"I'll say it again. You were eyeing my woman with lust."
This jolted Matlin, until he realized he was not being addressed. The words were spoken by an expensively-dressed highborn Kedaki on his left, but the man's face was averted. He was talking, Matlin realized, to a baseborn Kedaki further down the bar who, from the looks of his tunic, probably had no business here.
Between them, an amused look on her face, stood a Kedaki woman. She was incredibly beautiful with the extremely arrogant beauty found among the highborn Kedaki ladies who, it was said, might have each toenail painted by a different lowborn slave if they so desired. Her face was pampered but insolent, and her body, its beauty of line and curve and hue enhanced rather than hidden by the diaphanous folds of her veil-like garment, was magnificent. She said, in a deep, throaty, contralto voice, "Now really, Felg. Don't you think that's enough?"
The man named Felg was a big fellow, tall as Matlin but heavier, with a dueling scar on each cheek. Duels, Matlin knew, were common on Kedak as copter zoning tickets were on other worlds, for you had nothing to lose in a duel but your life, and what did this matter against the possible loss of honor if your death would immediately usher a—possibly better—rebirth?
"I don't think it's enough," said Felg. "This lowborn was gawking at you and while you are beautiful, he should not gawk at another's woman."
"I am neither your woman nor anyone else's," the beautiful creature said coldly.
This angered Felg. If there had been the chance of preventing a duel, that chance was gone now, trampled in the dust of what might have been by the woman's insolent words. "Well, then," Felg said slowly, "you are my woman at least as long as I am your escort. You, there!" he roared, turning again to the lowborn Kedak who stood waiting quietly, patiently and almost indifferently. "Are you armed?"
"I am armed, master," said the lowborn. He was a small, thin Kedaki with a piping but unfrightened voice. Instinctively, Matlin sympathized with him. Smaller, weaker, with less to remember and less to look forward to, victimized by a system hardly above slavery, he was forced by tradition to wait on the highborn Felg's pleasure, even if that pleasure were to mean death in an uneven duel with the spike-studded Kedaki maces.
Felg laughed harshly. "No dagger, you fool. I mean a mace."