“They are building a gallows in the courtyard. Can’t you hear them?”
“I have made my peace with God,” Klemmer said with
lumpen
certainty.
Tiegen bit his lip with mingled pity and exasperation.
Cholo
, he thought What was there about the slightest infusion of the kaffir in the blood that made a man so stubborn? And so fatalistic?
“The Voerster needs you,” Tiegen said. “You can bargain with him.”
The airman’s voice was all but gone, his battered mouth made clear speech impossible, but he muttered hoarsely, “You can’t bargain with a man who will sell his daughter to the Highlanders just to have them at his back instead of his throat.”
There was the sound of boot-heels on the stone floors. Tiegen waited with dread, thinking that one of these times the guards would be coming for him--for Healer Roark
The door burst open. There, like a shrike, stood Ian Voerster, flanked by two brutish Highlanders. “Go back to Fontein. I have no further need of you here,” he ordered.
“Sah.” The Highlanders, bundled in ebray furs and leather and hung about with hand-weapons, departed. Ian Voerster stepped into the room and slammed shut the door.
He snapped, “Healer, have you patched him up so he can walk?”
“He is badly hurt, Voertrekker-Praesident. He has been tortured.”
“He has had just punishment.”
Tiegen Roark felt the unfamiliar pressure of blood pounding behind his eyes. For some unexplainable reason, Ian Voerster’s crassness tipped some inner scale in the physician. “That is shit, Voertrekker-Praesident. We were returning to Voersterstaad when we were intercepted. The Luftkapitan was only following orders given him by the Ehrengraf.” He could not explain to himself why he spoke of Eliana in quite that way. He knew--had always known--that it irritated the Voertrekker-Praesident to be reminded that his wife was the heiress of a family as ancient and renowned as his own, and was considerably better loved on Voerster.
Ian Voerster’s eyes glittered. “I have always suspected that your loyalty was to the Ehrengraf rather than to me. In spite of all our traditions, you have always been ready to betray me.” He slapped at his booted leg with the short crop he carried. The impacts were like pistol shots and Tiegen’s anger subsided to be replaced with a damp, icy fear.
“You have heard the rumors, have you, Physician?” Voerster asked with an almost demented slyness. “Trouble in Voersterstaad. The legislators getting above themselves. They all favor my wife. They have begun to call her ’the new Elmi.’ How would they regard her actions if they were in my place?” He stood over the semiconscious airshipman, prodded his battered cheek with his whip. “Stand,
cholo
. On your feet.”
“He cannot, Voerster,” Tiegen Roark protested.
“Malingering bastard.” Voerster walked to the window and stood looking down at the encampment in the mountain valley. It suddenly came to Tiegen that Ian Voerster was trapped here in the valley of Einsamtal. There was no one to fight, but if he abandoned the kraal to the Fonteins--or even to the mountain winds--his reputation would fall into ruin among the Kraalheeren. And if there was one thing a Head of State on Voerster could not survive, it was a loss of reputation. What the kaffirs called “cheek.”
Voerster seemed to feel the physician’s scrutiny and he turned. His face was livid, eyes sunken. No, thought Tiegen, his adventure with the Planetians was not succeeding. Eliana had been right, after all.
“What are you staring at, damn you?”
“Nothing, Mynheer Voertrekker-Praesident,” Tiegen said.
Voerster pointed with his whip. “Patch him up enough to walk from here to the courtyard.”
Tiegen felt the bottom drop out of his belly. “Mynheer--”
Ian Voerster said, “Luftkapitan Klemmer will be hanged as soon as he is well enough to stand on his feet like a Voertrekker. I intend to make him an example for the people.”
He slapped his leather boot-top once again, and strode from the room, leaving Healer Tiegen Roark open-mouthed with amazement and dismay.
As in a dream, Eliana Ehrengraf floated through the long passageways inside
Glory
. Surrounded by the silence and space of a more peaceful world than she had ever known, her thoughts roamed.
The Starman physician Krieg had insisted that Broni’s convalescence would not be long, considering the extent of the surgery he had found it necessary to perform on her. It was true that the girl looked comfortable in her deep coma inside the healing pod. There was color in Broni’s cheeks and a deep, easy rhythm to her breathing. Her shallow breasts rose and fell quietly. Her golden hair lay tumbled about her pale face, and her lips were slightly parted, as though she were on the verge of waking.
Eliana had asked, “Does she dream, Healer?”
“Some do, mynheera,” Dietr Krieg had said. “Not all, but some.”
She regarded him obliquely. “Did Duncan?”
The neurocybersurgeon shrugged. “Gnaedige Frau, my Master and Commander is a mystery to me. Who knows if Duncan Kr dreams, or if he does, of whom or what?”
Eliana showed the physician a book. “Anya Amaya lent this to me. She said it was Duncan’s. It is very old, I think.”
The physician turned the small volume over in his hand.
“One of Duncan’s antique prizes.
The Poems of John Donne
. Is the poet known on Planet Voerster?”
Eliana smiled ruefully, “Poetry is not much read on Voerster.”
Krieg handed the book back. “Duncan would think that more a pity than would I.” He shrugged. “I am not at all like the captain, mynheera. I did not become a wanderer for love of the stars.”
“A practical man, Healer.”
“I believe in what I know.” He turned away from the Voertrekker woman. There was something about her simple elegance that discomfited him. Sooner or later he was going to have to tell her that the transplantation in Broni’s chest had not been a true success, and that there were going to be costs. He was thankful that Broni was still deep in her healing coma and that the moment of disclosure was not yet. Dietr Krieg was not accustomed to failure--even to partial failure. It would be some time before he could come to terms with it. Typically, Dietr was more concerned about his own self-esteem than about the potentially devastating effect his confession would have on this unsettlingly beautiful woman.
“Have you seen Duncan since he came out of the pod?” he asked.
“No,” Eliana Ehrengraf said. “He has made no effort to see me and I don’t want to intrude on his privacy.”
“Well, he is a strange one, mynheera. A solitary man.”
“Yes.”
“If he has been avoiding you, it is because he thinks it best.”
She thought of that exchange now, as she drifted, weightless, through
Glory
’s vast, empty spaces. Time was strange aboard the Goldenwing. The Starmen kept a twenty-hour day. It could have been almost any length, she surmised, but twenty hours--Earth hours, twelve cesium-clock minutes shorter than the hours which passed on the planet above. She had begun to think in Starman’s terms, she realized. “Above” because the
Gloria Coelis
was orbiting in an inverted position relative to Planet Voerster. The silver-and-blue planet could be seen through the many dorsal transparencies scattered throughout the long empty hull. Voerster seemed to blaze with a rush of color and light that was incredibly beautiful.
Eliana found, to her surprise, that she did not mind terribly being alone in
Glory
. Osbertus and Buele spent most of their time with Black Clavius and the young Rigger, Damon Ng, doing the technical and scientific things that commanded their attention. When she encountered the Astronomer-Select and his apprentice, they were euphoric, overwhelmed with new knowledge. The Ehrengraf in her felt a measure of pride.
Colonials we are
, she thought,
and far from a technological people, but the wonders of space are wonders Voertrekkers could grasp and appreciate.
Eliana longed for the companionship of Duncan Kr. The man had touched her deeply. On the planet she would never have allowed herself the thought. But she was not on Voerster--she was free, in Duncan’s world.
The woman syndic, Anya Amaya, was an enigma. On Voerster she had seemed resentful of Eliana. But in her own element she had been generous, even friendly. It was clear that she watched over Duncan intently. But their relationship was oddly like brother and sister--though from what the girl said (and she spoke quite freely of intimate things), they had been occasional lovers. It seemed probable that Anya Amaya had been--was--lover to all the Starmen. With the exception of the one on the planet’s surface held by Ian. “Our Earth-born lunatic,” she called him.
Amaya had returned to what was her normal Starman’s routine of wandering about the vessel nude or nearly so. Eliana flushed the first time she had unexpectedly encountered Anya in what the girl called “her natural state.” The Sailing Master was without inhibitions. More than that, she was sharply alert to the feelings Eliana had when Duncan entered her mind. Life in a microcolony of empaths had its rewards, but privacy was not one of them.
When Amaya had delivered Duncan’s book of poems to Eliana she took pains to call her attention to the dozen or so verses on certain dog-eared pages, poems lined with yellow marking pen.
“Duncan’s favorites,” Amaya said.
Eliana Ehrengraf had never in her life read anything about love so earthy, yet so moving.
Come, Madame, come, all rest my powers defie,
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
The foe oft-times having the foe in sight.
Is tir’d with standing though he never fight ....
The lines brought a smile and a tingle to her cheeks. She had never heard a lustful man’s erection so deftly invoked, Ian would be scandalized.
Your gown going off, such beautious state reveals,
As when from flowery meads th’hills shadow steales.
Off with that wyerie Cornonet and shew
The haiery Diademe which on you doth grow....
Anya said, “Poor Duncan. How he must long for someone to love. Look here.” She pointed to a pair of melancholy lines Duncan, or someone centuries gone, had underlined in ancient brown ink.
I long to talke with some old lovers ghost
Who died before the god of love was borne....
“The Elizabethans were outspoken,” Amaya said with a sidelong smile. “And who would ever imagine there were such fires burning in our silent Thalassan, mynheera?”
Who, indeed?
Who but Eliana Ehrengraf Voerster?
She arrived silently at the hatch to the compartment where Broni lay in the healing pod. Strange instruments watched over the girl’s vital signs. And Mira,
Glory
’s cat, lay protectively over the transparent shield that covered her. The small beast lifted her head and regarded Eliana unblinkingly. The tiny wire drogue trembled as she moved. What could she be thinking, Eliana wondered? For the first time Eliana speculated on how it would be to wear a Starman’s drogue, to see the vast universe as the ship’s computer saw it--and as Mira did. How marvelous that would be, the Voertrekkerschatz thought. To have come from a world of so many walls into a world that was all vast spaces and movement and coruscating light.
Mira appeared to have sensed what she was thinking and she stood, stretched, and then launched herself into a surreal leap that ended on the wall by Eliana’s face. The cat’s emerald-colored eyes fixed on the woman’s. For a moment, Eliana felt disoriented, as though she were plunging into those deep green wells. Mira opened her mouth, bared the Jacobson’s organ in the roof of her mouth to “taste” the woman, then trilled with satisfaction. She showed her tiny teeth in what may have been a snarl but was not. She stepped from the vertical wall onto Eliana’s shoulder, rubbed against her cheek and was gone in another slow flying leap to her chosen station on Broni’s pod.
“It seems the small queen finds you acceptable.”
Eliana turned to see Anya Amaya. She was dressed in sweat-damp shirt and workout trousers fresh from the spin-gravity well where she must have been exercising.
Her face was shiny and her hair hung in wet ringlets. She stripped the shirt off over her head and tied the sleeves around her waist. “That’s better,” Her full breasts were slick with perspiration, the nipples soft and dark rose-colored.
“Come with me, mynheera,” she said, and launched herself down the long, empty plenum. Eliana followed. The Voertrekkerschatz had not even the words to describe a sexual attraction between women, but Amaya’s nakedness stirred unfamiliar feelings.
Anya turned to address Eliana as she moved down the fabric tube. “You still have not seen Duncan yet, have you?”
“No.”
“A self-denying man, my Master and Commander.”
“I don’t understand you,” Eliana* said.
“I think you do, mynheera. Aboard the
Glory
you can let. yourself understand many things that could never be--up there.” Amaya indicated the silvery sea and cloud of Voerster shining through a transparency. “He loves you. Is that so hard to grasp? You’re an empath. Surely you feel it?”
Eliana stopped herself with a hand against the curving wall. She said, “This is a different world from any I have ever known, Amaya. I am groping. Feeling my way.”
Anya caught her by the hand and pulled her along. She was smiling as she said, “At least you aren’t telling me that you are a married woman.”
“Did you think I was liable to say that?”
“No. I’m an empath, too, mynheera. And a trained one. I know how things are between you and your husband. There are loveless marriages on New Earth, too.”
“I am not yet easy discussing very private matters, Anya.”
The girl caught her by the shoulders and spoke with a sudden, almost angry intensity. “My concern is for Duncan. Always for Duncan and
this ship
. Look at me. Do you love him?”
“How can one say--”
“Stop it, forget what is downworld. Speak the truth. The truth.
Do you love him?”
Eliana heard herself saying, “Yes.”