The problem was not really so much Ferinc, and why should it even become an issue, when Ferinc was Malcontent and people minded their own business where Malcontents were concerned?
The problem was Andrej. The thought of exchanging intimacies with a man she had only just re–met made her skin crawl, and yet Andrej gave no sign of any such reservations.
Andrej was coming in through the bed curtains to his bed now, in sleeping dress as she was; which for a man meant a shirt, of course. And slippers and a robe, as well, but there was no way around it — this was a man who was naked beneath his garment, and he was coming into the bed enclosure to sit down next to her.
Looking at her he smiled with a sort of defeated hopelessness, and Marana realized with a shock of icy horror that not only was Andrej stark naked beneath his shirt but so was she. She looked at her hands, and not at him.
Seating himself at the edge of the bed at a respectable arm’s length from her, Andrej spoke, almost the first time he’d spoken directly to her since he’d arrived. “This bed is the size of my room on the Ragnarok,” Andrej said. “And I’m an officer. I have twice as much space as anybody. You could put a full Security team into a room the size of this bed. I had forgotten. It is a little bit intimidating, Marana.”
She didn’t know what she could say. He had offered her conversation, clearly trying to solicit her reaction. She had no reaction. She was benumbed with disgust and dismay to think that she was naked in a bed with a naked man who might as well be a complete stranger.
“That’s why there are curtains, my lord. To dampen the echo.” She didn’t want to be hurtful or cold to him, just because he was a stranger. He had a right to expect at least basic courtesy from her. He had just made her the second–most important woman in his entire family, not excepting his elder sister, not excepting Zsuzsa, the Autocrat’s Proxy.
Her son would inherit the controlling interest in one of the oldest, richest, most powerful familial corporations in the entire Dolgorukij Combine. Surely that called for friendly behavior, at least, on her part.
“And the entire bed, perhaps the size of the bolster. Perhaps not quite so large as that. You have slept in decent beds these years past, Marana. Tell me, which side of the bed is it that you prefer?”
She could set that bolster between them, under pretense of desiring the support. Then it would be less like being in bed with him. “I take the near side, Andrej. When Anton was a baby, it was this side that was nearest to the nursery.” Not this same bed, of course, but her own bed, in her own apartment. The bed that Ferinc shared with her from time to time, and took the far side of the mattress when he did.
Andrej nodded, but did not get up immediately to go to the other side of the bed. He was looking at the bed curtains right in front of her. Maybe he was just not looking at her, Marana thought, and the fact that there were curtains there was incidental.
“My lord father and my lady mother came to the airfield today, Marana. I suppose you heard.”
Yes, she had, and she had therefore no need for him to tell her; so he meant to tell her something else.
“I do not have my father’s blessing, to have insulted Lise Semyonevna. But neither was blessing withheld. I’m sorry to have put you in this position, Marana. It was only because of Anton. There are things I may not tell to even you.”
A man did not take a sacred wife as Andrej had taken her today. A man sued for acceptance as a husband. She could have spurned him; he had named her sacred to him, but as masterfully as though she had been a share–owned mare. Very high–handed behavior on his part. Had it not been for what the change would mean for her son Anton she might have slapped him, instead of quoting Dyraine to his Dasidar.
At least he knew that he was in the wrong. “He doesn’t seem afraid of you.” She wanted to be loving. She wanted to be charitable. Maybe if she talked about their son; they had Anton in common. Only Anton. Nothing else; not any more. “I think that you have almost won him over. That gives you credit in his mother’s eyes, my lord.”
Andrej smiled with gratitude, but twisted his face up into a grimace of distress almost at once. “What is this ‘my lord,’ Marana? Must it indeed be so? I can’t pretend to be the man I was. I don’t know you. You don’t know me. And yet we loved each other once, I believe we did. I trust we did. I’m almost certain I remember.”
His cry was from the heart. “All right.” It startled her to realize how close his thoughts moved to match her own. “But it’s expected, Andrej, ‘my lord husband.’ You know that it is.”
The formal language was a species of barricade that she could raise to hide behind. It was too bad that Andrej knew that as well as she did. He stood up.
“If you do I’ll call you ‘Holiest–unto–me,’ Marana, I will. And it will be your own fault, too.” The sound of his voice was mild and only humorously annoyed. “If we were to pull the pillow down the middle of the bed it need not be too embarrassing to lie together, Holiest–unto–me. So long as someone wakes before the servants come, to set the bed to rights.”
Marana stood as well, and felt a strange and unexpected tremor in her belly to hear him speak. It had been her thought, too. It had been her thought almost exactly. Was there something of the Andrej she had loved still there within him somewhere after all? Kept she in any form some faded trace of who she’d been when she’d been his Marana?
“It’s been a long day, Andrej.” She could say it. The name had an unusual flavor in her mouth, but it was not an unpleasant one. “And you are not on home–time yet, I would guess. It would be better not to risk the scandal. Leave the pillows where they are. If we shall chance to touch by accident, it’s nothing that we have not done before, once of a time.”
He was untying the sash of his bed robe, and paused, resuming the task only much more slowly. “There are, after all, these years to stand between us,” he agreed. “We will not need the pillows. You’re quite right. They will be after me for laps tomorrow morning, Marana. You will have the room to yourself to take your breakfast.”
Keeping his back to her he laid his robe aside and climbed into the bed. There was something in his body that she knew. Not in the body itself so much perhaps but in the movement of it. Something. She turned down the light.
In the dim golden glow of the votive lamp that burned within the lattice niche of the headboard before the icon that was treasured there Marana took her robe off and got into bed herself, shifting a bit toward the middle of the bed as she pulled the covers up over her bosom.
She reached out her hand, not looking, lying on her back.
After a moment she felt his hand, similarly extended at length across the expanse of the bed linen to touch her fingers — and her fingers only — with unspoken and tentative address.
Thus it was she slept.
###
Andrej Koscuisko awakened in the dark, not knowing what time it was, not knowing where he was for a long moment. He knew that he was safe, but it took him some thought to gather together the threads of the past day’s events and decide what he was doing here in this immense bed.
He’d slept here before, but not for years.
He had made planetfall, he had done his in–processing, he had come home to the Matredonat and made his declaration beneath the canopy of Heaven, Marana to be his first and sacred wife, Anton, his son, to inherit.
This was why he had come home.
Not to astound Marana and infuriate his parents, but to set Anton firmly in place before he turned his attention to the underlying issue, the constant trouble that had dogged his waking moments since first Garol Vogel had shown him the Bench warrant at Port Burkhayden. As regards the person of the following named soul the bearer is to exercise the solemn ruling of the Bench in support of the Judicial order. His name.
Vogel had left the warrant with him, and Andrej had brought it. He wanted to take it to the Malcontent, but first he had had to be sure that no matter what happened Anton would be safe.
&n
bsp; Unless he could discover who wanted him dead, he could not count on living to engender other sons; so it only made sense that he have no other wife than Marana. He had no fond hopes of convincing his parents of this. He dared not tell anyone but the Malcontent.
Garol Vogel’s Bench warrant had not been for Captain Lowden. Therefore Garol Vogel had not exercised it. Then who had killed Lowden, and why had Vogel made the claim that he had, to cover it up?
If it had been Vogel, Bench warrant or no, there would have been nothing to cover up. Vogel was a Bench intelligence specialist. He had the authority to take the Law into his own hands. The existence of the Bench warrant with Andrej’s name on it could only mean that someone else had killed Captain Lowden and that Garol Vogel was protecting somebody.
It would be all too easy for any intelligent person to turn their attention to Andrej Koscuisko, the man whose name was on the Bench warrant, a man much worked upon by Captain Lowden, a man whose whereabouts could not be accounted for during crucial hours at Port Burkhayden that night. A man who might conceivably have been mistaken for a Bench intelligence specialist in the dark and confusion of the service house on that fatal evening.
Andrej needed the resources of the best secret service there was. Andrej needed the Malcontent, if he was to have any hope of getting through to the truth behind the Bench warrant. But he could say nothing to anyone else about its existence, and that meant that any excuses he could offer for his behavior would be facile and unconvincing.
He was awake, now. Not just waking up — wide awake, clear headed; he even felt rested. That probably meant it was his normal rising time — early morning, on the Matredonat’s schedule, time to go to exercise with Security.
Lying in the bed for one moment longer Andrej stretched himself, listening to Marana breathe. It would be less awkward for them both if he was gone when she got up. Exercise made a good excuse, one that the household could understand. He was expected to renew carnal relations, to possess himself of her body once more. And he didn’t dare touch her.
Her breathing sounded deep and regular. If she was awake, she was encouraging the charade, pretending to be asleep, playing along. He had forgotten how well they had once understood each other.
Sliding carefully out from under the sheets Andrej climbed down through the double row of bed curtains into the room, leaving his robe and his slippers behind. There was little risk of waking her by disturbing the bed. It was a big bed. It had been brave of her to reach out to him in the night, but even so formal a contact as that had been almost distressing.
There was too much between them.
When he and Marana had become lovers they had been much younger, and among the very first of each other’s loves. She had not been the first woman he had known, but she had been the one he most sincerely wanted, and she had desired him. Once. Long ago. Then he had gone away, to the Fleet, gone as his father had told him to learn how to torture in the name of the Law; and found out such horrors about himself that destroyed what innocence he might have had in lovemaking entirely.
He still liked women. He could engage with them in any of the conventional manners, and have satisfaction, and even give satisfaction. But there was the other thing; there was pain.
The impact it had on him was so much more than merely sexual. The pleasure possessed him body and soul, heart and mind, terrible and transcendent, and overwhelming in its sheer power. Sexual pleasure was sexual pleasure, and it was still available, but it was an almost trivial thing set against the reaction that Andrej had learned that he could have to the suffering of souls in the torments he inflicted.
There were two problems.
One of them was that the suffering that the Bench decreed was so grotesquely out of proportion to the supposed crimes it was meant to address that there was no rational purpose to it, no excuse, no justification. It was wrong, but worse than wrong, it was ineffectual, an atrocious imposition on captive bodies that had no relation to justice or any good effect.
The second was that whether or not it was wrong for the Bench to torture its criminals, it was not right for any decent man to enjoy it. Not even if the Protocols had truly been just and judicious could it be right for the officer charged with their implementation to take so much pleasure as Andrej had in the suffering of feeling creatures fallen foul of Jurisdiction.
And Andrej took pleasure in the Inquisition, a drug so intense that his first experience had been addictive almost at once. He was soiled in flesh and in heart and in spirit by the degradation his pleasure entailed. How could he hope to strip away the years of sadistic indulgence and stand before the friend of his childhood as her true lover?
It was only decent of a man to wash before he approached his lover for intimacies. No amount of washing could remove the stain of sin that was on him. He would soil her if he touched her, because he was corrupt, and his desire had been too compromised by the helpless suffering of his victims to share with an honest woman ever again.
His pleasure itself was compromised. It would be an offense to drown in her arms who had drowned on dry land in Secured Medical, overwhelmed not by the attainment of the sacred ocean within women’s bodies but by the gross lust that was within him for mastery.
He hadn’t quite thought it all through before now. He’d had too many other things on his mind. But now that he had come home to be her husband, it was all too clear that he could never be any such thing in the physical sense ever again. She had been honest and true to him, even before the wedding–rite had made her holy. And he was a man too corrupt with obscenity to touch her flesh without soiling it.
He needed to think. Exercise would serve.
Andrej did not really care for exercise in and of itself, but Stildyne had a right to expect Andrej to take reasonable measures to cooperate with the efforts of the Security who would be expected to die if need be to protect him from harm. And he had come to rely on Stildyne’s demands to give structure and order to his daily life, even when it could have no possible meaning.
Going through the dark bedroom to his dressing room Andrej exchanged his sleep shirt for an exercise uniform and let himself out into the inner hallway, where his people would meet him.
There was only Stildyne, waiting in the corridor, standing there talking with the porter, the elderly woman whose duty it was to sit outside Andrej’s bedroom during the night in case he decided he wanted something from the kitchen. Or anything at all. Stildyne alone; Andrej looked up at him, a little confused, and as Stildyne started off down the hall with him Stildyne explained.
“You wanted to give your people a holiday, your Excellency. And they’re pretty tired.”
As if that meant anything. They were Security. They were expected to execute Stildyne’s will and instruction, regardless of how tired they might be. This was funny. Andrej never would have thought to hear such a thing, not from Stildyne.
“So I’ve put them on their honor to do their own training. It’s just you and me. The house–master tells me where we could go do laps, and it will be a change to be running outdoors.” Rather than on an exercise track on board of the Ragnarok, which ran the perimeter of the ship along the carapace hull.
It was up to Stildyne to decide on the training schedule one way or the other; if Stildyne felt his people could be excused early morning exercise, could be allowed to sleep late, it was Stildyne’s business. Andrej followed Stildyne out of the master’s apartments, out of the house, out toward the river past the motor stables down the long allee of trees, distracted by the strange and the familiar alike.
Familiar, because this place was his. These grounds, these fields, this house and everything — and everybody — in it, were his own. Possession; and responsibility.
It was a beautiful morning. The sun was not yet clear of the mountains on the horizon, and the little fog from off the river set everything into soft focus. It smelled like home, a unique and indescribable combination of dirt and vegetation, air and water for which Andrej had b
een longing for years without even realizing his homesickness. It was good to be back home, in his own place.
He was depraved, unfilial, a sinner. But he was a depraved unfilial sinner who was at home.
Stildyne strolled thoughtfully beside him, silent in respect for Andrej’s thoughts. Stildyne was long accustomed to the fact that Andrej didn’t speak much before breakfast. It took him a while to turn his attention outward in the morning. But something had caught Stildyne’s attention.
Andrej sensed a change in Stildyne’s demeanor, and glanced up and over at him to see what it might be. Stildyne was watching someone who appeared to be watching Stildyne through the trees, someone who walked on the other side of the ranked shield–leaf trees and kept them in view.
“Something, Mister Stildyne?”
Stildyne shifted his eyes from his target to Andrej and back in the direction of their companion in the distance, pointing without seeming to point. “He’s following us. He picked us up the moment we stepped out of the building. I don’t know enough about the people here to be able to say, but it seems to me that there’s something out of place about that man.”
There was no necessary reason why Andrej’s own house security should not have a post on them. To keep Andrej’s outland Security from getting lost, if for no other reason. And with Andrej back after nine years’ absence there was nothing insulting — perhaps the opposite — about an impulse on House–master Chuska’s part to send someone with Andrej in case he forgot his way. It would only be looking out for their master, a mark of respect and delicacy of feeling.
But once Andrej had a look at the figure who was following them he knew it wasn’t house security. “Men don’t usually wear their hair long here. You’re quite right, Chief.”
Their shadow was keeping his distance, too far off for Andrej to be able to guess whether he knew that man or not. But he could see the man’s figure and the more obvious details of his dress. Decent Dolgorukij men wore beards, yes, if they grew beards at all and were old enough. But no decent Dolgorukij male ever wore his hair long down his back. That was no decent Dolgorukij.
The Devil and Deep Space Page 13