“Yes,” Humbaba murmured, “I know you, Reede … I know that look. You think you’re indispensable. But losing your gemtalia won’t affect your brains.” He looked back and forth between their silent, stricken faces. Slowly he reached into the folds of his long, sleeveless robe, and brought out a heavy blade, with serrations the size of teeth and a tip curved like a claw. “Tell me,” he said, “how much do you really love each other? Would you give away your manhood to save your lover’s face, Kullervo? … Would you give up your beauty, my jewel, to spare him that indignity?” He gestured, the blade echoing his invitation with its smile of steel.
“Yes.”
“Yes—” Reede broke off, as he realized that Mundilfoere had answered the same way, at the same moment. He stepped forward, coming between her and Humbaba. He unfastened his belt and dropped his pants. “Go ahead,” he said, meeting Humbaba’s unreadable gaze above the gleaming knifeblade. “Cut it off.”
Humbaba stared at Reede a moment longer. Then suddenly his face began to quake, a landslide of flesh. Deep laughter poured out of the lipless opening that was his mouth. His Head of Research stood glaring back at him with his pants down around his ankles. Humbaba shook his head. “You probably know a way to make it grow back, you crazy bastard.” As slowly as he had brought the knife out, he put it away again. “Pull your pants up.” He looked at Mundilfoere and shook his head again, his wattles jiggling. “My jewel …”he said, almost sadly. He touched her face, a gentle contact this time. “It would have been painful to have ruined that face … although in your way you would still have been as beautiful to me, and given me as much pleasure… .”He sighed. “But you are growing old, anyway, and that is a form of damage I do not care for.” He took her arm abruptly, and pushed her at Reede. “Here. I give her to you, Reede. Have her for a wife. See if she is still as irresistible when the fruit is no longer forbidden.”
Reede took hold of her, steadying her against the abrupt motion and his own surprise.
“My lord …” Mundilfoere whispered, looking from man to man with stunned eyes. “Is this a joke?”
Humbaba shrugged irritably. “My sense of humor doesn’t extend that far,” he said, and Reede sensed from his voice what he couldn’t tell from his face—that he frowned. “I don’t want you anymore. I’m finished with you. You belong to my man Kullervo now, until he doesn’t want you anymore.” He waved a hand at them, dismissing them.
Mundilfoere fluttered her hands, jingling. Reede put his arm around her, started to lead her to the door; he saw that the expression on her face looked more like distress than joy or relief. “Mundilfoere … ?” he murmured. She looked up at him, seeing the unspoken question in his eyes. She reached up, touching his cheek lightly, her face transforming suddenly, giving him his answer. He looked back at Humbaba. “Thank you,” he said, for the second time in his life that he could remember.
Humbaba made an unreadable gesture. Reede knew as well as Humbaba did that he could do his work with his cock cut off. But he’d do it better if he was a happy man. Humbaba wasn’t an original thinker. He survived because he had a gut instinct for how to keep his people loyal. “That new inhalant you’ve been developing. I expect to be enjoying it soon,” Humbaba said to his retreating back.
“Yes, sab.” Reede smiled to himself as the doors slid aside, permitting him to leave with Mundilfoere held close against him, and shut again behind him.
In the outer room he tried to stop, but Mundilfoere kept him moving with a subtle motion of her body. He obeyed her, suddenly understanding her need to put more distance between them and what had almost happened. They went on through the seemingly endless corridor beyond the antechamber. The air was incongruously thick with the scent of flowers, the light was green and dappled, as they entered the lush foliage of a hydroponics area.
He stopped Mundilfoere at last, under the spreading shelter of a fruit tree, and put his arms around her; kissed her with all the depth of need and ravenous hunger of a freed prisoner. He had never kissed her like this, openly, freely, as if there were nothing to fear, nothing to hide.
But her own hands rose, separating her from him with gentle, insistent pressure until he let her go, although his hands still clung to her. “We must be discreet—”
“Why—?” he said.
“Until we have considered the consequences.”
He saw the urgency in her eyes, and remembered what she was trying to make him remember. He nodded, barely. “Come to my room with me, then.”
“Yes.” she murmured, pressing her face against him, her body momentarily fusing to his own. He felt her heartbeat inside his chest like the wildly beating wings of a bird. “I need to weep for joy….”
In his room, in his bed, he made love to her as if the act were a sacrament; though he had no real idea what a sacrament was. He knew only that he would worship her if he could, that her body was the altar of her soul, and that pleasure was the only form of prayer he knew….
Afterwards, lying beside her. the restless motion of his existence stilled at last, he asked, “Why did you seduce me when we met, if it wasn’t to make me want to work for Humbaba?”
She looked over at him languorously, her eyes half-closed. He smelled the scent of her, rich with the strange herbs and oils she used on her hair and skin. “To bring you peace,” she said, running her fingers across the sweat-gleaming surface of his chest.
He lifted his head, with a single grunt that might have been laughter or disbelief; let it fall back again. “Damn you …”he muttered. His hand closed over hers, covering it until it disappeared inside his own. And yet the gesture was that of a child clinging to its mother. “No wonder you kept Humbaba besotted all those years. Even I never know what you really mean. … I don’t know what anything means, sometimes,” He pushed up onto his elbows, looking back at her, touching the silver-metal pendant that lay between her breasts, the solii jewel at its center like a nacreous eye looking up at him. His hand rose to couch the matching pendant that he wore, reassuring himself that it was still there. “Mundilfoere … tell me the way we met.”
“Again?” She looked up at him, her blue-violet eyes filled with a curious emotion. For a moment he thought that she would refuse. But she only said, as if she were reciting a Story of the Saints, “There are many hidden hands that play the Great Game … and the Game controls them all, You were playing the games in the station arcade as I passed, on my way to somewhere else. I looked in because I heard the shouting of the crowd that was watching you play, watching you win and win. I went inside, because I was curious; I watched you too, and I saw you do things by instinct that most players could not even dream of doing. I saw that you had a rare gift, and that it was being wasted in that place. And then you looked up at me, and I saw your face … and you saw mine.”
“And time stopped,” he whispered, finishing it for her. “And you said, ‘Come with me,’ and I did… .”He shut his eyes, trying to imagine the electric feel of winning; the moment when he had looked up, and seen her standing there, waiting for him to look up and see her. Fragments of memory flashed inside his eyes. mirror-shards, puzzle pieces, whirling like leaves in a wind, a storm of randomness. He opened his eyes again, with a grunt of terror, to the serenity and reality of her face, the unreadable depths of her eyes. “Why can’t I remember? I can’t remember—”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said softly, and reached up to stroke his hair, smoothing it back from his face, soothing him with the slow, repetitive motion; gentling him. “I love you. I will always love you, more than life itself.”