Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [537]
He had locked the door, but sat clutching a small chopper. The bulimia engendered by the Fat Death made everyone on ship a potential enemy. He used the chopper occasionally to hack into the beams of the ship. The wood was needed to fuel the small fire on which he roasted joints cut from the last fhlebiht. Shokerandit and Toress Lahl between them had all but devoured the four long-legged goats in what he estimated was eight or nine days at sea.
The Fat Death generally ran its course in about a week. By that time, the sufferer was dead or on his way to recovery, faculties unimpaired but physiologically altered. He watched as the woman struggled and thickened. In her fight to get free, Toress Lahl had torn the clothes from herself, often using her teeth. She had gnawed the upright to which she was secured. Her mouth was bruised and bleeding. He looked at her with love.
The time came when she was able to return his gaze. She smiled.
She slept for some hours and then was better, with that feeling of well-being which accompanies those who survive the Fat Death.
Shokerandit untied her limbs and bathed her with a cloth and salt water in a bowl. She kissed him as he tried to help her to her feet. She surveyed her naked form and wept.
‘I’m like a barrel. I was so slim.’
‘It’s natural. Look at me.’
She stared at him through her tears and then laughed.
They laughed together. He took in the marvellous architecture of her new body, still gleaming from its wash, the beauty of her shoulders, breasts, stomach, thighs.
‘These are the proportions of a new world, Luterin,’ Toress Lahl said; he heard her using his first name for the first time.
He threw up his arms, scraping his knuckles on the bulkhead. ‘I’m relieved that you survived.’
‘Because you looked after your captive.’
It was natural to wrap his arms about her, natural to kiss her bruised mouth, and natural to sink with her to the deck on which they had recently wrestled with agony. There they wrestled with sexual rejoicing.
Later, he said to her, ‘You are no longer my captive, Toress Lahl. We are now captives of each other. You are the first woman I have loved. I will take you to Shivenink, and we will go into the mountains where my father lives. You shall see the wonders of the Great Wheel of Kharnabhar.’
She was already beginning to forget what had happened, and answered indifferently.
‘Even in Oldorando we have heard of the Great Wheel. I will come with you if you say so. The ship is very silent. Shall we see how the others fare? They may all be sick with the plague – Odim and his vast brood, and the crew.’
‘Wait here with me a little longer.’ Lying with his arms about her, looking down into her dark eyes, he was reluctant to break the spell. At that time he was incapable of distinguishing between love and restored health.
She said briskly, ‘Back in Oldorando I was a doctor. It’s my duty to tend the sick.’ She turned her face from Luterin.
‘Where does the plague come from? From phagors?’
‘From phagors, we believe.’
‘So our brave captain spoke the truth. Our army was going to be prevented by force from returning to Sibornal, just in case we spread the plague; it was among us. So what the Oligarch decreed was wise rather than evil.’
Toress Lahl shook her head. She began to comb her hair with slow strokes, luxuriously, looking into a small mirror rather than at him as she spoke. ‘That’s too easy. What the Oligarch decreed is entirely wicked. To destroy life is always wicked. What he did may not only be evil; it may prove ineffective too. I do know something about the contagious nature of the Fat Death – although since the Fat Death is latent for most of the Great Year it is difficult to study. Knowledge hard-learnt one year is forgotten by the next.’
He expected her to continue but she fell silent, continuing to regard her face even when she had set down her comb, licking a finger to smooth her eyebrows.
‘Be careful what you say about the Oligarch. He knows more than we.’
Then she