High Couch of Silistra (26 page)

“Where is my father?” I asked.

“At the star nurseries,” Raet explained, as if such an answer made it all clear. “He is at a critical stage in his shaping, and will return when he has his project stabilized. You will stay with us, your choice of Esyia’s tridoe or mine, until he does. That is, unless you would return to the cubes.”

That was no choice at all. Raet’s hand was on the small of my back. I tried to ignore my body, surging at his touch. I had much reason to hate him, but I could find no hate in me. My mind raged at my weakness, but my body would not listen. What he had said—that he would have given me a child in Arlet—rang in my head. I longed to fill that void within me. I wondered if he might not be able to do so here, despite the fact that I had so recently lost one.

“No,” he said. I winced and concentrated upon keeping my thoughts under control. But they would not obey me. No he could not? Or no he would not? My mind demanded an answer.

“No I cannot, but not for the reason you think.” I caught his amused expression out of the corner of my eye. My skin felt hot and flushed.

“Estrazi would doubtless reduce him to component atoms,” Esyia put in. “Such a child, so admixed in but two generations, would upset his plans. If it had been done before the testing, the constants would have fallen out differently. There would have been no need to worry what effect such a child would have upon the future of your planet.”

Certainly they felt my confusion, but neither deigned to enlighten me.

We stopped before a door, identical in my sight to dozens we had passed, and it opened obediently. Within, I saw sculptured gardens, under a summer sky. We walked between fancifully trimmed hedges of flowering bush, gold and pearl and green. The walk was flagged with slabs of iridescent stone, the air cool and clean, with pungent aliveness that tickled my nostrils. At the end of the long straight path, I could see an arabesqued, towered building, of some gold-veined white stone.

Up the tiered steps we went, and into a mosaicked hall of breathtaking beauty. Esyia’s tridoe made Astria seem some peasant hovel. Precious metals filigreed the door lintels, the walls were covered with hangings of vibrant intricate silks. They showed me through the tridoe: the kitchen, where a great table of some golden material was laid with platters of the same; the sleeping rooms, each more wonderful than the one preceding it; the large chamber that could seat three hundred. In the kitchen were no stoves, no stores, no plumbing. In the sleeping rooms were no facilities for grooming or toilet. I had been here long enough not to need to ask why.

In that sleeping room of umber and ocher, which Esyia assigned to me, was a great couch of intaglioed sienna metal. I sat upon it, on the spread that bore the same pattern as my father’s ring. Raet removed the leash from my collar. My hands were still bound in front of me. He looked down upon me.

“Will you behave yourself?” he said severely.

“It seems I have little choice.”

He looked at me with that expression of distrust I have come to expect from him, and touched the metal bracelets at my wrists. They fell away and hit the brightly patterned thick-piled earth-tone rug and were gone. He stood, muscles tensed, regarding me like the dorkat one finds in the parr-house among its slaughter: one can never tell what the wild and dangerous beast will do.

“Are these quarters satisfactory?” Esyia asked softly, stepping between us.

I nodded, but my mind knew my body’s needs, and spoke its message.

“Oh,” she said, and circuited the large room. “How about here?” And where the keep narrowed into an alcove, a wall came into being. Since the retarded child could not dispose of her own waste or attend to her own cleanliness, mechanical means had been provided.

I put my recently freed hands in my lap. I wished they would remove my collar.

“That we will not do, for your sake as much as ours,” said Esyia, coming to sit beside me. “We will come for you later, and share a meal,” she said, and her body was gone from the room. I looked dumbly at the wrinkled depression where her bottom had indented the coverlet with her weight. Raet leaned against one of the chased bronze posts that rose from the couch to meet the muraled ceiling high above our heads.

What can I say about him? That he was his father’s son seemed a certainty. That I was so aroused by him as to make the misery he had caused me on Silistra inconsequential? That even Tyith’s death was not meaningful enough to stem my need for him? All of that and more. That I cared not that he considered me at best a wild animal, incapable of rational thought? Doubtless. Trembling with eagerness, I went to him, honored beyond comprehension that he would deign to use me. That no child could come from this union, I had previously ascertained. But I wanted that meaningless couching more than I had wanted any other, and I despised myself for my need. Perhaps he used me out of pity, perhaps curiosity, perhaps to further put me in my place. That last he truly accomplished. I, so skilled in the needs of men, found myself barely able to satisfy him. His vitality was such that when I lay finally exhausted from my efforts, I understood why my mother had given up her life to bear a child to such a one. But I would not be allowed that sense of purpose, that rationalization, that Estrazi had permitted my mother. With this couching, I had met my own lust head-on for the first time in my life. To do so is a shattering experience for a woman. To do so with a creature as superior to oneself as one is to the bondrex on the plain rubs salt into the open wound.

When he had gone from the keep, by that instant exit the Mi’ysten prefer, I thought long upon what had occurred. Full of self-recrimination, I paced off my assigned quarters. There were no windows in the ocher keep, nor would the door open for me. I was as much a prisoner as I had been in the crystal cube, but in a more urbane setting. I cannot blame them for being loath to let the beast roam their keep at will. I would not set a dorkat loose in the halls of Astria.

“Flesh toy,” he had called me, “come here.”

“We are all flesh,” I had replied.

“Ah, but we by choice, and you by design. Therin is a great difference.” His voice had been husky, his eyes half-closed. God-man or not, the man in him knew and desired me.

I held onto that one shred of comfort. For whatever reason, I excited him. When he was gone, I was consumed with fear that I could not do so again, that he might never again so use me. I found myself desperate for his acknowledgment. I doubted I would ever have his respect, but how he regarded me seemed more important than the next breath I would take—out of proportion to what had occurred. I was more right than I knew.

I determined to ask Esyia if she could teach me a mind shield effective against him. I could not bear the thought that Raet had access to the emotional maelstrom whirling within me.

We were in the kitchen, Esyia and I. She had come for me while I lay, drained and dozing, on the black couch-spread that bore my father’s mark, and escorted me through the corridors into the kitchen with the great golden table. The walls, which had been sculptured winy rock when I had first seen them, were covered so thickly by green-leaved plants that the rock was merely the pattern in which the creeping shiny-leaved mat had conceived to grow. That any plants could have grown up along the walls in such profusion in the short time since I had been in that room was impossible.

I went and ran my hand along their slick-smooth leaves. Up to my wrist I buried it in new green. The smell of growth was tangy in my nostrils.

“Do you like it?” Esyia asked, pride in her voice. “I thought it a nice change.”

I nodded, running my hand through my tangled hair. She had suggested that I help her with the meal. There was little chance that I could help this woman with anything. When she had arrived to bring me to this greened kitchen, I had been dreaming of Sereth Crill Tyris. I could not put the dream from my mind. In it he had been called to task, at Celendra’s bidding, by the Day-Keepers, for not returning Tyith’s body, nor mine, to Arlet, nor having proof that I still lived. I was greatly troubled, for in the dream the council had stripped from the Seven all his rank and privilege and turned him, chaldless and outlaw, out from Arlet. If it had not been for Sereth, and what he had taught me about myself, I surely would not have survived my couching with Raet with mind intact.

Esyia came to me where I stood against the living tapestry that covered the walls of the lofty-ceilinged hall. She took my hand from my neck where I worried a thick knot of hair. Then she put both hands to the crown of my head and slowly brought them down. My scalp tingled, and every hair on my head raised itself away from its fellows and settled, tangle-free and shining, down against my back. I could feel the electricity dissipate, crackling around me.

Esyia smiled at me. I took up a handful of my long bronze mane and stared at it incredulously. I shook my head, unbelieving.

“Could you teach me that?” I asked her.

“Is that really what you want to learn?” she said, and led me to sit at the great golden table, she at its head and I beside her, on her right. The cushioned, carved chair was warm and yielding against my naked flesh. I leaned back gingerly, for the work that Raet’s hands had done upon me was beginning to bear fruit. I could see the bruises darkening on my thighs, feel them tender on my back and rump. On my breasts the marks his teeth had made were raised and purple.

“I would learn a way to keep Raet out of my mind,” I said.

“If you had such a skill, it would be a blessing to all of us. Everyone in a sereel radius must know of your coupling. You are a very strong sender.”

I wondered what a sereel was. I noticed that Esyia’s face seemed pinched and drawn. I could feel the flush of embarrassment creep across my skin. I saw again that moment in the couching when, on my hands and knees, I had kissed his feet, laid my cheek against them. Dismally I remembered that I had begged to be allowed to do so.

“He is a very difficult Mi’yst,” Esyia commiserated.

“I meant a block, a screen, to keep him from reading my thoughts,” I explained.

She spread her hands wide.

“I will submit your request to one of the fathers,” she said, “but we must make the meal. Let us have it typically Silistran.” She smiled comfortingly. “I have not been there since the shaping, and I must have the exactness of the meal—the components and their preparation—from your mind.”

I obediently visualized the most sumptuous and delectable Astrian feast I could conceive: jellied harth, golden-fried grinta, denter with a danne-flavored sauce, cheesed tuns, name wine, kifra, fresh greens and fruit I arrayed before my mind’s eye. Homesickness swelled and drowned me in a great wave.

With no more effort from Esyia than it would have cost me to raise a fork to my mouth, the dishes I had pictured appeared before us, covering the length of the golden table, steaming hot and frosty cold, sliced and glazed and sauced, perfect. I reached to the fresh fruit and picked from its stalk a fat gul, purple-blue-skinned and juicy. The juice was tart and sweet and achingly familiar. I crunched the seeds within it. My throat convulsed, and I lowered my head to hide my tears.

There was enough food upon that long table to feed a hundred. I was about to comment upon this to Esyia when they started appearing. The air would shimmer and spark, and one would be where none had been before. I wondered how they kept from colliding with one another. Soon the room was filled with naked bronze forms. I had not realized there could be such variety within perfection. Esyia introduced me to so many, so fast, I despaired at divining one from the other. Could they all know what Raet had done to me? Their amused faces, smiling, seemed to say that they did.

Esyia was speaking to me, her hand upon the arm of a Mi’ysten who could have been my father’s brother. He carried more mass than Raet, seemed more mature. The bronze face was unlined, but the eyes, fire-gleam that held mine steadily, were wise beyond compassion.

“This is Kystrai, one of the fathers,” Esyia had said. I could feel his delicate probe, and yet I felt calmed under his scrutiny.

“So this is Estri, daughter of Estrazi by a space-time woman. You are she who would learn to shield?” His questioning seemed rhetorical.

I nodded.

“Teach her, Esyia,” he said slowly, never taking his eyes from me. “It will be instructive to see how far she can progress.” He chuckled. My confusion must have been a screeching wail in their minds. He had not been present when I had asked Esyia to do me that service.

“But—” Esyia protested. Searing himself between us, he raised a hand and cut her off.

I hardly noticed. Raet had arrived, simultaneous with a lithe, copper-skinned woman whose bronze hip-length hair was streaked with gold. Her whole body shimmered with tiny points of light. She took Raet’s hand, laughing, and the sparks flowed from her hand to his, up his arm, into his mouth. I felt as if I had been cruelly struck in the solar plexus. Such love-play was, for me, unattainable. I could not compete with such a woman, against whose beauty I was merely plain. I felt again the animal, the retarded alien. By escorting such a creature into my sight, Raet had made my diminishment complete. I wondered if she, too, knew from my mind what had occurred with him; if he would treat her, his equal, as he had treated me. I hunched over in my seat, my arms crossed over my breasts to hide, some way, the marks he had left upon me. I tried desperately to control my agonized thoughts.

As I had known he would, his hand on her high, gilded rump, Raet guided her toward us. I did not bother to remember her name. I saw only the smile that flickered at the corners of Raet’s mouth, and Kystrai’s hand on my arm.

Raet leaned his weight upon the table, between me and Kystrai. His elbow brushed my breast and started it burning. He spoke low in Kystrai’s ear, then took his hand from the table and laid it on the back of my neck, massaging gently, while he spoke in a tongue I did not know to Kystrai, whom Esyia had called a father. I almost cried out for joy that his touch was upon me. I let my eyes roam from the muscles of his back to the sparkling girl’s face. It was a face full of impatient disdain, and that disdain held more than a trace of annoyance.