“Ah,” she said.
They were silent again, but it was a different sort of silence from the hard, awkward one of before.
Then she said, “In my tribe it was never the custom for the offering-woman to take a mate, but then things changed for us when we left the cocoon and new customs came. And I realized that I too wanted a mate like all the others, and I took one. So I had my man only for a little while, and it was very recently. You understand what I am saying, Trei Husathirn? Most of my life I was without a man, and that was all right. Then I had one, and I think I was happy with him; and then he left me and it hurt very much. There are times when I think I would have been better off never having had a man at all than to have had one and lost him in that way.”
“No,” he said. “How can you say that? You knew love, did you not? The man goes away, but the knowledge of the love that you had can never go away. Would you rather never have had love at all in your life?”
“I have had love, other than the love I had with him. The love of Koshmar, my—” She faltered, realizing she knew no Beng word for twining-partner. “My friend,” she said lamely. “And the love of all my tribe. I know I am much loved, and I love them.”
“It is not the same kind of love.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps.” She took a deep breath. “And you? Do you have a woman, Trei Husathirn?”
“I had one.”
“Ah.”
“She is dead. The hjjk-men—”
“At the same time as that ?” she said, pointing at the scar.
“A later battle. Much later.”
“You have had many battles with the hjjk-men?”
Trei Husathirn shrugged. “They are everywhere. They made us suffer, and we made them suffer, I think. Although they seem not to feel pain of any kind, pain of the body, pain of the soul.” He shook his head and grimaced, as though talk of hjjk-men were nauseating to him. “I said I had a gift for you, Torlyri.”
“Yes. There is no need—”
“Please,” he said. He dug about in one of his wicker baskets and drew forth a helmet, not one of the ferocious kind but a smaller one of the sort that she had seen some Beng women wearing. It was fashioned of a shining red metal, highly polished and very bright, almost like a mirror, but it was graceful and delicate of design, a tapering cone with two rounded summits and complex patterns of interlacing lines cut into it by some master’s hand. Timidly he handed it to her. She stared at it without taking it.
“It’s wonderful,” she said. “But I couldn’t.”
“You will, please.”
“It’s too valuable.”
“It is very valuable. That is why I give it to you.”
“What does it mean,” Torlyri said after a moment, “when a woman takes a helmet from a man?”
Trei Husathirn looked uncomfortable. “That they are friends.”
“Ah,” she said. She had spoken of Koshmar as her friend. “And friendship between man and woman? What does that mean?”
He looked even more uncomfortable. “It means — you must understand — it — means — oh, Torlyri, must I say, must I say? You know! You do!”
“I gave myself in friendship to a man and he hurt me.”
“It happens. But not all the time.”
“We are of different tribes — there is no precedent—”
“You speak our language. You will know our ways.” He proffered the shining helmet again. “There is something between us. You know that. You knew it from the first. Even when we could not speak with each other, there was something. The helmet is for you, Torlyri. Many years have I kept it in this box, but now I give it to you. Please. Please.”
Now he was trembling. She could not have that. Gently she took the helmet from him, and held it above her head as though trying it on, and then, without putting it on, she pressed it against her bosom and carefully laid it to one side.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “I will treasure it all my life.”
She touched his scar again, lightly, lovingly. His hand went to the white stripe that began at her left shoulder, and traveled down her body as far as her breast, and paused there. She moved toward him. Then he embraced her and drew her down toward the pile of furs.
Under the hot cutting wind out of the south Taniane felt her soul stirring with yearnings both of the body and the spirit.
There was a throbbing all along her belly and thighs and inward to her sexual parts that was easy enough to understand. It would be good to couple today. Haniman was probably around somewhere, or else Orbin would do. Orbin was never unwilling.
Then, too, she felt a tension in her forehead and at the base of her neck and downward through her spine that appeared to argue in favor of a twining. She had not twined in a long time. Indeed, it was something she rarely did, for lack of a partner who touched her spirit. But today the need seemed urgent. Perhaps, she thought, she was only confusing it with coupling-need, and that other pressure would go away once she had found the pleasure her body craved.
But there was something else troubling her that was neither coupling-need nor twining-need: a restlessness, a deep sense of impatience and uneasiness, that sprang from no specific cause. She felt it in her teeth, behind her eyes, in the pit of her stomach; but she knew that those were mere outward manifestations of some ache of the soul. That was not an unfamiliar sensation for her, but it was more intense today, as if fanned to kindling-heat by the unceasing maddening gusts of the dry wind. It had something to do with the departure of Harruel and his followers — Taniane by now had come to believe that they must be undergoing the most marvelous adventures in dazzling far-off lands, while she remained trapped here pointlessly in dusty crumbling Vengiboneeza — and it had something to do also with the expanding presence of the Bengs. The Bengs pretended friendship, but it was friendship of a strange kind. In their friendly way they had slowly but steadily taken full possession of nearly every quarter of the city as though they were the masters of the place and Koshmar’s tribe a mere raggle-taggle band of amiably tolerated intruders. Taniane was bothered, too, by Koshmar’s passivity in the face of this displacement. She had not tried to deal with the Bengs at all. She had done nothing to limit the spread of their power. She simply shrugged and let them do as they pleased.
Koshmar barely seemed to be Koshmar any longer. It seemed to Taniane that the secession of Harruel must have broken her. And there were problems of some sort between Koshmar and Torlyri, evidently; Torlyri was hardly ever to be found in the settlement now, but spent most of her time off among the Bengs. The rumor was that Torlyri had taken a Beng lover. Why did Koshmar tolerate that? What was wrong with Koshmar? If she lacked the strength to be chieftain any longer, why didn’t she step down, and let someone with a little vigor take over? Koshmar was past the old limit-age now. If the tribe still lived in the cocoon, Taniane thought, Koshmar would have gone outside to her death, and very likely I would be chieftain now. But there was no longer a limit-age and Koshmar refused to relinquish power.
Taniane had no desire to overthrow Koshmar by force, nor did she think the People would support her if she attempted it, even though she was the only woman of the tribe who was of the proper age and the proper spirit to be chieftain. But something had to be done. New leadership is what we need, she thought, and soon. And the new leader, Taniane told herself, must find some way of halting the encroachments of the Bengs.
She crossed the plaza and entered the storehouse where the Great World artifacts were kept. She hoped to find Haniman there, and deal with the simplest of the needs that were assailing her this morning.
But instead of Haniman she found Hresh, morosely prowling among the mysterious ancient devices that he and his Seekers had collected, which had largely been neglected since the coming of the Bengs. He looked up at her but did not speak,