Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie Page B

thought, believing that maybe it wasn’t a lie. Her Amaats would probably have a similar reaction. “Have them pull their own numbers up in the next week, and they’ll have dredgefruit with supper, too. And Kalr as well.” That last for always-listening Five.
    “And the arrack?” asked Seivarden, hopefully.
    In the soldiers’ mess, the drinking, which had begun in a very focused, disciplined manner, each communal swallow accompanied by an invocation of one of the ship’s gods, the sting of the arrack carefully savored on the way down, had begun to degenerate. Bo Ten rose, and just slightly slurrily begged the lieutenant’s indulgence, and, receiving it, declared her intention to recite her own poetry.
    “I have more arrack,” I told Seivarden, in my quarters. “And I intend to give some of it out. But I’d rather not give it out wholesale.”
    In the soldiers’ mess, Bo Ten’s declaration met with cheers of approval, even from Lieutenant Tisarwat, and so Ten launched into what turned out to be an epic, largely improvised narrative of the deeds of the god Kalr. Who, according to Bo Ten’s account, was drunk a lot of the time and rhymed very badly.
    “Limiting the arrack is probably a good idea,” said Seivarden, in my quarters. A shade wistfully. “And I wouldn’t have had any anyway.” When I’d found her, naked and unconscious in an icy street a year before, she’d been taking far too much kef far too often. She’d mostly abstained since then.
    As Bo Ten’s poem rambled on, it turned into a paean toBo decade’s superiority to any other on the ship, including Amaat decade. No,
especially
Amaat decade, who sang foolish children’s songs, and not very well at that.
    “Our song is better!” declared one intoxicated Bo, halting the flow of Bo Ten’s poetry, and another, equally intoxicated but perhaps slightly clearer-thinking soldier, asked, “What
is
our song?”
    Bo Ten, not particular about her subject and not at all ready to yield the center of attention, took a deep breath and began to sing, in a surprisingly pleasant, if wobbly, contralto. “Oh, tree! Eat the fish!” It was a song I had sung to myself fairly frequently. It wasn’t in Radchaai, and Bo Ten was only approximating the sound of the actual words, using more familiar ones she recognized. “This granite folds a peach!” At the head of the table, Tisarwat actually giggled. “Oh, tree! Oh, tree! Where’s my ass?”
    The last word rendered Tisarwat and all her Bos utterly helpless with laughter. Four of them slid off their seats and collapsed onto the floor. It took them a good five minutes to recover.
    “Wait!” exclaimed Tisarwat. Considered rising, and then abandoned the idea as requiring too much effort. “Wait! Wait!” And when she had their attention, “Wait! That”—she waved one gloved hand—“is our song.” Or she tried to say it—the last word was lost in more laughter. She raised her glass, nearly sloshing the arrack out onto the table. “To Bo!”
    “To Bo!” they echoed, and then a soldier added, “To Fleet Captain Breq!”
    And Tisarwat was drunk enough to agree, without hesitation, “To Fleet Captain Breq! Who doesn’t know where her ass is!” And after that there was nothing but laughter and top-of-the-lungs choruses of
Oh, tree! Where’s my ass?
    “That, sir,” said Medic an hour later, in the bath, attended, as I was, by a Kalr with a cloth and a basin, “is why Captain Vel didn’t allow the decades to drink.”
    “No, it isn’t,” I said, equably. Medic, still frowning as always, raised an eyebrow but didn’t argue. “I don’t think it would be a good idea on a regular basis, of course. But I have my reasons, right now.” As Medic knew. “Are you ready for eleven hangovers when they wake up?”
    “Sir!” Indignant acknowledgment. Lifted an elbow—waving a bare hand, in the bath, was rude. “Kalr can handle that easily enough.”
    “That they can,” I agreed. Ship said