“I have not yet had Queen-touch either,” he said. “But we are — not in the Nest now—” He sucked his breath in deeply, and a look of mingled torment and passion blazed in his eyes. He was as virgin as she was. Of course. Who would he have coupled with, in the Nest? But now he was swept by need, flesh-need, the need inborn in everyone of his true race.

And so, she understood suddenly, was she.

Almost without realizing what was happening, she was warming to his touch. As he stroked her, sensations were arising in her that she had never known before. She felt hot, she felt itchy, she felt eager. Muscles strained and throbbed along her thighs, her belly, her chest. Her breath came in gusts.

They were the sensations of pleasure. And somehow she knew that greater pleasure still was within her grasp. All she had to do was let it sweep over her.

It came upon her unanswerably that this was the moment, this the time, this the place, this the man. The barriers fell away. She smiled and nodded. He reached for her again, uttering hjjk-sounds, and she responded to them in hjjk and in inchoate wordless People-sounds, and together they slipped down to the floor, knocking over the flask of wine, scattering the tray of food she had brought. That didn’t matter. His hands were everywhere on her. He seemed to have no real idea of what to do, only vague guesses and approximations, and she knew barely more than that herself; but somehow they found an alignment that was right, and she drew him to her and parted her thighs, and he slipped inside.

So this is what it is like, she thought.

So this is what it is, the great thing over which so much is made. The bodies fit together and they move. That’s all there is to it. But how good it feels! How simple, how right!

And then she ceased thinking at all, except to wonder vaguely whether they had fastened the door securely. Even that thought went from her mind. They rolled about and about, laughing and crying out in both their languages, clutching at each other and nipping and clawing, and gasping in the strange excitement of it, until Nialli Apuilana heard him make a hoarse heavy sound that she had never heard from him before, and a kind of convulsion swept him. And, to her astonishment, she became aware of a warm welling-up of feeling within her, almost as if she would burst, and she heard a sound not unlike the one he had made erupting suddenly from her own lips a moment later. It was, she realized, the sound of joy, the sound of ecstasy, the sound of release from a self-imposed penance.

They lay in silence, in wonder, now and again looking at each other. Then he reached for her once more.

Afterward, long afterward, when they were calm again, passion giving way to quiet tenderness, Kundalimon said, “Is one other thing I want.”

“Tell me. Tell me.”

“Is too sad here, always in one room for me,” he said, as he ran the tips of his fingers fondly across the fur of Nialli Apuilana’s back. “You get them let me go outside? You get them let me walk in city like free man? You do that for me, Nialli Apuilana? You do that?”

Thu-Kimnibol had five handsome well-made wagons, each drawn by a pair of xlendis that he had selected personally for their spirit and vigor, and a quartet of equally fine animals as spares, in case any of the others fell by the wayside. He had no intention of making this journey the way a merchant would, plodding placidly along northward for month after month. No, he meant to race northward in one single furious burst, like a shooting star streaking across the heavens, halting only when he must, driving the xlendis and his companions to the limits of their capacity. He longed to hurl himself quickly into this enterprise, to come before King Salaman swiftly and sit down with him to bring into being the alliance that was so long overdue.

But for all his high resolve the trip went slowly, and he saw very quickly that there was little he could do to hasten things. Esperasagiot was his wagonmaster, a bright golden Beng of the pure blood who knew xlendis the way he knew the name of his own father; and Esperasagiot drove the animals to their limits, but he knew where those limits were.

“We should stop now and rest,” he said on the first evening out from Dawinno, when the sun was still high in the west.

“So early? Half an hour more,” said Thu-Kimnibol.

“The xlendis will die of it.”

“Just half an hour.”

“Prince, do you want to kill the beasts on our very first day?”

Something about the man’s tone told Thu-Kimnibol to take him seriously. “Will they actually die, if we ask them to carry us just a little way farther?”

“If not today, then tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then the day after. This is where we must halt. I’ll stake my helmet on it, that if we go any farther tonight, and try to do as much tomorrow, we’ll have some dead xlendis within three days. There’s delicacy behind their strength. These aren’t lumber-wagon xlendis. You’ve chosen high-spirited beasts, that carry us swiftly enough when they’re fresh. But when they’ve begun to weary—” Esperasagiot pulled off his helmet, an artful one with five plumes of a silvery metal sweeping straight back, and put it in Thu-Kimnibol’s hands. “I stake my helmet on it, Prince Thu-Kimnibol. Against your sash. Two dead ones in three days, at this pace.”

“No,” Thu-Kimnibol said, “We’ll stop when you say.”

The summer was still high, and the air was thick and heavy. Rain fell often. This was fertile land, out here north of Dawinno, with many farms Sometimes Thu-Kimnibol saw little knots of farmers standing uneasily by the borders of their property, perhaps wondering whether he meant to raid them.

Soon the caravan was climbing into the hill country, though. Here it was much drier, and there were no more farms. The land was brown and rocky and bleak and the wind came from the north, with an edge on it. Some wild beasts, which had become scarce closer to the settled territories, roamed here. Flights of beaky wide-winged carrion-birds passed ominously overhead. At night the great scarred silver eye that was the Moon, dark with the wounds the death-stars had inflicted on it, lit the bare terrain with a cold gleaming glare.

The xlendis, under Esperasagiot’s expert handling, performed well. Each day they seemed to scamper with greater zeal. They were slender gray beasts, slender-flanked and proud-necked, with aristocratic round heads and flaring nostrils, and they snorted and pranced as they went.

Thu-Kimnibol understood now why Esperasagiot had been so sparing with the xlendis in the early days of the trip. These were city-trained animals, accustomed to pulling the chariots of princes, and they had no experience of long hauls in open country. If he wore them out at the beginning, when provender was easy to come by, what reserve of energy would they have in the harder days to come? Let them grow tough gradually, and be fully inured by the time the journey’s most difficult work was upon them, that was Esperasagiot’s theory.

“I owe you an apology,” Thu-Kimnibol told the wagon-master, when they had been on the road ten days. “Your way with the xlendis is the right one.”

Esperasagiot only grunted. He had no use for apologies, or praise, or anything else but xlendis.

They were in the great windswept coastal plateau now that lay between Dawinno and Yissou. Small twisted gray plants grew here in pale pebbly soil. There were ruined Great World cities along the route. But all that remained of them were faint white lines in the ground, the merest sketchy traces of foundations and pavements. Hresh had sent crews of University students here to dig for more, but there was nothing more to find.

Thu-Kimnibol ordered a halt at the first of these ancient sites that they came to, and looked around. He imagined a host of sapphire-eyes living in this place once, great meaty long-jawed reptilian things with big heads and heavy thighs, strolling slowly about like philosophers with their huge tails propped behind them as a sort of crutch, and the light of genius ablaze in their bulging blue eyes.