Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (14 page)

Chapter Seven

Jole woke early the next morning in the old bed with Cordelia tucked up under his arm, bonelessly relaxed, her breath moving slowly with a sound too dainty to be called snoring, quite. He inhaled the warm smell of her hair, the slick of her skin, next to his face on the pillow.
Elation
, he decided, was the name for this emotion, excited and a little scared. In an infinite number of ways, he was glad he wasn’t a teenager anymore, but it was heartening to still find that wild western boy, buried yet alive down under his layers of age and experience.

Without the youthful insecurity, though. He was glad to have lost
that
part. Yesterday had been
good
. Far better than his first—in retrospect—highly impractical naughty nautical visions. So often, reality disappointed imagination; not this time. It was going to be all right. Or at least…all right for now. He kissed her awake and set about proving to them both that yesterday hadn’t been a fluke. She was all sleepy little cat noises and welcoming limbs, with the odd practical jink that was so utterly Cordelia.

Quite a good time later, she rolled off him, flopped down with a thump, and muttered, “Hungry.” He wanted to linger on in Shack Number One for, oh, the rest of the year, maybe. But their food cooler had only been stocked for a day, not this unplanned extension. Like an army in the Time of Isolation, this reduced them to scavenging for provisions from the nearby civilian population. Ma Penney, it turned out, was entirely prepared for this incursion, and they ended up picnicking on her front porch with boiled eggs, bread and butter, dried fruit, homemade coffeecakes, and strong, welcome tea with cream.

The morning was warm and windless, the surface of the lake like glass, mirroring the farther shore and the cloudless sky. One last sail before they departed was obviously off the menu. Far from being disappointed, Cordelia eagerly organized an excursion in that bizarre transparent canoe that had so caught her eye yesterday. Rykov and Penney helped them hoist it up off its sawhorses—it was surprisingly lightweight—and carry it to the water. As Rykov handed him down his paddle, Jole tried to read the armsman’s opinion of this new turn in his widowed liege lady’s life, but the man was typically expressionless. Which told its own tale, perhaps—if he’d
approved
, he might actually have smiled. It was not unknown for him to do so, now and then. On the other hand, if he’d seriously disapproved, there were a dozen ways he could have subtly interrupted or interfered before now. Rykov…well, Rykov was Cordelia’s chain-of-command, not Jole’s. She’d know how to handle him.

Cordelia had taken the rear seat, which gave her the best view through the hull and the task of steering. She aimed them left along the shore, up toward the quiet backwaters that headed this arm of the lake. Jole enjoyed the slowly moving shoreline, and the kiss of the sun on his face and through his thin shirt. A lone, red-furred hexaped drinking from the water raised its neckless head, froze, and stared at them, its four eyes unblinking. It clacked its triangular beak a few times, then scuttered away into the undergrowth. At the lake’s shallow end, the strange-colored water plants hissed over the hull as they slid through them. The little radials were out, floating about in iridescent clouds, a confetti-celebration of the morning.

“Oh, you have to see all this,” said Cordelia, the first words she had spoken for a while. “Turn around and take a look.”

Jole shipped his paddle, grasped the thwarts, and swung around with all the due care of a fully dressed man not wishing to convert his boat ride into a swim. The canoe was broad in the beam, however, and quite stable for its class. He stared down through the hull, and then, after a moment, slid to his knees for a closer view. And then to his hands and knees.

It was like being a bird looking down through an alien forest. He could count three…six, eight different sorts of little creatures moving through the shading stems. Even more shapes than the round and six-limbed models familiar from dry land, and remarkable subtle colors, reds and blues, silvery and orange, in stripes and spots and chevrons. A larger ovoid slid past, then jerked aside; its…meal?…escaped in a gold flash and a cloud of bronze smoke, and Jole laughed half in surprise, half in delight. “What
are
all those things? What are they called?” And why, for all the times he’d skimmed over this very lake, had he never noticed them before?

“No idea. It’s possible most of them don’t even have names, yet. We still don’t have enough people doing basic science surveys. Even after forty years, most of this planet is a mystery. What bio-people we have got are mostly tied up doing evaluations of the proposed settlement sites, looking for hazards. Finding ’em, too, sometimes. Though generally the first colonists do a bang-up job of that all on their own.” Cordelia vented a particularly vicereinal sigh.

Jole grinned, still staring downward. “This is like looking through some magic mirror in a kids’ story. It’s like there’s this whole other, secret Sergyar down there! That no one knows about!”

“Yep.” Her voice was warm, pleased with his pleasure.

After a few more minutes of staring down, Jole waved his arm vaguely about. “Take us around. Let’s see more.”

“Aye-aye, Admiral.”

She dipped her paddle, and more strange sights slid past. His nose was nearly pressed to the plastic, now. A skatagator—a small one, no longer than his arm—scooted by just below him, close enough to have touched had this hull been the un-barrier it seemed. It bumped up curiously, or at least, reactively, against the keel, then drifted off. The canoe brought him silently over a bed of stones very near the shore, where the shapes and colors of the living things changed yet again, then on another long line through the water-forest; then, at last, out into a deeper channel, where the light fell away into mystery once more.

He sat up blinking as if from a trance, wondering when the back of his neck had acquired a prickle that was going to become a cheery red sunburn, later. Cordelia was smiling with all the fascination he had just bestowed on this surprise Sergyar, except that she was looking at
him
. “What?” he said.

“You like this stuff.”

“Well…yeah.” He rolled his shoulders. “I’m just wondering how I
missed
it, in all the time I’ve spent on this water.”

“You only came out on windy days, when the water’s too ruffled to see through? You sensibly stuck to the deep sections?”

“I guess.”

She glanced at the sun, rising high and hot, and at the chrono on her wristcom. “I suppose we’d best break off. You want to take the rear seat, going home?”

“Sure.”

He slid himself down flat on his back, centered above the keel. She grasped both thwarts and edged over him, stopping to lower herself for a kiss in passing. “Not in a canoe, I suppose,” she murmured in regret.

“I think we both would have to be much younger.”

“Ha.” She grinned into his mouth. Her smile tasted…just fine.

With them both safely upright in their respective seats once more, he dug his paddle into the silken waters and aimed them back toward Penney’s Place. “I wonder if I could get one of these glass boats?”

She glanced over her shoulder, her still-lean muscles moving smoothly under her only-slightly-age-softened skin as she swung and dipped her paddle. “Ask Penney. Or his stepson. New Hassadar, didn’t he say?”

“Ah, yes.”

“I expect you could order a sailing hull, and have both kinds of boat at once.”

“Mm, perhaps. All-purpose tends to be no-purpose, sometimes. It would depend on one’s primary aim.”

“Since when has your primary aim when presented with a lake not been sailing?”

Since about an hour ago?
That…was a thought too new to examine closely, lest it pop like one of the soap bubbles the radials were not. “Moot point anyway, till I get more time.”

“That is unfortunately true.”

Time, yeah
. They’d pushed theirs to the limit, and probably past.
Pull up your shorts, Cinderfella, the dance is over…for now
. They matched their strokes and put their backs into a straighter, mid-lake course to the distant dock.

* * *

Settling up with Penney took Jole very little time; he added a generous bonus for the extension—and, tacitly, the discretion—which made the man shake his hand, grin, and invite him to bring his guests again. Rykov had already packed their meager belongings into the aircar. Jole and Cordelia slid into the rear compartment together once more, and pressed their faces to the canopy for a last fond look as Lake Serena fell away behind them.

Jole scooted closer and slid his arm around Cordelia’s shoulders, and she snuggled into him. She’d caught a rosy touch of sun across her nose and cheeks as well. They were both a little manky in yesterday’s clothes, after two days of varied holiday activities and no wash-up but a pitcher and basin and Penney’s outdoor showerhead, but it was a good camp-people smell.

“When shall we two meet again?” he inquired lightly.

She blinked. “I’m sure there are a couple of committee meetings on the calendar this week, but I don’t think that’s what you mean.”

“We two, not we ten, yeah.”

Her lips sneaked up. “Not unless we want to put on a show, no.”

“I think not.” But then his smile was swallowed in another thought. “How, uh…I suppose we’d better get our signals straight. How do you want to play this thing, publicly?”

“This new thing? New old thing?”

“New thing.” Though he could never wish the old thing away. His mind was drawn sideways despite himself. “Uh…
do
you still have your old Betan sex-toy collection?” Not all of which had been Betan, to be fair, but it was a useful and distancing shorthand.

“Mostly not. In a fit of something—depression, probably—I disposed of it a couple of years ago.” She glanced up at him through her eyelashes. “Do you still have yours?”

“Mostly not,” he admitted. “Same reason.”

“Huh.” It was not quite a laugh. “Maybe we can go catalog-shopping together some night.”

“Brilliant idea.” He kissed her curls, nestled under his nose. “When?”

“My schedule this week is packed.”

“On purpose?” he asked quietly.

“Yeah.”

He nodded. “Mine, too.” Though with the Gridgrad Base project swinging into high gear, he hadn’t needed to
look
for extra time-and-thought-absorbing tasks. Well, this was nothing new. Back in the old days, spontaneity had seldom been an option, though it had tended to be memorable when it occurred. “You’d think it easier to schedule a spot of privacy for two people than three.”

She frowned, although into space, not at him. “Shouldn’t think we’ll need
that
much privacy. What do you imagine us to be doing?”

“I…um…”

“If the word you are groping for is
dating
, Oliver, it’s not illegal, immoral, or fattening. Unless we go out to a great many meals together, I suppose.”

“
Dating
sounds…a bit adolescent, somehow.”

“Seeing each other?”

“Vague. Invites…unrestrained speculation.”

“Courting?”

“Too Time-of-Isolation.”

“Fucking?”

“Don’t you dare!”

“Well, screwing, if you want a politer utterance. I wasn’t actually planning to write a press release, you know.”

“I’m relieved.”

She gave him an amused but admonishing poke.

“I’m just trying to figure out how to describe this.” Aside from private, nobody’s-business judgments such as
joyous
or
astounding
, he supposed.

“Ambushed by your need for categories, again? Most categories are arbitrary, though I admit people do tend to find them reassuring.”

“I guess the category I’m groping for here is, what security level are we on?”

“Ah.” She rolled out from his arm and frowned, perhaps by chance, at the back of the piloting Rykov’s head, distorted through two thankfully sound-blocking canopies.

“I mean to be
done
with such things,” she said after a moment. “I grant you there was real need, once. Surely not now. I gave forty-three years to Barrayar, and I’m not asking for a refund, but the next forty-three years are
mine
. After
that
, Barrayar can negotiate.”

“You will never not be a public figure, Cordelia.”

Her fist swiped the air, a negating gesture. “No, I’m going to escape. They’ll all forget soon enough.” She settled back once more. “Though if you insist on going all Old-Barrayaran, I suppose we could tell people I’m your mistress.”

He snorted involuntarily. “Are you trying to get me strung up? Also, not to channel your nephew Ivan, but that’s just wrong.”

She raised her chin and considered this. “There’s a model for you. Alys and Simon. They weren’t, and then one day they’d always been. Very smooth transition, that.”

Lady Alys Vorpatril, Cordelia’s longtime friend and the Emperor’s diplomatic hostess for the better part of three decades, and Simon Illyan, Aral’s Chief of Imperial Security for most of that same period, had become a known romantic item very shortly after Illyan’s own medical retirement. “
Had
they always been? There was speculation, after.” If not, perhaps, unrestrained. Jole had known both of them well, earlier in Vorbarr Sultana in the course of his work for Aral and later on the couple’s few holiday visits to Sergyar, and even
he
wasn’t sure. That occluded view was nonreciprocal; Simon had certainly known
everything
about Jole.
Once
. They’d all moved on since then.

“Mm, let’s say they had valued each other very much for a very long time. But no, alas, they didn’t get started on anything worthy of proper salacious gossip—is that an oxymoron?—till after Alys no longer had to compete for Simon’s attention with his memory chip and the security of a three-planet empire.
I
thought they’d wasted a heartbreaking amount of potential happiness, but—not my decision, that one. At least they seem to be happy now.” Her lips curved in unselfconscious gladness for her old friends. Their old friends, truly.