I said nothing. Never, never for an instant could I forget that--all
human, all woman as she seemed--Dallisa's race was worn and old when the
Terran Empire had not left their home star. The mind of Wolf, which has
mingled with the nonhuman since before the beginnings of recorded time,
is unfathomable to an outsider. I was better equipped than most Earthmen
to keep pace with its surface acts, but I could never pretend to
understand its deeper motivations.
It works on complex and irrational logic. Mischief is an integral part
of it. Even the deadly blood-feud with Rakhal had begun with an
overelaborate practical joke--which had lost the Service, incidentally,
several thousand credits worth of spaceship.
And so I could not trust Dallisa for an instant. Yet it was wonderful to
lie here with my head resting against the perfumed softness of her body.
Then suddenly her arms were gripping me, frantic and hungry; the subdued
thing in her voice, her eyes, flamed out hot and wild. She was pressing
the whole length of her body to mine, breasts and thighs and long legs,
and her voice was hoarse.
"Is this torture too?"
Beneath the fur robe she was soft and white, and the subtle scent of her
hair seemed a deeper entrapment than any. Frail as she seemed, her arms
had the strength of steel, and pain blazed down my wrenched shoulders,
seared through the twisted wrists. Then I forgot the pain.
Over her shoulder the last dropping redness of the sun vanished and
plunged the room into orchid twilight.
I caught her wrists in my hands, prizing them backward, twisting them
upward over her head. I said thickly, "The sun's down." And then I
stopped her wild mouth with mine.
And I knew that the battle between us had reached climax and victory
simultaneously, and any question about who had won it was purely
academic.
* * * * *
During the night sometime, while her dark head lay motionless on my
shoulder, I found myself staring into the darkness, wakeful. The
throbbing of my bruises had little to do with my sleeplessness; I was
remembering other chained girls from the old days in the Dry-towns, and
the honey and poison of them distilled into Dallisa's kisses. Her head
was very light on my shoulders, and she felt curiously insubstantial,
like a woman of feathers.
One of the tiny moons was visible through the slitted windows. I thought
of my rooms in the Terran Trade City, clean and bright and warm, and all
the nights when I had paced the floor, hating, filled to the teeth with
bitterness, longing for the windswept stars of the Dry-towns, the salt
smell of the winds and the musical clashing of the walk of the chained
women.
With a sting of guilt, I realized that I had half forgotten Juli and my
pledge to her and her misfortune which had freed me again, for this.
Yet I had won, and what they knew had narrowed my planet-wide search to
a pinpoint. Rakhal was in Charin.
I wasn't altogether surprised. Charin is the only city on Wolf, except
the Kharsa, where the Terran Empire has put down deep roots into the
planet, built a Trade City, a smaller spaceport. Like the Kharsa, it
lies within the circle of Terran law--and a million miles outside it.
A nonhuman town, inhabited largely by _chaks_, it is the core and center
of the resistance movement, a noisy town in a perpetual ferment. It was
the logical place for a renegade. I settled myself so that the ache in
my racked shoulders was less violent, and muttered, "Why Charin?"
Slight as the movement was, it roused Dallisa. She rolled over and
propped herself on her elbows, quoting drowsily, "The prey walks safest
at the hunter's door."
I stared at the square of violet moonlight, trying to fit together all
the pieces of the puzzle, and asked half aloud, "What prey and what
hunters?"
Dallisa didn't answer. I hadn't expected her to answer. I asked the real
question in my mind: "Why does Kyral hate Rakhal Sensar, when he doesn't
even know him by sight?"
"There are reasons," she said somberly. "One of them is Miellyn, my twin
sister. Kyral climbed the steps of the Great House by claiming us both
as his consorts. He is our father's son by another wife."
That explained much. Brother-and-sister marriages, not uncommon in the
Dry-towns, are based on expediency and suspicion, and are frequently,
though not always loveless. It explained Dallisa's taunts, and it partly
explained, only partly, why I found her in my arms. It did not explain
Rakhal's part in this mysterious intrigue, nor why Kyral had taken me
for Rakhal, (but only after he remembered seeing me in Terran clothing).
I wondered why it had never occurred to me before that I might be
mistaken for Rakhal. There was no close resemblance between us, but a
casual description would apply equally well to me or to Rakhal. My
height is unusual for a Terran--within an inch of Rakhal's own--and we
had roughly the same build, the same coloring. I had copied his walk,
imitated his mannerisms, since we were boys together.
And, blurring minor facial characteristics, there were the scars of the
_kifirgh_ on my mouth, cheeks, and shoulders. Anyone who did not know us
by sight, anyone who had known us by reputation from the days when we
had worked together in the Dry-towns, might easily take one of us for
the other. Even Juli had blurted, "You're so much like--" before
thinking better of it.
Other odd bits of the puzzle floated in my mind, stubbornly refusing to
take on recognizable patterns, the disappearance of a toy-seller; Juli's
hysterical babbling; the way the girl--Miellyn?--had vanished into a
shrine of Nebran; and the taunts of Dallisa and the old man about a
mysterious "Toymaker." And something, some random joggling of a memory,
in that eerie trading in the city of the Silent Ones. I knew all these
things fitted together somehow, but I had no real hope that Dallisa
could complete their pattern for me.
She said, with a vehemence that startled me, "Miellyn is only the
excuse! Kyral hates Rakhal because Rakhal will compromise and because
he'll fight!"
She rolled over and pressed herself against me in the darkness. Her
voice trembled. "Race, our world is dying. We can't stand against Terra.
And there are other things, worse things."
I sat up, surprised to find myself defending Terra to this girl. After
all these years I was back in my own world. And yet I heard myself say
quietly, "The Terrans aren't exploiting Wolf. We haven't abolished the
rule of Shainsa. We've changed nothing."
It was true. Terra held Wolf by compact, not conquest. They paid, and
paid generously, for the lease of the lands where their Trade Cities
would rise, and stepped beyond them only when invited to do so.
"We let any city or state that wants to keep its independence govern
itself until it collapses, Dallisa. And they do collapse after a
generation or so. Very few primitive planets can hold out against us.
The people themselves get tired of living under feudal or theocratic
systems, and they beg to be taken into the Empire. That's all."
"But that's just it," Dallisa argued. "You give the people all those
things we used to give them, and you do it better. Just by being here,
you are killing the Dry-towns. They're turning to you and leaving us,
and you let them do it."
I shook my head. "We've kept the Terran Peace for centuries. What do you
expect? Should we give you arms, planes, bombs, weapons to hold your
slaves down?"
"Yes!" she flared at me. "The Dry-towns have ruled Wolf
since--since--you, you can't even imagine how long! And we made compact
with you to trade here--"
"And we have rewarded you by leaving you untouched," I said quietly.
"But we have not forbidden the Dry-towns to come into the Empire and
work with Terra."
She said bitterly, "Men like Kyral will die first," and pressed her face
helplessly against me. "And I will die with them. Miellyn broke away,
but I cannot! Courage is what I lack. Our world is rotten, Race, rotten
all through, and I'm as rotten as the core of it. I could have killed
you today, and I'm here in your arms. Our world is rotten, but I've no
confidence that the new world will be better!"
I put my hand under her chin, and looked down gravely into her face,
only a pale oval in the darkness. There was nothing I could say; she had
said it all, and truthfully. I had hated and yearned and starved for
this, and when I found it, it turned salty and bloody on my lips, like
Dallisa's despairing kisses. She ran her fingers over the scars on my
face, then gripped her small thin hands around my wrists so fiercely
that I grunted protest.
"You will not forget me," she said in her strangely lilting voice. "You
will not forget me, although you were victorious." She twisted and lay
looking up at me, her eyes glowing faintly luminous in darkness. I knew
that she could see me as clearly as if it were day. "I think it was my
victory, not yours, Race Cargill."
Gently, on an impulse I could not explain, I picked up one delicate
wrist, then the other, unclasping the heavy jeweled bracelets. She let
out a stifled cry of dismay. And then I tossed the chains into a corner
before I drew her savagely into my arms again and forced her head back
under my mouth.
* * * * *
I said good-bye to her alone, in the reddish, windswept space before the
Great House. She pressed her head against my shoulder and whispered,
"Race, take me with you!"
For answer I only picked up her narrow wrists and turned them over on my
palm. The jeweled bracelets were clasped again around the thinly boned
joints, and on some self-punishing impulse she had shortened the chains
so that she could not even put her arms around me. I lifted the punished
wrists to my mouth and kissed them gently.
"You don't want to leave, Dallisa."
I was desperately sorry for her. She would go down with her dying world,
proud and cold and with no place in the new one. She kissed me and I
tasted blood, her thin fettered body straining wildly against me, shaken
with tearing, convulsive sobs. Then she turned and fled back into the
shadow of the great dark house.