A child of ten came up, bearing garlands, and a girl with skeleton ribs, and vermilion-painted cheekbones presented Kallatah with a beautiful shell bracelet mottled yellow and black, slipping it on her wrist before she could recoil in protest.
She was still protesting when we were ushered into the hut, Geipgos grinning and bowing and his son standing straight and still and with a smirk of anticipatory amorousness in the midst of the women.
“Geega Drun Fra Hul,” Geipgos said. That translated out as: “We will leave you now. Later we will rejoice together in the great joy which has overtaken you. Ah, that I could be as young as you are on such a night as this.”
The din outside continued for a moment and then gradually subsided.
We looked at each other.
Night was already descending over the clearing. It falls fast on Dracona—a blanket of impenetrable darkness settling down. Just by craning our necks we could look out into the clearing and see the last glimmer of dusk departing. A star appeared in the sky as if by magic, but we just sat there exchanging meaningful glances, Kallatah’s face shadowed and curiously withdrawn.
Suddenly she spoke. “You didn’t fool me for a minute.”
“Fool you?” I said slowly. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Oh, you understand, all right. You’re very clever—or think you are.”
“I wasn’t trying to be clever,” I told her. “It looked pretty bad for us. They would have killed us both if I hadn’t talked them out of it.”
“You could have told me!” she flung at me, her eyes abruptly accusing. “Why did you have to make a secret of it?”
“A secret of what?”
“You didn’t think I’d guess straight off? You didn’t give me credit for knowing even that much about the psychology of primitives?”
“You’re talking in riddles,” I protested. “You’re taking too much for granted.”
“Am I? The things you take for granted are beyond belief. I know exactly how your mind worked. You told yourself they were angry enough to kill impulsively. You had to give them the strongest possible reason for not wanting to kill us. Isn’t that so?”
“Well—”
“There’s a very old saying that has a universal application,” she said, a stinging contempt in her voice. “All the world loves a lover. I thought of it instantly myself.”
“You did? If I had known—”
“Keep quiet and let me finish. You told them that I was your woman. You probably added that the whole ridiculous insanity was recent enough to be celebrated right here in their own village. Naturally that did it. Whisper the words ‘nuptial ceremony’ to a primitive and you’ve transferred to him an inward glow that makes him your friend forever.
“If he’s old he remembers what it meant when it happened to him. If he’s young there’s the rapture of anticipation. Besides, primitives like display and drama, human giggling and embarrassment just as much as you do. You of Earth still throw rice, you know. We have passed beyond such foolishness, but there are times—”
She looked at me and giggled. It was the cruelest thing she could have done because, despite the giggle, there was a cold mockery in her stare that castigated my Earthborn heritage and made me feel ridiculous.
It was then that she really threw the book at me. “Instead of discussing the whole matter as an anthropological problem that could only have been solved by analyzing it in a calmly scientific and detached way you acted as if you thought me capable of making an embarrassing situation out of it.”
She stood up abruptly, removing the binding circlet from her hair, and shaking her head until the freed tresses descended in a tumbled red-gold mass to her shoulders.
“Prudishness is both barbaric and childish,” she said. “It has nothing to do with modesty and reserve, which are admirable when a man and a woman do not know one another well enough to feel at ease in an atmosphere of mutual respect and admiration.”
There was a heavy silence for an instant. Then very calmly and deliberately she took off her weather jacket, folded it, and laid it on the floor at her feet.
“It will do for a pillow,” she said. “I hate sleeping without a support for my head.”
I stared automatically at her bare shoulders, the way I might have stared if a blinding vision of paradise had appeared to me between sleeping and waking and vanished in a flash.
“What makes all this so amusing is the way it parallels a good many of the farcical situations in the ancient folk writings of Terra,” she said. “I’ve made a comparative study of them, and they really are precious.”
The precise set of her waistline seemed to annoy her, and she changed it perceptibly, loosening the binding straps until I caught the barest glimmer of white between them. She stared at me with patronizing pity, as if my startlement was tantamount to a further step downward into the murk of a prudishness so childish that it branded me as a barbarian without a single redeeming trait.
She stared through and beyond me, her eyes stabbing the shadows, her voice derisive in its composure, “For some reason a man has to pretend that a woman is his wife. There’s a wealthy relative to impress, or a primitive conveyance breaks down, and a thunderstorm compels the pair to take refuge in a wayside dwelling.
“There is only one sleeping compartment available and what do you suppose the man does? The sane scientific approach would be to behave like an intelligent human being. When a man and a woman are alone together excessive prudishness is ridiculous. Why with such a charming companion available should he not relax as I am doing—be completely natural and human and at his ease? Why should he not sit down and discuss art and philosophy, music and the dance the whole night through?
“But does he—in the ancient folk
