Читать книгу Spiders' War - S. Fowler Wright - Страница 8

CHAPTER V: MARRIAGE

She waked to find that daylight had come, and that Lemno sat at his table as though he had not moved during the night. Did he never sleep?

Her mind went back to the thoughts which had preceded her own response. Was she a virgin? As a physical fact, as applied to the body which she now had, she was disposed to think that she had given the right reply. Was it what he had wished to hear? That seemed likely too.

He was studying the history of her own time. She wondered with what parts of her world he was becoming familiar. It had been a crudity of the scientists of her time that they had inclined to presume that conditions had been similar in past ages over the whole earth. There might be evidences of a stone age in Nevada or Natal, but why should there not have been a civilization in Tibet at the same time, perhaps superior to anything which had been known subsequently? Even in her own day, in spite of its abnormal development of communications, to which it had sacrificed its prosperity if not its existence, there had been differences between Paris and Central Africa and the interior of Brazil. There was a talking point there, which could be developed without disclosure of what she must not reveal.

Lemno rose, yawning. He stretched his arms upward, so that they were near to reaching the low ceiling of the room. He came over to where she lay. He said: “You lie late.” And then, as one who would be just in rebuke, he added: “But we will say there was cause.”

She rose at once. She had supposed it to be an early hour. And she had wondered what would be expected of her when she was on her feet what her duties would be.

He gave her a first direction without delay: “You shall heat water first. You shall rub me down.”

As the water warmed, he threw off his fur, and strode into the kitchen, a figure of vigorous masculine nudity which was not hard for her to admire. He stood erect and silent on a part of the floor which was slightly beneath the main level, of somewhat different and harder material than its polished boards, with a gutter along the edge. She stood hesitant, and he said, with more impatience than he had yet shown: “Well, will you begin?”

She said “I will do what you wish. It is strange to me.”

“It is strange that you do not know where a sponge would be—a sponge which is in your sight now.”

As he spoke, she knew; and became aware of a danger she had not realized before. She had two sets of memories, and she had thought that she must use care that those of her distant self—of her real self, she would have said—must not be allowed to fade. She had been dwelling on them, and had not realized that the two sets of memories could not be active at once.

Instantly, but none too soon, she became the girl he had captured the day before. She knew what to do now.

She took a sponge which was made of absorbent leaves, sewn together in a flat way, such as she had used all her life, and rubbed him down with warm water from head to foot as he stood motionless there, while a towel of somewhat similar material warmed at the fire. While he dried himself, she dealt with her own body in the same way.

His eyes were on her as she did this, in a fashion that she was not sure she liked, nor yet sure that she would not have. But he did not speak, and the short silence had seemed long by the time she put the towel down, and was conscious of the nervousness in her voice as she asked: “Shall I get breakfast now? Are there no nuts at all?”

“That can wait,” he said. He caught her in a strong grasp. “Do you not know what a wife does—or is done to? Well, you are near to learn.”

And in the next moments she did.