twenty people circulated in the relaxed atmosphere of this quiet party given by Golda, the flame-haired beauty with the bold eyes and the lush figure, a woman with whom I had spent a number of pleasant evenings. She greeted me bearing a book, a thick tome of many pages and thin paper, and she smiled tilting her cheek for me to kiss that smooth rosy skin.
“You’ll love this one, Dray. It was published in Marlimor, a reasonably civilized city some long way off in another of the seven continents and nine islands, and its legends are really most beautiful.”
“Thank you, Golda. You are very kind.”
She laughed, holding out the book. Her gown of some silvery lame glistened. I wore my usual simple white shirt and trousers and was barefoot. My hair had been, as I had promised myself aboard the leaf boat, cut to a neat shoulder length and, in honor of Golda’s party, I wore a jeweled fillet in my hair, one of the many presents I had received from friends in the city, among the trophies I had won.
“You were telling me about Gah,” said Maspero, walking up with a wine goblet for me. He drank from his own.
Again Golda laughed; but this time a different note crept into her deep voice. “Gah is really an offense in men’s nostrils, Maspero, my dear. They delight so in their primitiveness.”
Gah was one of the seven continents of Kregen, one where slavery was an established institution, where, so the men claimed, a woman’s highest ambition was to be chained up and grovel at a man’s feet, to be stripped, to be loaded with symbols of servitude. They even had iron bars at the foot of their beds where a woman might be shackled, naked, to shiver all night. The men claimed this made the girls love them.
“That sort of behavior appeals to some men,” said Maspero. He was looking at me as he spoke.
“It’s really sick,” said Golda.
“They claim it is a deep significant truth, this need of a woman to be subjugated by a man, and dates right back to our primitive past when we were cavemen.”
I said: “But we no longer tear flesh from our kill and eat it smoking and raw. We no longer believe that the wind brings babies. Thunder and lightning and storm and flood are no longer mysterious gods with malevolent designs on us. Individuals are individuals. The human spirit festers and grows cankerous and corrupt if one individual enslaves another, whatever the sex, whatever specious arguments about sexuality may be instanced.”
Golda nodded. Maspero said: “You are right, Dray, where a civilized people is concerned. But, in Gah, the women subscribe also to this barbaric code.”
“More fools them,” said Golda. And then, quickly: “No-that is not what I really mean. A man and a woman are alike yet different. So very many men are frightened clean through at the thought of a woman. They overreact. They have no conception in Gah of how a woman is-what she is as a person.”
Maspero chuckled. “I’ve always said that women were people as well.”
We talked on, about the latest fashions that had, in some mysterious way, reached Aphrasoe from the outside world. The city contained a pitifully few people to lead a planet. Everyone was needed. Maspero, later on, told me that he was now beginning to feel that I would be really the right fiber-as he put it-one of the privileged few who could shoulder the responsibilities of the Savanti. It would be hard, he said. “Don’t think the life will be easy; for you will be worked harder than you have ever worked in your life before-” He held up a hand. “Oh, I know of what you have told me of the conditions aboard your seventy-fours. But you will look back to those days and think them paradise compared with what you, as a Savanti, will have to undergo.”
“Aphrasoe is Paradise,” I said simply, meaning it.
Then Delia of Delphond hobbled across, her face as twisted as her leg at the effort of walking, her gasps loud and separate, a series of explosive blasts of pain.
I frowned.
Frowning was easy, habitual.
“And in Paradise,” I asked Maspero, “what of-?”
“I cannot talk about it, Dray, so please do not ask me.”
To have spoken at that moment to Delia would have been a mistake.
As the party was breaking up and the guests were calling
“Happy Swinging!” to one another and leaping out into space aboard their swingers, I found Delia and, without a word, put my hand beneath her armpit and so helped her along toward the landing platform where Maspero stood talking gaily with Golda. Delia, after a single angry wrench, allowed me to assist her. She did not speak and I guessed her contempt for her own condition, and her furious resentment of me chained her tongue.
“Delia and I,” I said to Maspero, “are engaged to take a boating trip downriver tomorrow. I notice my old leaf boat is still moored at your jetty.”
Golda laughed with her tinkly shiver of amusement. She looked with a very kindly eye on Delia. “Surely you don’t have to prove anything, Dray? If only Delia could be-” And then she caught Maspero’s eye and stopped and my heart warmed toward Golda. There was much I did not yet understand, not least what was the real mission of the Savanti with all their powers on a savage planet like Kregen.
I kissed Golda on the cheek and bowed quietly to Delia, who looked at me with an expression quite amazing, compounded of bafflement, annoyance, pique and-could that be amused affection? For me, plain Dray Prescot hot from the reeking battlesmoke swathing the bloody quarterdecks of my life on Earth?
That she might not meet me at the jetty was an outcome I was prepared to meet when it came. But she was there, dressed in a plain green tunic and short skirt, with silver slippers-one piteously twisted-on her feet and a reed bag in her hand filled with goodies like a flask of wine and fresh bread and palines.
“Lahal, Dray Prescot.”
“Lahal, Delia of the Blue Mountains.”
Maspero watched us cast off. I had provided a pair of oars and I pulled with that old familiar rhythm. “I thought you might care to see the vineyards this morning,” I said, loudly, for Maspero’s benefit. I headed downstream.
“Remberee!” called Maspero.
Delia turned to face him from the sternsheets and, together, we called back: “Remberee, Maspero!”
I suddenly shivered in the warm pink sunshine of Antares. We did not see the vineyards. I circled back along the extreme edge of the lake, and the green sun, which because of its own orbital movement around the red sun rose and set with an independent cycle, cast a deeper glow upon the waters. I entered the mouth of the River Zelph.
We had not spoken much. She had told me when I asked that her accident had resulted in a fall from an animal-she called it a zorca and I gathered it was a kind of horse-some two years ago. She had no explanation of how she had come to the City of Savanti. When I mentioned the three men, now dead, in the yellow robes, her brow furrowed in puzzlement. “My father,” she said,
“moved worlds to find a cure for me.”
Waiting until we were far enough up the river to be out of range of prying eyes I pulled in for the bank. Here we ate our lunch-and very good it was, to sit in my old leaf boat under the emerald and crimson suns of Antares with a girl who intrigued me and tugged at me and yet who regarded me as merely a warrior; to quaff rich ruby wine and to eat freshly-baked bread and nibble scented cheese and to chew on the ever-luscious palines. Upon the bank I threw off my white shirt and trousers and donned my hunting leathers that I had earlier concealed beneath a fold of blanket in the bottom of my craft. The soft leather encircled my waist and was drawn up through my legs and looped, the whole being held in position with a wide black leather belt, its gold buckle a trophy won in the arena. My leather baldric went over my shoulder so that the Savanti sword hung at my left side. On my left arm the strong leather straps were belted up. I had also brought with me a pair of leather Savanti hunting gloves, flexible yet strong, thonging to the wrist, and these I now drew on. The leather Savanti hunting boots would remain in my boat until we were forced to walk; I do not like wearing footwear aboard a boat, even though I had been forced to do so when walking the quarterdeck. The only item of equipment not belonging to a Savanti hunting accouterment was the dagger. Of course, it was of the city; but it was cold steel; it did not possess that miraculous power of stunning without killing. Many times had I saved my own life, and killed quickly, with a knife or dagger in my left hand-I understood that in the old days such a weapon was called a main gauche-in the melee of boarding or storming. It would serve me again now in what I purposed.
