The wanderers formed a ring before their wagons. Ivar had found he could neither sit indefinitely on his hams like them, nor crosslegged on the ground; after dark, his bottom would soon have been frozen. There was no energy to lavish on heated garments. He stood leaned against Redtop, hidden in darkness.
The center of the camp was bright silver, for Lavinia was high and Creusa hurrying toward the full. A young woman trod forth, genuflected to the king, stood erect and drew off her cloak. Beneath, she wore a pectoral, a broad brass girdle upholding filmy strips fore and aft, and incidental jewelry.
Ivar recognized her. Those delicate features and big gray eyes had caught his attention several times during the day. Virtually unclad, her figure seemed boy-slim save in the bosom. No, he decided, that wasn’t right; her femaleness was just more subtle and supple than he had known among his own heavy folk.
The music wailed. She stamped her bare feet, once, twice, thrice, and broke into dance.
The wind gusted from Ivar. He had seen tineran girls perform before, and some were a wild equal of any ballerina—but none like this. They save the best for their own, he guessed; then thought vanished in the swirl of her.
She leaped, human muscles against Aenean gravity, rose flying, returned swimming. She flowed across ground, fountained upward again, landed to pirouette on a toe, a top that gyrated on and on and on, while it swung in ever wider precessions until she was a wheel, which abruptly became an arrow and at once the catavale which dodged the shaft and rent the hunter. She snapped her cloak, made wings of it, made a lover of it, danced with it and her floating hair and the plume of her breath. She banished cold; moonlight sheened on sweat, and she made the radiance ripple across her. She was the moonlight herself, the wind, the sound of pipes and drums and the rhythmic handclaps of the whole Train and of Ivar; and when she soared away into the night and the music ended, men roared.
Inside, Mikkal’s wagon was well laid out but had scant room because of the things that crowded it. At the forward end stood a potbellied stove, for use when fuel was available. Two double-width bunks, one above the other, occupied the left wall, a locker beneath and extensible table between. The right wall was shelves, cupboard, racks, to hold an unholy number of items: the stores and equipment of everyday life, the costumes and paraphernalia of shows, a kaleidoscope of odd souvenirs and junk. From the ceiling dangled an oil lantern, several amulets, and bunches of dry food, sausages, onions, dragon apples, maufry, and more, which turned the air pungent.
Attached to the door was a cage. An animal within sat up on its hind legs as Mikkal, Dulcy, and Ivar entered. The Firstling wondered why anybody would keep so unprepossessing a creature. It was about 15 centimeters in length, quadrupedal though the forepaws came near resembling skinny hands. Coarse gray fur covered it beneath a leathery flap of skin which sprang from the shoulders and reached the hindquarters, a kind of natural mantle. The head was wedge-shaped, ears pointed and curved like horns, mouth needle-fanged. That it could not be a native Aenean organism was proved by the glittery little red eyes, three of them in a triangle.
“What’s that?” Ivar asked.
“Why, our luck,” Dulcy said. “Name of Larzo.” She reached into the cage, which had no provision for closing. “C’mon out and say hey-ah, Larzo, sweet.”
“Your, uh, mascot?”
“Our what?” Mikkal responded. “Oh, I grab you. A ju, like those?” He jerked his thumb at the hanging grotesques. “No. It’s true, lucks’re believed to help us, but mainly they’re pets. I never heard of a wagon, not in any Train, that didn’t keep one.”
A vague memory of it came to Ivar from his reading.
No author had done more than mention in passing a custom which was of no obvious attractiveness or significance.
Dulcy had brought the animal forth. She cuddled it on her lap when the three humans settled side by side onto the lower bunk, crooned and offered it bits of cheese. It accepted that, but gave no return of her affection.
“Where’re they from originally?” Ivar inquired.
Mikkal spread his hands. “Who knows? Some immigrant brought a pair or two along, I s’pose, ’way back in the early days. They never went off on their own, but tinerans got in the habit of keeping them and—” He yawned. “Let’s doss. The trouble with morning is, it comes too damn early in the day.”
Dulcy returned the luck to its cage. She leaned across Ivar’s lap to do so. When her hand was free, she stroked him there, while her other fingers rumpled his hair. Mikkal blinked, then smiled. “Why not?” he said. “You’ll be our companyo a spell, Rolf, and I think we’ll both like you. Might as well start right off.”
Unsure of himself, though immensely aware of the woman snuggled against him, the newcomer stammered, “Wh-what? I, I don’t follow—”
“You take her first tonight,” Mikkal invited.
“Huh? But, but, but—”
“You left your motor running,” Mikkal said, while Dulcy giggled. After a pause: “Shy? You nords often are, till you get drunk. No need among friends.”
Ivar’s face felt ablaze.
“Aw, now,” Dulcy said. “Poor boy, he’s too unready.” She kissed him lightly on the lips. “Never mind. We’ve time. Later, if you want. Only if you want.”
“Sure, don’t be afraid of us,” Mikkal added. “I don’t bite, and she doesn’t very hard. Go on to your rest if you’d rather.”
Their casualness was like a benediction. Ivar hadn’t imagined himself getting over such an embarrassment, immediately at that. “No offense meant,” he said. “I’m, well, engaged to be married, at home.”
“If you change your mind, let me know,” Dulcy murmured. “But if you don’t, I’ll not doubt you’re a man. Different tribes have different ways, that’s all.” She kissed him again, more vigorously. “Goodnight, dear.”
He scrambled into the upper bunk, where he undressed and crawled into his sleeping bag that she had laid out for him. Mikkal snuffed the lantern, and soon he heard the sounds and felt the quiverings below him, and thereafter were darkness, stillness, and the wind.
He was long about getting to sleep. The invitation given him had been too arousing. Or was it that simple? He’d known three or four sleazy women, on leaves from his military station. His friends had known them too. For a while he swaggered. Then he met star-clean Tatiana and was ashamed.
I’m no prig, he insisted to himself. Let them make what they would of their lives on distant, corrupted Terra, or in a near and not necessarily corrupted tineran wagon. A child of Firstmen and scholars had another destiny to follow. Man on Aeneas had survived because the leaders were dedicated to that survivaclass="underline" disciplined, constant men and women who ever demanded more of themselves than they did of their underlings. And self-command began in the inmost privacies of the soul.
A person stumbled, of course. He didn’t think he had fallen too hard, upon those camp followers, in the weird atmosphere of wartime. But a … an orgy was something else again. Especially when he had no flimsiest excuse. Then why did he lie there, trying not to toss and turn, and regret so very greatly that he should stay faithful to his Tanya? Why, when he summoned her image to help him, did Fraina come instead?
VII
Covering a hill in the middle of Nova Roma, the University of Virgil was a town within the city, and most of it older than most of the latter. The massive, crenelated wall around it still bore scars from the Troubles. Older in truth than the Empire, Desai thought. His glance passed over man-hewn red and gray stones to an incorporated section of glassy iridescence. A chill touched his spine. That part is older than humanity.