The Enemy of My Enemy (8 page)

“Oh, yes. Still quite safe, one need not hope.”

Something of the heat had begun to pass from the later afternoon air. The groups of spectators broke up, walked to and fro, formed into other groups, gradually dispersed. And still the two stood where they had stood, leaning each one upon his T-stave, talking in tones no less intent for being quiet. And at length even they turned and tucked their staves and slowly walked back to the great bulk of Green-glades, greener — beneath its clustering of thick-growing vines — than the robes of either. They had mounted the low rise just before the ramp when one of them stopped and took a bit of the other’s sleeve between his thumb and his forefinger.

“One moment more, my sister’s sib … .”

“Certainly … ? my brother’s get … .”

“In all our talk of those men long-known and familiar to us, let us not forget the newly re-arrived. Exiles need not necessarily assume their fathers’ and grandfathers’ allegiances. Do you follow? So. And there is this, too, that their former lives abroad have served to whet their wits and sharpen their — ”

The other nodded, once, twice, quickly.

“Yes. There
is
that. Toys or not. Let us indeed not forget it.”

They walked their separate ways into the house.

• • •

Tonorosant and Sarlamat stood looking over the railing of Tonorosant’s new house at the swift-flowing river where the water purled among the grasses of the shallows. Not far below, it curved and vanished among clumps of furry saplings and beneath overhanging branches of huge-boled trees. A water-wander flipped and dipped after sprats in the eddy, sending scattered drops to pierce the pattern of the ripples. Now and then came a sound of wooden bowls clattering from the kitchen, almost instantly hushed by the soft-voiced and soft-footed Pemathi house servants. Aside from this, the sound of the water, and an occasional flash of bird song, all was silence.

Tonorosant sighed and breathed deeply. “I hope that no one is ever bored with this,” he said. “The river … . A whole new, clean, vivid, sweet, wonderful world. The river at Old Port was an open sewer, it didn’t even have tide enough to keep it clean. I saw the body of an infant floating there once, I remember. Came back a week later, it was still there.” He grimaced, shook his head and shoulders. Then he turned to his friend.

“How is your new lady?”

Hob Sarlamat smiled, the lines about his full mouth deepening. “She is well, she is wonderful. We are good friends, very good ones. She now accepts the fact that I don’t and never will paint leaves well, and of course blames it on my foreign upbringing. And I of course don’t bother to explain that I simply have no interest in painting leaves. Some things sink in more than others, I suppose. But I am in no hurry to leave, you can understand.”

“I do, I must hope,” said Tonorosant, who had been Jerred Northi. And, in a way, still was. “Atoral is coming for supper and she will stay the night.”

Sarlamat murmured, How nice. He smiled again. He made no move to leave.

“ — And. I don’t know if you were informed … ” Tonorosant knew, in fact, almost nothing of the subtle means whereby Hob was kept informed. “ … but I have paid the last amount. To the Craftsmen, I mean. I now own myself.” It was his turn to smile. He saw his face reflected in a little pool below. It was a well-made face, in more senses than one, and he liked it not the least because it lacked a certain pinched, bitter look which the face of Jerred Northi had been sometimes wont to have. He admired in a detached way the line of the upper eyelids, in between acanthic and epicanthic, and the way the green of the iris took on a deeper green from the water.

“Congratulations,” Sarlamat said, in his low, slow, unhurried voice. “ ‘On owning yourself,’ I mean. It was a good stroke of business, wouldn’t you agree? Yes … you no longer need me. You haven’t for quite some time now. As far as that’s concerned I could leave. But … I rather like it here, do you know,” he smiled. “And in addition to everything else, there’s my new lady. So I am in no hurry.”

His friend disclaimed any desire that he should ever be in any hurry to leave. Somehow the talk fell upon the subject of “foreign toys,” as the Tarnisi had from the first chosen to call them. There were the water sleds which had set at least half of the younger male Tarnisi skimming and darting over rivers and lakes. The great, kite-shaped gliders which had made so great and so unexpected an appeal to the older members of the community, with their slow, silent, majestic soarings and swoopings, rich — it turned out — in philosophical over- and undertones. The coiffures, available in at least a hundred different models, undistinguishable by touch and sight from natural hair, which released the mature and elder matrons from the hours of tedious setting and waiting previously required to procure the results demanded by inflexible and unchanging tradition which had almost the force of law. And all the others … .

And still it passed off without difficulty as a mere hobby of Tonorosant’s, he helping to gratify the curiosity of his fellow-elite with foreign-acquired acumen. The stigma of commerce was not present. The open work of importation was arranged by his Pemathi clerk and distribution carried on between the latter and the clerks and stewards or other upper servants of the Tarnisi interested. Openly, the once Jerred Northi never touched money. No one insulted him by asking a price, he insulted no one by naming it. In all probability, no one but the Pemathi under-class was even aware that he was making money. The mind of aristocratic Tarnis was simply not attuned to thinking along such lines. The Pemathi, of course, knew. They had the task of paying out their master’s money, after all. Which made them, likely, the most pleased of all; for it was a firm principle of their homeland’s that “money must melt.” And it melted a little in every pair of pale, red-haired, often freckled hands … to freeze up again until it should be time to retire to Pemath and melt (or at least thaw) all over again.

Meanwhile, in several various foreign fiscals, Tonorosant’s personal (and exceedingly private!) accounts went on to grow and proliferate in a most satisfactory manner.

Atoral came and dined and stayed the night and her lover wondered again about the Tarnisi prejudice against early marriage … “early” being anything before the middle thirties. In general it had, he supposed, the virtue of keeping down the numbers of the Tarnisi population, although certainly sophisticated methods of doing so were not only known but utilized … as, for example, by Atoral. Prejudice, again, tended to disallow its use within the marital structure. And in particular it enabled him, Tonorosant, to enjoy the pleasures and benefits of the liaison without worrying about the entanglements of marriage. Which could become very entangled indeed. His genes had not been changed by the processes he had undergone at the hands of the Craftsmen. Such change was possible, or had at least once been possible. But Orinel was not a world in which the fullness of the possible had ever been used to flourish. Tarnisi reaction to his fathering obviously only half-Tarnisi children would be unfavorable, to say the least. It would not only be infinitely unwise for himself, it would be infinitely unfair to both the woman and the child. He recollected with distaste the incident he had been told about of the “Quasi” who had tried to pass as pure Tarnisi that day at Yellowtrees … and all the incredibly ugly talk about such wretched creatures which from time to time cropped up in conversation. And then there was the merely emotional matter of his becoming over-involved with Tarnisi life at all.

No, no. Better to remain disengaged as most he might, and then, when he judged it best, slip out and slip away and simply never return, leaving behind him nothing deeper than perhaps casual wonder.

Meanwhile, if Atoral had accepted wonderingly certain aspects of physical lovemaking which Tonorosant had not learned in Tarnis, it was his part to accept with perhaps less wonder but no less appreciation certain aspects which she had certainly learned nowhere else. The chamber still odorous of the fresh-worked and fragrant wood, her body unworn and pliant in his arms, her voice joyously astonished in his ears, her hands sincere and deft upon his skin, were all quite and excellently different from either the stews of Pemath Old Port or the fancier brothels of the New Port or the either bluntly commercial or rough liaisons he had had elsewhere. There was no striving without desire on either his part or hers, no mere sufferance by her, no mere seeking outlet and relief by him. Repetition did not satiate either before the other and both were spared the near-Hell into which near-Heaven may so easily turn or be turned when appetite and its quest is all one-sided.

The deadly words,
You think only of your own pleasure
, had never passed in voice or thought between them.

They arose and walked about the grounds in the coolness of the dawn and the dew. His tentative identification of certain plants amused her, his absolute ignorance of some several others dismayed her. “Exile must be quite dreadful,” she said, her humor passing into genuine feeling.

“It is … .”

“To have no home, no family, no scenes so necessary that they cannot be done without — I can’t know how that might be.”

“No,” he said, a bitter, sombre note penetrating his thought and voice. “You can’t. Be glad.”

She bent to touch a flower and watch the drops of mist distill down its petals. Her face in profile seemed incredibly delicate and young. And lovely, too. He bent and touched her lip, her cheek.

“Oh, stay today. You will, I must hope?”

She smiled gently, but was so firm that regret could not enter. “Not be present at the tulsa-festival of my aunt’s youngest daughter? You aren’t serious, I must hope. One reaches puberty only once, you know. I remember my own … . I would ask you, you know, but we haven’t been lovers quite long enough. But I’ll return tonight. Will I be welcome?”

He spent the morning going over accounts with Idór uDan, his ostensible personal steward but actual executive vice-president. Long familiarity with the Pemathi mind and method made it unnecessary for him to reveal that he knew both chopchop and the actual language; the figures in the records and a very few words sufficed them both — and sometimes only a look, a clearing of the throat, a tap of the finger was sufficient. It was far from likely that Idór uDan believed that his employer’s interests in “foreign toys” constituted no more than a hobby. There was no cause for concern. ‘Dan was in Tarnis for the exact same purpose as his master: the “pure and disinterested desire” of making money: and would keep silence all the days of his life for the sake of ten tickys … let alone the hundreds of units which the matter would bring him. A passenger by grace and favor alone, he was not one to risk rocking the boat.

It was after a lunch eaten leisurely on the front slope of his house, dressed with brief, flitting, recurrent memories of dirty three-dish dining rooms, that he had changed his clothes with the intention of taking the prescribed two turns around his grounds. The upper house-boy appeared and, bowing silently, held out to him a T-stave with something bright wound about the crutch of it. The silver shoulder loop and crest of formal-most attire. This was high courtesy indeed: for every-day formality was abundantly satisfied with a rectangular card on which the crest was enprinted. He looked at the servant. “Guardian Othofarinal,” the man whispered. Tonorosant reflected a moment. Then he removed it. This was in effect an invitation for the owner to enter, for, according to ceremonial theory, he could not proceed away without it. One was in effect compelling him to enter. The servant bowed again and made to withdraw.

“Wait.” Tonorosant went into his cabinet room and removed from the wall chest the small inlaid box containing his own silver shoulder loop and crest. Returning, he wound this around the crutch of the T-stave, gestured the servant to present it to the caller. This was a double invitation to enter, implying as it did that the master of the house deprived himself of the possibility of leaving it unless he who received it returned it … by his own hand, of course. Then he withdrew to change into formal dress: robe, ruff, hood, gloves; and when the servant returned with the Guardian, he, Tonorosant, the master of the house, bowed, and accepted as though it were a great gift the fastening of his own silver crest loop upon his shoulder.

Guardian Othofarinal was gray of hair and grave of manner. The gravity, however, was in no way a cold one. “I had heard,” he said, as they sat together over the half-emptied ritual glasses of greeting, “that you were scrupulous in observing the classical ways, and I am more than pleased to see that you are in this respect more than scrupulous. Evidently your late and august father must have been exceedingly careful to instruct you during your unhappy years amongst those who lack the Seven Signs. Thank you for receiving my offer of visitation as you did. It encourages me to proceed more directly to my subject than I perhaps otherwise would.”

“You will certainly do so, I must hope.”

He did. The subject of the Guardian was that of Tarnisi policy towards the exiles. Until now the policy was that there was no policy. Exiles were free to return, many had done so, moved by their individual urges or by the solicitation of other individuals. But it was altogether an individual thing. This, the Guardian suggested, ought not to be. The official and collective policy of the Governance of Tarnis should be, firstly, to invite all exiles back to the home of civilization; secondly, to assist their passages and to relieve their immediate needs; and, thirdly, to provide them with the means to occupy without embarrassment or difficulty their appropriate places in society. “You may agree with me, I must hope?” the Guardian concluded.

“I should and I do, my father’s brother.”

Othofarinal inclined his head, brought it up again so that he was face to face with his host. “Then may I venture to suggest to a small number of my friends who are of a like mind that we may arrange for all of us to meet and to discuss this subject? Your experiences will add an essential reality to a matter which none of the rest of us know by our own experience. You will consent, I must hope?”