High Couch of Silistra

by Janet Morris

“No. We know who you are,” my tormentor informed me. “Yes, we do.” His eyes were filmy and glazed. “We know that man, Liaison to Arlet, and you, high-couch girl. And we know because a little fellow we met on the trail was kind enough to tell us before he died. Terrible accident, that. Boom! Right, Tark? Boom!”

  A straw-haired, hulking youth nodded and turned toward us. He dragged his right leg. He knelt at my captor’s side and touched my dirt-smeared breast with a scabby finger.

  “Pretty fi-ire,” he said slowly and deliberately. Then he giggled and hunkered back on his heels. “Pret-ty fi-ire, Morkel.”

  I shuddered as I realized the extent of our difficulties. Poor Dalf. I counted the chaldless. I could see eleven ragged, filthy men. He would have had no chance.

  “Your couch-mate does not please us,” Morkel, the torturer, said. “You tell him, lady, to do what we say, and we will not kill you. We will keep you, you will be happy to be alive. You tell him that Jorna and Trinard like boys like him. You tell him, lady, to do good by my friends Jorna and Trinard.” He caressed my cheek with a horny paw. He pushed his face against mine. “Or we will cut something off, something he would like to keep, and feed it to you.” He was consumed in laughter at that. He pushed himself away from me and rolled on the ground, kicking his legs in the air. “And feed it to her,” he screamed repeatedly, pointing.

  The others took up the cry. They giggled and guffawed and danced around each other as the two I assumed to be Jorna and Trinard dragged Dellin to within an arm’s length of me. His arms and legs were still bound, and there was another thick hemp rope around his neck.

  I searched the sky. I saw nothing. I turned pleading eyes to Dellin. He was struggling furiously, his face transformed with impotent rage. He looked upon me, unseeing.

  Morkel jerked me to my knees and pushed me, his foot in the small of my back, toward Dellin. I fell forward, my face so close to his that I could see the blood and sweat mix on his skin. He was cut above the eye, and more blood ran from the right corner of his mouth. His eyes were wild.

  “Please,” I whispered in M’ksakkan. “Do what they want. They will torture us if you do not. I called Santh.” I begged him. “We need just a little time. It is not the act, but the context in which it is viewed. It is not that terrible a thing.”

  Dellin shook his head and spit blood. “No chance. They’ll kill me afterward anyway.” His voice was toneless. His eyes implored me to understand. I could not. A foot struck me in the kidneys, and I bit my lip.

  “You better tell him good, lady,” someone said.

  “Please, Khaf-Re, if not for yourself, then for me. I am sure Santh will come. If you lose your manhood here, and he rescues us, what good will your life be to you? Buy me the time, please,” I sobbed. I had never before used his given name.

  I craned my head to see the sky. Still nothing.

  I looked back at Dellin. The tears streamed down my face unchecked. His face swam before my eyes.

  He stared at me and said nothing.

  Morkel stepped between us and hunkered over Dellin.

  “You ready to put on a show for us, star-man?” He giggled. The Liaison Second of Arlet did not respond.

  Morkel picked me up roughly and set me on my knees between himself and the bloody, hulking Tark. The men had formed a circle around the prostrate Dellin and the two men Jorna and Trinard.

  “You watch,” said Morkel to me, grasping me by the throat. When the two men forced Dellin’s mouth open, he kept his head, and hence his own imperiled sexual organs. He cried out once when they used him as if he were a woman. I sympathized with him.

  When the show was over, the two men dragged him to his feet and pushed him, stumbling and naked, to my side, where they knotted the end of the rope that dangled from his neck around my throat and forced us both to lie down. My hands were rebound behind my back. Our feet were rope-wrapped, and they left us, facing each other, bound together.

  They seemed almost to forget about us as they prepared a fire and cooked a meal of stolen stores from the hover.

  Dellin did not speak to me. I watched the sky. I nudged him, but he turned his head away. I kissed him once on the shoulder, and he shivered, but that was all. The day passed slowly into dusk, and our tormentors, drunk and sated, snored under the peaceful wisper trees.

  I must have dozed. When I awoke, it was pitch dark and the sliver of the moon was rising in the velvet night.

  I heard a rustle near me, then a soft sound as of gnashing teeth. I raised my head. I could see nothing. I stared, straining into the dark. Gradually I could make out the edges of the shapes, dark against dark, of the men sleeping on the little rise above us.

  I heard another rustle, farther away. I sniffed deeply. I thought I detected a musky smell, and then I saw him, silhouetted by the feeble moonlight between the trees. It was a hulion, surely the hulion. His head was high, and he was shaking something in his mouth. Back and forth he shook it, then, with a great toss of his mighty head, sent the thing flying into the midst of the sleeping men. I heard a grumble, a shout, and two figures rose up, their knives glinting.

  The battle was short. Growls and snarls and shouts, and Santh threw one man so far that the sound of his landing was lost in the commotion. The other turned to run, screaming to his fellows for aid. But no one moved from the still-sleeping camp on the rise to assist him.

  Santh followed his prey into the trees. I was so filled with pride and fear that I could hardly speak. I nudged Dellin, who still slept.

  He did not wake. I nudged him again, harder. He tried to move his arms, and came alert when he realized where he was.

  “Santh is here,” I whispered. I feared that somehow, some of our captors still lived.

  “Where?” asked Dellin loudly, struggling to sit up.

  “Move your feet here. Good.”

  We could, by placing our mutually bound feet between us, sit facing each other.

  “Hey,” Dellin shouted.

  “Sssh,” I hissed.

  “Why?” His tone was flat and cold. “If I am saved, I wish to know it. If not, I would know that also.”

  None stirred in the camp.

  “Could he have killed them all?” he asked wonderingly.

  “Easily,” I gloated.

  “Has he ever tasted man flesh before?”

  “No, he has not.”

  “Might he not, in his blood rage, kill us also?”

  “Santh would never hurt me,” I assured him with more confidence than I felt. I had not thought of that.

  Santh bounded out of the darkness and laid a large wet form at my feet. He snuffled his nose in my hair. I trembled.

  “Good Santh,” I said in my most approving voice.

  The great hulion sat with his front legs tucked between his rear, his fur touching my leg, waiting for me to taste his gift. His huge eyes shone like two golden full moons out of the night.

  “Santh, find a knife,” I commanded, sending to the great beast’s mind a picture of the object I wanted.

  He sighed explosively and slunk off in the dark.

  “Well”—Dellin let out his breath—“at least he is not going to devour us immediately. Do you think he understood you?”

  I nodded, forgetting that Dellin could not see such a slight gesture in the dim light cast by the small sliver of moon now directly overhead.

  Only when Santh returned and laid the knife he carried in his mouth between us did I realize that I, also, had been holding my breath.

  Dellin bent to the ground and took the knife in his own teeth. It was not long before our feet were free. The Liaison Second crawled behind me and sawed through the ropes that imprisoned my hands. Then I took it and cut him loose.

  Santh sat guarding his newest kill, purring softly in his throat.

  I rubbed my wrists and went to him. He lowered his massive head that I might scratch behind his tufted ears. I dug my thumb deep into his inner ear and let him lick the wax, stroking and fondling him.

&nbs
p; Dellin, amid the camp of our assailants, lit a torch. In the flicker, he waved me to him.

  Santh growled as I started up the gentle incline, and nudged the body at his feet with his nose.

  “No, Santh, I love you, but I have no stomach for such a meal,” I said. The hulion snorted.

  At Dellin’s side, I inspected the carnage in the glow of the torch. None of the men had any throat left, nor stomach. Some were mangled beyond recognition. I went to my knees and vomited quietly. Finally my stomach stopped convulsing. I had no more to give. I wiped my mouth with clean grass. On my hands and knees, I was unable to rise. My limbs trembled uncontrollably. I had been clear-headed and numb while my life hung in the balance. Safe, I was consumed with fear, and with anger at the Liaison’s thought.

  “Are you hurt?” Dellin was kneeling beside me, his hand on my bowed back. I raised my head and looked at him.

  “Can one have such an experience and remain untouched? When two people share such a point in time, when the wind from the abyss roars around them and they live to remember, cannot there be trust? No, I did not get pleasure from them. I see the question in your mind.

  “I would not have imperiled my life. They bound me, and I am grateful for that. I had no alternative but to submit. Had they not bound me, I would have served them, for my life’s sake. But I did not have to suffer that greater humiliation. I am grateful for that. Although every woman in her deepest self desires to be bound and raped, because of my terror I felt very little. I am also grateful for that. And I live. I am unmarked in body and mind. I thank you for trusting me.”

  He touched my face. I could read the turmoil in him without trying.

  “You have no reason to thank me,” he said softly.

  “Had your pride caused you to fight them, you would have lost. Perhaps your life, and certainly your maleness and your mind. What could I have salvaged of my own sanity had that been the case?” I hoped it would work.

  Dellin made no reply.

  “I think it is much harder for a man than a woman. For me it was an exaggeration of a normal experience. For a man, I would assume, there could be nothing but pain and humiliation in submission under duress.” I looked at him questioningly.

  “I, too, feel the chill,” he admitted. I felt him relax, the whirling within him slow and cease.

  “We will be,” I quipped, “in fashion in Arlet.”

  “What?”

  “M’lennin did not tell you, then, how Arlet differs from Astria?”

  He rocked back on his heels, rubbing his eyes.

  “No, he did not. But I think you just did. This is a strange world, Estri. Perhaps I am not suited for Liaisonship here.”

  “Doubtless it seems strange to you, from the prudery of M’ksakka. You may not be suited for Arlet. I think you will have to wait and see. Men change here. I would say to you that I know you are suited for Astria.” I took his hand. “M’lennin is not. He is, however, a man who would be at home in Arlet. Perhaps you and he could exchange posts. I would relax the trade embargo for the right man. You might find Astria profitable if such an arrangement were made.”

  Dellin, soon to be of Arlet, dug in the dirt with a stick.

  “I would think you would want me less, not more. I could not protect you, could not even control myself. As you said, I might have got us both killed.” Self-recrimination was a cutting edge in his voice. The torchlight flickered.

  I shrugged. It had cost me to put that offer into words.

  “Perhaps I liked what I saw in you when you bested yourself and endured them. A boy would have died there, for his purity and honor. M’lennin is such a boy. In Astria we are in need of a man, sure enough of his strength to act on his own standards. Would you trade Arlet for Astria, Khaf-Re Dellin?”

  He stood abruptly and extended his hand to me.

  “You speak of the Well but not the Well-Keepress. It is too soon for me to know what I will do, Estri, when I have lived in Arlet. As you say, men change here. And even if I wanted it, it might not come about. Offer me the Well-Keepress, and I will accept. These Wells, both of them, interest me less and less.”

  He stepped among the bodies, and he stooped among the corpses, collecting weapons and leathers and bits of food. He picked up the torch, half-burned, and another which he gave to me. I took the weapons and belts, and he gathered some coals and wood and we carried them to the hollow and made a fire and cooked chunks of meat on sword points. Santh snored peacefully.

  “I must dispose of this chaldra,” I said, “and then, if you choose, we will discuss the disposition of the Well-Keepress.” I had thought hard on how to answer without rejecting him. I did not entirely succeed.

  “I see no way to dissuade you,” he said.

  “Would you have Santh with you in Arlet?” I asked.

  “Do you think I need him?”

  “I need him and cannot take him into the Well.”

  “If that great beast wants to come to Arlet,” he said slowly, “I would not be able to stop him. If he would be in the Liaison’s there, I will allow it. If you would, also, prefer it to the Arletian Well, I would allow that also.”

  “I must be there for Ristran’s man to find me, in the Well.”

  “Then I will know where to find you, should I care to buy your use.”

  I threw food and sword into the dirt. I went to him and put my head in his lap.

  “Do not be angry with me for the way I must live, Khaf-Re,” I pleaded. I found I truly cared.

  He rubbed my shoulder and kissed me gently on the lips.

  “Women are not so free on M’ksakka,” he said gently.

  “On Silistra,” I whispered, “we are all bound.”

  When I awoke, Dellin was leaning over tending a fresh-made fire in the dim dawn light. Beside the fire lay three fat black harths. He had hunted us breakfast with the longbow he had taken from the camp of the chaldless.

  He had also appropriated for himself a vest of thick hide circles, linked together, such as is popular among the slayers. It protects the vital organs, coming low over the hips, but leaves the wearer’s arms and legs unencumbered. Beneath it he wore a short leather breech, of tas. Around his waist was slung a Silistran pocket belt, so named because of its many compartments, of wide parr-hide from which hung a short sword in a tooled scabbard and a knife in sheath. He had a thong across his brow, to keep his shoulder-length hair back from his face as he poked the crackling logs and the sparks flew. In the light of sun’s rising, he looked very Silistran, squatting before the fire in his leathers.

  I went to him and knelt beside him, fingering the harth carcasses.

  “I found your viewer and holos among the loot from the hover,” he said.

  “Give them to me.” I held out my hand.

  “No, I will hold them until we reach Arlet.” He took the birds and began to clean them. “They are safer with me.”

  “Where is Santh?”

  “He was gone when I awoke. He will find us again if he so chooses.” He met my eyes for the first time. “We will strike out for the road, that way,” he pointed, “as soon as we have eaten. I would make it there by mid-meal.”

  “I would wait for Santh.”

  “Woman, do not try my patience.” His eyes were hard. “I have thought much about what has happened since we met. I have paid for your use, but you have used me. I have paid with more than dippars, and I will yet get full value from you.”

  He reached into one of the pockets in his belt and drew forth a thong on which was strung perhaps two hundred gold dippars. He leaned to me and fastened the thong behind my neck. Then he leaned back and regarded me.

  “Now, you wear your worth. I had thought to wait and pay you in Arlet, but I have changed my mind. I would look on you and be reminded who and what you are. And perhaps you, too, will find yourself better able to recollect your station.”

  I was angry. I reached up to remove the necklace of coins. He took my wrists and held them in one hand. His grip was not
gentle. I had played the game of control and I had lost. One controls a man through his weakness, his self-image. Dellin had reassessed himself. He could not be handled now, as he was before. I struggled to free my hands, but he held me easily. I closed my eyes to read him, to find a reference point in him I could use, but he slapped me, hard, with his free hand, across the face.

  “No,” he said. “Look at me.” I did so.

  “Remove your chald.” He let my hands go.

  I shook my head. I could taste the blood in my mouth. His hand was in my hair.

  “Do it! Fear me, woman! I might kill you here and blame it on the chaldless, and none will gainsay me. If you serve me truly, I will deliver you to Arlet. Then I will give you your chald and your artifacts. Santh is not here to protect you. You must depend on me. I would not be taken for a chaldless on the road to Arlet.”

  “You are unbalanced, from the shock!”

  “On the contrary, I think I have, for the first time in my life, struck a tenable balance with myself. I would not bind you, Estri. You said yourself that that is too easy. By your chald and your father’s ring shall I hold you. Give them to me!”

  I did as he commanded. He was totally in control of the situation. For the first time, I did fear him. To have a man come to the Well, money in hand, determined to take an evening’s pleasure with a high-couch girl, is one thing. A woman has subtle but effective restraints upon his behavior. Here, alone, with Dellin, who had freed himself of those invisible bonds by which we bend men to our wills, I had no option. This was another thing entirely. I had put myself into his hands, when I thought those hands were weak. I had miscalculated. If I tried to escape him alone, my fate might be worse.

  He took the chald and examined it. He removed my father’s ring from the chald and slipped it on the middle finger of his left hand. The chald was too small for his waist. He draped it around his neck. Then he lay down on the soft grass. He pointed to the harths.

  “Cook the meal.” I did, and he ate his fill. Then he gave me the remains, and I devoured them. I read him, and what I saw confirmed what he had said.

  We struck out through the woods toward the road to Arlet. He moved quickly, said little, and I found myself half-running to match his pace. I called Santh, but got no response. I wondered if Dellin had somehow driven him away. When we were in sight of the road, a wide stone-block thoroughfare, lightly traveled, we stopped to rest in a thicket. The road was below us; we could see a good distance in either direction without being observed.