In the middle of the first room they entered stood a girl Tomos knew he had never before seen, and he knew that he would have remembered this one had he seen her before, for her beauty was striking—long, long blond tresses from which the sunbeams picked out hints of red, a face as freckled as his own, but heart-shaped, holding almond-shaped blue-green eyes, a narrow nose and the reddest lips he had ever seen. She was clearly nervous, and the tip of a red-pink tongue darted out a couple of times to wet those lips. Her clothing, though obviously in the barbarian mode, was elegant and richly embroidered, and the jewelry, if it was real, looked to be worth a good part of the ransom expected of a Vahrohneeskos, anyway.
When the three men entered the room, the girl hesitated momentarily, then, with downcast eyes, she made her way to the trio and sank to her knees before Tomos. As she raised her head and looked into his dark-blue eyes with her own—which, he noted, were swimming in unshed tears, which fact he found most unsettling for reasons he could not explain to himself—she also lifted her two hands, revealing that her wrists were encircled by brass cuffs connected by a length of gilded-brass chain.
Wetting her lips yet again, she parted them and spoke haltingly in an obscure dialect of Mehreekan, one he had never heard before, but close enough to that of his mountain-born mother’s to be understandable to him.
“Wilt not my master remove these fetters and free his handmaiden? She comes to thee a pure maiden; wilt my master not deign to render her a woman?” Her voice was soft and a little throaty; the words were a bit slurred, in the manner of the indigenous barbarians of the western mountains.
The wristbands, he saw, were fitted with catches, and the girl could have easily unsnapped and removed them herself, so he decided that this must be some variety of barbarian ritual, of which they seemed to have more than did the Ehleenohee.
With a smile and a shrug, he unfastened the bands and then glanced at Sitheeros. “Well? What’s the proper form now, my lord?”
The thoheeks grinned. “Take both her hands in both of yours, raise her to her feet, then bend and kiss her lips. Difficult, what?”
Tomos did as instructed, then started back from the girl, for it had felt when his lips touched upon hers as if some force of power had passed from her being to his. Had these jokers brought down from those mountains some ditch-witch to play tricks, then?
Before she could speak, however, Sitheeros had embraced him and was slapping his back and kissing his cheeks. “My heartiest and most sincere congratulations and felicitations, my old friend. You now are, by barbarian rites, wed to the daughter of one of the most powerful chiefs among all of the barbarian tribes, Chief Ritchud Bohldjoh, of the Tchatnooga Tribe. May you both live long and have many children.”
Gil Djohnz had taken and gripped his hand firmly and said soberly, “We felt you needed a woman to care for your needs here, my friend. It is not good for a man to live for too long alone, you know.” He grinned and chuckled. “It is said to lead to such afflictions as a permanently stiff . . . ahh, neck.”
Thoheeks Sitheeros had slapped him again on the back and crowed, “Now it is time to commence the drinking that must always precede the wedding feast. Come, take the hand of your bride and come. You must not allow your loving guests to perish of thirst, man.”
While Tomos was carefully watering the wine—he recalled how very intoxicated he had gotten at his last wedding feast, so befuddled that it had been impossible to consummate the marriage properly for three days, and although he still was at least half convinced that this all was an elaborate joke of some nature or description, he intended to take no chances—the burly thoheeks was worrying the stopper from out the neck of a huge stone jug. At length, the obstruction popped free, and, hooking a thumb through the ring handle and resting the heavy container on his arm, the thoheeks splashed a generous dollop of a clear, slightly yellowish liquid into each of three small winecups, filling the room with a strong, sharp odor.
Having looked over his shoulder at just what his guests were up to, Tomos wrinkled his nose at the stink and commented, “If that’s a jug of fermented fish sauce, I think the stuff has spoiled; smells that way to me.”
When the wine was diluted to his satisfaction, Tomos took his seat and left the dispensing of it to the servants. It was then that Gil Djohnz shoved a cup of the liquid from the stone jug before him. “It’s a wedding gift from Chief Ritchud’s private hwiskee stock, Tomos—it’s something he calls ‘danyuhlz,’ though it tastes just like any other corn hwiskee to me. The chief swears that it’s a special kind of hwiskee distilled carefully to a recipe and methods that are an ancient and an exclusive secret passed down for hundreds of years amongst the Tenzsee Tribes.”
Holding his breath against the rotten stench of the stuff, Tomos took a tentative swallow of it. After he could once more breathe and, with eyes still streaming from his strangled coughing, was wondering if the buffets of Sitheeros’ big, hard hands had really sundered his backbone and shattered his ribs or if they just felt that way, he was able to gasp, “Off the decomposing hides of what dead animals do they scrape the fungi out of which they make that?”
After a while, when Tomos was feeling more his usual self and when his two guests had ceased to laugh at his discomfiture, he inquired, “All right, now, how much of this is real and how much just one of your elaborate, infamous practical jokes, my lord Sitheeros? Am I really married to that child? Or is she just some new slave girl you two bought and coached and dolled up to cozen me? I’ll have a straight answer, and it please you, my lord. To akath’ahrohs, such as yourself, barbarian rites and customs may seem droll, but to me, whose mother was a barbarian princess, they are far less so.”
Gil answered first, saying solemnly, “Tomos, me ’n Sitheeros, we rode clear up to Chief Ritchud’s hold at a place called Kleevluhnd, smack dab in the middle of the ruins of a big city of the old times. We went up for a different reason, of course; Sitheeros owed the old chief a visit and he thought I might like to go along and see the place and the people, and it was an education, I can say that much. We wagoned up a couple pipes of wine and some other things Sitheeros knew his old pal fancied, and we both were treated top-notch by all Chief Ritchud’s folk.
“Then one night, after a feast, when we all of us were drinking and talking in the hall of Chief Ritchud’s hold, the old chief had little Brandee brought out and asked Sitheeros couldn’t he find some rich Ehleen husband for her. I think he expected old Sitheeros to take and marry her himself, is what I figure he had in mind, and”—he glanced over slyly at the thoheeks to ascertain if his barb sank home—“the way old Sitheeros was panting and drooling and all, his tongue just hanging down into his cup and his eyes fit to burst clear out of his head and all, I was just then of the mind that he might, then and there.”
Sitheeros stared, unwinking, at the captain of elephants, and remarked in a soft voice, “There are definite ways to deal with your kind of prevaricator, Captain Djohnz . . . and I am a past master at the most of them, and those that I misremember my torturer-executioner, Master Peeos, does recall. Remember this gentle warning in future, captain; it will be to your best interests to so do.” Then, unable to longer hold his very convincing pretense of cold rage, the thoheeks burst into laughter and threw the contents of his cup of watered wine at his friend become tease, and took up the recountal himself .
“Oh, Tomos, I admit, I freely, even joyfully admit, to the fact that that child’s very, very female shape and bearing and appearance moved me . . . well, moved certain parts of me; she is assuredly toothsome. But I then was forced to recall that I have a wife, that the Ehleen Church and customs allow but one legal wife at the time, that my old friend, Chief Ritchud Bohldjoh, wanted honorable marriage for his child and would certainly look askance at mere concubinage of her, and that he could field thousands of mountain warriors did he choose to so do; therefore I drew tight rein on my admittedly libidinous impulses, which, God be praised, I am not as yet too aged to feel to their fullest extent on occasion.