"I see ..."
"Still, events have made it plain that my real enemy is the current of the times which makes possible obscenities like imperia-conglomerate and the vermin they nurture. Alas this insight may satisfy the intellect, but it gives me a foe without a face, and that rankles."
Loreanna found herself swept up in his urge for revenge. "What of the pair from the capital, the Drector-Honorary Witsable and Lady Nasai-Ulness?"
He shrugged. "All I can discover is that they boarded Gyrfalcon sometime after I did, albeit in more dignified
376 HENRY MARTYN
circumstances, and were put off with Bowmore and his , officers. They did not appear at Hanover when he did."
"No!" She shrank back with a cry. "You don't think Bowmore ate them?"
"It was," he answered her, "a desperate voyage. Who can say?"
She returned to questions about Skye and he to answers, often difficult and painful, rather than futile, grisly conjectures. They spoke ofseporth and nacyl —he realized this was the first time in months that one of the latter was not his constant companion—and of waiting in vain for rescue from the cold and heartless Deep. Although neither of them might have predicted it, it now became Loreanna's turn to comfort her captor within the circle of her arms.
At intervals, their bodies merged again. In the end, all that he might have taken from her, the answers to every curiosity he burned to satisfy, Loreanna gave him freely and more, besides. He did grow violent, after all, but it proved a different sort of violence, three-quarters play, than he had first intended to inflict upon her. Before the night was over, Loreanna came to understand (as perhaps her lover did not; like most men, according to what she had read, he only knew his need and she felt fortunate that he was beginning to know hers, as well) that, just as the animal process of feeding had, over the long course of evolution, been converted from a i mechanical matter of fueling the body into an occasion for fellowship and celebration, so those reflexes which served reproduction had begun, with the fullness of time, to perform a secondary function, absorbing, diffusing, transmuting the killer rage with which life was all too likely to fill an individual into something bearable and consistent with continued sanity. j
A knock came upon the cabin door. "Nose-hair in sight, ' sir, and the captain's presence requested upon the quarterdeck." 1
Henry Martyn sighed and raised his voice. "Very well. I shall be along presently." Rising, he suggested to Loreanna that she remain abed a few more hours. The night which they had spent together, whatever its other virtues—and they had been many—had afforded her scant sleep. As he dressed himself, his movements were clumsy, for he chafed in ]
J
unaccustomed places. "Rest easy and for as long as you wish. I swear no harm will come to you."
She smiled in a way to melt his heart and settled deeper among the pillows. Reaching for his thrustibles, he recalled with a start what a threatening place a starship could be for a weak, helpless, and, worst of all, uninformed individual. Nodding to himself, he strode to a locker set against a bulkhead, removed a small plastic chest, and returned to the bunk, resting one knee upon it beside Loreanna. He found it difficult to speak.
"This, my . . . my beloved Loreanna, is one possession which was not taken at thnistible-point, with me from the beginning of my life upon the Deep. I give it to you, not just in token of what I feel, which I could not in any case express, but that you may never fear for your life again, having means of defending your own person." She looked up at him with sleepy eyes, not altogether understanding why the gift was so important to him, but knowing nonetheless, that it was. He grinned. "I shall have to wait to show you its operation, but now you need not crawl under the bunk for your scissors."
Loreanna smiled at him and blushed. Arising again, he left her. He had intended showing her what he carried upon a jeweled chain about his neck (no question lingered in his mind that she was the little dancer in the autothille) and asking her about it. Still, it could wait. They would have time. They had time enough for everything now.
She fell asleep with the ancient walther-weapon tucked beneath her pillow.
Chapter XLI: The Cormorant
Lx)reanna awakened to an unaccustomed quality of light seeping through the depolarized windows and the curtains floating loosely before them. And to a shocking memory of the night before.
Trying to sit up, she experienced a moment of panic, thinking she was restrained. Someone had tucked the comforter under the mattress, and for good reason. A comb which had escaped from one of her bags floated in the middle of the room. She sat upon the mattress but did not indent it. Not only was the Osprey hove to, it (she, Loreanna reminded herself, annoyed with her trivial concern for exactitude) was under no power at all.
All these things she observed with a small, rational comer of her mind. The rest of her consciousness recoiled at what had been done to her ... no, that was not quite right. Without question, she had been brutalized and violated beyond any extent she had ever realized it was possible to endure. Yet—hating herself for it—she discovered within her heart a dawning (and, given present circumstances, very disturbing) awareness. She had managed to accomplish rather more than her share of brutalizing, not to mention repeated violation. Her victim, who had several times expressed a doubt that he could long survive such ecstasy as she inflicted, was none other than the murdering bandit Henry Martyn.
In an unenviable state of moral confusion, she remembered , hearing or reading of the capability of the mind, for the sake of sheer survival, to compel its owner to identify with a powerful enemy, if that was what staying alive required. Was this such an instance? In all honesty, she thought not. She had enjoyed most of what had happened to her, missed
it already, and desired more. She was tempted to attribute this to some inherent evil which, thanks to her Hanoverian education and her perfidious uncle, she had come to believe lurked within the best of men. And, to all appearances, of women.
Dallrane Bamagus-Willhart was afraid.
Night bristled with a billion needlepoints of cruel brilliance. Within the nebula enveloping Sisao-Somon, one might expect the blazing splendor of the great curve-spoked wheel which was the galaxy to be subdued. Yet adrift in the belly of the Deep, Barnagus-Willhart, captain of the Cormorant, a Hanoverian caravel of nine projectibles, had never seen a sky crawl with such multicolored glittering. The knowledge that not a thousandth, not even a millionth, of the scintillating razor-chips about him were suns, but mundane, palpable, dangerous objects ranging from swift particles of frozen gas to tumbling asteroids the size of continents, reflecting the dazzling radiance of their primary, failed to diminish the terrible glory of the vision.
The vessel he departed having been secured for freefall like his own, Bamagus-Willhart seized a lubberline belayed parallel to the flexible watering main attached to the thirsty starship and launched himself back toward the glare-bright surface of Nosaer, sparing a glance for the belligerent-looking frigate floating nearby. The Skerry, he recalled, under command of a Captain SuUers-Masen, boasted an impressive fifty-seven projectibles. She was half again as large as the vessel he was leaving or his own, their hulls a mere thirty measures in diameter.
It was not his habit to authorize liberty for crewbeings at a stopover. He feared losing them to the pressgangs of other captains. Nor would he ordinarily visit such a body himself. Yet no alternative had been offered him. Although he was weeks away from those wielding power greater than a captain's minuscule authority—those threatening to convert his body into that of a mewling cripple, leaving his brain intact to appreciate the humor of it—never did he doubt their ability to reach across the lightyears and grasp him as they wished. What made the affair more ominous, in a manner he
380 HENRY MARTYN
could not put a finger upon, was that all they demanded was delivery of a message to one whose name lately promised to become better known than that of any Ceo, the infamous Deep-raider, Henry Martyn. Having
been a signal officer, Bamagus-Willhart had thought it most discreet to see to it himself, balancing the tube upon his shoulder like the ancient weapon it resembled, centering the notorious vessel in its sights:
Compliments of Dallrane Bamagus-Willhart, Master and Owner-in-Command caravel Cormorant, to Captain Henry Martyn. Request permission to come onboard, purpose of delivering personal message from Skye. Await reply.
Curiosity was no more habitual with Bamagus-Willhart' than granting liberty or accepting risks. He was one among many who never wondered why starships of a million worlds invariably took names from avians of a planet only historians ' remembered. He never wondered why those power-wielders had threatened to destroy him, nor questioned any right they had to do so. He was anxious to know one thing: how soon it would be over. Perched like an avian himself upon the taffrail of his quarterdeck, a leg twisted into the ratlines, the lasercom rendered clumsy upon his shoulder by lack of gravity, he had not been required to wait long. Modulated waves of infrared had flashed back over the intervening klommes as soon as he had finished sending his own:
Henry Martyn, Master of corsair Osprey to Captain Barnagus-Willhart. Advise means of arrival, as will save embarrassment all round.
The §-field being powered down and the upper decks exposed to the Deep, he had already attired himself in one of the few vacuum suits his starship carried, this being but the second time in his career he had done so. Now he took up a hand-held device resembling a hybrid of beer-stein and dowsing-fork, an annihilator which converted water into superheated steam, aligned its crosshairs with the wheels and valves at the asteroid end of the waterline stretching from his own ship, and closed his fist upon the grip, thumbing the button trigger. Had he been more experienced, he might have chanced thrusting himself across the gap between caravel and corsair, but he was a cautious man, aware of his limita-
tions, and thought it best to follow the waterline down to Nosaer, thence upward to the Osprey.
He was disappointed to observe, as he remembered being upon two previous occasions, that the jets thrusting backward at outspreading angles could not be seen. He was beyond them before they cooled into clouds of ice crystals. An ironic comer of his mind reflected that, lured slowly surfaceward by the asteroid's minute pull, the water would be sold back to him a decade hence. Still, the jets performed the task of taking him in the direction he desired.
Before he knew it, ulsic squawked a warning predicated upon feelers of invisible light. He flipped a lever so that the jets thrust forward, braking his velocity before he could injure himself upon the surface of the asteroid. As the ice boulder swam before his eyes, he caught himself entering a state of hyperventilation. Panic-stricken reference to ulsic patches upon one sleeve of his suit told him his oxygen supply was not to blame for the roaring in his ears or the sweat-trickle crawling along his ribs. He was familiar with this particular malfunction, although he knew it by another name.
What he feared was Henry Martyn's reputation. The man (if man he be and not some monster with a human alias) was something of a legend. Yet Bamagus-Willhart's informants had assured him that, long out of touch with events upon his native planet—ring-wrapped, mountainous, forest-covered Skye—he would be eager to learn of the upheavals taking place there. Bamagus-Willhart's task was simply to describe those changes, tell the truth about them. Why should that be so thrusted difficult? The only possible answer lay in a direction into which the captain's curiosity did not extend. Truth always represented unaccustomed difficulty in a culture built upon a foundation of euphemism, this being but another euphemism for a shorter, better word.
Some were more straightforward. The warning in Henry Martyn's reply was no exaggeration. Bamagus-Willhart was searched where Osprey's waterlines connected at the planetoid—he was not deprived of his thrustible—halfway along the line, and again upon reaching the end, which entered the vessel not at the lubberlift, as with his own ship, but at a boatdeck airlock. "If not weaponth," he asked the
382 HENRY MARTYN
officer at the lock, once he had removed his helmet and the amenities were observed, "what were your men looking for?"
Osprey presented a disconcerting spectacle. But only a converted one-decker herself (the phrase, less descriptive than it might have been, referred to the number of gundecks a vessel boasted), she was no larger than his nine-weaponed Cormorant. Yet features of her hull were indicative of the four-decked dreadnoughts whose potency was the very backbone of the imperia-conglomerate. Taking chasers into account, Bamagus-Willhart's first estimate of her strength was forty-six until he noticed that the nine-per-deck "rule" had been violated. Osprey carried twelve per deck (with full-sized projectibles remounted as chasers) and twice the number of expected auxiliaries, also—without precedent—well armed.
The giant first officer grinned down at him. "Surprises." Without further explanation, they ascended the ladderwell and crossed the airless, unpopulated maindeck to what he presumed were the quarters of Henry Martyn.
At first, Bamagus-Willhart wondered where the captain was. His curiosity extended that far. Within jury-airlocked doors, two plump women seated him and the officer at a heavy kitchen-style table, hurrying back with drinks in freefall sacks with sipping tubes and a covered plate of pastries. They were assisted by a youngster whom the caravel captain took to be a son to one of them or perhaps a cabin boy, until, refreshment having been served, he floated into a chair of his own and tugged its strap across his lap.
"Welcome, Captain," the boy nodded. "You have met Mr. Knimm, my first officer. These are his goodwives, Mathilde and Tula—did you see that thrusted frigate heave to out there, Krumm?—my signal officer tells me you have brought a message from Skye. From whom, may I ask?"
Bamagus-Willhart was grateful to the blue-eyed, sandy-haired child of perhaps thirteen years, judging by the standard of his own world. This sj>eech had given him time to regain control of his jaw, which had dropped open. The effort was made more difficult by entrance, from the main-deck, of a species of alien he had never seen before, a
I limbless slab of scarlet and ivory. It folded itself upon the floor at the young captain's feet, to the obvious discontent of the women, making Bamagus-Willhart unsure whether it be person or pet. "Captain Martyn—"
"Commodore Martyn," Krumm interrupted. "The corvette hangin' out there be his an' a sizable fleet insystem. Not bein' one t'stand upon ceremony, he don't insist upon bein' called 'Admiral,' though he mi^t."
"Er . .. Com—"
Henry Martyn threw back his head and laughed. " *Cap-tain' will do, sir. Krumm will not permit me to call him by that honorific, though if commodore I be, he should accept. You have stumbled into a jocular old controversy between us. By whatever title, I am anxious to receive your message."
Bamagus-Willhart cleared his throat. "I greatly fear me, thir, it ith not a pleathant one to be entruthted to deliver. It ! Cometh from one who dethcribeth herthelf ath a friend, a Mithtreth Woodgate."
"Lia?"
The captain closed his eyes a moment for the sake of memory, and opened them again. "Through Fionaleigh Thavage, Mithtreth Woodgate'th aide, from whom I have it firththand. Mithtreth Woodgate bidth me firtht inform you of her deduction ath to who—whom?—the infamouth 'Henry Martyn' really ith."
"An impressive intellectual leap, would you not say, Mr. Krumm?"
Krumm appeared, he observed, more wary than impressed. With a nervous glance at the alien, he took a breath. "It giveth me no pleathure to inform you, ath requethted, that Robret Ithlay^/^, 'by right Drector-Hereditary of Thkye,' ith dead, having been captured in battle and died afterward under quethtioning." The boy's face was impassive, as if he had not heard these terrible words. At his feet, where, in absence of gravity, it had curled itself about a table leg, the alien stiffened as if it understood. "Lacking other reathonable choiceth, Mithtreth Woodgate wath compelled to entrutht thith methage with the captain of the firtht pathing vethel— mythelf."
384 HENRYMARTYN ,
What Barnagus-Willhart could not say—must not, upon pain too terrible to conceive—was that, having met the rebel girl at Alysabethport, he had been captured lifting to his ship. Being a fellow of fragile sensibility, unable to abide the idea of torture let alone its actuality, all that was necessary to learn what he knew was to describe the implements to be used upon him (he had never even seen them) did he not cooperate. Thus, Lia Woodgate's message had fallen into two successive sets of wrong hands.
The first were those of Donol Islay, surviving son of the attainted elder Robret and apparent successor, to whom, he observed, this boy bore more than slight resemblance. Donol had questioned the Cormorant's captain hard before handing him over to the Ceo*s deputy upon Skye. Small wonder, he thought now, if in this manner Donol had learned that his younger brother—was the name Arran?—was not only still alive, but had become Henry Martyn.
"From within the confineth of the . . ."
'The Holdings," oflfered Henry Martyn, "our name for the Islay estate."
"Thank you, thir ... in her wordth, the Black Uthurper'th headquarterth, Mithtreth Woodgate hath taken command of the woodthrunnerth in the name of her late—I wath warned to be exthact: 'unwedded huthband'—to renew the rithing againtht the uthurpation. If I may be tho bold, intelligently and capably, judging by the ethteem in which the lady ith held everywhere, not the leatht by her adjutant, Mithtreth Thavage." He wondered whether the boy knew of rumors that she had lost her 'unwedded husband' to the girl before his death, whereupon she herself had become mistress to the younger brother. Barbaric lot, these colonials. His message delivered, the captain of the Cormorant lingered no more in the presence of the boy, his first ofl&cer, the two women, or their living throw-rug than he must before excusing himself.
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