Someone was supposed to be riding with them today. A guest? Someone not a member of this Hunt.
Sylvan. Here he was. Beside her, turning in the saddle to look adoringly at her. She felt her face flame and drew herself up proudly.
Some of the riders had fallen back. They had been at it all the morning, and it was noon now, with the sun overhead and hot on her hat. The fox had taken refuge in Brent’s Wood, and the Huntsman and whippers-in were among the trees. The Master, too, which was strange. Standing on his horse like some circus acrobat, standing and throwing things.
And then… a surge of feeling. A jolt of pure pleasure that streaked up from her groin. An orgasm of sheer delight which seemed to go on and on and on.
Sylvan felt it, too. They all felt it. Every face showed it. Every body lashed with it, heads jerking, jaws lax.
Then at last the Huntsman was sounding the kill. There was the Huntsman with the fox’s mask, and the horses turning for home. Now the sun was behind her. A long ride home. Even if they went the short way, along Magna Spinney and onto the gravel road past the Old Farm, it was still a long way home.
She was desperately tired when they returned. Her father came over to her and took her arm, roughly, too roughly, and they walked through the gate with the others.
“What in God’s name were you doing here?” he demanded, his mouth almost at her ear. “Stella, you little fool!”
She gaped at him. “Riding,” she said, wondering why he asked. “Why, Daddy, I was riding.”
She followed her father’s gaze, up to the terrace. Mother stood there, a glass in her hand, very pale, very beautiful. Sylvan was beside her. He had his arm around Marjorie, pointing down at them. How could he be there, not even in Hunt dress, when he had been riding just moments ago?
Stella felt her face growing red. Sylvan hadn’t really been on the Hunt. He couldn’t have been. Her father walked away from her, up the flight of shallow stairs. Mother was clutching the balustrade with both hands, tightly, her knuckles white. Sylvan was holding her up, snapping his fingers at a nearby servant. Then Father was there, shouldering him aside.
“Marjorie!”
His wife looked blindly at him, as though she did not know who he was. “Stella,” she said, pointing. “Her face…”
Rigo turned to look back at his daughter where she stood at the foot of the stairs, turned just too late to see what Marjorie had seen, the same chill, senseless gaze that the Goosegirl had worn when she had appeared among them at Opal Hill.
As for Stella, she tottered upon her feet, trembling between fury and shock with the realization that Sylvan hadn’t really been there to see her riding and that she could remember almost nothing about the day at all. She remembered horses and hounds and a fox, but they were real horses, real dogs from some other time, years ago. She remembered that jet of feeling which had filled her and the memory made her flush, but she did not know why she had felt it. Staring up at Sylvan’s concerned face, at her father’s furious one, at her mother’s anxious one, she had the fleeting realization that there were things happening all around her, hideous, important things, and that she had not paid attention to what was going on.
12
Shoethai, assistant in the Office of Acceptable Doctrine, sat in the dining room of the port facility waiting for a ship to unload. Elder Brother Noazee Fuasoi had explained that the ship carried a very important cargo, and he had sent Shoethai to receive it.
Shoethai’s automatic response had been unvoiced. “Why me?” Even now he studiously avoided looking at himself in the window, where his reflected image was superimposed over the ship in question like a hovering and misshapen ghost. The face was sufficiently grotesque to have made several staff people at the port pretend they hadn’t seen him, including two of the waiters in this dining room.
Shoethai was so accustomed to his appearance and to the way people reacted to it that he no longer showed his hurt and outrage, though the emotions seethed below the surface, more malevolently violent with every passing day. Elder Fuasoi could have sent someone else. Yavi, or Fumo. Either of them. They didn’t look like much but they didn’t look like monsters, either. The question was eternal. “Why me?”
Back in Sanctity, very occasionally some well-meaning idiot had tried to comfort Shoethai by saying something like, “Still, you’re glad to be alive, aren’t you? You’d rather be alive than dead, wouldn’t you?” Which just went to show how stupid and unfeeling they were, mouthing cliches at him that way. No, he would not rather be alive. Yes, he would rather be dead, except he was afraid of dying. Best yet would be if he’d never lived at all, if they’d let his father kill him when he tried to. Father, at least, had cared about him and wanted what was best for him. What was best was never to have been born or, if that wasn’t possible, never to have lived past a few weeks when he was still too little to know anything. What would have been absolute best was never to have looked at this face, conscious that it was his own.
Still, the Elder Brother hadn’t sent Fumo or Yavi. The Elder Brother had sent Shoethai, and that meant something. It meant that Fumo or Yavi weren’t supposed to know about this shipment. If Fumo and Yavi weren’t supposed to know, then Elder Brother Jhamlees Zoe didn’t know, and Sanctity didn’t know either. And that meant it was something that only Shoethai and Fuasoi knew about, only those two.
“Do you know what Moldies are?” the Elder Brother had asked him one day, out of nothing, while Shoethai was cleaning the Elder Brother’s office.
“It’s martyrs of something,” Shoethai had said.
“Martyrs of the Last Days,” the Elder Brother had said. “A group of men who are dedicated to hastening the end. Have you ever read the
Shoethai merely stood there, mouth open, shaking his head. Of course he hadn’t read any Moldy books. You could get yourself terminated by Sanctity for reading Moldy books.
The Elder Brother had read his mind. “I know. It’s among the forbidden volumes. Still, I think you’d be interested in reading it, Shoethai. I’ll grant a dispensation for you. Take the book with you when you leave, but don’t let anyone else see it. Particularly, don’t let Jhamlees Zoe see it.”
It wasn’t even a reader. It was an old-style book, with pages. Elder Fuasoi laid it out on the desk and just left it there, an old brown thing with the words
“Garbed in light, we will dwell in the house of light,” he recited to himself now as he sucked his tea through the gaps in his teeth. After the end of mankind would come the New Creation. In the New Creation he would no longer wear this face and this body. In the New Creation he would no longer be deformed. He would dart like a spear, clothed only in radiance, beautiful as an angel. Elder Fuasoi had taken particular notice of this, reading the proper section from the book and pointing to the illustrations, but Shoethai had believed it from the moment he read it for himself. It was as though it had been written just for him. Fair was fair. If people didn’t have a fair try in this life, they would in the next one.
“Let the changes come,” he whispered, inhaling another sip of tea. “Let the New Creation manifest itself.” The manager of the dining room had brought the tea after a furious whispering match with his two waiters. Shoethai prayed silently that the waiters would be among the first to be cleansed away, most painfully. Of course it would be painful. Elder Fuasoi had already told him that. Elder Fuasoi had seen the plague. Elder Fuasoi had actually spent almost a year in a plague camp. Elder Fuasoi was a Moldy. He said nobody could see the plague and be anything else.
Once Elder Fuasoi confessed that he was actually a Moldy, Shoethai had become a willing and dedicated convert even though they were the only Moldies on Grass and Jhamlees Zoe would have them both killed if he found out. Doing what the Moldies needed doing didn’t need more than two. Two, Elder Fuasoi had told him, would be more than enough.
