It was still not known, and never could be now, whether Lia had actually been selected with an eye, at least in part, to her suitability as a wife for Robret, one of the individuals who might have contrived to such an arrangement being dead these fifteen years, and the other having undertaken a vow of perpetual silence.
“True, Robret always seemed a trifle more reserved than she with regard to their relationship, but this was attributed not to any manner of disregard for Lia—at least so I always believed—but to my brother’s fundamentally conservative personality, and to the careful and deliberate manner in which he had been brought up, presumably someday to assume his own father’s solemn obligations.”
Arran had no need to tell his wife that, for his own part—that of an eight-year-old child who had virtually worshiped her—Lia had embodied the very definition of feminine pulchritude and exotic glamor. The boy had never really known his mother; Loreanna understood, wisely, and without resentment, that it was by no accident that she herself bore something of a resemblance—perhaps more in manner than in appearance—to Lia. She also knew that even now he was compelled to struggle not to be overwhelmed by lifelong feelings of unconditional filial adoration for his erstwhile tutor—now in some ways his competitor—feelings that could undermine the hard-won autonomy of his Drectorship.
“In any case,” he went on telling Loreanna now, “the growing emotional and intellectual understanding between Lia and my brother inevitably ripened into romantic love and eventually got as far as the most spectacular wedding that the Great Holdings Hall upon Skye-under-the-Moonrings had ever witnessed. I had been rather seriously ill, and had missed my father’s remarriage to his best friend’s daughter, Alysabeth Morven. (How ill considered that turned out to be!) For me, this would be the occasion to make up for my previous absence.
“It was, furthermore, a wedding to which hundreds of native Skyans had been asked, along with dozens of decidedly more aristocratic, but no more warmly welcomed, interstellar guests, principally of Hanover and Shandish. It was a wedding that, in the end, was to be violently interrupted in a dramatic and premeditated—many termed it, afterward, ‘theatrical’—manner, by the first blow of a coup d’état engineered by that Shandeen traitor, Tarbert Morven.”
“Father,” Loreanna had heard the story often, “of your father’s bride, Alysabeth.”
“None other. Oplyte warriors who had been brought, ostensibly to salute the newlywed couple, were used instead in an only partly successful attempt to arrest the members of my family and our household. My dear old friend and retainer Henry Martyn perished, protecting me from the Oplytes, which is why I assumed his name in order to exact revenge for all of us. With his brothers Donol and me, Robret accomplished the unforeseen, escaping into years of bitter exile as a woodsrunner, where, hopelessly separated from Lia, who was afterward held hostage at the Holdings, he eventually took a mistress—the beautiful and spirited Fionaleigh Savage—and perished fighting the Morvens’ tyranny.”
“For his own part,” Loreanna smiled, taking her husband’s other hand, as well, “Arran stowed away aboard a starship, hoping to reach Hanover to appeal for assistance from his father’s political friends. At that time, of course, he had had no way of knowing that his father no longer had political friends upon the capital world, or that he himself would never reach Hanover. Instead, after many a hair-raising adventure aboard any number of different vessels, he would go on to secure everlasting glory as the beloved world-liberator Henry Martyn.”
“And eventually to discover Loreanna, the one love of his life.” They kissed, and in that moment understood that, however long they sat conversing here, they would not be attending to their various domestic chores upon this morning. The only consideration that kept their hands from one another’s clothing now was that they still occupied a room with transparent walls and floor.
He sat back and cleared his throat, flushed and sweating, conspicuously keeping his eyes from the open throat of Loreanna’s blouse as she attempted to regain her own composure. To occupy his shaking hands, he began to reassemble his pair of thrustibles once again as he continued speaking of his family’s history.
“Meanwhile,” he said, “by what was understood by us, his brothers, merely to be a strategic arrangement, Donol formally surrendered himself to Morven, who was becoming known across the breadth of an unwilling world as ‘The Black Usurper.’
“This docile compliance upon Donol’s part was supposed to have been in response to the Shandeen villain’s broadcast promises of amnesty and perhaps even a share of power under the Skyan moonrings. My poor father having been murdered, Donol was led to understand that he might someday possess Morven’s daughter Alysabeth, and, in the throes of his abject moral collapse, he even accepted this incestuous offer. Instead, it was Lia who was given to him, ostensibly as an initial token of good faith, but in fact as a mere diversion—we never knew how much he had always secretly envied and resented Robret—to serve as his sexual plaything, as an initial reward for his treacherous collaboration.
“All the while, his visible approval of Morven was used to legitimize the Usurpation.”
In the time he had with her, an increasingly dissolute Donol had made the most energetic use conceivable of his ill-won prize. Arran and Loreanna knew that Lia still bore profound physical and emotional scars from her endlessly humiliating captivity and brutal maltreatment. Ironically, or so she had once confessed to Loreanna, there was but little which the depraved middle brother had inflicted upon her that she might not willingly have endured at the hand of the eldest, the issue being what it always is in such cases, one of loving consent.
The Islays had always assumed that these soul-shattering experiences, the tragic murder of her intended and her hideous abuse by his younger brother, were the reason that Lia—often misrepresented by mass media as the “Virgin Ceo”—had never married or shown even the slightest inclination to do so. And yet, Arran knew (although it had taken him a long time, tremendous effort, and no small amount of money to discover the truth) she carried within her the grisly satisfaction of having castrated Donol with a makeshift knife she had fashioned for herself, and dangled the results of this long-planned vengeance before his horrified and all but unbelieving eyes. Then, possessing secret means of commanding them, she had given him over, still living, to the first squad of Oplyte slave-warriors she had happened upon, to be raped, killed, and eaten.
Not necessarily in that order.
Lia had disappeared for three years, immediately following the Battle of Skye. It was even now a period in her life of which, save for one rare moment of openness with Loreanna, she refused to speak with anyone. She had come forth again, only with the greatest of reluctance, when public announcements had been carried from world to world and broadcast far and wide to the effect that her father, Ceo Leupould IX, prayed urgently to see her. Accompanying the proclamation was a deceitful implication that the poor fellow lay upon his deathbed. When he had greeted her in a condition of perfect—and libidinous—good health, she had angrily remonstrated with him, and he had laughed uproariously.
Later, and in secure privacy, she had laughed at her father’s joke, herself.
Thus it had come to pass that a certain Lia Woodgate Wheeler, lately Ceo of the Monopolity of Hanover, and an Autonomous Drector’s Lady, one Loreanna Daimler-Wilkinson Islay, late of the Hanoverian capital planet herself, having first been swept together by an implacable and undeniable current of titanic historical events, violent tragedies and triumphs, and most of all by the love of strong-willed and heroic men larger than life itself, had—for those and many another reason—chosen to keep up a voluminous and lively personal correspondence between the Monopolitan ’Droom and moonringed Skye all these years.
The encrypted section of Lia’s message was less restrained. She lounged beside a pool, not in swimming costume—that would have been too much—but in comfortable working trousers not unlike those that Loreanna affected, and a blouse prin
ted in a cheerful floral pattern, tied at the midriff. Either it had been an unusually beautiful day upon Hanover or—as Loreanna believed more likely—the area where the Ceo relaxed was covered with a dome or §-field, simulating weather which almost never occurred upon the gloomy capital world.
“I am extremely happy for you, dear Loreanna,” the most powerful ruler in the Known Universe told the device focused upon her. She clasped her hands before her as if to show the sheer joy she was feeling. “I wish to greet you here as soon as can be contrived. The fact that I may have been an agent, in some small way, of this unlooked-for reunion with your family, fills me with satisfaction.”
Lia went on to speak of other matters, including accommodations she might arrange for them upon their arrival. The woman was almost chattering, which was uncharacteristic of her. It was not the best performance she had ever given, Arran thought—and told his wife as much—which probably meant that it was genuine.
“Once again, however, I must force myself to ignore the obvious with Lia and to read between the lines. In all things, whether she relishes it or not—indeed whether she chooses to acknowledge it to herself or not—she must remain her father’s daughter. And no one with that much power can be trusted wholeheartedly.”
Loreanna nodded, for she had long since come to similar conclusions. All that to one side, it seemed easier to remain friends with Lia at this distance than to contemplate, as Lia now seemed to desire, becoming a houseguest in Lia’s home, in Lia’s city, upon Lia’s planet, within the boundaries of Lia’s empire.
“In this connection,” Arran calculated, “she enjoys a singular advantage of having been my tutor as well as my brother’s ‘unwed wife’ of Skyan song and legend. And it would be altogether unlike her not to avail herself fully of it. Except for you, my dearest, she appreciates better than anyone how deeply I loathe the Oplyte trade, and that I would be willing—belay that, eager—to aid her in destroying it, root and branch. After all, was it not she who gave nurture to this strong natural inclination upon my part to detest all slavery?”
He sighed with amused resignation. “I fear that my instructress knows me all too well—and knows that I know it, and enjoys the fact extravagantly! And she knows that I know that, as well! Ceo blind me, where will it all end?”
Loreanna opened her mouth, but had no chance to reply.
“In the end—precisely despite all her assurances and the personal cajolery to which we have been subjected—she knew I would decide to go to Hanover!”
Loreanna dimpled. “And you knew that she knew that you knew that she knew?”
He threw up his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Well, if nothing else, it has been far too long since my old friend Phoebus and I shared an adventure!”
Loreanna laughed, seizing his hand again. Adventure with Phoebus it was to be. But there was their strong-willed, high-spirited eldest, fifteen-year-old Robretta, to consider, as well, and although Arran himself was unaware of it, Loreanna understood that the girl would soon be uppermost in his mind. He had long believed her quite as sorely in need of an adventure as himself. However, at this juncture, he preferred to choose it for her—and in this his wife agreed—before she ventured out and found it for herself. Loreanna judged her husband an excellent and observant father—although this was something else he was unaware of, believing all men to possess virtues which in truth are rare. Arran knew his daughter better than she would understand until she had children of her own, “in thirty or forty years,” he often said, only half-jokingly.
Robretta had been named to honor her grandfather and uncle (her father’s elder brother) neither of whom she had had a chance to know. Both had fought and died horribly in the struggle which had brought her into being. She had, since the moment of her birth, been known to her adoring father simply as “Bretta.”
Having been that young himself (for what had seemed no less than ten thousand years) Arran appreciated tolerantly that, at this particular time in her life, Bretta preferred not to think of herself as the eldest—and presumably, most responsible—child of Arran and Loreanna Islay. It was not that she failed to love them both—upon the contrary—it was simply that they were too excruciatingly boring for words. For after all, had he not had a moment or two exactly like this—perhaps even several million of them—in his own youth?
As he snapped the two remaining parts together, Loreanna knew that he had come to a decision. He would bring his family with him to Hanover as Lia had implicitly demanded. And, although the Ceo would doubtless disapprove (Loreanna believed that Arran suspected that Lia wished to acquire hostages to guarantee his tractability), to wherever else this desperate business took him.
Bretta would be given opportunity to see what her boring old dad was made of.
And maybe her mother.
And she herself, perhaps, as well.
CHAPTER XIII:
OF PARENTS AND CHILDREN
THWACK!
In the comparative silence of the great forest all about her, the report—her quarrel had struck hardwood no more than a finger’s width from where she had aligned her sights—came echoing back in a way she found more than satisfying.
Far away, deeper in the forest, a feathered insectivore heard the noise as a challenge and, answering the affront, dashed his beak against another tree.
Robretta Islay lowered the front end of the crossbow she had fashioned two years previously with her own two hands, to the moss-covered ground before her. She placed a small, well-formed foot through its stirrup, leaned over, and seizing the stranded steel string in both fists, drew it back until it locked into the nut.
The task required all of her strength. Even now, she might have used a compound lever or a crank to do the job, but in her view, that would just have added one more component to go wrong. And although it might have come as a surprise to many who falsely believed they knew her well, Bretta valued rugged simplicity and reliability above all other qualities in weapons—as in other things.
Without setting her cocked weapon aside, she swirled the pointed end of the next projectile in a small gray crock she’d brought with her—everything required for this task having been laid out neatly upon a kind of soft yellow leather kerchief her father called a “shammy,” which she had spread upon the ground before her—before setting the quarrel carefully within the grooved barrel of the crossbow and sliding it back to the nut, into contact with the string.
Again taking careful, well-practiced aim through the tiny aperture of the rear sight, past the simple post at the front end of the weapon, she squeezed the long trigger with all four fingers where it lay against the underside of the stock, until—snap!—it released the nut, releasing the string, permitting the stiff alloy limbs of the prod, or bow, to drag the unfletched quarrel and its precious microscopic load forward at a higher and higher velocity.
THWACK!
Once again the quarrel hit its target, a different tree this time. Once again, after nodding satisfaction to herself, she stooped over to recock her crossbow. At this rate, she thought, by the end of summer, there would be no one in this hemisphere of Skye to match her marksmanship. But, no matter how the work she did improved her aim, the strength of her back and arms, or the fine coordination between her eye and trigger hand, it was far more than idle target practice which had brought her to the rounded crest of a low hill this afternoon.
It was, although she did not know the expression, no less than noblesse oblige.
THWACK!
The physical strength that Bretta had to call upon was considerable for one of her age and gender. She was already taller than her mother, with long, smooth limbs and the slender beginnings of a woman’s figure. Considering her age and the cadence of her growth thus far, she confidently anticipated being taller than her father in another couple of summers. By no means would this make any giantess of her. All of her relatives, it would appear—Shandeen, Hanoverian, and Skyan—were a trifle below galactic average stature. Nobody could tell
her from what corner of the family she had received her comparative height.
There could be no similar question with regard to the color of her hair. Her mother Loreanna’s was of a glossy, medium dark brown with striking auburn highlights—about the color of a well-aged copper token, burnished slightly along its edges and the higher features of the face. Her father Arran’s was very fine and exactly the same color as a wind-rippled meadow of well-ripened grain.
Bretta’s own hair color was an almost perfect blend of the two, a thick and brightly shining red-gold, hacked off, to a mother’s despair, without any attempt at elegance, at her shoulders, which, like the bridge of her nose, had received a generous (and at the moment deeply resented) smattering of maternal freckles.
Bretta’s mother, who, in what she considered proper company was inclined to affect sweeping floor-length gowns of pleated velvet (although she secretly preferred trousers), had long since given up on her daughter’s choice of clothing. Today the girl wore a pair of frayed, faded work trousers fashioned of brushed kefflar washed too many times, in a shade of blue that had been traditional for far longer than a millennium. Bretta had chopped them off well above mid-thigh, and with even less ceremony than her hair.
Her suede vest, as she stooped low over her uncocked crossbow, gapped just sufficiently to offer a glimpse—had there been anybody about to enjoy it, which there was not—of a rounded fullness that was still more potential than actuality. The vest itself had been cut from the cured hide of an animal of her own size that she had killed two winters earlier with this very weapon. The soft-soled slippers that laced halfway up her ankles had been fashioned from the same material. Each of the garments she presently wore had been too large for her a year ago. They had fit her perfectly at mid-winter. Now they molded themselves to her body in a manner local Skyan boys found impossibly distracting, although if she had been aware of this—which she was not—her immediate reaction would have been one of disbelieving scorn or embarrassed annoyance.
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