As it turned out, Murra wasn’t even in the house he’d left her in (that one hardly more than a tent), because while Blundy was out with the flocks the building boom had reached its peak. Most of the constructions of the year before, that winter ice had crushed and spring floods had washed away entirely, had now been replaced. Now they had a real house, he discovered. Murra had moved their things into it while he was out with the sheep. It was smallish but spanking new, all their own; and of course Murra was waiting in it for him, because she always was.
What she was waiting for was to be kissed. He obliged her, wondering why a kiss seemed so much like a political statement, but she had no such reservations. She pressed herself against him as they kissed, confident she was welcomed.
In a certain sense she was; Blundy could feel his body confirming it. Whatever Blundy’s thoughts felt about his wife, his body found her powerfully attractive. Murra was a handsome woman: tall, ten centimeters taller than Blundy himself. She was big-boned and not exactly pretty, but very close to beautiful. Murra had a kind of Oriental cast to her face, with long, black hair and blue eyes, and when she moved it was with studied grace.
More than any of that, she was Blundy’s. She proclaimed it in everything she did. She was totally supportive of him in everything he chose to do, and let that fact be known to everyone. She had a soft, cultivated, well-articulated voice; for Blundy it was her best feature, and the one that made her the exact right choice to appear in his vid productions.
All in all, she was ideal for him. He accepted that fact. It was an annoyance that he didn’t always enjoy it.
When they had finished their kiss she didn’t release him but comfortably and whispered the latest bits of news against his lips to bring him up to date. “They’re starting up the shuttles,” she told him. “Ten-month infant mortality figures are up a little-around eleven point three per cent-but that’s still in the normal range. I hope you like your new house; I only finished moving things in last week. And, oh, yes, the Fezguth-Mokorris have broken up, he’s taken up with some two-year-old and Miwa simply can’t stand it.”
She sounded proud. Blundy recognized the tone, because he knew what the pride came from. Both Kilowar Miwa Fezguth and Murra were among the few who could call themselves successful winter wives, the envied kind who had managed to keep their marriages going all through the cramped, everybody-in-everybody’s-pocket months and months of the interminable winter. But Murra’s pride was double now, because, of the two of them, it now transpired that only Murra had managed to stay married through the spring. “I feel so sorry for her,” she added generously, smug in her own security. “They say if you can make it as a winter wife you can make it forever, but I guess they showed that isn’t true for everybody. Just the lucky ones like us,” she finished with pride.
“Yes,” he said, separating himself from her at last.
She gazed at him fondly. “And do you like what I’ve done with your new house?”
“Of course. Are they all in working condition?” Blundy asked, and she looked puzzled until she realized he meant the shuttles.
“Oh, I think so. They’ve been kept in a good, sheltered valley ever since the last ship came. Of course, the ice covered them every year, but the roof held.” She smiled at him affectionately. “Don’t worry, they’ll be ready to go by the time the ship gets here. And it’ll be warmspring by then-a good time to come here, don’t you think? Are you going to write something about it?”
Since Blundy was used to his wife’s uncanny ability to read his mind-though he was certain he’d never said anything to her about his plans-he didn’t blink at that. “I’ve been thinking about it, yes.”
“I thought you might. Of course, you know best, dear, but isn’t that sort of depressing subject?”
“Tragic,” he corrected her. “That’s where real drama is, after all, and I’m tired of writing all this light stuff to keep people quiet during the winter.”
“I see. So you’ll want to go up to the ship right away, won’t you? Don’t deny it, dear; who knows you as well as I do? And of course you should.”
He didn’t deny it. He’d already decided to put his application in, and with his standing in the community there was every chance the governor’s council would approve it. He had even told Murra when he’d done it. What he hadn’t told her was who he proposed to take with him on that first mission to the starship, and so he was surprised when, without a break, she went on:
“And how was Petoyne?”
Blundy misunderstood her on purpose. “She’s fine. She got away with it again.”
“No, of course she got away with it,” Murra said, tolerant and sweet, and not in the least interested with the fact that once more Petoyne had escaped with her life, “or you would have said something right away. That’s not what I mean. I mean how was she in bed?”
He glared at her. “For God’s sake, Murra, she isn’t even one yet!”
“I know,” Murra agreed, her tone interested and a little amused. “Isn’t it funny how men always like the very young ones? Is it because they’re so skinny? Or so ignorant and unexperienced? Please don’t be embarrassed to talk about it with me, Blundy. I’ve never been jealous, have I? And you know we always tell each other things like that.” She smiled. “In pillow talk,” she added, “because, do you realize, you haven’t even looked at your new house yet? Not even at the new bed I just put in.” And he knew what to do then, and wondered when it had begun to be a chore.
.5e
There were times while they were making love when Blundy’s body managed to make Blundy’s mind forget the fact that Murra was really a royal pain in the ass. At those times he pretty much forgot to think about anything at all, because Murra in bed was not at all like the Murra who let herself be viewed as she sat, perfumed, enrobed and regal, in her reception room. In sexual intercourse she was wild. She screamed and scratched, and she writhed and squeezed; she was everything any man dreamed of in the arts of intercourse. None of it was inadvertent, either. That had been of the most disillusioning of Blundy’s slow discoveries about the woman he had married. It was all rehearsed. Murra made love by script, her skills quickly and thoroughly learned. “A lady in the drawing room, a harlot in bed,” she said of herself, in that pillow talk that meant so much to her, and she had herself perfectly right.
But then, when they had sufficiently worn each other out, she naturally had to spoil it all by talking.
“I wrote you a poem, my love,” she told him, serene again if sweaty. “Would you like to hear it?”
“Of course,” he of course said, but hardly listened as she pulled her notebook out of the nightstand and sat naked and crosslegged at the foot of the bed, reading. The poem was a typically long one. It had to do with ancient shepherds and the loving lasses they had left behind them, and it was full of graceful little turns of phrase and unexpected rhymes, but he didn’t really listen. He was studying her. He observed, as though for the first time, that his wife had a wide-browed face that tapered to the chin, with large, pale blue eyes and the kind of bobbed hair that is usually seen in pictures of medieval squires. She smiled a lot as she read-faintly, enigmatically, frequently. It occurred to Blundy that Murra’s smiles didn’t seem to be related to anything she found humorous, only to an inner confidence that whatever happened next was bound to be nice.
She didn’t ask him if he liked the poem when she was done, she only sat there, regarding him with that smiling self-confidence. So naturally he said, “It’s a fine poem, Murra. Your poems are always fine.”
She nodded graciously. “Thank you, Bludy, but what about you? Did you write anything while you were away?” That was the naked question he had known she would ask, so much an offense to hear. He shook his head. “Not even a political manifesto?” He shook his head again, resentfully now. Murra didn’t let that put her off. She laughed, the silvery, loving, forgiving laugh that he had heard so often. “Oh, Blundy, what am I going to do with you? You don’t write anything but puppet shows all winter because you need to be alone in order to do anything serious. Then you don’t write anything at all when you’re out in the boonies with all the room in the world because- Well, I don’t know what the because is there, do I? Maybe then you’re not alone enough out there, are you, with that pretty little Petoyne there to distract you?”