"Well," said Mainoa, lifting his brows and patting his younger colleague on the arm. "He's young yet. I thought of such things too, long ago."
A brooding silence fell. Marjorie persisted in moving the conversation away from these troublesome areas. "Brother Mainoa, do you know of an animal here on Grass which looks something like a bat?" She described the creature she had seen in the caverns, dwelling upon its most noteworthy feature, the fringing teeth.
"Not only know it," the friar answered, "but been bitten by it. Most people have, at least once. It's a bloodsucker. It comes out of the dusk and hits you right here – " he clamped a work-roughened hand on the back of his neck, just at the base of his skull, "and tries to sink those teeth into you. Since our headbones get in the way, they don't do much damage to humans. Evidently the Grassian animals have a notch in the skull right there. Miserable-looking things, aren't they?"
Marjorie nodded.
"Where did you see them?"
She explained, telling the story of the cavern once more. Rillibee and Father James were interested, even though Brother Mainoa was quite unsurprised.
"Then you undoubtedly saw dead ones, also. Their bodies lie around the Hippae caverns like leaves on a forest floor in a Terran fall. I do know about them. I'm among the few who've sneaked up on a cavern and gotten away afterward." He gave her a look which told her that he guessed more of her reasons for going into the grasses than she wanted him to.
"Gotten away?" she repeated faintly.
"I would say it's a rare thing to get away, Lady Westriding. If you'd been smelled or spotted, they'd have had you." He had fallen into his colloquial, avuncular manner.
"I was riding. On a horse."
"Still, I find it amazing. Well, if your horse got you out of there quickly, you may have outrun 'em. Or maybe the wind was just right and you simply weren't noticed. Or maybe the smell of the horse confused them just long enough. You took your life between your teeth, Lady." He gave her a concentrated, percipient look. "I'd suggest you not do it again. Certainly not during the lapse."
"I … I had already decided that." She cast her eyes down, embarrassed at Tony's scowl of agreement. Could the man read her mind?
"They don't like to be spied upon?" Tony asked.
"They won't tolerate it. That's why so little's known about 'em. That's why so few people that wander off into the grasses ever come home. I can tell you, though. Hippae lay eggs sometime during the winter or early spring. I've seen the eggs in the backs of caverns in late spring and I know they weren't there in the fall. When the sun gets enough warmth in it, the migerers move the eggs into the sun and shift 'em around until the heat hatches 'em. About the same time, some of the peepers and some of the hounds, those that are grown enough, come back to the caverns and change themselves into something new. The Hippae guard 'em while they're doing it. That's why the lapse."
"The bons don't know," Marjorie said, a statement rather than a question.
"Right, they don't know. Don't know, won't be told, don't want to hear. Taboo for 'em."
"I do have something you may not know," she said, getting up to fetch the trip recorder and punching up the pattern she had walked over in the cavern. "I have been told that the thunderous noise we sometimes hear is Hippae, dancing. Well, this seems to be what the dancing produces."
Brother Mainoa stared at it, at first in confusion, then in disbelief.
Marjorie smiled. Good. For all his knowing looks, he wasn't omniscient, then.
It was Rillibee who said, almost casually, "It looks like the words in the Arbai books, doesn't it, Brother?"
"The spherical peepers!" Marjorie exclaimed, remembering suddenly where she had seen the rotund peepers and heraldric hounds, carved on the housefronts of the Arbai city. The twining design did look like the words in the Arbai books – or like the vines carved on the housefronts. She mentioned this, occasioning a deep and thoughtful silence from everyone.
Though the conversation later turned to other things, including whether there was or was not unexplained death upon Grass (for Marjorie and Tony remained aware of their duty) the pattern on Marjorie's recorder was in all their minds. Brother Mainoa, particularly, wanted very much to show it to a friend – so he said as he departed – and Marjorie let him borrow the recorder, believing he meant some friend among the Green Brothers.
It was only after he was gone that she began to wonder how it was that Brother Mainoa had seen the caverns of the Hippae and had escaped to tell them about it.
When Rigo left for the Hunt on the following day, the last Hunt to be held at Klive, Stella, who had been thinking much of Sylvan, demanded to go with him.
"You said you wouldn't risk the children," Marjorie reminded him. "Rigo, you promised." She would not cry. She would not shout. She would merely remind him. Still, the tears hung unshed in her eyes.
He had forgotten he had wanted tears, and tears over the children would never have satisfied him in any case. "I wouldn't have," he explained in his most reasonable voice. "I would never have ordered any of you to ride. But she wants to. That's a different matter."
"She could die, Rigo."
"Any of us could die," he said calmly, gesturing to convey a hostile universe which plotted death against them all. "But Stella won't.
According to Stavenger bon Damfels, she rode brilliantly." He said the word as though it had been an accolade. "Stavenger urged me to bring her again."
"Stavenger," Marjorie said quietly, the name seething on her tongue. "The man who beat Rowena half to death and attempted to starve her. The man who hasn't figured out yet that she is gone. That Stavenger. Why would you risk Stella's life on Stavenger's say-so?"
"Oh, Mother," Stella said in a voice very much like her father's in its obdurate reasonableness. "Stop it! I'm going, and that's that."
Marjorie stood on the terrace steps and watched them go, staring into the sky until the car became merely a dot and vanished. As she was about to go in, Persun Pollut came up behind her. "Lady … "
"Yes, Persun."
"You have had a message on the tell-me. Sylvan bon Damfels asks if you will be attending the Hunt, I told him you would not. He says he wishes to visit you here, this afternoon."
"He may have word of Rowena," Marjorie said sadly, still staring at the empty sky where they had gone. "Bring him to my study when he arrives."
When he came, he did have some word of Rowena. As Marjorie commiserated and exclaimed, he told her that the wounds to Rowena's flesh were healing. The wounds to her mind were more troublesome. Finding Dimity had become an obsession with her. She could not admit that the girl was gone forever, or if not, that finding her might be more heartbreaking than considering her dead.
None of which was what Sylvan had really come to say. He soon left the subject of Rowena and Dimity, which he found painful, and began to talk of something else. It had been so long since Marjorie had been the object of anyone's overt romantic intentions that he had managed to get out most of what he had planned to say, however allusively and poetically, before she realized the tenor of his words.
"Sylvan," she begged, suddenly terrified. "Don't."
"I must," he whispered. "I love you. I've loved you since the moment I saw you. The moment I first took you into my arms on the dance floor. You must have known. You must have felt – "
She shook her head, forbidding him to say anything more. "If you say anything else, Sylvan, I will have to forbid you this house. I am not free to listen to you. I have a family."
"So? What difference does that make?"
"To you, none perhaps. To me, all the difference."
"Is it your religion? Those priest persons you have with you? Do they guard you for Rigo?"
"Father Sandoval? Father James? Of course not, Sylvan. They help me guard myself!" She turned away from him. exasperated. "How can I explain to you? You have none of the same ideas. And you are so young. It would be a sin!"
"Because I am young?"
"No. Not for that reason. But because I am married to someone else, it would be a sin."
He looked puzzled. "Not on Grass."
"Have you no sacrament of marriage upon Grass?"
He shrugged. "It is not marriages the bons need but children. Proper children, of course, though the fiction will often do as well as the fact. There's many a bon with commoner blood, though the Obermuns would deny it. Well, look at it yourself! Why should Rowena have a lonely bed all spring and all fall while Stavenger hunts, or recovers from hunting, or sweats thinking of hunting again? I have no doubt Shevlok is Stavenger's son, but I have some doubts about myself."
"Have you no sins upon Grass? Nothing that you feel is wrong to do?"
He stared at her, as though trying to see past her surface to the mystery she confronted him with. "It would be wrong to kill another bon, I suppose. Or to force a woman if she weren't willing, or hurt a child. Or to take something from some other estancia. But no one would see it as wrong for us to be lovers."
She regarded him almost with fear. His eyes glowed with fervor, his hands reached out to her. Her fleeting desire to take those hands filled her with panic. So she had once longed to take Rigo's hands. How could she convince someone who had so little in common with her when her own self was conspiring against her? "You say you love me, Sylvan."
"I do."
"And by this you mean more, I presume, than mere lust. You are not telling me only that you want my body." She flushed, saying this, a thing she had never said, not even to Rigo. It was only possible to say it if she walked away from him, to the window where she stood looking out.
"Of course not," he blurted, stung.
She spoke to the garden. "Then, if you love me, you will say nothing further about it. You must accept what I tell you. I am married to Rigo It does not matter if that marriage is happy or unhappy. It doesn't matter that you and I might be happier together than either of us might be with others. None of that matters, and you must not speak of it! My marriage is a fact in my religion, and that fact can't be changed. I will be your friend. I cannot be your lover. If you want religious explanations, ask Father Sandoval to explain it If I were even to converse with you about it, it would be an occasion of sin."
"What can I do?" he begged. "What can I do?"
"Nothing. Go home. Forget you came here. Forget you said anything, as I will try to do."
He rose, unwillingly, reluctantly, far more stirred to passion by her refusal than he would have been by her consent. He could not let her go. "I will be your friend," he cried. "And you must be mine. This business of the plague, we must not forget that. You need me to help you with that!"
She turned back to him, her arms crossed protectively across her breasts. "Yes, we need you, Sylvan. If you will. But not if you talk about this other thing." Her throat was dry. She longed to comfort him, he seemed so distraught, but she did not dare touch him or even smile at him.
"Very well, then. I will not talk about this other thing." He made a wide, two-handed gesture, as though casting everything away, though he gave up nothing. If talking of love was not the way to Marjorie's affection, he would try to find some other way. He would not give up courting her. He did not understand Marjorie's religion, but he would learn about it. Obviously it tolerated many things it did not allow. Otherwise that proud, harsh man, her husband, would not be able to keep his mistress almost upon his wife's doorstep!
He stayed, for a time, sitting a good distance from her, discussing the things she needed to know. He promised to do everything he could to find out whether there was any unusual disease upon Grass. He let nothing happen to disturb her again, controlling their conversation with a courtly charm, seeing her gradually relax, lower her defenses, become the woman he had danced with. When he left her, he felt his eyes grow wet, wondering what she thought of him, amazed that it mattered to him that much. He was no youngster to worry what a woman thought! And yet … and yet he did.
She, looking after him, was more stirred than she had been in years, wishing with all her heart that he had never come, that he had never spoken, or that she had met him before she had met Roderigo Yrarier.
It was an evil thought. She went to the chapel and prayed. Over the years, prayer had comforted her. It did not do so now, though she knelt for most of an hour, seeking peace. The light over the altar glowed red Once she had thought of it as a holy eye, seeing her, but she did not think it saw her now. She had been God's child once. Now she was only a thinking virus, a thing beset by longings with no appeasement allowed. "How long has it been since I laughed at something?" she asked herself. "How long since we have had any fun at all, as a family?" She could remember both, and it had been long, too long ago, when Stella was still a child, before Rigo had Eugenie.
She went outside. The afternoon had grown chill. From the northeast came the muted roar of an aircar. She hurried toward the graveled court where it would land, stood there shivering and looking up. She needed Rigo, needed Stella, needed family, needed to belong to someone, be held by someone. She would make them offer her something, make them show some affection. She would beg it, demand it!
The car came slowly closer, from a speck to a ball, from a ball to an ornament, one of the ornaments her family had used to hang upon trees at Christmas time, bulging with rococo extravagance.
It landed. The door opened and the servant who had piloted it got out and went away, without looking at her. Rigo came out, facing the car, turning slowly until he saw her, He did not move then, just stood there, his face still and empty. There was an endless moment during which nothing moved at all, a moment in which a first dreadful suspicion hardened into certainty.
"Stella!" she cried, her voice shrilling into the wind.
Rigo made a hopeless gesture but said nothing. He did not move toward her. She knew he was too ashamed to do so, that he knew there was nothing he could ever say which would help at all.
"Brother Mainoa," she insisted, pounding her fist on the kitchen table where she found Father James and her son having an evening snack together. "Brother Mainoa knows something! He's been out in the grass. He's seen. Things. If the Hippae have taken Stella, he's the only one who can possibly help us."
"Where is your husband?" the priest asked. "Marjorie, where is Uncle Rigo?"
"I don't know," she said, turning wild eyes upon him. "He came into the house."
"What exactly did he say?"
"That she was gone. Vanished. She never returned. Like Janetta. Like the bon Damfels girl. Gone." She gulped for air, as though she could not possibly get enough into her lungs. "He won't be any use. He's like them. Like Stavenger and like the Obermun bon Haunser. I've been thinking who to ask. Not any of the bons. They don't do anything about it when their own children get carried off; they wouldn't do anything for mine. Not anyone from Commons. They don't know anything about it. Not villagers. They're frightened to death of the grass. I wish you could have seen Sebastian Mechanic's face when he was telling me about the thundering in the night. But someone told him! Who do you suppose? I asked. He says Brother Mainoa. It always comes back to Brother Mainoa!"
"Do you want to go there now, Marjorie?"
"Now. Yes."
"Have you checked to be sure he's there?"
"No." She sobbed helplessly. "He has to be there."
The priest nodded at Tony, then toward the tell-me link in the corner of the kitchen, before rising to fold Marjorie in his arms. He was no taller than she, and slighter, but he gave her enough support that he could urge her into a chair and make her sit there until she grew quieter. Tony muttered in the corner once, then again before snapping off the link and turning back to them.
"He's there. Him and the other one, I told him what happened. He says he'd come to you but he doesn't have a car. You can come to him, or I'll go get him and bring him here."
"I'll go." She jumped up, staring wildly around herself. "I was wicked, Father James. I resented her. God has taken her away because of – "
/> "Marjorie!" he shouted, shaking her. "Stop that! Is God so unjust that he would punish your daughter because of something you did? You won't help Stella by having fits of guilt. Stop it."
She gulped again, visibly taking hold of herself. "Yes. Oh, yes, of course. I'm sorry. You're right. Tony, grab whatever food you can put together in five minutes. You and Father James will be hungry. I must get my coat."
She ran out and they heard her footsteps clattering along the hallway, stumbling at first, then slowing into a firm, rapid walk as she took better control of herself. She returned in moments and did not break down again during the flight.
In the Arbai city, Brother Lourai took them to the home he and Mainoa occupied, one of the excavated houses made weathertight, with a stove in one corner and a few pieces of furniture that fit human bodies. Brother Lourai conducted them there through a downpour of rain, and Brother Mainoa refused to let Marjorie talk until she had shed her wet cloak and was settled with a steaming cup before her. Then, unable to contain herself a moment longer, she poured out the story of Stella's disappearance.
"Why did you come to me?" he asked.
"You know why," she answered, like a challenge. "You may have fooled everyone else with that business about theoretical discussions and postulating what the foxen think, but I think that was real, at least partly. I think you know things the rest of us don't know. About the Hippae, maybe. About the foxen. About what goes on out there in the grasses."
"You want to find your daughter."
"Of course I want to find my daughter."
"Even if she is like the other girl. Janetta bon Maukerden. Even if your daughter is like that?"
"Damn it," Tony interjected angrily. "Did you have to bring that up?"
Brother Mainoa gave him a long, measuring look. "Of course I did, young man. I don't know where your sister is. I know the Hippae took her. I wasn't at your reception, but I've heard about Janetta bon Maukerden showing up. I've talked with Jandra Jellico on the tell-me. I've heard what happens when the Hippae take young women, and you've seen it for yourself. Before we all risk our lives on something hideously dangerous, it's best to know that we really want to, wouldn't you say?"