Free Alyx - Joanna Russ by Unknown Author

dead.” Alyx started, rousing the baby. The slave still slept by the door, blacker than the blackness, but under him oozed something darker still in the twilight flame of the lamp. “You did that?” whispered Alyx, hushed. She had not seen him move. He took something dark and hollow, like the shell of a nut, from the palm of his hand and laid it next to the baby’s cradle; with a shiver half of awe and half of distaste Alyx put the richest and most fortunate daughter of Ourdh back into her gilt cradle. Then she said:
    “Now we’ll go.”
    “But I have not what I came for,” said the fat man.
    “And what is that?”
    “The baby.”
    “Do you mean to steal her?” said Alyx curiously.
    “No,” said he, “I mean for you to kill her.”
    The woman stared. In sleep the governor’s daughter’s nurse stirred; then she sat bolt upright, said something incomprehensible in a loud voice, and fell back to her couch, still deep in sleep. So astonished was the picklock that she did not move. She only looked at the fat man. Then she sat by the cradle and rocked it mechanically with one hand while she looked at him.
    “What on earth for?” she said at length. He smiled. He seemed as easy as if he were discussing her wages or the price of pigs; he sat down opposite her and he too rocked the cradle, looking on the burden it contained with a benevolent, amused interest. If the nurse had woken up at that moment, she might have thought she saw the governor and his wife, two loving parents who had come to visit their child by lamplight. The fat man said:
    “Must you know?”
    “I must,” said Alyx.
    “Then I will tell you,” said the fat man, “not because you must, but because I choose. This little six-months morsel is going to grow up.”
    “Most of us do,” said Alyx, still astonished.
    “She will become a queen,” the fat man went on, “and a surprisingly wicked woman for one who now looks so innocent. She will be the death of more than one child and more than one slave. In plain fact, she will be a horror to the world. This I know.”
    “I believe you,” said Alyx, shaken.
    “Then kill her,” said the fat man. But still the picklock did not stir. The baby in her cradle snored, as infants sometimes do, as if to prove the fat man’s opinion of her by showing a surprising precocity; still the picklock did not move, but stared at the man across the cradle as if he were a novel work of nature.
    “I ask you to kill her,” said he again.
    “In twenty years,” said she, “when she has become so very wicked.”
    “Woman, are you deaf? I told you—”
    “In twenty years!” In the feeble light from the lamp she appeared pale, as if with rage or terror. He leaned deliberately across the cradle, closing his hand around the shell or round-shot or unidentifiable object he had dropped there a moment before; he said very deliberately:
    “In twenty years you will be dead.”
    “Then do it yourself,” said Alyx softly, pointing at the object in his hand, “unless you had only one?”
    “I had only one.”
    “Ah, well then,” she said, “here!” and she held out to him across the sleeping baby the handle of her dagger, for she had divined something about this man in the months they had known each other, and when he made no move to take the blade, she nudged his hand with the handle.
    “You don’t like things like this, do you?” she said.
    “Do as I say, woman!” he whispered. She pushed the handle into his palm. She stood up and poked him deliberately with it, watching him tremble and sweat; she had never seen him so much at a loss. She moved round the cradle, smiling and stretching out her arm seductively. “Do as I say!” he cried.
    “Softly, softly.”
    “You’re a sentimental fool!”
    “Am I?” she said. “Whatever I do, I must feel; I can’t just twiddle my fingers like you, can I?”
    “Ape!”
    “You chose me for it.”
    '‘Do as I say!”
    “Sh! You will wake the nurse.” For a