What he first said was, “You knew Leelson Famber.”
It was a statement of fact, though he paused, as one does when expecting an answer.
Lutha Tallstaff contented herself with a slight cock of her head, meaning all right, so? She was annoyed. She felt much put upon. She was tired of the demands made upon her. Anyone who would send invigilators to drag her from her bath and supper—not literally drag, of course, though it felt like it—to this unscheduled and mysterious meeting at Prime needed no help from her! Besides, she’d last seen Leelson four years ago.
“You knew Famber well.” This time he was pushing.
Skinny old puritan, Lutha thought. Of course she had known Leelson well.
“We were lovers once,” she replied, without emphasis, letting him stew on that as she stared out the tall windows over the roofs of Alliance Prime upon Alliance Central.
A single ramified city-structure, pierced by transport routes, decked with plazas, fountains, and spires, flourished with flags, burrowed through by bureaucrats, all under the protective translucence of the Prime-dome, higher and more effulgent than those covering the urbs. The planet had been completely homo-normed for centuries. Nothing breathed upon it but man and the vagrant wind, and even the wind was tamed beneath the dome, a citywide respiration inhaled at the zenith and exhaled along the circumference walls into the surrounding urbs with their sun-shielded, pallid hordes. Lutha, so she would tell me, had a large apartment near the walls: two whole rooms, and a food dispenser and sleeping cubicles and an office wall. The apartment had a window scene, as well, one that could create a forest or a meadow or a wide, sun-drenched savanna, complete with creatures. Lutha sometimes wondered what it would be like to actually live among other creatures. Came a time she and I laughed ruefully about that, a time when we knew all too well what it was like!
On that day, however, she was not thinking of creatures as she remained fixed by the Procurator’s expectant eyes. He was waiting for more answer than she had given him thus far.
She sighed, already tired of this. “Why is my relationship with Leelson Famber any concern of yours?”
“I … that is, we need someone who … was connected to him.”
Only now the tocsin. “You knew Leelson Famber,” he’d said. “You knew him.”
“Why!” she demanded with a surge of totally unexpected panic. “What’s happened to him?”
“He’s disappeared.”
She almost laughed, feeling both relief and a kind of pleasure at thinking Leelson might be injured, or ill, or maybe even dead. So she told me.
“But you were lovers!” I cried in that later time. “You said you were made for each other!”
So we believe, we women of Dinadh, who sit at the loom to make an inner robe for our lovers or our children or our husbands or ourselves, beginning a stripe of color, so, and another color, so, with the intent that they shall come together to make a wonderful pattern at the center, one pattern begetting another. So people, too, can be intended to come together in wonder and joy.
So I pleaded with her, dismayed. “Didn’t you love him? Didn’t he love you?”
“You don’t understand,” she cried. “We’d been lovers, yes! But against all good sense! Against all reason. It was like being tied to some huge stampeding animal, dragged along, unable to stop!” She panted, calming herself, and I held her, knowing very well the feeling she spoke of. I, too, had felt dragged along.
“Besides,” she said, “I was sick of hearing about Leelson! Him and his endless chain of triumphs! All those dramatic disappearances, those climactic reappearances, bearing wonders, bearing marvels. The Roc’s egg. The Holy Grail.”
“Truly?” I asked. Even I had heard of the Holy Grail, a mystical artifact of the Kristin faith, a religion mostly supplanted by Firstism, though it is practiced by some remote peoples still. “Practiced,” we say of all religions but that of the Gracious One. “Because they haven’t got it right yet.” It is the kind of joke our songfathers tell.
But Lutha shook her head at me, crying angrily, saying well, no, not the Holy Grail. But Leelson had found the Sword of Salibar, and the Gem of Adalpi. And there was that business about his fetching home the Lost King of Kamir. Well, we knew what came of that!