Then he padded silently out of the room without turning back.
Eustus watched him go, wondering exactly what was bothering his friend so much.
***
While Eustus and most of the other trainees were piling into the buses that would take them to the nearby towns, Reza was running through the forest as fast as his legs would take him, which was far faster than any human being had ever run. He whispered between the trees, faster than the wind, taking in the scents of the forest animals and trees, all descended from Old Terra after Quantico had been terraformed. He smelled a rabbit, several squirrels, and some larger predators: a fox and two wolves. The sun had set and it was time for them to hunt. Like them, Reza’s vision in the darkness was as keen as those born of Kreelan flesh: another gift of the Change.
He opened his mind, going beyond mere sight and smell. He could sense the birds overhead in their nests, the strange creatures that burrowed underground that he had never seen but knew were there, the insects that clung to the ground and the leaves of the trees.
At last he reached a spot that suited his spirit, a deep cove of trees with a small creek running through it. He knelt next to a rock and became one with it, thinking nothing, sensing everything. Time passed…
When the sky was completely dark, Reza stirred. He wanted to see the stars. He lay down on his back, wondering at the countless points of light that brightened the night sky.
“Where is she?” he asked the sky in the Old Tongue. There were so many questions he wanted to ask, but there was no one to answer. He had made the only decision his Way allowed, thereby damning himself to an eternity of spiritual solitude and Esah-Zhurah to… what? He prayed to the Empress to carry his love to Esah-Zhurah in her dreams. At this moment he would have given anything to be with her, but even the Devil that Father Hernandez so feared would not be lured into making such a bargain.
Sleep finally carried him to the faraway land he had once called home.
***
Dawn came.
A deer neared the creek, thirsty for a drink. Reza rose silently from his sanctuary and approached it. It did not run away, for it sensed nothing to fear; he appeared only as an insubstantial shadow, no more a threat than was the mist. That was how Reza preferred it. He wished the animal no pain. Death, when it came, was instantaneous.
This was the first time he had been able to make an unhurried hunt since leaving the Empire. Reza constantly craved meat, but there was no accommodation to be found in the mess hall. Instead, he was forced to hunt in the occasional spare hour or so that was not taken up by training or commander’s call. He knew his abnormal need for meat was a result of the Change, but it was one he welcomed; it was another means of preserving in his mind the heritage he had earned, the love he now missed.
He cleaned the deer carefully and stripped it of meat, cutting it into strips to carry back with him, where he would dry and salt it. What little was left of the carcass he carried away from the stream, that the other animals could have their share, and that the water would not become fouled.
He laid out the hide and began to cure it, fortunately a swift process using the methods Esah-Zhurah had taught him long ago. Getting the proper ingredients had been very difficult, but he had finally convinced a pharmacist at the hospital to make up what he had requested. When asked what Reza was going to use the concoctions for, he had told the man, explaining the process in halting Standard, the technical terms of curing a hide not coming to him easily. Strangely, the man had not believed him, but had indulged his request anyway, the ingredients being harmless ones. Reza shook his head in silent wonder at how humans so often mistook the truth for deception.
In any case, Reza was eager to have a skin to sleep on again, even one as thin as this. The human-fashioned bed in his room was unbearable.
***
“Hello, mon ami,” Nicole said as she leaned against the entryway. Reza had left the door standing open to let fresh air flow through the room from the window. “May I come in?”
“Of course, commander,” he said, coming gracefully to attention. He had been sitting on the deerskin, reading another technical manual. He had felt her approaching long before she reached the door, but he reacted as if he had not known this. He had discovered that certain of his abilities unnerved those around him, and he had gotten into the habit of screening himself with more human reactions, difficult as they often were to emulate. “You are always welcome here.”
“Please, Reza,” she said as she stepped into the room, quietly closing the door behind her, “we are off duty now. You can relax and call me by name.”
Reza nodded, noting her clothes and the light makeup that adorned her face. She was dressed in a close-fitting scarlet blouse of pure silk, skin-tight black pants, and a gold sash tied around her petite waist. A slim gold chain hung around her neck, and her feet were wrapped in soft black leather boots.
“I thought you had gone into town with the others yesterday, when I did not find you here,” she said casually, knowing full well that Reza would not have gone. This was the first and only free weekend the trainees would have during their basic training. Very, very few chose to pass up the opportunity to go into one of the nearby towns and get their fill of booze, gambling, and sex before returning to the discipline of the barracks. Jodi had begged Nicole to go, but she had refused, insisting that Jodi go on with some of the other instructors for an outing probably every bit as wild as those the trainees had in mind, Nicole claiming she had some work to finish that could not wait.
While she did not say so, Jodi had suspected otherwise.
“No,” Reza said lightly, smiling as he shook his head. “After Eustus explained to me the merits of ‘booze, babes, and booze’ and the controversy over ‘beefcake,’ I decided to forego such pleasures for simpler pursuits.” While Eustus was sometimes an awkward young man, his vigor in any endeavor he set his mind to was not to be underestimated. “No, Nicole,” he said, his smile fading slightly, “I have no need of these things. I went hunting instead.”
Nicole sat down on Eustus’s bed, and Reza folded back into his sitting position opposite her, his legs resting on the freshly cleaned and cured deerskin that lay atop a collection of blankets that he had scrounged from somewhere. He had removed the bulky bed frame, having found it intolerably uncomfortable. Along with his long, braided hair, it was written off as an acceptable – barely – deviation from the norm, and therefore exempt from inspection as long as it was kept orderly and neat, which of course it was.
Nicole shook her head. Very few things he did now surprised her. Or so she liked to think. “It looks very comfortable,” she said, silently wondering what the animal fur might feel like against her skin. She felt the stirrings of heat in her body and a flush rising to her cheeks, and she quickly changed the subject, groping for a more delicate way of approaching him.
“I have spoken several times with Eustus,” she said as she compared the two sides of the room. Eustus had the maximum number of allowable personal effects displayed: a holo of his mother and father, another of his whole family – so many children! – and a real photograph, tastefully framed in luminous black metal, of a famous singer with the woman’s autograph.
But on Reza’s side, there was nothing but bare wall and – she stopped. That was not quite true. The silver crucifix she had given him when they were children hung from a pin directly above his bed. It made her flush with a combined sense of pride and guilt, of conflicting duty and impatient desires.
“He thinks the world of you, Reza,” she told him. “And, from what the other instructors have said, not only he but your whole platoon has been performing and learning better and faster than the others, thanks to you.”
“All of them have the warrior spirit,” Reza said, proud that others had thought and spoken well of him. It was a far cry from what they had said in his first days among them, and there remained those who would never trust him because of his unusual heritage and the collar he wore.
“They simply have not yet learned to use it and control it. But this shall come, in time.”
He looked at Nicole, who seemed to be studiously examining the portrait Eustus treasured. “Nicole,” he said quietly, sensing the turmoil within her, “what is wrong?”
“I am afraid, Reza,” she said, still averting her eyes. “There are things I would like to say, to do, but I…” She shook her head, a bittersweet smile on her face. “I am so silly, Reza,” she told him. “I have waited all this time to have you alone to myself for a while so that we could… get to know one another again. I thought it might be good to talk of things other than the war, or what you can tell us of your time in the Empire. To get away from all the things of official interest. But now I find my courage has gone. I do not know what to do, what to say.” She looked up at him then, her brown eyes brimming with tears. “Would you hold me?” she whispered.
Reza held his arms open for her, and she knelt next to him, wrapping her arms around him in a fierce embrace, her head against his shoulder.
“What is it in the world that could frighten you so?” he asked softly.
“Oh, Reza,” she whispered. “Ever since the day that I found out Hallmark had been destroyed, I knew that you had not died. I simply could not accept it. You were… special in my heart. I had dreams that someday we might… be together. Something in me knew that you would come back, that you would be with me again. Years passed, and still I waited for you. There were times… there were times when it seemed that the thought of your return was all that sustained me.
“But I have not always been faithful to your memory. I know we were only children then, but it seemed more real than anything I have since felt, as foolish as that may sound.” He felt her quiver in his embrace, holding him tighter, drawing him closer. “I sometimes listened to the advice of others and the wants of my body; I slept with a few men, but it was never right for me. Never.” She brought her face close to his, her eyes glowing with a passion he suddenly realized no one else had ever witnessed. “May God forgive me, Reza,” she whispered, “but I love you. I have always loved you.”
He felt the sudden heat of Nicole’s lips pressing against his, parting for the velvet tongue that yearned to touch his own. He felt the strength of her emotion, was almost overcome by it as she pressed herself against him, the warmth of her breasts burning through her flimsy silk blouse, searing his own chest with the heat of her need.
“Nicole,” he managed before she pulled him to her again.
“Make love to me,” she whispered urgently between kisses as she pulled him down on top of her. Her hands began to work on the bindings of his clothes. “There is nothing in the world I have ever wanted so much as I want you now.”
Confused and alarmed, his nervous system afire with sensations he was powerless to control, Reza somehow managed to gently disengage himself from her embrace. “Nicole, please, I cannot do this,” he said softly as he rolled over, gently pushing her away.
“Reza, what is wrong?” she asked, her voice trembling. “You do not want me, do you?”
Reza sat up, an expression of pain and misery on his face. “Nicole…” He shook his head, his mind swirling with confusion as his blood began to burn with desire for the one his heart held most dear, and whom he could never again hold close to him, could never again touch. It was physical agony. “Nicole,” he rasped, fighting against the roaring pain that surged through him, “I love you as a friend and kindred soul more than any other, for who you once were in my eyes and my heart, and for who you are now. But I cannot give you the love you seek, the true love of my heart, for that forever belongs to another.”
Nicole felt like she had been stabbed through the heart, and Reza felt her pain in his own. “Who?” she asked, bitter and angry, not at Reza, but at fate. Why? she cried to herself. Why must it be like this, after waiting so very long? “Who is it? One of the trainees? Jodi?”
Reza shook his head slowly, rubbing the scar in his hand where Esah-Zhurah had shared her heritage with him, consummating their love with blood. “No,” he replied. “No, if only our lives were that simple, but it is not so.”
Nicole watched the skin of his face tighten as his jaw set. His eyes closed, and his head bowed, as if a heavy burden had just been dropped upon his shoulders. He was in pain, terrible pain. She sat up next to him, her sudden anger at his rejection overtaken by concern. She put a hand to his face simply to touch him, to reassure him. His skin was on fire, almost too hot for her to touch.
“Mon Dieu, Reza,” she gasped, “are you… are you all right? You are burning up.”
“It shall pass,” he whispered fiercely as he fought to control the trembling that swept his body. “I get this way when I think of her. It has been… the most difficult thing for me to deal with. Her face is seared into my brain, and my blood burns at the mere thought of her.”
“Who is she?” Nicole asked again softly.
Reza’s hands tightened into fists of iron. “Her name is Esah-Zhurah,” he whispered. It was the first time he had uttered her name aloud since leaving the Empire.
“A Kreelan,” Nicole whispered, incredulous.
“Yes,” he said mournfully, opening his eyes again to face her. “She has the key to my heart, but I shall never see her again. I am banished from her, as I am from the Empire.”
“Tell me about her,” Nicole asked quietly as his skin began to cool under her touch. She wrapped her arms around him, holding him close. “I want to know who this… woman… is, what she means to you. Please. I know you have sworn not to reveal the secrets of the Empire, but this is very important to me. I must know.”
How to tell her? Reza wondered dazedly, acutely aware of her body against his. How could he share with her what he had been, what he had known, what he had felt then and now? He was not concerned with staining his honor with words spoken of the Empire where Nicole was involved; he was worried more about how to convey to her all that made the love he had shared with Esah-Zhurah what it was.
Then he knew. Perhaps he was wrong to even think what now ran through his mind, but he could imagine nothing more fitting. And the more the thought took hold, the more he knew it to be the right thing, almost as if some unknowable power had suddenly dictated this course in his life. “Will you trust me, Nicole?” he asked. “Will you trust me with your spirit and your life?”
A chill ran up Nicole’s spine at the sound of Reza’s voice. It was not malevolent, not chilling, but held a note of power and understanding that seemed ages beyond his years. The intensity of his gaze proclaimed it as a challenge, daring her to follow where no others of her kind save the man kneeling beside her had gone.
“Oui, mon ami,” she said evenly, trying to keep the sudden surge of excitement out of her voice, “I trust you.”
Moving away from her, Reza turned to the precisely arranged stack of his Kreelan things and withdrew a particularly beautiful and deadly looking knife. Nicole suddenly wondered what Reza was going to do, but she had given him her trust, and was not about to take it back.
“Give me your hand,” he said, holding up his own in the space between their bodies as he had done before with Esah-Zhurah. He put the knife between their joined hands, the blade now flat and cold against their palms. “This is one of the most ancient and sacred rituals among my people,” he said, his soft voice a marked contrast to the sparkling fire that danced in his eyes. “In our blood lies our spirit, our honor, our soul. In sharing our blood,” Nicole suddenly felt the warmth of blood upon her skin as Reza drew the knife across their palms, but she felt no pain, lost now in Reza’s eyes and the lilt of his voice, “we share ourselves with one another, that we may become one. In Her name, let it be so.”
Nicole felt Reza’s hand close tightly with hers, and she silently wondered at what a silly thing this was, for what could come out of pressing two bloody wounds together? Surely blood did not really flow from one to the other? But why did she feel no pain, for surely the knife had cut her de
eply?
“Reza,” she gasped as a tingling began in her hand, a warm, prickly feeling the likes of which she had never before felt. The feeling raced up her arm like an incoming tide, then spread through her body like the warmth from a glass of good brandy on a chill evening. “I feel… dizzy,” she said, watching as Reza’s face began to swim before her, and the light in the room faded toward darkness.
“Come,” she suddenly heard him say in a language she had never heard before, but somehow understood. “Come with me.”
He stood there, waiting for her, dressed in the gleaming armor that she recalled had once disturbed her, had found threatening somehow. But now it seemed normal, as if that is the way he always had been, and always would be. Behind him she could see a great city of stone and spires, with a brilliantly colored moon hanging in the sun-filled magenta sky. She stopped and stared in awe at a world that no human had seen and survived except Reza. He held his hand out to her, and she took it, barely noticing the talons on her hands and the blueness of her skin, for that was the way she had been born, a daughter of the Empress. And within her, she felt the endless chorus of voices that sang the melody of Her will and love. She felt the power of her own spirit there, a tiny but wondrous drop in an endless ocean of souls.
“Our Ways again are one, my love,” she said, feeling as if sunlight bathed her heart, as if the Empress had caressed her soul with kindness.
“In Her name, may it always be so,” he said, tenderly kissing her on the lips. “Yours shall my heart always be, Esah-Zhurah.”
She smiled as he spoke her name, and walked with him toward the great gates and the wonders that lay beyond.
***
“Nicole!”
Nicole sat up at the vaguely familiar voice, blinking at the light that illuminated her surroundings. She fought to say something, but her body did not understand the words her mind wanted to form. Her lips moved, but no sound came.
“Nicole,” Jodi said urgently, “are you all right?”
In Her Name Page 51