It was heaven, and I drifted off again. After a moment I felt a cup against my lips.
"Can you swallow this?"
I could and did. I couldn't taste it yet, but it was cold and wet and felt heavenly trickling5 down my throat. She bent and looked into my eyes, and I felt as if I were falling into those reddish and stormy depths. She touched my scarred mouth with a light finger. Suddenly my head cleared and I sat upright.
"Is this a trick to force me into calling my bet?"
She recoiled6 as if I had struck her, then the trace of a smile flitted around her red mouth. Yes, between us it was battle. "You are right to be suspicious, I suppose. But if I tell you what I know of Rakhal, will you trust me then?"
I looked straight at her and said, "No."
Surprisingly, she threw back her head and laughed. I flexed7 my freed wrists cautiously. The skin was torn away and chafed8, and my arms ached to the bone. When I moved harsh lances of pain drove through my chest.
"Well, until sunset I have no right to ask you to trust me," said Dallisa when she had done laughing. "And since you are bound by my command until the last ray has fallen, I command that you lay your head upon my knees."
I blazed, "You are making a game of me!"
"Is that my privilege? Do you refuse?"
"Refuse?" It was not yet sunset. This might be a torture more complex than any which had yet greeted me. From the scarlet9 glint in her eyes I felt she was playing with me, as the cat-things of the forest play with their helpless victims. My mouth twitched10 in a grimace11 of humiliation12 as I lowered[67] myself obediently until my head rested on her fur-clad knees.
She murmured, smiling, "Is this so unbearable13, then?"
I said nothing. Never, never for an instant could I forget that—all human, all woman as she seemed—Dallisa's race was worn and old when the Terran Empire had not left their home star. The mind of Wolf, which has mingled14 with the nonhuman since before the beginnings of recorded time, is unfathomable to an outsider. I was better equipped than most Earthmen to keep pace with its surface acts, but I could never pretend to understand its deeper motivations.
It works on complex and irrational15 logic16. Mischief17 is an integral part of it. Even the deadly blood-feud with Rakhal had begun with an overelaborate practical joke—which had lost the Service, incidentally, several thousand credits worth of spaceship.
And so I could not trust Dallisa for an instant. Yet it was wonderful to lie here with my head resting against the perfumed softness of her body.
Then suddenly her arms were gripping me, frantic18 and hungry; the subdued19 thing in her voice, her eyes, flamed out hot and wild. She was pressing the whole length of her body to mine, breasts and thighs and long legs, and her voice was hoarse20.
"Is this torture too?"
Beneath the fur robe she was soft and white, and the subtle scent21 of her hair seemed a deeper entrapment22 than any. Frail23 as she seemed, her arms had the strength of steel, and pain blazed down my wrenched24 shoulders, seared through the twisted wrists. Then I forgot the pain.
Over her shoulder the last dropping redness of the sun vanished and plunged25 the room into orchid26 twilight27.
I caught her wrists in my hands, prizing them backward, twisting them upward over her head. I said thickly, "The sun's down." And then I stopped her wild mouth with mine.
And I knew that the battle between us had reached climax28 and victory simultaneously29, and any question about who had won it was purely30 academic.
During the night sometime, while her dark head lay motionless on my shoulder, I found myself staring into the darkness, wakeful. The throbbing31 of my bruises32 had little to do[68] with my sleeplessness33; I was remembering other chained girls from the old days in the Dry-towns, and the honey and poison of them distilled34 into Dallisa's kisses. Her head was very light on my shoulders, and she felt curiously35 insubstantial, like a woman of feathers.
One of the tiny moons was visible through the slitted windows. I thought of my rooms in the Terran Trade City, clean and bright and warm, and all the nights when I had paced the floor, hating, filled to the teeth with bitterness, longing36 for the windswept stars of the Dry-towns, the salt smell of the winds and the musical clashing of the walk of the chained women.
With a sting of guilt37, I realized that I had half forgotten Juli and my pledge to her and her misfortune which had freed me again, for this.
Yet I had won, and what they knew had narrowed my planet-wide search to a pinpoint38. Rakhal was in Charin.
I wasn't altogether surprised. Charin is the only city on Wolf, except the Kharsa, where the Terran Empire has put down deep roots into the planet, built a Trade City, a smaller spaceport. Like the Kharsa, it lies within the circle of Terran law—and a million miles outside it.
A nonhuman town, inhabited largely by chaks, it is the core and center of the resistance movement, a noisy town in a perpetual ferment39. It was the logical place for a renegade. I settled myself so that the ache in my racked shoulders was less violent, and muttered, "Why Charin?"
Slight as the movement was, it roused Dallisa. She rolled over and propped40 herself on her elbows, quoting drowsily41, "The prey42 walks safest at the hunter's door."
I stared at the square of violet moonlight, trying to fit together all the pieces of the puzzle, and asked half aloud, "What prey and what hunters?"
Dallisa didn't answer. I hadn't expected her to answer. I asked the real question in my mind: "Why does Kyral hate Rakhal Sensar, when he doesn't even know him by sight?"
"There are reasons," she said somberly. "One of them is Miellyn, my twin sister. Kyral climbed the steps of the Great House by claiming us both as his consorts43. He is our father's son by another wife."
That explained much. Brother-and-sister marriages, not[69] uncommon44 in the Dry-towns, are based on expediency45 and suspicion, and are frequently, though not always loveless. It explained Dallisa's taunts46, and it partly explained, only partly, why I found her in my arms. It did not explain Rakhal's part in this mysterious intrigue47, nor why Kyral had taken me for Rakhal, (but only after he remembered seeing me in Terran clothing).
I wondered why it had never occurred to me before that I might be mistaken for Rakhal. There was no close resemblance between us, but a casual description would apply equally well to me or to Rakhal. My height is unusual for a Terran—within an inch of Rakhal's own—and we had roughly the same build, the same coloring. I had copied his walk, imitated his mannerisms, since we were boys together.
And, blurring48 minor49 facial characteristics, there were the scars of the kifirgh on my mouth, cheeks, and shoulders. Anyone who did not know us by sight, anyone who had known us by reputation from the days when we had worked together in the Dry-towns, might easily take one of us for the other. Even Juli had blurted50, "You're so much like—" before thinking better of it.
Other odd bits of the puzzle floated in my mind, stubbornly refusing to take on recognizable patterns, the disappearance51 of a toy-seller; Juli's hysterical52 babbling53; the way the girl—Miellyn?—had vanished into a shrine54 of Nebran; and the taunts of Dallisa and the old man about a mysterious "Toymaker." And something, some random55 joggling of a memory, in that eerie56 trading in the city of the Silent Ones. I knew all these things fitted together somehow, but I had no real hope that Dallisa could complete their pattern for me.
She said, with a vehemence57 that startled me, "Miellyn is only the excuse! Kyral hates Rakhal because Rakhal will compromise and because he'll fight!"
She rolled over and pressed herself against me in the darkness. Her voice trembled. "Race, our world is dying. We can't stand against Terra. And there are other things, worse things."
I sat up, surprised to find myself defending Terra to this girl. After all these years I was back in my own world. And yet I heard myself say quietly, "The Terrans aren't exploit[70]ing Wolf. We haven't abolished the rule of Shainsa. We've changed nothing."
It was true. Terra held Wolf by compact, not conquest. They paid, and paid generously, for the lease of the lands where their Trade Cities would rise, and stepped beyond them only when invited to do so.
"We let any city or state that wants to keep its independence govern itself until it collapses58, Dallisa. And they do collapse59 after a generation or so. Very few primitive60 planets can hold out against us. The people themselves get tired of living under feudal61 or theocratic62 systems, and they beg to be taken into the Empire. That's all."
"But that's just it," Dallisa argued. "You give the people all those things we used to give them, and you do it better. Just by being here, you are killing63 the Dry-towns. They're turning to you and leaving us, and you let them do it."
I shook my head. "We've kept the Terran Peace for centuries. What do you expect? Should we give you arms, planes, bombs, weapons to hold your slaves down?"
"Yes!" she flared64 at me. "The Dry-towns have ruled Wolf since—since—you, you can't even imagine how long! And we made compact with you to trade here—"
"And we have rewarded you by leaving you untouched," I said quietly. "But we have not forbidden the Dry-towns to come into the Empire and work with Terra."
She said bitterly, "Men like Kyral will die first," and pressed her face helplessly against me. "And I will die with them. Miellyn broke away, but I cannot! Courage is what I lack. Our world is rotten, Race, rotten all through, and I'm as rotten as the core of it. I could have killed you today, and I'm here in your arms. Our world is rotten, but I've no confidence that the new world will be better!"
I put my hand under her chin, and looked down gravely into her face, only a pale oval in the darkness. There was nothing I could say; she had said it all, and truthfully. I had hated and yearned65 and starved for this, and when I found it, it turned salty and bloody66 on my lips, like Dallisa's despairing kisses. She ran her fingers over the scars on my face, then gripped her small thin hands around my wrists so fiercely that I grunted67 protest.
"You will not forget me," she said in her strangely lilting[71] voice. "You will not forget me, although you were victorious68." She twisted and lay looking up at me, her eyes glowing faintly luminous69 in darkness. I knew that she could see me as clearly as if it were day. "I think it was my victory, not yours, Race Cargill."
Gently, on an impulse I could not explain, I picked up one delicate wrist, then the other, unclasping the heavy jeweled bracelets70. She let out a stifled71 cry of dismay. And then I tossed the chains into a corner before I drew her savagely72 into my arms again and forced her head back under my mouth.
I said good-bye to her alone, in the reddish, windswept space before the Great House. She pressed her head against my shoulder and whispered, "Race, take me with you!"
For answer I only picked up her narrow wrists and turned them over on my palm. The jeweled bracelets were clasped again around the thinly boned joints73, and on some self-punishing impulse she had shortened the chains so that she could not even put her arms around me. I lifted the punished wrists to my mouth and kissed them gently.
"You don't want to leave, Dallisa."
I was desperately74 sorry for her. She would go down with her dying world, proud and cold and with no place in the new one. She kissed me and I tasted blood, her thin fettered75 body straining wildly against me, shaken with tearing, convulsive sobs76. Then she turned and fled back into the shadow of the great dark house.
I never saw her again.
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1
thighs
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| n.股，大腿( thigh的名词复数 )；食用的鸡（等的）腿 | |
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2
delirium
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| n. 神智昏迷,说胡话;极度兴奋 | |
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3
bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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4
hush
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| int.嘘，别出声；n.沉默，静寂；v.使安静 | |
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5
trickling
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| n.油画底色含油太多而成泡沫状突起v.滴( trickle的现在分词 )；淌；使)慢慢走；缓慢移动 | |
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6
recoiled
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| v.畏缩( recoil的过去式和过去分词 )；退缩；报应；返回 | |
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7
flexed
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| adj.[医]曲折的，屈曲v.屈曲( flex的过去式和过去分词 )；弯曲；（为准备大干而）显示实力；摩拳擦掌 | |
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8
chafed
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| v.擦热（尤指皮肤）( chafe的过去式 )；擦痛；发怒；惹怒 | |
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9
scarlet
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| n.深红色，绯红色，红衣；adj.绯红色的 | |
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10
twitched
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| vt.& vi.（使）抽动，（使）颤动（twitch的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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11
grimace
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| v.做鬼脸，面部歪扭 | |
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12
humiliation
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| n.羞辱 | |
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13
unbearable
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| adj.不能容忍的；忍受不住的 | |
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14
mingled
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| 混合，混入( mingle的过去式和过去分词 )； 混进，与…交往[联系] | |
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15
irrational
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| adj.无理性的，失去理性的 | |
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16
logic
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| n.逻辑(学)；逻辑性 | |
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mischief
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| n.损害，伤害，危害；恶作剧，捣蛋，胡闹 | |
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18
frantic
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| adj.狂乱的，错乱的，激昂的 | |
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19
subdued
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| adj. 屈服的，柔和的，减弱的 动词subdue的过去式和过去分词 | |
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20
hoarse
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| adj.嘶哑的，沙哑的 | |
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21
scent
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| n.气味，香味，香水，线索，嗅觉；v.嗅，发觉 | |
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22
entrapment
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| n.（非法）诱捕，诱人犯罪；诱使犯罪 | |
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23
frail
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| adj.身体虚弱的；易损坏的 | |
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24
wrenched
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| v.（猛力地）扭( wrench的过去式和过去分词 )；扭伤；使感到痛苦；使悲痛 | |
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25
plunged
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| v.颠簸( plunge的过去式和过去分词 )；暴跌；骤降；突降 | |
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26
orchid
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| n.兰花，淡紫色 | |
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27
twilight
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| n.暮光，黄昏；暮年，晚期，衰落时期 | |
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28
climax
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| n.顶点；高潮；v.(使)达到顶点 | |
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29
simultaneously
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| adv.同时发生地，同时进行地 | |
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30
purely
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| adv.纯粹地，完全地 | |
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31
throbbing
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| a. 跳动的,悸动的 | |
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32
bruises
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| n.瘀伤，伤痕，擦伤( bruise的名词复数 ) | |
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33
sleeplessness
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| n.失眠，警觉 | |
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34
distilled
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| adj.由蒸馏得来的v.蒸馏( distil的过去式和过去分词 )；从…提取精华 | |
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35
curiously
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| adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地 | |
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36
longing
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| n.（for）渴望 | |
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37
guilt
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| n.犯罪；内疚；过失，罪责 | |
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38
pinpoint
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| vt.准确地确定；用针标出…的精确位置 | |
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39
ferment
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| vt.使发酵；n./vt.（使）激动，（使）动乱 | |
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40
propped
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| 支撑，支持，维持( prop的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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41
drowsily
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| adv.睡地，懒洋洋地，昏昏欲睡地 | |
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42
prey
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| n.被掠食者，牺牲者，掠食；v.捕食，掠夺，折磨 | |
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43
consorts
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| n.配偶( consort的名词复数 )；（演奏古典音乐的）一组乐师；一组古典乐器；一起v.结伴( consort的第三人称单数 )；交往；相称；调和 | |
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44
uncommon
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| adj.罕见的，非凡的，不平常的 | |
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45
expediency
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| n.适宜；方便；合算；利己 | |
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46
taunts
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| 嘲弄的言语，嘲笑，奚落( taunt的名词复数 ) | |
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47
intrigue
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| vt.激起兴趣，迷住；vi.耍阴谋；n.阴谋，密谋 | |
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48
blurring
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| n.模糊，斑点甚多，（图像的）混乱v.（使）变模糊( blur的现在分词 )；（使）难以区分 | |
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49
minor
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| adj.较小(少)的，较次要的；n.辅修学科；vi.辅修 | |
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50
blurted
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| v.突然说出，脱口而出( blurt的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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51
disappearance
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| n.消失，消散，失踪 | |
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52
hysterical
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| adj.情绪异常激动的，歇斯底里般的 | |
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53
babbling
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| n.胡说，婴儿发出的咿哑声adj.胡说的v.喋喋不休( babble的现在分词 )；作潺潺声（如流水）；含糊不清地说话；泄漏秘密 | |
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54
shrine
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| n.圣地，神龛，庙；v.将...置于神龛内，把...奉为神圣 | |
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55
random
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| adj.随机的；任意的；n.偶然的(或随便的)行动 | |
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56
eerie
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| adj.怪诞的；奇异的；可怕的；胆怯的 | |
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57
vehemence
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| n.热切；激烈；愤怒 | |
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58
collapses
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| 折叠( collapse的第三人称单数 )； 倒塌； 崩溃； （尤指工作劳累后）坐下 | |
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59
collapse
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| vi.累倒；昏倒；倒塌；塌陷 | |
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60
primitive
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| adj.原始的；简单的；n.原(始)人，原始事物 | |
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61
feudal
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| adj.封建的，封地的，领地的 | |
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62
theocratic
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| adj.神权的，神权政治的 | |
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63
killing
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| n.巨额利润；突然赚大钱，发大财 | |
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64
Flared
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| adj. 端部张开的, 爆发的, 加宽的, 漏斗式的 动词flare的过去式和过去分词 | |
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65
yearned
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| 渴望，切盼，向往( yearn的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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66
bloody
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| adj.非常的的；流血的；残忍的；adv.很；vt.血染 | |
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67
grunted
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| （猪等）作呼噜声( grunt的过去式和过去分词 )； （指人）发出类似的哼声； 咕哝着说 | |
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68
victorious
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| adj.胜利的，得胜的 | |
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69
luminous
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| adj.发光的，发亮的；光明的；明白易懂的；有启发的 | |
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70
bracelets
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| n.手镯，臂镯( bracelet的名词复数 ) | |
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71
stifled
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| （使）窒息， （使）窒闷( stifle的过去式和过去分词 )； 镇压，遏制； 堵 | |
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72
savagely
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| adv. 野蛮地，残酷地 | |
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73
joints
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| 接头( joint的名词复数 )； 关节； 公共场所（尤指价格低廉的饮食和娱乐场所） （非正式）； 一块烤肉 （英式英语） | |
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74
desperately
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| adv.极度渴望地，绝望地，孤注一掷地 | |
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75
fettered
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| v.给…上脚镣，束缚( fetter的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
参考例句： |
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sobs
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| 啜泣（声），呜咽（声）( sob的名词复数 ) | |
参考例句： |
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