Worlds Apart (ThreeCon)

by Carmen Webster Buxton

  After Chio indulged in a return insult, Ogilvy turned the conversation to other things. Prax stayed a while longer and then he went to his room.

  He played his bouzouki briefly, and then he took the two blankets Hari had left on the bed and went out the security door. When he got to his spot on the hill, he sat for a while, watching lights go out in the house, and then he got up and walked around to Rishi’s side of the house. He put his palm on the panel next to the private entrance, and the door slid open smoothly and soundlessly. In a few seconds, he was at Rishi’s bedroom door. Then it opened, and she was in his arms.

  She was wearing a nightdress of some silky red material. Prax had meant to talk to her first, because he had so much he wanted to say. Somehow the nightdress ended up on the floor, and his own clothes soon followed it. It was only later, while they were lying in bed in that relaxed mood that follows sexual satisfaction, that he remembered what he wanted to ask her.

  “What happened last night, lady? Why were you wearing that dress, and why were you crying?”

  Rishi rolled over so that she was looking into his face. “I went out last night. I went to a bar to look for a man to go to bed with me. That’s the kind of dress you wear if you’re looking for that sort of relationship. No names, no feelings, just sex.”

  Even though he had once done very much the same kind of thing, it distressed Prax to hear her talk that way. “Why would you want that?”

  “I didn’t really want that. I wanted you. But when I found out you had gone back to that bar to see that Danitra person, I got very angry at you. I thought I’d show you that I didn’t need you.”

  “But, lady,” Prax said, feeling aggrieved, “I didn’t go there to see her. And I didn’t do anything with her. She asked me to take her home, but I said no.”

  “And the other time you went there?”

  Prax met her gaze. He had to tell her the truth. “The first time I met her, I went to her home. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but I woke up in her bed.”

  Rishi didn’t seem upset. In fact, she smiled. “I’ll bet she meant for it to happen.”

  “But why were you crying?” Prax said, returning to his original question. “What happened to upset you?”

  Rishi touched his face lightly with one fingertip. “I found out I didn’t really want what I was getting. I went to a hotel room with a man I picked because he looked more like you than anyone else in the bar. Then, when he started to touch me, I changed my mind. I tried to leave, but he wouldn’t let me. He frightened me. If Hari hadn’t come so quickly when I activated the transponder, he would have—” Rishi stopped talking.

  Listening to her, Prax could feel his heart pound with fear, anger, and jealousy all at the same time. She had been in danger and he hadn’t been there to help her. He held her close. “Lady! Lady! Promise me you won’t do that again!”

  “I won’t. I don’t want to now. It’s different with you. It’s so much better, it’s hardly the same thing at all.”

  Prax felt a rush of warm exhilaration that she cared so much for him. He embraced her tightly and held her until she fell asleep.

  In the morning, Prax woke first and dressed quietly. This time he managed not to wake Rishi at all. He kissed her shoulder gently while she slept, and then went out the door. He had his usual run, stopped by the hill, picked up his blankets and headed back toward the house. He didn’t meet anyone coming in, and he showered and changed clothes in time to have breakfast.

  PRAX had never been in Rishi’s rooms before the first time they slept together. Over the next few days, he was very interested to see what she had chosen to do with her living space. Her rooms felt much more open than his. The high ceiling, the skylights over the bed, the huge fireplace, and the three walls of windows, all made being in her rooms feel like being in the spaceport or a cavern. The many things Rishi had collected and put on the shelves around the room made it an interesting space.

  On their fourth night together, Prax spotted a bowl from one of the ruined cities of Celadon on a shelf on the wall.

  “This is from my home,” he said, touching the rim with one finger.

  “Yes,” Rishi said. “I bought it from a young woman in the market in Pireaus. She said it was an antique. I paid too much, but it’s beautiful.”

  Prax picked it up carefully and turned it over. “It’s real, anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My people make bowls like this.” Prax traced the bottom rim with one finger. “The material comes from under the ground, near riverbanks. You can dig it out in large chunks, and then heat it very hot to carve it or shape it. Then you heat it again, even hotter, and you apply the color.”

  “You mean the Elliniká make fake antiques?”

  She didn’t understand. “We don’t think of it that way. We learned to make bowls and dishes because we use them. If the people from the cities buy them from us and then choose to sell them to strangers as old things, that’s not our concern.”

  “But this one is real?” Rishi said insistently.

  “Yes.” Prax nodded. “The pattern is different. We haven’t been able to make those colors. And there’s no maker’s mark on the bottom.”

  “Your people sign their fakes?” Rishi sounded entranced by the notion.

  “They’re not fakes when we make them, only when someone else sells them,” Prax corrected patiently. It was important she understand Elliniká ways. “And a craftsman likes to sign his work.”

  The next night, Rishi showed him her walled garden. He hadn’t realized that the drape on one wall covered not a window but a door that opened directly to the outside.

  “See,” she said, pulling back the drape. “If you feel a need to go outside, we don’t have to go far.”

  She opened the door and they stepped outside. Three walls taller than Prax defined the garden space, with the side of the house making the fourth wall. Flowering shrubs grew in beds around the walls and along the narrow paths. A tiny waterfall in one corner splashed down silvery rocks to a little pool at the bottom. Small black fish darted among the pebbles of the pool.

  Prax had walked around the house from the outside many times and never realized the garden wasn’t part of the house itself. Unlike the atrium, it really was open to the sky. He could feel the freshness of the air, and how much cooler it was than in the house.

  Prax looked more closely at the grass underfoot and the leaves of the shrubbery. In the puddle of light from the door, and the dim lights on top of the walls, they didn’t look familiar. He hadn’t seen any of these plants outside on the grounds, and the color was wrong, too. Unlike the dark green of Subidar’s vegetation, everything that grew here was a silvery gray that was only faintly green. The grass didn’t have the now-familiar crunch when he walked on it, either. It was softer and more like the grass on Celadon.

  “Everything here is from Prashat,” Rishi said, before Prax could ask the question. “I come here sometimes, to remember what it was like.”

  Prax looked around. Would he have a garden that looked like Celadon if he could? Perhaps. But remembering his family was no longer painful. They weren’t dead, and he was happier there now that he had Rishi, than he had been on Celadon. “It’s beautiful. But doesn’t it pain you to look at it?”

  “It did. Sometimes I would come here just for the pain. The pain was all I had left of them.”

  Prax put his arms around her and pulled her close.

  After a moment, she pulled away. “I think I’ll start the fireplace. Would you like that?”

  Prax agreed that a fire would be pleasant. He was surprised when she started a fire by turning a dial, but his interest in fireplaces paled when she tugged on his hand. “Let’s go to bed.”

  Sometime later, Prax lay beside Rishi and felt the warmth of her body against his.

  “It’s wonderful having you here
in my room,” Rishi said. The light flickering from the fireplace made deep shadows on her cheeks and her neck. “I always thought of this room as my refuge, a place to go when I needed to be alone. Then I realized that I had made it into a hiding place, not a refuge. Since I almost never let anyone in it beside Hari and Lidiya, it was a place I could go to keep people away.”

  “I like being here with you.” Prax kissed her shoulder and then her neck. Her hair tickled his nose. “In here I don’t feel that I’m on an alien world.”

  “When it’s warmer, we can go outside and sit in the garden. Maybe even make love on the grass.” She stroked his arm. “Would you like that?”

  The words brought a picture to Prax’s mind—a moonless night on Celadon, he and Zoë lying side by side, naked on the grass. He didn’t answer. His heart was beating rapidly. In a matter of seconds, he had gone from deep content to fear and shame.

  “What’s wrong?” Rishi sat up. “You’re as pale as a ghost. What’s wrong?”

  He drew a ragged breath. He had to tell her. It would be wrong not to tell her his secret. He should have told her before. “I—I was remembering.”

  “Remembering what?”

  “A long time ago. I did something bad once, a long time ago.”

  Now he was committed. He had to tell her. His chest pumped air as if he had been running hard for an hour. He could feel his pulse racing. He swallowed hard.

  “Are you ready to tell me about it?” she asked.

  He nodded, unable to speak for a few seconds. Finally, he got his voice. “When I was young, only eleven—” he counted in his head, “eighteen to you, a young woman came to live with my clan. Her name was Zoë Mercouri.”

  Rishi frowned. “So was she a Mercouri?”

  “Yes, but her father was a widower who had remarried. He went to live with the Spiridopolus, his second wife’s clan, and he took Zoë with him. I hadn’t seen her since she was very small.”

  “Did she come back because she was grown up?”

  Prax shook his head. “No. Her father died when Zoë was only ten and a half—seventeen. Her mother was my mother’s first cousin.” He drew another breath. There, it was out. Or at least the first part was out. “So Zoë came to live with my Aunt Aphrodite, my mother’s sister, who was married but had no children of her own.”

  Prax paused, reluctant to proceed.

  Rishi laid her head down on the pillow and looked up at him. The firelight gleamed in her eyes and made them glow like golden gemstones. “What happened when she came back?”

  Prax cleared his throat. “The first time I saw her, I didn’t know who she was. She walked past the place where I was gathering firewood, and I looked over and saw this beautiful young woman with golden hair and eyes like the sky on a cloudy day. I—I loved her the first time I saw her.”

  Rishi said nothing.

  “I knew it was wrong,” Prax said in a rush. “She did, too, but that didn’t stop us. She came to find me one night, when I had come back from riding herd. She met me just as it grew dark, and asked me to talk to her alone. I knew she wanted more than talk, but I went anyway. We lay in the dark, on the prairie grasses.”

  Prax felt his eyes fill with tears. He had thought he had wept all he could for Zoë, but apparently he was wrong.

  “How long were you lovers?”

  Prax flinched at the word. “A few months.” He looked out into the dark of Rishi’s garden. “When I was very small, the night was a frightening thing. I slept in my family’s wagon, afraid of the blackness beyond the wagon cover, and the sounds of the animals. When I was older, I was allowed to move my bedroll outside and sleep beside Apollo and Penelope. After a few nights, I grew to like it, but then I had the campfire to hold back the night. I had Apollo beside me, to tell me the animals I heard were far away.” Prax let out a deep breath, remembering the past. The sheet beneath him was smooth and silky, nothing like the rough-woven feel of a bedroll. “But those few months with Zoë, the night was our friend. During the day, we didn’t dare be seen together for fear someone would guess our secret, but at night we would meet to be alone. Every minute we were together, I knew it was hopeless, and yet I treasured those moments above all others.”

  “And no one found out?”

  “My parents slept in the wagon. Penelope would have known I was up to something, but she was courting then and always got back later than I did. Apollo was a sound sleeper and never woke when I snuck off. Nikos and Iphigenia were still too young to sleep outside.”

  “What happened after a few months?”

  Prax closed his eyes. “Zoë came to me one night. After we made love, she said she wanted us to run away to Agnios. She said in the city we could be together all the time.”

  “And what did you say?” Rishi’s voice was little more than a whisper.

  Prax opened his eyes, but he couldn’t look at her. He stared at the fire instead. “I said I didn’t want to live in a city, spending all day indoors. Back then, I didn’t speak your language at all. I couldn’t imagine living in a box surrounded by strangers I couldn’t talk to. I told her so, but it only made Zoë persistent, shrill almost. I became angry, and we argued. She accused me of not loving her. I said if she loved me, she would never want to leave me to go to the city.”

  “And then?”

  “And then she ran away from me. I went back to my family’s campfire and went to sleep. In the morning, Zoë was missing.”

  Prax recalled the anguish of that morning, the crushing sense of guilt. “I felt terrible. I thought I had driven her away from the Elliniká.”

  “Where did she go?”

  Prax looked down at his hands. “We searched for her. Apollo found her body, hanging from a tree.”

  “Oh!” Rishi’s hand went to her mouth.

  Prax held his breath, expecting condemnation.

  “Oh, Praxiteles! I’m so sorry! She killed herself?”

  He nodded, amazed at her restraint.

  “You must have felt terrible!” Rishi said.

  He brushed his eyes. “I did. But later—later Eugenie summoned all the men in the camp to a meeting. We all sat on the ground while she spoke to us. My father sat beside me and my brother Apollo and Penelope’s fiancé who was staying with relatives. Eugenie said—she said Zoë had confided to a friend that she was with child. She asked the father of Zoë’s baby to stand up.”

  Rishi’s eyes were wide. “Did you stand up?”

  He nodded, remembering his shame. It had been the worst moment of his life, worse by far than his punishment. His father’s eyes had looked so horrified that Prax had been sure his family couldn’t love him anymore.

  “What happened after you stood up?”

  “They held the trial that night.”

  Now she was shocked. Her eyes widened in amazement. “A trial? But why?”

  Prax didn’t want to meet her eyes. She didn’t understand. “Incest is a crime, and crime is always punished among the Elliniká.”

  “Incest?”

  “We were in the same clan,” Prax said gently. “Our mothers were first cousins.”

  “But still, that only made you second cousins.”

  “But on my mother’s side.”

  She still didn’t understand. “Praxiteles, maybe you have laws against taking a second cousin as a lover, but the rest of us don’t. And I don’t think you should blame yourself too much because Zoë killed herself. You were very young, too, and you didn’t even know she was pregnant.”

  Prax felt his heart fill with relief that she didn’t condemn him. But of course, she didn’t comprehend the gravity of his crime. “I wish I could think as you do, but I can’t. I did wrong. That’s why my clan punished me.”

  Her eyes clouded over. “Is that how you got the scars on your back?”

  Prax nodded. “I wondered when you would as
k me about them.”

  “I wanted you to tell me without my asking. What did they do to you?”

  Prax remembered Eugenie standing sternly in the firelight, delivering his sentence. “They beat me with sticks until I passed out. Then they put me in the prison wagon for three days, without food or water.”

  “That’s terrible!”

  Prax shook his head at her anger. “That wasn’t so bad, lady. When it was over, it was over. I recovered from the beating and the deprivation. But when I woke up in my parents’ wagon, my mother told me that Eugenie had added a third part to my sentence. I can’t marry and leave the Mercouri. I cost my clan a life, so I have to pay it back by staying with them.”

  She stared at him. “But—but they let you come away with me?”

  “I asked Eugenie—when you said what you said—and she said the clan’s debt to you was greater than my debt to it.”

  Rishi smiled, a tearful, tentative smile. “I’m glad. I’m glad your clan owed me a debt. I’m glad it was a big enough debt to make them let you go.” She flung her arms around him and hugged him tightly.

  Prax hugged her back, but worry still pricked at his heart. Not only didn’t she understand the nature of his crime, she didn’t seem to realize his debt to the Mercouri was still there. His punishment wasn’t wiped clean; it was only in abeyance until the Mercouri debt to her was paid. He was still shamed, still bound to his clan.

  Rishi sighed. “And last of all, I’m glad I finally know your secret.”

  Prax stroked her hair and debated whether he should try to explain. It would only make her unhappy. And until the Mercouri debt was paid, his debt didn’t matter.

  “I’m glad I told you,” he said.

  She let him go and snuggled up against him. “And now we can go to sleep. Good night, Praxiteles.”

  “Good night, lady.”

  PRAX slept a little later than usual the next morning, and he ran into Tinibu when he was on his way into the house. Tinibu was coming back from breakfast. He was just about to step into Nakamura’s room when Prax came down the hall from the outside entrance.