She was so lost in the fog of misery that she didn’t notice, at first, when Gabriel returned to stand over her, looking down at her. Finally, he dropped to a crouch, studying her face. “I didn’t find anyone else.”
Lexa stared at him blankly for several moments. Abruptly, a harsh sob tore its way from her chest. “You didn’t?” she asked hopefully.
“No.”
She covered her face with her hands as another sob escaped her and then another and another until she was weeping uncontrollably, rocking herself mindlessly. She jerked all over when she felt two hard arms encircle her and then dove at his chest, leapt toward the comfort offered. He held her until she’d cried till she couldn’t cry anymore, just held her, without a word.
When she finally pulled away and began mopping at her face, he straightened. “There’s no sign that this place has been inhabited for years.”
Lexa swallowed convulsively, trying to convince herself that Ralph and his raiders wouldn’t have taken the boys if they had intended to kill them. Surely, they would have just left them? Abandoned them or killed them on the spot?
“I’ll look for them for you, Lexa.”
Lexa looked up at him, feeling a surge of hope, but it died almost as quickly as it had sprung up. She shook her head sadly. “You’ll never find them.”
His expression hardened. “I can try.”
She searched his face. She could see that he meant it and she knew in that moment that she loved him. She didn’t care that he wasn’t the same as her, that he wasn’t human, or that her own people would probably despise her for loving him.
* * * *
Lexa’s hopefulness didn’t last long. They found a sprinkling of other tiny farms like the one she’d lived on as a child that looked as if they’d been attacked and destroyed around the same time as her family had been attacked. After that, they found several small, abandoned villages. Eventually they arrived at King Ralph’s domain, or what had been his village.
Gabriel had refused to allow her to go in with him despite her argument that he wasn’t likely to recognize her siblings if they were there. He’d told her she would get her chance once he’d taken care of the gang and left her.
She couldn’t see what was going on, but she was close enough to hear and her imagination filled in the blanks.
Her confidence that Gabriel could handle anything took a beating as she listened to the battle. She’d been too focused on the possibility of finding her little sister and brothers, she realized in dismay. She supposed she’d thought in terms of slipping in as she generally did when she had to go into a village, quietly discovering what they could and then leaving again. She hadn’t considered that Gabriel would fight Ralph and his gang. She hadn’t considered that Gabriel could be hurt or killed.
She considered both with fear and anxiety the moment violence erupted and she heard the sounds of a fierce battle.
As soon as a deathly silence fell, she ignored Gabriel’s order to stay put until he came back for her and rushed inside.
The village looked little changed in the years since she’d left. She wasn’t certain if that was what made her skin crawl or the eerie silence or the fact that she saw no one at all until she finally reached the scene of carnage.
She was too relieved to see Gabriel striding along the street, examining the faces of the dead, to consider the wisdom of her impulse to rush to him and examine him for injury, but she was sorry she hadn’t. Hearing her running footsteps, he’d whirled toward her with his weapon raised. He lowered it as soon as he recognized her and scowled at her furiously.
“I told you to wait where it was safe!” he growled.
Lexa braked to a halt. “I wanted to make sure you were alright,” she responded in dismay, flicking a quick look over him. Blood spattered his clothing liberally, but she couldn’t tell whether it was his or the men he’d killed.
He strode toward her, gripping her upper arms almost painfully. “And if I hadn’t been, you would’ve rushed directly into the ambush!”
Lexa stared up at him in dismay, feeling her heart squeeze in her chest. It struck her forcefully, though, that he was right. She’d thrown common sense to the wind, ignored years of hard lessons in survival and could have rushed to her death because she’d been more focused on his life than her own. “I’m sorry. It was … stupid. I just ….”
“Didn’t think,” he finished for her in a harsh voice.
Lexa swallowed a little convulsively. “Guess not,” she muttered, looking away from the anger in his eyes.
She saw then that villagers had begun to creep from hiding up and down the street.
Gabriel must have realized they had an audience, as well. He released her, but as he did he allowed his hands to slip along her arms almost like a caress or an apology.
He surveyed the bodies again. “I suppose this must be all of them since you didn’t get your head blown off rushing to me,” he said dryly. “Do you see Ralph?”
Lexa felt her stomach lurch as she turned obediently to look. “I don’t … I’m not sure.”
“Check the bodies,” Gabriel said tightly. Shifting his attention to the people he could see in or near the buildings along the street, he lifted his voice and addressed them. “I am the Lawgiver, Gah-re-al. These men have been judged and executed per code 57800 of the Udai Federation of Worlds for the crimes of murder, rape, and aggravated assault. Gather something to dig with. The bodies must be disposed of.”
A voice wafted to them from close by. “Let the buzzards have the bastards.”
Gah-re-al zeroed in on the man who’d spoken, a shadowy figure standing just inside a doorway. His jaw tightened. “You might regret that when the stench of rotting corpses surpasses the stink of human waste,” he growled, “but that wasn’t a request.”
Lexa had jolted to a halt when she heard the response to Gabriel’s order. Uneasiness slithered down her spine. She wasn’t certain why until she scanned the faces of the people she could see. There was fear there, much as there had been in the other village, but there was something else that she wasn’t accustomed to seeing—judgment—and they were all looking at her.
* * * *
“Fraternizing with the primitives wasn’t what we had in mind when we appointed you as a Lawgiver.
“You seem to be laboring under some confusion regarding the handling of the savages. We need to keep a careful balance,” Justice Mer-laine added. “We have a policy of non-interference.”
Gah-re-al’s discomfort ebbed and his anger rose. He’d been seesawing back and forth between discomfort at the speculation of exactly what had occurred between him and Lexa, anger and resentment that the Justices seemed to consider it their business at all, and even guilt when he knew damned well there was no reason for him to feel it. “I’ll admit to some confusion. Exactly how are we defining ‘non-interference’ these days?”
His sarcasm wasn’t lost on the justices or well received.
“Fucking one of the savages would certainly fall into the interference category,” Justice Jon retorted dryly.
Gah-re-al felt his face heat in spite of all he could do to prevent it. It wasn’t entirely from embarrassment, however. Anger had a good deal to do with it. He considered who he bedded to be private, regardless of his appointment as Lawgiver. Beyond that, he certainly hadn’t confessed what had occurred between them. That was entirely speculation on Phil-a-shee’s part, passed on to the Justices when she’d reported him.
The bitch!
“The entire rehabilitation program would seem to fall under the category of interference as far as I can see,” Gah-re-al responded after a moment.
“It’s a matter of record that you object to the program,” Justice Mer-laine said pointedly, “which makes me question Phil-a-shee’s assertion that you’ve been having sexual relations with one of the savages. According to the report you turned in upon your return, this … female helped you pinpoint the location of nearly a dozen villages previously unknown to us.
Are you suggesting that you were merely working to establish trust to insure her cooperation in our endeavor to eradicate the threat the natives represent?”
It was a broad hint that he could avoid unpleasantness if he flatly denied having had intercourse with Lexa, but it put him in a dilemma. He was as uncomfortable denying his liaison with Lexa as he was discussing his relations before the court and it went beyond his natural reluctance to lie just to save his skin. It would be as much a betrayal as a confession would be. They would assume that he was ashamed of having sex with Lexa, a primitive, and he felt none.
On the contrary, he’d thought of little else since their first night together but repeating the infraction as often as he could manage it and she was willing.
He’d certainly worked to gain her trust, he thought wryly, but his objective had been to get between her legs—not to find out what he could about her people. That hadn’t occurred to him as a possibility until later—but he wasn’t about to tell them that.
Their excursion—well, excursions—had created a problem he hadn’t anticipated, however.
He’d known that none of his people would approve of a liaison between them and that included the ‘bleeding hearts’ he’d held in contempt who supposedly saw them as higher intelligent life that needed only a helping hand to ‘recover’. What he hadn’t expected—or at least hadn’t really believed—was that her own people would despise her for laying with him and that worried him far more than the charges that had been brought against him.
Regardless of what Lexa had said, he’d convinced himself that it wasn’t her that they were shunning. They simply wanted to give him a wide berth and since he made sure he stayed close enough to her to convince them another attack would be inadvisable, they avoided her.
Even he couldn’t convince himself that it was purely imagination on Lexa’s part, though, after they’d returned. There’d been condemnation to the degree of hate in the expressions of every villager that looked at her, however fleetingly.
He didn’t even know how it had come about that absolutely everyone in camp knew they’d gone off together that first night and had leapt instantly to the correct assumption of what had transpired between them.
Had they both looked too well satisfied for it to be anything else? Or had he been far more obvious than he’d thought in his preoccupation with Lexa? Had he somehow given away the fact that his interest went beyond his duty as peace keeper?
On the other hand, he supposed the assumption that his interest in Lexa was purely sexual might still be better for her than the alternative. If her people shunned her, now, because they thought he’d taken her off for sex when they didn’t seem to have any particular social taboos regarding sex in general, how might they react if they knew she’d led him to other villages?
Would they see it as betrayal?
It seemed possible, despite the fact that he hadn’t heretofore seen any signs of unity among them, because it was hard to ignore the fact that the humans appeared to see all of the udai as enemies and he was certainly no exception.
That thought made him far more uneasy than he liked and made it all the more difficult to contain his impatience with the proceedings.
His interest in Lexa might well have made her a target for their frustrations rather than convincing them to stay away from her as he’d thought it would.
“There are a number of reasons I objected to the program,” Gah-re-al responded finally, deciding to ignore the offer to save himself from any penalty by denying Lexa. “First and foremost because it taxes our own resources with no conclusive data that it will benefit our people in any way. I understand the theory is that there would be less trouble with the natives if they were lifted out of survival mode and taught how to take care of themselves, but it will take decades before we can even see if it’s effective—just as we’ve already spent decades nurturing the flora and fauna in an effort to stabilize and improve this world. And tampering with the natives is liable to undo all the years spent trying to improve our own situation in regards to air quality and renewable resources. They must crawl before they can walk. The technology to preserve and protect the environment could be generations away if they must develop it themselves.”
“You were pretty vocal regarding your contempt of the savages and your certainty that nothing would civilize them or make them cease to be a problem short of exterminating them.”
He hadn’t been that vocal about it, damn it! It was true that he had said as much, but he’d done no more than voiced his personal opinion … at that time. He hadn’t made any attempt to influence the decision to save the natives and rehabilitate them. He’d merely said that he thought it was a waste of time and energy.
His experiences with them prior to meeting Lexa had led to that conclusion and he still wasn’t convinced that the majority could be saved or were worth saving. Half were wolves and the other half sheep—dangerous predators or weak prey that would fall to the next predator as soon as the udai eliminated those of their own kind preying upon them.
With the exception of Lexa.
He’d seen signs, though, that none of them had seen before when he’d taken Lexa in search of her siblings. The little farm Lexa had described wasn’t a singular occurrence—an evolutionary fluke. There had been others, enough to make it impossible to ignore the fact that the humans weren’t as backwards as they’d all thought, not as savage and undisciplined. There was plenty of that going on but in the midst of it there were also humans struggling to build against all odds.
“I still have my doubts the program will succeed, but I had no vote in the decision and still don’t. I’m a Lawgiver and satisfied to follow orders and allow others to make the decisions—for good or evil.”
Justice Jon narrowed his eyes speculatively. “So you wouldn’t hesitate if you were ordered to exterminate them?”
Gah-re-al felt a cold finger inch its way down his spine. A wave of nausea followed it. He maintained an expression void of emotion with an effort. “Has that been ordered?”
Justice Mer-laine sent Justice Jon a furious glare. “It has not! And it will not! We are not savages! We are a civilized people.” He paused for a long moment. “Since you haven’t denied the charges of unlawful fraternization with a native, Lawgiver Gah-re-al, you will be fined one hundred credits and you are hereby ordered to have no further contact with the female in question—or any others. I’m not certain I understand the attraction you seem to have developed for the primitives, but we certainly don’t want to risk cross-breeding with the natives and I also have a concern that that sort of ‘interference’ could create more problems than we want to deal with. Furthermore, you are a Lawgiver and this gives rise to doubts regarding your ability to remain impartial and objective when judging them. If we receive similar reports in the future you will be removed as a lawgiver.”
Whereas he could be impartial and objective as long as he despised them and remained too aloof to actually know them or understand them, Gah-re-al thought sardonically? Instead of voicing his opinion, however, he merely bowed at the judgment, keeping his expression carefully guarded as he left the chambers, but he was furious.
By the time he left the building, however, the rage had resolved itself into a queasiness in his gut. The fine was steep—higher than he’d expected—but not the source of his anger and frustration.
He was forbidden to see Lexa again.
Chapter Fifteen
Lexa had been stunned and awed when they had finally drawn close enough to see what had appeared to be a solid mass of green in the distance. In a sense, it was solid. Plants carpeted the earth, more plants than she’d ever seen together in one place. There was so much green it made her dizzy.
There were trees, as well, she discovered as they descended from the sky, unlike anything she’d ever seen, not scraggly stunted things barely taller than she was, but trees many times taller than her whose branches, fanning out like open arms, were so thickly covered in bright green l
eaves that they captured the rays of the sun and cast deep shadows beneath them.
It made her forget, for many moments, the turmoil that had besieged her since the village.
Ralph had been among the dead, but that hadn’t seemed to especially please Gabriel and it hadn’t relieved her nearly as much as she’d thought it would. Mostly, she’d just felt hollow, because his death didn’t undo the things he’d done and she’d discovered so many more just like him in her wanderings that she felt none of the freedom from fear that she’d thought she would feel in knowing he could never touch her again.
She hadn’t seen any sign of her little sister and brothers among the villagers and that had so distressed her that it was a while before it sank in that there was far more to the attitudes of the villagers toward her than a natural distrust of strangers. And they were strangers. She saw none of the faces she remembered from her time there. Few of Ralph’s men were even familiar to her.
The Lawgivers: Gabriel Page 21