She waved him silent in a silvery murmur from her wrist. Apart from the bells, she wore nothing on her body — though her hair was piled around crystalline combs which refracted the dim red light.
“I’m a slave,” she repeated, “but I can forget that, usually, with the part of me that lives.” Her hand gripped the tribune’s, and her eyes demanded that he meet hers. “Do you understand?”
He gave an upward nod of assent, afraid to speak but filled with sudden hope that it wasn’t over, that there was something between them still to salvage.
“I’m good at what I do,” Quartilla said with fierce emotion that was neither anger nor very far apart from it. “I have my pride, and maybe that’s because of what they did to my mind after they bought me, the guild, but it’s all I have. You had the right to make me your personal slave, Gaius Caper, you earned that and I’m very pleased for you.
“But why in the name of the god you worship did you decide to exercise that right? Why did you rob me of all the little fantasies that left me free in my own mind?”
“I thought. . . ,” the tribune said. He turned suddenly away and slammed the wall with his fist in a blaze of self-revulsion.
He hadn’t thought. He had wished and acted on the wish, unwilling to consider anything but the way he wanted his world to be structured and arrogantly certain that his power to choose also gave him authority over the outcome of his choice.
He didn’t want to die now. He wanted to have died that morning, before he had time to speak to the Commander and claim the reward which destroyed more of his life than remained.
There was a whisper of bells. Quartilla set her hands on his shoulder blades. Vibulenus let his shoulders loosen, but he would not, could not, turn around. He hid his face in the crook of his right elbow and squeezed back his tears of frustration with the muscles that enabled his sword to shear through simpler problems.
“Gaius,” said the woman gently, “you could have asked that you never have to fight again. Yourself. They would have granted that, you know. There are twenty of us, the females, but they have only one of you among so many swords.”
“Quartilla,” the tribune said as he turned with his eyes still closed, “I will not — fail to think again.” He did not offer to undo what he had done, because he could not change the past, change his words. He would ask the ship, the Commander, that the woman be returned to her regular duties; but that would not change the fact that he had made her a slave, of his whim or anyone’s whim.
“Truth,” he said in a flat voice, “isn’t as important as perception.” He wasn’t even close to considering whether he could live with the situation he now perceived. For now it would be enough that he be permitted to try — that she permit him to try.
Quartilla smiled as he met her eyes, but it wasn’t a particularly happy smile.
He didn’t, now that he was aware of externals again, remember when he had stood up. His knees were quivering and he wanted very badly to sit down again, but —
“We’ll either get through this,” said Quartilla gently, “or we won’t. And ‘won’t’ could be a very long time for both of us, the way things are.”
She took one plump hand from Vibulenus’ shoulder and gestured toward the couch. The tribune read the gesture in his peripheral vision, still afraid to break the eye contact he had regained. He sat or collapsed, and Quartilla curved gracefully down beside him, her breast wobbling momentarily against his elbow.
“I want to change the way things are, Quartilla,” Vibulenus said. “I want to take my men home, and I need your help.”
“Gaius,” said the woman with new concern in her eyes. “You can’t go home.”
“And just now,” the tribune continued, without recognition that he knew something had been said in the interval, “I want most of all to think that you’ll forgive me for what I did.”