“Gabriel, what’s the matter?”
“I
…
I misspoke myself. I didn’t mean—If you like I
can send someone to you—”
She frowned. “If ‘someone’ was all I wanted I could have hired them from
town. I wanted someone I like.”
He gazed at her, with a quick faint grateful smile. Perhaps he had decided to
stop repressing his beard and grow it out at the same time he decided to leave
his father’s house, for his cheeks showed a trace of fine red-gold hair.
“Thank you for that,” he said.
She guided him to the couch, made him sit down, and sat beside him. “What’s
wrong?”
He shook his head. His hair fell across his forehead, half hiding his eyes.
“Gabriel, have you somehow not noticed that you are beautiful?”
“No.” He managed a rueful grin. “I know that.”
“Do I have to pry this out of you? Is it me? Gods know I can’t match the
looks of Mountainside people. Or if you prefer men, I understand.” She had not
hit on what made him draw away from her yet; he had not reacted to anything she
had suggested. “Are you ill? I’m the first person you should tell!”
“I’m not ill,” he said softly, not meeting her gaze. “And it isn’t you. I
mean, if I had my choice of anyone
…
I’m honored you
think this much of me.”
Snake waited for him to continue.
“It wouldn’t be fair to you, if I stayed. I might—”
When he stopped again, Snake said, “This is the trouble between you and your
father. This is why you’re going away.”
Gabriel nodded. “And he’s right to want me to go.”
“Because you haven’t lived up to his expectations?” Snake shook her head.
“Punishment is no help. It’s stupid and self-gratifying. Come to bed with me,
Gabriel. I won’t make any demands on you.”
“You don’t understand,” Gabriel said miserably. He took her hand and lifted
it to his face, rubbing her fingertips across the fine soft stubble. “I can’t
keep my side of the agreement lovers make between them. I don’t know why. I had
a good teacher. But biocontrol is all beyond my reach. I’ve tried. Gods, I’ve
tried.” His blue eyes were bright. He let his hand fall away from hers, to his
side. Snake caressed his cheek once more and put her arm around his shoulders,
hiding her surprise. Impotence she could comprehend, but lack of control—! She
did not know what to say to him, and he had more to tell her, something he
desperately wanted to talk about: she could feel that from the stark tension of
his whole body. His fists were clenched. She did not want to push him; he had
been hurt enough that way already. She found herself searching for gentle and
roundabout ways of saying things she would ordinarily deal with
straightforwardly.
“It’s all right,” Snake said. “I understand what you’re saying. Be easy. With
me it doesn’t matter.”
He looked up at her, as wide-eyed and surprised as the little girl in the
stable had been when Snake looked at the new bruise instead of the old, ugly
scar.
“You can’t mean that. I can’t talk to anyone. They’d be disgusted, like my
father. I don’t blame them.”
“You can talk to me. I won’t judge you.”
He hesitated a moment more, then the words, pent up for years, rushed out. “I
had a friend named Leah,” Gabriel said. “That was three years ago, when I was
fifteen. She was twelve. The first time she decided to make love with anyone,
more than just playing, you know, she chose me. She hadn’t finished her training
yet, of course, but it shouldn’t have mattered because I’d finished mine. I
thought.”
He was leaning against Snake, now, with his head on her shoulder, gazing with
unfocused eyes at the black windows.
“Maybe I should have taken other precautions,” he said. “But I never even
thought I might be fertile. I never heard of anybody who couldn’t handle
biocontrol. Well, maybe not deep trance, but fertility.“ He laughed bitterly.
”And whiskers, but I hadn’t started growing any then.“ Snake felt him shrug as
the smooth material of his shirt slid across the rough new fabric of her own. ”A
few months later we had a party for her, because we thought she’d learned her
biocontrol faster than usual. No one was surprised. Everything comes quickly to
Leah. She’s brilliant.“ He stopped for a moment and simply lay against Snake,
breathing slowly and deeply. He glanced up at her. ”But it wasn’t her biocontrol
that stopped her menstruation, it was that I had made her pregnant. She was
twelve and my friend and she chose me, and I almost ruined her life.“
Now Snake understood everything, Gabriel’s shyness, his uncertainty, his
shame, even why he cloaked his beauty when he went outside: he did not want to
be recognized; even more, he did not want anyone to offer him their bed.
“You poor children,” Snake said.
“I think we always assumed we’d partner, eventually, when we both knew what
we were going to do. When we were settled. But who’d want an uncontrolled
partner? They’d always know that if their control lapsed just a little, the
other would have none. A partnering couldn’t last that way.” He shifted his
weight. “Even so, she didn’t want to humiliate me. She didn’t tell anyone. She
aborted it, but she was all alone. And her training wasn’t far enough along for
that. She almost bled to death.”
“You shouldn’t treat yourself as if you’d hurt her out of spite,” Snake said,
knowing that nothing as simple as words would be sufficient to make Gabriel stop
despising himself, or to make up for the way his father treated him. He could
not have known he was fertile, if he had not just been tested, and once one
learned the technique it was not usually necessary to worry. Snake had heard of
people incapable of biocontrol, but not very often. Only a person unable to care
for anyone would have come unmarked through what Gabriel had undergone. And
Gabriel quite obviously cared.
“She got well,” Gabriel said. “But I turned what should have been pleasure
into nightmare for her. Leah
…
I think she wanted to
see me again, but couldn’t make herself. If that makes sense.”
“Yes,” Snake said. Twelve years old: perhaps that had been Leah’s first
realization that other people could influence her life without her control or
even knowledge; it was not a lesson children learned willingly or easily.
“She wants to be a glass-former, and she had an appointment to assist
Ashley.”
Snake whistled softly in admiration. Glass-forming was a demanding and
respected profession. Only the best of its people could build solar mirrors; it
took a long time just to learn to make decent tubed panels, or curved panes like
the ones in the towers. Ashley was not one of the best. She was
the
best.
“Did Leah have to give it up?”
“Yes. It could have been permanently. She went the next year. But that was a
year out of her life.” He spoke slowly and carefully but without emotion, as if
he had been through this so many times in his mind that he had forced some
distance between himself and the memory. “Of course I went back to the teacher,
but when they tracked my reactions longer they realized I could only keep the
temperature differential a few hours at a time. Not enough.”
“No,” Snake said thoughtfully, wondering just how good Gabriel’s teacher
really could have been.
Gabriel drew back so he could look into her face. “So, you see, I can’t stay
with you tonight.”
“You can. Please do. We’re both lonely, and we can help each other.”
He caught his breath and stood abruptly. “Don’t you understand—” he cried.
“Gabriel.”
He sat down slowly, but did not touch her.
“I am not twelve years old. You don’t need to be afraid of giving me a child
I don’t want. Healers never have children. We take the responsibility for that
ourselves, because we cannot afford to share it with our partners.”
“You never have children?”
“Never. Women do not bear them and men do not father them.”
He stared at her.
“Do you believe me?”
“You really still want me, even knowing—?”
In answer, Snake stood up and began unbuttoning her shirt. The newness made
the buttonholes stiff, so she stripped the shirt off over her head and dropped
it on the floor. Gabriel stood up slowly, looking at her shyly. Snake unbuttoned
his shirt and his pants as he reached out to hold her. When his pants slid off
his narrow hips he began to blush.
“What’s wrong?”
“I haven’t been naked in front of anyone since I was fifteen.”
“Well,” Snake said, grinning, “high time.” Gabriel’s body was as beautiful as
his face. Snake unfastened her pants and left them in a heap on the floor.
Taking Gabriel to her bed, Snake slipped under the sheet beside him. The soft
glow of the lamp highlighted his blond hair and his fair skin. He was trembling.
“Relax,” Snake whispered. “There’s no hurry, and this is all for fun.” As she
massaged his shoulders the tightness slowly left them. She realized she too was
tense, tense with desire and excitement and need. She wondered what Arevin was
doing.
Gabriel turned on his side and reached for her. They caressed each other and
Snake smiled to herself, thinking that though no single experience could
compensate Gabriel for the last three years, she would do her best to make a
start.
Soon, though, she realized he was not prolonging the foreplay by intent. He
was working to please her, still thinking and worrying much too much, as if she
were Leah, a twelve year old whose first sexual pleasure was his responsibility.
Snake got no joy out of being worked on, out of being someone’s duty. And, as
well, he was trying hard to respond to her, failing, and growing more
embarrassed by the second. Snake touched him gently, brushing his face with her
lips.
Gabriel flung himself away from her with a curse and hunched over on his side
with his back to her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. His voice was so rough Snake knew he was crying. She
sat up beside him and stroked his shoulder.
“I told you I’d make no demands.”
“I keep thinking
…
”
She kissed the point of his shoulder, letting her breath tickle him.
“Thinking isn’t the idea.”
“I can’t help it. All I can offer anyone is trouble and pain. And now without
even giving them any pleasure first. Maybe it’s just as well.”
“Gabriel, an impotent man can satisfy another person. You must know that.
What we’re talking about now is
your
pleasure.”
He did not answer, did not look at her: he had flinched when she said
“impotent,” for that was one difficulty Gabriel had not talked himself into
until now.
“You don’t believe you’re safe with me, do you?”
He rolled over and looked up. “Leah wasn’t safe with me.”
Snake drew her knees up against her breasts and rested her chin on her fists.
She gazed at Gabriel for a long time, sighed, and held out her hand so he could
see the scars and slashes of snakebites.
“Any of those bites would have killed anyone but a healer. Quickly and
unpleasantly or slowly and unpleasantly.”
She paused to let what she had said sink in.
“I spent a lot of time developing immunities to those venoms,” she said. “And
a good deal of discomfort. I never get sick. I never have infections. I can’t
get cancer. My teeth don’t decay. Healers’ immunities are so active they respond
to anything unusual. Most of us are sterile because we even form antibodies to
our own sex cells. Let alone anyone else’s.“
Gabriel pushed himself up on one elbow. “Then
…
if
you can’t have children, why did you say healers can’t afford to have them? I
thought you meant you didn’t have time. So if I—”
“We raise children!” Snake said. “We adopt them. But the first healers tried
to bear them. Most of them couldn’t. A few could, but the infants were deformed,
and they had no minds.”
Gabriel turned on his back and gazed at the ceiling. He sighed deeply.
“Gods.”
“We learn fertility control very well,” Snake said.
Gabriel did not answer.
“You’re still worried.” Snake leaned on her elbow beside him, but she did not
reach out to touch him yet.
He glanced at her with an ironic and humorless smile, his face strained with
self-doubt. “I’m scared, I guess.”
“I know.”
“Have you ever been afraid? Really frightened?”
“Oh, yes,” Snake said.
She rested her hand on his belly, brushing her fingers across his smooth skin
and the delicate dark-gold hairs. He was not visibly shaking but Snake could
feel his deep, steady, frightened trembling.
“Lie still,” she said. “Don’t move until I tell you.” She began stroking his
belly and thighs, his hips and the sides of his buttocks, ending each stroke
closer to his genitals but not actually touching them.
“What are you doing?”
“Sh-h. Lie still.” She kept stroking him; and she talked to him, letting her
voice slip into a hypnotic, soothing monotone. She could feel him fighting not
to move as she teased him: he fought himself, and the trembling stopped without
his noticing.
“Snake!”
“What?” she asked innocently. “Is something wrong?”
“I can’t—”
“Sh-h.”
He groaned. This time he was not shaking with fear. Snake smiled, eased
herself down beside him, and drew him around to face her.
“Now you can move,” she said.
For whatever reason—because of her teasing, or because Snake had made herself
as vulnerable to him as he was to her, and he could trust her, or more probably
simply because he was young and healthy and eighteen and at the end of three
years’ guilty self-deprivation, he was all right after that.
Snake felt like an observer, not a salacious eavesdropper but an
imperturbable watcher, almost disinterested. And that was strange. Gabriel was
innately gentle, and Snake drew him on to abandonment as well. Though her own
climax was satisfying, a welcome release of emotional tensions that had been
building as long as she had been alone, she was concerned mostly for Gabriel.
Though she returned his passion eagerly, she could not keep from wondering how
sex would be with Arevin.