“Did you hear me, milord?” she persisted. “I wanted to wear them for you.”
“Princess,” I answered, “you have your prettiest clothes right with you, always.”
I heard the happy chuckle that goes with her dimples. “I’m sure that you have often said that before. And no doubt with great success.”
We were out of the swamp long before dark and hit the brick road soon after. Blood kites are no problem. They are such murderous things that if you shoot an arrow in the direction of one of their dives, a kite will swerve and pluck it out of the air, getting the shaft right down its gullet. We usually recovered the arrows.
We were among plowed fields soon after we reached the road and soon the blood kites thinned out. Just at sundown we could see outbuildings and the lights in the manor where Star said that we would spend the night.
Chapter 8
Milord Doral ‘t Giuk Dorali should have been a Texan. I don’t mean that the Doral could have been mistaken for a Texan but he had that you-paid-for-the-lunch-I’ll-pay-for-the-Cadillacs expansiveness.
His farmhouse was the size of a circus tent and as lavish as a Thanksgiving dinner–rich, sumptuous, fine carvings and inlaid jewels. Nevertheless it had a sloppy, lived-in look and if you didn’t watch where you put your feet, you would step on a child’s toy on a broad, sweeping staircase and wind up with a broken collarbone. There were children and dogs underfoot everywhere and the youngest of each weren’t housebroken. It didn’t worry the Doral. Nothing worried the Doral, he enjoyed life.
We had been passing through his fields for miles (rich as the best Iowa farmland and no winters; Star told me they produced four crops a year)–but it was late in the day and an occasional field hand was all we saw save for one wagon we met on the road. I thought that it was pulled by a team of two pairs of horses. I was mistaken; the team was but one pair and the animals were not horses, they had eight legs each.
All of Nevia valley is like that, the commonplace mixed with the wildly different. Humans were humans, dogs were dogs–but horses weren’t horses. Like Alice trying to cope with the Flamingo, every time I thought I had it licked, it would wiggle loose.
The man driving those equine centipedes stared but not because we were dressed oddly; he was dressed as I was. He was staring at Star, as who wouldn’t? The people working in fields had mostly been dressed in sort of a lava-lava. This garment, a simple wraparound tied off at the waist, is the equivalent in Nevia of overalls or blue jeans for both men and women; what we were wearing was equal to the Gray Flannel Suit or to a woman s basic black. Party or formal clothes–well, that’s another matter.
As we turned into the grounds of the manor we picked up a wake of children and dogs. One kid ran ahead and, when we reached the broad terrace in front of the main house, milord Doral himself came out the great front door. I didn’t pick him for lord of the manor; he was wearing one of those short sarongs, was barefooted and bareheaded. He had thick hair, shot with gray, an imposing beard, and looked like General U. S. Grant.
Star waved and called out, “Jock! Oh, Jocko!” (The name was “Giuk,” but I caught it as “Jock” and Jock he is.)
The Doral stared at us, then lumbered forward like a tank, “Ettyboo! Bless your beautiful blue eyes! Bless your bouncy little bottom! Why didn’t you let me know?” (I have to launder this because Nevian idioms don’t parallel ours. Try translating certain French idioms literally into English and you’ll see what I mean. The Doral was not being vulgar; he was being formally and gallantly polite to an old and highly respected friend.)
He grabbed Star in a hug, lifted her off her feet, kissed her on both cheeks and on the mouth, gnawed one ear, then set her down with an arm around her. “Games and celebrations! Three months of holiday! Races and rassling every day, orgies every night! Prizes for the strongest, the fairest, the wittiest–“