The Blue Star

by Fletcher Pratt

II

He woke with scaly tongue, head spinning in the fumes of the fired-wine and body burning with unfulfilled desires, to the clink of silver on porcelain, as the maid Damaris bore in his breakfast tray. She was already in costume, a milkmaid and not badly done; her eyes and feet were dancing. “Oh, where did you get the lovely Kjermanash mask?” she asked as he propped himself up among the pillows, and giving him the tray, went to run her fingers lovingly over the white silk where it hung across the chair. “It’s just the most beautiful thing ever. I’ll be so happy to be with you in it.”

“Count Cleudi lent it to me . . . Damaris.”

“What is it?”

“Sit down a minute. On the chair, no matter.”

“I’ll ruffle your beautiful costume. Was it made in Kjermanash?” She sat facing him on the bed as he moved over to make room. The neck of her milkmaid’s dress was cut low enough to show the upper round of her breasts with a little in between (and the Blue Star told him that she noticed, and wanted him to notice; that it was festival day, when all’s forgotten in the new spring).

“Damaris—about this ball . . . I’m afraid I won’t be able to go with you after all.”

Rather than angry, her face was woebegone to the edge of tears. (A world was crashing in her thoughts.) “You don’t want to be with servant-class people?”

He reached out and patted her hand conciliatingly. “Of course I do, with you. But Damaris . . . you said it cost three spadas and I haven’t hardly any coppers, even.”

“Oh.” She perched her head on one side and looked at him birdlike under prettily arched brows. “I can let you have that much.” Then, seeing the expression on his face; “You can give it back to me when you get it from your master.”

(He did not really want to go at all, headache and the thought of his position with Cleudi and the Duke of Aggermans gnawed at him, he could not think clearly.) “I—I—”

“I don’t mind, really.”

“But I don’t want to take your money. I may—may not get any.”

She considered, looking at him sharply, with eyes narrowing. Then; “I know. You don’t want to go with me because I’m not your friend.” She tipped suddenly forward, one arm round his neck, and kissed him hard, then drew her head back, and with a long breath, said; “Will you go with me now?”

“I—”

She kissed him again, tonguewise, and as her lips clung, shifted her body, and with her free hand, guided his to the V of her dress. Her eyes said she did not want him to stop, and he did not. Near the end it came to him that the Blue Star was dead, he could not fathom a single thought in her mind.

11
KAZMERGA; TWO AGAINST A WORLD

Mathurin entered on his almost soundless feet and let the door close behind him in the dark before saying, “Rodvard,” softly. Rodvard, who had been letting his mind drift along endless alleys rather than thinking, swung himself up. “I will make a light.”

“Do not. There is danger enough, and its point would so be sharpened. Do not even speak aloud.”

“What is it?”

“The Duke of Aggermans. His bravoes are let loose. No time. I only just now learned it from the Count.” Outside there was the soft sighing of rain.

“I am to go?”

“At once. Make your way south, to the Center of Sedad Mir. The contact is a wool-dealer named Stündert, in the second dock street. Can you remember? Change clothes with me quickly. Do not even take the door, which is watched, but go by the window, across the road, and south into the country.”

The serving-man began to undress in the dark; Rodvard recognized the sound. “Is there any money?” he asked.

The rustling stopped. “You to need money, who have the Blue Star?”

Even under the dark, Rodvard felt himself flush (did he dare tell what had happened? No.). “Still, I will need some small amount. I have nothing.”

Even under his breath Rodvard could catch the fury in the other’s tone; “Ah, you deserve to have your bones broken.”

“I know; but is there any money?” Rodvard fumbled for the unfamiliar lace-points.

The man snarled, but pressed a few coins into his grasp. “You are to regard this as a loan. Cleudi sends it.”

“Oh. You did not tell me he was aiding this escape.”

“He wants you to go south to Tritulacca, and gave me a letter for you to carry—which I will transmit to the High Center.”

It might be a girl’s light tap at the door. “Go,” whispered Mathurin, fiercely.

The window swung wide; Rodvard felt rain on his face, and the mud of the flower-bed squished round Mathurin’s soft shoes as he took the leap down. A light flamed up in the room behind him; he began to run, stumbling up the terraces with branches snatching at his body, zigzagging to avoid the pennon of light. A voice shouted across the rain after him (and he thought Mathurin was a mighty bold fellow to face the Duke of Aggermans’ assassins back there). He came against a hedge; there was another shout and the sound of crashing footsteps from the left, in which direction the hedge ran, no way to turn, and he stumbled over a root, prone, to roll beneath the lip of the shrubbery, thinking concealment might be a better resource than speed.

So it was; shout echoed shout with an accent of lost, footsteps went past, but apparently no one had a light and before one could be brought, Rodvard rolled out, and began to work cautiously toward the end of the hedge, bending double. The bushes turned back to enclose a square of garden, but there was a locked gate, low enough to be climbed. Over; the gravel path beyond, for a wonder, did not run circular like most, from which he deduced that it must be the one leading down from the main road. It offered the only real clue to direction, for the lights had winked out back there, the villa’s mass and the trees cut off the night-shine from the bay, and the slope was no help at all with everything so gardened. Rodvard pushed forward cautiously; presently the feel of ruts under his feet told him his reasoning was sound, and he paused to consider whether along the road or across it. The second alternative won; if Aggermans were so in earnest, his people would not give up easily, and they would likely spread along the road.

There was no hedge at the opposite side, but a narrow ditch, in which Rodvard got one leg well wetted to the knee and almost fell. Beyond a slope pitched upward into what, as nearly as he could make out by feeling, would be a sapling grove with low underbrush. Having no cloak, he was by this time so wet that it did not matter when he stumbled against small trunks and the leaves just bursting above deluged him with big drops, but the sensation was so unpleasant that it tipped him into a despairing mood, where his fatigues of the night and day rolled in (and he began to ask himself whether all pleasures must end in an escape of some kind). So he followed the pent of the hill blindly, not thinking at all of where he was going (but only of how he was trapped by unfairnesses somewhere; and that it could not be altogether a matter of man’s justice, which was the plainder of the Sons of the New Day, since no justice of man’s would hold men from fiery passion).

Beyond an easy crest there was a dip, and Rodvard hurt his knee against a wall of piled stone. In the field beyond, he could sense under his feet the stumps of last year’s corn, he was sick with weariness and fear and had begun to sneeze; there was no light or life in the world. What direction? With no reason for any, he followed the line of the stone wall for a little time, and it brought him ultimately to a sodden straw-stack, whose hard surface yielded just enough to the persistence of his fingers so that he could get the upper half of his body in and slide down into unhappy sleep.