what, I wondered. Was there a delicate way of putting it? “I mean, what are the other three rooms of your house used for?”
    She turned to me and smiled slightly, but there was something other than a smile behind her eyes. “That I will tell to those who have a practical reason for such knowledge.”
    Didn’t work. And worse, I had to watch as Mwabao Mawa casually took off her robe and walked naked across the room toward me.
    “Aren’t you going to sleep?” she asked me.
    “Yes,” I said, not bothering to hide how flustered I was. Her body was not particularly attractive, but it was the first time I had ever seen such a large woman undressed, and that, combined with her blackness and my long deprivation, made her exotic and intensely arousing. It made it all the more urgent for me to figure out a way to keep from getting undressed myself, since my modesty was essential to my survival in a nation which took me for a woman.
    “Then why aren’t you undressing?” she asked, puzzled.
    “Because in my nation we don’t undress to sleep.”
    She laughed aloud. “You mean you wear clothing even in front of other women?”
    I pretended to speak as if I were from a nation whose customs exactly coincided with my present need, though in fact at that time I did not yet know of any such place. “The body is one’s most private possession,” I said, “and the most important. Do you wear all your jewels all the time?”
    She shook her head, still amused. “Well, at least I hope you’ll take it off to drop.”
    “Drop?”
    She laughed again (that damned superior laugh) and said, “I guess a soiler would have a different word for it, wouldn’t you? Well, you might as well watch the technique—it’s easier to show it than to explain it.”
    I followed her to the corner of the room. She grasped the corner pole and then swung out, through the curtain. I gasped at the suddenness of the way she lurched out over the vast distance to the ground. For a moment I wondered if she had leapt out into space and flown away; but there were her hands, still gripping the pole through the curtains, and she sounded calm as she said, “Well, open the curtain, Lark. You can’t learn if you don’t look!”
    So I opened and watched as she defecated over empty space. Then she swung back in and walked over to another water bucket —not the one she had drunk out of—and cleaned herself.
    “You’ve got to learn quickly which bucket is which,” she said with a smile. “And also—don’t ever drop in a wind, especially in a wind with rain. There’s nobody directly below us, but there are plenty of houses off at an angle below my home, and they have strong opinions about feces on their roofs and urine in their drinking water.” Then she lay down on a pile of cushions on the floor.
    I hitched up my robe until the skirt was very short, and then grasped the pole tightly and delicately tiptoed through the curtain. I began to tremble as I glanced down and saw how far below me the few torches still burning seemed to be. But I bowed—or rather squatted—to the inevitable, trying to pretend that I was not where I was.
    It took a long time to convince my sphincters that they should relax, not clench up in terror. When at last I finished, I came back and walked awkwardly to the water barrel. For a difficult moment, I wondered if I was at the wrong one.
    “That’s the one,” came Mwabao Mawa’s