“I think you’d better keep them penned or tied,” Stavia told Septemius. “If you pass flocks, likely they’d try to join the sheep. I want them well away from here before their owners come looking for them.”
Septemius gave her another worried look. “I told you about those people who live south of here, Stavia.”
“I remember. Don’t worry. You sound like Joshua.”
When morning came, she was gone. Septemius spent half a day with a helper from the camp building a cage for the new dogs, another half day getting a few stores together, one night safe behind walls, and then they started back the way they had come.
“I don’t like her being out there,” he said for the dozenth time, to no one in particular.
“I know,” replied Kostia. “And when we deliver the message and animals to Morgot, we ought to tell her so.”
REHEARSAL:
(Achilles approaches the group of women purposefully)
ACHILLES This then is Polyxena.
POLYXENA (Yawning) Yes, I’m Polyxena.
ACHILLES My slave, Polyxena.
POLYXENA NO one’s slave, Polyxena.
(Achilles attempts to grab her and finds he cannot hold her)
ACHILLES She sifted through my arms, like rays of sun,
like moonlit smoke, like mist, like….
IPHIGENIA Like a ghost.
ACHILLES Like a ghost. Yes.
POLYXENA (Pleased) Somehow I was not surprised.
ACHILLES HOW can I force obedience on this? In other times I’ve used the fear of death to make a woman bow herself to me. If not the fear of her own death, then fear for someone else, a husband or a child. How can I bend this woman to my will?!
POLYXENA I think I will not bend.
IPHIGENIA YOU see, it’s as we’ve tried to tell you, Great Achilles. Women are no good to you dead.
AFTER LEAVING SEPTEMIUS, CHERNON HIKED OUT of the flatlands onto a moderate height, camped on it, spent a virtually sleepless night, and then lit a smoky fire at dawn. Stavia rose early, watched for the smoke, and was already out the northern gate of the sheep camp by the time Chernon buried the fire, which he did very shortly after lighting it. All was precisely according to plan. She traveled toward him in a mood of fatalistic expectancy, not precisely joyous, but with more contentment in her than she had felt in some time, her feeling of guilt toward him eased.
It took her several hours to reach him. Though he kept himself well concealed in forest as she had instructed, he watched for her from the high edge of a ridge, growing more impatient and heated with each passing moment. When she arrived he had no words to greet her with. Imaginings had kept him awake for most of the night; his restless body had done the rest. He took hold of her as she approached the camp, pulling her away from the donkey, dragging her toward his spread blankets, covering her mouth with his own so that she had no time to speak. He gave her no time, no word, nothing but a frenzied and almost forcible ravishment which, while it did not totally surprise her, left her, when he rolled away, completely unfulfilled and trembling in a state of pain and half-aroused anger. He was tangled into his blankets, eyes closed, breathing like surf in deep, liquid heavings. If it had not been precisely rape, it had been close to it.
She drew her clothes together and rose, crouching away from him, as she might have done from some normally tame animal which had turned dangerous. He sank deeper into sleep, and she retreated farther into the woods where her pack animal waited patiently, reins dragging on the ground. She lifted the pack off, pegged the animal to a line, searched until she found a trickle of water down a nearby wooded gully, then stripped and washed herself, pouring the water over herself again and again from cupped hands, all very quietly, trying to keep from screaming or striking out or going back where he lay and killing him. There was blood on her thighs, but she had more or less expected that. She had received more hurt than pleasure from the encounter, but she knew that was not unusual. She had started women’s studies at ten; she had had classes in physiology and sexual skills; at her age she was far older than almost all of her acquaintances in gaining her first actual experience, but she was no less prepared than they had been. Chernon had simply given her no time or opportunity to do or be anything except a receptacle for his hasty passion. She was not terrified or greatly hurt, but she was angry.
He had said nothing! Nothing loving, nothing sentimental. He had done no wooing. He had taken her as though she had been one of the Gypsies….
“You could have stopped him,” the actor Stavia remarked from some dim and cavernous mental recess. “You could have laid him out, Stavia.”
“It wasn’t stopping him that mattered. I wanted something else from him, not something else from me.” That wasn’t the real reason. It wasn’t. She tried again. “I was so surprised, I couldn’t figure out what to do, and then it was all over.” And still again. “This wasn’t what I thought
