Later, when even Totha deigned to rest, she lay beside him on the skins and toyed with his beard. They had long since dropped the Mazda pretence among themselves. Blade, Org and Totha, and the neuter had had many long conferences and had come to perfect agreement, each with the silent reservation that he would kill the other three when the proper time came. Blade knew that Org was now jealous of Totha and him in a sexual sense. The Pethcines had no understanding of incest; at first Org had offered his daughter as a gift, as hospitality, and perhaps as a political gesture but now he was jealous and resentful and beginning to sulk.
Blade could not decide which one of the three was the more dangerous. He inclined toward Totha, yet Org was capable of gigantic rages. Honcho was cunning, crafty, with a highly developed homid brain that had somehow been misplaced in a neuter's body. His brain was as good as Blade's own and the techniques at his disposal far superior to anything Blade had at the moment. Yet Blade lived, kept a half step ahead, because they needed him desperately. Without him Tharn could not be taken.
Now Totha said: "I may not kill you after all. I have never had this feeling for a man before. Not Org, nor Gutar, nor any of the great warriors of the tribe has made me feel as you do. And I will not find a man in Tharn that can gratify me, the Lordsmen are all runt things, shriveled and sickly. I shall put all of them to death immediately. No, Blade, perhaps I will let you live." She laughed and poked his chest. "After all, who will be left?"
"Who indeed?" Then, slyly, he added: "There is always Honcho?"
Totha went into a gale of giggles. "Honcho? That thing? Ha-ho, he is indeed a thing that has no thing!" And she grabbed for Blade as if to reassure herself.
"He is cunning and has great powers, this I know, but he is useless to a woman."
Blade studied her. She had let a careless remark drop earlier, and now he came back to it. It was a possible way of handling the neuter in the future. In the imminent future, because very soon now Blade must return to Tharn and then to Urcit.
"Yet you told me that Honcho sometimes takes a girl, a Pethdne maiden, when he comes into the Gorge. Why?"
Totha, when she was not engaged in or thinking about sex, could be very sharp. She narrowed her eyes and tweaked his beard. "Why? I ask you the same. Why do you care? I will take care of Honcho when the time comes. Org will. What matter?"
"It matters," he said. "Because it may be a weakness and Honcho does not have many weaknesses. Down here in the Gorge, perhaps, but not in Tharn. He will not be as easy to kill as you think. But if he, a thing as you say, is interested in girls, then it is a weakness and I must know all about it So tell me. What does he do with a girl? Or don't you know?"
Totha was not laughing now. She stared at him. "Maybe you are right. I do not know. But I do know what Honcho does with a girl. He does nothing! He talks. He asks questions. He makes them show him things. But he himself does nothing. How can he?"
"How do you know all this?"
She laughed again. "I know. I have asked the girls after Honcho has been with them. I am Queen here and it is my right to know, anyway I was curious."
Honcho, Blade though wryly, was lucky in a sense. He didn't have to satisfy this little Pethcinian wildcat.
He persevered. "Tell me about it. It may be very important." Important enough, he thought, to save my life and let me win. Sex, and there was irony for you, might be the neuter's Achilles' heel. A weakness that could be used to destroy him.
Finally, seeing that he was serious, Totha told him all about it. In the most descriptive and earthy terms.
Honcho had an unquenchable curiosity about sex. What the Tharnians called coi. He would take a Pethcine girl into seclusion, strip her naked, and finger and prod her and ask her endless questions. What did it feel like to have coi? How often did they like coi? What did they do when they had coi?
Once, and Totha fought hard to restrain her giggles, once the neuter had brought along an artificial phallus, made of the omnipresent teksin, and thrust it into a girl and watched her reactions. And made those strange marks of his with a stick on a piece of flat bark. This was as near as Totha could describe a stylus and slate.
Blade listened with an odd sense of pity, and with a growing certainty that he had found Honcho's vulnerable spot. The man was in torment. Blade was now thinking of the neuter as a man. First it had been it, like the unlucky Moyna, then he. Now it was man. Because that was his misfortune and that was going to be his downfall if Blade could arrange it. Somehow a mistake had been made: Honcho had been made with a homid, human, brain in a neuter's body.
Blade felt brief pity, once more, then banished it forever. He knew what must be done. He whispered now. Pulled Totha down atop him and whispered in her ear.
Her eyes widened and she pushed up away from him. "Me? With that thing? I will not! He can do nothing!"
Blade was patient. He did not try to explain that that was precisely the point He said, "It will work. I know it will. Honcho will not be able to resist you. He has not tried before with you, because you are a Princess and..."
"I am a Queen!"
"A Queen, and you are Org's daughter and anyway he does not trust either of you. He is using you because he must, as you are using him, and as you are both using me..."
Totha was aroused again. She began to climb over him. Blade was ready, but he said, "Wait! Listen to me."
"You speak like Honcho," she said sullenly. 'Too many words. Words that are like winds in the caves, that twist and go nowhere. This is what I want. This is what I will have!"
She had her way. When it was over Blade said, "Now will you listen?"
"I will listen. I do not promise to do it. I am Totha and I do nothing that I do not wish."
Blade put his mouth against her ear and whispered for a long time. At last she agreed. Reluctantly, or so she tried to pretend, but he could see that the idea was beginning to attract her. In her way she was as curious as Honcho.
Blade was content. He had planted a seed. It might flourish, it might not. Timing was important, but that he could not exactly control. Blade smiled. It was, then, in the hands of the Gods. Tharnian Gods. Which meant, when you got right down to it, that it was in his hands. He would just have to do the best he could with what he had. And pray. To himself?
When Blade and Honcho returned to the Gorge Tower he took the great Sacred Sword with him. Org did not want to let it go at first but the neuter persuaded him.
"When we have taken Tharn," he said, "and THEY have been destroyed, then the sword can be returned to its rightful place in the Palace. Think, Org! The Sacred Sword does not really belong here in the Gorge. It belongs in Tharn. Is this not so?"
Org agreed that it was so.
As Honcho and Blade floated slowly up the shaft to the Tower the neuter said: "You are curious about the sword?"
Blade had the heavy weapon slung over his shoulder. He had cleaned and burnished it as best he could.
"I am curious."
Honcho spoke now in a purer, more upperclass Tharnian than he had used in the Gorge.
"The sword is nearly as old as Tharn itself. Many, many megakronos. It was the one great treasure the Tharnian men were able to take when they were defeated and hurled into the Gorge."
Blade had read of that great struggle. The Tharnian women had revolted, vanquished the men and banished them forever from Tharn, keeping only a few prisoners for breeding purposes. The men, living like savages in the Gorge, had gradually evolved into a new race, the savage Pethcines. But racial memories did not die, and always the hope glimmered that one day the Sword, and the Pethcines, would return to rule in Tharn.
"That is why Org let you take it," said Honcho as they neared the top of the shaft "When you go to Urcit the sword will go with you, to the Palace, and the sword is the symbol!"