But Vodan would not have gone away afterward, leaving her clawed, bitten, and battered for Arinnian to find.
Tabby was still asleep, Holm still looking for his poor friend, Draun lately departed with a remark about seeing if he couldn’t help, the retainers and fishers off on their various businesses. The compound lay quiet under the morning.
Rochefort stole back into the bedroom. She was among the few women he’d known who looked good at this hour. The tall body, the brown skin were too firm to sag or puff; the short fair locks tangled in a way that begged his fingers to play games. She breathed deeply, steadily, no snoring though the lips were a little parted over the whiteness beneath. When he bent above her, through bars of light and shade cast by the blind, she had no smell of sourness, just of girl. He saw a trace of dried tears.
His mouth twisted. The broken lip twinged less than his heart. She’d cried on his account, after they came home. “Of course you can’t tonight, darling,” she’d whispered leaning over him on an elbow and running the other hand down cheek and breast and flank. “With this trouble, and you pulled ninety different ways, and everything. You’d be damned callous if you could, how ’bout that? Don’t you cry. You don’t know how, you make it too rough on yourself. Wait till tomorrow or the next night, Phil, beloved. We’ve got a lifetime.”
A large subdivision of my hell was that I couldn’t tell you why I was taking it so hard, he thought.
I’d kiss you… but you might wake and — O all you saints, St. Joan who burned for her people, help me!
The knowledge came that if he dithered too long, she would indeed wake. He gave himself a slow count of one hundred before he slipped back out.
The roofs of the buildings, the peak beyond them, stood in impossible clarity against a sky which a-pair of distant wings shared with the sun. The softest greens and umbers shone no less than the most brilliant red. The air was drenched in fragrances of growth and of the sea which tumbled beyond the breakwater. No. This much beauty is unendurable. Rochefort walked fast from the area, onto a trail among the orchards. Soon it would join the main road to the landing field.
I can’t succeed. Someone’ll be on guard; or I’ll be unable to get in; or something’ll happen and I’ll simply have been out for a stroll. No harm in looking, is there?
Merely looking and returning for breakfast. No harm in that, except for letting her Avalonians be killed, maybe by millions, maybe including her — and, yes, my shipmates dying too — uselessly, for no reason whatsoever except pride — when maybe they can be saved. When maybe she’ll see that I did what I did to end the war quickly that she might live.
The country lay hushed. Nobody had work on the plantations this time of year…
The landing field was deserted. For as scanty traffic as St. Li got, automated ground control sufficed.
The space flitter stood closed. Rochefort strangled on relief till he remembered: Could be against no more than weather. They have no worries about thieves here.
How about curious children?
If somebody comes along and sees me, I can explain I got worried about that. Tabby will believe me.
He wheeled a portable ramp, used for unloading cargo carriers, to the sleek hull. Mounting, his boots went knock… knock… knock. The entrance was similar to kinds he had known and he found immediately a plate which must cover an exterior manual control. It was not secured, it slid easily aside, and behind was nothing keyed to any individual or signal, only a button. He pressed it. The outer valve purred open and a gangway came forth like a licking tongue.
Father, show me your will. Rochefort stepped across and inside.
The Ythrian vessel was quite similar to her Terran counterparts. No surprise, when you considered that the flying race learned spaceflight from man, and that on Avalon their craft must often carry humans. In the pilot room, seats and controls were adjustable for either species. The legends were in Planha, but Rochefort puzzled them out. After five minutes he knew he could lift and navigate this boat.
He smote palm into fist, once. Then he buckled down to work.
XVI
Arinnian carried Eyath back to the compound on foot. His gravbelt wouldn’t safely raise them both and he left it behind. Twice she told him she could fly, or walk at any rate, but in such a weak whisper that he said, “No.” Otherwise they did not speak, after the few words she had coughed against his breast while he knelt to hold her.
He couldn’t carry that mass long in his arms. Instead, she clung to him, keelbone alongside his back, foot-claws curved over his shoulders, hugging his waist, like a small Ythrian child except that he must help her against the heaviness of the planet by his clasp on her alatans. He had cut his shirt into rags to sponge her hurts with rainwater off the leaves, and into bandages to stop further bleeding. The injuries weren’t clinically serious, but it gave him something to use his knife on. Thus the warmth (the heat) and silk featheriness of her lay upon his skin; and the smell of her lovetime, like heavy perfume, was around him and in him.
That’s the worst, he kept thinking. The conditional last for days — a couple of weeks, given reinforcement. If she encounters him again—
Is she remorseful? How can she be, for a thing she couldn’t halt? She’s stunned, of course, harmed, dazed; but does she feel mortally befouled? Ought she to?
Suddenly I don’t understand my galemate.
He trudged on. There had been scant rest for him during his search. He ached, his mouth was dry, his brain seemed full of sand. The world was a path he had to walk, so-and-so many kilometers long, except that the kilometers kept stretching. This naturally thinned the path still more, until the world had no room left for anything but a row of betrayals. He tried to shut out consciousness of them by reciting a childish chant in his head for the benefit of his feet “You pick ’em up an’ lay ’em down. You pick ’em up—” But this made him too aware of feet, how they hurt, knees, how they shivered, arms, how they burned, and perforce he went back to the betrayals. Terra-Ythri. Ythri-Avalon. Tabitha-Rochef ort. Eyath-Draun, no, Draun-Eyath… Vodan-whatsername, that horrible creature in Centauri, yes, Quenna… Eyath-anybody, because right now she was anybody’s… no, a person had self-control, forethought, a person could stay chaste if not preserve that wind-virginity which had been hers… Those hands clasped on his belly, which had lain in his, had lately strained to pull Draun closer; that voice which had sung to him, and was now stilled, had moaned like the voice of any slut — Stop that! Stop, I say!
Sight of the compound jarred him back to a sort of reality. No one seemed about. Luck. He’d get Eyath safely put away. Ythrian chemists had developed an aerosol which effectively nullified the pheromones, and doubtless some could be borrowed from a neighbor. It’d keep the local males from strutting and gawking outside her room, till she’d rested enough to fly with him to the boat and thence home to Stormgate.
Tabitha’s house stood open. She must have heard his footsteps and breath, for she came to the door. “Hullo,” she called. “You found her?… Hoy!” She ran. He supposed once he would have appreciated the sight “She okay?”