"I'd have skipped this battle scene, and have some chap run in to announce a glorious victory, like those Russian plays where a cove wanders in to say that Uncle Ivan just hanged himself in the barn. But no, Attila must have his battle, with simulated gore and severed heads scattered about." He sighed. "Ho for the Middle Ages!"
Reith said, "Consider yourselves lucky to shoot medieval Krishna before it disappears."
"I thought" said White, "the Interplanetary Council kept out advanced technology."
"They try," said Reith. "But blockades leak, and the Krishnans invent on their own. A couple of Krishnan armies have a few crude muskets, something like a Renaissance arquebus. They create more noise and smoke than damage—so far."
"We shan't want guns," said Ordway. "They'd spoil the romance, like Romeo calculating his income tax. Are there castles in Zinjaban?"
"Mikardand isn't a feudal state," said Reith, "but there's a big government fortress across the Khoruz. If the Knights cooperate, you might use it as your castle ..."
At last Reith looked at the wall clock. "Enough planning for one day. I've got to round up a carriage for Rosid, get you two outfitted, and give you a date with Heggstad."
"Who's he?" said White.
"Ivar Heggstad's our athletic trainer. You'll need some exercise to toughen you and some practice at sword fighting, aya riding, and other Krishnan skills."
White and Ordway groaned in unison.
Sinking Roqir saw Fergus Reith and Alicia Dyckman facing each other across the terrace of Reith's ranch house. Padded and masked, they were whacking and thrusting with qong-wood, basket-hilted single sticks. When they drew back after a touch, Reith said: "No, no, Lish! I've told you a parry in seconde is suicide if the other party knows the double."
"My fencing has gone downhill," she said, pulling off the wire mask. "Enough for today; I'm soft. I see you've kept in practice."
"I try, since I want to stay alive. You take first crack at the tub." With a small curl of his lip, he added: "It's only big enough for one, alas."
"You leer most attractively, Mr. Reith," she said with a departing laugh.
After dinner for three, counting Alister, Reith suggested: "Why don't you stay over again? We've got so much to talk about."
"Wish I could, Fergus; but I don't dare leave Cyril and Jack to their own devices. I shouldn't have left the compound last night, except it's not often one finds one's long lost—uh—"
"Amorex?" said Reith, cocking a sardonic eyebrow. The term meant "a lover of one's former spouse."
"Ex-amorex would fit better, but it sounds like some medicine. Oh, before I forget!" She dug into her carryall and handed Reith a book. "Remember urging me to write up my Krishnan adventures? Here they are!"
"By Bákh's toenails!" said Reith. "A real Terran book!" He read the title: Pirates, Priests, and Potentates, by Alicia Dyckman Reith. "Oh, boy! I won't get much sleep tonight ... Say, if this has been published, wouldn't White and Ordway know—ah ..."
She shook her head. "It hadn't yet appeared when we left Terra. So please don't show it to them, at least not soon. Your demon reporter's been after me, but I refused to discuss personal matters."
Minyev brought the gig around the corner and handed Reith the reins. With a backward glance at the ranch house in the moonlight, Alicia asked, "When do we leave for Rosid?"
"In a few days." Reith clucked the aya to its six-legged trot. "I'll send someone ahead to warn the Dasht"
At the Visitors' Building in the Novorecife compound, he dropped Alicia off with the perfunctory kiss that was becoming their regular ritual.
Back at the ranch, Reith settled himself to read in bed. He started on Pirates, Priests, and Potentates. Although fascinating, the book proved slow going. Every sentence so flooded his mind with memories that he had to stop reading every few paragraphs and stare at the wall as image after image paraded by.
When Alicia had spoken of writing a popular book instead of a sociological treatise on Krishna, she had promised to dedicate the book to him. Reith looted in vain for a dedication. Then he noticed that the page following the tide page had been snipped out leaving a centimeter-wide strip. He suspected that the missing sheet had borne the dedication. Had she dedicated it to another? Had the sheet borne some embarrassingly personal sentiment?
The more Reith read, the more absorbed he became. He found himself appalled by the candor with which she set forth the details of their checkered relationship. She accepted the entire blame for their breakup and pictured him much more saintly and heroic than he knew himself to be. Without actually saying so, the work was a book-length love letter.
On the other hand, the incident of the three clerics, that morning, suggested that Alicia the termagant was not dead but sleeping, easily roused to fury. Although his sympathies had lain with her in that confrontation, he firmly resolved thenceforth to treat her as a quasi-sister and to shun the slightest hint of anything closer.
He was also taken aback by her precise, unabashed accounts of her liasons with other males on Krishna, two natives and a Terran, before and after her marriage to Reith. Although in each case she had been more or less coerced, the last of these intrigues had played a part in her final rupture with Reith.
Throughout, Doctor Dyckman the social scientist was in evidence. Using her own experience, she told in baldly physical terms what copulation with a Krishnan male was like. Reith was shaken and embarrassed. Even honesty, he thought, could be overdone.
Reith had assumed that all his feelings towards Alicia Dyckman had faded away, that he had put their stormy romance behind him. Now he was alarmed to find himself bubbling with contradictory emotions. He wanted both to treat her with wary reserve and to offer the ultimate intimacy; to share his every thought and feeling and to retire into a shell of isolation; to be lovingly warm and coldly indifferent; to kiss and cuddle and to shake and slap her.
Despite all that had happened, Alicia had not lost the capacity to arouse an emotional tornado in Fergus Mac-Donald Reith. The sky was paling when at last he fell asleep, the book open on his lap.
At Avoid, the halfway point from Novorecife to Rosid, Reith's party drew up at Asteratun's Inn, identified by an animal skull above the front door.
The carriage that Reith had rented was a barouche, with two facing double seats in the body, another seat in front for the driver, and a collapsible top. A pair of Reith's ayas drew the vehicle. Alicia, Ordway, and White rode in the carriage. Reith was driving; but sometimes he turned the reins over to Timásh, his assistant, and either sat with his clients or rode one of the spare animals. Now Timásh, wearing one of the broad-brimmed, floppy straw hats favored by Krishnan shaihan-herds, rode one spare aya and led the other two.
Alicia also took an occasional turn in the saddle, she said, to get her riding muscles back in trim. When Reith suggested that White and Ordway do likewise, White groaned. Ordway, now clean-shaven, growled: "Not on your life, cobber! I'm so stiff from the workouts that displaced Viking of yours gave me that I can scarcely climb into your rattletrap."
Reith led them into the inn, where he greeted a stout, wrinkled Krishnan with ragged antennae. The innkeeper cried in Gozashtandou: "God den, Master Reef! Your herdsman told me to expect you. Be these your latest batch of Terran tourists?"
"They are businesspersons," said Reith, introducing them. When he presented Alicia as "Doctor Dyckman," Asteratun peered at her dusty riding clothes and said: "Excuse my curiosity, my good sir, but this lady bears an astonishing resemblance to one ye brought hither, it must be nigh unto twenty years past, the one ye called wife. Could this fair young maid be the daughter of you twain? I know not how long it takes you Terrans to grow up."