'Fine,' I agreed. 'You need the food more than I do.' She did; she was pale. Low blood sugar? Were the nanite maintenance requirements higher for her because of whatever medical treatments she'd had?
Without a look over her shoulder. Cerrelle headed for the low counters that held the food reformulators.
The circular sweep of permaglass overlooked a frozen oval expanse fringed by mounds of snow that were doubtless grasses or bushes in the spring and summer. On the far side of the pond, the snow-covered ground sloped upward for several hundred meters to where the forest began. There was a path entering the forest, but not a cleared one, and it had tracks of some sort, made as if by old-fashioned sleds or skis.
Cerrelle returned and set down a tray with two platters, one heaped with slices of some meat slathered in a greenish glaze with potatoes covered with cheese beside it, and the second with greenery. 'Lamb with apple mint glaze, cheese potatoes, and a mixed green salad.'
'You are hungry.' I stood and made my way to the counters, where I selected a Toze chicken dish out of curiosity, something with peanuts and peppers, along with various steamed vegetables.
After I returned and sat down, I looked at her, taking in the green eyes and the red hair, when she looked up from several hurried bites. 'So many things make sense now, and I never saw.'
'I didn't want you to see them. You weren't supposed to look for a fellow lost soul. I'm not lost, anyway. Dezret was never home.' She started in on the greenery.
I had several bites of the bite-sized chicken, spicier than I normally preferred but good, before I asked, 'You never miss anything?'
She took a long swallow of water, followed by a sip of the red wine. 'What would I miss? Sharing a husband with two other women? Having three or four children and trying to scrape a living out of land that was worn out twenty centuries ago? Dying young without ever having seen or learned anything?'
'Dorcha sounds like paradise compared to Dezret,' I said slowly, after a sip of Arleen and then a bite of chicken. Most of my platter was empty, more than I would have expected, since I hadn't felt that hungry.
'Women still have to obey men there, don't they?' she asked.
'I don't know that my mother ever obeyed my father if she disagreed.' I laughed softly. 'Some women feel that way, though.'
'Women and girls don't have that choice in Dezret. We -they're handmaidens. Did you know that a woman can't enter the upper levels of paradise unless her husband does?'
'I didn't even know that the Saints had a paradise,' I had to admit.
'I doubt they do, but that's what people believe.'
Even the Rykashans had believers, I'd discovered, but I merely nodded, not wanting to get into a theological discussion. I'd made enough mistakes for a year in less than an hour.
As we finished eating, Cerrelle looked at me, her head cocked slightly sideways. 'Have you ever been on snow-shoes?'
'No.' I'd seen pictures of them, but no one I knew ever used them, since it snowed so seldom in most of Dorcha - amazing, given that Hybra was less than a hundred kilometers from Lyncol. Then, the warmth of the Summer Sea stopped short of the mountains, well short. 'We'll take the short trail.'
After the mess I'd made before lunch, I wasn't about to protest, not one word.
I should have. Being on snowshoes was worse than crossing Heck's beams. The short trail was an expanse of snow less than ten meters wide that might have been packed once but was covered with a half meter of fine new snow. On each side of the trail were ancient pines that rose a good thirty meters or more into the gray sky from which snow continued to drift.
Every so often, as I strapped the basketlike snowshoes to my boots, snow sifted off the overhanging pines and fell like a blanket. One of those blankets covered me as I finally stood up after fastening the snowshoes, but I brushed it away with gloved hands and started after Cerrelle, already twenty meters down the trail from me.
The snow shifted under the baskets that held my boots, and I lumbered from side to side as much as forward. I hadn't gone a dozen meters before the front edge of one of the contraptions caught, and I ended up lying sideways and covered with snow.
Cerrelle turned and just stood there, holding on to a pine trunk and laughing.
I struggled to my feet and plodded onward, almost going to my knees once more.
She laughed again, shaking her head.
So I threw a snowball and caught her in the face.
'You!' She threw back, and I lurched sideways, catching an edge once more and sprawling into the too-soft snow.
I sat halfway up and packed a snowball, firing it at her, but tangled as I was in the snowshoes and snow, far more of her missiles struck than mine. Besides, I ended up laughing.
Eventually, so did she. 'A would-be Web pilot, and you can't get fifty meters on snowshoes!' She kept laughing, and that made it even harder for me.
I finally took off the snowshoes and staggered upright. 'I'll walk anywhere you want, but not on these.'
Cerrelle just grinned, but she took hers off, and we trudged through the semipacked snow for fifty meters or so until we were back on the cleared path toward the center of Lyncol ... and someplace to dry off and warm up.
And talk.
58
Those who praise honesty have not felt its knives.
Cerrelle and I talked most of the time I was in Lyncol -walking down cold but cleared paths under a quarter moon. Sitting in a hot pool while snow poured out of the night sky and turned to a silver brume when it struck the water's surface. Struggling through hip-deep snow to climb for a view of yet another hill. Watching black-capped chickadees flit through the pines in search of seeds carefully cached seasons earlier, marveling at how they remembered thousands of hoards. Sharing dishes at different eating establishments throughout Lyncol.
I learned more about Dezret - from the wind-deaths whipping off the Salt Desert to herd rotations to ancient temples predating the Devastation to seasonal grasses to the politics of families with junior and senior wives - than about Rykasha. Cerrelle learned some about Dorcha, but I didn't know what Cerrelle learned about me that she hadn't already known. Talk was all we shared, and more than enough for the time we had. I slept alone in the transient quarters, my sleep blessedly phantasm- and dream-free.
She never let me know where she lived, and I didn't push that. Knowing what I had learned, I suspected I could have discovered her dwelling, but what would have been the point - except to make a point?
On the third morning, she met me for breakfast and we walked back toward the Overlook. I had my small duffel in hand as we went down the pine-lined lane in the postdawn sunlight. The snow of the night before sparkled so brightly I wasn't sure we even cast shadows.
The Overlook was far less crowded in the morning, and we sat in the middle of the sweep of glass, looking down on the shimmering snow covering the ice of the pond.
'You look more rested,' Cerrelle observed as she sipped the black cafe she preferred in the morning.
I could sense her nervousness, the edge to her body posture, the slightest acridness of apprehension that had been stronger when I'd first arrived - and that I hadn't recognized then. Now it was fainter but still present. 'I feel better.' I held the cup of Arleen just under my chin and let the steamy aroma wreathe my face for a moment before taking a sip. 'It's been a long time since I haven't had to do something immediately. A day's been the greatest break I've had in years.' I laughed. 'Unless you count the time lost in travel dilation.'
'That doesn't count.' Cerrelle took a bite of something that looked like a muffin stuffed with meat and eggs, and far too heavy even for a system of mine that now required nearly twice the food it had when I'd been but a Dzin schoolmaster.