Two To Conquer ELF

  He thought, with a cynical grin, that he was reacting normally. Reprieved from death, recalled out of the stasis box, what better way to spend a few odd hours than with women? But just in case this was real, he wasn’t going to make the same mistake that had got him into the box in the first place. If by some strange chance this was one of Bard’s women, he’d adopt a strict hands-off policy! There were plenty of other women…

  But damn it, that was the one he wanted! Too bad the child had been there; he wasn’t quite enough of a bastard to grab a woman with a youngster looking on. He had a feeling she wouldn’t be coy. The ripeness of that bosom, the red mouth which looked well kissed, told him she was no innocent virgin! To do her justice, he couldn’t say she’d given him any clear signals; she’d been modest enough, but he bet his life she wouldn’t make any fuss once he got his hands on her!

  Bard sent for him late that evening, and they sat before the fire over a stack of campaign maps which Bard had insisted Paul should understand thoroughly. It was not too early to start. They talked for a long time about tactics and campaigns, and although it was professional, strictly business, Paul had the sense that Bard welcomed this companionship, enjoyed teaching him this; that he seldom had anyone to share his interests.

  He’s like me, a man who doesn’t often find anyone he can talk to as an equal. They call him Wolf, but I have a feeling that “Lone Wolf” would be more like it. He’s been a loner all his life, I bet. Like me.

  There just weren’t that many people who could follow his mental processes. It wasn’t at all an unmixed blessing—to be brighter than ninety per cent of the people you met. It made men seem like fools, and women like worse fools, and most people never had the slightest idea what he was talking about or thinking about.

  Even when Paul led the rebellion that had brought him to disaster, he had already known that it was hopeless. Not because the rebellion was impossible—it could have been successful, if he’d had a couple of intelligent allies who knew what the hell he was really trying to do—but because, basically, the men he led weren’t half so committed as he was himself. He’d been the only one who really cared, deep down, what they were fighting about. The other men didn’t have that rage at the center of themselves; he had suspected, sooner or later, that most of them would climb down—as, in fact, they had done—and crawl to the powers that be for another chance; even if that chance meant having their whole selves carved up until there was nothing left of them. Well, there’d been nothing much to them in the first place, small loss! But it meant he had always been alone.

  I can make myself necessary to the Wolf.

  Because I’m his equal, his duplicate, the nearest to an equal he’ll ever have. He looked at Bard for a minute with something very akin to love, thinking, He’d understand. If I’d had just one follower like him, we could have put some steel into the spines of the men who followed me. We could have done it, together. Two like us could have changed the world!

  Rebellions, Paul knew, usually failed, because the brains and guts and imagination to lead them came along only once in a century or so. But this time there were two of them.

  I couldn’t change my world alone. But the two of us can change his, together!

  Bard looked up sharply, and Paul felt sudden disquiet. Was he doing that thought-reading trick again? But the Wolf only stretched and yawned and said it was late.

  “I’m for my bed. By the way, I forgot to ask, shall I have the steward send you a woman? There are enough useless females, heaven knows, and most of them just as eager for a man in their bed as the men are for them. Have you, perhaps, seen one that’s to your liking?”

  “Only one,” said Paul. “Your son’s governess, I suppose; long braids, bright red, freckled—curvy, not very tall. That one—unless she’s married, or something. I don’t want trouble.”

  Bard flung his head back and laughed.

  “Melisendra! I wouldn’t advise—she has a tongue like a whip!”

  “It was all I could do to keep my hands off her.”

  “I should have expected that,” Bard said, still laughing. “If we’re the same man! That was how I reacted when I was seventeen, and she wasn’t, I suppose, fourteen yet! She made a great fuss, and my foster mother has never forgiven me for it, but damn it, it was worth it! Erlend’s her son. And mine.”

  “Oh, well, if she’s yours—”

  Bard laughed again. “Hell, no! I’m sick to death of her, but my foster mother’s shoved her off on me, and she’s getting above herself! I’d enjoy teaching her a lesson, prove to her she’s no better than any of the other women around here and that it’s only by my good nature, not as a right, that she’s allowed to be my woman and stay here to raise my son! Let me think—if I told her to go to you, she’d run whining to Lady Jerana, and I haven’t the heart for a quarrel with my father’s wife. But just the same—” He grinned with mischief. “Well, you are supposed to be my duplicate! I wonder if she would ever know the difference? Her room is there, and she’ll think it’s me, and know better than to make a fuss!”

  Something in Bard’s tone bothered him, as Bard added with a sarcastic grin, “After all, you are me; she can’t complain that I’ve given her to someone else!”

  Who the hell did Bard think he was, to fling him at Melisendra this way? But the thought of the red-haired woman’s lovely ripe body stopped any thought of resistance. No woman had ever aroused him so, like that, at first glance!

  His heart was pounding, as, later, he went toward the darkened room Bard had pointed out to him. And behind the excitement, the thought of the woman, was a note of cynical caution.

  Bard would find it hilarious, he sensed, to guide him, not into Melisendra’s room, but into the room of some withered old hag, some ancient virgin who would rouse the house screaming.

  But even if Bard tried that, he’d find her; somehow he’d hold Bard to his promise.

  He’s my size and he’s been fighting all his life. And right now, after God knows how long in the stasis box, he’s probably more fit than I am; but he’s not any stronger. I bet I could take him. I doubt, for instance, if he knows much karate.

  But he dropped the thought of their inevitable confrontation from his mind as he came into the room. Moonlight from an open window lay across the bed, and he could see the loosened waves of the copper hair, rich and thick, the freckled face he had seen before. Her eyes were closed and she slept. She was wearing a long nightgown, embroidered at neck and sleeves, but it could not conceal the round ripeness of her body. Carefully, he shut the door. In the darkness, how would she know he was not Bard? He wanted her, somehow, to know, to want him too! And yet, if this was the only way he could have her… what the hell was he delaying for? If she was the kind of woman who could be handed from man to man, would it matter? But she obviously was not that kind of woman, or Bard would simply have handed her over, without this ruse…

  Or perhaps not. He found that thinking of Bard’s body, his own body, entangled with this woman, was curiously arousing. Somehow it gave him a charge to think of it. Did Bard have the same kink, that it would give him some kind of kick to think of his duplicate, making love to his woman?

  He sat on the edge of the bed to take off his clothes. It was pitch dark, but he would not risk a light. She could have told the difference, perhaps, by the fact that he did not have the warrior’s braid of hair… He discovered, with an amused grimace, that he was actually shaking with anticipation, like a boy about to take his first woman.

  What the hell?

  And Bard had given Melisendra to him, not to please Paul but, he sensed, to humiliate Melisendra. Suddenly he was not sure he wanted to collaborate with Bard on humiliating this woman.

  But she would probably never know the difference anyway; and if this was the only way he could have her, he wasn’t going to give up that chance! He got into bed beside her, and lay a hand on her under the blankets.

  She turned toward him with a little sigh, not of acceptance or
welcome, but of resignation. Was Bard so inept a lover as all that, or did she simply dislike him? Surely there was no love lost between them now! Well, perhaps he could change her tune; no woman who gave him half a chance had ever failed to welcome him as a lover.

  She lay passive under his caresses, not refusing his touch, not accepting, simply acting as if he were not there at all. Damn the woman, he didn’t want her that way, he would rather she’d scream and fight him than accept him as a loathsome duty! But even as he formulated the thought, she sighed again, and put up her arms around his neck, and he pulled her to him. He could feel her growing excitement, and felt her trembling against him as his own arousal grew greater and greater.

  He let himself fall, spent and gasping, across her. He lay there, his hands still caressing her, covering her with kisses, unwilling to let her go even for a moment. She said quietly into the darkness, “Who are you?”

  He drew breath in astonishment. And then he realized he should have known. He and Bard were physically doubles, yes, doubles even in personality perhaps. But sex was, of all activities, the most subject to total cultural conditioning. He could not possibly expect to make love in the way a Darkovan would do. The mechanics of the act were the same, but the whole psychological milieu was entirely different; he might have deceived her with a familiar face and body while he kept still, but every caress, every movement, betrayed a whole world of conditioning too deep to be altered. He could no more have made love to her in Bard’s way—even if his duplicate had, unimaginably, told him the customary method—than he could have performed the sexual act in the manner of a Cro-Magnon man!

  He said quietly, “Please don’t cry out, Melisendra. He sent me here; I could not resist, I wanted you so.”

  Her voice was low and agitated. “He has played a cruel trick on us both; it is not his first. No, I will not cry out. Do you mind if I strike a light?”

  He lay back while she lit a small lamp and held it where she could see him.

  “Yes,” she said, “the resemblance is—is demoniacal. I noticed it when I saw you with Erlend. But it is more than just resemblance, is it not? Somehow I could sense a tie between you. Even though you are—are very different,” she said, and her breath came, ragged.

  He reached out and took the lamp away from her, setting it down on the bedside table. “Don’t hate me, Melisendra,” he pleaded. Her mouth trembled, and he discovered that he wanted to kiss away whatever troubled her. That was not at all the usual reaction he had toward women! Damn it, usually when he’d had what he wanted of them he couldn’t get away fast enough! But this one did something very strange to him.

  She looked at him, shaken.

  “I thought—for a moment, I thought, perhaps, something had changed in him. I—I—I have always wanted him to be this way with me—” She swallowed, hard, choking, and he sensed that she was trying very hard not to cry. “But I have only deceived myself, for he is rotten, rotten to the core, and I despise him. But I despised myself more, for—for wishing that he were such a man as I could—could come to love. For, since I must belong to him, since I have been given to him, I cannot help but wish he were—were a man I could love—”

  He pulled her down to him, kissing the shaking mouth, the streaming tears beneath the pale lashes.

  “I can’t regret anything,” he said. “Not when it brought me to you, Melisendra. I’m sorry for your grief, I’m sorry you were frightened; I wouldn’t have hurt you or frightened you willingly—but I’m glad to have had you, once, when you wouldn’t protest—”

  She looked at him soberly, her eyes still wet.

  “I am not sorry either,” she said. “Believe me. Even though I suppose he was trying to humiliate me. I always refused when Lady Jerana would have given me to another, even when she offered to marry me honorably to one of Dom Rafael’s paxmen. I feared it would be even worse. Bard has done his worst to me, I have no more to fear from him, and I thought, better the cruelty that I knew than new cruelty from a stranger… But you have taught me otherwise.” She smiled at him suddenly in the lamplight, a very faint smile, but he knew he would never be wholly content until she smiled at him as today she had smiled at the child, a wholehearted, mirthful smile of love.

  “I think I am grateful to you. And I do not even know your name.”

  With one hand he put out the light and with the other he drew her down to him.

  “Then are you willing to show your gratitude?”

  He heard her surprised, grateful sigh in the moment before she turned and kissed him, with a surprised delight which shook him to the roots.

  “I have never hated Bard before,” she said, trembling, holding herself tight to him. “Now, because of you, I have learned how to hate him, and I shall never cease to be grateful to you.”

  “But I want more than gratitude,” he heard himself say, to his own surprise. “I want your love, Melisendra.”

  She said in the dark, with a frightening intensity, “I am not sure I know how to love. But I think if I could learn to love anyone, I would love you, Paul.”

  He said no more, drawing her fiercely against his mouth. But even in the midst of his wonder and delight, a troubling thought nagged at him.

  Now I can’t turn back, now I am committed to this world, now there is someone here who means more to me than anyone and anything in the world I came from. What will happen now that I can’t treat it all as a crazy dream?

  * * *

  Chapter Three

  « ^ »

  A tenday later, Paul Harrell rode to war for the first time beside Bard di Asturien.

  “The men of Serrais have broken their oaths,” Bard told him as they made their preparations. “We may not have to fight. But we do have to remind them of what they have sworn, and the best way to do that is with a show of force and a sight of our armies. You had better be ready to ride within the hour.”

  Paul’s first thought was triumph, so, there will be a chance to strike for power! His second, displacing even that, was one of dismay; Melisendra! He did not want to be parted from her so swiftly. He had just begun to suspect, and for the first time in his life, that he did not want to be parted from her at all. Yet a moment’s sober reflection told him that this parting was the best thing that could possibly have happened.

  Sooner or later, he knew it soberly, he would quarrel with Bard over Melisendra. He wanted her, still, as he had never wanted any other woman. Ordinarily, a tenday’s possession would have satiated him and he would be more than ready for anything that removed him from any woman’s hold. But he still wanted Melisendra. He dreaded this parting, he wanted her—and he couldn’t explain it—in a new way. He wanted her for all time, and with her own consent; he was dismayed to realize that her happiness had become more important to him than his own.

  He had always thought that women were there for the taking, and that was that. Why, he wondered, should he feel differently about Melisendra?

  I always swore I’d never let any woman lead me around by the balls… I knew it in my heart that women wanted to be mastered, to have a real man they couldn’t dominate… . Why is this one so different?

  He knew he still wanted Melisendra; and he wanted her, undisputed, for the rest of their lives. But he also knew that Bard, produced by a less sophisticated society, regarded Melisendra as his property, his prize, his possession. He might pass her on to Paul for a time, to humiliate her, but he was not likely to give her up entirely. She was, after all, the mother of his only son.

  And at the moment there was nothing he could do about any of it. A time would come when they would quarrel over Melisendra, and when that happened, Paul knew he must be prepared.

  For when that time comes, he thought grimly, either he will kill me or I will have to kill him. And I don’t intend to be killed.

  So he gathered his pack for riding, and told Bard, “I would like to say farewell to Melisendra.”

  “Why, as to that, there is no need,” said Bard, “for she rides with
the army.”

  Paul nodded, at first without much thought; he was accustomed to women soldiers, even to women generals. Then the shock hit him. Yes, in warfare which was a matter of button-pushing and guns, women would be as competent in combat as men—but in this world, where war meant close-order fighting with swords and knives?

  “Oh, we have those too,” said Bard, reading his mind. “The women of the Order of Renunciates, the Sisterhood of the Sword, ride into battle with men, and they fight like berserkers. But Melisendra is a real woman, not one of those; she is a leronis, a spell-caster who rides with the armies to fight off sorcery.”

  Paul thought perhaps that might be more dangerous still, but he did not say so. As they rode out an hour later, Bard said that this was just as well.

  “There are those who would recognize my style of fighting,” he said, “and while we are on this campaign—since you are supposed to be a nedestro kinsman of mine—it will not strike anyone as significant if I have you given lessons from my own arms-master.”

  Paul, riding unregarded with a small group of Bard’s aides, noted for himself how the armies greeted their general: cries of “The Kilghard Wolf! The Wolf!” cheers and shouts of acclaim. His very presence seemed to encourage and inspire them with courage and enthusiasm for this war against the Serrais.

  So Bard would someday trust him with that power—and believe that he would tamely render it back again when the time was past? Not likely. There was, Paul knew with a chill of certainty along the spine, only one explanation. Bard would use him on his climb to conquest—and then, rather than rewarding him and sending him away as he had pledged, it would be back to the stasis box, by the same sorcery that had brought him here. Or perhaps, more simply still, a knife in the ribs on some dark night, and a corpse to the kyorebni wheeling around the cliffs. Paul kept his face impassive, joining in with the men who cried out in Bard’s acclaim. It would not be easy. For now, Bard had other things to think of than the duplicate being trained to be his double and his dupe; but at other times they could read one another’s thoughts, and he had had no training in blocking them. Perhaps Melisendra could help him, if she was truly a sorceress; but Melisendra would not be all that eager, either, to kill the father of her son. She might say that she hated Bard, but Paul wasn’t entirely sure of the depths of that hate.