Her eyes flickered up, fixed on the trefoil hanging against his robe, before she met his eyes again. “Gundhaiinu-ken…” she murmured.
He smiled.
“You said that this would be strictly a marriage of convenience?”
He nodded. “I would ask only the use of a spare room for an occasional night, if I can find the time to visit the house now and then, until I leave for Tiamat. Nothing more. You will be free to live your own life.”
She looked at him speculatively. “I would not find it at all—inconvenient to share a marriage bed with thou,” she said. Her hand settled on his arm. “If thou would like it.”
He turned away, feeling his face flush. “No. It’s all right. You—thou honor me, but I can’t.”
“Is it this—?” Her fingers brushed the trefoil. “I thought there was no dangei of infection, if one is careful—”
He shook his head. “It’s not that.”
She let go of the sibyl sign. “I see,” she whispered, glancing away; although he knew that she did not.
Seeing her chagrin, still ne could not bring himself to confess the truth to someone he barely knew. “But I would like very much for us to be friends,” he said. “Would that be possible?”
She looked back at him, and smiled. “Suddenly I feel as if anything is possible,” she said.
She took his hand as they rose from the bench, kept it held tightly in hers, as if she had to prove his reality through the long walk back to the house.
TIAMAT: Carbuncle
Tor Starhiker came down the steps from her private apartment, into the rear of the Stasis Restaurant, which occupied the entire ground floor of the townhouse. Dressed in a sensuous, sensual jumpsuit—one of the endless supply of garments from the old days that Shotwyn unearthed so effortlessly, from gods only knew whose closets— she could almost convince herself that these were still the old days in reality. The time when she had run Persipone’s Hell had been the pinnacle of her existence, no question….
She glanced at her reflection in the mirror that hung discreetly at the bottom of the stairs: confronted by the present wearing her face. Her once stolid body had changed, rounding out with the years and Shotwyn’s rich cooking. But to her surprise she found that she liked the changes. Maybe it was because Shotwyn, in his better moments, referred to her as voluptuous; or maybe it was just that the wider, softer curves filled her clothing in a way that made her feel elegant, and not fraudulent
She forced herself to admit again that while this might not be all she could ask of a future, at least there had been a future after all, and at least she was here to see it. And now they were even saying that the Millennium had come, that the offworlders had gotten their legendary stardrive and would be back on Tiamat within a matter of years. Never in her wildest dreams had she expected she’d live to see that day. Life hadn’t turned out to be nearly as dull and fish-stinking as she had imagined it would be.
In fact it felt, and smelled, extremely good as she drifted on past the mirror. She took a deep breath. Between her own perfume—which Shotwyn had concocted from a blend of herbs and flowers on a passionate whim, too long ago—and whatever he was putting in the sauce and soup tonight, the warm, heavy air around her smelled like heaven. She looked out into the dimly lamplit room, at the scattering of early evening guests. The lampglow was not exactly a high-tech environment, but the light was more flattering to all those aging faces; and even the offworlders had liked a few rustic touches, that let them feel like they were experiencing something exotic, here on this strange backwater world.
She picked up a copy of the evening’s menu and glanced at it as she started into the kitchen. The florid names riddled with words in barely pronounceable languages always annoyed her, even though she knew they were necessary; a part of the ambience, as Shotwyn would say. She had to ask him for a functional description of each dish every evening, because most of their clientele could no longer speak any of those languages fluently, if they ever had.
“Ye gods—”
She heard Shotwyn’s slightly nasal voice rising in exasperation as she let the kitchen doors slip shut behind her. He stood across the room, oblivious to her arrival, gesturing expressively as he berated one of the cook’s helpers for some inadequacy or other. The hapless recipient of the abuse was Brannod, one of the two Winter nomad brothers she had hired to wash dishes and clean up.
The City was filling up with nomads these days; aimless, ignorant, and likely to starve to death unless a soft touch like her took pity on them, and gave them some menial job. The worst part was that they had no idea even of how ignorant they were, which made them worse than the Summers. Many of them had become dependent on the offworlders through trade and thievery during the hundred and fifty years when the Snow Queen and the Hegemony had ruled; but they were only superficially knowledgeable about technology, unlike Winters from the city or the coast. The nomads tended to be as insular and superstitious as the Summers, but unlike the Summers they had let their traditional customs slide, until they no longer knew how to survive off the land when they had no choice. And so they wandered down to the shore with the melting snow, and eventually found their way into the city.
This pair were all right—not too bright but not too stubborn, and they’d been hungry enough to become loyal, if limited, employees. She hired city-bred Winters for work that required more skill, or more social grace.
“What’s the matter, Shotwyn?” She strolled up behind him, saw him start and turn to look at her; saw the relief in Brannod’s pale blue eyes at her appearance.
“Everything!” Shotwyn snapped, planting a flour-covered hand in the middle of Brannod’s chest and shoving him away. “Go, and get me another one! Then clean up this mess! Imbeciles …” Brannod wandered away glumly, in search of another whatever. Showtyn ran the floury hand through his hair, whitening the gray-shot auburn. “I’m going to disembowel myself if this goes on—”
“Only Kharemoughis disembowel themselves, Shotwyn,” she said mildly. “Don’t carry nostalgia for the past too far.”
He sniffed. “That’s what’s paying the bills, my dear.”
“Well, we won’t pay many more bills if you kill yourself over broken crockery. So what are we eating tonight, anyway?”
“Cream of crockery soup.”
“We’ll charge extra,” she said, and saw him smile, grudgingly. His long, saturnine face looked ten years younger when he smiled, which wasn’t often— because, he insisted, he was an artist. “And explain this menu to me, will you? What’s this?” She gestured at something which contained a hieroglyphic character.
“It’s Sandhi,” Shotwyn said, with irritating superiority. “The primary language of Kharemough.”
“I know,” she replied, with exaggerated patience. “But what is it?”
“ ‘Fish,’ of course,” he muttered, frowning as he turned away. “It means ‘fish,’ that’s all. Everything means ‘fish.’ Pronounce it any way you like.” He waved his hand in despair and dismissal, as Brannod came back reluctantly into his line of sight, carrying a bowl and a broom.
Tor sighed and went back through the doors into the dining room. There was no use talking to him when he was in one of those moods; which was most of the time, she thought irritably. She fixed a serene, welcoming smile on her face as she moved out into the room beyond, to mingle with the early diners, most of whom were regulars she knew personally. She had been forced to develop a reasonably gracious manner as the proprietor of Persipone’s, had worn it like the bizarre persona its real owner had forced her to wear—the image of a dead woman, whose holo he kept with him always, in the blackness he had inhabited like some night demon. Having to play Persiponë was the one thing about her job she had hated. When the Change came, she left behind everything that even reminded her of that unwholesome imitation of someone else’s life.