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adults after a dinner party. Ruefully, he smiled as he remembered holding the brandy snifter in an authoritative pose anyone but himself must have recognized as copied from Pa's… And yet it was all tinged with sorrow and anger; impossible to forget, hurtful to remember, a turning and itching in his mind.
    He looked downslope; beyond that screen of pines was a stock dam where the children of the house had gone swimming sometimes, gods alone knew why, except that they were supposed to use the pool up by the manor. There, one memorable day, he had knocked Frikkie Thyssen flat for sneering at his poetry. The memory brought a grin; it had been the sort of epic you'd expect a twelve-year-old in love with Chapman's Homer to do, but that little bastard Thyssen wouldn't have known if it had been a work of genius… And over there in the cherry orchard he had lost his virginity under a harvest moon one week after his thirteenth birthday, to a giggling field wench twice his age and weight…

    And then there had been Tyansha, the Circassian girl. Pa had given her to him on his fourteenth birthday. The dealer had called her something more pronounceable, but that was the name she had taught him, along with her mother tongue. She had been… perhaps four years older than he; nobody had been keeping records in eastern Turkey during those years of blood and chaos. There were vague memories of a father, she had said, and a veiled woman who held her close, then lay in a ditch by a burning house and did not move. Then the bayonets of the Janissaries herding her and a mob of terrified children into trucks. Thirst, darkness, hunger; then the training creche.
    Learning reading and writing, the soft blurred Draka dialect of English; household duties, dancing, the arts of pleasing. Friends, who vanished one by one into the world beyond the walls. And him.
    Her eyes had been what he had noticed first— huge, a deep pale blue, like a wild thing seen in the forest. Dark-red hair falling to her waist, past a smooth, pale, high-cheeked face. She had worn a silver-link collar that emphasized the slender neck and the serf-number tattooed on it, and a wrapped white sheath-dress to show off her long legs and high, small breasts.
    Hands linked before her, she had stood between his smiling father and the impassive dealer, who slapped her riding-crop against one boot, anxious to be gone.
    " Well boy, does she please ?" Pa had asked. Eric remembered a wordless stutter until his voice broke humiliatingly in a squeak; his elder brother John had roared laughter and slapped him on the back, urging him forward as he led her from the room by the hand. Hers had been small and cool; his own hands and feet felt enormous, clumsy; he was hideously aware of a pimple beside his nose.
    She had been afraid—not showing it much, but he could tell.
    He had not touched her; not then, or in the month that followed.
    Not even at the first shyly beautiful smile…
    Gods, but I was callow , Eric thought in sadly affectionate embarrassment. They had talked; rather, he had, while she replied in tense, polite monosyllables, until she began to shed the fear. He had showed her things—his battle prints, his butterfly collection— that had disgusted her—and the secret place in the pine grove, where he came to dream the vast vague glories of youth… A month, before she crept in beside him one night. A friend, one of the overseer's sons, had asked casually to borrow her; he had beaten the older boy bloody. Not wildly, in the manner of puppy fights, but with the pankration disciplines, in a cold ferocity that ended only when he was pulled off.
    There had been little constraint between them, in private. She even came to use his first name without the "master," eventually.
    He had allowed her his books, and she had devoured them with a hunger that astonished him; so did her questions, sometimes disconcertingly sharp. Making love with a lover was… different.
    Better; she had been more