“In lightness, what else?” the male replied. He didn’t stop his work, nor appear to notice that Flandry was not a Merseian. In his eyes, the differences were probably negligible. “The metal is of the Ruadrath, as is the house. For use we give payment, that they may be well pleased with us when they come out of the sea.” He did pause then, to make a sign that might be avertive or might be reverent—or both or neither, but surely reflected the universal sense of a mortal creature confronting the unknown. “Such is the law, by which our forebears lived while others died. Thch ra’a.”
Ruadrath: elves, gods, winter ghosts.
Chapter XIV
More and more, as the weeks of Flandry’s absence passed, her existence took on for Djana an unreality. Or was it that she began slowly to enter a higher truth, which muted the winds outside and made the walls around her shadowy?
Not that she thought about it in that way, save perhaps when the magician wove her into a spell. Otherwise she lived in everydayness. She woke in the chamber that the man had shared with her. She exercised and groomed herself out of habit, because her living had hitherto depended on her body. At mess she stood respectfully aside while the Merseians went through brief rituals religious, familial, and patriotic—oddly impressive and stirring, those big forms and deep voices, drawn steel and talking drums—and afterward joined in coarse bread, raw vegetables, gwydh-msk cheese, and the Terran-descended tea which they raised throughout the Roidhunate. There followed study, talk, sometimes a special interview, sometimes recreation for a while; a simple lunch; a nap in deference to her human circadian rhythm; more study, until evening’s meat and ale. (Since Merseia rotated at about half the rate of Talwin, a night had already gone over the land.) Later she might have further conversation, or attend a concert or recorded show or amateur performance of something traditional; or she might retire alone with a tape. In any event, she was early abed.
Talk, like perusal of a textreel or watching of a projection, was via the linguistic computer. It had plenty of spare channels, and could throw out a visual translation as easily as a sonic one. However, she was methodically being given a working knowledge of Eriau, along with an introduction to Merseian history and culture.
She cooperated willingly. Final disposition of her case lay with superiors who had not yet been heard from. At worst, though, she wasn’t likely to suffer harm—given a prince of the blood on her side—and at best…well, who dared predict? Anyway, her education gave her something to do. And as it advanced, it started interesting, at last entrancing her.
Merseia, rival, aggressor, troublemaker, menace lairing out beyond Betelgeuse; she’d accepted the slogans like everybody else, never stopping to think about them. Oh, yes, the Merseians were terrible, but they lived far off and the Navy was supposed to keep them there while the diplomatic corps maintained an uneasy peace, and she had troubles of her own.
Here she dwelt among beings who treated her with gruff kindness. Once you got to know them, she thought, they were…they had homes and kin the same as people, that they missed the same as people; they had arts, melodies, sports, games, jokes, minor vices, though of course you had to learn their conventions, their whole style of thinking, before you could appreciate it…They didn’t want war with Terra, they only saw the Empire as a bloated sick monstrosity which had long outlived its usefulness but with senile cunning contrived to hinder and threaten them…No, they did not dream of conquering the galaxy, that was absurd on the face of it, they simply wanted freedom to range and rule without bound, and “rule” did not mean tyranny over others, it meant just that others should not stand in the way of the full outfolding of that spirit which lay in the Race…
A spirit often hard and harsh, perhaps, but bone-honest with itself; possessed of an astringency that was like a sea breeze after the psychic stench of what Djana had known; not jaded or rootless, but reaching for infinity and for a God beyond infinity, while planted deep in the consciousness of kinship, heroic ancestral memories, symbols of courage, pride, sacrifice…Djana felt it betokened much that the chief of a Vach—not quite a clan—was called not its Head but its Hand.
Were those humans who served Merseia really traitors…to anything worth their loyalty?
But it was not this slow wondering that made the solid world recede from her. It was Ydwyr the Seeker and his spells; and belike they had first roused the questions in her.
To start with, he too had merely talked. His interest in her background, experiences, habits, and attitudes appeared strictly scientific. As a rule they met à deux in his office. “Thus I need not be a nephew of the Roidhun,” he explained wryly. Fear stabbed her for a second. He gave her a shrewd regard and added, “No one is monitoring our translator channel.”
She garnered nerve to say, “The qanryf—”
“We have had our differences,” Ydwyr replied, “but Morioch is a male of honor.”
She thought: How many Imperial officers in this kind of setup would dare skip precautions against snooping and blackmail?
He had a human-type chair built for her, and poured her a glass of arthberry wine at each colloquy. Before long she was looking forward to the sessions and wishing he were less busy elsewhere, coordinating his workers in the field and the data they brought back. He didn’t press her for answers, he relaxed and let conversation ramble and opened for her the hoard of his reminiscences about adventures on distant planets.
She gathered that xenology had always fascinated him and that he was seldom home. Almost absent-mindedly, in obligation to his Vach, he had married and begotten; but he took his sons with him from the time they were old enough to leave the gynaeceum until they were ready for their Navy hitches. Yet he did not lack warmth. His subordinates adored him. When he chanced to speak of the estate where he was born and raised, his parents and siblings, the staff whose fathers had served his fathers for generations, she came to recognize tenderness.
Then finally—it was dark outside, the hot still dark of summer’s end, heat lightning aflicker beyond stockade and skeletal trees—he summoned her; but when she entered the office, he rose and said: “Let us go to my private quarters.”
For a space she was again frightened. He bulked so big, so gaunt and impassive in his gray robe, and they were so alone together. A fluoro glowed cold, and the air that slid and whispered across her skin had likewise gone chill.
He smiled his Merseian smile, which she had learned to read as amicable. Crinkles radiated through the tiny scales of his skin, from eyes and mouth. “I want to show you something I keep from most of my fellows,” he said. “You might understand where they cannot.”
The little voicebox hung around his neck, like the one around hers, spoke with the computer’s flat Anglic. She filled that out with his Eriau. No longer did the language sound rough and guttural; it was, in truth, rather soft, and rich in tones. She could pick out individual words by now. She heard nothing in his invitation except—
—the father I never knew.
Abruptly she despised herself for what she had feared. How must she look to him? Face: hag-thin, wax-white, save for the bizarrely thick and red lips; behind it, two twisted flaps of cartilage. Body: dwarfish, scrawny, bulge-breasted, pinch-waisted, fat-bottomed, tailless, feet outright deformed. Skin: no intricate pattern of delicate flexible overlap; a rubberiness relieved only by lines and coarse pores; and hair, everywhere hair in ridiculous bunches and tufts, like fungus on a corpse. Odor: what? Sour? Whatever it was, no lure for a natural taste.