Ranora’s arrival on the second day of negotiations is branded into my imagination for as long as that dimension of my personality may survive. She added a Wonderland dimension to the story. I was Alice and she was the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the Red Queen all rolled into one cute little package.
I think if she could testify (maybe I should say when she decides to testify) she’d claim I was Humpty-Dumpty too.
I couldn’t figure out why the game needed her. Or the worlds, ours and theirs. On the other hand, maybe both cosmoi need as many ilels as they can find.
I had the impression as I played the God Game that need, unspecific perhaps but powerful, was driving the game. Their world needed ours for a few months (a week or two of our time, but the time was all fouled up—sometimes the game was in real time, occasionally it was slower than real time and often much faster; I have no explanation for that). And they, especially the Duke and the Duchess, needed me.
Arguably it was the other way around. Maybe our world, in the persons of a score or so of befuddled scholars, needed exposure to their world. Maybe I needed B’Mella and Lenrau.
To be perfectly fair I should tell you about the parapsychologist. It was my idea to call him in. Our University, of course, does not permit parapsychology on the campus, so he had to fly in from Elsewhere. He puffed mysteriously on his pipe for several minutes after we’d run the last tape.
“Possible,” he finally murmured.
“What’s possible?”
“That these tapes are the result of a strongly psychic imagination sending out electronic energies which create visual images. We have been able to do it in a minor way in the lab. Nothing like these, of course, but still…”
I am, for the record, utterly devoid of psychic powers.
But, as the man said, still …
Finally, to end the speculation and get back to the story, I can’t believe that coming to know Ranora was an accident. I still hear her pipe late at night. Or I think I do.
By that second day of negotiations, they had rigged up tents at either side of a clearing in one of their oak-that-wasn’t-oak forests. Maybe I should call them pavilions because they were luxurious portable palaces. These people did not live poorly. They sat on plush lounges, which adapted to their body shapes, in glistening pastel gowns on either side of the clearing and went through the rituals that they considered negotiation—mostly shouting invective at one another and suggesting how they would carve one another up when the battle began again. They had rather unkind words for one another’s leaders too, of which “foul-smelling whore” and “cowardly degenerate” were the mildest. It was hard to figure out what the issues in the conflict were. Some small tracts of land, fishing rights on a lake, and memories of unsettled vendettas from long ago. The exchange was curiously artificial. It seemed as stylized as black teenagers doing the “dozens” with each other. But then someone would rise to his feet and rush across the meadow, waving his (or her, because this was strictly an equal-opportunity war) sword or spear in the air.
One leader or the other would raise a hand and the charge would stop. I couldn’t tell when these alarums and excursions were serious and when they were not. I had the feeling that the rituals had been played out before. But the young man had said earlier that Lenrau had never seen B’Mella. He wasn’t seeing much of her now either. Her face was partially veiled by the collar of her magnificent glowing blue-green robe and he didn’t look at her anyway.
I began to wonder what I was supposed to do next. I had imposed a truce on this world and forced the warring factions to negotiate; was I supposed to resolve the conflict too? How?
I felt like a benign British monarch who had forced the Prots and the Teagues in Belfast or Derry to sit down to talk with each other and now was baffled that mere negotiation didn’t lead to peace.
How odd of them.
There was, however, Ranora to provide entertainment. How can I describe her? A luscious little middle-adolescent blonde in a short red-and-white peppermint-candy gown with a matching hood, pert nose, dancing blue eyes, an acrobat’s responsive body, and a face which seemed to be made of rubber putty, but which, in its rare repose, was delicately lovely.
She emerged from the woods and marched straight across the middle of the meadow, blowing a dissonant melody on a small pipe, not unlike an Irish tin whistle in appearance but with a much greater range of sounds, also red-and-white striped.
The exchange of insults stopped and everyone listened silently as she reversed direction and paraded right back across the meadow to the edge of the woods whence she had come. Instead of disappearing into the woods she flounced up towards B’Mella’s throne, sat imperiously in the shade of one of those almost oak trees, tucked her legs under her, modestly arranged her gown, and, occasionally experimenting with a theme melody, stared boldly and I thought affectionately at the Duchess.
B’Mella turned crimson and tried to avert her eyes from the outrageous child. More notes on the pipe, demanding attention. B’Mella motioned the girl to come closer. She mimed a giggle, shook her head elaborately, and continued to stare and experiment with her pipe. The Duchess acted like a woman who had been captured on Candid Camera.
Like most warriors, this crowd was not strong on wit, but they knew they were being ridiculed. The debate continued with a little less vigor. The girl with the pipe refused to permit it to become serious. Whenever a warrior would start shouting, she would accompany him on her pipe with a mocking melody. Some of the victims had the good grace to laugh, others looked like they wanted to strangle her.
Malvau rose with considerable solemnity towards the end of the cloudless afternoon to deliver his daily summary, which normally was enough to put everyone, even his Lady, to sleep.
“We have a rare opportunity,” he began, “for peace. You all know that either we will have peace now or the war will overflow from the warrior class and spread to all our peoples. The fields will be burned, the cities destroyed, women raped, men tortured to death, children mutilated and killed, as it was written that it happened in the time of the evil Duke Franon. Perhaps those of us who are warriors are not tired of combat. What else can we do? Our people are amused by the conflict much as though it were an athletic match, but they too know how dangerous it will shortly become. Can we not find the will for peace that will end forever this conflict which has no sense, no point, no reason, other than its own continuation?”
The girl leaped to her feet and began to do approving somersaults and cartwheels, like an Olympic gymnastics champion.
Kaila rose from the other side, handsome, casual, self-possessed.
“My distinguished colleague, the noble Lord Malvau speaks only the truth. Why must we fight? Cannot we become friends, fellow citizens, even perhaps some of us lovers? We are the same people, we worship the same God…”
“Blasphemy,” shouted a tall, white-haired, handsome chief priest (dressed in crimson and ermine) on B’Mella’s side. “Your God is the prince of darkness.”
“And you are an effeminate coward,” yelled a one-armed woman warrior.
“Your Duchess is a foul-smelling whore.”
“Your Duke is a degenerate pervert.”
G’Ranne the ice maiden said nothing. Her silence at insult time was rather un-Irish behavior.
The peppermint-candy girl did not elect to be quiet, however. On the contrary, she exploded with fury. She bounded across the meadow blowing vulgar insults on the contestants.
B’Mella lost her temper. “Lord Lenrau, are you so weak and ineffectual that you cannot control this obstreperous child?”
The obstreperous child wheeled on the Duchess and favored her with a rude and insulting melody, then removed the pipe from her mouth and made a rude face.
The Duchess, to my astonishment, did not reach for her own sword or order someone to remove the offending young woman. Instead she smiled graciously. “Small one, we must have our arguments first, before we can make peace. Come here.”
The small one, pipe in one hand, rested her hands on her hips and considered the Duchess gravely. Then she shook her head and giggled. Instead of responding to the Duchess’s invitation, she lifted the pipe back to her lips and played a sweet little melody, so lovely that it reduced everyone to reverent silence; she paused, considered what she had played, and played it over, making a few adjustments the second time.
Then she bowed elaborately to the Duchess, who in turned bowed elaborately back. “Is that me?”
The girl threw up her hands in a “sometimes” mime.
“When I’m good?”
She nodded enthusiastically.
“Which isn’t very often?”
The kid shook her finger in a “shame, shame” gesture.
“I like the tune very much. Thank you. I’ll try to be good.”
The kid clapped her hands, did a couple of handstands, and began to march across the meadow, switching her cute little rear end defiantly as she played “B’Mella’s tune.”
The pipe, as I have said, was little more than an Irish tin whistle, but the child could make the most wondrous sounds come from it, almost as though it were an instrument from the fairie glen.
I began to wonder whether she was some sort of elf from some tiny, upcountry meadow of this country, a survivor of their fairie past.
“Ranora!” the Lord Kaila said firmly.
She took the pipe out of her mouth, stared at him impatiently, hands on hips, little foot beating the turf rhythmically, obviously displeased.
“Come here,” he ordered.
She shook her head negatively, now a stubborn teen-aged brat.
“Don’t embarrass me and the Lord Lenrau.”
She sighed elaborately and with a great show of resigned displeasure stalked over to Kaila’s chair and sat stiffly at his feet, telling the whole world by the cold tilt of her shoulder that she was greatly displeased with this handsome young courtier.
Five minutes later she was holding his hand.
He was too young to be her father, didn’t look at all enough like her to be her brother, and didn’t act, not then at any rate, like her lover. No one, I suspected even then, would dare to be her master.
So what was he?
I would learn later on that when ilels rose up in that world and attached themselves to someone who “needed” an ilel, they also elected someone else to be their “protector” or “keeper” or “minder.” Or maybe the right word is “babysitter.”
Poor Kaila had been given the nod. The courtly, scholarly humanist was stuck with a waif who was half child, half imp, half angel.
How would you like to have had someone like that dropped on your doorstep when you were maybe twenty-two or twenty-three?
Kaila seemed then to accept his mission with resigned good humor. As the story continued, however, his manner towards her changed subtly. More about that later.
I began to think she was a kind of slave and adolescent mistress to the Duke. She brought him his breakfast on his couch in the morning, laid out the gown he was to wear, bathed him in his pool, massaged the back of his neck, made him eat his food, provided a late night hot toddy, turned out his portable hand lamp, and tucked him into bed when it was time for him to sleep.
It soon became evident that she was neither a slave nor a concubine. Whatever the rules which regulated relationships with an ilel, she could hold his hand, kiss his forehead, caress his arm when she wished, but he dared not lay a finger on her. She was a mixture of Tinker Bell and Ariel, a sprite, an imp, a pixie (with small piquant features for the role), a female leprechaun, a trickster, a wise woman, a conscience, a sister, a daughter, a mother, and a haughty archangel.
She was also pure hell when she was displeased; fortunately that didn’t seem to happen very often. In fact, her temper reminded me of Michele’s. Very much so. In the back of my head I began to wonder if there was some sort of connection.
That’s a tough one. I haven’t figured it out yet.
God help me if they’re in cahoots with each other, even unconsciously, across cosmos boundaries.
The next day the ilel was back, still fascinated by the Duchess. While the warriors were shouting at one another, she would prance around the edge of the meadow and sit twenty yards away from B’Mella, arranging her red-and-white gown around herself carefully, like a properly trained parochial school graduate. She would then rest her tough little chin on her hand and stare admiringly at the Duchess.
Again B’Mella blushed and looked away, somehow embarrassed by the sprite child’s attention. Then she stole a cautious peek. Ranora giggled happily. The Duchess turned away, suppressing with difficulty her own smile.
The ritual became a daily affair, always disconcerting but pleasing the Duchess, who acted like a novice model under consideration by a trained professional. At least once a day Ranora would play her B’Mella theme. Unfailingly, the Duchess would turn her head away so that no one would see her tears.
Ranora was clinically blunt with her Duke. “Master, you must win her to your marriage bed, penetrate her most vigorously but with proper respect, and make her pregnant. That will end all this foolish fighting.”
“Is she not a foul-smelling whore?” Lenrau asked with the faint smile that his ilel always seemed to excite.
“You like her.” Ranora jabbed a finger at him. “You can’t take your eyes off her. She likes you, too. I can tell.”
“End the war on the couch?” Kaila asked tentatively—no other form of expression seemed to be permitted him when he was speaking to his lissome charge.
“Where else?” She jumped up, drew her tiny pipe from her gown, and begin to play it and dance to a lascivious tune. “I think she’d be fun in bed.” The others laughed, it seemed to me, a trifle uneasily.
“You wouldn’t have to sleep with her.” The Duke smiled wryly.
“Don’t be vulgar,” the ilel fired back at him and stamped angrily out of the tent.
“If you can endure her,” Kaila closed the book he was reading (he always had his head buried in his book), “you would have no trouble with B’Mella.”
“I heard that!” Ranora bounced back in, blew a few cacophonous notes, and then stamped out again.
“You are right.” Lenrau laughed. “B’Mella at her worst would not be that haughty,” his eyes glazed a bit, as though he were drifting to a faraway world, “and probably not that loving.”
“That we do not know.” Kaila was ever the man of reason. “She has perhaps never been given a chance.”
“Hmmn…”
If I were in the Duke’s position I would have been meditating on that possibility. I’m sure he was preoccupied by something ineffable and distant.
“She is attracted to the ilel…”
“Can they attach themselves to two people at the same time?” The Duke struggled to return to his world.
“It is written,” Kaila flipped open his huge folio book, “that five hundred years ago it may have happened.”
“B’Mella was very courteous to her, was she not?”
“Indeed.”
“That,” the Duke sighed disconsolately, “would be all I need.”
Neither of the two principals paid all that much attention to the negotiations, save when they had to intervene to maintain order. Rarely did they say anything, and, except for B’Mella’s rebuke to Lenrau when Ranora was misbehaving, never a word to each other.
The Duchess would twist and turn nervously on her form-fitting chair, impatient, restless, bored. You thought she’d rather run through the forest or swim in one of the lakes or dance and sing with the ilel or fight another war—anything but endure any more tiresome talk.
Her counterpart often seemed asleep or so abstracted in thought that he might as well be asleep. Kaila, or one of the other young courtiers who hung around him, would often have to nudge him to pay attention if something important was being said.
Or Ranora would blow a soft little tune, a variation usually on her B’Mella theme.
She also had a Lenrau theme which sounded as if it might have been lifted from Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” or Handel’s “See the Conquering Hero Comes.”
It embarrassed the Duke enormously because he certainly didn’t see himself that way.
“Well, I do,” she said flatly when he tried to register a mild protest. “And I play the tunes, you don’t.”
So there, too.
After what seemed a particularly acrimonious negotiating session ended abruptly, as though someone had blown a whistle, everyone withdrew to their fabric palaces. I decided that I was after all the author of the story and I had let the plot get out of hand and turn dull, save for the appearance of the delightful but contentious ilel. It was time to reassert my authorship.
That was the second turning point in my active intrusion into the God business.
I suspended the game for a few moments and tried to think rationally about it. In the heat of the moment there wasn’t much time to think and, anyway, when Ranora was dancing around, thought was impossible.
I was betting that the real issues between them were minimal and that like the Prots and the Teagues in Northern Ireland they were prisoners of a history over which they had little control. Maybe, I reasoned, if I focused a little more intently on the personalities of the principal figures I would be able to reverse the trend of history. Lenrau and B’Mella were the Duke and the Duchess, the hero and the heroine, the ones who really mattered. I had allowed myself to fixate on the process instead of attending to the principal characters—a major fault in a storyteller.
I informed the 286 I wanted to observe Lenrau.
He and Kaila and Ranora, the three of them in the most minimal of swimsuits (hers red-and-white striped and displaying a perfectly delightful little figure) were floating in a pool which seemed to keep them effortlessly on the surface—Dead Sea density. She leaped out of the pool as I joined them, did a number of quite impossible acrobatics, dove back in, and promptly shoved the heads of both the men underwater. Neither of them was in any mood to play. But Ranora wanted to play, so they both tried to dunk her and for their troubles were rewarded with vast lungfuls of water as she dove under them, surfaced behind them, and dunked them before they could lay a hand on her. Finally Kaila wrestled her if not into submission at least into powerlessness.
“Game’s over, I win,” she announced brightly.
Kaila released her, I noticed with a hint of reluctance. There was a glint of something in his eye which I thought not appropriate in a keeper of a vestal virgin. Did she catch it?
Don’t they all. She showed no sign that she was pleased or displeased. She merely kept her distance from him for the rest of the pool session.
Were you an ilel for life, I wondered?
She began to devote her ministrations to the Duke.
“You are so tired, Master.” She caressed the Duke’s weary brow.
I thought that I wanted an ilel of my own.
“We must not despair.” Kaila took her hand playfully. She let him hold it for a while and then slipped it away, but not without a hint of a promise that he might have it back later. “The master has kept us together in negotiations already longer than we have talked for three generations.”
“Good master.” She patted the Duke’s forehead with her free hand. “I think the woman is as tired as you are and wants peace as much as you do and doesn’t know how to do it either and is very pretty and not at all a foul-smelling whore. I want to talk to her. I’ll tell her that you can hardly wait to get inside her thighs.”
“You forget yourself.” The Duke pushed her hand away.
“Ranora…” Kaila protested in vain.
“And you forget yourself too,” she shouted, pulling his kinky hair kindly but firmly and dunking him briefly.
He came up sputtering, but no longer angry.
“I’m sorry, good Ranora,” he sighed and sank deeper into the pool. “Strangely I want peace, so badly that I cannot drive the desire away from me. I want peace more than I want a woman.…”
The young one laughed at that. He frowned but continued. “It is true. And I want a woman again, too. It has been so long. I don’t know why the lust for peace is so powerful. They say I’m a coward. But perhaps the Lord Our God has put this desire for peace in me.”
“And in her?” Kaila asked.
“Who knows? She is but an animal.”
“A sleek and desirable animal.” Ranora jabbed his ribs.
“In truth,” he agreed.
They lapsed into silence. I cut to the Duchess and found her at prayer.
And felt my eyes pop out of my sockets.
As I learned later, the people in this world removed their outer garments when they prayed, a sign of humility and dependence which caused no scandal (they are prudes most of the time) because prayer was a private, very private activity.
However, my first view of herself in the undergarments of her culture (they would be a hot item at the exotic lingerie stores and would greatly delight your SF illustrators) took my breath away. I agreed with Ranora—she was no foul-scented whore.
Not one of Boris’s more voluptuous dark women, but slender, almost thin, sleek, boyish at first glance, before you noted the slightly curving hips, the long elegant legs, the slightly convex belly, and the small, delicately shaped girlish breasts. At prayer all her arrogance vanished; she seemed a fragile little girl in the presence of a father whom she knew doted on her but whose ways were hard to comprehend.
“What do you wish of me, Lord Our God?” She seemed to be speaking to me. “I wish to do your will in all things. All my life I have been taught that it is your will that I kill them and seek especially the death of the evil Lord Lenrau who is the agent in our world of your enemy, the Lord of Darkness. Now I see that he is a human like me and on his poor face the same anguish that I feel. He seems to have suffered even more. I should feel guilty, but I don’t: I want to make the pain leave him. I wanted to cuddle his poor weary head against my breasts. Is that wrong?”
Not wrong, but remarkably honest.
“In my heart I hear you demanding that I make peace with him. You tell me that I have always wanted the killing to end. How can this be? Are they not evil and your enemies?”
MAKE PEACE, I told her.
She heard me. “It is your will. I will try to turn my heart in your way. It is so strange.” She stood up and reached for a thin robe. “Yet, Lord Our God, I like the way this new rule of yours makes me feel.”
She paused as she was belting her robe. “But, how does one make peace? I do not know. I have never done it before. You made me end the conflict, you force me to control those who want to fight again, but you will not show me what I am to do next.”
WHO, ME? I typed in.
WHAT? said the machine.
“Yes, you.” She didn’t wait for the machine to translate. “Please!” Tears in her soft brown eyes. “What good are you if you don’t help me now?”
What the hell?
Thus far I had played peacemaker on instinct. I had kept them from killing off any more of one another. Now I had a choice: I could continue to be a spectator or I could begin to force my own solution on the Duke and the Duchess, a decision whose romantic implications should be clear to anyone who has ever read or written stories, even if it wasn’t to the two idiots themselves.
It was, I told myself, only a story, a game, Nathan’s game. Besides, clever little Ranora saw the same ending.
I didn’t ask then what would happen if we were both wrong.