Starfire Saga, page 13
When they got up to leave, Coney kissed me lightly and went out first. Kray lingered long enough to say, “Ronnie, there are times when I wish you were less of a talent and more of a normal, ordinary woman.”
I was feeling quite well again, and I smiled. “I’m sure there are.” We stared at each other for a moment longer, and then he turned and left the room.
We were all friends again, and I didn’t sleep with Coney anymore. I never talked about it, and neither did he. Kray wouldn’t mention it, either, and for a while we tentatively joked about everything but ourselves. Then slowly the old relationship came back. The wedge I had driven between us had been withdrawn.
I was not nearly as bad after the Ilto as I had been after the Drenalion. Clinging to Jemeret’s waist as we rode into camp, I had more reserves left than I had had in the floater, but I needed to deep and I knew it. I even knew that this world was a much more dangerous place to drain my reserves than Koldor had been, for this place had no restorers that I knew of. A planet of Class C’s would go lightly on healing potions, for they would be so very rarely needed.
So I was well aware, if a little lethargic, when Jemeret and the other riders pulled up by the circle of tents that held the chief’s tent. Unlike during my first arrival among the Boru, there were many people standing around, and I recognized joy on Variel’s face as she rushed to greet Gundever.
Venacrona hovered at Jemeret’s stirrup, his face open and anxious. Jemeret made him a sign of some kind that I couldn’t quite see, and the priest disappeared from my view. I unclasped my arms from around Jemeret’s waist as he swung a leg over the tivong and dropped lightly to the ground. He turned and held his hands up to me, and I slid down into them.
“Urichen, take Vrand to Sejineth,” I heard him say. “Tell him I’ll speak with him at the court tomorrow afternoon.”
He supported me with one arm around my waist, but didn’t lift me off my feet. Gundever, leading his own tivong, stopped and asked a question so softly I didn’t hear it at all, nor Jemeret’s answer. Then the Lord of the Boru turned to the waiting crowd. “We are all safe,” he said. “Shefta and Ronica have been brought home, and the Ilto have a new chief. Return to your tents. Tomorrow evening we will meet at the sacred spring and give thanks to the stars for our strength.”
He stood, still supporting me, until the crowd had dispersed, and then he helped me walk to his tent. It was the darkest hour of the night, the one I later learned was called the Hour of the Eclipse, but he didn’t light the stanchion lamps, which were out. I didn’t need them, for I saw the interior of the tent as bright as day, and Jemeret knew that I did.
“I’ll deep now,” I said, and relaxed my control enough to sway in his arm.
“Not yet,” he said quietly. He leaned down toward me, and I felt his lips lightly brush my forehead. With the hand that was not holding me, he stripped out of his boots and leggings, but the motions were so swift that I barely noticed them. “I have asked you for nothing until now,” he said, his voice soothingly steady above me. “Now I ask you to remember, when this is over, that I want you to forgive me.”
In my lethargy, I was bewildered. “I don’t understand,” I said, looking up at his expressionless face. “What have you done?”
“It’s what I’m about to do,” he said. “I may never find you this tired again.” Moving faster than I could have followed, accelerating, his free hand ripped the tunic that I wore from neck to hem, stripped it off me, and flung me, naked, backward onto the rugs.
Lethargy fled as the reflexes slammed me into awareness. Frantically I groped to gather for a sting that wasn’t there, fighting physically now as he knelt beside me, still accelerated, and caught my wrists, pinning my legs down with one of his. Despite everything he’d said, everything he promised, rape was what I expected. I had never before seriously battled anyone with as much Class C power as my own, and it soon became clear to me that I could not hope to win.
I had one defense reflex left, and I used it almost without being aware I was doing it, tamping down my sense receptors bit by bit until I had closed off my body from my mind, until I could not have felt him thrust into me. His face was still strangely expressionless, but intense as he studied me, one hand imprisoning my wrists, the other supporting his weight above me. I stopped struggling and received a shock so great that my whole understanding of reality twisted out of shape around me and left me gasping with fear and amazement.
It was not my body he penetrated, but my mind, sliding in past nonexistent shields as if he’d always known the way. He’d tricked me, most of my reserves gone, into using a good deal of the rest in trying to guard my body, and when I was totally preoccupied, he’d thrust a mental probe into my brain. Jemeret of the Boru was a Class A, and he was using the sting.
It is impossible to describe to anyone who has never felt it the sensation of someone else inside your mind. Jemeret was strong, firm, and determined, taking possession of my consciousness with almost no disruption, but I hated this kind of invasion as much as I would have hated the other kind. My diverting of reserves to my shields was too late to keep him out, but I fought his possession as strongly as I could, feeling sensation returning to my body as I threw my fading strength into the immobile battle inside my head.
He was trying to soothe me, to relax me, moving in places inside my brain that Jasin Lebec had never touched. In rage, I committed myself utterly to the fight, throwing more and more of my failing energy into the defense of an already breached wall. The room grew brighter and brighter, and though I knew shutting my eyes would do nothing to reduce the light, I closed them. The glare was almost overwhelming.
I knew in an instant that I’d gone too far, that I’d used up all my reserves, that I was drained, and that I was dying. My resistance failed as my reserves did, and Jemeret was firmly implanted in every part of my mind that was not locked away from me. I had not surrendered, but I had lost.
From what seemed to be an immense distance, I heard Jemeret say, “Ronica, you have to want to live. I can help you, but you have to want me to.”
And suddenly I realized that I’d been taught all my life to be a survivor. I very much wanted to live, even if living meant yielding, past regret and past hope. As soon as I wished it, with a surge of power, Jemeret began to pour strength into me. The glare in the room, which had become unbearable, dropped to bright, then to what I’d think of as early morning, then to dim. His reserves were unimaginably greater than mine, and I believe now that he must have given me at least half of them, if not more. He brought me back from a nearly certain death by willing me part of his own survival.
When he knew I was truly going to live, reading that I knew it, he dropped down onto the rugs beside me and slowly, gently, withdrew his presence from my battered mind. The two of us lay naked, covered with sweat from the exertion, panting, and nearly exhausted.
I turned my face away from him and began to cry, but he turned me back with his near hand and let my tears mingle with the glaze of sweat on his shoulder. “I was afraid I’d lost you,” he said, his voice thick and edged with emotion. “That time you almost got away.”
I wanted to ask why he had done it, but the sobs were sweeping up from inside me in long, uncontrollable waves until my whole body trembled under them. With his free hand he stroked my face and hair, my breast and hips, calming me as he’d calm a frightened animal.
Once again I felt his lips lightly brush my forehead. “Deep now,” he said, and pulled a rug up over our bodies. It was a long while before the sobs subsided and I finally slept in his arms.
I awoke past midday the next day, coming alert at once, feeling strong and shaken simultaneously. Jemeret was still deeping, his breathing too slow and even for simple sleep. I realized then, if I hadn’t fully the night before, how much of his own strength he had poured into me. But I would not let myself be grateful. Now that I was recovered from my touch of death, I was angry at the man in whose arms I still lay, for he had turned me into a person he had had to save.
He had drawn me back, not from the edge of the pit, but from the pit itself, and what I felt as I lay looking at his profile was an absolute rage that he had put me in it in the first place. I need to be clear about this: I did not hate him. In fact, I may already have been half in love with him. He had shown himself to be completely my own kind, even more than Jasin Lebec—for I had already spent more time in his company than my total acquaintance with the older Class A—more than Coney and Kray, who had never known the power of using a sting. But he had been stronger than I, and he had probed me against my will, and those two sins seemed unforgivable.
I deliberately blocked out the voice that rose instantly to memory, saying, “I ask you to remember, when this is over, that I want you to forgive me.” I was not in a forgiving mood. As I slipped out from the circle of his arm, being careful not to awaken him, I wondered at the absence of an open impulse for revenge, but I knew that I probably could not hurt him. For one thing, that morning I was too much of him. For another, my own sting was gone. I still felt nothing of people’s minds, and thus I could not influence his.
Had I been, at that time, a fair person—as I have since then been shown many times what “fair” really means—I might have understood that he had not hurt me by his penetration of my mind. He had done nothing to influence me, except to ask me to choose life; he had only probed me, more completely than Jasin Lebec had done, in an act that was a Class A’s right to perform on those around him or her. I had always taken for granted my own right to do it; in that light alone, I might have granted the same right to him. But I was not fair. I truly believe that no one ever sees both sides of a question in which they have a stake.
Someone, probably Numima, had brought in fresh clothes and left them on the table. Mine was a deep gray talma, trimmed in pure white. I assumed that I was not to go to the tivongs today.
After I’d washed and dressed in the talma and braided my hair with the white cord I found under the gown, I sat in a chair and watched him sleep, winding the end of the cord around my finger, then unwinding it again. Even my boots were white today. It occurred to me to check his clothes, and I found his tunic to match mine, though his leggings and boots were black. Under his tunic was a thin silver band of beaten metal, and after I studied it for a moment, I realized it was a brow-crown.
I looked up and found him awake, watching me. I let his tunic fall back on the crown and stood up. “Should I undress again?” I asked.
“You’re free to do as you like.”
“In that case, I’d like to leave,” I said.
His eyes clouded. “There are ceremonies today, and I’ll need you with me.”
I sat down again and held my hands tightly clasped in my lap. “I don’t see why I should feel obligated to help you any longer,” I said, trying to sound reasonable. “You’ve freed me from that, too.”
He sat upright, his body somehow negligent and tightly coiled at the same time. “I don’t remember doing that. Perhaps you can refresh my memory.” His self-possession made me nervous.
“How can you pretend?” I cried out. “You—violated me, and after you said you wouldn’t! You told me to learn to trust you!”
A quizzical, bemused expression passed swiftly across his face and was instantly gone. “I said I wouldn’t physically force you,” he said, “and I haven’t. And I won’t. You’d hate rape, and I want you to enjoy me as much as I intend to enjoy you.”
“I won’t forgive you for last night.” My voice rasped more than I’d intended, but there seemed little sense in controlling emotion he would know I was feeling.
He threw the rug aside and got to his feet, but I neither jumped nor drew back from him. His self had become too much a part of me for my body to recoil from him any longer. “What I did to you last night is neither more nor less than I’ve done—without their knowledge—to the members of the Boru at manhood or womanhood ceremonials. You were aware that I was doing it. That’s the only difference. That, and the fact that I had to wait until you were worn-out. You are stronger than even I guessed.” He came to the table, splashed water from the basin on his face, and dressed with spare, economical motions. “I paid a tribute to your strength, but that’s all.”
“I am not a Boru yet,” I said steadily. “It is possible that I will choose not to become one.”
That hurt him, and I knew it instantly, even though I couldn’t have said how I knew. I turned away, not wanting to confront his hurt—my having been responsible for it. But I wouldn’t take it back.
He set the crown on his brow and faced me directly. “The next tribe in strength to the Boru is the Genda. If you stay with me today through the ceremonies, I’ll take you to the Genda, and you can decide if they suit you better.”
I felt a pang I barely understood, a certainty inside me that here was where I belonged. But I said, “All right, I agree to that.”
He held out his hand, and I put mine into it, feeling as I did so a slight, inexplicable tingle run up my arm. “How ever could I have your child if I were not a Boru?” I flung it at him in confusion at my own reaction to him.
Jemeret smiled. “You are a highly intelligent woman, Ronica, and like many highly intelligent women, you tend to overlook simple things. With your power, even if I impregnated you against your will, you wouldn’t have to carry the child an hour.” His words were not patronizing, just informative, and I was astonished, because that had never occurred to me before.
With genuine surprise at my previous failure to have thought of something as elementary as that, I said wonderingly, “You have to have my consent.”
“Consent is a momentary thing, while a pregnancy tends to drag on a bit,” Jemeret said. “I have to have more than just your consent. I want—I will have—your enthusiastic cooperation.”
“I can’t imagine why you would ever possibly have that.” My reply was out of my mouth instantly, an instinctive declaration. I don’t know how I expected him to respond, for I saw it as a challenge.
His expression softened, blending the lines of his face to smoothness, and his free hand moved up and gently pushed a curl of hair off my forehead. “I know you can’t,” he said, and despite his trying to mask his compassion, I sensed it clearly. “But I think you will someday. You have the strength to.”
“Strength!” The word exploded outward from my lungs as if he’d punched me.
And as if that had been a signal, Venacrona flung open the tent flap. I barely had time to notice that the priest wore a long black robe, heavily embroidered in coils of red, gold, white, and blue. On his head he wore a pyramid hat, each side one of the colors from the robe’s embroidery. Then Jemeret led me outside to a low platform in front of one of the other tents in the circle, and we mounted it.
Two things were instantly apparent as we turned around at the top of the steps. First, every Boru who could fit into the circle and the area of surrounding tents was there. Second, there was something wrong with the fire in the center. Instead of blazing from the logs, as I’d been used to seeing it, it grew from a wide metal bowl. Instead of the usual way a fire moved, it danced and writhed with a rhythm that seemed to have nothing to do with wind or crowd movement, and its interior shone with separate strands of the same four colors that Venacrona wore on his robe and hat.
The colors were, I realized abruptly, star colors—the red of red giants, the white of white dwarves, the blue of the hot young blue stars, and the gold of the middle-aged, yellow suns. While I wasn’t then aware of it as such, I was looking at starfire. A tingle like the one I had felt when Jemeret took my hand ran up the back of my spine.
The crowd of massed Boru shouted Jemeret’s name once, and their leader held out his hands to ask them for quiet. “This is the Boru Court of Justice,” he said. “Let all with claim before this court come forward.”
The men who had ridden with Jemeret to retrieve Shefta and me from the Ilto found their way through the crowd and knelt in rows between the platform and the fire. I picked out Gundever in the second rank, but watched Jemeret more than I watched the kneeling men.
“These warriors have gone into danger and have returned,” Jemeret said, his voice full and carefully pitched so the crowd could hear. “For a successful foray, each man here is granted half a tenday of rest this winter.”
The men cheered. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Venacrona held a golden bowl full of metal tokens, and he took his place with another man and a woman, both in plain white robes, to the left of the platform. The warriors rose and walked past the platform, each bowing to Jemeret and taking a metal token out of the bowl.
I was not accustomed to a court that dispensed rewards. Most of the courts I had known had been constituted to punish, and if a reward was judged to one claimant, it was at the cost of another.
Jemeret waited, not moving, until all the men were back in the crowd. Then he said, “Let the girl Shefta come forward.”
Shefta, wearing a green and brown talma and looking very adult, came to kneel in the open space between the fire and the platform. She smiled broadly at me, then blushed furiously and looked at Jemeret.
“This girl,” Jemeret said, and he smiled down at her, “was carried into danger and has returned. From this time forward she will be a woman of the Boru, with the name Shenefta. Her womanhood ceremony at Convalee will only confirm what each of us knows. Shenefta knelt as a girl, but rises a woman. Fortunate the man who chooses to share her courage.”
Shenefta reddened, but stiffened her back and raised her chin. Venacrona gestured, and the two assistant priests helped her to rise. The three of them bowed to Jemeret, and Shenefta threw me another wide smile as she returned to her place.
