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Through the metalloid fabric of the starship around her, Tris heard the thump of an auxiliary arriving and being made fast below.
Without being told so---and maybe for the sake of saving her sanity---she was being held for ransom. Having resigned herself to a long wait until the sum demanded of her uncle (or perhaps the Premier) could be paid, she had resolved to make the best of her ordeal and to maintain the appearance of composure, so that, afterward, she might hold her head up. In this manner, she would represent both herself and the Romanovan people to these barbarians as the superior stock she had grown up believing they were. Although, of late, she had begun entertaining some chilling thoughts about that. However that may be, maybe Uncle Flownx would be proud enough of her, in the end, to relent in the matter of her exile.
To this purpose, she was at the moment sitting---almost content, washed and owned afresh as she had striven to appear each day from the outset of her captivity---in a straight-backed chair beside the broad, soft, railed bed, mending with skillful care a traveling dress, among her favorites, which the repulsive Omarov had torn up. She was aware that these accommodations, with their unique plumbing and bathing facilities, were the captain's personal quarters, and even cognizant, in an odd way, of the fact that this hospitality, and his continuous absence since she had come aboard, was what had given her an impression her release was, if not in the immediate offing, at least sure to come sooner or later. It didn't occur to her, maybe because she had not let it, that the place she had been quartered might portend another kind of fate.
Now she heard thumping on the maindeck, saw moving shadows cast from beyond the angle of vision which, from this vantage-point, the cabin windows permitted. She looked up from her mending as the cabin door swung open. The young man she knew as Yvan Dragomilov stepped inside and shut the door behind him. Without saying a word, he strode to the many-paned windows overlooking the maindeck, polarized them until they were purple-black, and shook out curtains in front of them which had been tied back and not let down for years.
She stood. He turned to face her, cupping his left palm over the aperture of the quickblade he wore on his right arm in a warrior's gesture of well-intentioned greeting the significance of which she failed to realize.
"Good afternoon, Mistress Trezleniya-Silvertou. Forgive the fact that I have, until this moment, been too busy to pay you proper attention. Remove your clothing." Tris took a step backward and found, to her dismay, that she had placed a hand over her mouth as if she were the heroine of some melodrama file. Yvan Dragomilov grinned and stepped forth, taking two deep strides to her one. "Must I repeat myself, girl? Off with your clothes! Now!"
Swallowing, she raised her other hand, and, where it met the first, began, with fingers rendered awkward by terror, to unfasten the short row of small buttons at her throat. The startling thought struck her that this moment would not have passed much differently had she agreed to give herself as a bribe and bride to the Dzendayn Premier.
With a local pilot at the helm, one Gorat Dragos, captain-by-courtesy and foremost among those badgering him to join that stupid Deperado's Club, and Putin to do the breathing down his neck, Yvan Dragomilov had left instructions that he was not to be disturbed until their arrival at the ice asteroid Lusin. He was free to take his time with the little captive. Yielding to impatience despite himself, he obliterated the distance between them, swept her hands down, and finished off the row of buttons for her. He did not tear her clothing, but, before she was altogether aware of it, he had the short jacket off her shoulders, her blouse as well, the sheer camisole beneath it over her head, and she was standing before him in stockings and her long, full skirt, naked from the waist up, just as she had been before Omarov.
Above all, she was aware that the hands on her---his quickblade glittered in the cabin light, cold where here and there it brushed her bare and goose-pimpled skin---had murdered an untold number of men, and, no doubt had brutalized many women. Had it been within her character, she might have fainted or prayed to the long-dead gods of her ancestors for another interruption, however disastrous. Instead, she stood straight, disdaining her nakedness, even with upraised arms.
"Go ahead, sir, mock me." She tried with all her might to keep a tremor out of her voice. For all she had despised him as an animal, Omarov's sneering criticism of what was, in fact, her slim and youthful figure had stung her pride. "Do not hesitate to enumerate the many bovine virtues of which I no doubt all short. Make whatever brutish remark lies foremost upon your mind. But I will have you know that you do this at your own peril, for I am the niece of...."
"I know who you are," replied Yvan Dragomilov. "We will have the skirt off as well." Out of modest reflex, she turned to unfasten her waistband, as she did so spying the mending basket she had placed upon the bed. Suddenly, her knees buckled under her as if in a faint. When she rose again, with his assistance at her elbow, she whirled, startling herself with a snarl, a long pair of gleaming scissors raised in one tiny fist. Yvan Dragomilov clapped a hand about her wrist, squeezing until her hand grew numb. She heard (not felt) the scissors fall from her tingling fingers and clatter to the floor where, still holding her, he kicked them under the bunk. Eyes shut tight, she waited for a backhand blow across her face---but it never came. "No more tomfoolery!" he yelled. "Now take that skirt off before I rip it off of your body!"
Defeated, Tris complied. As she did so, he reached out, timidly, it struck her afterward, and brushed his fingers across one of her nipples. A shudder, not altogether of revulsion, swept through her body.
"Please...." As he pulled her forward, she stepped out of her skirt where it lay upon the floor, clad only in her garters and sheer stockings. "Have mercy, for I am a virgin."
"One who talks too much," he replied, "but I've an idea how to deal with both failings.) He stared at Tris, fascinated by her moist, full-lipped mouth, having given it much thought. His plans for her were detailed and precise. This first night, for as many hours as it took, he would make repeated use of her in this manner, handling her with cuffs and sharp words when, in his estimate, she failed to please him. He would stroke her hair and caress her when she managed to perform to his criterion. One curiosity satisfied, the next time he came for her, probably tomorrow when they were hove to at Lusin, he would use her as he had first been used, keeping her at it until she was accustomed to that outrage as well. After they cast off for Tzitzeron and Ovidu, he would start with something new.
These thoughts singing in his blood and weakening his limbs, he pushed her backward until something hit her behind the knees and she found herself sitting on the edge of the bunk. In almost the same motion, he unfastened his own clothing so that, stepping towards her, lacing his fingers into the hair at the nape of his neck---she raised protesting hands to push him back, but he was too strong---he might lever her teeth open with a thumb.
"No...."
Of a sudden, having no reason he could account for, he stopped before completing the act he had intended. Looking down at her, what he saw on her face was an expression of resignation---her eyes were squeezed shut, her body quaking with fear and tense anticipation of his attack on her---articulate of all the suffering he had himself endured. In short, this beautiful creature had composed herself for a dishonorable death.
Thus the dreaded Yvan Dragomilov could not bring himself to do to Tris what had been done to him, to inflict upon her the merest fraction of pain and terror which had changed his life. She seemed so small and fragile he wished only to defend her, even from himself. He shook his fingers loose from her hair, and sat down beside her on the bunk, wrapping his arms about her naked, vulnerable form, holding her to him as tightly as if she would not release, in his unwelcome presence, the wail of despair he was sure, from his own experience of life, she was feeling. He held her closer and stroked her hair until the trembling subsided and she started weeping softly into his shoulder, discovering, as he held her, that his own face had become wet with tears.
A considerable time passed.
It was in his mind to say that he regretted having frightened and humiliated her. Feeling an apology was mere words and in the circumstances grotesquely inadequate, he continued, in its place, to sit beside her, holding her without words, until---noticing how chilled her flesh had become, how exhausted she looked, and finding he felt much the same himself---he lowered her to the pillows, lay down beside her, and, still holding her thin, pale form in his arms, covered her with the quilted comforter upon the bunk.
Tris's eyes remained shut, but her expression of terror and defeat relaxed by gradual stages. Perhaps without realizing what she did---for he could not imagine it to be an act of deliberation on her part---she laid a small, white hand upon his forearm where it rested across her midriff, and began to breathe more evenly and deeply. So it was, in the warmth and semidarkness of his cabin, in the comfort of encircling arms which neither of them had felt for so long, they both fell asleep.217Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡmrPgyMwArm
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Yvan Dragomilov awakened to the startling sensation of soft fingers stroking his cheek. Not until long afterward did he realize that his first thought had not been for the readiness of his quickblade. Instead, he opened his eyes to the sight of Tris, propped up on one elbow, looking down at him with an expression he could not altogether fathom. She did not speak.
He had surprised---and frightened---himself by drifting off in this manner. Yet he had spent several days and nights without sleep, without pause, at the backbreaking labor of refitting the captured Obrazets. This was the first rest he had enjoyed in all that time. She might have killed him as he lay insensible. He suggested as much, and asked her why she had not.
The corners of her pretty mouth twitched upward. "I might have, at that," she told him, "but my scissors were under the bed where you earlier kicked them. You were sleeping so peacefully that I could not bring myself to bother you by retrieving them. Maybe another time."
Still feeling tired, he grinned, relaxed again , and closed his eyes---until he felt a small, soft hand, not quite as gentle as before, upon his shoulder. Puzzled, he opened his eyes and looked up.
"Please have mercy," she told him, with the same fathomless expression, "for I am still a virgin."
A thrill of wondering disbelief, maybe something like joy, passed through his body like a wave of frozen fire. He opened his mouth. "I've an idea how to deal with that, but..." He hesitated over what he was about to say, which, in a sense, he considered a half-life. "I believe it only honest and straightforward to inform you beforehand, Mistress Trezleniya-Silvertou----that this will be my first time as well."
"You talk too much," she told him. "We will learn together."
In answer, he seized her---ever so tenderly---by the hair at the nape of her neck, and pulled her mouth to his own. Afterward, they did not sleep. He unsealed the outboard gallery windows, battened down for battle, and not since reopened so that they might gaze upon the faraway mist-shrouded glory of the Tzitzeron-Ovidu System. They lay beside each other, taking far into those hours which, had they been on a planet's surface, would have been fading into dawn. Tris spoke of her Uncle Flownx, of her life on the dangerous fringes of the Droom, of power and politics, of her studies of history and economics, of her friend and servant the redoubtable Omarov, and, in a somewhat halting manner, of how she came to be aboard the Ayvengo.
Yvan Dragomilov spoke, with equal diffidence in the beginning, of moonringed Genrich, his long-dead mother Gabdrakhimovishin, his murdered father Eugene, his brothers Eugene fils and Adam, his tutor and sister-in-law Maria, and in particular of his wise, valorous friend Terrible Yvan, whom he had never quite been able to think of as a servant. At last he came to Zaytseva's usupration. It surprised him to discover his own interest in all she had to tell him of galactic politics. In large measure she approached in theory what he was able to confirm by virtue of experience. he found her eager and incisive intellect as stimulating as her beauty. Watching her speak fascinated him all over again with her lovely mouth. He was even more shocked to hear himself telling her, at last, of his first evil hours aboard the Zilvagabond, of the sirleaf crate, and of what happened on the foul, dark liftdeck.
"Sometimes, Tris, I ache in my bones because no one is left upon whom to revenge myself, save Zaytseva and his obscene daughter, as yet beyond my reach." She nodded, trying to understand. "And Omarov," he added, "whom circumstance has twice compelled me to set free."
"And if any were left?"
"Man after guilty man would fall to the skill-at-arms I daily practice. Towards that end would I frequent ports where other brigands supply themselves and exchange information. I find myself in possession of a deal of money for which I have no better use. I have let it be known I am willing to pay for information bearing on Omarov's whereabouts, should he again survive the Deep, for I swear he will not escape me a third time."
"I see...."
"Still, events have made it plain that my true enemy is the current of the times which makes possible obscenities like imperia-conglomerate and the vermin they nurture. Alas, this insight may satisfy the intellect, but it gives me a foe without a face, and that rankles."
Tris found herself swept up in his urge for vengeance. "What of the pair from the capital, the Oligarch-Honorary Gurvey and Lady Malinovsyn-Korochuvak?"
He shrugged. "All I can discover is that they boarded Zilvagabond sometime after I did, albeit it in more dignified circumstances, and were put off with Omarov and his officers. They did not appear at Romanova when he did."
"No!" She shrank back with a cry. "You don't think Omaraov ate them?"217Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡSzvrYdD3BN
"It was," he answered her, "a desperate voyage. Who knows?"
She returned to questions about Genrich and him to answers, often difficult and painful, rather than futile, gruesome conjectures. They spoke of sleemov and strozad---he realized that this was the first time in months that one of the latter was not his constant companion---and of waiting in vain for rescue from the cold and heartless Deep. Although neither of them might have predicted it, it now became Tris's turn to comfort her captor within the circle of her arms.
At intervals, their bodies merged again. In the end, all that he might have taken from her, the answers to every curiosity he burned to satisfy, Tris gave him freely and more, besides. He did grow violent, after all, but it proved a different kind of violence, three-quarters play than he had first intended to inflict on her. Before the night was over, Tris came to understand (as maybe her lover did not; like most men, according to what she had read, he only knew his need and she felt fortunate that he was starting to know hers, as well) that, just as the animal process of feeding had, over the long course of evolution, been converted from a mechanical matter of fueling the body into an occasion for fellowship and celebration, so those reflexes which served reproduction had begun, with the fullness of time, to perform a secondary function, absorbing, diffusing, transmuting the killer rage with which life was all too likely to fill an individual into something bearable and consistent with continued sanity.
A knock came on the cabin door. "Lusin sighted, sir, and the captain's presence is requested on the quarterback."
Yvan Dragomilov sighed, raising his voice. "All right. I shall be along presently." Rising, he suggested to Tris that she remain abed for a few more hours. The night which they had spent together, whatever its other virtues---and they had been many----had afforded her scant sleep. As he dressed himself, his movements were clumsy, for he chafed in unaccustomed places. "Rest easy and for as long as you wish. I swear no harm will come to you."
She smiled in a way to melt his heart and settled deeper among the pillows. Reaching for his quickblades, he recalled with a start what a threatening place a starship could be for a weak, helpless, and, worst of all, uninformed individual. Nodding to himself, he strode to a locker set against a bulkhead, removed a little plastic chest, and returned to the bunk, resting one knee upon it beside Tris. He found it hard to speak.
"This, my----my beloved Tris, is one possession which was not taken at quickblade-point, with me from the start of my life on the Deep. I give it to you, not just in token of what I feel, which I could not in any case express, but that you may never fear for your life again, having means of defending your own person." She looked up at him with sleepy eyes, not altogether understanding why the gift was so important to him, but knowing nonetheless, that it was. He grinned. "I shall have to wait to show you its operation, but now you need not crawl under the bunk for your scissors."
Tris smiled at him and blushed. Arising again, he left her. He had intended showing her what he carried on a jeweled chain about his neck (no question lingered in his mind that she was the little dancer in the autofile) and asking her about it. Still, it could wait. They would have time. They had time enough for everything now.
She fell asleep with the ancient tokarev-weapon tucked beneath her pillow.
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