by Sharon Shinn
“And he sent her away and never forgave her.”
“And for years I thought he had done that just because she hugged another man,” Drake added. “I’m sure now that it was more than that, but at the time I thought the severe punishment was for such a small crime.”
“No wonder you disapprove of me,” she said.
He dropped their linked hands so he could kiss her knuckles. “I don’t disapprove of you,” he said. “At any rate, I try not to.”
“I don’t think I could have ever loved a man that harsh,” she said. “Even if he was my father and I believed he was right.”
“Oh, but there were times when his cruel justice made him fabulous,” Drake said. “I told you he was an important man in his church—very. Well, it’s a complicated story but there were other religious groups in the city, and there were a lot of tensions between the groups—and part of it was religious and part of it, I realize now, was also a caste distinction, because my father’s church had most of the money and other churches had none. So there was fear and actual hatred among some of the groups.
“Anyway, when I was in my teens, my father’s church went on a vendetta against two of the other groups—the Reftwi group in particular. Wanted to drive them from the city, bankrupt them, destroy them if they could. The Reftwis, you must know, were mostly very poor, but there were a lot of them and they could be quite fanatical. As if my father’s people couldn’t be.
“Many of the Reftwis worked for laborer’s wages, and did factory work and became servants. One day two of the elders from my father’s church came to our house to say that the church had decided that all its members would henceforth cease to employ any Reftwis—part of an economic campaign to drive them from the city. They knew that my father employed two Reftwi housemaids and they had come to demand that he dismiss them from his service as an example for the rest of the members of the church. You have to realize that not everyone was in favor of this religious persecution, but the zealots had become very powerful and many of the church members were afraid to oppose them.
“I happened to be with my father in his study when the elders arrived. I had expected him to send me from the room, but he didn’t, so I saw everything firsthand. He listened to the elders with that impassive look he so often had, and then he rang for the two housemaids to be brought to him. They were rather young, I recall—older than me, certainly, but probably not much into their twenties, and they were terrified. My father—well, you can imagine the kind of fear he would inspire as an employer.
“He told them to come in, and he stood up and they stood before them. ‘My elders here have told me that I have been harboring Reftwis in my household,’ he began in a very stern voice. ‘They think that you are carrying secrets of my church to the elders of yours. Is this true?’ And they cowered before him and cried out, No no no, kind Lord Drake, we would never betray any of your secrets.
“ ‘But it is true that you belong to the Reftwi church?’ he demanded, and they admitted it. And he said, ‘And your family and your friends are Reftwis?’ and they had to admit that as well. He was implacable. ‘All of your family? All of your friends?’ he asked. By this time they were clinging to each other and sobbing—they didn’t know what he was going to do with them—and they could scarcely answer. I didn’t blame them—I would have been sobbing, too, had he been addressing me. The one girl just nodded, but the other one said she had one or two friends who were not Reftwis, though they would scarcely admit any more to be friends of hers. My father gave her a long hard look. The church elders, as you can imagine, were positively beaming. It was a rare treat to see my father chastise someone. I can’t give you the exact tone and his words don’t do him justice. He was an awesome man.
“ ‘You, Rakell, and you, Marra, go from this house,’ he said. ‘Each of you bring back one of your Reftwi friends. We have need of more servants, and I would like to hire only those that are friends of the servants that I already trust. You may leave me now.’
“Well, there was dead silence for about three minutes as everyone in the room tried to assimilate what he had said. Rakell and Marra recovered the fastest. They knelt down to kiss his hand, and then they ran from the room and out the front door. The church elders were positively livid. This was not at all what they’d expected—this was a deliberate slap in the face. I was beside myself with excitement and pride in my father. He was the only one in the room who seemed calm. He just stared at the elders with his cold, harsh eyes. ‘I trust you now understand exactly how I feel about the Reftwi question,’ he said. ‘I would be most pleased if you were to leave my house at your earliest convenience.’ And they left.”
“What happened to your father? Was he punished by the church council or the elders or whatever?”
“Oh no. He made a speech the next day to the whole congregation, which had people on their feet cheering. It was strange, too, because before this you wouldn’t have heard my father say a kind thing about the Reftwis in general, although he never seemed to have any personal animosity toward them as individuals. But he was not in favor of persecution. My father would have been a great zealot if he had had the conviction. He could have raised armies against the Reftwis and exterminated them through sheer force of personality. But that seemed unjust to him, and so he protected them instead.”
“A complicated man,” Jovieve said. “Hard to know if you should love him or hate him.”
“Hard, indeed,” Drake agreed.
“And have you made your peace with him? Come to love him for his good points and to forgive him for his blind spots?”
“I think so.”
“Do you see him very often?”
He was silent a moment. “He’s dead,” he said after a while. “He died eight years ago.”
“I’m sorry. And the others? Your sister? Your mother?”
He turned on his side, away from her. “They’re all dead,” he said.
He could feel that she sat up in concern. “Your cousins?”
“Dead.”
“Cowen, what happened to them?”
Why was it so hard to say, to tell her? He had told Laura with almost no prompting. “There was a Reftwi uprising eight years ago. A mutiny across the planet—incredible slaughter. You have no idea. Most of the people from my father’s church were killed, and particularly the highly visible ones like my father. And his family. They were among the first to be destroyed.”
“But—” He could hear the empathetic pain in her voice, and he wanted to close his ears to it. “After he protected them? After he—Cowen, that’s so unfair.”
“Yes,” he said. “Well, you wondered why I had no use for religion. You wondered why I have no faith. Why I don’t trust the gods. Because they don’t protect their own, that’s why. Because they allow senseless, stupid, awful things to happen—all in their name. All for their sake. You think it would be hard to love my father. It is easier to love him than to love one of the gods.”
He had hunched his shoulders tightly together as he spoke, ready to ward her off. He was sure she would know just what Ava would have to say to such a speech, and he didn’t want to hear it. When she touched his arm, he shuddered, but he did not jerk away. She slid her arm around him, across his chest and upward, wrapping her hand around his cheek; she pulled him to her, cradling him against her. He kept his head down. He could not see her face but he could feel her bending over him. Her grip tightened, becoming fierce and protective. She kissed the back of his head over and over. He felt the soft mouth disturb his hair and then move to his ear, his temple, his cheek. He turned partially in her arms till he was lying across her lap, gazing up at her. Her face was very close.
When she kissed his mouth, he closed his eyes. He felt the kiss sink into his muscles and bones the way water would seep into packed earth, slowly and with incalculable effect. He reached his hands up to her face, threading his fingers through her hair and pulling her
down more insistently into the kiss. She braced her hands against his shoulders to steady herself, but his response grew more demanding. He placed one arm behind her head and forced her down so that she tumbled forward and they were hopelessly intertwined. He shifted his body, making room for her. Now her hips were on the sand and she lay curled half against him and half over him. Now it was his head hovering over hers, driving the kiss from above.
She peeled back the collar of his shirt, slipping her hands inside the tight neckline, tearing off one button as she did so. Her bare hands were under the fabric of the shirt, massaging his shoulders, sliding down the smooth skin along his ribs, palming the hard surfaces of his chest. He kissed her ravenously, his own hands too impatient to deal with the fasteners that held her blue tunic in place. He put both arms under her and tightened his hold, crushing her to him almost mindlessly, feeling her hands splay against his back as they were trapped by the tent of his shirt. He knew the whole weight of his body was too great for her slight form, but he could not release her and she did not protest.
Somehow she got her hands free; she pulled at his clothing and her own. He edged back a little, to give her room, letting her strip away everything of his, everything of hers. In the glancing twilight sun, her skin was the color of the golden desert pool. His was pale and white by contrast. She was small and perfectly formed. He ran his hand with sensual delight across her flat stomach and the sharp curve of her hip and waist. She smiled at him. He smiled back.
“You’re beautiful,” she said.
“No,” he said, “you are.”
She laughed and lifted her arms around his neck, snuggling against him with the whole length of her body. “We’re both beautiful,” she murmured.
“I’m not going to argue,” he said. “Not here, not now.” And he kissed her again, and drew her closer; and under the fading rays of the setting sun, under the eyes of Ava and any gods who cared to watch, he made love to her on the desert sands by a pool of molten gold. He could not shake the illusion of water and earth, for she seemed to pour herself into him and he seemed to soak her up and grow, beneath her hands, pliable and rich where he had once been crusty and dry. He felt the change in his own body and held her to him more tightly. Somehow he was not afraid that the wellspring of her spirit could be used up, even by a need as deep as his. Like the desert, she seemed limitless, and like the water, she seemed the source of all life. He held her, and he learned again what it was like to love.
Chapter Sixteen
The next three days were full of unalloyed irritation. Backed now by Benito’s men, Drake continued his searches through the likeliest neighborhoods for traces of Diadeloro and traces of the killer. Now that they had a profile of sorts, Drake hoped that they would have more luck narrowing their leads when they went from house to house looking for a possible murderer. He is small, fair-haired, uses some foreign words, has a star tattooed on his left cheek . . . But none of the barrio landlords had a tenant who answered to precisely that description.
Nochestrella and Lusalma spent the three days at the hombueno headquarters, looking at holograms and videotapes of convicted felons. Although the star-shaped tattoo was the most easily identifiable mark on their attacker, Benito and Drake had not made it a condition for the computer’s sorting system. There was no way of knowing when the criminal had acquired the tattoo—if it was a tattoo—if it wasn’t something he had just painted on his face that night to confuse or alarm his victims. So the two Triumphantes searched through visual after visual of small blond men, and saw no one they recognized.
“He may not even be from Semay,” Benito observed at the end of the first day, when the Triumphantes had had no luck.
“Can you requisition files from other planetary systems?”
“Sure, but which ones? These girls can’t spend the rest of their lives watching home movies of felons from around the galaxy.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Drake dropped them off at the temple early in the evening. He debated for about five minutes, but finally turned the car back toward his hotel without going in. He was glad of his decision when, back at the hotel, he found Lise sitting out front on a white stone bench, catching the first cool evening breeze.
“I thought you’d been transferred back to New Terra,” he commented, coming to sit beside her.
She smiled at him and swung her legs. “You thought no such thing.”
“Am I now supposed to say you look glowing, or something along those lines?”
She laughed. “Do I?”
“I’ve never been much of one for noting the outward effects of love.”
She looked at him sideways, started to say something, and changed her mind. “The word ‘love,’ ” she said instead, “seems a little strong.”
“There’s the old Moonchild code,” he said admiringly. “Spot those emotions early and stomp them flat.”
“You should know,” she said.
“I do.”
“Although I would not say this attachment is entirely devoid of affection.”
“Glad to hear it. I wouldn’t want you to be spending all your nights with a man you hated.”
“Not tonight, though,” she offered.
“Ah. So if I invited you to dinner, you’d accept?”
“Depends on where you were going to take me.”
“I always let the lady choose. Unless she chooses somewhere in the spaceport.”
Lise laughed again. “Somewhere nice, then.”
“I know just the place.”
They changed clothes, upgrading, and went to the elegant restaurant where Drake and Jovieve once had lunched. More than ever this night, Lise reminded him of a child brimming with excitement, a little girl on the night before her birthday, who was certain she was going to get the gifts she had asked for. It made him smile just to be with her. She was wearing the earring he had bought for her in the spaceport. Neither of them commented on it, although once, when she absently flicked it with her finger to make the gildore chains chime, she caught him watching her, and both of them smiled.
They were back at a decent hour and parted outside Lise’s suite. Inside his room, Drake found an envelope that had been slipped under his door while he was gone. He recognized the handwriting before he broke the seal. Jovieve.
Inside was a single sheet of paper, symmetrically covered with her beautiful script. It was a poem, and as its title she had written in the word “Oasis.” It was short:
Love does not fall on an untouched heart
Or seed in a garden chaste.
Until it once has been plowed apart
The heart is a desert waste.
So raze and trample the virgin turf.
To every blade and blow
Offer the rich but unmixed earth
So love will grow.
Beneath the verses, she had written: “Dinner tomorrow? Just show up if you want to come, because I’ll be here anyway.” She had signed it with a big looping J.
Drake read the poem again, then folded the paper and laid it on the dresser next to the comline. He was in bed five minutes later but lay for a long time looking up at the ceiling. It was nearly three hours before he fell asleep.
* * *
* * *
The next day was a repetition of the one before, except that, during the search of abandoned buildings, Drake and one of Benito’s officers surprised two young boys in the middle of transacting a drug deal. Officer Cortez—young, big and zealous—reacted more quickly than Drake, who had not at first recognized the crime in progress. The policeman darted forward, trank gun extended, and barked out a few sharp words in Semayse. The boys leapt to their feet and broke in different directions, but Drake had figured it out by then. He dove after the one who was outside of the optimum range of the tranquilizer. There was a short struggle, but Drake had height, weight, sobriety and experience on his side, and he easi
ly prevailed.
Cortez had shot a couple of darts into his target and then swung around to assist Drake, who didn’t need the help. “You’re good,” the officer said, unlooping a silver coil of something that looked like tape from his belt. “We usually just use the darts. More certain.”
“I thought guns weren’t allowed on Semay, even for cops,” Drake said, watching as Cortez wound the silver material twice around the young man’s wrists. “What is that stuff?”
“Chemically treated bonding wrap. Can only be dissolved with special solvents but won’t hurt the skin. We use it all the time.”
“And the gun?”
“Only cops can carry them, and then only the trank guns. No lasers, no projectile weapons.”
“They on the black market much?”
“Some. Rarely on the street, though. The petty criminals don’t carry them much—just the druglords and the out-of-towners.”
“And there aren’t many of them around.”
“Enough, though.”
That little contretemps was the only excitement for the day, and none of the other officers had turned up any leads during their investigations. Lusalma and Noches had continued to look through videos, and still saw no one they could recognize.
“I don’t know why you’re so edgy,” Benito commented when Drake got ready to take the girls back to the temple. “You know these sorts of searches take days or weeks.”
“We don’t have weeks,” Drake said.
“Thought we did.”
Drake ran a hand through his hair, which felt dusty and unwashed. Couldn’t go visit priestesses looking like this. “Maybe we do. I don’t know. I keep thinking . . . He failed last time, so he’s going to strike more quickly this time. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Well, Lise and I keep going back to the temples to give lessons in self-defense,” Benito said. “We’re doing what we can.”
“We’re missing something,” Drake said, and left.
