The idea of coupling with Harruel excited her. To feel all that strength, all that dark force of his, between her legs! To hear him grunt in pleasure! To have him dig his fingers deep into the flesh of her arms!
Yes, but Harruel was out there in the wilderness now, and she was still in Vengiboneeza, waiting to grow older, waiting for her time to come. It might never come. Koshmar was full of vigor. There was no longer a limit-age. Taniane had dreamed of becoming chieftain someday; now she saw the realization of that dream receding farther and farther into the future.
“And would you become chieftain if you were with Harruel now?” Haniman asked, giving her a skeptical look. Haniman was her main friend these days, and her coupling-partner. He wanted to twine with her too, but Taniane had never granted him that. “Harruel is chieftain himself. That’s what ‘king’ means. And he has a mate, besides. There’d be no place for you.”
“Minbain is getting old. Life in the wild country is harsh. She might die in another year or two.”
“And Harruel would choose you? Well, he might. Or take Weiawala away from Salaman, or Thaloin from Bruikkos. Harruel is king. He does as he pleases.”
“I think he would choose me.”
Haniman smiled. “So you would be the mate of the king. Would that give you any power? Has it given Minbain any power?”
“I am not like Minbain.”
“That is indeed so. You think you’d be able to wangle a share in Harruel’s authority, is that it?”
“I might be able to do that,” said Taniane.
“As Hresh would say, you might also be able to learn how to fly by flapping your arms, if you worked at it long enough. But that’s not wonderfully likely.”
“Not flying, no. But I could have found my way around Harruel.” Taniane grinned slyly. “And Harruel won’t live forever. It’s dangerous in the wild country. Do you remember the rat-wolves? The bloodbirds? If something happened to Harruel, would Konya become king, do you think? Or would the ones who had left the city prefer the old custom and choose a woman to be chieftain, perhaps?”
Haniman laughed, a sharp snorting kind of laugh. “How marvelous you are, Taniane. Out of nothing at all, you conjure up a role for yourself as Harruel’s mate in place of Minbain, and as Harruel’s master when you are his mate, and then as Harruel’s successor after he dies. But meanwhile you are here and he is somewhere far from here, and getting farther every day.”
“I know,” she said, looking away.
Haniman’s hand came to rest suddenly on her knee, and moved a short way up her thigh toward the meeting-place of her legs. Taniane let it remain there.
Her thoughts turned darker. She was here, and Harruel was there, and, as Haniman had pointed out, she was conjuring great things for herself out of nothing at all. She had made her choice; now she had to live with it.
If only Hresh were not such a fool!
She still winced at his stupidity, that day that he had come rushing up to her idiotically begging her to twine with him. Of course she had wanted to twine with him! But she had felt compelled to say no to him. If she had given in to him so readily, right then and there, she would have had no hope of gaining him in the way she wanted him. He would twine with her, yes, and then he would go off, caught up in the frenzy that comes over one in one’s first twining days, and twine perhaps with Bonlai or Sinistine or Thaloin — or with Haniman, for all anybody knew — and eventually the frenzy would pass and he would settle into some sort of a regular twining partnership with someone. With anyone. Not necessarily her. What she had wanted, when she refused him, was for him to go off and gain some twining experience and return to her in a more seemly way, wanting her all the more. And she would have accepted him gladly. But he hadn’t done that. Instead he had barely spoken to her ever since; he had kept his distance from her as though it would burn him just to look at her.
The fool! Wisest one in the tribe, and a fool all the same!
Haniman’s hand moved farther up Taniane’s thigh. The other one began to caress her shoulder. It glided toward her breast.
“Couple with me?” he asked.
She nodded, still thinking of Hresh, how she might have become twining-partner with the sharpest mind of the tribe and gained all manner of wisdom that way: how she might even have mated with him, if custom now allowed the old man to mate. Custom had changed enough to allow the offering-woman to mate with Lakkamai, hadn’t it? Though a lot of good that had done Torlyri when Harruel had split the tribe apart. If I were Hresh’s mate, Taniane thought, then I would hold power just below that of Koshmar, and if Koshmar died—
“And twine with me afterward?” Haniman asked.
“No,” Taniane said. “I don’t want to twine with you.”
“Not now, or not ever?”
“Not now. Maybe not ever.”
“Ah,” he said. “Too bad. But you’ll couple with me?”
“Of course.”
“What if I asked you to be my mate, too?”
Taniane gave him a long steady look.
“Let me think about that one,” she said. “Meanwhile let’s just couple, all right?”
For Torlyri it was a dark and anguished time. She felt that the light had gone out of her soul, that she had turned to a lump of black ash.
All that pain over a man!
How quickly, how deeply, she had become dependent on Lakkamai! How vulnerable she had left herself to his leaving her! She barely recognized herself in this strange shattered woman who could not awaken in the morning without reaching toward the empty place where Lakkamai had slept beside her, and without hearing in her mind his echoing voice, calmly telling Harruel that he too would join the party that was going from Vengiboneeza.
Torlyri had lived satisfactorily enough for thirty years and some without any great need of men. Her love for Koshmar and her responsibilities as offering-woman had made a sufficient life for her. But then had come the New Springtime, then had come the Going Forth, and everything had changed. Suddenly everyone was coupling, suddenly everyone was mating, suddenly new children were being brought into the world in unprecedented numbers. In that great flowering of the tribe Torlyri had felt herself blossoming, opening, ripening. Changing. She too yearned now for coupling, even for mating. So she had given herself to Lakkamai; and now Lakkamai had gone off with Harruel; and Torlyri found herself desolate, although she tried to tell herself that she was no worse off than before she had become entangled with Lakkamai.
“Come to me,” Koshmar said. “Twine with me.”
“Yes,” Torlyri said. “Gladly!”
Koshmar was a great comfort to her in these difficult days. They twined often, far more often than they had for years, and at each twining Torlyri could feel Koshmar pouring strength, warmth, love into her soul.
Torlyri knew that Koshmar had been deeply hurt by her infatuation with Lakkamai. Koshmar had never said it in so many words, but there was no way for her to hide her true feelings from Torlyri, in twining or outside of it, after all their years together. Still, Koshmar had stood aside, allowing Torlyri to do as she wished. And now that it was over, now that Lakkamai had casually allowed Torlyri to fall from his grasp, Koshmar offered no recriminations, no smugness, no cruelty: only love, warmth, strength.
That could not be easy for her. Yet she did it.
And did it, Torlyri knew, at a time when she herself was undergoing great stress. The secession of Harruel had been a powerful blow to her. Koshmar had never had to face such mockery before. No chieftain had. To be scorned in front of her entire tribe, to be reviled, to be rejected — for eleven of her own people to turn their backs on her — what humiliation, what a lessening of her! And then to have this great horde of Helmet People swarming into the city, with all their bustle and energy, their colossal smelly beasts, their strange costumes, their alien ways. Once upon a time the cocoon had been an entire world, and Koshmar had been supreme ruler of that world; but now the People had come forth into a much bigger world and she was nothing more than the chieftain of a small splintered tribe occupying one small corner of a large city, with a much larger tribe nearby, pressing close, impinging, encroaching.