Rebel Ice by S. L. Viehl Page A

understanding it. His claws distended, straining against his flesh, and then he thought of something. "You have no women in your shelter."
    "I desire men, not women," Hasal said, very matter-of-fact.
    Same-gender sex, too, was an accepted practice among the Iisleg. Teulon could not lie and claim to have the same preference; his second would simply bring him males from which to choose. He had to find words to explain that there was no viable alternative to his solitary state.
    "It is that you desire no one, woman or man," Hasal said, as if the thought had been spoken aloud.
    "Desire." On Teulon's homeworld, it was not used in such references. "My people Choose a single woman. That Choice is for life." He made the hand gesture of bonding, to emphasize this. "Two become one. One that never becomes two again."
    It was, perhaps, the longest speech Teulon had ever made in front of his second, who was now gaping at him. Hasal could not understand what Choice meant to the Jorenians, or that it was a privilege.
    You no longer have the privilege of choice, slave.
    Teulon's second stared at him as if seeing him clearly for the first time. "I think I understand." He made a
    No, it cannot . "Go now."
    "As you command, Raktar." Hasal slipped out of the shelter and secured the flap from outside.
    Not yet.
    Teuton's claws became fingers once more, and he replaced the blades he had taken from his forearm and chest sheaths. The strap was bitten through; he would have to make a new one.
    This made the seventh strap he had gnawed through in his sleep.
    Hasal had been the one to introduce Teulon to the strap one morning some months past, when he had seen his general washing blood from his mouth. "This you may find useful, Raktar."
    He had examined it and saw how it was made of a single long piece of leather wrapped around a small cylinder of salvaged plas. "How so?"
    "We give it to those who are wounded." His second had sounded a little too casual. "It helps them when they cannot… be silent."
    Since that time Teulon had rarely slept for more than an hour at a time, but when he did, he tied the strap over his mouth and set the center piece between his teeth. Crude as it was, it worked as well as the restraints and silencers that had been used on him on the journey to this world, where he had been brought to be sold as a slave.
    You no longer have the privilege of choice.
    Teulon rose and went to sluice the sweat from his skin. He had modified one leg of the heatarc to accommodate a shallow basin, in which he melted snow for cleansing. When he had first come to the Iisleg, they had thought his hygiene practices strange. That changed after he and Bsak demonstrated how much easier it was to track a man who did not bathe than one who did. Now all the heatarcs in the camp were modified with meltwater basins, and every man bathed before leaving camp.
    Hygiene had not been a priority during his brief time as a Toskald slave. Do not clean him , was the first thing Teuton's owner had said. We like how the blood and the sweat make his skin gleam .
    Teulon thought it a pity he could not peel back his skull and cleanse that single voice from his mind. There had been a time when he might have tried, but for the other voices. The ones that repeated what had been said in the past, and the ones that drowned in silence, unable to speak again. Both reinforced the necessity of carrying on and continuing along the path that had brought him here.
    He could not deny them. He could not fail them.
    He used his damp shirt to remove the excess moisture from his body before he put on dry, clean garments and his outfurs. The outside temperature had dropped, he saw when he extracted the weather stick Hasal had inserted into one of the shelter's seams. The Iisleg coveted the fossilized twigs, which contained ancient resins that expanded with heat and contracted with cold. Learning to read the tiny beads enabled one to measure the climate with incredible accuracy. At this