“A set, at least,” said Dellin.
“A set!” I cried. “I could walk there in that time.”
“Ah, but it will be infinitely more pleasurable to fly,” said he.
“I must get to Arlet,” I objected.
“You will,” he assured me as we made our way across the stone court to the egg-shaped, creamy metal hover. “But you must teach me of Silistra on the way.”
We climbed the ramp, and I ducked my head in the low entry. It was a very tiny space, filled with more hateful blinking gadgets and three contoured seats. I chose the back one, away from the window. I do not like to fly. One must give over too much of one’s destiny to the caprice of circuits and steel. The Beten pilot waved.
I was not pleased with Dellin. I knew he could have had me in Arlet before next sun’s rise. I leaned back on the seat and closed my eyes. I was hungry and irritable and tired. I felt guilty about sneaking off from Santh, but I knew he would have insisted on following, and one cannot be inconspicuous with a giant hulion at one’s heels. I had been lucky to get away without him. I heard the pilot bringing the engines to life. I was very tired. I was asleep before the hover gained the air.
I dreamed I was in a strange checkerboard land, where all of time-space were jammed together like some impossible collage. A piece of winter laid half atop a chunk of primal sea, which bubbled over an unseen edge into a volcano that vomited fire and ash onto a plain covered with waving grain, while hailstones fell bouncing into a triangle of rainforest that grew in the midst of desert dunes, and a great bronze figure stood laughing, towering over the scene, legs astraddle. He pointed at me with a finger, and I saw that that finger was adorned with my father’s ring. I fell down on my knees and cried in fear, but the giant only laughed and snapped his fingers. Instantly I was imprisoned in a block of transparent ice.
I awoke sweating, to find Dellin shaking my shoulder.
“You were moaning and crying. Are you all right?”
“Yes, now,” I said, knuckling the sleep from my eyes. My stomach churned, and my face and eyes stung from lack of sleep. “I had the strangest dream. About the ring.” I sat up, wide-awake. “I forgot to show M’len the ring! I am such a fool, it is a wonder I can feed myself.” I groaned.
“Easy, Estri.” He brushed my hair from my eyes. “We are going to set down for a meal. I thought you would prefer it to eating in the air.” He patted my arm and took his seat next to the Betenese pilot.
My head was spinning. How could I have forgotten? The landing was accomplished without incident, and I felt better as soon as I had solid ground beneath my feet.
Dalf, the pilot, carried out a basket filled with good Silistran fruit, cheese, honeyed binnirin bread, and the inevitable brin. Dellin made pleasant small talk with his pilot while I ate in silence. He seemed determined not to discuss the ring or my dream. So be it! After all, he and I had nothing together but mutual lust. I chided myself for expecting more from him. I examined the glade around us.
When there was nothing in the basket but crumbs, seeds, and cores, the diminutive Betenese disappeared into the hover. He returned with two large bladders of drink, and handing one to Dellin, retired with the other to the shade of a giant wisper tree.
“Let us explore,” said Dellin, shouldering the bladder and helping me up. I brushed the crumbs from my white s’kim and took his arm. My irritation was fading. A full belly and the warm sun of Silistra do wonders for the temper.
We walked far through brush and trees. The jitkaws flittered and the black harths cawed and the large-eyed, bush-tailed krits scurried in the high branches. It was a beautiful day. I pointed out flora and fauna to Dellin as we went, that he might see pictures for the words he had hypno-learned. We wandered past the glade into deeper forest of dappled light and moist cushioned sound; a sunken meadow.
I sat beneath a fan-leaved wisper tree, leaning my back against the cool velvet bark, motioning Dellin to join me. He squatted cross-legged and pulled the bladder from his shoulder. He uncorked it and tipped it to his lips, swallowed, and handed the skin to me.
“I have no name for this, but it is good,” said he, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.
“It is fermented name, from that round red fruit you ate last night,” I said when I tasted it. “It is called the same whether food or drink. The drink is always potent,” I explained.
“Tell me about your dream,” he suggested, moving to share the support of the tree trunk with me.
I did so. He listened, his arm around me, his nose in my hair.
“Let me see this ring,” said he thoughtfully when I had finished.
I reached down under my s’kim and took the tiny key from its hiding place and removed the chald from my body and held it out to him.
“I thought you said it did not come off,” said he, referring to the chald.
“They do not, as a rule.” I smiled. “I would not be without my chald, even in sleep.”
He held the ring close to his face, and the ends of the chald, looped through its band, dangled in his lap. He turned it, and turned it again. He peered long into the stone. Then he handed it back to me.
“It reminds me of something,” said he as I refastened the chald around my waist and replaced the tiny key in its housing and smoothed my white s’kim down around my thighs. “Something about it that I should connect. I cannot quite grab the thought. I have seen something that relates to it, somehow, and recently.”
“Think,” said I, staring at him.
He raised his free hand and dropped it in his lap. I waited. Finally he shook his head.
“I am sorry,” said he. “Perhaps later on. My mind is on other things.” He grinned broadly.
“Not now,” I snapped. I had an uncomfortable chill.
“Now,” said he, taking me by the hair. “Fight me,” he advised.
I did, until I felt myself fighting my own desire.
Then I lay on my back under the wisper tree and struggled futilely, deliriously, and with much art.
I was very close when I opened my eyes and saw them staring down at us. Dellin’s mouth was on mine, and he was deep in his pleasure. I tried to warn him, but it was too late.
Hands dragged us apart. Hands forced me to my belly on the leaves and bound my wrists to my ankles, right to right and left to left. There, under the tree, a number of them took their turns with me. I caught a glimpse of Dellin trussed and helpless, watching, while two of them held him. The two men that held Dellin wore no visible chalds.
They took much glee in my debasement.
I lost count of them, and my mind went elsewhere and I endured them until the last rolled away and pulled up his laced pants.
In that moment I gathered my wits about me and feigned unconsciousness. I raced through the mind-clearing ritual and called Santh with all the power I had. Then a hand was shaking me, and I did not get the hulion’s answer.
A filthy bearded face loomed before my eyes. The teeth in that face were yellow and broken, and the breath from that mouth was fetid. I tried to turn my head away, but he jerked me back.
“High lady, do I offend you?” he rasped.
I spit at him, hitting him square in the eye.
He jerked my head back by the hair until I thought my neck would snap. I cried out in pain.
“My Well will pay a ransom for me,” I gasped. He loosened his hold, and we eyed each other. Over his shoulder I could see Dellin, bloodied, down on his belly on the ground, naked. I groaned inwardly.
“No. We know who you are,” my tormentor informed me. “Yes, we do.” His eyes were filmy and glazed. “We know that man, Liaison to Arlet, and you, high-couch girl. And we know because a little fellow we met on the trail was kind enough to tell us before he died. Terrible accident, that. Boom! Right, Tark? Boom!”
A straw-haired, hulking youth nodded and turned toward us. He dragged his right leg. He knelt at my captor’s side and touched my dirt-smeared breast with a scabby finger.
“Pretty fi-ire,” he said slowly and deliberately. Then he giggled and hunkered back on his heels. “Pret-ty fi-ire, Morkel.”
I shuddered as I realized the extent of our difficulties. Poor Dalf. I counted the chaldless. I could see eleven ragged, filthy men. He would have had no chance.
“Your couch-mate does not please us,” Morkel, the torturer, said. “You tell him, lady, to do what we say, and we will not kill you. We will keep you, you will be happy to be alive. You tell him that Jorna and Trinard like boys like him. You tell him, lady, to do good by my friends Jorna and Trinard.” He caressed my cheek with a horny paw. He pushed his face against mine. “Or we will cut something off, something he would like to keep, and feed it to you.” He was consumed in laughter at that. He pushed himself away from me and rolled on the ground, kicking his legs in the air. “And feed it to her,” he screamed repeatedly, pointing.
The others took up the cry. They giggled and guffawed and danced around each other as the two I assumed to be Jorna and Trinard dragged Dellin to within an arm’s length of me. His arms and legs were still bound, and there was another thick hemp rope around his neck.
I searched the sky. I saw nothing. I turned pleading eyes to Dellin. He was struggling furiously, his face transformed with impotent rage. He looked upon me, unseeing.
Morkel jerked me to my knees and pushed me, his foot in the small of my back, toward Dellin. I fell forward, my face so close to his that I could see the blood and sweat mix on his skin. He was cut above the eye, and more blood ran from the right corner of his mouth. His eyes were wild.
“Please,” I whispered in M’ksakkan. “Do what they want. They will torture us if you do not. I called Santh.” I begged him. “We need just a little time. It is not the act, but the context in which it is viewed. It is not that terrible a thing.”
Dellin shook his head and spit blood. “No chance. They’ll kill me afterward anyway.” His voice was toneless. His eyes implored me to understand. I could not. A foot struck me in the kidneys, and I bit my lip.
“You better tell him good, lady,” someone said.
“Please, Khaf-Re, if not for yourself, then for me. I am sure Santh will come. If you lose your manhood here, and he rescues us, what good will your life be to you? Buy me the time, please,” I sobbed. I had never before used his given name.
I craned my head to see the sky. Still nothing.
I looked back at Dellin. The tears streamed down my face unchecked. His face swam before my eyes.
He stared at me and said nothing.
Morkel stepped between us and hunkered over Dellin.
“You ready to put on a show for us, star-man?” He giggled. The Liaison Second of Arlet did not respond.
Morkel picked me up roughly and set me on my knees between himself and the bloody, hulking Tark. The men had formed a circle around the prostrate Dellin and the two men Jorna and Trinard.
“You watch,” said Morkel to me, grasping me by the throat. When the two men forced Dellin’s mouth open, he kept his head, and hence his own imperiled sexual organs. He cried out once when they used him as if he were a woman. I sympathized with him.
When the show was over, the two men dragged him to his feet and pushed him, stumbling and naked, to my side, where they knotted the end of the rope that dangled from his neck around my throat and forced us both to lie down. My hands were rebound behind my back. Our feet were rope-wrapped, and they left us, facing each other, bound together.
They seemed almost to forget about us as they prepared a fire and cooked a meal of stolen stores from the hover.
Dellin did not speak to me. I watched the sky. I nudged him, but he turned his head away. I kissed him once on the shoulder, and he shivered, but that was all. The day passed slowly into dusk, and our tormentors, drunk and sated, snored under the peaceful wisper trees.
I must have dozed. When I awoke, it was pitch dark and the sliver of the moon was rising in the velvet night.
I heard a rustle near me, then a soft sound as of gnashing teeth. I raised my head. I could see nothing. I stared, straining into the dark. Gradually I could make out the edges of the shapes, dark against dark, of the men sleeping on the little rise above us.
I heard another rustle, farther away. I sniffed deeply. I thought I detected a musky smell, and then I saw him, silhouetted by the feeble moonlight between the trees. It was a hulion, surely the hulion. His head was high, and he was shaking something in his mouth. Back and forth he shook it, then, with a great toss of his mighty head, sent the thing flying into the midst of the sleeping men. I heard a grumble, a shout, and two figures rose up, their knives glinting.
The battle was short. Growls and snarls and shouts, and Santh threw one man so far that the sound of his landing was lost in the commotion. The other turned to run, screaming to his fellows for aid. But no one moved from the still-sleeping camp on the rise to assist him.
Santh followed his prey into the trees. I was so filled with pride and fear that I could hardly speak. I nudged Dellin, who still slept.
He did not wake. I nudged him again, harder. He tried to move his arms, and came alert when he realized where he was.
“Santh is here,” I whispered. I feared that somehow, some of our captors still lived.
“Where?” asked Dellin loudly, struggling to sit up.
“Move your feet here. Good.”
We could, by placing our mutually bound feet between us, sit facing each other.
“Hey,” Dellin shouted.
“Sssh,” I hissed.
“Why?” His tone was flat and cold. “If I am saved, I wish to know it. If not, I would know that also.”
None stirred in the camp.
“Could he have killed them all?” he asked wonderingly.
“Easily,” I gloated.
“Has he ever tasted man flesh before?”
“No, he has not.”
“Might he not, in his blood rage, kill us also?”
“Santh would never hurt me,” I assured him with more confidence than I felt. I had not thought of that.
Santh bounded out of the darkness and laid a large wet form at my feet. He snuffled his nose in my hair. I trembled.
“Good Santh,” I said in my most approving voice.