The Lawgivers: Gabriel (7 page)

“Ran in to? So brief an encounter and
yet you know his name?”

Jesus! She didn’t need to talk to him
at all! She couldn’t open her mouth without giving something away!
She decided to keep her mouth shut. She needed to focus on figuring
out a way to escape, not giving him more stuff he could use against
her to figure out a penalty.

He said nothing for a time. “I could
simply assign a name.”

Lexa wasn’t entirely certainly she
understood, but she thought he was saying he was going to name her.
She considered it, trying to decide whether it would be less of a
threat, and it occurred to her that very few people knew her name.
She kept to herself as much as possible because it was just plain
safer to do so, but she had been seen each time she’d been forced
to trade for goods and none of them knew her by name. They might
remember what she looked like and they might not. She’d always
dressed as a young man when she’d gone to trade, because there was
less chance of catching some man’s eye and ending up under him with
him grunting and sweating all over her.

So how much did it matter whether he
knew her name or not? He knew what she looked like—in disguise—and
he could describe her for any posters they might put
out.

“Lexa.”

He didn’t actually smile but she had
the sense that he was pleased with himself. She felt like kicking
him.

“Sir called me Lex.”

“Who is Sir?”

Pain lanced through Lexa unexpectedly.
She didn’t know if it was because his asking reminded her that Sir
was dead or if it was because Sir had never allowed her to call him
father as he had the little ones. She’d never completely understood
why she wasn’t allowed to call him father when her sister and
brothers were supposed to but it had always hurt—always made her
feel left out and unwanted. “The father—my little sister and
brothers’ father.”

He glanced at her, frowning slightly.
“He shortened it to Lex because …?”

“Because it sounds like a boy and he
always had me dress like one so no men would try to take me until
he was ready to trade me.”

Gabriel halted abruptly. “Your father
sold you to a man?”

“He wasn’t my father. And he didn’t get
the chance to. The raiders took me.” She thought about that
incident in a different light for the first time. “Guess it was
just as well King Ralph wasn’t fooled. He might have killed me
instead of taking me as his woman.”

“How old were you?”

Lexa lifted her brows at the anger that
seemed to permeate his voice, but she didn’t see how he could
charge her with anything Sir had done—particularly when he hadn’t
actually gotten around to doing it. Even so, it was hard to provide
information she didn’t know. She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’d got
the curse.”

“Curse?” he echoed blankly.

Lexa felt her face reddening, although
she wasn’t sure why it made her so uncomfortable discussing
something that was, after all, not only perfectly natural but as
mundane as breathing. Everybody did it. Everything did it as far as
she knew—well, that was female. Unless it was because he wasn’t
human and she got the feeling that his interest might not be a good
thing for her. “You know. The woman thing.”

“So you reached maturity? You’d just
reached maturity? Or this was some time after that?”

He was starting to make Lexa really
uncomfortable. She felt guilty and she didn’t even know why, felt
like his probing questions meant that there was something about
what had happened that broke one of his laws and she was going to
be in trouble for it. She didn’t see how. It wasn’t like she’d
wanted to do it. But his ideas of wrong didn’t exactly mesh with
hers she’d already discovered, not closely enough for her comfort,
at any rate. She shrugged, trying to act nonchalant about it. “I
don’t know. Actually, I guess it was a while after. A few months,
at least, I guess.”

She glanced at his face, trying to read
his expression and decide if that sounded acceptable to him, but it
was really too dark to tell much beyond the fact that he seemed
angry. On the other hand, he didn’t exactly have a sunny
disposition from what she’d seen so far.

“Might have been a year or two. It was
a long time ago,” she added a little lamely.

Outrage suffused Gah-re-al and it was
all he could do to keep it to himself. Primitives! Savages! He
doubted his superiors had any inkling of just how backwards the
humans were, but as far as he was concerned nothing more surely
labeled them as backwards savages than their tendency to prey upon
the weak of their own kind! Small wonder they were growing in
numbers so rapidly if it was commonplace to begin breeding the
females as soon as they were capable of being bred! He was no
longer convinced, as a matter of fact, that they even waited to see
if the females were old enough to be bred before the males took
them.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t known, or at
least suspected, that women and children were regarded as little
more than bartering goods. For that matter, Lexa’s story didn’t
necessarily prove that his suspicions were correct. Her situation
might be unique, and yet the way that she spoke of it certainly
seemed to indicate just that. At least, as far as she knew, it was
the norm not the exception.

The urge to simply drop the subject
smote him. He was a lawgiver, however, he reminded himself. As
distasteful as he found it, it was his duty to be as certain of his
facts as he could be. “Your father planned to sell you—trade you to
a man knowing what the man wanted with you?” he asked, keeping his
voice carefully neutral.

Lexa frowned, confused now. She
supposed it was splitting hairs to remind the angel that he hadn’t
been her father. He didn’t seem to care about that. “Uh. I guess he
figured it was for breeding. That’s what he said, anyway. He caught
mother to breed on her. He didn’t have nobody to help him with
chores, but then I don’t guess he counted on it taking so long for
them to get big enough to help, ‘cause he complained about
that.”

“So this is common practice? Bartering
females for breeding purposes?”

Lexa blinked at him. It occurred to her
that she didn’t know, for certain, if it was common or not. It
seemed to her that they weren’t that keen on trading for women in
general. Sir hadn’t and Ralph hadn’t. They’d just taken. “I guess.
Ralph didn’t … not to get me anyway. He just came with his raiders
and took everything. Later, though, he said he was going to trade
me off ‘cause I wasn’t no good for breeding.”

She regretted that statement almost as
soon as she’d said it. It certainly didn’t make her look
particularly valuable, she realized, to admit she hadn’t been able
to produce. She didn’t know why it was important to assure him that
she was of worth. She didn’t examine it too closely either. “I
never believed that, though. I got three babes. They just died. I
figured it was ‘cause Ralph had a nasty habit of kicking me when he
got pissed off and he did it. But he said it was me so I don’t
know.”

“What happened to Ralph? Did somebody
else kill him to claim you?”

Lexa sent him an uneasy look, wondering
if it was safe to admit that she’d run off, but when it came right
down to it, Ralph had stolen her and he’d been pretty clear that
stealing was a punishable offense. “No. I just ran off. He was
talking about giving me to his man, Clarence, and Clarence was
worse than Ralph.”

He studied her for a long moment in a
way that made Lexa distinctly uneasy, made her wonder if she’d
figured wrong. “Well, he didn’t pay, you know!” she pointed out
defensively. “He didn’t really own me. So it wasn’t stealing. He
stole me!”

He didn’t respond and that made Lexa
even more uneasy, but she was just too tired to worry about it for
long. His legs were longer than hers and he didn’t slow his stride
that she could see to allow for her shorter one. She thought they
made better time heading back than she’d managed heading out. She
was all but staggering with fatigue when they finally reached the
packed dirt streets of the village and too exhausted to question
what he had in mind for her, tired enough she was beyond caring at
that moment.

That state didn’t last. When he took
her to the local saloon and up the stairs to a room and told her to
lie down on the bed, fear zoomed to the forefront of her mind again
and she looked around a little wildly for a route of escape. His
look of disgust didn’t soothe her any.

“Sleep,” he growled.

Like she could sleep with him hovering
over her! “You’re leaving?” she asked hopefully.

“So you can climb out the window again?
No. I’m not through questioning you. But the rest can wait until
tomorrow.”

She stared at him in dismay. “I’m too
tired to think up any lies right now. Don’t you want to go ahead
and finish?”

That time there was no mistake. He
didn’t try to hide the fact that he was amused. “Good point, but it
can wait. I’ll take my chances that I can discern the lies from the
truth.”

She blinked at him uncertainly, but
there seemed no hope for it. And she was too tired to object
anymore. She thought if he did decide to rape her it couldn’t be
too bad anyway. She might actually manage to sleep through it and
even if she couldn’t she was too numb with exhaustion to feel
much.

The bed was almost as hard and lumpy as
the ground she usually slept on, but there was no chilly night air
to deal with and the cover on the bed was thicker than the one she
had. Curling up into a tight ball beneath it, she emptied her mind
without much difficulty at all and dropped into
oblivion.

* * * *

Gah-re-al settled on the floor since
there was nothing else in the room that looked comfortable and
studied the lump Lexa made on the bed. He couldn’t see her. She’d
curled into a tight ball under the cover, but he’d had time enough
to examine her fairly thoroughly and his mind’s eye had no trouble
producing the image.

Well, the face and that
hair.

It was the hair that had first caught
his eye. As dull as it was with dirt, the dying rays of the sun had
caught fire in it when she’d scurried away. He supposed it was the
furtive movement that had first caught his attention and then the
glint of hair, but, whichever way it had happened, the hair had
definitely snagged his interest.

He’d been patrolling the sector for
almost a year and in all that time he hadn’t seen hair the color of
hers. He’d seen a wide variety of hair and eye colors and skin
tones, but nothing like hers.

He was almost inclined to wonder if she
was even the same species as the others, but she wasn’t that
different when all was said and done—just colored a little
differently than the typical primitive—oddly pale skin with spots,
eyes as green as new leaves, and hair the color of fire.

She’d gotten the genetic traits from
somewhere, so she wasn’t the only one. Just the only one he’d
seen.

The face—reluctantly he admitted that
that was also—unusual—in the sense that he found it strangely
appealing. Of course, he wasn’t actually in the habit of examining
the faces of the females. The males were the dangerous ones and
usually the culprits in every crime—at least the most violent which
was his primary focus. In any case, he didn’t see many females.
Maybe one out of every fifteen or twenty humans he came across was
female.

That was small wonder if what she’d
told him was true—that the females were traded off for breeders as
soon as they reached the capability of breeding. That alone was
enough to account for a higher than normal mortality rate. When one
added the fact that they were smaller and weaker and less capable
of defending themselves and the scarcity of food ….

He redirected his mind to sifting
through what he’d learned from her—far more than he’d learned from
any of the others he’d encountered and in a much shorter length of
time! She was like the rare songbird of her world, quiet when she
sensed a predator and chirping the moment the threat
passed.

He narrowed his eyes, realizing there
was more about her that reminded him of the small creatures he
thought one of the few things of true beauty their world
boasted.

Of course the males were far more
vibrantly colored than the females when it came to birds
….

They’d found no images of the people
who’d built the great civilization of this world. Apparently their
technology hadn’t been such that that sort of thing could survive
for long, but it was clear enough from the things they’d built and
left behind that they were physically similar to the udai. In size,
perhaps somewhat smaller, but with two arms and legs, and similar
hands—flightless as the primitives were.

He wondered for the first time if the
khabler were right in their assumption that the primitives were
descendents of the builders. He’d always been inclined to dismiss
that theory, but ….

Lexa was clearly intelligent—old in the
ways of her world, far more experienced than she should be given
the fact that he was as certain as he could be that she was very
young in years.

It was a shame that the old ones hadn’t
considered themselves when they were so busy collecting,
cataloguing, and saving the flora and fauna of their world. The
first colonists had discovered huge, well protected vaults of the
seeds of plants long gone and used those to begin the task of
replacing the natural vegetation. Later arrivals had discovered the
genetic codes they needed to begin replacing some of the extinct
animals—such as the birds—but they’d found only the technological
remnants and the great, crumbling buildings of the people
themselves, and very little at that.