Alicia stared at him, then seized both shoulders and kissed him. "You're sweet, under that gruff manner, and I'm glad you care. You deserve a woman with all my better qualities and none of my horrible faults. With this captain, you needn't worry. I used the same gag I did with King Ainkhist."
"Teeth in your personal person?"
"Sure. I said it would be a pity if, in a transport of passion, I bereft him of the pride of the merchant fleet. He was a little puzzled, saying: "In that case, how do you Terrans propagate, if every male who impregnates a female suffers mortal hurt?' I told him the teeth wouldn't bite the female's official mate."
"But, as I remember, that talk didn't scare off Ainkhist the second time."
"That's true; but the reason was that Percy, unintentionally, had given the game away. So the second time I was in Mutabwk, it was either give the king what he demanded or be flogged to death for lèse majesté. Percy swore he'd kill Ainkhist if he got a chance, for dishonoring Terran womanhood. Percy has some of the quaintest ideas you ever heard of outside a nineteenth-century novel."
"Quaint, maybe," growled Reith, "but I'd kill the swine, too."
"Dear Fergus! You and Percy want me to be a delicate, dimwitted, fluttery female like the heroine of one of those old novels."
"That's not the point. I'm no killer, but the thought of my woman's being laid by one of those quasi-men pushes the same buttons in me as if he were human."
She looked sharply at Reith. "What do you mean, your woman?"
"Well, say a woman I care about. Didn't you feel somehow degraded?"
"Yes; because I'd been compelled against my will, not because Ainkhist wasn't human. When you live among Krishnans as much as I have, you forget they're of another species. So, while I wouldn't ask anybody to take vengeance, if I heard that Ainkhist had come to a sticky end, my grief wouldn't overwhelm me. And in the long run I profited from the episode."
"You mean Ainkhist paid you?"
"No—yes—well, not exactly. He gave me a valuable necklace; but after we escaped from him, I gave the thing to Percy to give his wife as a homecoming present. I didn't want it; it made me feel like a whore. And don't you dare ever tell Vicky where it came from!"
"Of course not! But how did you profit?"
"I had a whole day in the harem, while Ainkhist went hunting; and I interviewed all the inmates. After I left you, I wrote Women of a Khaldoni Harem and sent it off to my Terran agent. Of course it'll be years before I learn whether the book was published and how it made out."
Reith shook his head. "You're the most amazing person I've ever known."
She turned away with a small smile of satisfaction.
Reith had taken one of the upper bunks, to save his companions the trouble of climbing. During the night, a change in the ship's motion woke him. For a confused moment he wondered if they had reached port, though an instant's pause quashed this idea. Carefully he lowered himself to the cabin floor. He lit the candle in the small lantern, put on shirt and pants, and went out.
Thick fog lay like a sable blanket over oily-smooth water. A faint breeze stirred the limp sails, giving the ship just enough way to dispatch a line of ripples from each side of the bow.
Aft, Captain Gendu stood at the taffrail, near the sailor at the whipstaff. Above their heads, a lantern hung from a pole, its feeble yellow light pushing ineffectually at the fog. To starboard, a faint pearly luminescence heralded the coming dawn.
"Fear not; 'twill lift after sunup," growled the captain when Reith came up to him. "Then we may hope the breeze will freshen."
Reith walked the deck to warm his muscles and did a few knee bends and pushups. Little by little, the light in the east waxed stronger and the fog began to turn pink.
"Sun's up," said Gendu. "Twill soon burn off the vapor."
Reith reentered the cabin, meaning to try to snatch another hour's sleep before full daylight. Marot snored in his bunk; Alicia breathed lightly in hers. Reith set down the lantern and began to remove his trousers when a sound from outside brought him to full alert. It was a shout, which seemed to come, not from aboard the Kubitar, but from across water.
Captain Gendu's deep, rasping voice gave an answering shout. Then came cries of crewmen, a patter of bare feet on the deck, and a clash of metal. Something metallic struck wood with a sound like that of an ax biting into a log. Amid a rising babel of voices came a grinding and cracking of strained timbers. The deck jerked beneath Reith's feet, staggering him.
In the seconds between the first shout and the jolt of the ship-to-ship contact, Reith, groping in the dim light, found his sword and stepped to the door on the side whence the noise seemed to come. A glance showed Marot and Alicia sitting up in their bunks and putting their feet on the floor.
"Qu'est que—" mumbled Marot, in chorus with Alicia's soprano: "What's this—"
"Hold the other door, Aristide!" shouted Reith. "Alicia, get some clothes on!"
As he spoke, the door in which Reith stood flew open. In the doorway stood a Krishnan wearing a dirty breechclout and a dented, rusty breastplate. The newcomer brandished a curved sword, aiming a forehand cut at Reith's neck.
Reith got his blade up in time to parry, though the shock of the contact with the massive weapon made his hand tingle. The invader next swung a backhand slash, wielding the heavy blade as if it were feather-light. Again, Reith barely caught the sweep on his own sword.
At that instant, Reith heard the other door, behind him, fly open and the sound of entry of more armed Krishnans. A shriek from Alicia cut through a shout from Marot and sounds of struggle.
Reith sent a quick thrust at his opponent's face while the latter was still recovering from his second slash. The Krishnan jerked back out of range, brought his heavy sword up over his head, and started a terrific downright cut, with both hands on the hilt. Reith had an instant of fear that, while he could get his sword up in time to parry the blow, the impact might break his lighter blade.
The Krishnan, however, had forgotten that he was standing in a doorway, with the lintel a few spans above his head. His blade struck the lintel, pierced deeply into the wood, and stuck fast.
Without thinking out his next move, Reith threw himself forward in an extended lunge, aiming for the Krishnan heart region, as if he faced an unarmored foe. The lunge went home perfectly, striking the Krishnan about where the solar plexus would be on a Terran and the heart on a Krishnan.
The point, however, skittered off the steel of the breastplate. Remembering too late the difference between an armored and an unarmored foe, Reith jerked his arm back to send a remise at the Krishnan's unprotected throat. But something hard and heavy struck his skull from behind. The surroundings dissolved in a pyrotechnics of whirling lights. Reith dimly heard the clang of his dropped sword and felt the impact of the deck against the hands and knees to which he had fallen.
Horny hands seized Reith, hauled him to his feet, and hustled him, staggering, out the door, vaguely surprised to find himself still alive. Outside, the brightening light showed that alongside the Kubitar lay another ship, of similar length but more slender hull. Three grapnels from the strange ship were sunk in the Kubitar's starboard bulkhead. Figures, dimly seen through the fog on the deck of the other ship, held the grapnel ropes and thus kept the ships together.