"I need something a little more binding from you, Rokhlenu," Wuinlendhono said in a low voice. She was a head shorter than Rokhlenu, but somehow her stern round face was very near his face. She smelled a little like the ginger root that grew on the sacred slopes of the necropolis east of the Stone Tree. "Things were tough enough for me," she continued, "before you and your happy band of jugglers showed up last night-"
"We're not jugglers!"
"Keep your voice down. That was a lighthearted, insincere compliment. I wish your boys had any skill as useful as juggling. Listen to me. I mean, listen to nie. You say your boys will back you. If you want to stay here, I need you to back me. Either you are with me or you're against me."
"I don't know anything about you."
"Yes, you do. I'm the person who decides whether you stay here or you go."
"Are you?"
"I am. Half your people are still asleep; many are wounded. It would be a lot of trouble to drive you off or kill you, but we could do it. It'd make me very popular with some of my pack-mates, too. Listen, I'm not talking about indentured service. But if you're going to stay here, I need to know you're not going to get in my way. You can go any time you want. No shackles on anyone."
Rokhlenu thought about it. He looked at her: dark-haired, pale-skinned, round-headed, intent: a cool shadow in the freakishly warm winter sunlight. Not a stupid female. But still a female. He couldn't afford to bow his head to a female; no male would look up to him again.
She read his hesitation perfectly. "How about this?" she said. "My mate is dead. We'll say you're courting me. That way if you, urrr, defer to my judgment, it will seem like politeness, not submission."
"I guess. As long as I don't have to `defer' too often."
"Well, well, well. What a romance this is. The poet sings from the heat in his blood."
"If it's just a ruse-"
"Of course it is," Wuinlendhono said, in a silky contralto murmur as dark as her hair and as warm as fresh blood, "you stupid brach's bastard, do you think I have no one better to turn to than a filthy naked bloodstained refugee from a prison house?"
"Do you?" he replied frostily.
Her fierce little face unbent in a gentle smile. "You're quite right, new friend Rokhlenu," she said, in a voice meant to be heard by those standing nearby. "We must get you some pants, at least." Her eyes flickered downward and she walked away.
Rokhlenu followed her glance down and saw with dismay that he was sporting an advanced erection.
He willed it down by thinking of dead puppies and weeping grandmothers and anything, anything except the warm sensual poison of her voice in his ear. It took a while.
Eventually, he looked up and saw One-Eye standing nearby, but not too nearby. He was not grinning, but his fur-covered face was a little too obviously not grinning.
Rokhlenu called him over. He almost called him One-Eye, but stopped himself at the last minute. No doubt the semiwolf disliked being reminded of his disability, and Rokhlenu particularly wanted to avoid offending him. "Hey," he said finally. "It was busy last night, and I didn't catch your name."
"Olleiulu," said the one-eyed werewolf. Olleiulu meant One-Eye. Rokhlenu repressed an irritated growl.
"All right, Olleiulu," Rokhlenu said. "I need someone to watch my back, and we both know that's you. Am I wrong?"
"You're not wrong," Olleiulu agreed. "But I don't know how long I'm going to stay here. Just thought it's fair to tell you."
"Fair is fair. Just let me know when you're going to leave, if you leave."
"Fair is fair," Olleiulu echoed, and they each gripped the other's shoulder to seal the conditional allegiance.
"I need some clothes if I'm going to talk to that female again," Rokhlenu continued briskly, "and I don't want to get them from her. If there's a market or a rag shop around here, we should be able to trade some of our gear for a kilt or a loincloth or something."
"Breeches for males in the outliers," Olleiulu said. "Anything else makes them look at you funny. I'll get a shirt and some footgear, too, even if it is furnace-hot for winter."
"And it is. Thanks."
"Anything else?"
"Pick a sidekick, someone else to watch your back when you're watching mine."
"Done. It's old Lekkativengu, there." Lekkativengu meant Claufinger, and Olleiulu indicated a werewolf, largely human in appearance, but with wolvish claws on his hands and bare feet. His feet were somewhat pawlike, too. Rokhlenu didn't remember him from the prison escape, but it had been pretty chaotic. "We've sounded out most of the fifth- and fourth-floor gang, and they're with you, as long as you don't cross Khretvarrgliu. The rest are rats who'll go wherever they smell the most cheese."
Khretvarrgliu: that was what they were calling Morlock last night. Rokhlenu thought Morlock might not care for the nickname, but that wasn't the most urgent issue.
"You've done politics before?" Rokhlenu asked.
"I ran an extortion gang in Dogtown," Olleiulu said. "I guess it's pretty similar."
Rokhlenu was washed, breeched, shirted, and booted before he had to face Wuinlendhono again. In spite of the heat of the day, he found this a great relief. Hesitantly, he offered her his left arm; she smiled and intertwined herself with him.
"You can play the part, I see," she said, her contralto voice cooler than the warm winter breeze. "Let's walk. I'll show you the lairs, and something less pleasant."
Rokhlenu's heart was trying to hammer its way out of his chest. It took him several steps to gather enough breath to say, "It's not a part. I'm willing to mate with you."
"Ulugarriu's left testicle," was Wuinlendhono's amused response. "You've been in prison, Rokhlenu. Right now you're willing to mate with anything that doesn't get away fast enough."
"I'm serious."
"I don't want to argue about that. I just want to make something clear. If you're talking about mating with me, we're not talking about a quick screw. I only mate for life. You're too twisted up to think about that right now, but I'm not. You're no good to me like this. So go find someone and discreetly express the depths of your poetic soul-by the bucketful if necessary. We're short on females in the outliers, but there are working girls (and for that matter working boys) who come out from Apetown and Dogtown. You can find them in the day-lairs by the marketplace; your fellow Olleiulu will show you. Until your mind is clear, I'm not making any deal."
Rokhlenu snarled. "Aren't you at least going to say how touched and honored you are by my proposal?"
Wuinlendhono laughed sympathetically. She patted his left hand with her own. "Sorry, new friend, if I seem a little cold. I'm not a puppy, you know, anxiously awaiting her first heat. If we mate, you'll be my fifth."
"Oh? I thought you didn't go in for casual mating."
"I don't. They're all dead. My fourth, who was First Wolf of this hellhole, was killed by a gang of Dogtown robbers. My third caught some sort of lingering illness and ate silver rather than let it finish him. My second was out hunting one day when he ran into a werebear and they killed each other."
They walked on for a while in silence. When it became clear that she had finished he said, "And your first?"
"It was an arranged marriage," Wuinlendhono said. "My guardian outwed me to an old ghost-sniffer in the Goweiteiuun pack. I hated him, so I killed him. That's why I'm here, which was probably your next question."
"No," Rokhlenu said, thinking how much like prison this all was in some ways. "But thanks for telling me."
The lairs of the outlier pack were built on the swamps below Wuruyaaria's south wall. For streets they had boarded ways; the lairs were rickety towers built on stilts driven into the sandy mud of the swamp. The whole place looked like a strong wind could knock it down.
The people were a little tougher looking. They moved fast; they talked or sang fast. He didn't see too many stupid faces, and no sentimental ones. Even the stupid faces wore a hard, cheerful determination. If the wind came and the lairs fell, these people would rebuild-or sell the wreckage to a passing mark.