“Oh, it’s you,” Gesalla said in a cold voice. “I thought you were Lain.”
Toller smiled, wondering if he could begin a new and more constructive relationship with Gesalla. “A trick of the light.”
“Why are you back so early?”
“Ah… the meeting didn’t go as planned. There was some trouble. Lain will tell you all about it — he’s on his way home now.”
Gesalla tilted her head and moved until she had the advantage of the light. “Why can’t you tell me? Was it something to do with you?”
“With me?”
“Yes. I advised Lain not to let you go anywhere near the palace.”
“Well, perhaps he’s getting as sick as I am of you and your endless torrents of advice.” Toller tried to stop speaking, but the word fever was upon him. “Perhaps he has begun to regret marrying a withered twig instead of a real woman.”
“Thank you — I’ll pass your comments on to Lain in full.” Gesalla’s lips quirked, showing that — far from being wounded — she was pleased at having invoked the kind of intemperate response which could result in Toller being banished from the Square House. “Do I take it that your concept of a real woman is embodied in the whore who is waiting in your bed at this moment?”
“You can take.…” Toller scowled, trying to conceal the fact that he had completely forgotten about his companion of the night. “You should guard your tongue! Felise is no whore.”
Gesalla’s eyes sparkled. “Her name is Fera.”
“Felise or Fera — she isn’t a whore.”
“I won’t bandy definitions with you,” Gesalla said, her tones now light, cool and infuriating. “The cook told me you left instructions for your… guest to be provided with all the food she wished. And if the amounts she has already consumed this foreday are any yardstick, you should think yourself fortunate that you don’t have to support her in marriage.”
“But I do!” Toller saw his chance to deliver the verbal thrust and took it on the reflex, with heady disregard for the consequences. “I’ve been trying to tell you that I gave Fera gradewife status before I left here this morning. I’m sure you will soon learn to enjoy her company about the house, and then we can all be friends together. Now, if you will excuse me.…”
He smiled, savouring the shock and incredulity on Gesalla’s face, then turned and sauntered towards the main stair, taking care to hide his own numb bemusement over what a few angry seconds could do to the course of his life. The last thing he wanted was the responsibility of a wife, even of the fourth grade, and he could only hope that Fera would refuse the offer he had committed himself to making.
Chapter 5
General Risdel Dalacott awoke at first light and, following the routine which had rarely varied in his sixty-eight years of life, left his bed immediately.
He walked around the room several times, his step growing firmer as the stiffness and pain gradually departed from his right leg. It was almost thirty years since the aftday, during the first Sorka campaign, when a heavy Merrillian throwing spear had smashed his thigh bone just above the knee. The injury had troubled him at intervals ever since, and the periods when he was free of discomfort were becoming shorter and quite infrequent.
As soon as he was satisfied with the leg’s performance he went into the adjoining toilet chamber and threw the lever of enamelled brakka which was set in one wall. The water which sprayed down on him from the perforated ceiling was hot — a reminder that he was not in his own spartan quarters in Trompha. Putting aside irrational feelings of guilt, he took maximum enjoyment from the warmth as it penetrated and soothed his muscles.
After drying himself he paused at a wall-mounted mirror, which was made of two layers of clear glass with highly different refractive indices, and took stock of his image. Although age had had its inevitable effect on the once-powerful body, the austere discipline of his way of life had prevented fatty degeneration. His long, thoughtful face had become deeply lined, but the greyness which had entered his cropped hair scarcely showed against its fair coloration, and his overall appearance was one of durable health and fitness.
Still serviceable, he thought. But I’ll do only one more year. The army has taken too much from me already.
While he was donning his informal blues he turned his thoughts to the day ahead. It was the twelfth birthday of his grandson, Hallie, and — as part of the ritual which proved he was ready to enter military academy — the boy was due to go alone against ptertha. The occasion was an important one, and Dalacott vividly remembered the pride he had felt on watching his own son, Oderan, pass the same test. Oderan’s subsequent army career had been cut short by his death at the age of thirty-three — the result of an airship crash in Yalrofac — and it was Dalacott’s painful duty to stand in for him during the day’s celebrations. He finished dressing, left the bedroom and went downstairs to the dining room where, in spite of the earliness of the hour, he found Conna Dalacott seated at the round table. She was a tall, open-faced woman whose form was developing the solidity of early middle age.
“Good foreday, Conna,” he said, noting that she was alone. “Is young Hallie still asleep?”
“On his twelfth?” She nodded towards the walled garden, part of which was visible through the floor-to-ceiling window. “He’s out there somewhere, practising. He wouldn’t even look at his breakfast.”
“It’s a big day for him. For us all.”
“Yes.” Something in the timbre of Conna’s voice told Dalacott that she was under a strain. “A wonderful day.”
“I know it’s distressing for you,” he said gently, “but Oderan would have wanted us to make the most of it, for Hallie’s sake.”
Conna gave him a calm smile. “Do you still take nothing but porridge for breakfast? Can’t I tempt you with some whitefish? Sausage? A forcemeat cake?”
“I’ve lived too long on line soldier’s rations,” he protested, tacitly agreeing to restrict himself to small-talk. Conna had maintained the villa and conducted her life ably enough without his assistance in the ten years since Oderan’s death, and it would be presumptuous of him to offer her any advice at this juncture.
“Very well,” she said, beginning to serve him from one of the covered dishes on the table, “but there’ll be no soldier’s rations for you at the littlenight feast.”
“Agreed!” While Dalacott was eating the lightly salted porridge he exchanged pleasantries with his daughter-in-law, but the seething of his memories continued unabated and — as had been happening more often of late — thoughts of the son he had lost evoked others of the son he had never claimed. Looking back over his life he had, once again, to ponder the ways in which the major turning points were frequently unrecognisable as such, in which the inconsequential could lead to the momentous.
Had he not been caught off his guard during the course of a minor skirmish in Yalrofac all those years ago he would not have received the serious wound in his leg. The injury had led to a long convalescence in the quietness of Redant province; and it was there, while walking by the Bes-Undar river, he had chanced to find the strangest natural object he had ever seen, the one he still carried everywhere he went. The object had been in his possession for about a year when, on a rare visit to the capital, he had impulsively taken it to the science quarter on Greenmount to find out if its strange properties could be explained.