She looked terrified. Her eyes were wide and rigidly fixed on him, and she was trembling in a way that had nothing to do with the chill of the air. A muscle was jerking rhythmically in her cheek. Harpirias stood there a long while, staring at her, not knowing what to do.

"No," he said to her after a time, trying to keep his voice gentle. "I’m really sorry. But I can’t do this. I simply can’t." He smiled sadly, shook his head, pointed outward through the door. "Can you understand what I’m saying? You have to go. What you want from me is something I can’t give you."

She shivered in an almost convulsive way. Held out her hands to him. They were shaking.

"No," she said, and to his amazement she was speaking his language. "No — please — please—"

"You know Majipoori?"

Not very much of it, apparently. He had the impression that the girl was speaking by rote. "Please — please — I — come - in! —

Korinaam has taught her this, Harpirias thought suddenly. That would be very much like him.

He shook his head again.

"You can’t. You mustn’t. I’m simply not going to—"

"Please!" There was a terrible urgency in her tone. She seemed about to fall at his feet.

In the face of that, how could he turn her away? Harpirias sighed and beckoned her in. Just for a little while, he told himself. A little while, and that would be all.

The girl stumbled into the icy room. It was impossible for her to stop shivering. Harpirias wanted to put his arms around her and offer comfort. But he could not allow himself to do that. It was important to keep his distance.

Evidently she had exhausted her few comprehensible words now. She was gesturing to him in some sort of pantomime, raising her arms high over her head and bringing them down to her sides in a broad sweeping gesture, then doing it again, again, again. Harpirias struggled to make sense out of her miming. Something big. A mountain, was that what she was portraying? Did this have anything to do with the two dead animals that had been thrown down into the village from the top of the canyon wall?

She swept one hand downward in front of herself in a swelling curve from her forehead to her knees. Indicating her belly? A representation of the pregnancy that she desired from him? Maybe not. She made the mountain gesture again, and then the belly. He watched her uncomprehendingly. She opened her mouth, pointed to her teeth. The mountain again. The belly. Once more the teeth.

Harpirias shook his head.

She paused in thought for an instant or two. Then she thrust her arms out toward the floor at an angle, a gesture that seemed to indicate size, and began to march stiff-leggedly around the room in a comical hulking way.

He was altogether lost. "An animal? A big animal? A hajbarak?"

"No. No." She looked annoyed at his denseness. Once more the mountain, the belly, the teeth. The hulking stiff-legged strut. And this time he got it.

A mountain that walked — a big belly — and the teeth — a big potbellied man with unusual teeth -

"Toikella!" he cried.

The girl nodded happily. Comprehension at last.

He waited. She appeared to be thinking again. Then, as she had done the last time she had come to him, she pointed toward the pile of sleeping-furs, tapped her chest, extended her hand to Harpirias. Harpirias began to explain to her once again that he wasn’t willing to go to bed with her. But before he could say anything she acted out the Toikella pantomime again; and then she let her face puff up and her eyes turn demented in what was clearly a representation of royal anger, and went jumping around the room furiously wielding an imaginary sword or lance. After which, shrinking down from her Toikella size to her own, she clutched at her body with both her arms and made her eyes glaze over. Wounded. Dying.

"Toikella will kill you if I don’t sleep with you?" Harpirias asked. "Is that it?"

She gave him a helpless uncomprehending look. He tried again, speaking louder and more slowly. "King — will — kill — you?"

The girl shrugged and went through the whole pantomimed rigmarole again.

"Kill both of us?" Harpirias asked. "Kill only me?"

But words were useless. Evidently she had already uttered every word of his language that she understood, all four or five of them. He knew only two or three words of hers, and none that would help him now.

She was imploring him with her eyes. Looking desperately at him, then looking toward the pile of furs. Offering herself to him once more.

Harpirias realized that he had probably caught the gist of her anguished charade correctly. Her father the king had ordered her to bear a royal heir. He would settle for nothing less. If Harpirias sent her away as he had before, Toikella’s ire would be aroused to a murderous heat.

Whether it was the girl that he would kill, or Harpirias, or the two of them, was not something that he had been able to get from her. But it made no difference. The implications were clear that some sort of violence would come from this, unless he yielded to the king’s blind insistence.

And, trapped between the cynical lies that Konnaam had told and the dynastic expectations of King Toikella, Harpirias saw that he had no choice.

"All right," he said to her. "Come on. I’ll make a little prince for you, if that’s what your father wants so badly."

He didn’t expect her to understand anything of that, nor did she. But when he caught her lightly by the wrist and drew her toward the bed of furs her eyes brightened in immediate comprehension. A kind of glow came into her face that made her seem almost attractive.

Not that she was particularly repugnant, Harpirias thought. Stockier and more muscular than he really preferred a woman to be, and somewhat deficient in bodily cleanliness, perhaps, and the dark spaces in her smile where front teeth were missing disturbed him. But — even so -

He had never been an outstanding model of moral fastidiousness himself. In his time Harpirias had embraced more than a few young women whose deportment and appearance would have raised eyebrows at the Coronal’s court. That laughing red-haired dancing girl long ago in Bombifale, the one with the fiery eyes and the hoarse shrill voice of a fish-peddler — and that slim-legged juggler lass in the holiday town of High Morpin, who could swear like a sailor — and especially that swaggering broad-hipped huntress he had met while wandering alone in the forests back of Normork, who had showed him a trick or two when he was eighteen that would never have crossed his mind -

There had been others. More than a few, more than a few. If he was forced now to add a swarthy smudge-faced barbarian girl to the list, well, so be it. Diplomats have to perform all sorts of unusual things in the course of their duties, Harpirias told himself once again. His mission would very likely fail if he persisted in his prissy refusal to honor Toikella’s wishes in this matter. Therefore it could be construed as his professional duty to oblige the king. And if he was not in fact the Coronal, for all that Toikella had chosen to believe he was, it was certainly true that the blood of Coronals past ran in his veins. The king would have to be satisfied with that.

So be it. So be it.

Harpirias unfastened the robe of white fur and held it open as the girl slipped out of it.

She was naked beneath it. Her body was lean and taut-fleshed, with small hard breasts and nicely flaring hips. Apparently she had oiled herself from head to foot with something — could it be hajbarak grease, he wondered? — that gave her a smooth and agreeably slippery feel, and masked to some extent the scent of her unwashed skin.

They dropped down together to the pile of hides. Harpirias quickly wriggled into the middle of the heap, for it was much too cold in the ice-walled room for him to want to expose his unclothed body very long to the air. Though apparently the girl would have preferred to remain on top of the pile rather than within it, she seemed to understand his need, and after a bit she followed him underneath. Once they were safely covered, side by side and snug beneath the mound of furs, she laughed and pressed her hand against his chest, rolling over and pushing him down so that she could climb into the upper position.