“What in Darvin’s name happened here?” a voice came, and I turned my bead to see Garth standing in the doorway to his cabin, his nose wrinkled in disgust. Tammad was already gone into his own cabin, so he had to be addressing me.
“That expert on women you’re so friendly with demanded a show from some trippers the captain found,” I explained. “The women gave him a show he’ll never forget.”
“That has to be grub slime,” he said, hobbling farther into the common area. “I haven’t smelled that smell since the time I went drinking in the dives around the port. One of the strip dancers used the stuff to discourage someone who tried to put his hands on her at the wrong time. How did a strip dancer get here?”
“Three strip dancers, if that’s what they are,” I corrected, shifting to look up at him. “I couldn’t really say one way or the other. I don’t often spend my time in port dives.”
“Of course.” He nodded, looking down at me with less than friendliness. “Doing something like that would be too far beneath you. And you did say they were trippers. I’ll have to ask you to excuse my slowness.”
“Don’t I always?” I came back, getting satisfaction from the flash of anger I felt in him. His sarcasm had been meant to annoy me, but his plans had backfired. He wavered a moment, trying to decide whether or not to be angry out loud, then decided against it. He moved forward again instead, and lowered himself to the carpeting in front of me.
“What does—darayse—mean?” he asked, stumbling over the unfamiliar word. His gray eyes were serious, as though the question held personal importance.
“lt means non-man,” I supplied, wondering why he wanted to know. “The concept is the antithesis of Nenda, who is a warrior and a man in the Rimilian society. It means coward and fool and anything else derogatory you’d care to call a male. If you saw the party, why did you ask about it?”
“I didn’t see all of it,” he denied with a headshake. “I heard the uproar and started out to see what was going on, but this ankle kept me from getting to the door until everything was just about over. Tammad thinks you knew what was going to happen, but I’m convinced you didn’t. Why didn’t you deny his accusation?”
He was still looking at me in that very serious way, his mind echoing the look in his eyes. I didn’t know what business it was of his, and didn’t mind saying so.
“Since when do I have to excuse my actions to you?” I demanded, letting the heat come through in my tone. “I couldn’t care less what that barbarian believes, and you can include yourself in on that!”
“What will he do if he does come to believe it?” Garth persisted, unaffected by my anger. “You know him better than I do; you must know what his reckoning will consist of.”
His gray eyes did not leave me, and I couldn’t stand it. I closed my own eyes and turned my head away, wrapping my arms around myself as if against a chill.
“He’ll beat me,” I said harshly, suddenly fighting to keep the bitterness and hurt from flowing out of my mind. “Does that please you, Garth? Does it make you feel proud to be a male? Well, I don’t care if he does beat me. I simply and completely don’t care!”
Garth cringed as a portion of my bleakness touched him, his mind recoiling from the strength of mine. Most non-empaths never feel any emotions but their own, making them particularly vulnerable to outside projections. If an empath’s range was greater than the mere twenty-five feet it was, we never would have been allowed to survive. I savagely cut off the flow, disgusted with myself for having let it .happen, and suddenly Garth’s arm was around me.
“Terry, take it easy,” he soothed. “He won’t really hurt you, I’m sure he won’t. He told me he loves you and wants to be with you forever.”
“Oh, sure,” I nodded, keeping my eyes closed even as the tears began to form. “He wants me so desperately he’s even willing to let me work for him. That’s what I call true love.”
“Work for him?” he echoed with a frown. “What do you mean?”
“He’s in love with my abilities as an empath,” I whispered, feeling tears roll down my cheeks. “He doesn’t want me, Garth, he wants the sort of help I gave him during my assignment on his world. I fell in love with him then, and I’m sure that was part of his plans. The only thing that wasn’t part of his plans was my finding out the truth.”
Garth’s arm was around me, holding me close to his chest, but even the wave of pained sympathy that came from him was no comfort. I just let the tears roll out of my eyes, making no attempt to stop them, feeling the great contrast between the pushing and turning in Garth’s mind and the deep, thick silence he chose to show me.
After a few minutes of the silence, Garth stirred and said, “What do you really want to do now, Terry? Do you want to stay with him, or would you leave if you could?”
“Do you think I ran from him just for the exercise?” I sniffled, feeling very tired on the inside. “Of course I would leave, but do you really think he’ll let me go? He’s convinced he can get me to do as he wishes.”
“And you think he can’t?” he asked, surprised. “From what I’ve seen, he’ll have very little trouble getting anything he wants.”
“He can’t force me to work for him,” I denied, looking up at him. “He knows I lose control when he beats me, so he can’t beat me when he needs my ability. There’s nothing else he can do but try to convince me with words, and I’m all through listening to his words.”
“How many times has he beaten you?” Garth frowned, his mind definitely disturbed. “I never thought Tammad was the sort to beat a woman.”
“Tammad is the sort to do anything he damned well pleases,” I snorted. “And he’s beaten me every time he cared to, except for the one time I used a projection on him and lied about my range.” I moved against the arm he still had around me and added, “And you’d be wise to remember not to touch me from now on. The mighty l’lenda doesn’t like having other men touch his woman—not unless it happens to be his own idea.”
“I don’t like the sound of any of this,” Garth growled, slowly moving his arm away. “From what he said, I thought—well, never mind what I thought. I’ve just decided that if this is the price I have to pay for it, the price is too high.”
“What did he offer you, Garth?” I asked, trying to keep my tone soft and without too much curiosity. If the barbarian’s plans included Garth, and they certainly seemed to, I wanted to know about it.
“He—offered me a place in his world,” Garth answered after a brief hesitation, his mind almost embarrassed. “He described it as a place where a man is free to be a man, free to do what he yearns to. I’m tired of being a fancy-dress play soldier, but I won’t buy a new life with the misery of innocent women. He seems to want me with him for some reason; if that’s true, then the only way he’ll get me is if he lets you go.”
Garth sat next to me, staring off into the distance, seeing nothing of what was around him. It wasn’t particularly surprising that he would bargain his dream in return for my freedom; that was the sort of man Garth was. High idealed, high principled—and totally uninvolved in any human way. He wasn’t about to do something to help me, he Was adhering to beliefs he felt very strongly about. He would have done the same no matter who was involved, me or any other helpless woman. On behalf of all helpless women I was disgusted, but I couldn’t afford to reject the offer. If he managed to get me free, he could be as high-principled as he liked about it.
We lapsed into another silence after that, but it didn’t take long before faint sounds began intruding into my distraction. Automatically my mind reached for the source of the sounds, but once I had them I was sorry I’d tried. The three women, each in a separate cabin, were so hysterical over what was being done to them that I cringed away, unable to cope with even the fringes of their desperate hysteria. I didn’t know the details of what the l’lendaa were doing, and I didn’t want to know. I just rose quickly to my feet, passed a surprised Garth, and burried to one of the cabins on the far side of the common area. The locks had been removed from all of the doors, but I didn’t need a lock to keep the smell and hysteria out. I closed the door behind me, went over to the bed, then tried to get some rests