Гарднер Дозуа - The Good Old Stuff

“I will not,” said Semley.

But when she saw that the four Claymen who were to be her guides let themselves be tied down first, she submitted. The others left. There was a roaring sound, and a long silence; a great weight that could not be seen pressed upon her. Then there was no weight; no sound; nothing at all.

“Am I dead?” asked Semley.

“Oh no, Lady,” said a voice she did not like.

Opening her eyes, she saw the white face bent over her, the wide lips pulled back, the eyes like little stones. Her bonds had fallen away from her, and she leaped up. She was weightless, bodiless; she felt herself only a gust of terror on the wind.

“We will not hurt you,” said the sullen voice or voices. “Only let us touch you, Lady. We would like to touch your hair. Let us touch your hair ....”

The round cart they were in trembled a little. Outside its one window lay blank night, or was it mist, or nothing at all? One long night, they had said. Very long. She sat motionless and endured the touch of their heavy grey hands on her hair. Later they would touch her hands and feet and arms, and once her throat: at that she set her teeth and stood up, and they drew back. “We have not hurt you, Lady,” they said.

She shook her head.

When they bade her, she lay down again in the chair that bound her down; and when light flashed golden, at the window, she would have wept at the sight, but fainted first.

“Well,” said Rocannon, “now at least we know what she is.”

“I wish there were some way of knowing who she is,” the curator mumbled. “She wants something we’ve got here in the Museum, is that what the trogs say?”

“Now, don’t call ’em trogs,” Rocannon said conscientiously; as a hilfer, an ethnologist of the High Intelligence Life-forms, he was supposed to resist such words. “They’re not pretty, but they’re Status C Allies .... I wonder why the Commission picked them to develop? Before even contacting all the HILF species? I’ll bet the survey was from Centaurus—Centaurans always like nocturnals and cave dwellers. I’d have backed Species II, here, I think.”

“The troglodytes seem to be rather in awe of her.”

“Aren’t you?”

Ketho glanced at the tall woman again, then reddened and laughed.

“Well, in a way. I never saw such a beautiful alien type in eighteen years here on New South Georgia. I never saw such a beautiful woman anywhere, in fact. She looks like a goddess.” The red now reached the top of his bald head, for Ketho was a shy curator, not given to hyperbole. But Rocannon nodded soberly, agreeing.

“I wish we could talk to her without those tn-Gdemiar as interpreters.

But there’s no help for it.” Rocannon went toward their visitor, and when she turned her splendid face to him he bowed down very deeply, going right down to the floor on one knee, his head bowed and his eyes shut. This was what he called his All-Purpose Intercultural Curtsey, and he performed it with some grace. When he came erect again the beautiful woman smiled and spoke.

“She say, Hail, Lord of Stars,” growled one of her squat escorts in Pidgin-Galactic.

“Hail, Lady of the Angyar,” Rocannon replied. “In what way can we of the Museum serve the lady?”

Across the troglodytes’ growling her voice ran like a brief silver wind.

“She say, Please give her necklace which treasure her blood-kin—forebears long long.”

“Which necklace?” he asked, and understanding him, she pointed to the central display of the case before them, a magnificent thing, a chain of yellow gold, massive but very delicate in workmanship, set with one big hot-blue sapphire. Rocannon’s eyebrows went up, and Ketho at his shoulder murmured, “She’s got good taste. That’s the Fomalhaut Necklace—famous bit of work.”

She smiled at the two men, and again spoke to them over the heads of the troglodytes.

“She say, O Starlords, Elder and Younger Dwellers in House of Treasures, this treasure her one. Long long time. Thank you.”

“How did we get the thing, Ketho?”

“Wait; let me look it up in the catalogue. I’ve got it here. Here. It came from these trogs—trolls—whatever they are: Gdemiar. They have a bargain-obsession, it says; we had to let ’em buy the ship they came here on, an AD-4. This was part payment. It’ s their own handiwork.”

“And I’ll bet they can’t do this kind of work anymore, since they’ve been steered to Industrial.”

“But they seem to feel the thing is hers, not theirs or ours. It must be important, Rocannon, or they wouldn’t have given up this time-span to her errand. Why, the objective lapse between here and Fomalhaut must be considerable!”

“Several years, no doubt,” said the hilfer, who was used to star-jumping. “Not very far. Well, neither the Handbook nor the Guide gives me enough data to base a decent guess on. These species obviously haven’t been properly studied at all. The little fellows may be showing her simple courtesy. Or an interspecies war may depend on this damn sapphire. Perhaps her desire rules them, because they consider themselves totally inferior to her. Or despite appearances she may be their prisoner, their decoy. How can we tell?... Can you give the thing away, Ketho?”

“Oh, yes. All the Exotica are technically on loan, not our property, since these claims come up now and then. We seldom argue. Peace above all, until the War comes .... “

“Then I’d say give it to her.”

Ketho smiled. “It’s a privilege,” he said. Unlocking the case, he lifted out the great golden chain; then, in his shyness, he held it out to Rocannon, saying, “You give it to her.”

So the blue jewel first lay, for a moment, in Rocannon’s hand.

His mind was not on it; he turned straight to the beautiful, alien woman, with his handful of blue fire and gold. She did not raise her hands to take it, but bent her head, and he slipped the necklace over her hair. It lay like a burning fuse along her golden-brown throat.

She looked up from it with such pride, delight, and gratitude in her face that Rocannon stood wordless, and the little curator murmured hurriedly in his own language, “You’ re welcome, you’re very welcome.”

She bowed her golden head to him and to Rocannon. Then, turning, she nodded to her squat guards—or captors?—and, drawing her worn blue cloak about her, paced down the long hall and was gone. Ketho and Rocannon stood looking after her.

“What I feel ...” Rocannon began.

“Well?” Ketho inquired hoarsely, after a long pause.

“What I feel sometimes is that I ... meeting these people from worlds we know so little of, you know, sometimes. that I have as it were blundered through the corner of a legend, or a tragic myth, maybe, which I do not understand .... “

“Yes,” said the curator, clearing his throat. “I wonder ... I wonder what her name is.”

Semley the Fair, Semley the Golden, Semley of the Necklace. The Clay-folk had bent to her will, and so had even the Starlords in that terrible place where the Clayfolk had taken her, the city at the end of the night. They had bowed to her, and given her gladly her treasure from amongst their own.

But she could not yet shake off the feeling of those caverns about her where rock lowered overhead, where you could not tell who spoke or what they did, where voices boomed and grey hands reached out—Enough of that. She had paid for the necklace; very well. Now it was hers. The price was paid, the past was the past.

Her windsteed had crept out of some kind of box, with his eyes filmy and his fur rimed with ice, and at first when they had left the caves of the Gdemiar he would not fly. Now he seemed all right again, riding a smooth south wind through the bright sky toward Hallan. “Go quick, go quick,” she told him, beginning to laugh as the wind cleared away her mind’s darkness. “I want to see Durhal soon, soon .... “ And swiftly they flew, coming to Hallan by dusk of the second day. Now the caves of the Clayfolk seemed no more than last year’s nightmare, as the steed swooped with her up the thousand steps of Hallan and across the Chasmbridge where the forests fell away for a thousand feet. In the gold light of evening in the flightcourt she dismounted and walked up the last steps between the stiffcarven figures of heroes and the two gatewards, who bowed to her, staring at the beautiful, fiery thing around her neck.