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Tark? Boom!"
A straw-haired, hulking youth nodded and turned' toward us. He dragged his
right leg. He knelt at my captor's side and touched my dirt-smeared breast
with a scabby finger.
"Pretty fi-ire," he said slowly and deliberately. Then he giggled and hunkered
back on his heels. "Pret-ty fi-ire, Morkel."
I shuddered as I realized the extent of our difficul-
ties. Poor Dalf. I counted the chaldless. I could see eleven ragged, filthy
men. He would have had no chance.
"Your couch-mate does not please us," Morkel, the torturer, said. "You tell
him, lady, to do what we say, and we will not kill you. We will keep you, you
will be happy to be alive. You tell him that Jorna and Trinard like boys like
him. You tell him, lady, to do good by my friends Jorna and Trinard." He
caressed my cheek with a horny paw. He pushed his face against mine. "Or we
will cut something off, something he would like to keep, and feed it to you."
He was consumed in laughter at that. He pushed himself away from me and rolled
on the ground, kicking his legs in the air.
"And feed it to her," he screamed re-peatedly, pointing.
The others took up the cry. They giggled and guf-fawed and danced around each
other as the two I as-sumed to be
Jorna and Trinard dragged Dellin to within an arm's length of me. His arms and
legs were still bound, and there was another thick hemp rope around his neck.
I searched the sky. I saw nothing. I turned pleading eyes to Dellin. He was
struggling furiously, his face transformed
with impotent rage. He looked upon me, unseeing.
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Morkel jerked me to my knees and pushed me, his foot in the small of my back,
toward Dellin. I fell for-ward, my face so close to his that I could see the
blood and sweat mix on his skin. He was cut above the eye, and more blood ran
from the right corner of his mouth. His eyes were wild.
"Please," I whispered in M'ksakkan. "Do what they want. They will torture us
if you do not. I called Santh." I begged him. "We need just a little time. It
is not the act, but the context in which it is viewed. It is not that terrible
a thing."
Dellin shook his head and spit blood. "No chance. They'll kill me afterward
anyway." His voice was tone-less. His eyes implored me to understand. I could
not. A foot struck me in the kidneys, and I bit my lip.
"You better tell him good, lady," someone said.
"Please, Khaf-Re, if not for yourself, then for me. I am sure Santh will come.
If you lose your manhood here, and he rescues us, what good will your life be
to you? Buy me the time, please," I sobbed. I had never before used his given
name.
I craned my head to see the sky. Still nothing.
I looked back at Dellin. The tears streamed down my face unchecked. His face
swam before my eyes.
He stared at me and said nothing.
Morkel stepped between us and hunkered over Del-lin.
"You ready to put on a show for us, star-man?" He giggled. The Liaison Second
of Arlet did not respond.
Morkel picked me up roughly and set me on my knees between himself and the
bloody, hulking Tark. The men had formed a circle around the prostrate Dellin
and the two men Jorna and Trinard.
"You watch," said Morkel to me, grasping me by the throat. When the two men
forced Dellin's mouth open, he kept his head, and hence his own imperiled
sex-ual organs. He cried out once when they used him as if he were a woman. I
sympathized with him.
When the show was over, the two men dragged him to his feet and pushed him,
stumbling and naked, to my side, where they knotted the end of the rope that
dangled from his neck around my throat and forced us both to lie down.
My hands were rebound behind my back. Our feet were rope-wrapped, and they
left us, facing each other, bound together.
They seemed almost to forget about us as they pre-pared a fire and cooked a
meal of stolen stores from the hover.
Dellin did not speak to me. I watched the sky. I nudged him, but he turned his
head away. I kissed him once on the shoulder, and he shivered, but that was
all. The day passed slowly into dusk, and our tormentors, drunk and sated,
snored under the peace-ful wisper trees.
I must have dozed. When I awoke, it was pitch dark and the sliver of the moon
was rising in the velvet night.
I heard a rustle near me, then a soft sound as of gnashing teeth. I raised my
head. I could see nothing. I stared, straining into the dark. Gradually I
could make out the edges of the shapes, dark against dark, of the men sleeping
on the little rise above us.
I heard another rustle, farther away. I sniffed deeply. I thought I detected a
musky smell, and then I saw him, silhouetted by the feeble moonlight between
the trees. It was a hulion, surely the hulion. His head was high, and he was
shaking something in his mouth. Back and forth he shook it, then, with a great
toss of his mighty head, sent the thing flying into the midst of the sleeping
men. I heard a grumble, a shout, and two figures rose up, their knives
glinting.
The battle was short. Growls and snarls and shouts, and Santh threw one man so
far that the sound of his landing was lost in the commotion. The other turned
to run, screaming to his fellows for aid. But no one moved from the
still-sleeping camp on the rise to as-sist him.
Santh followed his prey into the trees. I was so filled with pride and fear
that I could hardly speak. I nudged Dellin, who still slept.
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He did not wake. I nudged him again, harder. He tried to move his arms, and
came alert when he realized where he was.
"Santh is here," I whispered. I feared that somehow, some of our captors still
lived.
"Where?" asked Dellin loudly, struggling to sit up. "Move your feet here.
Good."
We could, by placing our mutually bound feet between us, sit facing each
other.
"Hey," Dellin shouted.
"Sssh," I hissed.
"Why?" His tone was flat and cold. "If I am saved, I wish to know it. If not,
I would know that also."
None stirred in the camp.
"Could he have killed them all?" he asked wonderingly.
"Easily," I gloated.
"Has he ever tasted man flesh before?"
"No, he has not."
"Might he not, in his blood rage, kill us also?"
"Santh would never hurt me," I assured him with more confidence than I felt. I
had not thought of that.
Santh bounded out of the darkness and laid a large wet form at my feet. He
snuffled his nose in my hair. I trembled.
"Good Santh," I said in my most approving voice.
The great hulion sat with his front legs tucked be-tween his rear, his fur
touching my leg, waiting for me to taste his gift. His huge eyes shone like
two golden full moons out of the night.
"Santh, find a knife," I commanded, sending to the great beast's mind a
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