Retribution (42 page)

“No,” Dominic said. “If I have a choice, I’d
rather not hear it, not right now.” He shrugged his shoulders in
resignation. “But I don’t suppose I really have a choice.”

“It won’t take long, Dominic,” I said. “It’s
only this.” Anger surged through me, gave me strength and courage.
“If I’d known how wrong it was to let a five-year-old girl wear
breeches or to cut her hair, I would never have committed such
crimes. I would simply have died, starved and sick in my prison,
waiting for my husband to rescue me. I was dying, and so was Val.
It would have been very easy to let myself slip away, although I
would have– disliked—” I choked on the understatement. “—letting my
son die and leaving my daughter alone with bandits.”

I stared at Dominic’s face to see how he was
taking this but could not focus through my tears, saw only a blurry
whiteness pierced by cold silver. “But I didn’t know,” I said. “So
now you’re stuck with a living wife and son, and a daughter with
short hair that will grow back, and who wore breeches a couple of
times.”

There was the shocked silence that was
becoming increasingly familiar since my captivity and the
disruptions it had brought to our formerly peaceful existence. Most
people had not heard the beginning of my speech or the question
that had preceded it. But the switch in mood from merry wedding
party to domestic quarrel was unmistakable.

Only Naomi was unaffected.
Anger,
Amalie,
she thought to me, laughing to herself, enjoying my
scorching words.
Be careful with your anger
. She knew from
our communion that uncontrolled rage was my worst fault, a
dangerous weapon in the hands of a telepath.

Her warning came too late. Dominic reached
for me with his mind, attempting to calm me or at least shut me up,
and I pulled him into the communion of anger. For a few minutes he
lived it, exactly as I had: the weakness and the sickness, the
debilitating fear that without food I would be unable to protect my
children. He felt what it was to be, not a powerful, muscular
swordsman, but a small woman with rapidly declining strength and
rising fever, alone with her children among enemies.

Dominic’s face grew white and pinched. His
limbs shook and he sank to his knees in front of me, fell on his
side and curled in a fetal position. A gargling sound emerged from
his throat as he tried to speak and failed, lacking the strength to
form words. Together we suffered all the pains of my captivity, I
in memory, he in body, on the floor at my feet. It is much the same
thing a ‘Gravina does to her husband when she gives birth, except
that he consents to that, has time to prepare himself.

Dominic had undergone the agony of birth four
times: with his first natural-born son who had died young, with
Lady Melanie and Struan, and twice with me. Each time Dominic had
shared it all, every labor pain, every wrenching contraction, and
the woman’s primitive terror that the life trapped inside will kill
her as it fights its way out to life. Dominic had gone down to the
valley of death four times and had brought his woman and child up
safely to the land of the living. But I did it to him now without
warning, out of anger, not love, and the sudden change literally
laid him low.

Dominic wept at my feet, groveling on the
floor, a dark-haired angel cast out of paradise. Dominic-Leandro he
is, a lord of Eclipsis and a soldier of ‘Graven. It was wrong to
see him like this, devastating to know I had brought him to it.

Dimly I heard Sir Nicholas, outside the link
of rage, addressing his wife with what I now realized was irony.
“It’s one damn thing after another with these ‘Graven. Do you know,
my dear, it’s not always such a pleasure, having company.”

Our communion of suffering was invaded by
comfort. Niall lifted his lover up and caught him in his arms.
My love,
he thought,
my dearest love, lean on me
.
Naomi was there beside him and they joined hands, Dominic with
Niall with Naomi, supporting each other in a short chain that met
head to tail, as Dominic, in his need, took Naomi’s offered free
hand. The three of them, holding hands, formed a circle, the wall
of a cell. A
crypta
cell.
Come,
Niall said,
join
the cell. It’s not full
.

Some cell
, I said.
It’s not a
crypta cell, it’s one of the dark underworlds of Erebos.

No
, Naomi said, still smiling with her
newfound joy,
it’s a crypta cell. A strange one, but a
cell.

In its own peculiar way it was. A cell is a
group of gifted people in deep communion, their
crypta
joined to accomplish tasks beyond the abilities of any one
individual. Love is the strongest emotion that can connect people
creatively, as hate is used to destroy. We are taught in our
seminary training to develop our love for each other in communion,
to form cells of constructive energy.

And this peculiar little cell, a foursome of
shifting couples, was awash with love, realized and potential.
Dominic loved Niall and he loved me. Through Niall he would learn
to accept Naomi. Niall loved Dominic and now Naomi. He loved me
too, as we had discovered, through the communion with Dominic,
which led him to partake of all his lover’s emotions. Naomi loved
Niall. She had always loved Dominic, from a distance, and for me
she had discovered a new regard, the camaraderie of shared
experience and desire.

All I had to do to
fill the cell
was
return all these feelings and put aside my anger. That was the
important thing, to let go of my anger. We were all passionate
people. It was easy for any one of us to let anger overwhelm the
love in a careless emotional moment. But it was love that produced
the practical force. By focusing on the love and eliminating the
anger we could work together, generating a power far greater than
the four of us acting separately.

I entered the cell as the chain opened at one
link, pulled me in and closed around me. The communion deepened and
widened, absorbing us, drinking up and dissipating my anger and
Dominic’s jealousy. Dominic stood, strong and steady, hands held
fast by Naomi on the one side and Niall on the other. He looked
down at me in the center, where the nucleus of the cell would be.
You are no girl
, said.
You are a woman, my lady wife.
The little ring revolved slowly around me and I was lost,
assimilated into the love that surrounded me.

An hour or two passed in what felt like
minutes while we explored each other in the revealing light of full
communion. Dominic and Naomi joined in their own communion that
began like two wary cats circling each other. Understanding passed
between them and they sheathed their claws as Dominic thanked the
woman for her extraordinary generosity. I had not really given
Niall to Naomi. But Naomi, by her act of love, had given Niall to
Dominic. The ‘Graven lord thanked the forest witch, acknowledging
the gift that cost the giver dearly.

Dominic turned next to Niall, their heads
bent together as if in a kiss. When they faced the cell again they
were grim as they looked down at me in the center, but it was their
own belated realization of justice that made them frown. They knelt
at my feet, not thrown down roughly as in my act of rage, but
graceful and deliberate, two tall men recognizing an obligation
unmet.
Thank you
, Dominic and Niall spoke in unison, bass
and baritone in harmonious communion.
Thank you for my
companion’s life
. Both men had the same thought, the same
consciousness of gratitude, and their two voices blended into one
strand of melody.
What you did today saved us all. We are in
your debt.

They opened their arms again to Naomi, and
the three of them circled me as before. It was because Dominic had
made full confession to Niall of what had possessed him that the
two men could admit the truth. This duel, so necessary to Niall’s
sense of honor, could not have had an honorable outcome. If it been
allowed to run its course, one man would have killed the other and
the survivor would have followed in suicide.

Only now did my anger evaporate and my body
relax in the warmth of communion. In joy I participated fully, as I
could not at supper, in the reunion I had worked so hard to
achieve. Together the four of us formed the cell of our marriage,
reestablishing what I had thought ruined. In the intimacy of full
communion we uncovered ourselves, each to the other, and did not
judge or reject any sentiment as wrong. And at the end, when my
husband, yielding to the flow of love, dropped his internal
protective shield, I learned something of him that I would not
expose to the others but kept to myself.

When we opened the cell it was late. The
household had gone to bed, the tables cleared and put away, the
room dark but for the embers of the fire. With no discussion or
hesitation we separated into couples, Dominic with me, Naomi with
Niall.

I was limp when I fell into bed beside my
husband. The sheets had been smoothed out when the bed was remade
but not changed. They smelled of men and their love. No wonder
Dominic had been so eager for me at supper. He had enjoyed his
companion during the day. In the natural progression he has always
followed, tonight he was ready for his wife.

Dominic was in a wild mood, jubilant at the
successful outcome of our journey, teasing and reckless. He dared
to put his hand between my legs. “See?” he said as his fingers
toyed with my most sensitive places. “Breeches don’t belong
here.”

“Don’t start that up again,” I said. “You
said you’d deal with me when we got home.”

“I can’t wait,” Dominic said. “I must deal
with you now.”

I let him. I let him kiss me and fondle me
and make love to me while I held myself back from communion, crying
inside for the young boy he had been, that I had seen just now in
the circle. The child of the alien mother.

The genetically engineered “aliens” of
Eclipsis are hermaphrodite, with fully-developed male and female
sex organs, but the children of aliens and humans can vary in
unpredictable ways. No one knew if Dominic would be man or
intersex, or a sexless neuter. Dominic’s father, with his
exaggerated machismo and mental instability, had mocked Dominic as
he grew: tall and slim, beardless and hairless, slow to reach
puberty, with the alien’s beautiful voice and musical gift.

It was only at the ‘Graven Military Academy
that Dominic matured at last, older than the others when his voice
broke and his beard grew and he developed the powerful sexuality
that awed the former tormentors into silence—and desire. As he
worked to become the master swordsman, any lingering questioning of
his masculinity disappeared like smoke in the wind. But Dominic
never sang again in public. And his father had called him the
“beardless wonder” and the “man-woman” often enough that Dominic
had come, in the perverse way of the victimized, to embrace all of
Eclipsis’s strict divisions of sex roles and dress with the
over-enthusiasm of the forced convert.

Dominic finished his lovemaking, rested from
his labors and watched me out of the corners of his eyes when I did
not respond with my usual passion.

“You were magnificent,” I said.

Dominic heaved a sigh of relief and laughed
with feigned modesty. “Let me catch my breath,” he said, “and I
will try next time to make you show it.”

“No,” I said, “in the battle.” I recalled it
for him now, the experience of lethal beauty I had known from the
inside out, when Dominic had fought the bandits while I accompanied
him in communion as I returned from the
crypta-death
. “Did
you know I was with you, during the battle?”

“I sensed something,” Dominic said. “I felt
invincible.”

“You are,” I said. “Nothing mortal can defeat
you.” I was wrong, of course, but at that time I felt positive in
my error, safe after all our troubles.

It was the swordsmanship that had given
Dominic the confidence to become the man that Niall and I could
love and trust. Dominic would come to see in time that Jana in her
breeches had not unmanned him. And now that we had mucked out the
dungeon and had Reynaldo’s cremation, there was no need for Dominic
ever to see me in breeches again.
My lord husband
, I thought
to him in formal speech, as he likes best,
Dominic-Leandro
...

When he made love to me the second time I
cried my pleasure aloud. I did not care who heard. I am ‘Gravina
Aranyi, and there is no shame in loving such a husband.

We rose early to be greeted by Sir Nicholas’s
impatient explosions. “A whole day wasted,” he said, “while bandits
plunder and steal and escape across the mountains.”

Dominic and Niall exchanged smiling rueful
looks. Their reconciliation had been costly, but worth any price,
although Sir Nicholas might not agree. He could accept it with
relative equanimity only because there had been a second night of
proper coupling, Niall with Naomi, husband with wife.

This morning nobody argued over who would go
and who would stay behind. All the men would join the chase. The
rest of my visit to Galloway would be a female affair.

Dominic made a point of speaking to Jana at
the quick breakfast. “Even if you were a boy,” he said, “you are
too young to come with us. This job is for men—adults.”

“When I’m—” Jana had to count on her fingers
to plan her tantalizing future. “—sixteen, I’ll wear breeches and
carry a sword.”

Dominic swore silently, in thought, so that
only I heard. “Cherie,” he said, “even when you’re sixteen, you’ll
be a woman, not a man. You will always wear skirts.” He touched a
finger to her cheek. “But in an emergency, you must do whatever is
necessary. When you were with Mama in the bandits’ stronghold, you
were a brave girl and you helped her by wearing boys’ clothes.”