Surface Detail

The first part of the sentence, approved by Sichult’s highest court, was duly carried out; Lededje’s mother was taken, put into something resembling a coma, and tattooed. The night of the day they had taken her away, her husband slit his own throat with one of the two knives the original disastrous agreement had been solemnised by.

They found Grautze’s body quite quickly. The medics were able to take a viable sample of his seed from him. Brought together with an egg, taken from his widow while she was still under from the tattooing procedure, the resulting embryo was altered, changed to become that of an Intagliate, and then implanted back into his widow. Many of the team who had overseen the designing and patterning of the embryo felt it was their finest work. The result was Lededje.

The basis for the fabulous scroll work wrapping every square centimetre of her skin was that of the letter V, for Veppers, and the Veprine Corporation he commanded. Other elements included twin, crossed knives and images of the object the fateful deal had been about in the first place; Sichult’s soletta, the giant space-mounted fabrication which shielded the world from some of the light of the sun.

Lededje tried running away a lot as she grew up. She never got very far. Around about the time she started to think of herself as a young woman rather than a girl, when her intaglia was revealing itself in its true, mature, astoundingly intricate and colourful glory, she began to realise just how fabulously rich her master Mr. Veppers was and how far his power and influence reached. She gave up trying to run away.

It wasn’t until some years later, when Veppers started raping her, that she discovered that the richer the alleged perpetrator was, the more all those strictly enforced statutes regarding the rights of the Intagliate became, well, more like aspirations; general guidelines rather than properly enforced laws. That was when she started trying to run away again. The first time, she’d got to the edge of the estate, ninety kilometres from the house, after travelling down one of the great forested trackways that led to the estate perimeter.

The day before Lededje was caught and brought back, her mother, despairing, had thrown herself from one of the towers in the part of the estate near the house Lededje and her friends called the water maze.

Lededje had never confided to her mother that Veppers was raping her; he’d told her after the first time that if she did he’d make sure she never saw her mother again. Simple as that. She thought that her mother had suspected though. That might have been the real reason she took her own life.

Lededje felt she understood why death had seemed like an easier course for her mother. She even thought about doing the same thing herself, but couldn’t bring herself to go through with it. Part of her wanted to deprive Veppers of the most monetarily precious person in his household, but a more important part of her refused to let herself be ground down to the point of suicide by him.

Losing her mother hadn’t been enough, apparently. She’d been physically punished for her attempt to escape, too; a relatively unadorned patch of her flesh at the base of her back had been retro-marked with a beautifully drawn, exquisitely detailed though to her still inestimably crude etching of a black-skinned girl flitting through a forest. Even the applying of it had hurt.

And now, as Sensia slowly let the memories filter back, she knew that the second time she’d escaped had been in the city, in the capital, in Ubruater. She’d got away for longer that time – five days rather than four – though she’d only travelled a couple of kilometres across Ubruater, the adventure ending in the opera house that Veppers himself had funded.

She winced as she remembered the knife entering her chest, sliding between her ribs, plunging into her heart. The taste of his blood, the grisly feel of the tip of his nose as she’d chewed once and swallowed it, the shrieked obscenity and the final slap across the face when she was already as good as dead.

They were somewhere else now.

She’d had Sensia turn her skin from reddish-gold – too much like Veppers’ own flesh tone – to a dark, glossy black. The house and landscape had been altered at her request too, all in an instant.

Now they stood outside a more modest single-storey dwelling of white-painted mud brick whose prospect was of a leafy little oasis in a great duned desert of sable sand spreading as far as the eye could see. Colourful tents stood around pools and little streams, shadowed by tall, red-leafed trees.

“Make there be children,” she’d said, and there they were; a dozen or so, all laughing and splashing in one of the shallow pools, oblivious to the two women watching them from the mud brick house on its slight rise.