In her room, Alicia dropped her handbag with a heavy thud, took off her shirt, and lugubriously examined her face and body in the mirror. "Oh, dear!" she sighed. "What horrible bruises! I can put makeup over the shiner; but this cut lip I can't disguise."
"It'll all be healed up by the time we get back to Novo," said Reith, picking up Alicia's handbag and hefting it. "What's in this, Lish? A flatiron?"
She opened the handbag and took out a spherical, tightly packed leather sack. Reith fingered the sack, saying, "Coins?"
She nodded. "It comes in handy with tumescent males."
"No wonder you knocked those guys off the roof! I'd better say good night before you decide to use it on me!"
Leisurely Krishnan legal proceedings put them two days behind schedule. As a result, they reached the village of Zinjaban, in the westerly province of the same name, seven days after leaving Mishé. Since rainfall hereabouts was less than in the central and eastern parts of Mikardand, the landscape was open, sparsely covered by many-colored Krishnan analogues of grass and herbs. Trees, with gaudy trunks of ruby and turquoise and amethyst, were confined to gallery forests along the streams, while elsewhere clumps of spiny bushes hugged the bare brown soil. As they traveled west, the riotous colors of the well-watered eastern provinces gradually faded to pastels and sober greenish grays.
The village boasted one tiny inn. Reith signed in for his party and then discovered that the second floor had only three bedrooms, a large one occupied by the innkeeper and his family, and two small guest chambers, each of which contained one double bed.
Before, Reith had always obtained a private room for Alicia. Now Timásh and Zerré made ready to stretch out in the common room below, while Ordway and White bore their belongings into one of the two available bedrooms.
Reith and Alicia halted at the door of the remaining room. She glanced in, then faced him with an enigmatic expression on her classic features. Reith thought she had gone pale under her light tan, but he could not tell whether her countenance betokened apprehension or anticipation, hope or fear.
For an instant, Reith was balanced on a knife edge of indecision. The male animal in him urged him one way, while his inbred caution, and suspicion that all of Alicia's fangs had not yet been drawn, pushed him in the other. His neo-Puritan conscience warned him that, the instant they bedded together, the brother-and-sister relationship he had been cultivating would not have the chance of a snowball in Hishkak.
Then Ordway, peering out of his doorway, gave a salacious smirk. Alicia looked at the production manager with distaste, then said coolly: "Fergus, we must have an understanding ..."
"I already understand," said Reith reading into her tone an uncertainty like his own. "Don't worry about me. Hey, Zerré!"
"Aye, sir?" The Krishnan looked up from below stairs.
"Get out my sleeping bag and hand it up, will you please?"
Reith entered the other men's bedroom and threw his sleeping bag on the floor. Ordway said: "Good God, man, you're bunking in with us?"
"Yep."
Ordway shook his head. "Either you're out of your calabash, mate, or you're a bloody neo-Puritan."
"Call it a little of both," said Reith, stamping on a many-legged scuttler that raced across the floor.
Reith was already kicking himself for having ducked a chance to clarify his anomalous relationship with his former wife, his desire for whom waxed daily stronger. But he was too stubborn to reverse his snap decision and too protective of his dignity to present Ordway with ammunition for lewd jokes and innuendoes. Besides, he hated to give satisfaction to busybodies, like Strachan and Fallon, who were doubtless fantasizing about a romantic reunion between the ill-starred Reiths.
Next morning, Reith and White went location hunting. Alicia said she was tired and wanted to repair some clothes. Ordway also begged off on the ground that he could never learn to ride a six-legged gnu at his time of life. Reith told his Krishnans to saddle three ayas, so that Timásh could go along in case of accident.
The trio rode downstream along the Khoruz, circling about and examining landscapes that might serve as movie-sequence sites. In the afternoon, they worked upstream from the village.
The location manager, who made frequent notes and took pictures with his Hayashi ring camera, was becoming a passable aya rider. The Krishnan sun was fast turning his pale skin swarthy, and he could even exchange greetings in Mikardandou.
When they returned to the inn, White announced that he had found several good sites. The next day, Alicia said to Reith: "Fergus, I'm coming with you. I don't care to be left alone with our resident sex maniac again."
"What! Has that dreg—"
"No, no, he hasn't laid a hand on me. But he fixes me with his glittering eye and says things like: 'If that skinny ex of yours hasn't got any balls, there are others who have!' or 'If that's all the enterprise he's got, no wonder you gave him the burlap!' "
Clenching a pair of knobby fists, Reith interrupted. "I'll punch his leering face in! I'll dance on his recumbent form with my climbing boots, the ones with hobnails!"
"No, no! He doesn't mean any harm. He's just a vulgar, pushy little gloop who thinks he's Batch's gift to women and doesn't like to see them unf—going to waste, as he'd put it. So he drags the subject in by the hair of its crotch. I'm not afraid of him, but he's a bother. At least, don't hit him until the movie's been shot and you're paid off in full!"
"All right; but I still think he'd look better stuffed. I'd like to be the taxidermist, too."
They crossed the Khoruz at the ford near the village and followed the Balhib road, winding through the rugged Qe'bas, until they sighted Castle Kandakh, perched on its elephant-gray crag, with blue-and-orange pennants flying and drawbridge down. A trumpet brayed as the riders clattered into the courtyard. Reith, stiffly formal, presented the Grand Master's letter to the commanding officer, a Sir Litáhn.
To show the party around the fortress, Sir Litáhn called to him a knight with a false beard of a poisonous green. Reith turned to Alicia and quoted:
Viewing the arrow slits and other defensive measures, White became voluble with excitement. "Couldn't be better!" he cried. "Superbly photogenic! A cameraman's dream! Say, Fergus, the morning's not half over, with these long days they have here. Is there anything else we ought to see?"
Reith thought. "A Krishnan friend of mine lives a few hoda west of here. Let's ride down and say hello."
Under the blazing rays of the yellow primary, they trotted westward downgrade along the trans-Qe'ba road. When they walked the ayas to breathe them, Reith explained. "Yekar bad-Sehr is a cousin of the rancher Sainian, whose spread lies southeast of here. It was on his ranch that I helped to discover some kind of fossil reptile, which they say is an important evolutionary link. Remember, Lish?"
"How could I ever forget! What does this Yekar do?"
"Runs a shaihan ranch, like Sainian's, only smaller. I've thought he and I might go into dude ranching together. It would be quite an experience for rich Terran dudes.
"Yekar's spread lies in what used to be Balhibo territory; but when the Qaathians conquered Balhib, the late Grand Master seized the Qe'ba range. So one fine night, Yekar went to bed a Balhibo subject and woke up a Mikardandu."
West of the Qe'bas, the undulating plain wore a drab mantle of sparse vegetation in dull greens, browns, and grays. Yekar, who proved to be a younger cousin of Sainian's wife, welcomed the travelers warmly, and his mate served them a lunch big enough for a hungry yeki. When Reith asked him for news, the rancher replied: "Something is brewing with the Qaathians. Across the border on a clear, windless day, we see distant clouds of dust. I should guess cavalry maneuvers."