Tales from the First Cultural Exchange
Alison and Lynda had long intended to write a hypertext web fiction covering the first Reetion-Sevolite cultural exchange: a pet project of Erien’s that proves more eventful than he bargained for. The following extracts are salvaged from an early wiki-based exploration by the two of them that got trashed by spammers. Lynda gave the snippets a bit of a polish, as well.
Amel Brings the News to Barmi II
"And which one of them --" Perry said, casting the pronoun to denote a pair of Purebloods which was rare usage in a universe with so few left. "-- had this particular bright idea?"
Not a promising start, thought Amel, standing in his flight leathers on the other side of her desk. He suspected he ought to say something encouraging. "Um, well," was all he actually said.
Perry dropped the message to fix an ominous blue stare on the messenger. "A cultural exchange?"
"It's a sort of ... reception thing," Amel explained, gesturing vaguely and then dropping his hands with a feeling of crowning inadequacy in the face of Perry's scowl.
"Except it isn't," he concluded. "Not quite."
"Between Reetions and the Ava's Empire?" Perry double-checked.
Amel cleared his throat. "Pretty much, yes."
Perry gave him a hard look. Then she dropped her eyes, again, to the vellum sheet on her desk. It was covered in Erien's neat handwriting, as legible and regular as print. "Sounds like one of Erien's ideas," she said.
"Actually--" Amel began.
"Except for holding it here!" Perry said with rising anger. "I am betting the idea of holding it here, on Barmi, was His." She didn’t have to use a name. Only one Sevolite in the Empire was Ava, entitled to that special cast of "Him".
Perry transfixed Amel with her glare. "Am I right?"
Amel drew breath to speak, held it a moment, then abandoned the effort as Perry said, "Is Ameron counting on me to kill the idea?"
"No," Amel said.
"No!" she exclaimed. "What do you mean no! Ameron's done this to make it my job to tell Erien it can't happen. Don’t tell me he isn't up to that! He’s a crafty, Lor’Vrellish – "
"No, Perry, really!" Insisted Amel and paused to wet his lips as she simmered down a little. "Ameron supports the idea of hosting a Cultural Exchange," he assured her. "Here."
"In about another hundred years!" Perry said, with a snort. "Am I right?"
Amel winced. "Erien has convinced him that -- "
"Then you'll have to unconvinced him!" said Perry. "Gods alive, Amel! Improve diplomatic relations, the boy genius says? I can think of a dozen different ways that an Empire-Reetion Exchange could be the prelude to the second Killing War, instead!"
"What?" Amel asked, lightly. "Only twelve?" He yanked over a chair and sat down, shaking out his hair. It was drying out, after the close confines of the cockpit, and stiff with sweat. "I stopped counting after twenty-three dreadful scenarios, myself."
"You aren't taking this seriously," she accused him.
"I take it very seriously when you make the kind of faces you’ve been making since you saw that letter," he assured her, stretching out as he settled. Then leaned forward again with an earnest look. "Honestly."
"But?" she said.
"Well," he said, and shrugged. "There isn't much that Ameron and Erien agree on."
Perry opened her mouth to confront him with more arguments and closed it again with a vexed, brooding air. "I see your point."
"Exactly," Amel said. "We're doomed." He got up again and stretched his arms to their full length, to get the ache out of them from the long trip. Then he offered her a mild, lop-sided sliver of a smile. "I thought I'd better come out and break the news to you myself."
Amel Performs; Ranar & Erien take a walk
Amel is twitchy about Reetions with homosexual leanings wherever he encounters them during the Exchange. Momod, in the scene below, is the make-up artist assigned by the Reetions to prepare Amel for his appearance in the opening ceremonies, at which he is to sword dance with Alivda (his grown up “baby dragon”) as his partner . This scene, and the conversation on the walk that follows, are part of the reason Erien loses patience with Amel’s homophobia in the “Rik” scene that follows. The conversation with Ranar and Erien, afterwards, echoes events related in The Courtesan Prince and Far Arena.
The Reetion make-up artist, Momod, studied Amel's face with an intense frown. He looked at the right side. Then he moved over to inspect the left side. Then he declared, "He needs nothing. He could stand up to any strength of zoom and still do better untouched." He looked uncertain whether he was happy about that or not. Finally he gave up the struggle to decide just declared, "His skin is perfect!"
"This isn't for close ups, it's for viewing from the stands at a distance," explained Ranar.
"Yes, of course," said Momod. "But the cameras – "
"He's performing live," said Ranar. "Only live. No vid-record."
Momod blinked at Ranar as if he had just endorsed an atrocity. "One showing?" the large Reetion make-up man asked. "Flash and gone? Just like that?"
"Live events are very Gelack," Ranar assured him, and frowned. "Although generally for smaller groups of people. The whole town seems to have turned out to watch Amel perform."
"Ah," said Momod, "do I detect a Voting Citizen's disapproval of the assembled mob? Really," he confided aloud to Erien, "Your Gelacks are wasted on Ranar."
Erien smiled thinly. He stood outside the heavily mirrored area of the dressing floor, flanked by a quiet, observant Horth Nersal who somehow managed not to look too wildly out of place despite the steady hand resting on the worn hilt of his dueling sword.
"We are not Erien's Gelacks," Amel spoke up in his excellent Reetion. "Are you done?" he asked.
"For viewing at a distance, you say," Momod muttered, inspected Amel’s face anew. "Mmm, perhaps ..."
"Actually, Momod, I think you might have been right to start," said Ranar, beginning to think it might be better not to prolong the situation. He was just fractionally too late. Temptation proved too much for Momod.
The make-up artist was fussing with Amel's silky black hair. Amel tolerated the initial touch, until Momod stroked his face in a much too caressing gesture, unsupported by the need to do something with his hair. Momod found his wrist manacled and his hand removed a healthy distance from the object of his admiration.
"Do it again," Amel said, quietly. "And I'll break it." Then he let go.
Ranar said, diplomatically, "I think we'll skip make-up."
Amel removed the cover over his dancer's costume and coiled up to his feet. "Works for me," he said, with a glare at the Reetion attending him as he stalked away towards the ready room.
Momod recovered his aplomb and blinked at Ranar, looking like an injured innocent.
"Touching isn't culturally appropriate between strangers," Ranar tactfully clarified.
Momod took offense at that. "Really!" he declared, with a sniff. "You didn't watch him letting the girls help him get dressed!"
Ranar inhaled, gave up, and just pinched the bridge of his nose with two fingers instead.
"Oh," said Momod, belatedly catching on.
"I realize," Ranar said with strained patience, "that you have probably never paid any attention in your life, to anything that didn't come scripted with camera angles, but -- you must have at least been briefed to get this far. Or did you sleep through the cultural sensitivity seminars?"
Momod scowled and folded his arms. "Yes, well it didn't make much sense what they said in those briefings about Gelack culture. I mean, what do they do with their own homosexuals? The ones that aren't sadistic child molesters, I mean, of course."
"There are none," said Horth, simply. It was the only contribution he had cared to make, in a morning of shadowing Erien. Apparently, he considered it a sufficient contribution for the day, as well, for he chose that moment to depart in the opposite direction from Amel.
Ranar looked ill.
Momod startled the anthropologist/diplomat by touching his arm. "I didn't mean any harm," he said.
"What?" Ranar reacted, belatedly. "No, no, of course not." Ranar patted the other man's hand and then slipped free of the connection. "Don't worry," he told Momod. "Prince Amel does not offend easily in that regard. At least not in a serious manner. But don't do it again or he just might break your arm."
"Which would not be ... serious?" Momod inquired.
"No," Ranar assured him.
The make-up artist left, shaking his head and muttering to himself about Amel's finer qualities. One got the feeling that he would have been equally interested whether Amel was male or female, purely on aesthetic grounds, not sexual ones.
Ranar looked up to find Erien by his side, looking concerned. "I'm sorry about that," Ranar said.
"Amel over-reacted," said Erien.
"Yes, well," Ranar inhaled and straightened sagging shoulders. "Perhaps. But he's still Amel. I worry more about what will happen when it is Liege Nersal someone makes a pass at."
"Don't," Erien took the older man's arm. "It won't be any worse than a broken arm, and he's as apt to break a woman's who presumed too far, if he could find one so inclined whom he didn't want."
"You know him better than I do," Ranar allowed.
"Let's walk," said Erien. "I don't need to watch Amel dance or see the crowd oooh and ahh at him."
Ranar nodded.
They passed out of the backstage area of the coliseum building and onto the deserted street of
"You're right about Amel emptying the town," noted Erien, as they passed through it.
Ranar was lost in thought and didn't answer. They walked the length of the Reetion-constructed, mini-city, sparkling with artificial lights in the falling dusk. Erien was proud of the accomplishment. The facilities would remain to compensate the P.A. for its hospitality during the event filled month of games, meetings and entertainment which was, for both cultures, the cream of the crop.
In the engineering department, on the Gelack side, his own fledgling academy had played a significant part. Horth even had Nersallians co-operating with the Reetion overseers, without incident. The Nersallians were soaking up Reetion methods and proficiency like sponges in the process, weighing what would work for them and what would not.
At the end of
"Horth had great respect for Di Mon," Erien finally broke the silence. "They respected one another's honor despite political and personal differences."
"Respect that would have gone, like that," Ranar flicked the air with his fingers, in a rare flare of anger. "If he knew the truth about Di Mon."
"Are you so sure?" asked Erien. It hurt him to believe that of his friend, Horth Nersal.
Ranar stopped. He gazed up at the stars for a moment, then settled his stare on a fringe of trees beyond the field to their right. "It is true that Ameron does appears to have accepted me as a homosexual. Perhaps because I do not flaunt it like Momod. But could he accept that I was more than a friend to his First Sworn without it rebounding on Di Mon?" He gave a burdened laugh. "Listen to me! I speak of Di Mon as if he's still alive to care what anyone thought!"
Erien lowered his eyes to the ground. He still felt the pain of Di Mon's suicide as acutely as his Reetion foster father. They had walked side by side on that day, too; newly introduced and returning early from the stroll Di Mon had sent them on to the room where they had left him to speak with Amel, shortly before. It was Amel who subsequently flew them both to Rire, acting, he said, on Di Mon's wishes.
"It's Monitum's damn family honor," Ranar decided, aloud. "It is still alive, even though he's gone. But it was never worth as much to me as he was."
Erien said, softly, "I know."
Ranar put an arm around Erien as if he was still the grieving child for whom he had to master his own grief in order to help him adjust to a new, strange life, without his guardian. He squeezed Erien's hand, in parting, as he broke contact once more.
"Let's climb that fence," suggested Ranar.
"What?" said Erien.
"Di Mon told me, once, that he and Darren used to clamor about the countryside incognito, when he was young. It's something of a Monatese tradition. But I never spent enough time with him, outdoors. Our best moments were always spent in locked rooms. Somehow I could never imagine him, even at 13, climbing fences. Not that it was his idea, of course. Darren, I think, was a lot more like young Tatt than like Di Mon, but with a harder streak about him. Darren killed himself, too. Went off to war to find a Nesak to bump him off. At least he killed his murdering mekan’st, first, who had killed their own children when she found out he was homosexual."
Ranar was not a young nor an athletic man, to be suddenly taking it into his head to begin climbing rough hewed fences. Erien was forced to help unless he chose to haul him down instead. He got Ranar over, and scramble over lightly himself.
The ground on the other side of the fence was prickly with stubble, and muddied the top of their walking shoes.
"No," Ranar remarked. "Mon wouldn't have liked this much."
"Shall we go back?" Erien suggested.
"Let's go as far as the other side, first," said Ranar pointing off to the far side of the field. "Then I'll go back. They will be oohing and ahhing for at least that long."
After the first dozen steps, Ranar slipped. Erien caught him and helped him up. Ranar stood, holding onto his ward's steady arm.
Ranar said, looking off into the distance as if he was watching for something. "Only someone like Horth Nersal could understand how terrible it was for Mon," he said. "I know that I could not. I told him, more than once, that I would be content to love him whether or not we ever touched again. It wasn't my preference but I could have lived with that. He frightened me sometimes, in fact."
Ranar paused to inhale the cool air. "Di Mon wouldn't have liked getting chilled either," he reverted to the exercise in hand. "Darren must, indeed, have had a powerful influence."
"Why do you think that Horth, in particular, could understand Di Mon's problem," asked Erien. "Forgive me, but that seems ... odd."
Ranar turned to look at him, slightly chilled, in muddy shoes, and a little out of breath but less haunted now that he was starting to put what he felt into words. "Imagine this," he said. "Horth Nersal in a world in which desiring women was dishonorable." It was a terrible, powerful image; a blaze that could only consume itself.
Ranar saw he'd made his point and smiled at Erien. "Watching Momah, in there, made me remember how there were moments when I was afraid Di Mon would kill Amel. Mon hated being in the same room with him because he couldn't help finding him attractive and he didn’t want to. I don't know how soon Amel knew, or guessed. He was always close to Eva, Di Mon's lyka. I'm fairly sure she knew what I was to her lyka'st. Eva loved Mon, and you know when someone looks at you with envy in her heart. For my part, I envied her. She could be with him. I could not."
They were quiet, together, for a while then, each silently remembering the scene pulled from Amel's memory of Di Mon’s last meeting with him, right before Di Mon died. Di Mon had tricked Amel into revealing that he knew his secret.
First the most perceptive, Di Mon had said, fearing, in his struggle with mortal illness, that he might reveal too much of what he felt or need Ranar too much to send him away again.
"I can well imagine that Amel had known for rather a long time, and never made use of it to blackmail either one of us," Ranar said. "Even though there were times when having that kind of leverage would have made his life easier. For all that he bristles at long looks from people like Momod, he respects love. Even between men. I think that’s it, at rock bottom. Or else Eva had a hand in his feigned ignorance. Or he was simply too afraid of Mon to dare broach the subject anywhere. But I think --" Ranar yielded to a faint smile, "-- it was his belief in Mon's ability to love that gave him power over Amel. I always wondered what compelled Amel to do as he was told: fetch me from Rire, when Di Mon dared not send a Monatese pilot; take you and I back again. Amel was counted part of Ev'rel's family, at the time, and flew for Ameron. Neither attachment obliged him to take orders from Liege Monitum. But he is Golden enough to serve love itself." He paused, and added sadly. "It must have mortified Di Mon to think Amel knew."
"He didn't like Amel?" asked Erien.
"No, not from the very beginning. He couldn't cope with him, I think: or rather the mix of emotions that he generated. It set Di Mon's teeth on edge. And he did not think Amel was good for Ev'rel." Ranar inhaled deeply, and relaxed again with a gentle smile. "He didn't like Ev'rel, either, mind you, but he always felt that he had let her down." Ranar slogged over to a great stone which by the evidence of a trampled cloth napkin and rusted spoon had been used by locals for a picnic, earlier in the year. He found a spot that looked reliable for sitting on and sat, rubbing his forearms to warm them up. It had turned out to be a cool day, and his plain Reetion pullover and trousers were made for the indoors. He coughed.
"We should go back," recommended Erien.
"Soon," Ranar promised, staring across the field in his oddly expectant manner, again, as if watching for a sign from the Waiting Dead. Or maybe one of them in particular.
Resigned, Erien likewise settled.
"Aging, in a commoner, isn't an sudden sentence of frailty, you know," Ranar accused him. "And I'm only middle-aged."
"You can still catch cold," insisted Erien.
"So can you," Ranar told him, and gave him a rare, playful smile. "If you try really hard."
"Alright," Erien promised. "I won't fuss."
Ranar sat in silence a while longer. His face became composed, less vulnerable, and more in keeping with his usual, scholarly demeanor. "Ah, yes." Ranar said softly.
Erien waited, expectant. Ranar nodded to himself. Then, apparently satisfied, at last, the Reetion got up.
"Let's go back," Ranar said, and trudged off across the field the way that they had come, leaving Erien to follow, unenlightened.
It wasn't until they had slogged back, climbed the fence, and regained the dirt road that Ranar followed up on his remark.
"One's own feelings are always the hardest to see and account for in any analysis," Ranar volunteered at last, without preamble. "I know what upset me now, about that remark from Liege Nersal." He gave Erien a quick glance like a teacher checking to see if the pupil had got the answer, first, before giving it out. When Erien failed to show any sign of relieving him of the need to explain, Ranar nodded to himself with a determined air and soldiered on.
"If Horth knew about Di Mon, he would either confirm the prejudice which made Di Mon his own executioner, or he would prove such prejudice could be overcome, in the current generation, by someone widely viewed as an exemplar of honorable conduct under Okal Rel.
On the face of it, Horth's remark today suggests the former result would obtain: disgusted rejection. Naturally, that wounds me as it always did Di Mon, although the source of the foul opinion in his case was, most cruelly, himself. But if you thing about it the alternative is much worse. Let me explain," Ranar forestalled any possible questions, raising a hand to tap the air. "Given what I know of Horth Nersal, I can not help wondering whether 'There are none' might not mean literally that, and nothing more.
Within the empire there are no honorable homosexuals he knows of, only people like H'Reth who even I find it hard to begrudge your culture the indulgence of dispatching on the Ava's Square. How, therefore, can Liege Nersal entertain the possibility of acceptance, when the only exposed examples that he knows of are sadistic child molesters, as Momod said? There is Darren's example, to be sure, but even Darren was caught seducing farm boys with bribes -- something Di Mon heartily disapproved of, and had quarreled with Darren about, though he was himself little more than a boy at the time and quite spellbound by Darren as both liege and lover. I would suggest, in fact, that there has never been a more sterling example of a homosexual Sevolite than Di Mon, himself. Or perhaps there have been others. That's the crux of it, you see, because we'll never know.
Horth Nersal does not have the good examples to weigh up against the bad ones for the same reasons Di Mon is not openly remembered as my lover." Ranar ran out of steam for logic. "It's an interesting social dilemma. But the thing that upset me so is personal." He stopped walking to face Erien squarely. "What if Horth did find out, and coped handsomely -- it would break my heart."
The logic here confounded Erien, but Ranar's pain was obvious. Wanting to help, and feeling helpless, he touched his foster father's arm and admitted, "I don't understand. Surely you aren't saying you would prefer it if Horth found out and reviled Di Mon's memory, instead."
Ranar blinked back tears, smiled, and struggled a moment to recover self control. "No, no. But don't you see? One Horth Nersal who said 'so what', might have saved Mon. If I had defied Mon and told Ameron, myself -- risked Mon's precious honor for the life I valued more than any other -- if I had dared to risk his hatred for such a betrayal. But I couldn't even think of it, not so fresh from that damn intense stare that made promising my silence something sacred, beyond the reach of life or death or reason. That man could keep a secret from his own soul! But by your foul Gods, Erien, if it might bring him back I'd do it now!" Ranar stopped and pressed his hand over his face.
He didn't apologize for crying. He was not ashamed. He simply wasn't comfortable feeling so much and had to wait out the storm.
"Please ..." he said, quietly, when he was able, " ... don't tell Evert about any of this. It upsets him. It shouldn't. I love him. It's just -- " his brow contracted momentarily. "I don't know."
"You and Di Mon were cher'stan," Erien said, simply, with great respect.
"Well then," Ranar smiled, eyes still wet. "We'll meet again." He glanced up at the stars. "You hear that Mon?" He gave Erien an unexpected hug. "Let's go back, now, and be normal. Mon's ghost is as exhausting as the man was."
The Rik Incident
The lead up to this snippet went something like this: Amel was working out with the Reetion dance group attending the exchange when a young male dancer named Rik confessed his adoration was not solely professional. Amel freaked, bolted straight into the midst of a diplomatic meeting, more or less yanked Ranar out of his chair and attempted to make it Ranar’s job to deal with the problem rather than get anywhere near the young Reetion dancer again, himself. Erien lost his temper with Amel’s homophobic antics and gave him a short, sharp dressing down for it, telling him he had seen him deflect unwanted female attentions with tact and grace plenty of times. Why couldn’t he just do the same here. What’s below, is a bit of Amel's reaction to that outburst.
Amel stared, with a stunned expression, as Erien delivered his stinging speech. There was no change at all in Amel's frozen demeanor from the moment he ceased to breathe until the whole, dry rebuke had been delivered. Erien stopped as suddenly as he had shown anger. Amel took a step back, inhaling with a jerk. Even the automatic reflex felt as stiff as Perry's old tractors after a frost.
Ranar watched both Erien and Amel, looking anxious. "It is all right, Liege Dem," he told Amel with reassuring formality. "I can speak with the young man, as you suggested."
Amel swung towards Ranar with unexpected suddenness, drawing Erien's block. The half-brothers stood like that momentarily, Erien's shoulder interposed between Amel and Ranar. Amel wet his lips and swallowed, the words "someone else's bad experience" and "cease to regard you as an asset here" pinging around in the maelstrom of shaking fury that confused him more than he could manage to contain.
He recognized the emotion overwhelming him. He was afraid.
Of what? Amel thought, desperately and had no answer. He remembered H'Reth's determined effort to convert him to a homosexual preference and felt nauseous. He stared into Erien's unforgiving stare and felt shame. He remembered the bitter suggestion that Erien's own adolescence had been "no erotic folic" and seethed with resentment and compassion. It was true that Erien had suffered, as well, in a different, almost opposite, way from Amel! But could that possibly help Erien imagine how extreme the emotions were that Amel felt, against all reason, in a moment like the one he'd just fled?
Amel badly wanted to hit something. But it wouldn't help. Nothing helped! It wasn't Rik he was afraid of. It was himself. The way he reacted. The way he wanted to --
"No," he said, like a gulp, looking at Ranar. "I'll deal with it." His confidence dropped out of him like lost cargo as he forced a smile that felt brittle and sharp-edged. "Can't have Erien deciding I'm an adolescent. Can I." He slashed a glance back in Erien's direction, gave a nod that was supposed to look airy, and walked away at a brisk pace, uncomfortably aware that, dressed in a dancer's sheath, he could not hide the tension locking up his muscles from head to toes. He hated feeling so tense and stiff.
"No erotic frolic," Amel muttered, as he headed back to the gym, and thought, darkly, He has no idea what a 'bad experience' is really like! And I wasn't quite an adolescent at the time, but let’s not quibble about details like whether I was nineteen or ten! Oh no! The gods forbid we should cause a Reetion kid a 'bad experience' of any kind! Not when they're so civilized and everything. Yes, and it was such a burden for poor Erien, staying a virgin: physically and emotionally, capable of falling in love despite not even seeming to care about it!
The huge, heaving swells of self pity revolted Amel. He tried to hurl the feelings away from him, but it didn't work. He called himself names, in his head, beginning with "idiot" and running the gamete through far worse than Erien had ever said to him about "getting over it". He wound up wrestling with a choice between self-abusive misery and feeling too hollow or ridiculous to care.
I really don't have time for this, he appealed to whatever scrap of pilot's will was listening. I don't want to make time for it! Not if I live a thousand years. His stiff-legged pace had brought him within seconds of the door to the rehearsal gym. He fastened on the word adolescent, in Erien's motivating speech, and set his teeth into it. Fine, he thought. So let's get mature.
He was frightened, for a moment that the Reetion dancer, Rik, might not be inside any longer. He needed to prove he could cope with this.
Which is probably the most pathetic bit, he told himself brutally. Waves of nausea answered him, but he wasn't crying, and he wasn't going to be sick. Both good signs, he told himself, working on light-heartedness in tandem with his efforts to dilute a lingering, alarming desire to smash Erien's nose right through the middle of his skull for reasons that were stubbornly unclear to him but had something to do with Erien's damned, uncompromising stare that had seemed to reach into his soul and expose something nasty and wrongfully bitter there.
Amel went through the open door and paused at the sight of Rik, sitting huddled on the exercise mat where he had left him, knees drawn up to his chest. His first feeling was relief. Then came trepidation and a shiver of the same panic that had made him sprint to find Ranar. But the young Reetion's distress was so palpable, compassion crept silently into the mix, overcoming the impulse to be violent.
A noise behind Amel made him turn to see Ranar hovering by the door. Amel smiled at the Reetion diplomat quite naturally and earned Ranar's cautious smile in reply before the Reetion withdrew out of sight once more.
Amel returned his attention to the problem he was here to solve.
This kid thinks he loves me, Amel thought, looking at Rik's well-made body curled up tight in misery. He repressed a self-mocking snort long enough to put himself, involuntarily, in the young Reetion's place. What if Rik really felt love? Not the kind of thing that had been forced on Amel in its name, but genuine, soft, gushy feelings. Amel supposed that was possible. It was still hard to keep the idea fixed, sympathetically, in his brain. It kept rebounding on him with black humor. And that's why he's particularly miserable, Amel realized, with unwelcome insight. Knowing how it makes me feel.
He hated to admit that Erien was right, but he saw then that Ranar could not ease that pain. No one could, except him. For a moment, he felt so hollow he wanted to go away and fly a rel-ship until the ache in his chest was fixed. But he couldn't take the sight of Rik on the floor, in a ball, like that, either. He unfroze, and cleared his throat.
The young Reetion dancer did not look up.
"Rik? It's Amel," Amel said in Reetion.
If anything, the huddled figure held himself tighter.
Amel sighed, beginning to feel sympathetic leg cramps. "Come on," he said, and dropped on his haunches beside the young man, arm across a thigh. "You can't do this. You won't be able to dance tomorrow."
Rik unfolded enough to look up, askance. He looked like he'd taken a hit at the sight of Amel crouched beside him, looking studiously casual, in a plain, grey-white dancer’s sheath. He gulped. "You -- you'll still dance with me?"
Amel tried to say, "Sure!", but it would not come out. He sidestepped the issue by laying hands on the young Reetion, firmly but gently, and pulling him up to his feet. Rik came willingly, looking dazed. But as soon as he was on his feet he snapped out of it straight into abject apologies.
"I am so sorry!" the young Reetion blurted, tears welling up violently, trembling beneath Amel's touch. "I promised myself I wouldn't. I know you aren't -- I mean, I know how you feel about--"
"Forget it," Amel said, too curtly.
"How can I?" the Reetion asked, in earnest.
Amel had to smile at that. "Good point. Look, let's get out of here. Let's -- go walk. Will you walk with me?"
Rik seemed to need time to think about that, then he nodded.
"Great," Amel said. He went to fetch their sweat pants, pulled his on and when Rik remained as unresponsive as a statue, held out the second pair for him to climb into, thinking blithely as Rik steadied himself on Amel’s arm, I can do this. Piece of cake.
Rik overbalanced, due to nerves, and fell in against him momentarily. Amel stiffened. Rik straightened up awkwardly. Both of them said, more or less at once, "Sorry, I--"
Amel laughed. Rik followed suite. When they stopped, Amel finished tying the satin belt on his Demoran-made sweat pants with swift, deft fingers, much too aware of the young Reetion watching him, and looked up all at once, tossing back silky black hair. "Listen, my reactions aren't about you. I'm flattered. Or I should be. My reactions are about me. Understand?"
Rik listened with a sympathy that was unnerving. "I think so," he said, bravely.
Amel sighed. He was shaking all over again inside. He hated that. "Let's move," he said. "It's easier."
"Right," Rik said. "I won't touch you!" he said again, too fast. "I mean on purpose."
Amel laughed out loud at the Reetion's solicitude and sobered just as quickly, dismayed by the broken-glass quality in the sound. "I'm not fragile," he told Rik, still sounding much too bitter. With a sudden determination to prove it, Amel pulled the young man towards him and kissed him on the mouth. It wasn't much of a kiss by courtesan standards. Barely a touching of lips to lips. It felt more like an insult. A dare. Even a violent act. As if Amel meant to say, "see, I can be a slut, nothing to it." It was all wrong.
The backlash floundered Amel's emotional balance. Rik looked as stricken as if he'd been slapped. Amel didn't know what he felt, or if he felt anything at all, except dreadful confusion about how to get them both through this intact, somehow.
In the end, it was the hurt on Rik's face that was the most unbearable.
"Oh Gods, I'm sorry," Amel told the young man, and retreated to the nearest bleachers to sit down, elbows on his thighs, to press his face into his hands and give his scalp a scrub just for the opportunity to hide his face for a little while. Then he sat up, made himself look at Rik, and quietly pressed his left fist into his right palm. "Sometimes I don't know how to react. I mean, you think you are the one who is wrong-footed for confessing your love for me and blame yourself because you had sworn -- for love of me -- that you would not do that. But I had no business doing what I did just now. I don't even really know why I did it. Maybe in the vain hope of cutting the conversation short? If I need to prove I'm not disgusted by you, hey, sure. Why not. Maybe I wanted to shock you. I don't know." Amel was holding his fist so tight that his fingers were starting to hurt. He shook the fist out and dropped the hand into his lap. He had run out of breath. His chest swelled as he drew his next breath and he sighed with his whole body as he let it out. "People think I ought to get over my past. I'm for that. I just don't know how." He huffed a sort of breathy sound.
"People?" Rik asked, blinking rapidly.
"Well, Erien." Amel shifted. "Weren't we going to go for a walk?"
"Outside?" Rik sounded apprehensive. Then he ventured to add, "Would that be to prove you aren't ... being uncivil, too?"
Amel frowned. "Could be." He looked around the walls of the rehearsal room. "We would be in the public eye already, wouldn’t we? I mean, if we were on Rire."
Rik didn't bother confirming the obvious. Instead he said, "It is strange being without surveillance of any sort. I'm not ... used to that."
He seemed so nervous about it that Amel laughed. "You aren't afraid of me, are -- " he stopped. The youth’s eyes confessed all.
"You are afraid of me," he realized. He got up. "Rik, I wouldn't hurt you. I don't – okay, I do mind that men find me attractive. I mean your kind of -- oh Gods." Amel broke off with another sigh and swept a stiff-fingered hand through his silky hair. "Can you give me a hand, here, kid? What are we supposed to be working out?"
"Nothing," Rik said, in a small voice, and swallowed thickly.
Amel's expression convulsed in reflected distress. He said, gently at last, "That's not true. Please, what can I do?"
Rik took a moment to pull himself together. "Thank you, first of all, for not offering --or assuming I might ask -- for ..." He ran out of courage.
"Sex?" Amel grinned. "I thought you Reetions were all educated and rational about that."
"In theory," Rik admitted, avoiding Amel's eyes. "I haven't actually had a lot of personal experience. "
"Oh?" Amel said, surprised, and repeated with contrition, "oh."
"Why does Erien--that's Heir Gelion, isn't it?--think you should get over your past?" Rik asked.
Amel was glad to change the subject. He shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe it gets up his nose. Men either like me for the wrong reasons -- from my point of view, of course," he added quickly, "-- or dislike me for the right reasons. They figure I should have -- I don't know, died resisting or if I insisted on surviving, not be so touchy about it after all these years. Sort of treat the whole thing like no more than a bad cold."
"How can you?" Rik said, as if the callousness of such attitudes injured him personally. "People keep throwing it up to you."
Amel shook his head. "No," he said. "They're right." He patted his chest with an open palm. "It's me. I don't know what it feels like to be nervous about a first kiss. Or even to love someone the way you say -- no, okay, the way you do love me. I can’t take myself seriously when I look at a woman the way you are looking at me, now!" Amel laughed at an unexpected thought. "I think I'm jealous of you!"
"You want to be in love?" Rik asked, in a tone full of alarming hope. "With a woman," Rik added, upon seeing Amel react. "But you are loved. By women. And you love them back."
"Yes," Amel agreed, and smiled. "Them. Plural. And I am not – never mind." He laughed at himself. "Of course I’m not complaining. About the plural part. Not exactly." He started to prowl a bit, wondering whether it would be a misstep to suggest getting out of the enclosed space of the empty rehearsal hall once more.
"You would rather love one person," Rik said, solemnly. "One true love."
Amel felt completely ridiculous. "Rik," he said, carefully, "let's worry about you, all right?"
"Would you marry one of your mekan'stan, if you could?"
Mature is what we're working on here, Amel reminded himself, and said. "Wouldn't work. How about you? You want to get married one day? Or the Reetion equivalent. What is that? Agree to a mutually exclusive, permanent contract?"
"I think I do, yes," Rik said, honestly. "When I am able to love someone else." He paused to pull himself together. "I believe in mutually exclusive, permanent contracts."
Amel smiled at how seriously the young man said that. He said, "You believe in true love."
Rik nodded. "I am sorry you don't think you'll find yours."
"Probably better for her if I don’t," Amel said, cheerfully. "One of the good things about knowing you are screwed up is realizing you can’t dump more of it than is manageable on other people. Which brings me back to the bit about my reaction to you being my problem, not yours. What?" Amel interrupted his own lecture, seeing Rik smile sadly.
"Maybe you don't know a lot about love, at that," the young Reetion said. Amel's throat tightened, warily, as Rik continued. "I love you. Enough to hope you will be happy with someone one day. Even if it isn't with me."
Uh uh, Amel thought, getting a very spooky feeling about Rik's infatuation for the sake of the resonance it struck with the way young women who hardly knew him sometimes tried to draw him out with conversation about hopeless love. He decided he had demonstrated all the maturity he was up to for the rest of the day.
Amel closed the distance between himself and Rik promptly, clapped the young Reetion on the shoulder in a friendly, most mature manner, and said, "Of course I'll dance with you tomorrow. You keep limber. And we'll talk again. Later? Okay."
"Where are you going?"
"Flying."
"In space?"
"It's traditional," Amel looked back over his shoulder and smiled with some genuine tolerance. "But we’ll take that walk. If you want."
"I do. Yes," Rik told him.
Amel nodded. "Tomorrow."
Rik looked steady enough to be left alone. Amel smiled. Rik smiled back.
Amel went into the change rooms, intending to shower, decided against it and told himself it wasn't for any particular reason. He just needed to get some exercise sooner rather than later. It had nothing to do with any discomfort at the idea of being naked in the showers with Rik around. He found the very need to deny the idea irritating.
Briskly, he changed into a casual Barmian shirt and 3/4 length trousers with embroidered suspenders. They made him feel comfortable. He planned to let himself out a side door and head for the nearest road, but the grounds were packed with people and he balked. What he needed was to be alone. Now.
He went up to the roof of the coliseum, instead; prowled around the surface until he found a spot he liked, and settled down in an enclosed space with his back to a wall and his knees drawn up, watching a whirling fan turning around in its cage. When he got tired of that he lowered his head to rest on his forearms where they lay crossed over his raised knees, closed his eyes and silently recited poetry to himself that spoke of private gardens, favorite toys, and innocent friendships that bloomed in the midst of loving families.
