Free The Enemy of My Enemy by Avram Davidson Page B

pale, red-haired, often freckled hands … to freeze up again until it should be time to retire to Pemath and melt (or at least thaw) all over again.
    Meanwhile, in several various foreign fiscals, Tonorosant’s personal (and exceedingly private!) accounts went on to grow and proliferate in a most satisfactory manner.
    Atoral came and dined and stayed the night and her lover wondered again about the Tarnisi prejudice against early marriage … “early” being anything before the middle thirties. In general it had, he supposed, the virtue of keeping down the numbers of the Tarnisi population, although certainly sophisticated methods of doing so were not only known but utilized … as, for example, by Atoral. Prejudice, again, tended to disallow its use within the marital structure. And in particular it enabled him, Tonorosant, to enjoy the pleasures and benefits of the liaison without worrying about the entanglements of marriage. Which could become very entangled indeed. His genes had not been changed by the processes he had undergone at the hands of the Craftsmen. Such change was possible, or had at least once been possible. But Orinel was not a world in which the fullness of the possible had ever been used to flourish. Tarnisi reaction to his fathering obviously only half-Tarnisi children would be unfavorable, to say the least. It would not only be infinitely unwise for himself, it would be infinitely unfair to both the woman and the child. He recollected with distaste the incident he had been told about of the “Quasi” who had tried to pass as pure Tarnisi that day at Yellowtrees … and all the incredibly ugly talk about such wretched creatures which from time to time cropped up in conversation. And then there was the merely emotional matter of his becoming over-involved with Tarnisi life at all.
    No, no. Better to remain disengaged as most he might, and then, when he judged it best, slip out and slip away and simply never return, leaving behind him nothing deeper than perhaps casual wonder.
    Meanwhile, if Atoral had accepted wonderingly certain aspects of physical lovemaking which Tonorosant had not learned in Tarnis, it was his part to accept with perhaps less wonder but no less appreciation certain aspects which she had certainly learned nowhere else. The chamber still odorous of the fresh-worked and fragrant wood, her body unworn and pliant in his arms, her voice joyously astonished in his ears, her hands sincere and deft upon his skin, were all quite and excellently different from either the stews of Pemath Old Port or the fancier brothels of the New Port or the either bluntly commercial or rough liaisons he had had elsewhere. There was no striving without desire on either his part or hers, no mere sufferance by her, no mere seeking outlet and relief by him. Repetition did not satiate either before the other and both were spared the near-Hell into which near-Heaven may so easily turn or be turned when appetite and its quest is all one-sided.
    The deadly words,
You think only of your own pleasure
, had never passed in voice or thought between them.
    They arose and walked about the grounds in the coolness of the dawn and the dew. His tentative identification of certain plants amused her, his absolute ignorance of some several others dismayed her. “Exile must be quite dreadful,” she said, her humor passing into genuine feeling.
    “It is … .”
    “To have no home, no family, no scenes so necessary that they cannot be done without — I can’t know how that might be.”
    “No,” he said, a bitter, sombre note penetrating his thought and voice. “You can’t. Be glad.”
    She bent to touch a flower and watch the drops of mist distill down its petals. Her face in profile seemed incredibly delicate and young. And lovely, too. He bent and touched her lip, her cheek.
    “Oh, stay today. You will, I must hope?”
    She smiled gently, but was so firm that regret could not enter. “Not be present at the