She stood there, searching his face, praying for guidance.
Into her silence he said — sounding hurt, she thought, although the cadence of Beng speech was so fierce that it was hard to tell — “You do not wish to come, then?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then let us go.”
“You must understand — I can’t stay long—”
“Of course. Just a short while.”
He made as though to go; but she remained where she was.
“Torlyri?” he said, reaching toward her, not quite touching her.
He looked strangely vulnerable without his helmet. She wished he would put it back on. It was the helmet that had drawn her to him in the first place, that simple shining golden dome lightly bedecked with leaves, so different from the eerie nightmarish helmets that most of his tribefellows preferred: his helmet, yes, and something about his eyes, and the way he smiled, and the way he held himself. Of the man behind the eyes she still knew nothing.
“Torlyri?” he said again, almost plaintively.
“All right. A short visit.”
“You will come! Nakhaba!” His eerie red eyes glowed like fiery suns in his delight. “A short visit, yes! Come. Come. I have something for you, Torlyri, a gift, a precious thing especially for you. Come!”
Quickly he strode past the sentry, not even looking back to see if she was following him. The sentry made a gesture that she did not understand, but that seemed friendly: perhaps a holy sign, perhaps just a bawdy one. Torlyri made the sign of Yissou at him and went rushing after Trei Husathirn.
His house, as he called it, was a single room. It was situated on the ground floor of some rambling palace of the sapphire-eyes, a structure built of a white stone with a cool yellow fire mysteriously burning within the building-blocks. Trei Husathirn’s house was a sparse place, with a pile of furs to serve as a bed, a simple upright altar of some sort in a niche, a few spears and throwing-sticks leaning against the wall, and two or three small wickerwork baskets that might contain clothing or other personal belongings.
Torlyri saw no sign of a woman’s presence anywhere about the room’s furnishings. She felt a great rush of relief at that; and then she felt abashed at feeling such relief.
Trei Husathirn knelt at his altar and whispered some words she did not hear, and laid his helmet within the altar niche with obvious reverence. Then he rose and came to her side and they stood facing each other, neither of them speaking.
She thought of all that she had planned to say to him, once they were finally alone and now that she was able to communicate properly with him, and she saw now the absurdity of the little speech she had constructed. To speak of love? How? By what right? They were strangers. In their occasional meetings when people of one tribe were visiting the other they had enjoyed eyeing one another, and winking and grinning, and pointing and laughing at things that had suddenly seemed funny to them, the gods only knew why. But nothing had ever passed between them. Nothing. She had not even known his name until a few minutes ago. All that he had known of her was that she was the offering-woman of her tribe, and even that might have had no real meaning to him. And now they were face to face, silent, neither of them with the slightest idea of what to do or say next.
To her horror she found herself reaching her hand to his right shoulder, lightly touching the long narrow scar that ran from the fleshy part of his forearm to the side of his neck. The fur was gone there and smooth silver-pink skin showed, very odd to the touch, like ancient parchment. When she realized what she was doing she pulled back from him as though she had put her hand in a bonfire.
“Hjjk-men,” he said. “When I was a boy. The beak they have, very bad. Three of them died for this.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It was long ago. I never think of it.”
The trembling began again. Torlyri steadied herself. His eyes rested unwaveringly on hers, and she made herself meet his gaze. He and she were almost the same height; but she was tall, for a woman. There was great strength to him. Plainly he was a warrior, and surely a valiant one.
It was his turn now to touch her. Lightly he drew his fingers over the spiral of brilliant white fur that ran from her right shoulder over her breast to her hip, and then he ran his hand down the matching stripe on her left side.
“Very beautiful,” he said. “The white. I have never seen anything like it.”
“It’s — not common among us.”
“You have a child, Torlyri? With the same white?”
“I have no children, no.”
“A man? You have a man?”
She saw the tension on his face.
The easiest thing would be to tell him what was, after all, the truth: No, I have no man. But that was only part of the truth, and she needed to have him know more. “I had a man for a while,” she said. “He went away.”
“Ah.”
“He went far away. I will never see him again.”
“I am very sorry, Torlyri.”
She managed a flickering smile. “Are you, really?”
“Sorry that you have been hurt, yes. Not sorry that he has gone away, no, I could not say that.”
“Ah,” she said.
They were silent again, but it was a different sort of silence from the hard, awkward one of before.
Then she said, “In my tribe it was never the custom for the offering-woman to take a mate, but then things changed for us when we left the cocoon and new customs came. And I realized that I too wanted a mate like all the others, and I took one. So I had my man only for a little while, and it was very recently. You understand what I am saying, Trei Husathirn? Most of my life I was without a man, and that was all right. Then I had one, and I think I was happy with him; and then he left me and it hurt very much. There are times when I think I would have been better off never having had a man at all than to have had one and lost him in that way.”
“No,” he said. “How can you say that? You knew love, did you not? The man goes away, but the knowledge of the love that you had can never go away. Would you rather never have had love at all in your life?”
“I have had love, other than the love I had with him. The love of Koshmar, my—” She faltered, realizing she knew no Beng word for twining-partner. “My friend,” she said lamely. “And the love of all my tribe. I know I am much loved, and I love them.”
“It is not the same kind of love.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps.” She took a deep breath. “And you? Do you have a woman, Trei Husathirn?”
“I had one.”
“Ah.”
“She is dead. The hjjk-men—”
“At the same time as that ?” she said, pointing at the scar.
“A later battle. Much later.”
“You have had many battles with the hjjk-men?”
Trei Husathirn shrugged. “They are everywhere. They made us suffer, and we made them suffer, I think. Although they seem not to feel pain of any kind, pain of the body, pain of the soul.” He shook his head and grimaced, as though talk of hjjk-men were nauseating to him. “I said I had a gift for you, Torlyri.”
“Yes. There is no need—”
“Please,” he said. He dug about in one of his wicker baskets and drew forth a helmet, not one of the ferocious kind but a smaller one of the sort that she had seen some Beng women wearing. It was fashioned of a shining red metal, highly polished and very bright, almost like a mirror, but it was graceful and delicate of design, a tapering cone with two rounded summits and complex patterns of interlacing lines cut into it by some master’s hand. Timidly he handed it to her. She stared at it without taking it.
“It’s wonderful,” she said. “But I couldn’t.”
“You will, please.”
“It’s too valuable.”
“It is very valuable. That is why I give it to you.”
“What does it mean,” Torlyri said after a moment, “when a woman takes a helmet from a man?”
Trei Husathirn looked uncomfortable. “That they are friends.”