Ardor on Aros (14 page)

 Pro Thoris answered the door: “You weren’t supposed to come through the shop, barbarian!” he snapped, but by then it was a joke, a pet name, and I grinned.

“How else?”

He shook his head. “American must be about the size of a sword scabbard! This building goes all the way through the block, couldn’t you tell? My home faces on the other street.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling jubilant, and I smiled and walked off.

“Ardor—”

I went around the block and then realized I hadn’t counted buildings. I was just going to knock on a strange door and ask which house was Pro Thoris’ when the door to the adjacent house opened. “Over here, you stupid barbarian!”

“You certainly talk snotty to a strong young Guildsman, you old tin-tinkerer.” He was that kind of man; every now and then you meet a person who is real, who exists as he is rather than within and behind a mask or three, and within a few minutes you’ve been old friends for twenty years.

“I would demonstrate to you my ability with a sword,” he growled, “but I would be likely to forget myself and use it on your backside, which would be unseemly for both of us.”

“Talk talk talk. Where is the loveliest girl in Brynda?”

“In the kitchen. You think I have servants? You think she lives a life of leisure? She keeps house, cooks, and helps in the business.”

I turned around and cocked an eye at him. “And what are you going to do when I take her away from you?”

Those melted-chocolate eyes studied me for a moment. Then: “Have you considered giving up your violent life of the sword and becoming an apprentice silversmith?”

It was my turn to study his face. Perfectly open; almost an ingenuous face in the honesty and straight-forwardness of its expression. I shook my head. “I have no artist in me, Thoris, and not craftsman either. Think about it. You’d better either consider a housekeeper, a slave, or a remarriage. Say, do you know Mama Selapah?”

He didn’t bother to answer, merely nodding to a short, too-low couch covered with an intricately-worked drape; it reminded me of the Islamic countries of Earth. I wondered if there was one single flaw, the deliberate mistake made because only Allah is perfect. I sat. The wine pitcher and goblets were before me. Goblets. Sunday-best! Unfinished.

“You explained?”

“What? To whom?”

“Don’t play that sweet innocent game with me, prince of silversmiths! You know what, and to whom.”

He smiled, we nodded at each other across the brims of our goblets, and he drank. I waited. I didn’t want to interrupt between question and answer by having to make some pleasant comment about the wine.

“I explained.”

I waited. Then: “You’re going to make me ask. All right. I ask. And—”

He shrugged. “Women are women, and girls are girls, but their minds are unreadable as the stars,” he said, which is better in Arone, since it rhymes and scans.

I was full of advice and thoughts and vinegar, and I barely contained myself until Dejah Thois appeared to announce dinner. Yes, she still looked like Her; even better, now, with her face clean and her hair kempt and coiffed. She filled to perfection a loose gown of sky blue, girt with a white sash whose ends fell past her knees. The hem caressed her feet, which were bare.

I depositied my goblet, rose quickly, and went straight to her.

“Dejah Thoris: I apologize profusely to the comeliest girl in all Brynda for the barbaric ignorance of a stranger here, and I lay claim to Julan within the period of the nearer moon.”

She stared at me. Those large, long eyes were at first wide, then slowly narrowing, as her mouth widened just as slowly into a smile.

“I didn’t know you could speak so prettily,” she said. “And I see that you’ve been about learning our customs, but it’s ‘within the period of the
biggest
moon.’”

Oops; I had accidentally performed a mental translation of the ritual phrase I had just learned. “Within the period of the biggest moon,” I said quickly, and smiled, and her smile went wider and there was life and electricity or stars or something in her eyes; whatever it is that makes them seem to sparkle with inner lights.

She bowed her head. “I renew offer to my savior,” she said, which was also ritual, and then she looked up and added, “But you haven’t even seen all the girls in Brynda.” Which was not ritual, but really is, in a way, on Earth as it is on Aros. It’s an ancient ritual performed by a woman who’s had one compliment and would like another: it’s called fishin’.

“Time for that later,” I said.

“Good then,” Pro Thoris said just behind me. “Then let’s eat, and we can take our time, and you can drink a lot, since you’ll be spending the night.”

Which I admit weakened my knees somewhat and played absolute hell with my appetite, even if the food was good. I admit to some (stupid) embarassment.

Out there on the desert, immediately after I’d got her away from that Vardor, would have been one think: spontaneous. Here it was another matter. There sat daddy, and there sat the lovely, bosomy girl with whom I was going to spend the night, and it was…different. The spontaneity was gone, and he’d be here, probably in the next room and suddenly I was drinking first wine and then the after-dinner distilled wine of Azulthade—brandy, and good—and wondering if I would embarrass myself with a bad case of psychic impotence.

After one brandy in the living room Pro Thoris came suddenly to his feet. “I’ll have to hurry—you should have reminded me, Dejah. It’s Farsday, and I’m going to be late. Rethah will be beside herself.” He left the room, returning almost at once with a lot of dark blue cloak.

“Uh—pardon me…but who’s Rethah?”

“Father’s mistress,” Dejah Thoris said, as if it were a stupid question.

Pro Thoris paused at the door to glance back: “My
Farsday
mistress, girl; don’t demean me before the barbarian!” And he winked and left. A moment later the door reopened and his head appeared, black and white and bald. “May Krotis smile and Thahara frown,” he said, grinning, rolling his eyes from me to Dejah, and then he was gone.

This time he stayed gone, and I wondered what Rethah looked like. For that matter, I wondered what his Sajaday mistress looked like—and if he had one for every other night in the week.

It was That Time, and he who hesistates is lost, and so on, and I had received advice and coaching aplenty from my three fellow-denizens of Mama Selapah’s. Not without some trepidation, I stood and crossed to her. I drew her up from her couch; she came willingly.

“You are beautiful, Thorisan Dejah.”

She smiled a quiet, closed-mouth smile. It was irresistible; her lips were irresistible. I kissed her, and quickly learned not only that the custom exists on Aros, but that Dejah knew quite well how to perform it. Our hands tightened about each other gradually, mine moving, moving, stroking her through the soft, rather filmy fabric of her gown. I was very aware of a large amount of soft but shockingly firm bosom pressing into me, someplace between my chest and stomach.

After awhile her hand went back, found mine. She twined our fingers, then turned, and allowed myself to be led into a room I had not previously entered: hers. It was soft and lovely and dim, only partially illuminated by the light filtered in from the living room. I still had her hand, and I pulled her back to me, against me. My hands moved lightly over the flare of her hips and the sudden inrushing tininess of her waist, up over the swell of her ribcage and then I was cupping, carefully and tenderly, the softness of her breasts through her gown.

The mounds within the fabric were stiff-tipped, those tips stiffened still more as I greeted them with my fingertips. Her eyes were closed, her head thrown back, and her hands, too, were moving. I am not sure how, or how long it took: not long. We undressed each other. We did it as if we had known each other for years, as if we’d been doing this for years. Then, holding her, I moved forward, and she backed the few short steps to her pastel-covered, pillow-strewn bed. The soft pillows and spread caressed us as we twined, but their caress was no softer than her hands on me. I stroked her arms, her flanks, her breasts, and over the smooth little mound of her belly. My hand slipped lower, rubbing and exploring. Her mouth drifted open, her eyes closed. Her thighs seemed to part without motion. Her hands were on me, on my shoulders, on my back, pulling, pulling as she writhed. We caressed each other’s lips, moving and caressing all the while, and then our lips could no longer caress but sought to crush and bite and enter, teeth and tongues entering strongly into the action. Her legs had drifted further and further open, until I lay between them, and it was necessary to move forward only a little.

I moved forward a little, and eventually a good deal further, and I have absolutely no intention of giving you a free ride with any further talk of Dejah and me and that first time.

I spent the night, and we enjoyed each other again in the morning, and I left, without knowing whether Thoris returned or not.

When I returned just after noon the shop was padlocked and they were gone.

“Thoris and his sexy daughter? You ought to know, Guildsman! Guildchief Shayhara’s personal squadders came and took them both away. Can’t you see the seal on the door?”

I stared at the man, the proprietor of a curio shop across the narrow street from the Thoris shop. “Whaaat? What
for?
”

He shrugged, raising two hands, palms up. “The Guildchief doesn’t confide in me, Guildsman. Doesn’t he in you?”

I’m afraid I acted pretty much like a uniformed snot: I bent down and got a nice handful of his tunic and pulled him up from his tailor’s squat before his shop door. His eyeballs threatened to pop forth and clutter his round little cheeks.

“No,” I snarled, “he doesn’t, and you’d be better advised to keep your nasty little tongue still!” Then I realized he was staring
past
me, not at me. I swung around—just in time to get a facefull of flapping green wings as my peregrinating parrot returned, backflapping to touch down on my shoulder.

“Hey, Hank!”

“Hey yourself, Bighead!”

“The bird talks—you answer—you are the foreigner Ardor?”

I turned back to face the man whose tunic I still grasped. I nodded. “I am. What about it?”

“I apologize for my tone to you, Ardor! You’re the man rescued Pro’s daughter from the perfidious Vardors. There’s not a man in Brynda doesn’t love both of them, especially Dejah!” He shook his head with a reminiscent sigh. Then his eyes widened again, probably seeing something in mine I didn’t know was there. “You must know she transacts much of his business outside the shop—he never leaves except at night, that great lover Pro Thoris! Think of our pleasure in
watching
her; think of every man’s regard for you for saving her, and our envy of you, after last night.”

“What happened last night?”

He smiled. “Julan!”

And without even a morning newspaper or Paul Harvey! News is news, and it travels, no matter what the communications situation!

I released him, apologized—admittedly brusquely—and asked him again what he knew of the arrest of Pro and Dejah Thoris.

He shook his head. “I don’t. There are rumors. Listen, let me call inside to my worthless daughter, who will mind the shop—badly—while I take you to meet Lalaikah. She knows everything.”

He did, the chubby little fellow, and I followed his rapid little footsteps down the street—exchanging greetings constantly—and around the corner and along another street and into a dingy old place whose whitewash was peeling.

The room was dim, the incense strong, the candles smoking to make the eyes water. The furniture and once-elegant draperies and once-rich rug were old, very old and fading. And so was the woman who sat in the center of the carpet, tailor-fashion as my guide had sat. I think; she was covered from just beneath the chin in black, a tentlike dress that flowed down to lie in ripples on the carpet about her. It left bare no part of her save her head. The head was long of chin, sparse of hair, gaunt and fine-etched with so many wrinkles it resembled a piece of paper wadded angrily into a ball and then straightened. And she was nearly as pale. Her eyes were keen, though, and seemingly younger than her face. Her voice was a firm, throaty alto, shockingly deep.

She was Lalaikah, formerly jadiriyah to the temple and now a has-been, forbidden to leave her street and her house after dark on pain of death from the Guild that had supplanted her.

“You bring a Guildsman here, Nammis? You are old and senile before your time!” And she stared at me with unsheathing contempt and hate.

“A man in a Guildsman’s uniform, Jadiriyah,” I said, quietly and with a tone of respect. “If I were differently clothed, you wouldn’t stare at me in hate. I am Hank Ardor, I am a foreigner, and—”

“Ah. And Nammis has brought you here to learn why the Guildchief arrested your paramour, eh? No, no—don’t dare to correct
me,
Hank Ardor of Earth! I know well that you were but offered and accepted—belatedly—Julan with Thorisan Dejah. But my word is correct—for already the skeins of your life tapestry and hers are interwoven, and the knots binding them are lover’s knots. And that creature on your shoulder: if you will leave him with me, I will teach him our language within a day. Don’t trouble to relay my words to him; I have already spoken to him in his mind.”

And Pope Borgia lifted easily into the air from my shoulder, flapped a couple of times, and soared to the black-clad and narrow shoulder of the old woman on the rug. “She’s OK, Hank!”

“Nammis: return to your shop before your giddy daughter sells the place for enough dowry to tempt a man who would flee from her scrawniness,” Lalaikah said. Nammis, with a little head-bob of respect, departed. I glanced about, then hunkered down, squatting to face Lalaikah so she would not have to crack her neck looking up at me. I wondered if she ever rose form this rug, from this place, the precise intersecting point of the beautiful old rug’s complicated pattern.

“You called me Hank Ardor of Earth,” I said.

“Of course. How silly to call yourself ‘of America’! You think too small, Hank Ardor. Your world should have outgrown nationalism; this world has barely discovered it. Yes, I know of you. Knew when you came here. It is in the carpet.”

I looked at the rug. She chuckled. Naturally I saw nothing to read, and certainly I’d no idea of where to find me in its many colors and vermiform pattern and tiny intersticings of varicolored skeins.

“Then you must know
where
this is, why I am constantly dizzy with the mystery and the inconsistencies of this place.”

The thin, thin head nodded. “I know. But is for you to learn. You have clues aplenty, but I will add this one: Aphrodite is the goddess of love, and Eros, too, means love and thus is connected with the goddess and Aros is simply Eros respelled, is it not? But wait: don’t speak. Save it. Your feet are on the road that leads to your destiny. You came to ask of Dejah Thoris—how easily you men forget, even when you tell yourselves you are ‘in love,’ whatever idiocy that phrase may convey to your superstitious and romantic little mind! Listen.”

I listened. I had no intention of doing anything else. This seemingly-bodiless old woman topped any mystery I had yet encountered on Aros/Eros (/Aprhodite?).

“The jadiriyah Sahyharasan Solah is a bitch,” she said. “Think about it. Her father is master of Brynda, and very nearly master of Itza and Rizathade as well. That would be enough for a spoiled and willful only child, and a daughter at that—and worse, a well-favored one. Physically, I mean. Her mind is a collection of spiderwebs and cess and cicatrices festering. I know what it is to be young and lovely and desirable, and powerful, and sickeningly spoiled, Hank Ardor. I have lived there.” She laughed. Her teeth were gleaming white, although a bit too much of them showed as her gums withdrew from them with her age.

“Oh yes. I am over a hundred years old. Try to see what this face was, once, and you will know I cannot be bothered to lie. Now. Her station as Shayhara’s daughter, as I said, is quite enough to make a girl a predatory serpent—but Solah is also blessed with the power of the ring. She is a jadiriyah, a sorceress—on your Earth, a witch. As I was, and, though Shayhara knows it not, still am.” Her jaw tightened, then: “Although the powers left me, since he confiscated my ring and set it on his daughter’s hand, are childish trifles. But still”—she smiled—“they transcend any power she might have without that ring, the ring you gave her, in your idiot’s ignorance. No wait: don’t say it. I know, I know. You have been a man in the dark, a man blind since you arrived here, naked and baffled. Well

“All unwittingly you insulted Her Bitchiness, the beloved term by which we call the Jadiriyah of Brynda. In the same way you insulted Thorisan Dejah, but an honest explanation sufficed to mollify both her father and herself. Not difficult, particularly in view of the fact that you wear the face of her dreams and she was all wet and trembly the moment she saw you.”

“I wear—”

She smiled again. “Yes. Isn’t that interesting—and she has the face of
your
dreams. Well, such things happen, upon occasion. But I assure you of this: Solah will listen to no explanations. Nor will her father, who is completely dominated by her. Yes. The master of Brynda, the chief of all warriors—clay in the clutching hands of his daughter. Is there aught so unusual in that—certainly it is not uncommon where you come from, and most particularly in your own little section of that place, America. Of
course
she was torn and sore when you found her, and bleeding too. Of
course
she desired no further tumbled. But she offered, ritually. And though you were nice enough about it, you refused—and
you did not refuse ritually.
Had you done so you would be favored of Shayhara, and probably wear Commander’s stripes or more. As it is, Shayhara learned only this morning that you were in the Guild. A problem, but it stands you well: you’d have been killed as Hank Ardor. As Guildsman First Hank Ardoris you have certain rights.”

“I want to know what they are, Jadiriyah,” I told her. “But—what of Dejah and her father?”

One bony shoulder rose in a shrug; the parrot teetered and made a nasty noise. Her head swiveled slowly and their eyes met and he looked away. More sorcery: a parrot is as hard to stare down as a cat. Certainly I’ve never succeeded.

She looked back at me. “The incense bothers you? The smoke?”

I shook my head.

“Incredible. You tell the truth when it might hurt you and you lie to avoid hurting someone else! I would like to go and live among your people, just to see and listen to them. How strange they all must be! But your question: Solah has whispered sweet evils in her father’s ear. His agents searched for you. Learned that you had been accepted into the Guild, that you lodge at Selapah’s. But you were not there, and they learned where you were last night. The reported to the Guildmaster as soon as he arose this morning. Perhaps his daughter was present, perhaps not, perhaps she had agents there. She has her own agents, you see, even among her father’s agents and personal squad. But immediately the squadders were sent to arrest Thoris and daughter.”

“Because of me.”

“This smoke and stinkstuff is getting me dizzy, Hank,” the parrot complained. I relayed his words to Lalaikah, and there was silence, as he looked sharply at her and seemed to be listening. Then he flew over and clutched a damper in his claws and in five tries put out all three candles. Next he closed the trapdoor lid on the censer. And he flew back to her shoulder.

“He hears me in his mind, and he obeys nicely,” Lalaikah said. “He is a very intelligent bird.” She was silent a moment, and he snapped his head to stare at her, then preened.

“Yes, Hank Ardor, because of you. You wronged Solah, which is worse than spitting on the Queen of Inglund.” She frowned. “
England,
” she corrected meticulously.

“You know my thoughts!”

A shrug: “Of course. Solah learned you were in Brynda, that you were friend of Thoris and spent the night with his daughter. So she has had them arrested. You will have several choices now.” She hesitated; I waited; she smiled. “A good trait, though dangerous with a woman: we like our little moments of drama, and want you to ask ‘Ah? What are they? and the like. But here are your choices:

“You can flee Brynda.”

“I will not.”

“Of course not. That would be the sensible action, and you are a man, and an unduly romantic one. You’ve read far too many books, Hank Ardor. Life might well be simpler for you had both you and Evelyn Shay read less. Well, then, here’s another choice: you could try to free Thoris and Thorisan Dejah by force. Ah, I see that appeals to you, you poor ass of a man!”

“Jadiriyah: it is cowardly of one who is gifted with both powers and the wisdom of ages to play name-calling with a young man with a normal brain and a little muscle.”

She gazed at me, then laughed. “Which is why Pro Thoris thinks so highly of you—you rapped him, I wager, just as firmly. You are right, and I have no need to aggrandize myself by smiting you with words. Nor does it become me. No one should call one names but oneself, eh?”

I was silent. She as silent; finally I decided to shelve that exchange by returning to business: “Is it possible?”

She shook her head. “Of course not. If you commanded a thousand Guildsman, protectors all, you could not free them by force.”

“In that case I hope there are more choices.”

“There are. Now listen. I am going to speak in your mind, and your friend here will hear also. I will call him Pope Borgia, not Bighead. I’ve no proof he deserves such a title. It means someone very brainy here, you know. We might call Sorah ‘Bighead.’”

There was not a movement in that incense-creeping room, and not a sound. But we listened.

Oh. She looked like my grandmother, by the way.