The Stone Dogs Read Online Free Page A

marble tumbled among vines, and strawberries starred red through the velvet plush of their beds.
    Arch-and-pillar gateways marked the turnoffs to the estate manors, hints of colored roofs amid the treetops of their gardens.
    Yolande felt what she always did when she saw a gate: an impulse to open it. Like an itch in the head, to follow and see what was there, who the people were, and what their lives were like. Make up stories about them, or poems.
    Silly , she thought. People were people; plantations were plantations, not much different from the one she grew up on.
    Words and surfaces, hard shiny shells, that was all you could know of people. Yet the itch would not go away. You thought that you knew what they were like, especially when you were little; then a thing would happen that showed you were wrong. She shivered. Like that time years ago at the party; she had been peeking down through the banisters when Mother and the stranger began quarreling. Their voices had gone hard, then very quiet. The man began a motion to hit Mother, and the slap of her hand on his forearm was very loud.
    A second before the main hall had been noisy with talk and music, then quiet had gone over it, rippling the way wind did through ripe wheat. Yolande had watched her mother's face go strange, very still and smiling. Not moving at all, even when the others talked and then some houseserfs came with her gunbelt and the man's. The two of them had walked out the French doors into the garden, Pa and a friend with Mother, two guests with the one who had tried to hit her. Two shots, so quick, before she had time even to be afraid, to think that Mother might be dead .
    Then she and Pa had come walking back through from the garden; Mother was laughing, and she had her arm around his waist. Some of the house servants had come in carrying the stranger on a folding garden chair; there was blood glistening and seeping from a pressure-bandage on his stomach, and his face looked yellow and waxy.
    Yolande shook the memory aside. It was just because it was so sudden , she reminded herself. Duels were-not that common—years could go by without one—and the insult had been gross. I was too young to understand .
    The senior maidservant Angelica was sulking, but she was quite old, twenty at least, probably missing somebody back home. It would have been good to have someone to talk to, reading in a car had always made her nauseated. Lele gave a giggle that was almost a squeal at something the other maidservant, Bianca, said, and Deng turned back to scowl at her .
    Lele stuck out her tongue at him, but lowered her voice. Lele was Deng's get; usually it was anybody's guess who fathered a housegirl's children, but the foreman was the only Oriental on the estate. You could see it in the saffron-brown tint of her skin, the delicate bones and the folds at the corners of her hazel-tinted eyes.
    The Draka girl leaned back with a sigh, feeling heavy and a little tired from the going-away party last night. She had the rear of the autosteamer to herself, a semicircle couch like the fantail of a small yacht. Nearly to herself: her Persian cat Machiavelli was curled up beside her. He always tried to sleep through an auto drive; at least he didn't hide under a seat and puke anymore… The windows slanted over her head, up to the roof of the auto, open a little to let in a rush of warm dry afternoon air.
    She let her head fall back, looking through the glass up into the cloudless bowl of the sky, just beginning to darken at the zenith.
    Her face looked back at her, transparent against the sky, centered in a fan of pale silky hair that rippled in the breeze.
    Like a ghost , she thought. Her mind could fill in the tinting, summer's olive tan, hair and brows faded to white-gold, Mother's coloring. Eyes the shade of granulated silver, rimmed with dark blue, a mixture from both her parents. Face her own, oval, high cheekbones and a short straight nose, wide full-lipped mouth, squared