Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [214]
The two women and the child spent their time indoors. The sense of waiting, the sense of an ending, was not unpleasant. Boredom had many mansions. They played with the boy, simple games that took them back to their own childhood. Once or twice Vry joined them, but Vry had an abstracted air these days. When she spoke, she told them of her work, and of all that she aspired to do. On one occasion, she broke out into passionate speech, confessing her involvement with Raynil Layan, of whom they had previously nothing good to say. The affair vexed her; she often felt disgust; she hated the man when he was absent; yet she flung herself on him when he appeared.
‘We’ve all done it, Vry,’ Dol commented. ‘It’s just that you’re a bit late, so it hurts you worse.’
‘We haven’t all done it enough,’ Oyre said quietly. ‘I have no desires now. They’ve gone from me … What I desire is desire. It may return if only Laintal Ay returns.’ She gazed out of the window at the blue sky.
‘But I’m so torn,’ Vry said, unwilling to be distracted from her own troubles. ‘I’m never calm, as once I was. I don’t know myself any longer.’
In her outburst, Vry said nothing of Dathka, and the other women evaded that issue. Her love might have brought her more ease if she did not worry about Dathka; not only was he on her conscience, but he had taken to following her obsessively. She feared for what might happen, and had easily persuaded the nervous Raynil Layan that they meet in a secret room, rather than in their own places. In this secret room, she and her fork-bearded lover had daily tryst, while the city waited on the disease and the sound of saddle animals drifted through their open window.
Raynil Layan wished the window closed, but she would not have it.
‘The animals may convey the illness,’ he protested. ‘Let’s leave here, my doe, leave the city – away from the pest and everything else that worries us.’
‘How would we survive? This is our place. Here in this city, and in each other’s arms.’
He gave her an uneasy grin. ‘And suppose we infect each other with the pest?’
She flung herself back on the bed, her breasts bouncing in his sight. ‘Then we die close, we die in the act, knotted! Maintain your spirit Raynil Layan, feed on mine. Spill yourself over – over and over!’ She rubbed her hand along his hairy loin and hooked a leg about the small of his back.
‘You greedy sow,’ he said admiringly, and he rolled beside her, pressing his body to hers.
Dathka sat on the edge of his bed, resting his head in his hands. As he said nothing, so the girl on the bed did not speak; she turned her face from him and brought her knees up to her chest.
Only when he rose and began to dress, with the abruptness of one who has suddenly made up his mind, did she say in a stifled voice, ‘I’m not carrying the plague, you know.’
He cast her back a bitter look, but said nothing, continuing hastily to dress.
She turned her head round, brushing long hair from her face. ‘What’s the matter with you, then, Dathka?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You’re not much of a man.’
He pulled on his boots, seemingly more concerned with them than with her.
‘Rot you, woman, I don’t want you – you’re not the one I want. Get that into your skull and shift yourself out of here.’
From a cupboard fitted into the wall he took a curved dagger of fine workmanship. Its brightness contrasted with the worm-scored panels of the cupboard door. He stuck it in his belt. She called to ask where he was going. He paid her no further attention, slamming the door behind him and clattering down the stairs.
He had not wasted the last few bitter weeks since Laintal Ay left and since he had discovered what he regarded as Vry’s betrayal of him. Much of his time had been spent building up support among the youth of Oldorando, securing his position, making alliances with foreign elements who chafed at the restrictions Oldorando imposed on them, sympathising with those – and there were many – whose way of life had been disrupted by arduous work patterns imposed by the introduction of a native