She turned to the other veiled figure and asked, “Is that so? Are you truly told so little?”
“It’s true,” grunted the other. “It’s hardbread and tea, work until noon, soup and hardbread and work until sundown. That’s life on Newholme.”
“It sounds hard,” said Gandro Bao.
“But satisfying,” said Mouche with a grim look at Ornery. “We are content with our lot.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Ornery.
Mouche took a deep breath and spoke directly to Bao. “You ladies are not veiled. Sometimes we who are veiled find working in such conditions troublesome and itchy. Sometimes we get irritable, as my friend is now. He is a good friend, however. I do not want to lose him as my friend. Please, do not say to anyone that my friend was anything less than accommodating to your needs.”
The four stood staring at one another, open interest on the one side and veiled frustration on the other. With some vague idea of clarifying things, Ellin asked, “Will you take down your veils for us? Just for a moment.”
Ornery and Mouche looked at one another, surprised, Mouche more shocked than Ornery, who had gone long times without veils on the ship.
“Please,” begged Ellin. “We will not mention it to anyone, but we need to discover things about this world, and so much of it is hidden behind … veils.”
“You are not getting into trouble over it,” said Bao. “We are discovering all kinds of things, as Ellin says.”
Well, they had been told to be polite! Though Mouche would have preferred not to display his battered countenance, he did so, with a quick glance around to be sure they were unobserved. The veil dropped at one side, and as it did so Mouche saw in his mind what he would have seen in a mirror, more or less what his interlocutors would see, and it struck him that he and the woman confronting him could have been kin. They had the same coloring. Same bones. Same long, thin hands. Only one of them was badly cut, of course.
Ellin and Bao searched the exposed face before them: ivory skin, a lock of pale hair showing under the cowl, dark brows, green eyes, a spatter of pale beard shadowing mouth and chin, and a new, horrid scar from beneath the left eye to the corner of the mouth. It seemed to be healing cleanly, but the flesh around it was livid and puffed. If it had not been for that, it would have been a handsome though, at the moment, rather furtive face.
“Why do you have to wear the veil?” Ellin asked.
“So as not to stir your insatiable lusts, lady,” said Ornery in a slightly ironic voice, lowering his own veil to display a countenance tanned by the sea winds and the sun.
Ellin managed to look both amused and offended. “My what?”
“Your insatiable lusts,” murmured Mouche. “So we are taught as children.”
“At the moment, I have none,” Ellin said. “Have you noticed that I have insatiable lusts, Gandro—ah, Gandra Bao?”
“I am seeing nothing of that kind, no,” he said, bowing slightly in her direction. “Perhaps, to be helping us, this gentleman will be explaining?”
Mouche leaned on his rake, examining their faces for guile. “Women are easily moved to lust,” he said at last, believing them to be truly interested. “It is part of their biological heritage, which is so very valuable to mankind. Their lusts serve their lineage, of course, since it forces them to bear and tend, which otherwise many would reject as uninteresting. Also, any child they bear is unequivocally their own, and the more males each female can associate herself with, the more likely she has links to survival. This is all sensible and correct as a survival technique, and women’s instincts still thrust in that direction.
“Historically, so we are taught, the same was true for males. They also desire survival, and through the designs and desires imposed on them by their own genetic pattern, wish more than anything to guarantee their own posterity. We are taught how great predator cats kill cubs not their own. Other creatures also do this, including sometimes mankind males, who take up with a woman with children, then kill her children. Males want above all to guarantee their own line. So, in order that men have surety of their lineage and women not be lured into mismothering, men must not stir their lusts.”