The Fat Death generally ran its course in about a week. By that time, the sufferer was dead or on his way to recovery, faculties unimpaired but physiologically altered. He watched as the woman struggled and thickened. In her fight to get free, Toress Lahl had torn the clothes from herself, often using her teeth. She had gnawed the upright to which she was secured. Her mouth was bruised and bleeding. He looked at her with love.
The time came when she was able to return his gaze. She smiled.
She slept for some hours and then was better, with that feeling of well-being which accompanies those who survive the Fat Death.
Shokerandit untied her limbs and bathed her with a cloth and salt water in a bowl. She kissed him as he tried to help her to her feet. She surveyed her naked form and wept.
“I’m like a barrel. I was so slim.”
“It’s natural. Look at me.”
She stared at him through her tears and then laughed.
They laughed together. He took in the marvellous architecture of her new body, still gleaming from its wash, the beauty of her shoulders, breasts, stomach, thighs.
“These are the proportions of a new world, Luterin,” Toress Lahl said; he heard her using his first name for the first time.
He threw up his arms, scraping his knuckles on the bulkhead. “I’m relieved that you survived.”
“Because you looked after your captive.”
It was natural to wrap his arms about her, natural to kiss her bruised mouth, and natural to sink with her to the deck on which they had recently wrestled with agony. There they wrestled with sexual rejoicing.
Later, he said to her, “You are no longer my captive, Toress Lahl. We are now captives of each other. You are the first woman I have loved. I will take you to Shivenink, and we will go into the mountains where my father lives. You shall see the wonders of the Great Wheel of Kharnabhar.”
She was already beginning to forget what had happened, and answered indifferently.
“Even in Oldorando we have heard of the Great Wheel. I will come with you if you say so. The ship is very silent. Shall we see how the others fare? They may all be sick with the plague—Odim and his vast brood, and the crew.”
“Wait here with me a little longer.” Lying with his arms about her, looking down into her dark eves, he was reluctant to break the spell.
At that time he was incapable of distinguishing between love and restored health.
She said briskly, “Back in Oldorando I was a doctor. It’s my duty to tend the sick.” She turned her face from Luterin.
“Where does the plague come from? From phagors?”
“From phagors, we believe.”
“So our brave captain spoke the truth. Our army was going to be prevented by force from returning to Sibornal, just in case we spread the plague; it was among us. So what the Oligarch decreed was wise rather than evil.”
Toress Lahl shook her head. She began to comb her hair with slow strokes, luxuriously, looking into a small mirror rather than at him as she spoke. “That’s too easy. What the Oligarch decreed is entirely wicked. To destroy life is always wicked. What he did may not only be evil; it may prove ineffective too. I do know something about the contagious nature of the Fat Death—although since the Fat Death is latent for most of the Great Year it is difficult to study. Knowledge hard-learnt one year is forgotten by the next.”
He expected her to continue but she fell silent, continuing to regard her face even when she had set down her comb, licking a finger to smooth her eyebrows.
“Be careful what you say about the Oligarch. He knows more than we.”
Then she turned to look at him. Their regards met as she said with some emphasis, “I don’t have to respect your Oligarch. Unlike the Oligarchy, the Fat Death has elements of mercy in its functioning. It’s mainly the old and very young who die of it: a majority of fit adults survive—over half. They successfully metamorphose, as we do.” She prodded him with a still moist finger, not without humour. “We in our compact shapes represent the future, Luterin.”
“Yet half the population will die … whole communities destroyed… The Oligarch wouldn’t allow that to happen in Sibornal. He’d take strong measures—”
She gestured dismissively. “Such die-back has its merciful side at a time when crops are failing and famine threatens. The healthy survivors benefit. Life goes on.”
He laughed. “In fits and starts…”
She shook her head as if suddenly impatient. “We must see who has survived on the ship. I don’t like the silence.”
“I hope to thank Eedap Mun Odim for his kindness.”
“I trust you will be able to.”
They stood close in the small stale room, gazing at each other through the stramineous light. Shokerandit kissed her, although at the last moment she moved her lips away. Then they ventured into the corridor.
The scene was to come back to him much later. He would see then, as not at the time, how much of herself Toress Lahl withheld from him. Physically, she was very desirable to him; but her attitude of inde- pendence was more attractive to him than he could then realise. Only when that independence was eroded by time could they come to any true understanding.
But Shokerandit’s proper appreciation of that fact could scarcely be arrived at while his whole outlook was based upon certain misunderstandings which left him, whichever way he turned, insecure, unable to develop emotionally. His innocence stood between him and maturity.
Shokerandit went first. Beyond the companionway, the corridor led to the main hold, where the relations of Odim had been settled. He went to listen at the door and heard stealthy movement within. From the cabins on either side of the corridor came silence. He tried the door of one, and knocked; it was locked, and no answer came.
As he emerged on deck, with Toress Lahl behind him, three naked men ran swiftly into hiding. They left a female corpse spread-eagled beneath the mizzenmast. It had been partially dismembered. Toress Lahl went over and looked at it.
“We’ll throw it overboard,” Shokerandit said.
“No. This woman is already dead. Leave her. Let the living be fed.”
They turned their attention to the situation of the New Season itself. The ship, as their senses had told them, was no longer in motion. The ocean currents had brought it slowly to fetch up against the shore. The New Season was trapped against a tongue of sand which curled out from the land.
Towards the stern, a small cluster of icebergs had accumulated. At the bows, it would be an easy matter to jump over the side and walk ashore without getting a foot wet. The guardians of this spit of sand were two large rocks, one taller than the masts of the ship, which stood on the shore, deflecting ocean tides. They had probably been thrown to their present position by some long-gone volcanic explosion, though nothing so dramatic as a volcano could be seen inland. The coast offered a vista only of low cliffs, so tumbled that they might have been an old wall part-demolished by cannon fire, and, beyond the cliffs, mustard-coloured moorland, off which a chill wind blew, bringing tears to the viewer’s eyes.
Blinking the water away, Shokerandit looked again at the larger rock. He was sure he had seen movement there. In a moment, two phagors appeared, walking with their curious glide away from the shore. It became apparent that they were going to meet a group of four of their kind who materialised over a rise, dragging with them the carcass of an animal of some kind. More phagors appeared from behind the rock to greet the hunters.
The original party of thirteen ancipitals had that morning met up with a second and larger party, a party also comprising escaped slaves, as well as four phagors who had served as transport animals in the Oligarch’s soldiery. There were now thirty-six phagors in all. They had a fire burning in a cavity in the landward side of the rock, on which they intended to roast whole flambreg their hunting party had speared.