Gabriel pushed himself up on one elbow. “Then… if you can’t have children, why did you say healers can’t afford to have them? I thought you meant you didn’t have time. So if I—”
“We raise children!” Snake said. “We adopt them. But the first healers tried to bear them. Most of them couldn’t. A few could, but the infants were deformed, and they had no minds.”
Gabriel turned on his back and gazed at the ceiling. He sighed deeply. “Gods.”
“We learn fertility control very well,” Snake said.
Gabriel did not answer.
“You’re still worried.” Snake leaned on her elbow beside him, but she did not reach out to touch him yet.
He glanced at her with an ironic and humorless smile, his face strained with self-doubt. “I’m scared, I guess.”
“I know.”
“Have you ever been afraid? Really frightened?”
“Oh, yes,” Snake said.
She rested her hand on his belly, brushing her fingers across his smooth skin and the delicate dark-gold hairs. He was not visibly shaking but Snake could feel his deep, steady, frightened trembling.
“Lie still,” she said. “Don’t move until I tell you.” She began stroking his belly and thighs, his hips and the sides of his buttocks, ending each stroke closer to his genitals but not actually touching them.
“What are you doing?”
“Sh-h. Lie still.” She kept stroking him; and she talked to him, letting her voice slip into a hypnotic, soothing monotone. She could feel him fighting not to move as she teased him: he fought himself, and the trembling stopped without his noticing.
“Snake!”
“What?” she asked innocently. “Is something wrong?”
“I can’t—”
“Sh-h.”
He groaned. This time he was not shaking with fear. Snake smiled, eased herself down beside him, and drew him around to face her.
“Now you can move,” she said.
For whatever reason — because of her teasing, or because Snake had made herself as vulnerable to him as he was to her, and he could trust her, or more probably simply because he was young and healthy and eighteen and at the end of three years’ guilty self-deprivation, he was all right after that.
Snake felt like an observer, not a salacious eavesdropper but an imperturbable watcher, almost disinterested. And that was strange. Gabriel was innately gentle, and Snake drew him on to abandonment as well. Though her own climax was satisfying, a welcome release of emotional tensions that had been building as long as she had been alone, she was concerned mostly for Gabriel. Though she returned his passion eagerly, she could not keep from wondering how sex would be with Arevin.
Snake and Gabriel lay close together, both sweaty and breathing heavily, their arms around each other. For Snake, the companionship was as important as the sex itself. More important, for sexual tensions were easily enough dealt with. Aloneness, and loneliness, were something else altogether. She leaned over Gabriel and kissed his throat and the edge of his jaw.
“Thank you,” he whispered. Snake could feel the vibration of his words against her lips.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “But I didn’t ask you for selfless reasons.”
He lay silent for a while, his fingers spread along the curve of her waist. Snake patted his hand. He was a sweet boy. She knew the thought was condescending, but she could not help it, nor could she help wishing, with the detached observer part of herself, that Arevin was with her instead. She wanted someone she could share with, not someone who would be grateful to her.
Gabriel suddenly held her tight and hid his face against her shoulder. She stroked the short curls at the back of his neck.
“What am I going to do?” His voice was muffled, his breath warm on her skin. “Where will I go?”
Snake held him and rocked him. Suddenly she wondered if it might have been kinder to let him leave her when he had offered to send someone else, to allow him to continue his life of abstinence unbroken. Yet she could not believe he was really one of the unfocused pitiful human beings who could never learn any biocontrol at all.
“Gabriel, what kind of training did you have? When they tested you, how long could you hold the temperature differential? Didn’t they give you a token?”
“What kind of token?”
“A little disc with a chemical inside that changes color with temperature. Most of the ones I’ve seen turn red when a man raises his genital temperature high enough.” She grinned, remembering an acquaintance who was rather vain about the intensity of his disc’s color, and had to be talked into removing it when he went to bed.
But Gabriel was frowning at her. “High enough?”
“Yes, of course, high enough. Isn’t that how you do it?”
His fair eyebrows drew together, distress and surprise mixing in his expression. “Our teacher instructs us on keeping the temperature low.”
The memory of her vain friend and any number of bawdy jokes came together in Snake’s mind. She wanted to laugh out loud. Somehow she managed to reply to Gabriel with a perfectly straight face.
“Gabriel, dear friend, how old was your teacher? A hundred?”
“Yes,” Gabriel said. “At least. A very wise old man. He still is.”
“Wise, I’m sure, but out of touch,” Snake said. “Out of date by eighty years. Lowering the temperature of your scrotum will make you infertile. But raising the temperature is much more effective. And it’s supposed to be a good deal easier to learn.”
“But he said I could never control myself properly—”
Snake frowned but did not say what she thought: that no teacher should ever say that to a student about anything. “Well, often one person doesn’t get along well with another and all that’s needed is a different teacher.”
“Do you think I could learn?”
“Yes.” She restrained another sharp comment about the wisdom and ability of Gabriel’s first teacher. It would be better if the young man realized the teacher’s faults himself. Clearly, he still felt too much admiration and respect; Snake did not want to push him into a defense of the old man, the person who perhaps had done most to hurt him,
Gabriel grasped Snake’s hand. “What do I do? Where do I go?” This time he spoke with hope and excitement.
“Anywhere the men’s teacher knows techniques less than a century old. Which direction are you going when you leave?”
“I… I haven’t decided.” He looked away.
“It’s hard to go,” Snake said. “I know it is. But it’s best. Spend some time exploring. Decide what will be good for you.”
“Find a new place,” Gabriel said sadly.
“You could go to Middlepath,” Snake said. “The best teachers I’ve heard of live there. And then when you’ve finished you can come back. There’ll be no reason not to.”
“I think there will. I think I’ll never be able to come home again, because even if I do learn what I need, people here will always wonder about me. The rumors will still be there.“ He shrugged. ”But I have to go anyway. I promised. I’ll go to Middlepath.“
“Good.” Snake reached back and turned down the lamp to a tiny spark. “The new technique has other benefits, I’m told.”
“What do you mean?”
She touched him. “It requires you to increase the circulation in the genital area. That’s supposed to increase endurance. And sensitivity.”
“I wonder if I have any endurance now?”
Snake began to answer him seriously, then realized Gabriel had made his first, tentative, joke about sex.
“Let’s see,” she said.
A hurried knock on the door woke Snake well before dawn. The room was gray and ghostly, highlighted in shades of pink and orange from the lamp’s low flame. Gabriel slept soundly, smiling faintly, his long blond eyelashes gently brushing his cheeks. He had pushed away the bedclothes and his long beautiful body lay uncovered to mid-thigh. Snake turned reluctantly toward the door.
“Come in.”
A stunningly lovely young servant entered hesitantly, and light from the corridor spilled over the bed.
“Healer, the mayor—” She gasped and stood staring at Gabriel, the blood on her hands forgotten. “The mayor…”
“I’ll be right there.” Snake got up, slipped into her new pants and the stiff new shirt, and followed the young woman to the mayor’s suite.
Blood from the opened wound soaked the bedding, but Brian had done the proper emergency things: the bleeding had nearly stopped. The mayor was ghastly pale, and his hands trembled.
“If you didn’t look so sick,” Snake said, “I’d give you the tongue-lashing you deserve.” She busied herself with the bandages. “You’re blessed with a superb nurse,” she said when Brian returned with fresh sheets and was easily within hearing. “I hope you pay him what he’s worth.”
“I thought…”
“Think all you like,” Snake said. “An admirable occupation. But don’t try to stand up again.”
“All right,” he muttered, and Snake took it as a promise.
She decided she did not need to help change the sheets. When it was necessary, or when it was for people she liked, she did not mind giving menial services. But sometimes she could be inordinately prideful. She knew she had been unforgivably short with the mayor, but she could not help it.
The young servant was taller than Snake, easily stronger than Brian; Snake expected she could handle her share of lifting the mayor and most of Brian’s as well. But she watched with a distressed expression as Snake left the room to go back to bed and padded barefoot down the hallway.
