There was a certain way he looked at her, a certain inflection when he spoke of her, that told me he had had her. It did not even rasp on me. I thought, You have bought a dry bed, Eshkir prince. She will not be for you as she was for me.
Her enamel face was aloof, cool as morning.
Erran said, “Demizdor, my sweeting, I must disappoint you, just a very little. I am planning to breed mighty boys from this one. He shall rest soft for today and tonight, for he has had two hard nights of it.” At that she came alive, turning to him wildly, but he clapped his hands and a bronzemask came in. “Take my guest to his apartment,” Erran said. “See he has what he wants, except, of course, a silver woman, or the key to the doors.”
“My lord,” Demizdor cried. Her color was up and her coldness all gone. “Am I to see this vileness every day about your palace?”
“Do not be importunate,” he answered. “Perhaps he will not take to luxury, your royal tribal barbarian. Then I shall have no choice but to send him below. You can always hope for that.”
He waved me toward the bronze-mask.
Having no option, I obeyed him and followed his soldierservant into the frescoed passageway. As we went, I heard
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him say to her, in that winsome, smiling tone of his, “Come, Demizdor, it is nothing. Imagine your gown was muddied and now it has been cleansed. Do you see this pendant of gold? It was my grandmother’s, but you shall have it. Look at the gold, and forget him, pretty Demizdor. You have not necessarily been foolish, coming to the house of the leopard.”
The dawn was burning up behind an apricot window when the door of my new prison was shut on me.
It was the best lodging I had had for some time.
Amber walls and amber drapes, interrupted by two great windows, each of a hundred pieces of thick-colored syrupy crystal set in a frame of heavy leading, the eastern one of which now threw a fantastic shattered patchwork of flame and shadow onto the marble flags. Having pointlessly tried the door, I investigated these windows on a sort of ironic reflex, but was not surprised to see that the city streets lay far below. Even if I could have breeched glass and frame, the leap would have cost me a whole spine.
Against the south wall lay a sleeping couch, wide enough for two, or three had you the mind for it, with thick pelts spread for comfort. Several narrow tables and benches littered the body of the room. The floor was warm from the slave-manned hot pipes, a delicate reminder, perhaps, of my punishment if I thwarted my owner. A bathing cell led off the larger chamber. It had a bizarre marble latrine that might be flushed by a bronze faucet, and brazen lions’ heads spit water into the bath.
I had, not been long in the apartment before two men with brown cloth faces entered through the recalcitrant door.
One was a barber with razors and a pot of scented grease. He bowed to me, making me curious as to what rank Tuvek (he slave might have been promoted, then set about shaving me, dexterous as Kortis’ man had been the day before. The other cloth-mask laid out a fresh set of clothes and city linen.
When they were gone, having acquired a taste for the Eshkirian bath, and with nothing more pressing to attend to, I took one and presently dressed. I kept the black garments I had got from Zrenn’s prank, all but the tunic that he had sliced to ribbons. The color of the new gear was Erran’s, an extra branding I could have done without. Yet he had left me the chain of gold links and the arm-ring of jade; only the
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black ring was gone, sent back to Kortis as proof of my capture, probably.
As I was belting on the tunic, the door opened again and in stepped a satin-masked girl with a tray of food. She set this on a table, and fled.
It was bronze wear on the tray. My master had ostentatiously promoted me, no doubt of it. On the bronze, an average meal of bread and meat and autumn fruit, good enough, but not suited to the surroundings. This was not his condescension, but the poverty of the city showing itself like the cracks in the plaster and the mouse-holes under the drapes. Only the wine was princely, as clear as the crystal that contained it.
All this while I had been amused, irritated, impatient, and at a loss. I was Erran’s pet, his fierce beast with a dubious pedigree. I could see no method of escape, but I had vowed to observe and to prepare against the hour when some chance would come. It did not occur to me that, I, too, should be observed, or that any immediate trap would be laid for me.
However, the wine had medicine in it, and soon after I had drunk it, the floor tilted and the light of the window went out.
I recovered my senses when the five physicians were still present.
The chamber was scattered with their anomalous and eccentric instruments. They themselves were of the bronze order, and wore Erran’s dark ocher. They were muttering over their philosophies like five elderly hens, one of whom has laid a square egg.
The dazzle in the apricot window was still golden. At first this puzzled me. Then I realized it was the opposite casement, and that the dawn was long past and the day had descended to sunset as I lay drugged on my couch, naked as a babe under their dissections.
I felt no apathy or weakness now, rather a towering mad rage.
I came off the couch in one great jump, and the five yellow hens retreated before me, clucking.
“Sir, sir, be calm,” one cried. “We are Lord Erran’s ministers. We have done you no harm. Merely examined your body in order to ascertain the source of its wondrous healing-” “‘
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They had left, alas, no handy surgeon’s knife for me to grasp.
I shouted; “Well, then, what you have discovered? Am I a sorcerer? Or a god, maybe?” I was thinking that if I panicked them, they would fly out of the door, leaving it wide for me to follow. Then I, presumably clad only in my skin, would make for freedom, unhampered by guard or sentry. At length, however, I regained some of my wits, abandoned the scheme, and sat down on the couch, at which the physicians gathered their paraphernalia and crept to the door. This, after they had tapped on it, was opened and the gentlemen departed.
Then the lethargy came, turgid as the sludge of some river.
I lay back on the couch and the sunset died gloriously in the window glass. I was a fool. A dog, kept in an opulent kennel. And this reality mated with a heritage eternally lost, and an abnormality that made me cringe when I remembered it. For I was sobering now, in the way every drunkard must, recalling my abilities with fear and amazement. My whole life I had accepted the unacceptable. But the chase had caught me up. It seemed to me at that moment that I might as well serve Erran, for all the use I had or ever could make of myself.
There came eventually another, more gentle whisper of the curtain at the door. I did not raise my head to see who had added themselves this time to the concourse in and out.
“Whoever you are,” I said, “the pet slave is in a killing mood. You had better take your leave.”
A couple of soft little cries went up like two pigeons disturbed on a roof. At that I looked.
They were two girls, ambered in the last of the afterglow, their faces bared, pretty as flowers, their bodies almost bare under thin dresses of what seemed pleated cobweb. They were not really afraid of me, for they knew men, or thought they did, and had been sent to pleasure one. But, finding me naked and angry, they had acted, as any schooled whore will do.
I would have liked to turn them out, for I had had a surfeit of Erran’s gifts and subtleties, and I had mused also on his plan to breed me like the bull. Yet I felt at once the sort of dreary urgent concupiscence that sometimes comes with fever.
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Seeing me aroused-I had no means to conceal it-they glided at once to the couch. One kissed my mouth, the second caressed my body; then the second fastened on my mouth, and the first lay in my arms. It was like supping from two cups that changed their perfume and their sweetness at every sip, as each mingled with the other.