Wizard (30 page)

“I’ve got the same kind of problem,” she said.

He opened his mouth to suggest a solution, thought about it, and closed his mouth again. What a waste of such a symmetrical solution, he thought. You scratch my back …

“You did say we were much the same,” she said. “I thought that’s what had been bothering you.” When he only grunted, she opened her sleeping bag and sat up. She reached across and touched a finger to his lips. “Would you show me how?”

He looked at her, not daring to believe, but feeling more desire than he had known since he was a teenager.

“Why? Do you find me attractive, or are you just curious?”

“I’m curious,” she admitted. “I’m not sure about the other yet. There is something there. Cirocco said that what I have been told is raping can be a lot like making love. She said a woman can get pleasure from it. I’m dubious.” She raised one eyebrow. A few weeks ago Chris would not have seen the gesture behind the elaborate facial tattoos, but now he felt more in tune with her. He threw off his sleeping bag and took her in his arms.

She seemed surprised that he did not simply enter her and get to work. When she understood that they could make love in the same way two women would, she showed no hesitation in the matter. In fact, she did things that Trini would certainly have charged extra for. There was nothing shy about her. She told him what she wanted and when she wanted it, talking as though she assumed he had never done this before. In a way, she was right. Though he had been with his share of women, he had never met one as certain of her own needs or as assured in expressing them.

She learned rapidly. At first she was full of questions and observations, wanting to know what he felt when she did this or that, surprised at the tastes and feels of things. None of the surprises seemed unpleasant, and by the time he felt ready to move on she had developed an obvious enthusiasm for the project.

Her skepticism returned when he entered her. She admitted it had not been painful, even that it was a pleasant sensation, but observed pointedly that the arrangement seemed unnatural in that it failed to provide for her needs. He tried to assure her that it would work out all right and then realized with dismay that it was going to because he was already too close and it was too late to stop.

He had time to hope that Robin would be willing to wait until he was ready for a second time before he was seized by the shoulder and pulled roughly away.

“You idiot, get away from her!” It was Cirocco. Chris did not have time to understand anything beyond that because too much was happening at once. He rolled on the ground, curling into a foetal position, and spasming into violent ejaculation. In a feverish confusion he did not know whether to be embarrassed, angry, or hurt. In a moment it was over and Chris came up off the floor, swinging at Cirocco. With a perfect roundhouse he hit her squarely on the chin. For a moment, reeling back, she looked almost as surprised as he felt. But his triumph lasted only a second. As Cirocco folded like a puppet with her strings cut, his hand began to throb, and Gaby appeared from nowhere, flying at him as though she’d dropped from the sky. The next thing he knew she was kneeling on his chest and about to drive her stiff fingers right through his face.

Instead, she hesitated, and the fire went out of her eyes. She hit the ground with her fist, rolled off him, and patted his cheek.

“Never hit the bones with your fist,” she counseled. “That’s what sticks and stones were made for.”

She helped him to his feet where he saw Robin still on her back and looking baffled. Hornpipe had squeezed into the tent and was seeing to Cirocco, who was working her jaw cautiously.

Chris’s fury was obviously still mounting, but with Gaby and a couple of Titanides stationed
between him and Cirocco he was forced to voice his anger.

“You had no right to do that,” he raved. “Damn it, I can’t even think why you would. But this is it! You’re getting out or I am.”

“Shut up,” Cirocco said coldly, waving Hornpipe away and sitting up. “There’s a small chance I did something terrible. If that’s true, I’ll stand still while you both beat the daylights out of me. But hear me out first. Robin, what kind of birth control are you using?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Right. What about you, Chris?”

Chris felt a distinct chill but shrugged it off. She couldn’t possibly be right.

“I take pills, but it doesn’t—”

“I remember you telling me that. When was the—”

“—but she
can’t have children!
She told me so, and if you had—”

“Stop. Hear me out.” Cirocco held her hand up until she was sure everyone would listen to her.

“I think you misunderstood her. She said ‘can’t,’ and you thought she meant she was unable to. What she really meant was, because her children would have her condition, she will not impregnate herself. What’s the use of sterilization when the act of conception is so complicated?” She looked at Robin, who was shaking her head in exasperation.

“But we were only making love,” she said.

Cirocco went to her, took her shoulders, and shook her. “How do you think babies get
made
, damn it? Everywhere but in the Coven it’s just like it was for—”

“But I
trust
him, can’t you see that?” Robin shouted back. “We were just making love, not making a baby. He wouldn’t have …” She wound down and for the first time looked uncertainly at Chris. He had to look away.

As Cirocco explained the true situation, the color slowly drained from Robin’s face. Chris had never seen her look frightened, but it was clear she was terrified in retrospect, as well she might have
been. The whole bizarre misunderstanding had arisen from Robin’s failure to realize that the male orgasm involved ejaculation, and that it was not under his control, and from the impression Chris had formed that Robin was sterilized. She was not, and he was fertile, as the production of the egg with Valiha had established. The fact was that his pills had been lost during his episode in quarantine, and he had been unable to replace them.

Robin was reduced almost to tears. She sat with her head in her hands, shaking, saying, “I didn’t know, I didn’t know, I really didn’t know.”

Chris did not know what long-term effects there would be between himself and Robin, but there was one thing that was clear.

“I owe you an apology,” he said to Cirocco.

She grinned at him. “No, you don’t. I’d have done the same thing. It’s not a situation where you hang around for explanations.” She rubbed her jaw. “Actually, it’s my own fault for not getting out of the way quicker. I think I’m slowing down.”

“Maybe I’m speeding up.”

“That’s a possibility.”

As though by mutual accord the others turned back to their tents, leaving Robin and Chris alone. The moment hung awkwardly in the air and Chris felt frightened. If Rocky had realized the score why hadn’t he? Maybe because he’d been too eager for sex. Robin seemed to have some of the same feeling. He could tell she was thinking of their earlier conversation and perhaps reassessing it. She turned away from him briefly to collect her thoughts and then very carefully said she was sorry. In a few words she professed not to blame him any more than she blamed herself. It had been a simple misunderstanding, fortunately averted in time. She said she was no more afraid of him now than she had ever been.

But she moved back into her own tent that night.

* * *

Cirocco came reeling in after the last day of Carnival, singing loudly. Gaby put her to bed and in the morning loaded her into a canoe and once more covered her with a blanket. They shoved off and soon left the diminishing gaity of Inglesina Island behind them. Ophion was again quiet, undisturbed, as the party, much subdued, paddled steadily toward the Twilight Sea.

The body of water half in Crius and half in Phoebe was usually designated on maps as Phoebe or the Phoebe Sea, but no one ever called it that. One traveled through Phoebe and sailed on the Twilight Sea.

It was an apt name. The western end of the sea was in Crius, and thus in daylight, but it extended through the twilight zone and into the night of Phoebe. Seen from a distance sufficient for Gaea’s curvature to upend it, the waters of Twilight began in shades of deep blue and green, faded through orange and copper, and ended in black. Roughly in the center was a large island known as Unome, always in twilight, that held two lakes known as Tarn Gandria and Tarn Concordia. A race of insectile creatures lived on the island and nowhere else, and they were known to humans and Titanides as the Iron Masters. Robin gathered from what little was said that they were thoroughly unpleasant, starting with their smell and continuing to just about every aspect of their culture and morals. She was just as glad that the Wizard had no business with them on this trip.

In fact, they planned to take the conservative path. The northern shore of the Twilight Sea was close enough to the straight-line route across it that it made sense to stay near a safe haven, particularly since Twilight was known for its sudden, violent storms.

The navigation of Twilight passed without incident, but Robin spent her time withdrawn from the others. The incident with Chris had upset her greatly. She did not blame him but could not help a certain queasy feeling when she caught him, sometimes, looking at her. Her policy was to draw lessons from the
bad things in life, and what she learned from her experiment in heterosexual love was that her worst enemy in Gaea was usually her own ignorance. It was not a new realization. All through her life she had tended to shut out things that seemed to have no immediate bearing on her survival. By doing that, she often missed the things noticed by more patient, less discriminating people who listened to and watched everything, no matter how trivial it appeared.

And it was time to discard an opinion, which was that the Wizard was an alcohol-soaked zombie, commanding respect only through a title and tales of her past deeds. It was a small thing, really, yet Robin had been impressed when she had time to think about it. Cirocco could not have heard them until Chris began to moan, meaning he had already been on the edge of disaster. Cirocco had thought quickly, putting together such details as the lost contraceptives and Robin’s genetic disorder, deducing their shared ignorance and Robin’s probable fertility, and had immediately acted on her answer without worrying about the consequences. No matter that what she had done was socially unthinkable; she had been right, had known it, and had acted.

She wondered if Chris’s blow had actually surprised Cirocco or if it had been allowed to land. It was obvious that he felt bad about being the worst fighter in a group of three women and one man. Being able to hit her at a moment of such indignity had allowed him to salvage some self-respect.

That was something she would never know. What she did know was that she would not underestimate Cirocco again.

Ophion emerged from Twilight in much the same way it had from Nox: the sea narrowed gradually and at some point became a river. But instead of a series of river pumps, the group confronted five kilometers of the swiftest water they had yet seen. They paused in the last quiet pool, and the four boats drew together to discuss the approach. Only Cirocco and Gaby knew this part of the river. The Titanides listened, paddling slowly backward to stay out of the current.

They moved into the current one at a time, Cirocco and Hornpipe in the lead, Gaby and Psaltery bringing up the rear. When her turn came, Robin exulted in the speed and noise. She knelt in the bow
and paddled vigorously until Hautbois advised her to save her strength and let the river do most of the work. She could feel the results of the Titanide’s strong, calculated strokes and did her best to help rather than hinder. There was a rhythm to find, a way of becoming attuned to the river. Twice she fended off submerged rocks with the end of her paddle and once was rewarded with a shout of encouragement from Hautbois. She was still grinning when they swung around a bend and confronted a hundred meters of chaos that seemed to go straight down.

There was no time for second thoughts. Robin recited a prayer almost before she realized what she was doing and held on tight.

The canoe shuddered. Water spilled over the side and sprayed in her face; then she was battling to keep the nose pointed downstream. She thought she heard Hautbois shout, but the roaring of the river was too loud for words. The wood splintered beneath her, and suddenly she was in the river, clinging to the side of the canoe.

When she got her head above the water and opened her eyes, she saw that Hautbois was also in the river, but standing on the bottom submerged to the waist. She had wrestled them to an area of relative quiet at the side of the river and now clambered onto a rocky shelf and lifted the stern of the canoe.

“You all right?” she called, and Robin managed to nod. When she looked up, she saw Gaby and Psaltery.

After an inspection and a shouted conference they decided the canoe would have to complete the trip down the rapids; that was fortunate since the other would have been dangerously overloaded with the two Titanides and two humans. Robin would have to ride with Gaby, while Hautbois managed the task of nursing the disabled craft down the river. Robin did not argue but climbed into Gaby’s boat with a sense of failure.

* * *

“I can’t fix that,” Hautbois told them after inspecting the broken ribs of the canoe. “We’ll have to
salvage the skin and wait until we get into another stand of canoe trees.”

“Robin can ride with me and Valiha,” Chris offered.

Robin hesitated only a moment, then nodded to him.

They were beached on a wide mud flat at the confluence of Ophion and the river Arges, near the center of Phoebe. The land was dark, with only an occasional spindly tree silver and translucent in the moonlight. Phoebe was actually a tiny bit brighter than Rhea had been. The reason was the Twilight Sea, part of which was in sunlight, was a better reflector than the lands which curved up on each side of Nox. But the slight gain was lost in the dreariness of the land itself. Rhea at least had been rugged; central Phoebe was swamp.