by Janet Morris
“You know me,” he said gently. “Who dances for me?”
“And you know me, also,” she whispered. “Do we dance?”
“We do.”
She slid her hands out from his, and her eyes out from his, led him down three steps into the soft, upholstered center of the pit. In the middle of the low-walled, dusky circle they sat like two castaway space-mariners in a rubber raft, with the sea between the stars twinkling all around. Between them was a meter-long black box, oblong, in the top of which two fillets of golden wire rested, each in its circular groove.
Without taking her eyes off his face, the dream dancer lifted both circlets from their resting place. Holding one out to him, she said so softly: “What is the dream of your heart?”
“I rather thought you knew that, too,” he said, taking one and holding it before him. “Improvise.”
Something writhed in her eyes, something that dragged from his lips: “When last we met, I wanted to possess you. But there was no echo of my desire in you. Give me the dream of my heart: what you withheld in life. Come to me, weak with desire, as I was then.”
Slowly the girl nodded, not looking away but not seeing him. From somewhere a voice came out of her, but not from her lips, which were motionless: “It will be your dream.” With the fillet half-raised, so that she gazed at him from behind it, she said, “A night is long. Have you a second dream?”
Chaeron Kerrion raised his own fillet to a height with Shebat’s. There was to that movement the hint of a salute, and to his voice a thickness that made it nearly as husky as hers. “We spend the first half of the night with your dream, one you make for me. The second half we will fill with one I have made for you.”
The two circlets hovered in their hands, close but not touching. A music came softly, waves crashing on a distant beach. “You would trust me with your fate?” she wondered.
“As you will with yours.”
The girl’s eyes squeezed shut. In a convulsive movement, she raised the fillet and settled it on her brow. Motionless, barely breathing, she awaited him.
Chaeron hesitated, savoring the moment. Against the slate upholstery, her form was cleariy limned. She had become more woman than giri, yet a hint of boyishness still lingered despite the softening four months’ time had wrought. With her eyes closed, the piquant beauty of her features was no longer overshadowed. For a moment, he almost forsook his resolve in favor of the ageless feelings her presence stirred deep within him. All the fine hairs on his body lifted and fell. Then in one swift motion he raised the resilient, warm fillet and felt it cuddle against his temples as it fit itself to his brow.
Then he walked on a sandy shore bespattered with salt spray. His feet were bare and moist and sand stuck to them, sucked wistfully as he raised them, and wept foam as he brought them down again where an old wave just receding had laved a gleaming dark expanse slick and smooth. Young waves far out to sea sang his name as they approached, rearing up their spumy heads to see him. Low horns soughed beyond the rim of the world; the waves raced to him with word. A flock of trebling birds preceded them. White with wings blurred gray, they wheeled above his head.
Without slackening his pace, he peered up at them, singing in the awesome wide sky which betrayed no comforting recurve, but ever expanded. Dream dance, he recalled, tasting the salt sprayed onto his lips. He looked down again at the bubbles that squelched out from under his heels as he drove them into the sand. The legs that drove the feet wore loose homespun, trousers the color of the newly washed shore. They were rolled up to his knees. He let his gaze continue upward; felt as well as saw the drawstring knotted below his navel. Still walking just beyond the waves’ caress in time to the sea’s song, it seemed that he had been walking forever; would walk, until entropy quelled the ocean’s tide.
He took stock of his gilt-haired trunk, seeing even an old burn from his childhood, low on his right side. The medallion Parma had given him when he turned sixteen beat chilly time against his solar plexus. He fingered the condensation on it, a grain of sand there, wondering at the complexity of the dream, inhaling the salt spray of a sea he had never seen under a sky he had never craved; so vast and diminishing. To his left there rolled the sea; to his right he passed dune after grass-caped dune.
Looking inland, he collided with her, grabbed her reflexively, struggled against gravity with her hot-cold flesh against his. Then her inexorable gaze like the thunderheads bubbling in off the ocean steadied him, and he held very still, his arms lightly around her.
“Do you like my song?”
“Oh yes.”
“Do you like my world?”
“It is so big—lonely.”
“I do not much like yours, either. But come, and we will make a smaller world together. And you will like it, I promise.”
Almost, he took it: her kiss, her choice, her dream as rendered. But his intention had been otherwise. With a bittersweet taste in his mouth, he whispered: “Not so easily, Shebat, nor so quickly done.”
“The dream-time is not so separate from your reality; what is done here echoes there.” Her hand pushed flat against his chest, between them.
“Good.” Then he kissed her, unclenching her teeth with his tongue, dissolving her resistance. He pushed her gently away, when that was done.
“Now I know why I brought you here,” she said through puffy lips, wiping them with her hand as she stepped back unsteadily like something wounded into a waxy-leaved forest that had not been there before.
He walked through the pungent, mossy grove, content to stroll in the live, whispering stands of trees which rayed moist golden light into artful shafts. She would appear between two bushes, lips apart, breast or thigh hidden by a brace of leaves. Eventually, her cheeks bore sparkling tears.
It was not until she reached out her fingers, entreating, her eyes full of the sorrow of the scorned, that he suffered her to come unto him.
When all he had longed to hear had been said, and what he longed to have done to him had been done without his speaking a single word on a bed of teal-headed mosses, she wept.
“This is no part of my dream,” he remarked, touching her lashes where a tear hung suspended, taking it onto his finger.
“Is it not?”
“You are undisciplined in your art, to question a client.”
“I have given you your dream, even in the place most besuited to it: that world where I was born.” Her cheek was on his shoulder, her face turned toward his. Eyes glittering with unshed tears glowed brighter, larger, until he found himself holding his breath lest the black pools suck it from him. “I am creator, here. Not you. Whatever I please, I can do. I can make you a snake or a frog; a mosquito alighting on my arm. If I choose to swat the life from you, what then?”
He shifted imperceptibly, managed a drawn smile.
“This is my place, as it has been the place of those like me for thousands of years. My kind has looked after yours over all the centuries, no matter that yours seeks to wipe us out. Had there been no single dweller on Earth to inherit the mage’s mantle, this place of power would still exist. One of your own would have been transmuted to fill it.”
“Are you threatening me, dream dancer?”
“I am warning you, stepbrother. Not for myself; I would not have bothered. I am just a girl. . . .”
“Or so it seems.”
She pushed up on one arm, regarding him narrowly. Then, slowly, she nodded. “Or so it seems. It seems also that it is on me to tell you not to thwart the dream dancers, for this place is alive and awake and will not respond kindly to being isolate and Entombed once again.”
“I must assume you are not talking about this physical grove, but the stuff out of which you have created it? if you did? Perhaps I did . . .”
She laughed, and began tearing at the braids bound up on top of her head. The verdegris, living light ran the contour of her breast, met its raised tip, swirled there. “Doubt me here, even?” The hair loosed, fell down around her face like
a wave of black water. She leaned over him until the hair tickled his cheeks, until her fresh warm breath puffed against his lips and the smell of a sated woman tickled his nostrils. “Have you ever had a dream like this before?” she queried slowly in husky satisfaction.
“No.” His smile sat askew on his lips.
“I can dance you a dream such as has never been thought of by your kind.” Her fingers came together, templed in midair. The greenish forest light turned azure, beryl, ultramarine where her fingertips touched. The light ran down her hands and collected between her palms. He distinctly smelled ozone. Her eyes took up the sapphire glow and seemed to flash. “But you must ask me, Chaeron. Or join me.”
“I would rather not, just yet.” He pushed up on his elbows. His arch, Achaemenid profile seemed to crawl with the blue glow. Chiseled lips dropped all pretense; he frowned. His wide brow creased as the blue trails rode his flesh toward his toes. Then he turned to her and said: “How much of this will I remember?”
She looked at him from across the blue radiance that splashed her cheekbones and the gentle fall of her nose. Then she inclined her templed hands with their Saint Elmo’s fire toward him. “So, I am not unsuccessful? You remember what you will; I will not attempt to shade what you have bought. But what I give freely . . . do you want it?”
“Not without knowing more.” He was sitting up, his arms out before him, turning them, watching the blue fire climb to whichever surface was uppermost. It had begun to fill the copse, chasing the dappled green light away. His skin where it was glowing felt cool and windwashed.
“I could bind you to me with those,” she inclined her head toward the spills of light beginning to form coils. “But I will not.” She untempled her hands and the blue luminescence hovered momentarily, oscillating in midair. Then it burst, shooting apart like a clever firework.
All the blue light was gone from the grove. Only a hint of it remained in her eyes.
“I will not. But neither will I refrain from showing you what you should see.”
She snapped a finger at him; a jagged thunderbolt spat out to lick his brow. The ground under him heaved, twisted; then fell away. He was walking across the thunderheads, striding in short leaps as if he trod the uppermost rocks of a jetty half-submerged by some rising tide. “This is very nice,” he said when he felt her body grazing his right side. Far below, flickering, wavering as if seen through deep water, the planetary vista unfurled.
“Then let us look closer,” he heard. He knew that if he turned his head toward her, her hungry eyes would swallow him; he tried to look only down on the scarred hills bestarred with village and farm. But she was below him.
And then it was he who was undermost, in a dark place of straw and fear and bitter servitude: “Bolen,” a whisper in his brain and on his/her lips confided. The dreadful weight ground him/her into the needle sharp straw. The cracked, lust-bubbled lips laughed chillingly: “Want your body back?” The ground shivered in a convulsive sob burred with pain.
He/she scrubbed a rude planked floor on bruised knees, hot-necked and so fearful that the ache in his/her back was a privilege. The eyes of five ribald, drunken patrons raped his/her buttocks as he/she labored near the hearth. He/she listened numbly; escape was impossible; there was no place to run. Working toward the shadows doggedly, their shelter had not yet been reached when his/her ears heard odious Bolen’s wheeze, atremble with greed, strike a bargain for her use. “No!”
“If you insist,” he heard, on his left. They stood together in deep shadow watching a child weep beneath a tumbled statue overgrown with weeds. The joy of having his own body back fended off the hopeless, tattered wails, but only temporarily. As he felt himself being drawn into the weeping child, he turned to her beside him, taking hold of her arm, squeezing with all his strength. “No,” he said again.
“Something else, perhaps?” She inclined her head infinitesimally. They ran down a city street, dodging a groping blindman; a scatter of tumbled brick; a band of brigands chasing a shrieking quarry into an alley. “Back. Hide!” she whispered urgently. They flattened themselves against rough brick: “Clop-clop, clop-clop,” he heard, his cheek pressed to the abrasive wall, peering round the corner. As the staccato clatter neared, silence fell: even the girl in the alley stopped sobbing. A cloaked enchanter on a magnificent, blue-eyed black horse ambled past unconcernedly. He dared not breathe, he shifted from the strain of trying to keep perfectly still. A pebble shot out from under his foot to strike a piece of metal. The metal rang, hardly more than a click . . . but the enchanter pulled the highly schooled, froth-mouthed black up on its haunches. It wheeled in place. Facing them, its metal shod hooves striking sparks as it pawed the pavement, it seemed to listen. “Seek,” said the enchanter, leaning forward to stroke its neck. Dancing, snorting, its chin tucked in so that froth dribbled on its mighty chest, the blue-eyed steed headed directly toward them. “Run,” urged Shebat. Even as he ran, he knew it a hopeless defiance. . . .
The running never stopped; only the pursuers changed. They were running through the low levels of Draconis, so deep that their steps stretched unnaturally in the lessened gravity. In the distance, Kerrion minions chased them; he fled on slippery feet, treacherous inside unyielding boots, slithering in the goo from broken blisters and oozing blood and perspiration running down his legs that had collected in the leather’s confines. He had lost his identification; no, it was a forgery; he had thrown all proof away. Somehow, he knew they were not going to believe him when he told them who he really was. . . .
He found himself sitting upright, drawing hasty gulps of breath. His legs tingled from being crossed under him so long; in the crease behind his knees and down the trough of his backbone and in the hollows under his arms he could feel the sweat streaming. He shuddered, and put his hands to his head. Searching fingers met the fillet about his temples. He drew it off. Only then did he think to open his eyes.
“Your turn,” said Shebat softly, lifting the circlet from her brow. The hair fell down around her face and neck.
“How did you do that?” he said hoarsely, his glance indicating the loosed braids, but his meaning much wider.
She held the circlet out before her, peering into it. “How did you hear my sea song before the fillet ever touched your forehead?” Under the spangled black netting, her chest rose and fell. “I think you can answer your own questions, upon reflection.” He noted that her hands were none too steady, that her face was pinched. She reached out and placed her fillet carefully in its groove. As he leaned over to do the same, she suggested: “The dream-box might have an answer for you. Look inside.”
He met her calm countenance, canted slightly, his hand hovering over the dream-amplifier. He knew what he would see in the box: wireless circuitry, microminiaturized squiggles. He fitted the circlet in its housing, then took the box into his lap. In the dim light, he fumbled with catches. Then he slid them free, lifting the lid.
Inside, the meter-long box was empty, but for mountings whose guts had been torn away.
“As you see, what you have had from me is not quite the standard dream dance. I would dispense with the circlets, but it makes the clients nervous.”
Chaeron found it difficult to reclose the box without spilling the circlets out on the floor. Holding them in place carefully with one hand, he felt around further in the box with his other. Then he just stared unseeingly at his hand in the empty box for a time, waiting for it to stop twitching and his mil to disperse the new flood of moisture popping out on his skin. At length, he took a long slow breath and exhaled it, pushing all disquiet out through his nose. Then he closed the box, fixed its catches and put it by in a single movement.
Leaning back against the dusky upholstery, he stretched one arm along its top. “If I were you, I would not show that to anyone else.” He sighed. “As you said, it is my turn. I am not an intelligencer; if I were, I would have to arrest you.”
She laughed throatily. “Perhaps I should arrest you, for coming h
ere when dream dancing is illegal, and you a Kerrion consul, very bastion of the law.”
“Shebat, this is no time for levity. You have killed a man, your own bodyguard, who meant you no harm.”
“How do you know that?” she asked stonily, her posture rigid.
“I am no stranger to intrigue, nor to the data pool. I—”
“I meant, how do you know they meant me no harm?” Her chin was high and her lower lip outthrust slightly. She reached behind her, and the eternity-walls brightened, faded out to be replaced by featureless gray.
Chaeron sighed deeply, tsk’d once and gave a little shrug. “Shebat, let us put things in perspective. Circumstances have no bearing on what has occurred: you are living here illegally with falsified papers; Kerrion or no, your full citizenship has lapsed. Whatever intrigue you are involved in has neither protected you from discovery nor from any penalties you have accrued. What were you thinking of? How can you repay my father so sordidly for his kindness?”
She laughed bitterly, drawing up her knees. “Kerrion kindness: the results of it are all around you. How did you find me? Lauren? Did she tell you?”
“Lauren? No, but she danced me Aba Cronin’s dream dance, about which so much is being said. And I knew then that you were she . . . but I would have found you; I have spent a lot of time looking. You are too valuable to our enemies to be declared dead out of hand, with no proof of it, as Parma did. I asked around; I packet-searched every data source on Draconis; I traded my virtue for information in the pilot’s guild mess hall; I defeated my own father’s security and took a look at his private data. When all that was done, I knew where to look for you: it was just a matter of time. You must have known that. And Spry must have known it, too. Aba Cronin; Sheba Spry; Shebat Kerrion . . . why would you turn against us?”
“You are wrong, Chaeron, about everything but a few facts, and those you weigh mistakenly. Parma’s use of me was done. He cast me aside, sent my own bodyguards to make an end to me. They were even dressed like low-livers. . . .”
“None of that explains the venom of Aba Cronin’s dream dance; why wish destruction upon us? What would a revolution by these scum insure except their deaths by reason of their total inadequacy to survive on their own? And if Spry told you Parma wished you harm, you were a fool to believe him. Spry sold his aid to Jebediah, not you. Jebediah paid Spry to place you with dream dancers. Then Spry used Bucephalus to pay Jebediah in more permanent coin. Jebediah was consorting with Labayan agents. He was last seen boarding the Bucephalus with a case he had earlier received from them; that case was never recovered. And the Bucephalus cannot, conveniently, remember—”