He thought she might have barred the door, but she had forgotten.
Inside the room he stood a long while looking down at her as she slept. Moon shafts described her body and her drifting hair. He woke her with the softest touch of his mouth, yet she stared at him in fear.
“What is wrong?”
“Nothing, darling Anici. Nothing.”
“Then why are you here?”
Her naivety served only to increase his need. He sat beside her and stroked her cheek, then took her face in his hands and kissed her, no longer with the familiar childlike kiss.
She did not resist him, but she gave a series of tense nervous shudders, and when he let her go, she began to weep very softly to herself.
“I’m afraid.”
“I won’t hurt you, Anici. I only want you to be happy. I want to share what I feel with you.” And at once he found the stale words again in his mouth from those endless courtships at Hamos—stupid, superficial sentences masking a lust, always impatient, now virtually agonizing. He found he could not bear to drone through those ritualistic phrases again, not with this girl with whom he had mingled thoughts. He moved close to her and began to caress her trembling body. She lay like stone and merely suffered him, and suddenly a rage took hold of him that he could not keep control of. He gripped her shoulders and snarled: “You forever say you love me. I think you lie to me.”
“Oh, Raldnor—you know my mind—how can you say these things—”
“Then you’re a child. They kept you a child in that pile of ghosts and ruins.”
The tears ran down her face and ended his patience. He found he despised her, hated her passive endurance. He felt that urge come on him that was like a possession—the Vis part of his body ravening to be free. He experienced a total loss of will to it.
When her hands came thrusting at him in terror, he held her more cruelly, and his brain was flooded by her frenzied inner cries. But she was no longer anything to him except an object that in some obscure way represented all the frustrations and tortures of his life. He remembered only partly that she was a virgin, and so, while he did not exactly force her, yet it was an effective and bloody rape. And not once did she cry aloud, only inside her mind, and it was these cries that finally brought him to his senses. His horror then at what he had accomplished was the more intense because he himself had done it. For it seemed to have been another man, a man he would hunt out through the byways of the inn and beat to a pulp. He held her and tried to comfort her, appalled by her anguish and her blood. And as he grew more panic-stricken, she faded into an empty and desolate calm.
“What have you done to me?” she eventually asked, the pathetic seal on her poor ignorance so thoroughly wrenched away.
He bathed the hurt and wrapped her in the blankets of the bed, and finally she fell into a dreary sleep.
He did not leave her until near dawn, when he wandered the streets of Sar as the sun rose, feeling as if some sort of murder had been committed in the dark by a man who had been his friend.
Somehow she kept from the others what he had done to her, but she kept herself from him also. And he found he was like a shamed child in her presence.
They came to Xarar at midday, showed the permit, and sheltered in a dismal eating house from a barrage of hail. The town seemed curiously inert and empty.
As they sat at the trestle over their muddy inexpensive wine, a young man came through the door, shaking hail from his cloak, cursing the weather in a colorful, altogether rather humorous way. He stayed drinking for a while, in a corner by the fire, but Raldnor was aware of his steady, dark, Xarabian gaze, and presently the Xarab rose and, bringing his wine jug with him, came and sat beside them.
“Pardon the intrusion, but I see our friend has served you the worst wine in the house. Permit me.” Whereupon he took up Raldnor’s cup, dashed the contents on the ground and refilled it from the jug. After which he repeated the performance with each of their cups in turn.
“I must protest,” Orhvan said, startled.
“Well, if you must, you must.”
“We’ve no means to repay you,” Orhvan said simply.
“I am already paid, twice over,” said the stranger, kissing Anici’s hand.
They seemed instantly in the young man’s power. He had a sorcerous personality, an indefatigable, oblique sense of fun.
He bought them dinner and they learned his name was Xaros. He was the agent, he said, of a miser in Lin Abissa. He seemed to know that they were not merely sightseers but had wares to sell, and later Orhvan took him to look at the colored cloth and the carvings and the few glazed pots that were their inventory.
“You’ll sell nothing in Xarar,” Xaros decided. “Lin Abissa’s the place.”
“We’ve had trade here before.”
“Haven’t you noticed, my friend, how empty the streets are? I see you Lowlanders get no news on the Plains. The Storm Lord is the guest of Thann Rashek at Abissa, and the whole of Xarabiss has crowded in after him to stare. At Abissa there is endless custom, therefore, from all the holiday-makers. In addition to which, my despicable master will get you a better price if you deal through him.”
“You were on the lookout, then, for Lowland traders,” Raldnor remarked.
“To be frank with you,” Xaros said, “I came to Xarar to visit a lady with whom I am slightly acquainted, at a time when I should have been on my employer’s tiresome and unimaginative errands. If you decide to deal with him, I shall use this as the excuse for my absence. Otherwise it’s the begging bowl and the open road. Don’t think for a moment, however, that I’m trying to influence any decision you might make—”
“What price could your master obtain for our work?”
“Name what you ask independently.”
Orhvan and Ras conferred and produced a sum. Xaros gave a bark of derision.
“No doubt you’re renowned for your charity, but how do you live? You’ll get three times that, even after the swindler has taken his share. And I suspect your permit’s been signed by some filthy Vis thief—some excrement of Sar, or worse, an Ommos. Think how delightful it will be to pay the vileness only the half of your expected profit, and keep the excess yourselves. Don’t be afraid. I make a very fair counterfeit bill of sale.”
It was a two-day journey to Lin Abissa. Xaros rode in their wagon. He had ridden a coal-black zeeba to Xarar, but subsequently sold it to buy his “lady” a present.
His company lifted all the sense of reserve and gloom from their party. He spread a kind of ubiquitous lightness. Raldnor found he could even be easy with Anici now, and she, beneath Xaros’s deluge of undemanding flattery, began to smile shyly and seem again like a sweet and untroubled child. Raldnor felt a warmth and a gratitude toward Xaros, but also a twisting of remorse inside himself, a pang of realization he refused to admit. The Xarabian’s freedom had been transmitted to him. Now he must ask: Might his true place be here, in Xarabiss, among Xarabians—his roots and all the leanings and cravings of his spirit and flesh? And it was Xaros who spoke it for him, the second night as they sat by the fire.
“The piece of your mother in you feels herself home.”
Raldnor stared at the flames and said: “I’ve lived a Lowlander all my life till now.”
“So the worm lives in the chrysalis till the sun bursts it. Then out pops the brilliant flying insect in amazement and mutters: ‘Well, well, I’ve lived in a chrysalis all my life till now.’”
“Not so easy to discard my father’s half, Xaros.”
“Easier than you think. The Plains breed a gentle and worthy people. Let’s admire them, but be honest. You’re not a Plains man. For one thing, I see you don’t use their mind language.”