Flesh and Gold

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  . . . he was moving in the river to his lover

  he was moving, moving in the river in his lover, as

  their sworn-to-die attackers swarmed around

  them,

  swarmed

  in the sedge with the reeds above them bending

  down toward the currents of the river

  Do not leave me! cried

  the lovers, crying

  in the reeds of the river

  while the spears of bloody vengeance

  hovered, hovered in shadows among the brambles

  and the points of their reflections

  quivered in the river’s mirror

  and lover clasped lover

  he in his vital brilliance, she in her awesome power

  hers the greatness of power, his the tension of

  brilliance—

  Skerow’s mind wandered away from this recital, yet another old-fashioned retelling of the Great River Epic, and she watched as a heavy seed pod dropped from the lobe tree with a thud; its shell split and it extruded four root legs and wandered off crookedly in a vain search for sunshine. Eskat crawled up and down the back of her neck and beat the knob of his tail on her head for attention, but she was thinking of Kobai swimming frantically in another kind of great river.

  Every once in a while the poet, a shallow and rather foolish fellow named Fasethi, raised his voice in a series of tremolo squeaks, to illustrate how brilliant, how tense his lovers were.

  At the edge of this distraction, Skerow sensed the faint touch of a mind seeking her attention. She had been so preoccupied by recent events that except for a few old friends she had spoken to almost no one in the last day or so; this inquiring mind was that of a stranger, a woman not a poet but the friend and guest of one. :Skerow . . . ?:

  :Yes, Lady.:

  :My name is Thasse.: When Skerow could not bring herself to answer for a moment, she added, :Thordh was my husband.:

  :I know . . . He mentioned your name.:

  :Did he? Not very often, I am sure.: The woman was a form unseen in the darkness. Skerow could not tell what her size or appearance was, or the color of the drapery she wore against the evening breeze blowing off the river’s current.

  :He . . . never spoke of you. He never spoke of anything but our cases, Thasse.:

  :Yet you have seen him more than I throughout our lives. Tell me, did he truly disgrace himself?:

  :That is not my business to know. His death was a tragedy, and it is being investigated . . . Thasse, would you like to withdraw aside so that we may speak more freely?:

  :This is free enough for me. Did you have sexual relations with him, Skerow?:

  :Never. He did not like me.:

  :Really? I am not surprised. He never cared for me or the children either. He was impotent except for the first few times that were necessary to get that brood of seventeen—his Lineage. After that he stopped being a man. I have been burning for forty-seven years.: She paused, then: :You have not much to say to that, I suppose.:

  Skerow was trembling. :Forgive me, Thasse. I envied you.:

  “Eeyik!” sang Fasethi, sounding very much like Eskat.

  . . . yes then

  lover clung in despair to lover

  as the minds above them clouded

  darkly in bitter vengeance, dark

  as the spears whose black moon-shadows poised

  above them in the silence, the red silence

  those adversaries

  sworn enemies of centuries, of millennia

  shot the lightning of their spears, and of their mind

  bolts

  on the innocence of lovers, caught

  in the greenblack waterweeds

  in that one immortal River.

  Skerow joined halfheartedly in the applause for this poem, which she considered rather silly stuff; small prizes had been offered for some of the best recitals, and she was sure this version of the Epic would win one in this Equatorial land. In spite of these feelings Skerow had always admired the River poets for their enthusiasm and vitality, and indeed the Epics were vastly popular everywhere—mainly, she thought, because their double-diastolic rhythms echoed so closely the beating of Khagodi hearts.

  Tonight Thasse had spoiled her pleasure. When she advanced into the center of the circle to recite her poems she felt so alien, so seized by homeward longing, that she forgot her text and dropped the daybook with her notes in it, and Eskat jumped off her shoulder and onto someone else’s head. Desperate and beside herself, she cried out:

  “O

  this desert

  I drown in moonlight!”

  She stopped in horror, voice drowned in her own passion, as the audience directed its attention to her in a still moment broken only by the chattering river and the whisper of the fragrant wind. These calmed her, the indigo dusk hid her trembling, and she continued voicelessly with the cycle she had vowed to show no one:

  where

  ice ages

  folded the seas under

  and

  wave-crests are

  combs of ancient salt . . .

  and, whispering:

  I

  drown and burn

  there in its white light

  shocking herself once again, for these words had come out without her conscious intent—and realizing with a satisfaction that came from another part of her mind entirely, that she had both combined two dissonant elements, and played them off against each other, to express the fullness of her spirit.

  There was a moment of intensity in which this feeling swept out through and back from her circle of fellow poets, a double beat; then she found her notes and continued with her recital as planned.

  When awards were given out, Fasethi was, as expected, winner of the first prize; afterward, the participants snacked on roasted lekk pods and sweetcomb nectar in tiny alabaster cups, and engaged in a lively discussion about the next day’s main topic: The Etiology of Fourteenth Era Riparian Metaphor Derived in Terms of Post-Fluvial Ideation. With her mind too full of her poems, and Thasse as well, to concentrate on this, Skerow let herself be drawn into a less serious conversation going on near her, yet still rather hovered around it than entered into it.

  . . . saying good-bye to Thasse? gone home already? no, not home surely, she came from, lives in, moved to, away from, the Isthmuses, to the Deltas, only yesterday, last thirtyday, half a year ago, after that awful thing happened, the Deltas is where she lives, but here she’s staying with, very well fixed for herself, playing the great lady with, Fasethi, him? that silly fellow, that minor talent, that never deserved the prize, you voted for, no! certainly not I, no one thinks much of his

  talent with women?

  and after she wears him out, next two off-moons with, with one of the wealthy Nohl families,

  indeed?

  then who voted for Fasethi in the first place?

  Skerow had turned very still and cold. Eskat squeaked and crept down under her arm.

  When I get hold of that Nohl there is not one scrap left that the dung-fish chew on.

  She would never understand what made her mind work so quickly then. “Nohl families? . . . I understood that they lived in the Isthmus provinces near the gold fields. I’ve never heard the name anywhere else.” Not quite a lie.

  The gossiper was flustered. “Surely you’re joking, Skerow! No one speaks very much of the Isthmus branch of the family . . . they are as good as banished to that estate in the gold fields.”

  Perceptions still colored by Thord’s betrayal and death, Skerow could not tell whether the conversation had become actively malicious or only that it seemed that way to her.

  :POETS AND SINGERS!: said a very loud mindvoice. :IS EVERYTHING OVER WHEN I HAVE ONLY JUST ARRIVED?:

  The group retreated, a last wisp of thought drifted and eddied away: : . . . eh, yes, there were rumors they’d sold it, with its Titles of Ancestry and everything, to a consortium!:

  Everyone cried aloud, “Threyha! How good t
o see you!”

  Threyha was a newly retired Sector Coordinator who had been based on Fthel IV and V, and was living now on the other side of the world in a West Ocean country.

  “Why are you so late, Threyha?”

  “I was held up at Port Manganese, where the shuttle could not lift me!”

  There was laughter, but Threyha was not joking. She was three meters tall and weighed six hundred kilos: her voice was a well-controlled baritone with a lot of resonance, but it occasionally veered off into the falsetto when she was out of wind. After a few more pleasantries, she turned the beam of her attention. “Hello Skerow, my girl!”

  Skerow had not seen her old friend and former colleague in the flesh for twenty years, but Threyha was strong and hearty. Her topaz eyes still burned in the ancient face that glistened with kerm oil. “Not quite a girl, Threyha.” She was delighted to have a friend with her.

  “Less than half my age, that’s a girl to me! Dear child, you left no forwarding address. I had to trace you.”

  “I needed a few days to myself.” Skerow looked away. “I suppose you have heard a deal of gossip.”

  “I learned the news about Thordh. I know that he was not your friend, but—working so closely—you must have been affected.”

  “Yes . . .” She longed to tell Threyha everything: I was nearly murdered, I nearly killed another person, I learned horrible things! But all of that belonged to a case yet to go through the courts. Yet . . . she had sworn to help Kobai, a woman she had known for hardly one tick of a stad. “Do you know of the Nohl family who have the estate in the Isthmus gold fields?”

  “A branch of the Deltas family, you mean?”

  “I was told so. I’d never in my life heard of the name before.”

  “Yes, the gossip. The name’s common enough in that district. The Isthmus Nohl is one who married an infertile woman for her wealth: he had none of his own. They sold the estate to the Brokerage Consortium, though they still live on it.”

  Skerow said, half to herself, “There was someone who needed help when I could not give it, whom I promised . . .”

  Threyha watched her shrewdly. “Nohl’s disgrace made a huge scandal at the time, and though it was hushed up it is common knowledge in some parts. Not here. You know how often we tell ourselves it is so rare for Khagodi to do such things.”

  Skerow bowed her head. She had been just so naive.

  “And of course we cannot discuss it as a case—but you are not the sitting judge! All this information is available in records and archives: Nohl was accused—but not convicted—of dealings, like giving shelter and laundering money, with major crime figures of several worlds. These people were slave traders, and were murdered before they could come to trial; there was no trial. Nohl faced a lesser charge, but was let off. It happened thirty years ago, and many people who do not live as long as we have forgotten about it.”

  Skerow felt the same icy stillness that the name Nohl had given her earlier. She said to herself, And I said that she was a gold picker from the Isthmuses. I forgot that machines pick gold for honest dealers, but slaves may pick gold for . . . And to Threyha, “You did say slavery?”

  “I did.”

  “And have you known about this all along?”

  “Only vaguely, that Nohl had been in some trouble. I was working far away from home then, and of course I know everything in the Galaxy except what goes on here in this world. The old memories stirred when I heard of Thordh’s death, and I knew he was your workmate, so I looked up the records.”

  “And Nohl got off.”

  “Yes. After that fracas he decided he had no head for business. Wisely, I think.” Threyha drew down her upper lip in the reptilian smile that had her sweetness of character in it. “You can find the details in any good data base, including the name of the presiding judge.”

  Good neighbors, Nohl and Thordh. “I don’t think that name will surprise me,” said Skerow.

  The conversations had dissolved around them. The tropic sky was very clear now, very black, and the stars rushed blazing forward out of the flare of the Galaxy. The group fell silent: even with their dim eyes they felt the starlight crashing down on them.

  I cannot see them distinctly, Skerow was thinking, but Fthel and the Twelveworlds are in that group of stars southeast just above the horizon, and just beyond the horizon east of them are the Lesser Archipelagoes and the Isthmuses. Thordh and Nohl, neighbors of a sort. And fellow aristocrats in the shadows. I could not help Kobai, and I was too befogged in myself to see that Thordh was corrupt. No, I am being too harsh on myself. I can think of something to do. Now,

  sleep

  is waiting under

  swooning stars

  —tik! that is bad poetry, but even though slaves exist, and on this world, I am alive, I have a good friend with me, and this is a magnificent night in a beautiful land.

  FOUR

  Shen IV: In Zamos’s Palace of Knossos

  Zella raked Sweet down the side of the jaw with the chebok and when he raised his buckler ducked underneath and got him in the belly. She laughed as he backed one foot out of the practice-circle. “You’re rashers!”

  If the chebok had been a proper one with spikes of steel instead of polythene, he would have been well sliced. He mumbled, “I wasn’t really trying,” and grinned. His teeth were pearly, ceramyx mother-of-pearl, and one of the front incisors had a diamond set in it. He simply could not see Zella as deadly.

  She was a white-blonde with very pale eyes and corn-silk hair tightly braided and wound in spirals on the back of her head; the hair shaded into a darker ash in the depth of the plaits. She had coral lips and milk-white skin: there were pink exertion spots on her cheeks.

  The half score of hungover spectators in the small arena applauded halfheartedly as they rose and began to file out; there was no blood at Zella’s practice sessions.

  Sweet made a complicated performer’s bow, and Zella repeated it in parody, then she laughed again, shadow-boxing, zipping around him like a hummingbird, one circle of hopping and grinning before she pulled the weapon off her fist and flung it in the tackle box. Just as it landed a spyhawk whipped out of a pneumatic tube in the wall and fluttered round her head. “Awk! Sztoyko,” it cawed. “Front Office asap!”

  She flapped it away with her arms, always afraid one of them would land on her head. “What could they want? I’ve never been called down before.”

  “Gonna give you a fucking promotion.”

  She made a face. ‘Yeah, sure. I’ve been here one whole half of a year. Got to run.” And shrugged a shoulder in annoyance, because asap meant sooner than possible here; no time to change out of the grubby sweats.

  Sunlight was lying along the grey scrubbed gym floors in brilliant planes; the huge waterfall windows were deeply tinted, but still the light was intense under the white sun Shen that so passionately kissed its fourth world. As Zella rode the walkway she could see to the left the port of the Palace of Knossos, stretches of whiteness curving around the purple blue aquamarine of the sea; to the right hundreds of cubicles stretched out on the level below the railing snaking under her hand. Some were open practice rings or small arenas where spectators were free to watch and usually made small bets. Others were capped with plasmix bubbles, and under them dark figures armored in bone or metal fought through swirling clouds of their own strange atmospheres, or swam like whips with knives in their world’s waters.

  There were fights still going on. A group of four young Khagodi men, very low-grade ESPs wearing impervious helmets of steel and bronze were squaring off at four-in-corners; their tails were their weapons: they had chopped off the ends and stimulated the growing buds to split; all of them had three or four tail-tips armed with steel spikes. There were only a few Khagodi fighters, in Zamos’s arenas or anywhere else; most Khagodi are not capable of much physical grace, and therefore not much interested in developing it; those who do are rather despised.

  Next cubicle to them a pair of Kylklad
i in electric blue and poison green feather armor were dueling with long sharp swords, and being watched by two coaches in stripes of the same colors, one of them a Varvani. Kylkladi were extremely punctilious, and in serious battle very cruel fighters, as opposed to Varvani, who fought merely crude and dirty. It seemed odd to Zella that the two peoples got on so well, even that they breathed the same air. The rudest Kylkladi were still only caricatures of the most refined. It seemed less odd that Zamos hired so many of the two species; Zamos chose extremes of everything.

  A red-eyed Kylkladi woman whose bleached white feathers were lacquered with pearl met Zella at the reception desk and ushered her into a tiny office lined with slots, key-hooks and minuscule drawers. “My name is Kati’ik,” she said. “I believe we’ve met before.”

  “Yes ma’am. You registered me when I first came.”

  “That’s right.” There was a file displayed on the vid, and Kati’ik tapped the screen with a gold-plated talon. “We’ve been watching you.”

  Zella stared at her; her heart did a double beat and she made a swift review of her life and its sins. But the record was there under the gold-taloned hand. The supervisor raised her head. “Keeping an eye out for someone like you.”

  Zella could not help feeling that these officious Kylkladi were sinister; she wondered sometimes if the Kylkladi did not recognize and exploit these feelings. There were no known ESPs among the pugs except for the few Khagodi, and none admitted among the staff. She said quietly, without enthusiasm, “What did you have in mind for me, ma’am?” She felt sweaty and self-conscious facing the sleekly vicious elegance of this creature.

  “We have found you a fighting partner . . .” The gold claw tap-tapped and a new file flicked on the screen; Kati’ik pointed to the holo in the screen’s corner.

  A step up: perhaps. More money. More safety than being drawn from the pool and paired with an unknown crazy, or worse, a known one. Zella peered at the tiny holo image. The fellow wore his hair too slick, but was not bad-looking except for the red pustules flourishing thickly on his three-day beard growth. “Edmund (Ned) Gattes. I hope he fights better than he looks.” I’d never want to jump into bed with that one.