No Other Love (20 page)

Shaking, Merin sank down onto a corner of the
mattress. A continued clatter came from the next room, along with
disjointed comments from Saray indicating that she was having
trouble finding what she wanted. Merin was glad for the delay. It
gave her a few minutes in which to compose herself. By the time
Saray appeared once more, Merin was the very picture of Oressian
reticence, eyes lowered, emotional barriers firmly in place. But
behind the calm façade she was still so upset that she meekly
accepted the costume of shining green and glittering jewels that
Saray now pressed upon her, and promised she would wear it.

“It’s lovely. Thank you.” Merin scarcely
glanced at the outfit.

“And these cosmetics, too.” Saray was so
concerned with how Merin should look that she seemed completely
unaware of Merin’s distress. “Use just a little of this powder on
your cheeks, the cream on your lips, and paint around your eyes
with this brush. The dress has been stored in khata wood, so you
won’t need perfume.” Saray was packing all of these supplies and
the dress into a wooden box as she spoke.

“You are very kind.” Merin rose from the bed,
relieved to find that her legs would support her. She took the box
Saray handed to her. “Will you also attend the Gathering?”

“I will appear. I am certain Dulan will have
admonishing words to speak about my experiments and I will want to
answer them in a way that will calm my friends. It seems I have
become the cause of much dissension in Tathan.” Saray’s hand
touched Merin’s shoulder. “I am not your enemy. I am truly sorry
for what has happened to you and Herne. For reasons of her own,
Ananka deliberately chose the two of you to be the subjects of our
most ambitious attempt. I will do what I can to convince her to
help you, but you must exercise patience. Tula and Dulan seem to
think I can simply order Ananka to do something and it will be
done. We work together, by merging our different abilities, and we
cannot do it often because for a long time afterward we have no
power left. The experiments that Dulan fears so much are rare
events.”

“I wish they had been rarer still,” said
Merin.

They had almost reached Tathan on their
return trip before Merin could bring herself to speak about what
had happened in Saray’s room.

“You were more right than you realized,
Dulan,” Merin said. “Saray told me the experiments exhaust not only
her, but Ananka as well.”

“I hoped when you went off with her,” Herne
said, “that you would discover just this sort of useful
information.”

“I was compelled to go with her, but I don’t
mind,” Merin told him, “because I saw Ananka.”

“You what?” Herne stared at her. Dulan turned
completely around in the front seat. Tula dropped the reins in his
astonishment, thus allowing the ixak to run free. They immediately
broke into a fast trot, perhaps scenting their stables and evening
food. Before Tula had them under control again they were racing
down the main thoroughfare of Tathan. It was not until both cart
and ixak had been returned to the stable and Tula had rejoined his
companions in Dulan’s sitting room that the others began to
question Merin.

“Where did you see Ananka?” Herne asked.

“If I am correct,” Merin told them all, “You
saw her, too. I believe the cat was Ananka in disguise.”

“Tell us everything,” Dulan urged, taking the
chair nearest the fire.

“Saray left me alone while she found clothing
for me,” Merin said. “When I turned around, instead of the cat
sitting on the bed, a woman was there. When Saray made a noise, the
woman vanished and the cat reappeared. It hissed at me and ran
away.”

“What did the woman look like?” Tula regarded
her with wide eyes.

“Like me,” Merin told him, “except her hair
was lighter.”

“Remarkable,” Tula breathed.

“Exactly what I would expect,” said Dulan.
“Herne, you have mentioned before that when you first saw Ananka,
she, looked much like Merin.”

“I only noticed the resemblance later,” Herne
amended the story, “after I looked more closely at Merin. I didn’t
really see her in those days.”

“When Ananka first appeared to you,” Dulan
asked, “had you been thinking of Merin?”

“Yes.” Herne spoke slowly, recalling that
now-remote scene by the campfire. “I was wishing she would remove
her blasted coif so I could see what color her hair was.”

“Did you have a mental image of her
hair?”

“From her brows and lashes, I thought it must
be light brown,” Herne said. “But I was wrong. It’s actually much
darker.”

“Ananka did not know the real color of
Merin’s hair, either,” Dulan pointed out, “because she took the
image of Merin out of your thoughts, and showed herself to you as
the Merin you imagined,”

“No wonder she looked so familiar. But when I
went to her in the grotto later that night – when I – we –
damnation! Was it a real creature I saw and touched, or was it all
an illusion?”

“We do not understand Ananka’s full powers,”
Dulan said.

“That answer is no help to me at all.” Herne
looked so miserable that Merin reached out to take his hand.

“You could no more have stopped what happened
in that grotto,” she told him, “than I could have refused to go
with Saray today. There are some things humans cannot resist.”

“I thought I wanted her,” Herne said,
“because I wanted you without knowing it. I understand that now,
but still, what I did –”

“It’s all right.” Fortified by the way he had
told Saray it was Merin he loved, she was able to smile at him. “It
doesn’t matter now. I understand, and I’m not angry.”

“Tarik said it must have been an illusion.”
Herne’s eyes were locked on Merin’s face. He was totally
concentrated on her, forgetting the others in the room. “Tarik was
so sure of it that he made me certain, too.”

“Tarik?’ Dulan’s sharp voice made them both
jump. “This is the second time today you have mentioned other
people. Herne, you two were not alone on this world, were you?”

“No.” The stark word brought a gasp from Tula
and a stiffening of Dulan’s robed figure.

“You led us to believe an untruth,” Dulan
accused him.

“We were trying to protect our friends,”
Herne said. “we weren’t sure you could be trusted, and we didn’t
know how extensive your power might be. I wasn’t even sure you were
real.”

“And now?” asked Dulan.

“I still don’t know what to believe about how
we found ourselves here,” Herne admitted. “But I do believe you are
honestly trying to help us, so I will tell you that there were ten
others with us, two of them descendants of your own people who
joined our colony after we arrived. We are all living in a building
far north of here, on an island in a lake.”

“At Lake Rhyadur? You have moved into our
private retreat, the place most truly my home on this planet?”
Dulan paused, apparently overcome by strong emotion.

“In their time,” Tula said to Dulan, “we are
dead for hundreds of years, old friend. Should we care if someone
else lives in our rooms after we have gone?”

“You are buried there,” Herne said. “Both of
you.”

“How do you know this?” Dulan asked.

“By your own words,” Herne answered. “You
kept a notebook. Our leader, Tarik, found it. Your mate is there,
too. It seems you all died of extreme old age.”

“Well, then.” Dulan’s head was bowed. “A
peaceful death, with loved ones near. A final resting place at
Rhyadur, where my heart lies. Thank you for telling me.”

“There’s more,” Merin said. “We call this
world Dulan’s Planet. That is the official Jurisdiction name.”

There was a laugh from beneath the blue hood,
a coarse, choked sound that broke suddenly into a clear peal of
pure mirth. On Tula’s face a look of startled delight appeared.

“Fair enough,” said Dulan. “In the
Jurisdiction, I lost a world that should have been mine to rule
because I was born a telepath. It’s only fair for the Jurisdiction
to give me back a world. What matter if it’s a posthumous
honor?”

* * * * *

Merin insisted on dressing in private for the
Gathering. She waited while Herne bathed and donned the formal robe
that Tula had brought for him to wear. It was a soft, grey-brown in
color, trimmed in silver, and loosely made like the robes worn by
Tula and Dulan, with long full sleeves and a hood, which Herne wore
thrown back into a cowl. His ash-brown hair was still a little damp
from his bath. Without a supply of the pills that kept his beard
from growing, he had been forced to shave with a razor. There was a
tiny nick on one side of his jaw. To Merin, he was remarkably
handsome, even if he looked pale and tired, with the harsh planes
of his face drawn and tense.

“I hope there are refreshments at this
Gathering,” he said. “I’m hungry.”

“We just ate with Dulan.” She laughed at his
words, dismissing the hollow feeling in her own stomach.

“Nothing I eat seems to fill me,” he
complained. His hands were at the chinstrap of her coif,
unfastening it. “Aren’t you hungry?”

“In all of Tathan, there is only one thing
that fills me,” she murmured, reaction to his touch stirring deep
inside her, “and leaves me satisfied, too.”

“You, my dear, are rapidly becoming a
galaxy-class tease.” He grinned at her. “Who would have thought the
cold and self-controlled Merin of just a few days ago could turn
into such a passionate woman in so short a time?” The coif was off
now and his hands were stroking through her hair, pulling it down
out of the tight coils and over her shoulders.

“I don’t understand what has happened to me.”
She sighed. “I never dreamed of feeling like this, of wanting
another person so badly that I can’t think about anything
else.”

Herne unfastened the opening of her treksuit
down to her waist. His hands were on her breasts. Merin felt the
passionate heat begin to rise in her. In another moment or two she
would not be able to stop what was certain to happen between the
two of them, and neither would he. She pulled away.

“We don’t have time for this,” she protested.
“I have to bathe and dress.”

“Are you refusing me?” He sounded stern, but
when she met his grey eyes they were filled with laughter.

“Never,” she promised, sliding her hands
along his chest, down toward his thighs, pausing at a crucial spot,
smiling into his eyes all the while. “It’s only a postponement.
Later, after the Gathering is over, when we are in this room again
with the rest of the night before us, then we will taste passion
and I’ll make the waiting up to you. You won’t regret the
delay.”

“I was wrong,” he said. “You aren’t a tease
at all. My dearest, you rank as one of the great seductresses of
all time.”

“An Oressian seductress?” The idea made her
laugh.

“That’s one of the reasons why I love you so
much,” he told her, turning serious. “You are a mass of fascinating
contradictions. You could even forgive what I did with Ananka. I
don’t know of another woman who would forgive that stupid
mistake.”

In a gesture that was rapidly becoming
familiar to her, he kissed the tip of her nose. She watched him
walk to the door, her eyes filling with tears of love. He had
enlarged her heart with tenderness and joy beyond anything she had
ever imagined was possible. He paused at the door to look back at
her.

“While we are at the Gathering, we ought to
be watching and listening for any information that might help us
find our way home,” he said. “But even while I appear to be
concentrating on other subjects, I won’t stop thinking about you
for a moment, or fantasizing about the things we’ll do when we are
together. Now, get dressed, and as you put on each garment, imagine
what I’ll do as I remove it later.”

She almost called him back. She almost told
him to forget about the Gathering, the waiting telepaths, Saray,
Ananka, everything but their love. All she wanted was Herne in her
arms, kissing her, his hands on her skin, his rough voice speaking
passionate words. She had to force herself not to tear open the
bedchamber door and go after him.

Instead, she made herself walk into the
bathing room and pull off her treksuit while the water ran into the
tub. And when she sank into the warm, fragrant suds she thought
about sinking into the bed in the next room, with Herne on top of
her and his hot love surrounding her.

She rinsed in the coldest water the pipes
could produce and she reminded herself that she had a duty to
perform this evening. For Herne’s sake, as well as her own, she had
to be prepared to seize upon any fact that would help them return
to their own time.

* * * * *

The gown that Saray had given Merin was made
of a green so dark it was almost black, a floor-length,
long-sleeved column of tiny pleats that clung to her figure,
swaying and rippling when she moved. The only decorations on the
dress were the golden band set with green and blue jewels that
edged the high, round neckline, and a matching sash that wrapped
just below her breasts. It was a design as demurely covered as any
Oressian robe, yet because of the way the pleats folded and
unfolded with her every breath or motion, it was scandalously
revealing. The tantalizing fragrance of khata wood that wafted from
the fabric only added to the seductiveness of the gown. The
headdress was made of golden fabric thickly sewn with jewels of
blue, green, and purple. It was uncomfortably heavy, but it did
cover all of Merin’s hair.

She applied the cosmetics Saray had provided,
using the narrow brush to paint a silvery-black line around her
eyes, rubbing pale pink on her cheeks and a darker shade on her
lips.

She had not planned to use these artifices –
they were entirely unnatural to an Oressian – but when she looked
into the bathing room mirror her face stared back at her as pale
and tightly drawn as Herne’s had seemed to be earlier. Her spells
of lightheadedness had diminished somewhat, but she felt tired and
listless, and oddly weak. And hungry. Always hungry, ever since she
arrived at Tathan. She was used to eating little. Gluttony was not
a vice permitted to Oressians, and she had always been even more
abstemious than her Oressian companions. Yet now she constantly
craved food. She wondered if vigorous lovemaking could create such
an unceasing need to eat. She decided to ask Herne about it
later.