The Blue Star by Fletcher Pratt (good novels to read .TXT) 📗
- Author: Fletcher Pratt
Book online «The Blue Star by Fletcher Pratt (good novels to read .TXT) 📗». Author Fletcher Pratt
“No, I say. I will cry out.” She writhed away from his touch, but he found her in the narrow space, the arm pinned her close and his head came down on her breast as he said, thickly; “But you must, you must. I am a diaconal and I have chosen you. I will tell them in Mancherei.”
His grip was so strong that it paralyzed, but he did not for the moment attempt to go further. Scream? Would she be heard above the rocking wind? “No,” she said, “no. Ser Brog will hear. The Captain.”
“It is the watch to daybreak. No one aboard will ever know.”
“No, no, I will not,” replied Lalette, (feeling all her strength melting), though he did not try to hold her hands or to put any compulsion upon her but that of the half-sobbing warm close contact, (somehow sweet, so that she could hardly bear it, and anything, anything, was better than this silent struggle). No water; she let a little moisture dribble out of her averted lips into the palm of one hand, and with the forefinger of the other traced the pattern above one ear in his hair, she did not know whether well or badly. “Go!” she said fierce and low (noting, as though it were something in which she had no part how the green fire seemed to run through his hair and to be absorbed into his head). “Go, and return no more.”
The breathing relaxed, the pressure ceased. She heard his feet shamble toward the door and the tiny creak again before realizing; then leaped like a bird to the heaving deck, night-robed as she was. Too late: even from the door of the cabin, she could see the faint lantern-gleam on Tegval’s back as he took the last stumbling steps to the rail and over into a white curl of foam.
A whistle blew; someone cried: “A man lost!” and Lalette was instantly and horribly seasick.
II“I will tell you plainly, demoiselle,” said Captain Mülvedo, “that if it were not for Ser Brog saying how he saw with his own eyes that this young man moved to the rail without your urging, I should have been most skeptic. As things stand, I must acquit you of acts direct. As for others, as employment of the Art, they are a matter for a court of Deacons, and since you are bound to Mancherei, you’ll be beyond such jurisdiction.” He stared at her gloomily. “As captain of this ship, and therefore judge in instruction, I must ask you to keep your cabin until we reach port.”
Lalette looked at the moving gullet of the first mate as he stood by the Captain beside the bed, and even this sight seemed to make her the more ill. Said Brog’s voice, dry as a ratchet; “Aye. You have my word for it. The little demoiselle never touched a hand to him as he went over. But he came from her cabin.”
“No more rehearsing of things known. We know all except what she will not tell us,” said Mülvedo. (Her body ached all over from lying in the one position.)
“Aye.” It was Brog again. “Yesterday he was all quick with life, maybe a little hasty, but a kindly, helpful young man, and now the fishes are tearing pieces of his guts out.” Brog’s face wrinkled in what might have been a smile, had there been any mirth in it.
She turned her face away and began to retch, but nothing came up beyond a few drops of spittle, bitter and sour.
“Not nice to think on, no,” said Brog. “But nicer than the mind that would bring such a death to the lad; there’s the real, black, stinking hell.”
(The bird of Lalette’s mind felt the bars shift in tighter, she wanted to cry and beat with her hands.) Said Captain Mülvedo; “Ser Brog, I have acquit this demoiselle of direct acts. You will oblige me by not questioning as though the matter were still to decide. If this were the Art, no jurisdiction lies in us.”
“You are my captain, and I am therefore even under your orders, even as to this court of the ship,” said Brog, his thin lips closing sharply. “But I am master of the cargo, of which she forms a part, and it is my province to know what kind of goods I deliver.”
(Lalette had a sense without seeing it directly that the chandelier swung twice as she looked at the three and thought—the truth? But how to explain about the trip, what Tegval had done, how he had demanded the deepest fruit of love as a casual thing like a cup of water, dragging her down?) “Ah, no,” she said in her dying voice, and swallowed again, turning eyes of misery toward the Captain.
He frowned (and she knew it for a frown in her favor, and knew the reason for it and hated him and herself). “Ser Brog,” he said, “I now declare the court shut. This demoiselle is not cargo but a person.”
Brog’s wrinkles ran deeper; the three passed out, the Captain remaining till latest, to pat her hand on the coverlet. Revolt ran through her veins at kindness for the wrong reason, which was worse than hate or anger; there was no understanding in this seaman who only wanted to change bed-partners now and again, she was afloat on a sea of desires.
The daylight swung from powder to deep dusk. One knocked, and it was the gnome-like creature who stewarded for the Captain, who offered her a bowl of broth. The motion of the ship being a trifle easier, she was able to eat a little and hold it, in spite of the shadow that lay across her mind. (But I will not regret, she cried inwardly, and then one-half her mind played critic to the other and cried—no, no. Is there no surcease?) The hours slid by along a silent stream, and she was alone.
IIIAll movement ceased. Sickness dropped from her like a veil, and from beneath burst such a joy of spirit as Lalette had rarely known, so that she could have sung herself a song, as she almost leaped from her place to put on the new dress. There was no mirror and she had to feel the strands of her hair into the demoiselle’s knot, hoping the result would not look too recklessly wild. Outside the deckhouse, shouts and confused, orderly trampings were toward, but no one came to call for her until long after she had packed everything into the small trunk, with the book Tegval had given her at the bottom. The door was tapped; Brog, followed by a man with a red peaked hat and a fur of sidewhisker, who held an annotation-roll in his hand.
“This is the Demoiselle Issensteg,” said Brog (and Lalette reflected incontinently that it was hard to distinguish an appearance of melancholy in a face from one of dissipation). “I transmit her to you. She is recommended from Ser Kimred, the residentialist at Netznegon.” He handed the man in the hat a folded letter. “It is my duty to warn you that in this ship she has been confined on suspicion of man-murder through witchery. In the home country, I would have brought her before a Court of Deacons.”
The dunnier bowed, as unsmiling as Brog himself, then with his annotation-roll as a wand, touched Lalette on the arm and her little trunk. “This is not Dossola, but Mancherei,” he said. “Subject to the regulations of the realm of Mancherei, and the association of the Myonessae, we accept her charge and her possessions.” Then, turning to Lalette; “In the name of the God of Love, come with me.”
(Knowing barely the name of these Myonessae, unwilling to ask more lest she somehow tip over the razor-narrow bridge of safety) Lalette only smiled and turned to the door. A plank-way led to the dock; the sun shone yellowly upon a row of wharfside houses, whose brick looked as though streaked with wet, while at many windows there was bunting as though for a festival, but much of it faded, miscolored or torn. As she watched, she brushed against a hand which had been held out to her and was beginning to fall in disappointment. Captain Mülvedo.
“I am sorry,” she said, and took the hand.
“Farewell, demoiselle. I do not believe it. If you are not accepted here, I—that is—”
He seemed at the edge of tears, a droll thing.
“Thank you. I will remember your kindness.” Brog was in the rear, looking right past her (and she had the dreadful feeling that when she was gone, he would have no trouble in bringing the Captain to his own point of view on her. This was goodbye to all yesterdays.). She mounted the plank for the shore.
There was a great press of people about, the men in loose pantaloons hanging over their shoes, and all walking about and yammering as fast as they could. They seemed reasonlessly excited, as though this were a day of crisis; Lalette could hardly make out a sign of that calm assurance that seemed to be the mark of the Amorosians in her own country. They stared at Lalette, the more when two of the guards who waited at the plank with short bills in their hands and the small “city” arbalests strapped to their backs, placed themselves on either side of her at a word from the dunnier, leading across to a building with a low door, over which was a shield painted thickly with something that might be a pair of clasped hands on a field of blue.
There was a door down the hallway rightward, with a little man at a desk behind it, writing laboriously, his tongue in his cheek, as the light struck over his shoulder. The guards led Lalette in; he jumped up and threw down his quill so rapidly that a blot was left on the paper. She noticed food-stains on his jacket.
“You must not interrupt, really you must not interrupt me unannounced,” he said. “You are not authorized. I am a protostylarion.”
His big pop-eyes with blue white seemed to swell as they fell on Lalette; one of the guards laid a paper before him saying; “A candidate for the Myonessae, on the incoming ship from Dossola. Orders of the dunnier.”
“Ah, ah.” The protostylarion was no taller than she herself as he came fussing importantly around the desk to move a chair two fingerlengths for her convenience, then diddled back to his place. The paper made him frown. “Ah, ah, suspicion of the Art. This does not happen often these days, but you are very fortunate to be here, demoiselle, instead of in Dossola. Ah—you have read the First Book of our great leader and Prophet? Answer me now, the misfortune of the loss of patrimony, why do you think that came upon him?”
(Not quite sure whether he meant the character in the book, or the Prophet’s own ejection from the heirship of Dossola), Lalette said hesitantly; “Why, sir, I—I suppose it would be because he tried so arrogantly to increase it.”
“Admirable, admirable. Whereas if he had given of it freely to the old aunt, it had been returned to him in high measure. From which we learn, demoiselle?”
(The jargon was distasteful, but) “That we must lovingly give all we have,” said Lalette, remembering.
The protostylarion bounced up and down behind his desk as he went on, prompting her replies in his eagerness, so that it hardly mattered how little she had read of the famous First Book. A porter came blundering into the midst of the colloquy with her trunk on a hook over his shoulder. This placed a period to the examination, for now the protostylarion fussed with his hands, said “Ah, ah,” two or three times more, then to the guards; “You are released.”
As the pair filed out, he drew from his desk a large ledger and a sheet of blue-colored paper, pointed his quill and said; “You—swear—that—whatever—of—the—Art—you—have—practiced—in—the—past—you—will—abandon—with—all—worldly—vanities—on—reception—into—the—high—order—of—the—Myonessae,” all in one breath. Then, more judicially:
“Your name is—”
“Lalette—” (should she say “Issensteg?”)
“Ah, you made an evasion! The God of love demands all truth from those who come to him.”
She felt a cheek-spot heat at this nagging. “Asterhax. I have given you nothing but truth. If you doubt it I will return to the ship that brought me.”
“Oh no, oh no, my dear demoiselle, you must not mistake. All pasts are buried in the world of love.”
“Well, I have done that.”
“And they will welcome you, I am sure, my dear demoiselle. Oh, the perfect peace.” His pen went scratch, scratch, skipping from ledger to paper, the head cocked on one side as he surveyed the result from one angle, then another, as an artist might look at a drawing, and his smile approved. A fly buzzed in the room.
“So. Demoiselle Lalette, you are
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