The Lotus Eaters

Runnistan, Pashtia, Terra Nova

"We are going to keep this a secret from his parents, right?" asked Cano of his wife, in Spanish to keep it private. She seemed extraordinarily happy. Cano assumed it was because she was doing something for her Avatar of God.

The dirt of the Bushkazi field where Cano had won his bride, Alena, had been carefully packed down and smoothed. Ringed by torches, crowded with people wearing anything from legionary battle dress to black native costume to Balboan guayaberas, an oval opening had been left in which danced a dozen of the tribe's most lovely maidens, to the accompaniment of primitive music from equally primitive musical instruments. In the center of one of the long sides of the oval, on a throne of sorts, flanked by more torches, sat Hamilcar Carrera, watching the show. Hamilcar was young, barely eleven years old. The trees from which the wood for the throne had come were older. Some of the fittings and jewels of the throne had come from Old Earth. They were thousands of years old.

Hamilcar kept his thoughts to himself, though his face said he was enjoying the girls' dance. It was a wedding dance, though it had not, in living memory, ever been performed by a dozen girls at once. To one side of the throne stood his military adjutant, Tribune David Cano, flanked by Cano's wife, the green-eyed Alena. Some local notables stood on the other side. The rear of the throne was ringed by fierce-visaged, armored and armed Pashtun, facing out while standing. In front was a similar ring, though there the guards were on single knees, so as not to interfere with their Iskandr's view.

Alena turned and tilted her head slightly, her emerald eyes laughing. "If you don't tell them, I won't, husband. But I'd suggest you have a little talk with his tutors, if you want them to be quiet about it."

Her head tilted the other way. "Still, I don't know why you would bother. The Carreras are going to know, eventually. Say, when he shows up back in Balboa in a few years with a dozen wives in tow."

Cano's chin sunk on his chest. Ham's mother is going to kill me.

"Oh, stop worrying, will you?" Alena insisted, poking her husband's ribs with her elbow. "It's years before he'll have to go back. By then, Lourdes and the Duque will be grandparents, probably a dozen times over; one of the factors in our choice for brides for Iskandr is that the girls had to come from highly fertile mothers and, in their day, grandmothers. Not a one of these girls has fewer than sixty first cousins. You think the Duque or Lourdes will object to that?"

"Maybe not," Cano conceded.

"There's something else, too," Alena said. "Something the Duque said to me before we left."

"When he asked to speak with you privately?"

"Yes, then. He told me the boy was not who I thought he was—of course I scoffed at that!—but that he really was something almost as special. He said he was sending him to us for training, more than anything, and he hoped we would put Iskandr through a regimen to make him grow up very quickly and very well."

"So?"

Alena pointed with her chin toward the oval where a dozen beautiful girls danced with hands in graceful pose and fingers subtly beckoning. "Those were also just about the most grown-up girls we could find, even if one of them is no older than Iskandr. Given that females are more mature than males by something like an order of magnitude, how long do you think those girls will allow him to remain a boy? And, no, I'm not just talking about sex."

"What would you have done," Cano asked, "if Carrera had not, on his own, decided to send the boy here?"

"I'd have brought the girls to him and presided over a wedding by our custom, myself," Alena answered without a moment's delay. "I picked most of them out when we were still in Balboa."

"You are a witch, wife."

"Perhaps," she conceded. "Mostly, though, in this case, I used the Globalnet and had the women here do the leg work."

"No 'perhaps' about it. You know too much. I shall have cross words with your father for having you taught to read."

Alena gave her husband a mysterious smile. "I do know something you don't know," she said.

"Surprise me."

"I will," she answered, looking up at him, mystery morphing into radiance, "in about seven months."