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'Brenda?' she repeated him, her accent husky, Szgany, as he relaxed his grip on her arms and flopped back into his damp bed. 'Were you dreaming, Harry Dweller-sire?' She leaned over him, supported his head with a cool hand, stroked his brow.
'Dreaming?' He looked up at her, tried to focus on her. It wasn't easy; he felt weak as a kitten, drained. And that last word - coupled with what she'd called him, Dwellersire - was a trigger which released more memories. No, not drained, merely depleted. Robbed. By his own son, The Dweller. And none of it had been a dream, or only the last part. And even that had been so close to reality as to make no difference.
He turned his head, looked around the small, stone-built, whitewashed, electric-lamplit room. A crude dwelling, little more than a cave. But luxury to some. Certainly to Travellers, who hadn't known what a permanent home was before The Dweller and his garden. And Harry's voice turned as sour as the fur lining his clammy mouth as he mumbled, 'Starside?'
She nodded, 'Yes, Starside, the garden. And your fever has broken.' She smiled at him. 'You're going to be well again.'
'My ... fever?' His eyes went back to her face. It looked very lovely in the soft, uneven yellow flow of the lamplight; most of the electricity from The Dweller's generators went to the greenhouses. 'Yes, my "fever",' Harry said again, nodding wrily. No fever, he knew. Just his shattered mind, gradually pulling its bits together again. 'How long have I been lying here?'
This is the second sundown,' she told him. She withdrew her hand from under his head, replaced it with a bundled fur for a pillow. Then she stood up from her stool and said, 'I'll prepare soup for you. After you have eaten, The Dweller will want to know that -'
'No!' he cut her short, his anxiety very tangible. 'Not ... yet, awhile. He doesn't need to know yet. I want a little time to myself, to get my thoughts in order.'
And she wondered: Is he afraid of his own son? Then perhaps we all should be.
Harry looked at her standing there, a frown on her attractive if careworn face. She was small, amply proportioned, with dark eyes slightly aslant, a small nose for a Gypsy, and hair glossy black where it fell to her shoulders. Passionate as all her race - dressed in soft, supple leather - even motionless there was something animal, sinuous, sensual about her.
Still frowning, she crossed to a fireplace built into the virgin rock of the i
'My needs are that I'm not to be disturbed,' Harry's wits were a little sharper now. 'I'm not to be excited. You mustn't ... mustn't argue with me.' All of this thinking, all of these words, were a big effort. Wearied, he lay back and wondered why he felt only half here. No, he knew why: it was because he was only half here. He had lost, been deprived of, several of his senses -like losing touch and taste. Which left him feeling numb, and life flavourless.
The Gypsy woman smiled and slowly nodded, as if the sharpness of Harry's words had confirmed some unspoken thing. 'You are wilful,' she said what was on her mind. 'All of you hell-landers are alike, wild and wilful. Zekintha, called Zek, and Jazz Simmons: they were the same. If only they had stayed here. Their hot blood - their children - would be welcome among the Travellers. We would be the stronger for it.' It was a Szgany compliment.
'Szgany blood is hot enough,' Harry answered, also a compliment. 'So ... will you report my awakening? What's your name, anyway?'
'I am Nana Kiklu,' she answered, coming back to sit beside him as before. 'And no, I will not report your awakening. Not for a little while.'
'Not until morning? Sunup?'
She cocked her head on one side. That's a long time. We're only half-way into the night. There will be others looking after you before sunup, who will surely see that you are recovered.'
'Not if I'm asleep,' Harry answered.
'Perhaps not ...' But now she could see how important this was to him, and so made up her mind. 'Mine is the last shift,' she said, thoughtfully. 'If your recovery is still undiscovered when I return, then it can wait till daylight.'
Harry held back a sigh of relief, settled down more easily into his bed. He did actually need the time, didn't want to be transported back to his own world while he was still in ... in a state of shock? And so, 'Fair enough,' he said. And in open admiration: 'Your man is fortunate, Nana Kiklu. At one and the same time, his woman is accommodating and charming.'
'I thank you,' she answered at once, 'but as for my man - alas, no.' And now a certain longing, an emptiness, crept into her voice, and a sadness on to her face. For like Harry, Nana, too, had been deprived. 'My man was ... less than fortunate,' she explained. 'In the battle for the garden, the Lord Belath's gauntlet, dipped in poison, sliced Hzak's shoulder to the bone. I prayed he would survive. He did survive - for six sunups.'
Now Harry Keogh sighed, more a groan than a sigh proper, and turned his face away; but not before she saw the sympathy living in it, and the regret. The time had been - but now was gone - when he might have contacted Hzak Kiklu to comfort him, tell him that the Wamphyri were no more. But ex-Necroscope, the dead were beyond Harry now.
'All things pass,' she said, bravely. 'Now - can you sit up? I have soup for you, with chunks of soft meat. Your blood has grown thin as water through all the hours you've lain here. This will thicken it up.' She brought soup and bread. Harry was suddenly very tired, but he was hungry too. While he ate, Nana Kiklu looked on in silent approval. She approved of him wolfing the food she'd prepared, and she approved ... of him.
Under his bedclothes lay the body of a hunter, a fighting man; hard-muscled as Hzak's had been, yet pale and different. Well, of course he was different, for he came out of the hell-lands of legend! But ... not that different. She'd washed him tip to toe and so knew he wasn't that different. But handsome, aye! Tall, and lean in the hip. Strong too, before his sickbed, and would be again. Nana had no concept of the word 'athlete', but she could picture Harry chasing a wild pig and casting his spear: the ripple of his muscles, the narrowing of his strange honey-brown eyes. She could picture him doing ... many things.
As for the waving grey streaks in the russet of his hair: it seemed unlikely that age could have put them there. Harry Dwellersire was - what, ageless? When she'd listened to him rambling in his fever, he had sounded like nothing so much as an i
So, why was he greying? Did it result from great learning, the wisdom that came from it, the weight of mighty knowledge? But knowledge of what strange things? In her reasoning, too, she came closer to the truth than she knew. But as things were she could only offer a small, unselfconscious shrug which went u
Harry was asleep almost before the last spoonful of soup was down, and a half-hour later Nana Kiklu handed over her duties to another, much older woman. Good as her word, she said nothing about their charge's partial recovery ...
Harry woke up at the end of the six-hour shift, saw the old Gypsy woman nodding on her stool, closed his eyes and moaned until she started awake. Then he kicked his limbs, but feebly, convincing her that he was feverish still. When he calmed down she spooned soup into him, crooned to him until he slept again. Six hours later he employed the same subterfuge with a third Szgany woman, but this time there could be no hiding his rapid improvement. He was only saved by the prompt arrival of Nana Kiklu.