Master of None (N. Lee Wood) by N. Lee Wood

Author:N. Lee Wood
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780446510141
Publisher: Warner Aspect
Published: 2004-09-03T07:00:00+00:00

XXV

AS WEDDINGS GO, NATHAN LATER THOUGHT WRYLY, HE’D BEEN TO BETTER. He wasn’t even sure at which part of the ceremony he actually became a married man. Not that he’d seen much of it, either.

The basics had been described to him, and he knew somewhat of what to expect. But the reality was far worse than the anticipation. He’d spent the previous day being soaked, washed, scraped, massaged, oiled, polished, painted, and purged until he’d gone to bed with every inch of his skin tender, the bedclothes nearly painful. Shortly before daybreak, he was rudely woken from a sound sleep by a cacophonous chorus of the Nga’esha men singing loudly while bashing hand drums and cymbals. With Aelgar directing the action, he was seized and lifted bodily out of bed, carried off to the main atrium of the men’s courtyard. There, a canopied sedan chair had been elaborately decorated with hundreds of bright silk streamers and brass bells. The men carried him around it three times before setting him on his feet in front of it.

Where he stood for the next three hours while Nga’esha men decorated him even more elaborately than the sedan chair. The weight of gold bracelets from wrist to elbow, and more on his legs from ankle to knee, dragged on him uncomfortably, making him wonder how he was going to walk with all this metal. The conventional sati had been dispensed with, and he was outfitted in a glittering costume not designed for the normal human male body. The exaggerated shoulders were settled onto him like a yoke for an ox, and someone cinched in his waist with such an abrupt jerk he gasped as the breath was knocked out of him. Once he was fastened into the rest of the costume, his thighs were squeezed together so tightly he could barely shuffle along by moving his knees.

Huge headgear completely covered his face with a garish curtain of beads, and he wondered how he was expected to even be able to see to walk. The answer, he discovered when he was picked up like an oversized doll and installed standing in the sedan chair, was that he wasn’t expected to do anything at all.

He clung to the canopy supports to keep from being pitched out, swaying dangerously as the chair was lifted onto as many shoulders as could be wedged under it and carried out of the men’s house to be paraded through the women’s half of the estate. Judging by the cheering as he was conveyed lurching through the halls, every Nga’esha female relative had come for the wedding, his already diminished sight further hampered by a shower of paper streamers and confetti flung over him.

Although it was still early morning, half of Sabtú seemed to be crowded into the expansive women’s gardens. Pratha Yaenida sat enthroned on a portable dais even larger and grander than his sedan chair. She, he would notice, spent most of the festivities dozing, comfortably snuggled into her nest of cushions.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.