Braxi-Azea - In Conquest Born Part 54

I was presented, at last, to the man whose name struck such chord of fear in me.

At the far end of a ceremonial chamber he waited, arrayed not like a statesman but like a warrior, before and not seated upon his throne, and by his side stood a Braxana. Harkur was broad and barbaric in costume and countenance, his light skin tanned and coa.r.s.ened from exposure to the elements. The only regal element about him was a narrow band of gold, not even a finger's width, lying across his forehead and confining his hair. And the hair! Its color was not even Braxin, but a deep blood red or wine color, and it shone as though it were metallic in the chamber's primitive lighting.

The man by his side was taller than he by a handswidth, and his white skin looked almost sickly beside the healthy exposure of his master. He was a man of dramatic features, though I would not say he was attractive. But the contrast of his face was arresting, and his frame and stance spoke of power, both in att.i.tude and in body. I wondered fleetingly what price such a man would have brought among the Mristi, for he would have pleased them. He was dressed in raw black silks, rich but not ostentatious, drawing attention to the medallion of rank which shone golden from where it lay on his chest.

As instructed, I approached the pair and knelt. Harkur walked over to me, regality obvious in every step, his aide following. The Kaim'era's presence inspired such confidence that for a moment I forgot my supposed fate. The other man I feared, a gut reaction so intense it was hard to speak when I had to.

Harkur reached a callused hand under my chin and gently drew my face upward. Never before had I known a man's touch in anything but cruelty; it was sweet, now.

"You are Dyle, the Zeymourian?"

I lowered my eyes. His voice was harsh, but strong and pleasing. I had never heard its like before. "I am, great Kaim'era."

He nodded, his eyes meeting Sokuz's. "I am very pleased. Were there losses?"

"Only theirs, Great One. A few."

The ruler of Braxi smiled, then regarded me again. "You've had a long confinement in the Void-I imagine you could do with some rest under proper gravity, and perhaps a bit of real food. My servants will show you to rooms, and supply you with all you need. I would be pleased to have your company at dinner this evening."

I was confused. What choice did I have? "As you wish," I managed. Why play this game of freedom when we both knew the truth?

He gestured toward the Braxana beside him. "This is Viton, my personal aide and advisor. He's offered to make himself available to you while you settle in.

Should you require something more, or should that which we supply be unsuitable for your race, you may speak to him."

I knew I would never have the courage for that, but I nodded.

Viton stepped forward and offered me his arm, to guide me. I tried not to tremble as I touched him-wouldn't that be amusing, the primitive alien terrified!

Sokuz stepped forward as Viton led me away, and I heard Harkur speaking words of praise. ". . . and I am pleased beyond expression. Now come, and tell me all you know . . ."

Viton led me to an exit behind the throne. We pa.s.sed through many walkways, all richly and tastefully adorned, until we reached apartments consisting of some five rooms. There women waited to receive me, and Viton turned me over to them without a word. He bowed as he left, but there was a smile on his face that I found disturbing and I looked away quickly.

One of the women, alien in feature and with hair the color of the sun (our sun) brought me to the bedchamber, where all manner of gowns were laid out, ranging from diaphanous sheaths with light embroidery to rich, fur-lined robes-of-state. I chose one, and the rest were taken away. I bathed- marvelous, welcome luxury!-and slept in a heaven of softness. When the time came for me to awaken they saw to it, and they insisted on dressing me. The dress was soft and its lining done in velvets, so that where it touched me there was only pleasure in the contact; it was also modest to my eyes, although not as much as something I might have designed myself. They pulled my hair back tightly and bound it there, then made curls to hang down about my neck and shoulders, and added to them small tinkling ornaments that brushed unexpectedly against my skin when I moved. All was so tactile, and thus so alien! Our people touch so rarely, and theirs so naturally, that I knew more human contact in that dressing than I had before in all my life.

Viton arrived, he said to give me a tour of the palace, which was now available to me. How could I refuse, even though he terrified me? There was something about him which was animal, not human, even predatory, an urge to violence which seemed barely under control, a hunger for indulgence that was in his black eyes whenever I looked in them, so clearly that I trembled. And I realized that he, not Harkur, was the embodiment of the evil and violence that had been presented to me as the Braxin nature.

We pa.s.sed libraries, terraces, chambers filled with art and music, halls rich in scent and lit primitively with torchlight- for Harkur had a taste for barbaric symbolism and found such things appropriate. Then he showed me the gardens, and oh! what beauty!

A fountain was central to this private place, its spray perfumed and its mist felt even by its enclosing walls. Plants grew about and between marbled pathways, and golden urns held ice and wine ready for the unexpected visitor. Benches covered with embroidered velvet cushions were half-hidden by the leaves and flowers, the pillows piled high and occasionally covered by bits of luxurious fur.

All about were things of pleasure, touch, and intoxication . . . I am beyond describing them, Beyl-my-brother. But it was incomparably beautiful, and I gazed at it long before allowing him to lead me away.

I dined with Harkur, Viton and other respected advisors, and also their chosen women. We reclined on cushions and sipped drugged wine, and women danced for us, and the incense filled the air with a heady sweetness that was almost too much to bear. And that was all. I feared him, I feared what he would do to me, and I came to be ashamed. For he did nothing. After hours of pleasure had pa.s.sed he sent me back to my rooms, saying that he sensed that to be my true desire.

And for the first time I truly understood that I had the freedom to turn him down-and that frightened me, somehow, more than anything.

I spent the days alternating between my rooms and the wonderfully voluptuous gardens which had been made available to me. I even thought fleetingly that if Harkur meant to keep me like this I should like to serve his will in return. I think now that that is as close as I dared come to desire for the charismatic ruler.

For desire, though utterly repressed, was born in that place. I hope you will understand enough to not think me utterly evil for it! After all, I was d.a.m.ned already beyond redemption just by having been raped. The softness, the spray of the fountain, everywhere the tactile richness of my surroundings did to me what no words could. My body territory was violated by the women who attended me, again and again, until its border became less sensitive; everywhere there was softness and pleasure, things to touch and feel, velvet for my hands and satin against my cheek. Is it a wonder I changed, in such a place?

I spent an easy month in the palace (seventeen days reckoned by the Braxin calendar, as Berros was without a moon). In the beginning I was fearful, but even fear could not lessen the wonder of my new circ.u.mstances. I learned to lose myself in the pleasure of my surroundings, for therein lay forgetful-ness. There were warm baths in marble halls, attended by females of many Scattered Races, which I enjoyed, although I was a bit distant when they gathered in small groups to discuss, laughing, the tastes of the Master of the House. There were pools for swimming and I used them often. There was wine and music and rich sensation all about me, and by the time Harkur desired my company again I was very different from what I had been when I arrived.

I knelt when I was brought to the dining hall, took his hand and kissed the ring of rank he wore. It was the first time I had ever touched a man of my own will. He drew me to my feet and fed me again the richness of Braxi, gave me wine in jewel- encrusted chalices, brought forth musicians and dancers and humorists to entertain me. By the end of the night my head was weak and I excused myself, humbling myself as I left as I had when I came.

I didn't make it to my apartments. I pa.s.sed the gardens, saw the starlight shining through the skylight, and entered. I walked through the fountain's spray and let it tingle against my skin, deliciously cold against the warmth the wine had instilled within me. And then I threw myself upon a pile of cushions, and they sank beneath me. And as I drifted softly into sleep, I was aware of my hands slowly stroking the velvet and furs, with a life of their own.

I awoke a bit later, disoriented but happy. The starlight was gone but someone had lit candles, and the light caught on the flying water in the center of the room.

As I slowly took in my surroundings I became aware that Harkur was there as well, sitting beside me, watching me, his vivid red hair falling over his shoulders, heavy ornaments wrapped about his waist and wide metal bracelets adorning his bare upper arms.

And do not condemn me, my brother, until you have been intoxicated by pleasure yourself and had a creature of such presence beside you. My hands ran of their own will to his shoulders, fingered his skin, the ornaments, the shining hair. I was hungry for the touch of him; I had only recently learned to feel with such perception and now I reveled in the combination of softness and metallic rigidity that he offered me. I wanted him, not for s.e.x, that evil, but to touch him, to feel the mysteries of him, to have this sensation to add to all the others. I never made the connection between the d.a.m.ning indulgence and what I was feeling.

Harkur had planned this moment and done it well, for even my conditioning could not defy the sensuality of my circ.u.mstances, and it died unheard in the back of my mind as I drew him slowly down to me and tasted the unbearable sweetness of a man's lips for the first time. Oh, Kaim'era, how could any woman be frightened in the face of such pleasure-and how could any mistake it for sin, my master, how?

I give you words, my brother, but I cannot give you my feelings. Nor can I help you to rationalize or understand what I have done, the sins I indulged in that were no sins at all except in the eyes and words of our oppressors.

Oh, Beyl, take this new world and help our people escape their suffocating heritage! Once I was against you, believing so strongly in what I was taught-or so terrified, perhaps- that I would have turned a pregnant woman over to the Mristi for the crime of having loved. I, now, have loved, and if that's a crime there's no sweeter one in the world. And I also-but that later, I will get to it in time. . . .

What can I say of my position in the palace on Berros that can help you understand it? Pleasure is so alien to our kind- can you conceive of my being draped in riches merely because the ruler of Braxi found pleasure in me? Other women were more intelligent, all were more knowledgeable- can you believe I was so treated simply because I asked nothing of him, had nothing to gain from his favors that I did not enjoy at that moment, never sought to use him and would hardly have known how had I tried? In his way, Harkur loved me. I gave him pleasure and I gave him myself, I amused him and could not hurt him . . . for a Braxin, that can be enough.

I was moved, though, when he had a portrait commissioned of us together, for he was self-conscious about the harmless mutation that had caused him to have hair of such an odd color and texture that he had allowed no picture to be taken of him, even frowned upon written description. This he hung in one of his hunting-palaces, in a dining hall, for it pleased him to look upon it when he vacationed there, away from the pressures of the Berren court.

I lived many zhents at the palace. He spoke to me sometimes of his work and his dreams, and of politics I barely understood. He told me that he meant for Viton to inherit the throne, and when I paled he declared, "I have no choice. My children, my advisors, my princes, they all talk of uniting Braxi, making treaties, birthing international organizations, bringing the tribes together. There is only one way to do that, and that is with blood! Give them war and they'll fight together, promise them power and they'll band together to grab at it. Viton will settle for no less than mastery of the galaxy, as much as he can grasp at in a lifetime, and the tribes will follow him to share in that glory. Nothing less than that will do, Dyle . . . but oh, I wish there were a better way."

He told me that the Braxana are so suspicious even of their own kind that a Braxana Kaim'era could never rule them all. "The entire nature of our government would have to change if they tried to hold the throne. "And he didn't say what we both knew: once they had the throne, it would take nothing short of slaughter to dislodge them from it. One by one he was dragging them into his court and forcing them to learn the games and ways of civilization, hoping that by the time of his death they could take his place and keep the Braxins united-for or against them, it didn't matter to him. The planet had to act as one nation if it was to prosper. That was all that concerned him.

He spent long sessions in his private chambers with Viton, comparing their philosophies and seeking common ground for a unified Braxin tradition. Oh, but I fear to say it was only a dream at best, though they were both devoted to it!

Even at his court the hostility between the members of different tribes was open and often violent; could he ever create out of that a Braxin whole that would outlast his lifetime?

On religion they disagreed. Harkur saw some value in it, Viton saw it only as a crutch of the weakminded. This was strange to me since Viton recognized a small pantheon of deities while Harkur was himself an atheist. An active G.o.d, the Braxana explained, cripples man by limiting his potential. And can any rational mind accept that a being with unlimited horizons would really bind itself down to the care and feeding of man for all eternity? The Braxana see their G.o.ds as having abandoned man and do not expect them to return. But on this the two men agreed, and I also: that religion, properly controlled, is the single most powerful manipulative tool in the a.r.s.enal of man against his own kind. I have seen that, looking back on Zeymour and my past, and I shudder to think of the other uses such faith might be turned to.

At night I awoke often, shivering, a nightmare all but gone from my mind.

When I was with him he held me. He never asked me of their nature or wondered aloud at their cause, even when I awoke crying out or with tears blinding my eyes.

For my part I never remembered the content of the dreams, or what they meant to me that they terrified me so. But I could guess.

I was wrong.

One day, many months after I had first arrived and long after my place with him had become established, he bade me follow him into a section of the palace that previously had not been open to me. Perplexed and curious, I obeyed.

What he took me to was a closed dock, although I didn't realize it until we had pa.s.sed through the last code-sealed door. There was-oh, there are tears in my eyes to remember it!-a starship, yes, but not only a starship-a vessel that captured the line of the long-lost Explorer. Oh, it was Braxin to be sure, and there was no mistaking the gravitic generator for anything else, or the fact that the very machinery which had caused me such agony on the way out was missing from this model, but still its purpose was clear . . . I wept. Long and hard and fearfully, my brother, until I was empty of tears and could cry no more. "How did you know?" I whispered.

He stroked my head and answered softly, "You talk in your sleep, my little one.

Now tell me." He pushed me back from him, enough to look in my eyes. "Do you really believe they have a chance? I won't let you go back there just to commit a grand gesture of racial suicide."

I thought, and I answered as I believed. "The odds are very bad," I admitted.

"But my brother said there was hope, and I have faith in him."

"And you want to go back?"

I lowered my eyes. "I have to go back. What they're doing, even if they succeed, will mean such suffering . . . they need the hope of knowing what's out there. The universe is filled with life, if only they can manage to reach it! They need to know it's worth fighting for. I need to tell them."

He nodded, and I thought he looked very sad. "Come," he said quietly. "I'll show you how it works."

He was long in teaching me how to fly the starship, perhaps because he feared my ignorance and perhaps . . . but no, that is private and I will leave it so. Suffice it to say that one night he took me in his arms and said to me that he knew what I might be returning to, and that I might well be hated, and that he wanted me always to remember that once, here, a man had called me mitethe. He whispered the word, an endearment from a language so descriptively rich that it spoke of tenderness as no word from any other language could. I held him again, and that was the last time. For in the morning I left him, and Braxi.

I skirted his empire ("That-Which-ls-Held-By-B'Salos," he called it) and cut through a lesser portion of Lugastine s.p.a.ce. I prayed that they wouldn't detect me, but as Harkur had said, s.p.a.ce is so vast that the odds of single starship being noticed if its arrival is not antic.i.p.ated are astronomically small. Just so, for they didn't notice me, and I pa.s.sed through and beyond that well-meaning nation and I turned . . .

. . . toward home.

Home?

Sunward are the asteroids. They weren't there when I left, at least not in that form. Some of them glow, with a dull blueness that I can see when the angle is right. A large group of them are traveling together, and how many bodies, how many shreds of man's glory in between them? This, Lord, was Zeymour, and you may spare it Your judgment because it managed to create its own.

The fourth planet: I circle it, far out. It has no moon, little atmosphere, nothing to welcome man but its convenient proximity at the time of disaster. At the edge of one continent I imagine I see light, perhaps searchbeams from a s.p.a.ceship, perhaps imagination, perhaps nothing.

Beyl, I lack the courage! I sit here in orbit and want to believe, with all my heart, that at the last moment you rebelled and took the ships and are below me, waiting-but I know the odds are against it, and the thought of facing the Mristi now is almost more than I can bear. I am pregnant, my brother, and I have waited as long as I can. I have supplies for many zhents more, but the child will not wait. Even now the first pains come . . . oh, I should have been careful, but what do I know of such things besides Mristi-warped legends, and what do rulers care? Harkur would have welcomed our child into his court, and I would have learned to care for it. Now?

I've waited as long as I can. I'll follow the light and hope that it indicates people, and pray as I land that the people are my own. If not ... it's been a long trip, my brother, but at least I'm home. There's something in that, isn't there?

Notes in the journal of Beyl vi Dakros, YE 1 Third Zeymour-month after the Exodus, third day.

Dyle is dead.

We did all we could for her, but still we failed. It seems years ago that we pulled her free from the wreckage of her ship in the mountains. I wonder if she was aware enough to see her child born, forced from her prematurely but safely adapting to the air here. The atmosphere was too thin for Dyle, or perhaps the deathwinds swept by while she waited for us to find her. Either way she's gone, lost to us a second time.

We lost five more today, bringing the total to half our number. The winter is coming quickly now and we struggle to have the shelters raised in time. We were shoulder to shoulder during the journey from Zeymour; even with our numbers reduced by half, we can't hope to survive this planet's long winter packed into the ships that brought us here.

Sometimes I despair. Then I remind myself of our original goals-and if only a pair of us makes it through to the spring, that will be enough.

We salvaged nothing of the Lyu. It ignited even as we pulled Dyle out of it; we barely had time to cover ourselves before the whole of it blew. The child, thank G.o.d, survived. We could not have saved her mother.

We are calling the infant Hasha, which means Firstborn. She is a symbol of hope to us in this barren place, the first new life in a world of death. Nevertheless, there are some who would have her killed. She appears to be part Mristi, and the only logical cause of her existence would have it so. They would put her to death for that reason. But isn't that just what was done to us? What we sought to escape by coming here?

Fragments of a community are beginning to form at last. Perhaps predictably, they are centering around the ships that brought us here and the settlements which were organized accordingly. We've taken the ship's numbers as secondary names, a grim reminder for future generations of what man can do when he has to-and of what man's stupidity can make necessary. I wonder if that's enough.

Today we broke the seal on the Zi's innermost laboratory. Already our would-be scientists have begun to study this new cache of treasures, and they have high hopes that we will soon find the texts and equipment for that most crucial sci- ence: genetics. We must unlock the secrets of human in inheritance before this planet destroys us all. Unhappily- ironically-we are dependent upon the foresight of our oppressors for hope. Did they have time to store the information we need? We can only pray. . . .

The Mristi. Like ghosts they hover around us, banished only by the promise of a world so different from their own that they would truly have no place there. For we will take this planet and build a new life for ourselves, setting standards we can be proud of. We will never do as our tormentors did, speak words only to bury them with actions. We will meet the future with our honor held sacred so that no mattr what the temptation, no matter what the cost, we will never resemble our tormentors and our society will never come to resemble theirs in any way. Thus "will the Mristi be laid to rest at last, and the people of the Firstborn be sustained.

Dyle, this I swear to you: your child will be treasured and remembered, the first human born on this hostile soil. We will conquer Azea and make it ours-all in her name, my sister, and yours. Be sure of it.