Elysia Read Free

plateau and its peoples with a little more respect, spends his time and energies in more profitable pursuits. In other words, the last time de Marigny visited here it worked to the good of the plateau. Remember, too, he saved my life, snatched me from Ithaqua's wolf-warriors — who without a doubt would have given me into the hands of their terrible master.'
    'He saved your life?' she flared up, and for the briefest moment a tinge of carmine flashed in her green eyes. 'And how often did you save his, at great risk? Oh, no, Lord Silberhutte,' (she only ever called him that when he was in the wrong), 'there's no debt between you there!'
    `He hasn't come back to collect on any debts, Armandra,' the Texan released her, turned away, clenched his great hands behind his back. 'He wants nothing of us except our hospitality. He's come back as he went a friend — come back to be with people, for however short a time — before he goes off again on this crazy quest of his. Next to Earth, which he put behind him the day he left it, we're the closest he's got to family. That's why he's come back: because this is , as near as he'll get to home. At least until he finds Titus Crow in Elysia. If he finds him!'
    Armandra stepped round in front of him. Draped in a deep-pile, white fur smock, still her figure was the answer to any man's dream, the body of an exceedingly beautiful woman. Almost unchanged from the first time Silberhutte had seen her nearly six years ago, Armandra was Complete Woman. Her long, full body was a wonder of half-seen, half-imagined curves growing out of the perfect pillars of her thighs; her neck, framed in the red, flowing silk of her hair, was long and slender, adorned with a large medallion of gold; her face was oval as her eyes and classically boned. With her straight nose, delicately rounded at its tip, and her Cupid's bow of a mouth, perfect in shape if perhaps a shade too ample, the Woman of the Winds was a beautiful picture of femininity. But where her flesh was pale as snow, those great eyes of hers were green as the boundless. northern oceans of Earth. Yes, and They were just as deep.
    That was Armandra. When she smiled it brought the sunlight into the Warlord's darkest hours, and when she frowned ... then the fiery hair of her head was wont to have an eerie life of its own, and her eyes might narrow and take on a warning tint other than ocean green: the carmine passed down to her from her inhuman father.
    She was frowning now, but not in anger. In fear, perhaps? Fear of losing this man of the Motherworld, this Warlord, this Texan whom she loved so desperately.
    `And what of you, Hank?' she asked at last. 'What of your home?' Her frown did not lighten, and Silberhutte knew what was coining next 'Do you, too, feel trapped here, marooned? You guard your thoughts well, my husband, but I would know the truth. The plateau must seem a very small place compared to what you've told -me of those mighty city-hives of the Motherworld. And now, with de Marigny returned him and his time-clock -'
    He took her in his arms, lifted her up as surely and as easily as her familiar winds when she walked in the sky, then lowered her down until his mouth closed on hers with a kiss. And after long moments he slid her down his hard-muscled body until her sandalled feet touched the furs of the floor; and before she could speak again, he said:
    'This - is my home. You - are my life. Borea's my world now, Armandra. My woman, my son, my people are here. If I could go down to the pens and take Morda and ride him out a single mile across the plain and into the Motherworld - if it was as easy, as that - I wouldn't do it. I might ... but only if I could take you with me. And for all its many wonders, the Motherworld is .a common place. It has nothing like you. What would its thronging people make .of a woman of unearthly beauty who walks on the wind and commands the very lightnings?' And he paused.
    He might have said more: how Armandra