Survivor

Version 1.0

Survivor

Octavia E. Butler

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.

GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK

1978

All of the characters in this book

are fictitious, and any resemblance

to actual persons, living or dead,

is purely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Butler, Octavia E

Survivor.

I. Title.

PZ4B98674Su [PS3552.U827] 813’.5‘4

ISBN: 0-385-13385-5

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 77-81548

Copyright © 1978 by Octavia E. Butler

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

CHAPTER ONE

Alanna

I didn’t know enough to appreciate my foster father the way I should have when we met back on Earth. That was when I was about fifteen and his Missionaries caught me stealing from their cornfield. They shot me, would have killed me, but he stopped them. Then he carried me back to his house, got a doctor to tend my wound, and announced that he and his wife were adopting me. Just like that. I heard the doctor try to talk him out of it when they both thought I was unconscious.

“You could be making a mistake, Jules. She’s not the harmless young girl she appears to be. And she’ll never replace your children.”

“My children are dead,” said my foster father quietly. “I’ve accepted that. I wouldn’t expect her or anyone else to replace them.”

The doctor was silent for a moment. Then he sighed. “Well, at least she can talk.”

“Of course she can talk! She is human, Bart, wild or not.”

“Yes… physically anyway. Some of them can’t do much more than grunt, you know. They’ve either forgotten speech, or they never learned it. As wild humans, they spend their lives either hunting or being hunted. By the time they’re this girl’s age, they’re more wild than human.”

“This one’s a future Missionary,” said my foster father. “She’ll learn. She’ll become one of us.”

“Maybe.” The doctor sounded doubtful. “If the people let her, and if she really wants to. But I think all she’ll learn for quite a while is how to pretend to be one of us. Don’t expect more than that.”

And my foster father didn’t at first. I don’t think he had even before the doctor warned him. All he asked of me was that I learn to put on a good act when I was with people other than him and his wife Neila. That would protect me from the less tolerant of his Missionaries. Perhaps during that early period, he was too tolerant himself, though, too willing to let me stand apart from his people as I was naturally inclined to do. Perhaps there was a time when I could have become a Missionary if he had insisted, pushed me. But as it happened, it was best for him, for his people, and especially for me, that he did not insist. Best that when we left Earth and settled on our new world, I became something else entirely.

Two days after Alanna Verrick was rescued from her Tehkohn captors, the sharp edge of her pain began to wear away. She could think again. She could look at her situation clearly and realize how much trouble she was in.

Her rescuers, complacent and overconfident after their victorious raid, were also in trouble but they did not know it. In fact, their ignorance was one of Alanna’s problems. But she had another more immediate problem. In a very short time, she was going to have to convince her rescuers that they had not made a mistake in setting her free.

For now, though, she followed them silently as she had for the past two days while they herded their own Tehkohn prisoners down from the mountains. They had already reached the foothills and Alanna could look down from the trail into the valley’s thick covering of yellow-green meklah trees. For the first time in nearly eight hundred days—two local years—she saw the planet’s only settlement of Earth humans. The Mission colony that had once been her home. Like her, it had changed.

The Missionaries had transformed their settlement from a scattered collection of cabins almost hidden by the surrounding trees to a solidly stockaded town—a fortress that apparently provided them with the dangerous illusion of security.

Alanna looked around for some sign of the Garkohn town. Since the Garkohn, native allies of the Missionaries, chose to live underground, a sign of their town would be a small hill somewhere along the eastern side of the valley—the far side. But there were many such hills, all natural-looking, all identically covered with meklah trees and shrubs. The Garkohn knew that real security began with adequate camouflage. But then, the Missionaries considered this world’s version of even adequate camouflage to be beyond their reach. The expertise of the natives intimidated them.

Thus, only the Missionary fortress stood in plain view, beckoning unwittingly to the Tehkohn—inviting them to steal in and butcher everyone without even the inconvenience of a battle. And, Alanna guessed, after the defeat that the Tehkohn had just suffered, they would be strongly motivated to do just that.

Alanna looked back at the Tehkohn prisoners. They walked together in a group completely surrounded by their Garkohn and Missionary captors. She noticed that one of the prisoners, the big blue one, was watching her. This startled her because until now, he had been very careful to pay no attention to her at all. She turned away quickly.

Her foster father, Jules Verrick, was walking beside her. He noticed the gesture and naturally misinterpreted it.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “They’re well guarded. For once, they’re the prisoners instead of us.”

Silently, Alanna found fault with the inclusive “us.” She alone had been a prisoner of the Tehkohn. Others, Garkohn and Missionary, had been captured with her, but they were dead. Only Alanna had managed to live beyond the first few days of her captivity. Only she had survived to be rescued.

Jules spoke again gently. “You’ll feel better when we get home and those creatures are locked up out of your sight.”

She nodded meaninglessly, wondering whether he really thought that after two years among the Tehkohn, she could still be upset by the sight of them. She looked out over the valley again. The sight of the defenseless Missionary fortress had far more power to upset her. In the long run, the Missionaries were in greater danger than she was.

She glanced at the prisoners again, seeing them in a different way now—seeing them as living shields for the Missionaries.

“How many of the prisoners are yours, Jules?” she asked. He was the Missionary leader and would know exactly.

“Five hunters,” he answered, “and one of the blue-green types.”

“A judge,” said Alanna. “Higher than a hunter among the Tehkohn.”

“Yes, and… all the farmers are ours.” He sounded a little ashamed of this last. As far as Alanna was concerned, he had reason to be. Farmers and artisans were nonfighters. Capturing them was no achievement. The Garkohn had taken none of them. The Garkohn had hunters, judges, and one other. These were the prisoners who would have been most useful to the Missionaries. Prisoners whom the Tehkohn could ill afford to lose, prisoners whom the Missionaries could shield themselves behind and negotiate through. The Missionaries could negotiate a peace now that all Tehkohn would respect if Jules could only speak privately with the prisoners who belonged to the Garkohn. Such a peace had to be arranged if the Missionaries were to survive. And Alanna had to arrange it somehow. That was the responsibility she had assigned herself. It was not a responsibility she wanted. It would center the attention of three warring peoples on her. If she made a mistake, one of the groups would surely kill her. But she was the only person with the knowledge, and possibly the leverage, to manage it. And she owed her foster parents a debt. Years before, they had saved her. Now she would try to save them, and save their Mission, which meant so much to them. She had to try.

“Lanna?”

Alanna looked at her foster father knowing from his apologetic tone that she would probably not like what he had to say.

“Natahk has been wanting to talk to you—ask you a few questions about your stay with the Tehkohn.”

Alanna turned away from him, striving to conceal her fear and anger. Here was the personal trouble she had been anticipating. Natahk was the Garkohn leader, their First Hunter. She could show fear at having to see him, but she had to be careful not to show her anger. “I guess I should have expected that,” she said.

Jules put an arm around her. “Look,” he said, “I know how you must feel about the natives—any natives—after what you’ve been through. If you think talking to Natahk will be too much for you right now, I’ll tell him you can’t…”

“No,” she said. “It’s all right, Jules. I’ll see him.”

He looked at her with concern. “You’re frightened,” he said, “and sick. You’ve been like a sleepwalker these past two days. I shouldn’t have bothered you with this. I’m going to tell him to wait.”

Tempted to let him go ahead, she kept silent for a long moment. She did not want to talk to anyone about her experiences with the Tehkohn, did not want to talk to a Garkohn about anything at all. She had no doubt that the Garkohn were responsible for involving the Missionaries in this raid that had so endangered them—just as two years before, the Garkohn had made the Missionaries vulnerable by using their settlement as a base from which to raid the Tehkohn. The valley natives were not the friends the Missionaries thought them to be. Alanna had learned much about them from their Tehkohn enemies. And she had seen some of what she had learned proven in the raid just past.

The thought of having to go to Natahk now and feign ignorance and friendship sickened her. But for that reason more than any other, she had to do it. She had to let him ask her in carefully veiled words where her loyalties were. What had two years among his enemies done to her? Had he freed a Missionary prisoner, or a Tehkohn spy?

“I’m well enough, Jules,” she said finally. “I’ll talk to him.”

Jules shrugged. “All right, girl. It’s your decision.”

After perhaps another hour of walking, Jules and Natahk called the noon rest stop. Alanna sought out Natahk at once.

The Garkohn leader was a tall stocky humanoid who easily matched Alanna’s own unusual height—nearly two meters. His height and his deeper-than-usual green coloring showed that although he was of the hunter clan, he had had a judge ancestor or two. It was only within Natahk’s own lifetime that the last of the Garkohn judges had been killed, victims of interclan fighting with the more numerous hunters.

Natahk’s eyes were narrowed by a Kohn version of the epicanthic fold. His fur grew longer and thicker on his head and around his neck and shoulders, forming a kind of mane. Even his face was furred all over, though the fur was shorter. But the face was long and flat and his body and limbs were humanly proportioned. He was not apelike. The Missionaries saw him and his people as strangely colored, furred caricatures of human beings.

The Missionaries had made a religion of maintaining and spreading their own version of humanity—a religion that had helped them to preserve that humanity back on Earth. Now, though, their religion had gotten in their way. It had helped them to justify their belief that the Kohn were lower creatures—higher than apes, but lower than true humans who had been made in the image of God. The trouble was, the Missionaries had known such “intelligent animals” before. Missionary prejudices were long established and, as far as Alanna was concerned, dangerous. If she had accepted them herself, the Tehkohn would have rid her of them. The natives were human enough. And they were powerful humans.

Their greatest weapon was the fur that the Missionaries condemned them for. It was unlike any fur that the Missionaries had known back on Earth—fine thick alive stuff that changed color and seemed to change texture. It permitted the natives to blend invisibly into their surroundings whenever they wished. It could permit the Tehkohn to camouflage themselves as they scaled the Missionaries’ wall. It could permit them to murder half the colony before anyone noticed them.

Alanna found Natahk seated on the ground, his back against a tree. She noticed that he had moved as far from the Tehkohn prisoners as he could get without leaving the group entirely. Many of the prisoners were bluer than he was and would have outranked him had they been Garkohn. As the bluest of the Garkohn, he must have felt that they detracted from his impressiveness. And they did, even in Alanna’s eyes. She smiled at the thought of his discomfort as she approached him.

“Natahk,” she greeted quietly as she sat down opposite him.

He startled her by drawing his lipless mouth into a smile. “Alanna.” It was something he had copied from the Missionaries, not a Kohn expression. And he did it badly. He made it an expression of condescension, of contempt, rather than one of friendliness.

“Jules said you had questions.” Alanna concentrated on speaking English. She did not attempt to speak Garkohn, knowing how easy it would be for her to offend Natahk by slipping into the more familiar Tehkohn dialect.

“I have several questions,” said Natahk. “But first, I want to tell you that I know of your loss, and that I’m sorry.”

Alanna froze, stared at him in disbelief. Suddenly, she was fighting to maintain her self-control. But the wound the Garkohn had prodded was too raw, too new. How could he know? How could he?

Natahk went on. “We tried hard to prevent your daughter’s death. I’m sorry we failed.”

Alanna felt her control cracking, falling away. Abruptly, she folded forward and down as though in physical pain so that her face was hidden by the black veil of her hair. She made no sound. Her grief was not something to share with the Garkohn liar, the Garkohn murderer! What tricks had he used to make Jules join him in raiding the Tehkohn—join him indirectly in the murder of her child?

Still silent, unmoving, Alanna decided that Natahk would die. No matter what else happened, no matter what other revenge the Tehkohn managed to take, this Garkohn would die.

She held her position of distress several seconds longer than necessary so that when she rose, the last signs of anguish were gone from her face. Replacing them was cold hatred.

“We did not kill your child,” said Natahk. “You know that.”

She said nothing, wondered again how Natahk could possibly have known that one of the children killed in the raid had been hers. As though to draw away from its pain, her mind worried at the question.

Her daughter Tien had not been the bright golden-green of most Kohn infants. But the child’s darker strangely shaded green was not beyond the Kohn spectrum—especially not beyond the Tehkohn spectrum. It might have meant no more than that Tien was destined for higher rank than the children who had more yellow in their coloring. And Tien had looked Tehkohn—almost. Her eyes were rounder than Kohn eyes, and her hands and feet promised to be too large, too long for a Kohn. Small things, especially in such a young child. Natahk’s people would almost have had to be looking for such a child. And even having found Tien, they could not have been sure. Natahk could not have been sure…

Alanna looked at him with Tehkohn-trained eyes. At once, she detected the slight brightening of his coloring—lighter toward white. That was the only sign he gave of his triumph, his success at tricking her into confirming his suspicions. And he was not used to Missionaries reading such small signs. He seemed to think he was still adequately maintaining his facade of solemnity and concern. He had tricked her so easily. Now he sat waiting to do it again.

“Do you know how my daughter died?” she asked. She kept her voice low and calm.

“I was told that a Tehkohn huntress killed her to keep her from being taken by my hunters.”

“So.” She switched abruptly to Tehkohn, allowing her anger to show. It made no difference now. The Garkohn was already well aware of which side she had to be on. “One of your hunters fed her from his bag of meklah poison while several Tehkohn were forced to watch. He did it so that he could enjoy their reactions; I was there. It is only because the Tehkohn broke ranks so quickly to tear him apart that your hunters had no time to notice my reaction. By the time your hunters had killed some of the Tehkohn and restored order, a Tehkohn huntress had killed my child.” Alanna stared at him in silence for a moment, then continued bitterly. “Do you know that I understand what she did, First Hunter? Do you know that I am grateful to her for saving my child from the life that meklah addiction would have condemned her to—the life of a Garkohn!” She made the name an obscenity.

But she was lying. Tien’s life meant more to her than any tribal feud, more than any personal prejudice. She would rather have had her daughter alive even addicted to meklah, and thus confined to the valley. But Natahk did not know that. He would believe her, and he would know that he could never again use Tien’s death as a tool to pry information from her. That was all Alanna wanted.

She started to rise to leave him and he caught her arm in a thick, powerful, short-fingered hand. His grip was loose, however, only warning.

“I’m not finished, Alanna.”

She looked at his hand, then at him. “The Missionaries may not be able to hear us at this distance, Natahk, but they can see us well enough.”

He released her arm and again she started to leave.

“Sit still!”

She was stopped by his tone rather than his words. She looked at him and saw that his coloring had taken on more yellow with his anger. He spoke again.

“You will talk to me now, or I will have my hunters take you from the Mission settlement and bring you to me later.”

Slowly, stunned, she sat back down. He meant it. She was alerted now; he would not deceive her again. But he had already goaded her into admitting that she was his enemy, and he would treat her as an enemy. He knew the Missionaries well enough to realize that she could not afford to have them learn that she had accepted a Tehkohn man, borne a “subhuman” child. Exodus 22:19: “Whosoever lieth with a beast shall surely be put to death.” Such a sin could turn even Jules and Neila Verrick against her. Thus, Natahk felt free to threaten her, and to carry out his threat if she made it necessary. She would be in no position to complain.

“So,” he said softly. “You understand.” And he leaned back, looked at her curiously, appraisingly, letting her know the subject of his next words before he spoke them. Her husband…

“I try to imagine what kind of Tehkohn man would accept you in a liaison,” he said. “And how such a man might feel when he learned that you carried his child and the liaison had become a marriage. Which clan does your husband belong to?”

“He’s a judge.” She was careful to say the words with the proper amount of pride and disdain. Judges were, among other things, lawgivers, advisers to rulers, and sometimes, rulers themselves. The judge blue-green could have accounted for the lack of yellow in Tien’s coloring. It did not, but it could have.

“A judge.” Natahk seemed to believe her. “We have captured four judges, we lowly hunters. Four judges and a Hao!” He shimmered, gleefully luminescent, and turned to look at the prisoners. Most of them were half covered with a red paint made especially for shaming enemies, criminals, and prisoners of war. With prisoners, it also served to neutralize their camouflage ability. No red-painted captive, even if he escaped his captors, could hope simply to fade away into the woods. Red was too rare a color aboveground in both the mountains and the valley. No matter how well the unpainted parts of a prisoner’s body blended with his background, the red blazed forth to reveal him.

“I wonder,” said Natahk, “whether we have captured your husband.”

“You haven’t,” she said shortly. Another lie—but this time, perhaps only half a lie.

“So? But I’ve watched you, Alanna. The way you look at the prisoners. The way you avoid looking at the prisoners. Your face shows more than fear and painful memories. Yes, I think we’ve captured him—or driven him into the hands of the Missionaries. Is he their one crippled judge?”

She realized peripherally that the Missionaries’ lone judge must have been the one with the broken arm and the long red gash in his forehead.

“Which is it?” asked Natahk.

Alanna said nothing.

“If you have feeling for the man who fathered your child, you’ll tell me. If he belongs to the Missionaries, I can speak to Verrick, perhaps make a trade. He would be safer in my hands. I know better than to kill my prisoners. The Missionaries may not.” He paused, trying to read her carefully expressionless face, then went on. “In the southern end of this valley, there is another Garkohn town.”

“A town of farmers,” said Alanna. “I know.”

“Mostly farmers, yes, and some hunters to defend against animals and raiders, and to get meat. I’m First among them too. I could make a place there for you and your husband to resume your lives together.”

Alanna smiled grimly. “My husband is not a captive, hunter.”

He looked doubtful. “If you are telling the truth, you may be less fortunate than you think. You may have no other chance for reunion with him.”

“Reunited to live as Garkohn, our loyalties ensured by the meklah?”

“That is our way, Alanna.”

“And I have said what I thought of that ‘way.’”

“Oh yes. Death would be preferable.” He rose to his feet. “Stand up.”

She obeyed slowly, suspiciously, taking real comfort in the fact that she was still within sight of the Missionaries.

“Walk with me. I have something to show you.”

She stayed where she was. Now she had reason for her fear. “Then bring it to me, Natahk.”

He laid a hand on her shoulder. The companionable gesture had a meaning all its own among the Kohn. It was as much a threat as a raised club. “You will come with me now or later,” he said. “It makes no difference.”

She looked around desperately, not knowing what to do. Whatever he had in mind for her would no doubt be worse if she made him wait and abduct her. She could not call on the Missionaries for help. And the other who had an interest in her welfare, her husband, was in no position to help her. He should not have been a captive, probably would not be one long, but he was one now, and that meant he had problems of his own.

She told herself that Natahk would not dare do her any real harm. Hurting her would lose him the friendship of the Missionaries, and for some reason he had gone to great trouble to maintain that friendship. Surely whatever satisfaction he might get from hurting her was not worth its loss. She followed him, holding that thought.

Natahk led her by the arm as though he was afraid she might suddenly change her mind and try to go back. When she saw the heavily laden meklah tree that he was leading her toward, she did exactly that. But by then, it was too late.

She panicked, twisted away from him, ran a few steps. She was quick—easily quicker than most hunters, she knew. But Natahk was not an ordinary hunter. He caught her arm and she kicked at him.’ But she was off balance. He dodged easily. He jerked her to him, twisted her arm behind her. His other arm clamped across her throat painfully, cutting off her breath.

“You’re being foolish, Alanna,” he said quietly. “What would you have done if you had managed to break away? Where would you go to escape me?”

She could not answer. She stood bent slightly backward against him by the pressure of his arm across her throat.

He pushed and guided her the rest of the way toward the tree, then spoke quietly into her ear. “What I intend to show you is a truth about yourself. I cannot believe that a Missionary can become Tehkohn in only two years. Now many Tehkohn would truly prefer death to the meklah. I know because I have watched them starve themselves to death when they reali/e that they cannot escape—that death is the only alternative to becoming Garkohn. But I have never seen Missionaries deliberately kill themselves for any reason.” He moved his arm from hei throat and suddenly she could breathe again. As she stood gasping, she felt his hand caress her throat, now obscenely gentle. “Pick a meklah fruit and eat it, Alanna, or I will kill you.”

She started to speak but he raised his hand to touch her mouth.

“Make no pleas and no outcry. Do exactly as I say, and you will live. Do anything else, and you will die. Now. Pick the fruit.”

One small fruit. Only one. It seemed so harmless. Yet the Tehkohn had warned her, She had been addicted once. Even one fruit would mean readdiction.

She had watched a room full of people, Missionary and Garkohn, die very slowly in meklah withdrawal. She had not been able to watch too carefully because she had been in withdrawal herself. For days, she had been near death. She could no longer remember all that had happened to her during that time, but she remembered the pain.

Her hand seemed to reach up against her will to pick a ripe yellow fruit.

She looked at the fruit and wondered whether it would kill her this time the way it had killed the others. Because she would have to withdraw again. She would have no choice.

She bit into the fruit, found it firm and sweet, delicious against all reason. No wonder the Missionaries had welcomed it so warmly .when the Garkohn introduced them to it. It had been one of the first gifts of the Garkohn to the new colonists three years before. The Mission doctor had tested it and declared it safe to eat. No one had thought that it might not be safe to stop eating.

She finished the fruit and the Garkohn released her. She did not move, did not even turn to look at him. “When the Tehkohn come to kill you, Natahk, I hope they do it slowly. I hope they take away your meklah and let me watch.”

“So?” He smiled again grotesquely. “You should use your time thinking of things that are possible. Your husband, for instance, freed and cleansed of the red stigma.”

She ignored him, started to walk back to where the raiding party rested. He moved after her quickly.

“Why do you continually force me to threaten you?”

“What more do you think your threats can do?” Her voice was flat, dead. “I’ve told you that you don’t have my husband. You can’t force me to point out someone who isn’t a captive. If you try, I’ll choose one of your judges and claim him to please you. And you will be pleased with a lie.”

She walked faster and left him behind. He did not call her again. She skirted widely around the prisoners and returned to the Missionaries, who were just preparing to resume their homeward march.

CHAPTER TWO

Alanna

We were busy cannibalizing the ship, clearing land, and building our cabins when I decided to learn the Garkohn language. It bothered me, frightened me to live among people I couldn’t understand-especially since they were learning to understand us so quickly. To the disgust of several Missionaries, Jules not only agreed with me, but he lessened my share of the work so that I would have time to learn.

Next, I had to find a teacher. I asked around. Missionaries were often approached by Garkohn who had been ordered by their leader Natahk to learn English. Most Missionaries did not want to learn the Garkohn language, but sometimes they condescended to teach English. Industriously, the Garkohn learned. Now, I was told that there was a persistent huntress who had been living in the woods near our settlement for days trying to get someone to teach her. A Missionary man pointed her out to me.

She was sitting on the thick exposed root of a meklah tree. Such trees spread some of their roots vinelike over the ground until they found open sunlight. Then they anchored themselves to the ground and began growing into new trees—or new extensions of old trees. Aboveground, much of the valley was covered with roots as thick as the bodies of two or three men. Missionaries had blasted loose many of them. The Garkohn had watched the blasting with fascination.

Now though, the Garkohn woman I wanted to talk with was leaning back watching nothing at all. The coloring of her legs and lower torso blended into the rich yellow-brown of the wood she was sitting on so that she appeared to be growing out of it. Unconscious camouflage. Already we Missionaries had seen it too often to be surprised by it.

I walked over to the woman and when she saw me she stood up, her coloring darkening to its normal deep green. She was tall—only half a head shorter than I was—and even then I knew that because of her coloring she ranked high among her people. Her body was straight and stocky and her eyes were wary. She examined me as closely as I was examining her.

“Alanna,” I said, raising my hand to my chest. “Toh Alanna. Ehtoh kai?” I had learned that much just from living around Garkohn for two of Jules’s thirty-day months. On a world without a moon, Jules had decided to stay with thirty and thirty-one-day months at least for a while.

“Ah,” the woman said. “Toh Gehl.” She was silent for a moment, then said my name. “Ah-la-na?”

It was a start. I took her arm and sat down, pulling her down beside me. The Garkohn seemed always to be touching each other so I did not expect her to be offended. I was surprised, though, at the hardness of her muscle beneath her soft fur.

She caught my hand as I released her and looked at it, examined it really, seeing how much longer my fingers were than her own, bending my fingers at the joints, testing the strength of my fingernails. She brushed a furry finger over the short sparse hairs that grew out of the back of my hand.

Then she held my open hand flat between her own two and shook it once. “Tahncheah,” she said. Then she repeated it more slowly. “Tahn.” She grasped my fingers alone. “Tahn.” And she made a tight fist of my hand. “Cheah.” She let go of me for a moment and struck her open palm with a closed fist. Then she held up the fist. “Cheah.” And then the open hand, “Tahncheah.” She whitened slightly and extended one of her hands for me to examine.

I took it, smiling to myself. We were going to get along, Gehl and I. We would teach each other.

Every day we met at that tree root as the Mission settlement took shape around us. When we were communicating fairly well, I in Garkohn and she in English, she began bringing a hunter to her lessons. The two were almost identical. Later, I noticed that Gehl was darker, slightly more blue, but at first, I could tell them apart only when the hunter sat so that his genitals were visible. It was this man—Ihiateh, his name was—who taught me that Garkohn men were not as poorly endowed sexually as most Missionaries thought. Their genitals were simply more protected within their bodies than were those of Missionary men.

Ihiateh was Gehl’s temporary husband and once as the two sat talking with me, the huntress said something to arouse him. She spoke to him in a quick aside that I did not quite hear. Whatever the words were though, they gave Ihiateh an erection that no Missionary man would have had reason to be ashamed of. I stared at him in surprise, then sat back waiting to see how they would handle the situation. I had already heard much from other Missionaries about Garkohn lasciviousness and immorality.

Gehl went white with what seemed to be amusement. Ihiateh spoke sharply to her, then caught her arm and dragged her off into the woods.

The next day, Gehl came to me alone and immediately began questioning me in her careful English.

“You have no man?”

I shook my head. She had learned to interpret the gesture. “Not yet. I must choose very carefully before I accept a man because by our custom, I would have to go through a ceremony with him and be as firmly tied to him as you would be to Ihiateh if you and he had a child.”

Flecks of yellow mixed strangely with Gehl’s deep green. She glowed slightly, making an iridescence. Doubt. Confusion. “You have a ceremony before there is a child?”

“Yes. Before the man and woman are even permitted to…” I frowned. I was speaking Garkohn and she English as usual. I had no word now though for what I wanted to say. “How do you say, to come together as with a man and woman, to…?”

“To mate?” she said in Garkohn. It was exactly the same word I had heard her use in referring to animals. I had known it, but had not realized that it should also be applied to people. The Missionaries made careful distinctions in English. Animals mated or bred. Humans obeyed the first commandment of God: “Be fruitful and multiply.”

“Mate,” I said. “Yes.”

“But so often a union is childless… What do your people do? Must a man and woman stay together in sterile union?”

I thought about that and found myself wondering whether she was inadvertently telling me the reason for some of what the Missionaries called Garkohn immorality—the frequent coupling and uncoupling of Garkohn adults. Perhaps what the Missionaries had seen as a matter of morality was more a matter of necessity. Perhaps the Garkohn were just not as fertile as the Missionaries.

“They would not be held permanently in such a union,” I said. “But they would have to stay together long enough to be certain that their union was sterile. They are joined by our law. They are not permitted to seek other partners until their union is dissolved by law.”

Gehl flashed yellow disapproval. “I would not like to be trapped in such a union. Will you choose a man soon?”

I shuddered. I was young and could get away with my disinterest in Missionary men now. They were certainly not interested in me. They had been during my early days among them when I had known no better than to go with them to secret places where we could break Mission law together. I stopped that as soon as I understood that I was risking the comfort and security that I had found with the Verricks—as soon as I understood that the men and I were “behaving like animals” together instead of marrying and keeping true human tradition. Then the men and I had no more interest in each other. There was no one of them that I wanted a marriage with, and now they pretended to find me contemptible because I was not “pure.” I had shared pleasure with some of them. I was guilty of sin, but somehow, they were all still innocent. Foolishness! It disgusted me to think I would have to spend my life with anyone so foolish.

“I’m in no hurry to choose a man,” I told Gehl. “I don’t want to be trapped either.”

“I will break with Ihiateh soon,” she said. “Natahk has asked me to come to him.”

“Gehl, will you help me learn to hunt?”

Her narrow eyes widened, and for the first time, her furry face seemed to show expression. Surprise. “To hunt?” she said. “But you have food. There is meklah over all the valley, and we bring you meat. And in time, you can kill some of your own animals and plant your own crops.”

“It will be awhile before we can slaughter many of our animals,” I said. “And though it is good of your people to help us, bring us meat, we should learn to help ourselves. We should learn what we can of your ways of hunting just as we learn to speak with you.”

“Most of your people are not learning to speak. We learn your English.”

“Then we should change.”

“You need not. We are content and your people are content. Why should there be change?”

“Will you help me learn to hunt?”

She gazed downward, answered softly. “No. Natahk has forbidden it.”

“Forbidden…“I frowned. “Why?”

“He has not said.”

She was lying. There was no new yellow in her coloring but there was suddenly an odd tension in the way she held her body. She was suppressing emotion, holding her coloring normal as Missionaries might hold their faces placid in spite of fear or anger. But I knew her well enough now to see through the deception.

“I speak your language well enough now,” she said. “I think we need not meet again.”

I stared at her. In spite of whatever had suddenly fallen between us, I had come to think of her as a friend. I had felt more comfortable with her in the short time that we had been meeting than I had felt with many of the Missionaries after three years. She was more like me somehow. Freer, less concerned with appearances.

“You know English,” I said, “and I know Garkohn. In the exchange, haven’t we become friends?”

Now she yellowed, just slightly. “I think you are a fighter.”

“When I have to, I fight. You know that we don’t divide ourselves into clans as you do.”

“I know.” She sighed, then suddenly flared yellow. “Sometimes it is foolish to make individual friendships among foreign fighters. But we will try a little foolishness.” Her coloring settled back to normal. “Perhaps soon you will have a friend highly placed.”

“So?”

“I… you will say nothing of this to anyone?”

“I’ll say nothing.”

“I’m going to challenge the Third Hunter. I can beat him. I know I can.”

I was impressed. I had seen the Third Hunter and he was impressive. If Gehl really thought she could beat him…

“Natahk knows,” said Gehl. “He says my ambition will kill me. He knows that if I beat the Third Hunter, I will take on the Second.”

“But you will not challenge Natahk himself, after that?”

She gave me a look of yellow disgust. “I do want to live, Alanna. I only challenge where there is a chance for me to win. No Garkohn would challenge Natahk until he is old and weak.”

I grinned. I had not seen anyone among the Missionaries who would have dared to challenge the massive Garkohn leader either. Not without a gun in his hand, at least.

“Come tonight and eat with my parents and me,” I told her. “Soon you may be too busy for such things.”

She looked thoughtful. “I can bring Ihiateh?”

I tried to hold back, but suddenly I found myself laughing aloud. “Bring him, Gehl, but…”

“I know.” She whitened. “He already knew some Missionary ways and he told me. I think he would have beaten me yesterday if he could have. I won’t provoke him here among your people again.”

Alanna passed through the high gates of the stockade with the raiding party and saw before her a town far more finished than it had been when she was abducted. There were more houses now. The settlement was much like the walled town the Missionaries had lived in back on Earth. As on Earth, the houses and storage buildings were grouped comfortably around a wide expanse of open land held in common by all the people. The common was landscaped as it had been on Earth with one difference. For some reason, there was no grass—no neatly cut lawn for.the people to sit or lie on. There were a few flowers—Earth flowers—nourishing in the alien soil. There was bare hard-packed ground, and there were tall meklah trees connected to each other by thick benchlike roots. Clumps of trees formed natural gathering places. Or the people could gather in the open as they were doing now around the raiding party. The Missionaries who had stayed behind and the several Garkohn who happened to be at the Mission settlement gathered around the raiding party just in front of the largest fragment of the ship that was left intact—the great, nearly hollow shell that served as the Mission Church.

Alanna found herself struggling to comprehend the words of welcome and congratulation that came both in English and in Garkohn. Both languages spoken quickly and carelessly sounded oddly foreign to her. More than once, she found herself mentally translating them into Tehkohn as though Tehkohn was her native language.

During the first moments, she was jostled but otherwise ignored by people eager to greet relatives or get a look at the prisoners. Missionaries in particular came to stare with a mixture of hostility and curiosity at the silent Tehkohn.

Finally, people began to notice Alanna. Her clothing attracted them. She was clearly a woman and yet she was dressed in pants and a short belted tunic—clothing forbidden by the Missionary interpretation of Deuteronomy 22:5, which they chose to enforce strictly. “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.” Thus Neila Verrick had quoted when Alanna, fresh from the wilds where she had gone almost naked, complained about the bothersome long dresses all Missionary girls and women wore. Alanna had never taken the prohibition seriously. As soon as the Tehkohn asked her what she needed to keep her furless body warm, she had described her present clothing to them. An artisan had managed to turn out exactly what she wanted and she had worn it in warmth and comfort ever since.

Now the Missionaries came to stare at her and at her strange clothing. She looked at their furless faces with interest. Many of the men had beards but that was not the same as the all-over fur covering of the Kohn. Through much of her time with the Tehkohn, she had longed to see another Earth-human face. Sometimes she had felt alone and more lonely than she ever had in the wilds of Earth—a different kind of loneliness. Now, finally, she was surrounded by the faces she had longed to see, and she felt herself to be among strangers. She felt confused, vaguely frightened. People spoke to her and she did not answer them.

“Alanna!”

“You’re Alanna Verrick, aren’t you?”

“Don’t you remember me, Alanna?”

“Were you with those animals all this time?”

“Hey, Alanna…”

They clustered around her, greeting her, welcoming her home, while she longed desperately to be at home. To be at the home she had left in the mountains. To be away from this crowding shouting gesturing mob. What was wrong with these people? The raiding party had not behaved this way.

Since she would not speak, the people began to talk about her rather than to her.

“It is the Verrick wild human, isn’t it?”

“It’s her all right—though dressed like that…”

“Why doesn’t she say something?”

“You know, she never was too bright.” This from an older woman who had never quite been able to forgive Alanna’s wildland origins. “Maybe she’s forgotten how to speak English.”

“Why not,” said someone else. “The Tehkohn had her almost as long as we did.”

Then Neila Verrick was there, hurrying through the crowd, her face wet with tears. “Alanna! Oh, it is you. Alanna, girl…”

In Neila’s arms, Alanna found her first moments of peace within the stockade. Her fear and her feelings of isolation began to ebb and she could smile at the woman who had become her mother. She could start to feel at home.

Now she grew more aware of her body’s discomfort. Now she had relaxed enough to concern herself with mere discomfort. She was hungry and weary and in need of meklah. The meklah need was only strong enough to emphasize her hunger, so far, causing her to feel as though she had been without food for many hours longer than she actually had. It was only nightfall—a half day since Natahk had forced her into readdiction. But she had eaten nothing since then, nothing for most of the day except that single yellow fruit.

It did not matter. For the moment, nothing mattered as she greeted her foster mother. She could hear people near her asking questions again. How had she survived? What had the Tehkohn done to her? Where were the other captives? Only this last question made any impression on her. There were people around her whom she recognized now as relatives of those who had died in the Tehkohn prison room. She did not want to tell them that their relatives were dead. She was still too close herself to the pain of losing a loved one and she did not want to watch as that pain replaced the hope in these people’s faces. Now was the time to concentrate on keeping the living alive, not on mourning the dead.

Still without speaking, she let Neila lead her into the Verrick cabin.

The main room of the cabin was as cluttered as she remembered it, full of the tools, furniture, and utensils of Missionary life. The room was used for cooking, for eating, for almost any work that could be done indoors, and simply for gathering together and taking pleasure in each other’s company. The room, like Neila’s presence, helped Alanna to bridge the two-year gap and rejoin herself to her Missionary past. She needed that past now to help her know how best to reach the Missionaries through their xenophobic shield. With a little rest now, and food, she would be ready to begin on Jules and Neila.

But weary as she was, she saw that she was not to be left alone yet. Just before Neila shut the door, a tall Garkohn huntress slipped in fully camouflaged. Neila seemed not to see her, but Alanna saw her plainly, marveled at her carelessness. No Tehkohn would use camouflage so poorly and expect it to be successful. But clearly the Garkohn got away with it at the Mission settlement. Or they had been getting away with it. Now was the beginning of the end of that. Alanna greeted the huntress quietly.

“Gehl”

The huntress dropped her camouflage, became as visible to Neila as she had been to Alanna. Beside Alanna, Neila jumper!, nvje a quick “Oh!” of surprise.

“Alanna,” murmured Gehl. This huntress had taught Alanna the Garkohn language and in return, Alanna had taught her English. Two years ago, Gehl had been a friend. Even now, with all the changes that had taken place, Alanna realized that she was glad to see the huntress. Gehl’s presence, like Neila’s, made the settlement seem more like home. But Gehl was Garkohn. Did she come now as persona] friend or tribal enemy.

“Your eyes are good,” said Gehl in English.

“Very good,” agreed Alanna.

“And you are strong—even stronger than I thought you were. In my life, I have never seen anyone return alive from Tehkohn captivity.”

“Your strength was promising too,” said Alanna. “What is your rank now?”

“Second, as I said it would be.”

“So. And it has cost you.” There was something wrong with Gehl’s left eye. Alanna had not noticed it at first. Over the eye’s natural deep green, there was a white film.

“It was worth the price,” said Gehl.

“Can you see out of that eye?”

“No. It doesn’t matter.” It mattered, and Gehl knew it. Her blind eye coupled with her high position would increase the number of her challengers dramatically. And every challenger would strike at her one good eye. Sooner or later, someone would hit it. But that was Gehl’s problem.

Alanna shrugged. “Are you with Natahk now?”

“We are together.” She switched to Tehkohn abruptly. “Though I have been less fortunate than you.”

Alanna lifted her head slightly and answered in Tehkohn. “You’ve already spoken to Natahk then.”

“So.”

“And after hearing what he had to say, you still think me fortunate?”

Gehl looked away. “No. I would not have wished you… that pain. Not even now when we must cause each other pain.”

“Must we? We were friends once.”

“Fighters of different tribes ask for pain when they form friendships.”

The two stared at each other for a moment. Then Gehl turned and walked out of the house.

“What was all that?” asked Neila.

Alanna rubbed a hand over her face. “That was the end of a friendship.”

“Because you were captured by the Tehkohn?”

“Yes. And because I survived.”

“She would rather you had died?”

“I don’t think so. She just can’t trust me any more.”

“You have an accent,” said Neila softly.

Alanna turned to look at her. “Accent?”

“You speak English with an odd accent. Tehkohn, I suppose. That may be what bothered Gehl.”

“I’ll get rid of it as quickly as I can. It might bother people more important than Gehl.” Alanna paused, looked at her foster mother with concern. “Does it bother you?”

Neila hugged her again. “Of course not. I’m so glad to have you home, nothing could bother me. Come over here. Look.” She led Alanna to Alanna’s old bedroom, small, clean, the bed made as though it was still in regular use. “People said, ‘Why don’t you turn it into a storage room now?’” Neila smiled. “And I said, ‘Because I don’t believe Alanna is dead. I’ll believe it when our men have gone to the Tehkohn dwelling and found out for themselves.’ It was the Garkohn who convinced everyone that you and the others were dead.” She frowned. “Alanna… what about the others?”

“They really are dead.”

“Oh.” Neila turned away, her head bowed. Alanna went into the tiny bedroom that had been hers, saw the large wooden chest that held her clothing and possessions. It paralleled the bed on the opposite side of the room, leaving not much more than a T-shaped passageway to move in. There were curtains at the one small window and a cloth of the same pattern covering the chest. The bed was covered with a heavy quilt that had once belonged to one of Jules and Neila’s three children. The bedroom was as simple as the main room was cluttered. It was as simple as the rooms Alanna had shared with her husband.

She went back to Neila, started to lift her hand in a Tehkohn gesture of affection that had become second nature to her. But she caught herself and let her hand fall to her side before it touched Neila. She spoke quietly.

“I’m going to rest a little before I do anything else. I’m so tired…”

“How did you survive, Alanna?”

“I’ll tell you about it—you and Jules—as soon as he comes in. I just want to rest a little first.”

Neila said nothing, but as Alanna retreated to her room, she could feel her foster mother’s gaze following her with curiosity. Innocent dangerous curiosity.

CHAPTER THREE

Diut

We captured Alanna along with eight others of her kind and twelve Garkohn. The Garkohn, we knew, would die during their period of cleansing. They had been dependent on the meklah for too many generations ever to be cleansed. But as far as we knew, their strange new allies, who called themselves Missionaries, had only just come to the poison. We thought some of them might survive.

I realized later that if I had separated the Missionaries from the Garkohn—shut them in different rooms for cleansing—more Missionaries might have lived. As it was, they were unnerved by the fatalism of the Garkohn. Alanna said later that several of them gave up their lives almost without a struggle when they saw how completely the Garkohn had given up.

As it was though, I knew almost nothing of the Missionaries. They had joined themselves with the Garkohn and I had decided to treat them as Garkohn until they proved otherwise. Only Alanna gave me the proof I sought. Only she lived.

When the five-day period of cleansing was over, I went to the room where she and the others had been held. My fighters were cleaning the room and clearing out the corpses for burning. I saw her, strangely colored, furless, very thin after her ordeal, covered with filth. I thought she was dead, but as I was about to turn away from her, she moved. I brought her water from a pot on one of the carts my hunters had brought in. The water was for washing the room, but none of it had been used yet. I knelt beside Alanna, spoke to her in Garkohn.

“Can you understand me, Missionary?”

She turned her face to me weakly and I could see that it was cut and bruised. Her eyes were swollen shut. I supposed that she was still in pain. There is no gentle way to rid one’s body of the poison and become clean.

She made a sound that was not a word and I realized that she could not speak. She had become so hoarse from screaming in pain that her voice was temporarily gone. From my cupped hands, I gave her water to drink. She swallowed it eagerly. I would not let her have as much as she wanted or let her drink it as quickly as she wanted. I had seen enough of my Tehkohn survive the meklah to know how easily she could make herself sick again.

I looked around the room at my fighters. “Who captured this Missionary?” I asked.

“I did,” said one of my judges. Jeh. He was loading the body of a Garkohn huntress onto the cart that would take the dead out for burning. He threw the dead woman onto the cart and came over to us. He is a friend, Jeh. We were children together, though he is older. I sided with him when he broke tradition and began a liaison and then a marriage with the huntress Cheah. He is a well-colored judge, and she, a well-colored huntress. Neither of their clans wished to have them marry out. But they fought all challengers for their right to do so, in accordance with ancient custom. When they had each beaten their challengers and the people continued to complain, I said “Enough.” I was still very young then but the people obeyed me. Jeh and Cheah were left alone. Now Jeh looked down at the Missionary he had captured.

“I thought she might live,” he said. “She almost took my eyes when I caught her. And three days ago, Cheah and I found her crawling out of this room.”

“She found her own way out?”

“Yes. By accident perhaps.”

“Or perhaps not. Her people may not all be as blind as our watchers think.”

“None of them saw our watchers.”

I let my body whiten a little. “None saw them and knew them as Tehkohn, no. But to people as different as this one,” I touched Alanna with my foot, “Tehkohn and Garkohn must look much alike.”

“Our watchers say this one is the daughter of the Missionary leader.”

“So? That may be important in the future—if you can keep her alive now.”

“Cheah and I will care for her if you wish.”

I flashed positive white. “It would be best for fighters to care for her now. You will be able to handle her when her strength returns.”

He looked from Alanna to me. “Aside from tending her injuries, what care shall we give her?”

“Begin teaching her our language, our ways—as in the old stories. There was a time when Garkohn survived the cleansing and our ancestors made good Tehkohn of them.”

“But she is so different…”

“She is. But I wonder how much the differences matter. We will let her show us. Through her we will learn more of what her kind can do—more of what the Garkohn might use them for.”

Jeh flashed white assent, then bent and lifted Alanna. She moaned as though in pain. Her pain was almost at an end though, if she proved tractable. Jeh and Cheah would treat her kindly. Kindness was best. She might be a valuable hostage someday. Meanwhile, it would be interesting to watch her change—to help her change. I would take part in her re-education myself. And I would see to it that if she was ever returned to her people, she would greet them as an emissary of the Tehkohn. She would speak to her parents for me and against Natahk.

For the first time in two years, Alanna lay on her own bed at the Mission colony and slid uncomfortably into a meklah dream. She had intended to use these moments of privacy to think, to plan a way to thwart Natahk—and Gehl. They both knew of her marriage. The fact that they kept it secret indicated that they planned to use the information to control her somehow. Natahk could make her a pawn of the Garkohn whenever he chose. And as soon as he realized that she was undoing his work, bringing the Tehkohn and the Missionaries together in peace rather than in war, he would begin to apply pressure. Thus, Alanna’s first moves had to be direct and sweeping. She had to give the Missionaries a hard push so that if she was silenced or killed or abducted again, the Missionaries would go on along the path that she had pointed out to them. To guide them, though, she had to become one of them again—or as much one of them as she had ever been. Now, ironically, her renewed meklah addiction helped her slip back into the ways of her Missionary past. Meklah dreams had their uses.

Meklah dreams came to people who allowed themselves to reach the second stage of meklah withdrawal—the stage of remembering. The first stage was hunger, uncomplicated, but intense, and distinctly, hunger for one of the many meklah products of the valley. Another ripe sweet meklah fruit or tea made from the leaves of the meklah tree or bread made from the unripe fruit dried and ground to flour or . But the list was endless. Meklah was the staple of the valley. Even meat and fish were seasoned with it. The Garkohn fermented it to make a kind of wine. No one had trouble getting enough of it. The tree was an evergreen that grew wild all over the valley. People were not even conscious of being addicted unless they left the valley—went into the mountains where the tree did not grow. Or unless they simply chose not to eat.

Fine sweat appeared on Alanna’s forehead. She felt almost sick with hunger. The meklah was demanding. She was tempted to try to eat something that did not contain the meklah just to relieve her hunger a little. But she knew better. Eating anything other than meklah now would start her vomiting and bring her into full withdrawal. The time for her to risk that would come, certainly, but it had not come yet. Best to wait now and let the memories come as she knew they would.

She closed her eyes, let her thoughts drift into the past. It was not so much remembering as reliving. Only time was distorted so that she could experience the events of days, of months, in only minutes. In her mind, she returned to Earth.

There, she met a woman, small and slender with hair that was long and very black like Alanna’s hair, and with eyes as narrow as Kohn eyes. And there was a man, as lean and tall as Alanna was now. His coloring was dark brown, almost black, contrasting strangely with the very fair skin of the woman. Alanna stood between them, her eyes only slightly narrowed, her skin a smooth medium brown.

They protected each other, these two, and together, they protected the child they had created. Even in the end when the Clayarks came to loot and kill, the man and woman held them off long enough for the child to escape.

Alanna had been eight years old then. And she was on her own. She had grown thin, hard, and feral stealing and foraging for herself. She had lived in the streets of the nearly deserted city of her birth, sometimes venturing out to the open land and to the walled Missionary town. By her fifteenth year when the Missionaries caught her stealing from their cornfield, she was an animal.

A Missionary guard shot her as she fled with an armload of corn. He was doing his job. Verrick Colony had lost too much in crops and in lives to disease-spreading thieves.

The shot only wounded her. The guard was stepping in close to finish her when Jules arrived. As she learned later, Jules had just lost his third and last child to the plague of Clay’s Ark. No doubt that was why he reacted so emotionally to a scene that had become all too familiar at the colony.

He knocked the rifle from the hands of her would-be executioner before the man could fire. Then he lifted Alanna into his arms and carried her back to his home. If she had had the plague, his unwary handling of her could have cost him his life. Alanna, wild with tear and pain, struggled, tried to bite him. Fortunately, she was too weak to succeed.

She recuperated from her wound in his house and he and his wife Neila began to teach her to be human again. She did not realize until later how difficult she must have made this for them. She bore them no love during those early days, and little gratitude. She obeyed them, when she understood enough to obey, because they were strong and wealthy beyond belief as she understood wealth. They had huge amounts of food and safe dry shelter—and they shared these things with her willingly. She obeyed them hoping to bribe them to continue their extravagance.

She had to learn Mission doctrine and unlearn many of the words and habits she had used in the wilds. Her habits were “dirty,” her speech “obscene.” She must change.

She listened and remembered and changed with a speed that startled the Verricks. Pleased, they began to teach her from the Bible and from a book called The Missionaries of Humanity, which interpreted the parts of the Bible that held special meaning for Missionaries. From this last book came the pledge that Alanna had to recite in the church before all the people of Verrick Colony: “I accept the Lord God who made man in His own image and gave him dominion over the universe. I accept Jesus Christ, the Son of God and of a human woman, as living proof of the kinship between God and humankind. The purpose of my life from this day forward will be to fulfill my role in our holy Mission—to preserve and to spread the sacred God-image of humankind.”

Alanna said the words, even understood them. The Missionaries believed that their shape was sacred while the Clayark beast-shape—that of the four-legged mutant children born to plague survivors—was a work of Satan. So many words. Alanna simply recited the pledge so that Jules and Neila would be pleased and stop bothering her about it.

Not until she began to hear other Missionaries talk about exiling her back to the wilds, or at least sending her to another colony, did she begin to realize what valuable allies she had in the Verricks.

The colonists had never really accepted her. She represented the wild outsiders, diseased and healthy, who had preyed on them for years. Most Missionary adults were content to express their displeasure by complaining to each other. But their children were more direct. Alanna was sometimes followed by a jeering crowd of Missionary children. She first ignored them, then regarded them with silent contempt—children who had never known hunger, soft children who would not have lasted a day in the wilds. Several of them were adolescents, as old as she was or older. Old enough to know better.

Alanna made no move against them until they attacked her. Then she put her back against the wall of the nearest house and fought them as though she had never left the wilds. She brought down four of them—one with her fist, one with a newly shod foot, and two with a stone she snatched up. The rest fled screaming back to their parents.

And their parents were outraged.

So the wild human had gone berserk. Just what everyone had been afraid of. After all, what could you expect from a creature more animal than human.

Jules came to Alanna’s defense at once. He met with the people in the church and told them they had been lucky. Alanna had been attacked by at least ten people, he said, and yet she had not killed even one—though surely with her experience, she could have. Was that the behavior of a savage wild human? Which Missionary, attacked by ten people, would control himself as carefully?

When the meeting was over and the people had gone away grumbling more quietly, Jules went home and asked Alanna whether she actually had held back.

“You mean, could I have killed?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I could have.”

He looked at a particularly large bruise on one side of her face. She had not come through the righting unbloodied. “Why didn’t you?” he asked.

“It’s a sin among the people here. Your Bible said it was a sin.”

“‘Thou shalt not kill,’” quoted Jules.

“Not that,” she said. “It was one of the other verses that came to me. ‘He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall surely be put to death.’”

Jules looked away from her for a moment, said nothing.

“If I had killed, wouldn’t the people here have killed me?”

For a time she thought Jules would not answer her. Then, “Yes. They probably would have, regardless of the circumstances. And I don’t think I would have been able to stop them.”

“You would have tried?”

“Don’t make it necessary for me to try. For your own sake, Alanna, be careful.”

“I’m careful. All the time. I think the ones who attacked me have learned to be careful too now.”

He grinned suddenly. “Yes, I don’t think they’ll bother you again. You taught them a lesson they needed.”

She began to draw closer to him then. Twice, he had stood against his people for her. He had chosen to do this—as her parents, on that final day, had chosen to stay behind and fight. From the time of her parents’ death, she had not been close to another person. Others were, at best, competitors for the limited food supply. At worst, they were Clayarks, predators, willing to eat the flesh of normal humans whom they considered inferior primitives. But the Verricks had been different from the first. She could remember a time when she was recovering from her gunshot wound—a time when Neila sat beside her and put food into her mouth. This was the most overwhelming of her early Missionary experiences. In the wilds, if someone was weak and attempting to eat, someone else might come to pry the food out of his mouth—but never to put food in. And Neila Verrick had done another thing for her.

An older woman, Beatrice Stamp, had been visiting Neila while Alanna was recuperating. Alanna was pretending to be asleep. She often did that during her recuperation when people other than the Verricks were in the house. Thus she avoided seeing the smiles that even she could read as false, and the frowns from more honest people that were all too real. But Beatrice Stamp had already had her look at the captive wild human—she was one of those who had smiled. Now she had come to see Neila for another reason.

“Neila, I’ve been talking to some of the others and they agree. If we’re going to keep the girl in the colony, surely she’d be happier with her own kind.”

There had been a moment of silence, then Neila spoke quietly. “Her own kind? Who are you suggesting I give my daughter to, Bea?”

The older woman sighed. “Oh, my. I knew this was going to be difficult. But, Neila, the girl isn’t white.”

“She’s Afro-Asian from what she says of her parents. Black father, Asian mother.”

“Well, we don’t have any Asians, but one of our black families might…”

“She has a home, Bea. Right here.”

“But…”

“Most of the blacks here are no more interested than the whites in adopting a wild human. The ones who are interested have already been here. Jules and I turned them down.”

“…so I’d heard.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I thought that after you’d had a few days with the girl, you might… reconsider.”

There was the sound of Neila’s laughter. “Come to my senses, you mean.”

“That’s exactly what I mean!” snapped the older woman. “Several of us feel that you and Jules ought to be setting a better example for the young people here—not encouraging them to mix and…”

“Bring it up at the next council meeting, Bea.” Neila sounded weary.

“I had hoped we wouldn’t have to do that.”

“If you feel it needs doing, do it. Now I’m awfully busy, so unless you had something else you wanted to discuss…”

Beatrice Stamp left, offended. Later when Alanna’s speech was a little better—from the beginning, she understood more than she could say—she asked Neila about the incident. And she learned for the first time how important some Missionaries believed their own coloring to be.

“We’ll be getting our ship soon,” said Neila. “We’ll be immigrating to a world all our own. I wonder whether people like Bea really think our small colony can survive separating itself into this and that race.”

“She’ll make trouble?” said Alanna.

Neila smiled unpleasantly. “She’d like to, but she wouldn’t dare. The people here are too bound together already. She has no support except from her little clique of aging bigots.”

“I’ll stay here then?”

“Do you want to stay here, Lanna, with Jules and me?”

“Yes.” Food, shelter, warm clothing, kindness. “Yes.”

“This is your home then.” Neila hugged her. For the first time, Alanna did not try to pull away. She was growing used to being touched.

Verrick Colony remained on Earth for two more years before it received its Mission Ship. By then, the Missionaries and Alanna had gotten used to each other. There was no more trouble even from Beatrice Stamp and her friends. Alanna had made a few friends herself. She had learned to read and write, and she could quote more from the Bible than most lifelong Missionaries. She was careful to observe Mission law even when, as often happened, it seemed foolish to her. She was as much a Missionary as she would ever become.

Finally, with the Missionaries of Verrick Colony, she prepared to leave Earth. There would be no returning. The Mission Ship would take the colonists and their supplies to a habitable new world, then it would die. It would become nothing more than a carcass to be cannibalized. The ship’s builders were taking no chances. Only Earth’s first starship, the Clay’s Ark, had been allowed to return after its voyage. With it had come the Clayark microorganism, secure inside the bodies of the surviving members of the crew. The men and women of the crew, driven by a disease-induced need to spread their affliction, evaded their mandatory quarantine and examination. They escaped easily since no one had expected them to try to escape. Then they disappeared into the general population and gleefully began spreading a world-wide epidemic. The Clayark plague had killed over half the population. It was still killing, and still causing the distinctive Clayark mutation in the young of its surviving victims.

The Missionaries were not leaving solely to escape the Clayark plague though. As Neila Verrick told Alanna on their last night at Verrick Colony, “We’re going to fulfill our part in the Mission. We’re going to spread the Sacred Image to one more world.”

Alanna sat comfortably on the bare floor of the Verrick house listening to the pious words, and knowing that Neila believed them. But Alanna had heard words less pious from other Missionaries—words that bothered her. She frowned, spoke to Neila.

“Some people are saying the ship is a trick. They say there is no ship and we’re being led like cattle to be slaughtered.”

Neila sighed, put aside the book she had held open pn her lap. She was sitting in a rocking chair made of wood. Her favorite chair, soon to be abandoned with the rest of the settlement’s furniture. “Do you believe the rumor, Lanna?”

“That we are to be slaughtered? Even the people who say it don’t believe it. If they did, nothing would move them from here.”

Neila gave her a small relieved smile. “Exactly. And just to put your mind fully at ease, I’ll tell you, I know the starships are real. I’ve seen them. I’ve seen them launched with Missionaries aboard. Most of the people here haven’t had that experience, and they’re a little afraid.”

“They say the people who build the ships aren’t Missionaries, so why should they help Missionaries.”

“Because they’re human—more or less. Because they care whether or not the human species survives. We Missionaries are their insurance. They have no choice but to stay here with the Clayarks. They think they can survive, but whether they can or not, they hope we will. Some of us, at least.”

“They can’t leave even though they have the ships?” said Alanna.

“That’s right. We’re lucky. If they could have left, they might have abandoned most of us. Their weakness gives us a chance.”

“What weakness? What’s wrong with them?”

“Some Missionaries say God has quarantined them on Earth in their city, their Forsyth. Chained them here for their own attempt at altering the Sacred Image.”

“I’ve heard that talk.”

“And you don’t believe it—just as you don’t really believe other more important things.”

Alanna said nothing.

Neila shook her head. “Well, for once, I agree with you. The people who now live in Forsyth began altering themselves slowly by selective breeding thousands of years ago. Their founder is supposed to have gotten the idea from the way the people of his ancient time bred animals. He guided his people to breed themselves as carefully as the rest of us breed our best animals. But through it all, they’ve retained the Sacred Image. They never meant to change it. It was their minds that they were struggling to reshape. And they worked only with people who were already slightly different. They began with small mutations and bred themselves to the power they have now. Now they can hear and see and heal and kill and more, all with their minds. And they still have all their physical senses. The power of their minds is extra.

“About fifty years ago, when the plague began to get out of hand, the people of Forsyth stopped pretending to be less than they were, and…”

“They pretended? They were in hiding in spite of all their power?”

Neila hesitated. “Yes. But not out of fear. They hid to keep their privacy and to live in their own way. Anyway, they stopped hiding. They brought scientists and technicians from all over the world and put them to work on more ships like the Clay’s Ark—or larger and better than the Ark. The people of Forsyth already knew something about starships. Some of them had secretly had a hand in the building of the Ark. But now, they wanted the best possible ships. They wanted to find a world of their own and leave Earth to the Clayarks. But the first load of them to leave died before they were much beyond the orbit of the moon. Those back here could feel them dying, but couldn’t help them. The distance was too great. After that, those here did some careful experimenting. They found that the telepathic adults—and most of the adults are telepathic—weren’t able to break free of the mental ties they had with those they left here on Earth.

“For a while, there was talk of everyone leaving at once in several ships, but one unanswered question prevented them from doing that: What would happen if even one of their ships was disabled or destroyed? What would the mass destruction of that ship’s occupants do to the people in nearby ships? The distant dying of the people on that first ship had been agonizing for the Earthbound observers. What would it be like to experience that agony at closer range? Could one ship drag the others down in a spiral of madness and death? They didn’t want to find out. And they didn’t want to risk the whole existence of their kind to only one huge ship, even though such a ship could have been built.

“So they go on building ships for us. And sometimes, they send groups of their children with us. The mental abilities of the children don’t mature until sometime after puberty so the children tolerate space travel as easily as we do.”

“And will they do that with us?” asked Alanna. “Send a group of their children?”

“No!” said Neila with sudden vehemence. “Not with us. Thank God, the leaders of Forsyth have promised us that much. Those children, Lanna…” She groped for words. “Those children are like the eggs some wasps lay inside the bodies of living caterpillars. They’re not evil, any more than any other parasite, but when they grew up, when their mental abilities matured, they would quietly, slowly, enslave us. Our Mission would be over, even forgotten, perhaps. They would become our gods.”

“They need not,” said Alanna. “They could be stopped.”

“But, I tell you, their power…”

“Need never mature. Missionaries are not helpless caterpillars. They can kill the children before the children mature.”

Neila stared down at her sadly. “Children, Alanna…?”

“Why not?” Alanna touched her side where the Missionary guard had shot her. “At least those children are really dangerous.”

“Yes… And I’m sure any Missionaries who knew about them would kill them if they could. But it’s not that simple. You see, the people of Forsyth are not only able to read minds, but to change them, condition them. Host Missionaries are programmed to be the best possible parents before they even see the children. They’re programmed to defend those children with their own lives.”

Alanna thought about that for a while, then said, “Now I see why our people here are afraid.”

“No. They don’t know most of what I’ve told you. It’s best that they not know.”

“Jules knows?”

“Yes. Jules and I.”

“How?”

“Jules and I were born in Forsyth, Lanna. We’ve already served our time of slavery.” She paused, stared straight ahead at nothing. “Twenty-five years ago we were freed and allowed to organize a group of newly arrived refugees into a Mission colony. Now, finally, I think we’re being rewarded for our earlier years of service.”

As it turned out, the reward was a second Earth. The Verrick Colony Mission Ship sought out a blue world of islands and island continents—a world that was not only habitable, but comfortable. A world so Earthlike that it made the Missionaries feel at first as though they had only moved to a different part of their homeworld. A clean new part.

Their ship, whose technology they had never understood, died right on schedule as soon as they touched down. Died, as they soon learned, was exactly the right word.

One of the first things they did upon landing was break into the sealed compartments that they had been warned not to touch while their ship was in space. Within, they found the engines, the Dana Drive, huge and incomprehensible, and they found a corpse.

The corpse frightened most of the people because they did not know who it had been or why it was there, freshly dead, in their ship. Also, the corpse was deformed.

It was the body of a young man, dressed in the bright-colored style of the city of Forsyth. His body was short and squat and his head large. His forehead bulged strangely on one side and seemed almost sunken on the other. His mouth was slack and half open, drooling. Jules looked down at him and wept the only tears Alanna had ever seen him shed. Then he ordered a pair of the younger men to dig a grave. He himself carried the corpse out to be buried, and when the people questioned him, he would tell them nothing. To Neila and Alanna, he said, “There are all kinds of slaves.” He looked at Neila. “You know, don’t you?”

She nodded. “They used to just destroy the defectives that they couldn’t… repair. I didn’t realize they’d stopped.”

“They’ve found a use for them. That one must have been one of their own kind gone wrong.”

“But what was he for, locked in there by himself?”

“Unless there’s equipment—a computer or something—aboard that we haven’t found, I’m going to assume that somehow, that man was our guidance system.”

“But how could he…?”

“He could be programmed to do whatever they wanted him to do. You know that. Programmed to control the drive, and propel the ship to wherever his ability and his implanted knowledge told him there might be a habitable world. Then, when his job was finished, programmed to die. He couldn’t have been a telepath or he would have died long ago, but he had useful abilities just the same.”

“We should give him a funeral,” said Neila. “At least.”

They gave him a funeral.

Then, with nothing more than the tools and supplies and knowledge they had brought with them, they began learning to live on their new world.

They named the world Canaan, and prayed that it would live up to its name. The long yellow-green valley in which they had landed was like an answer to their prayer. It was on the equator, but high above the level of the local seas—plateau land stretched between two ranges of mountains. It was well watered by rivers that flowed down from the mountains and the ship’s doctor pronounced the water safe. The weather was warm and mild, and the land apparently fertile. It was literally covered with yellow-green trees and their thick vinelike roots, but the Missionaries saw no aggressive animal life. In fact, they saw almost no animal life at all, though they realized later that this was only because they did not know how to look for it. In time, they cleared a place and corralled their larger animals outside the ship. It was then that they learned why the portion of the valley in which they had landed seemed so lush and peaceful. They had landed in the middle of the Garkohn gamelands.

Garkohn adolescents, young hunters still working toward their first substantial kill of native game, slaughtered the Missionary herd in a single night. And at that, the Missionaries were fortunate. The tragedy would have been far greater had the youngsters failed to recognize the furless, strangely colored invaders as people—had they seen them as merely another kind of helpless animal.

The Missionaries did not learn exactly what had killed their livestock until several days later when Garkohn adults came openly into the Mission settlement bringing gifts of meat, meklah, and other things—apparently in payment for what their children had done. Of course, no payment would have been enough. The horses and cattle were irreplaceable. But they were gone. Nothing could bring them back, and trouble with the natives could well make their loss seem trivial.

Jules managed to hold the Missionaries in check, prevent any act of rashness. Under his leadership, the Missionaries formed what they came to consider a friendship with the Garkohn. It seemed as though they had salvaged a fair beginning after all. They permitted themselves to be lulled.

And now, three years later, they were still lulled. It was time for Alanna to awaken them.

Alanna rose wearily from her bed and went out into the cabin’s main room. Jules came in through the front door at the same time, looking grayer and older than the Jules Alanna had just brought alive in her memory. He was fifty-three now. Not old, surely. He was tired but he would be able to handle the trouble that was coming. He went to his chair and collapsed into it.

Alanna went to the heavy meklah-wood dining table and took two meklah fruits from the bowl there. She ate one quickly, hating it with her mind as her body welcomed it. Her sick hunger began to dissipate. She ate the second fruit more slowly. When she turned to face Jules and Neila, both were staring at her. Neila spoke first.

“Did they have meklah in the mountains where you were?”

“No,” said Alanna softly.

“You went without them for two years? You had none at all?”

“None.” Alanna looked from her to Jules. At the time of Alanna’s abduction, no one in the colony had realized that the meklah was addictive. But now, “You know about it.”

“That we’re slaves to it,” said Jules bitterly.

“I tried to stop eating it once,” said Neila. “I thought I was dying.”

“You might have,” said Alanna.

“But you didn’t.”

“The others did. All of them, Garkohn and Missionary.”

“They locked you up,” accused Jules. “Then watched you suffer.”

Alanna looked at him in surprise. “They closed us all in a room together, but they didn’t watch. Who told you…?”

“Natahk. After you… and the others were taken, I asked him what would happen to you. He told me. That’s when we found out we were addicted. Deliberately addicted. The Garkohn knew what they were feeding us.”

“Of course,” said Alanna.

Jules frowned at her as she put the last of her second meklah fruit into her mouth. “Alanna, if you managed to survive without those things for two years, why did you go back to them. After what you went through, I’d think…”

“That Natahk would let me stay free, like a Tehkohn?”

“Natahk…?”

“The meklah is almost a sacred thing to the Garkohn, Jules. Friends eat it. Enemies don’t.”

Jules rose slowly, stood glaring at Alanna. He was one of the few men in the settlement who could glare at her without looking up. “You mean that’s what he wanted to see you about? To feed you that poison?”

“Yes.”

“And you said nothing to me about it?”

She laid a hand on his arm. “Here we are on his world, in his valley, trapped. What could you have done, Jules?”

He stared at her for a long moment, then he shook off her hand and turned away. “It didn’t take you long to size up the situation here. I was afraid we’d have to explain it to you.”

Confused, Alanna glanced at Neila. But Neila sank down into her own chair and sat staring into the fire in the fireplace.

“We had better explain to each other,” said Alanna softly. “I can see that you don’t consider the Garkohn the friends they seemed to be two years ago.”

“Clayark friends!” muttered Jules. Alanna had almost forgotten that bitter old epithet—the friend who caught the plague and managed to conceal it. The friend whose touch brought disease and possible death. The betrayer, the Judas.

Alanna smiled to herself. In her absence, Natahk had done her work for her. He had become more heavy-handed, had prepared Jules to change his loyalties. “What was Natahk’s betrayal?” she asked.

“Aside from addicting us all, and readdicting you to the meklah?”

“Aside from that.” Alanna sat down on the floor, made herself comfortable.

“A chair, Alanna,” murmured Neila from years-old habit.

Alanna ignored her. “What has he done, Jules?”

“Nothing overt, I guess.” Jules sat down again. “Most of our people don’t even realize there’s anything wrong. But in more and more ways, he treats us as though we were just another branch of his tribe—like that farming town of his in the south. He seems to think he’s as free to exercise authority over us as he is over them.”

“His hunters spy on us,” said Neila. “They camouflage themselves here in the settlement and watch and listen to us. I’ve caught a couple of them at it the way you caught Gehl today.”

“Gehl was here?” asked Jules.

“She came to see me,” said Alanna. “But she came hidden, and she needn’t have.”

“How did you happen to spot her?”

“She was careless. Her camouflage was bad.”

“I didn’t see her,” said Neila. “Not until you spoke.”

Alanna shrugged. “Maybe my eyes are sharper.”

“At your age, they should be,” said Jules. “But still… you said Gehl was careless. What if she had really been making an effort not to be seen. Do you think you could have spotted her?”

“A huntress? I think so. From now on, I’ll be watching.”

“Exactly what I was going to suggest. I don’t like the idea that there might be people watching me, spying on me even in my own home. And I’ve been living with it too long.”

“Most of the people still think of the Garkohn as not very bright,” said Neila. “They see that while only a few of us know the Garkohn language, all the Garkohn we deal with know English. They see that, but still, when they catch the Garkohn spying, they say, ‘Oh, well, they’re just curious—like monkeys, you know.’”

Jules made a sound of disgust. “We didn’t underestimate the Clayarks that way,” he said. “If we had, they would have murdered us all. That fur covering seems to make it so easy for some of us to assume that the Garkohn are stupid. Nonsense! Dangerous nonsense!”

“What will you do?” asked Alanna.

“That’s a question I’ve been asking myself for some time. I could call a meeting and force the people ~o face the facts that they’ve been refusing to face. That we’re becoming prisoners in our own settlement. That would bring Natahk out into the open quickly enough.”

“Anything you do that’s out of the ordinary will bring him into the open. I wonder what that would mean.”

“Slavery,” said Jules. “Or something very like it. Natahk’s gone to too much trouble to watch quietly as we begin reasserting our independence.”

“Perhaps slavery,” agreed Alanna. “But I don’t understand why the Garkohn would want or need slaves. They have no history of slavery.”

“They do,” said Neila. “The nonfighters.”

Alanna glanced at her. “No. Some fighters see nonfighters as lesser people—a little like the way Bea Stamp sees me. But they don’t make slaves of them.” She changed the subject suddenly. “Jules, did Natahk leave?”

“Yes. He and most of his raiders. I thought they would stay the night.”

“His raiders only? What about his prisoners?”

“They’re quartered with ours in one of the storehouses for the time being. Although… Natahk acted as though they might be here for quite a while.”

“So the Garkohn and I agree on something,” said Alanna. Then she realized that she had spoken in Tehkohn, her first such lapse since arriving home. Neither Jules nor Neila looked anything more than curious, so she explained in English. “I think Natahk is worried about your welfare. Whatever he plans to do with you, you won’t be of any use to him dead. By now, Tehkohn who are not captives know that important members of their tribe are held here. They won’t attack for fear of causing those members to be killed.”

“You think they know already?”

“Jules, we didn’t come down from those mountains alone.”

Jules looked surprised and his surprise startled Alanna. Even if he had not seen the raiding party’s Tehkohn shadows, it would seem reasonable for him to suspect that they were there. But then, he did not know the true value of the prisoners Natahk had left with him.

“You think the Tehkohn might have attacked us if Natahk hadn’t left his prisoners here?” he asked.

“They would have. At night, probably, not like before. This time, I don’t think there would have been enough of us left to make a colony.”

“In spite of our wall, our guns, you think they could have…”

“I know they could have. Natahk knew it too. We’re naked here, Jules. The Tehkohn know about our guns now. Most people wouldn’t get a chance to fire a shot.”

“You’re forgetting that we know quite a bit about the Tehkohn now too. We just helped win a substantial victory over them.”

Alanna lowered her head for a moment, carefully not thinking about that victory. “Did you ever think there might be a way for us to use the Tehkohn? A way that didn’t involve fighting them.”

Jules frowned. “What way?”

“They could help you against Natahk.”

Jules sat up straight. “And do you think I’d want their help? Do you think I’d trust them? My God, as bad as the Garkohn are, at least they’ve never murdered any of my people.”

Alanna spoke softly. “I’m not sure the Tehkohn would have killed any of us either if Natahk’s hunters hadn’t been using our settlement as a base for their raids on the Tehkohn.”

“And on the other hand, the settlement might have been totally destroyed if the Garkohn hadn’t been here during that first raid.” Jules’s voice was bitter. That first raid had taught him just how easily naked unarmed natives slaughtered armed Missionaries.

“But… whatever might have happened, you’re even with the Tehkohn now. They’ve beaten you. You’ve beaten them. Now you can use them. Let them keep the Garkohn busy and away from you. They’ve been fighting Garkohn for generations anyway. Now you have a chance to urge them back to it. Then you’ll have the freedom to run or join in or do whatever you think is best.”

“Manipulate them, you mean? Trick them into ignoring us while they fight each other?”

“Not quite. But the effect would be the same.”

“What do you mean, ‘not quite’?”

“Working alone, I don’t think we can trick the Tehkohn or the Garkohn. We’re at war with the Tehkohn and that means most of the prisoners we hold won’t believe anything we say. There’s no lie we could tell them, no trick we could use that wouldn’t be either ignored or even used against us. We’re enemies and they would rather kill themselves than co-operate with us in any useful way. And as for the Garkohn, we dare not try to manipulate them into more hostility. They’d drag us in with them.”

“They’d do that regardless.”

“No. Not if we let the Tehkohn think we’re on their side. They can help us stay out of it—or out of most of it. After all, it will be better for them if we stay out.”

“From what you’ve said so far, I don’t see how we can make the Tehkohn think anything at all.”

“We can change their thinking toward us. Because we can do the one thing Natahk can’t do. We can make peace with them. Even now, we can make peace.”

“With people who won’t believe a word we say. With people we certainly don’t have any reason to trust. With kidnapers and murderers…”

“But…”

“No, let me finish. What do you think would happen if we did make overtures to the Tehkohn, successful or not, and the Garkohn found out. They would, you know, the way they spy on us. And what do you think they would do then? Surely slavery would be too gentle.”

“Will you hear me, Jules?”

“I’d rather listen to you in the morning when you’ve… when we’ve both had food and sleep and time to think.”

“No, now, please. Because now you have a prisoner you can work through—one of the ones Natahk left. He’s a leader of the Tehkohn and I think he’d listen to you if you approached him. He’s freer to decide who to trust than the others are, and if he gives you his promise, you can trust him.”

“An honorable butcher.”

“A fighter, yes. All the ones with authority are fighters. But he could help you against Natahk.”

“I don’t want his…”

“And he’s not going to be here long.”

“What?”

“He’s the blue one, Jules, the big one. And what he would face at the Garkohn dwelling is a lot worse than just meklah addiction. I don’t think he’ll wait for it. He’ll either escape soon or get killed trying.” She took a deep breath. This talk was forcing her to put into words things she had not even wanted to think about. But she went on. “If you talk to him and he’s killed, you lose nothing. But if he escapes, he can go back to his people as your emissary. He can not only stop their vengeance, but make them our allies. If you’ll just talk to him.”

“Alanna, do you know how many of our people have been kidnapped by the Tehkohn since you were taken? Kidnapped and apparently murdered.”

Alanna opened her mouth to answer, then realized fully what he had said. “Since I was taken?”

“In the two years since you were…”

“Wait a moment.” She frowned. “There haven’t been any Tehkohn raids on the Mission colony since I was taken.”

Jules stared at her. “Listen, girl, the Tehkohn may have kept what they were doing from you, but…”

“They couldn’t keep it from me! Jules, I wasn’t locked up somewhere for two years. I was working out among the people. I spoke their language, and I couldn’t help knowing what was going on. There were two raids on the Garkohn. I saw the raiders leave, and I saw them come back with Garkohn prisoners—only Garkohn. No Missionaries.”

“I saw them take three people,” said Neila. “They almost took me too.”

“Not the Tehkohn.”

“Lanna, you’re wrong! I saw…”

“You saw natives abducting people. Who told you they were Tehkohn?”

Neila stared at her, speechless.

“I don’t know what’s happened here,” Alanna continued. “But whatever it was, the Tehkohn weren’t part of it. What they did do to us was bad enough, but if we don’t put that behind us, and join with them, we’re finished. Only they can help us to stop our more treacherous enemies—our Clayark friends.”

Jules looked at her silently for a long time—too long. He looked at her until she knew he was wondering about her own loyalty. She met his gaze and hid her sudden fear.

“You saved me once,” she said softly. “You didn’t have to. People said, ‘She’s an animal. She’d be better dead.’ But you saved me. Let me save you.”

“I don’t believe what you’re saying, Lanna—that our people are being abducted by the Garkohn.”

“You will.”

“But why would they bother? They already have us trapped here in a meklah cage.”

“Maybe to make more trouble between you and the Tehkohn. Maybe to make the stolen people work as slaves—I don’t know.” And then she did know. The idea came to her so suddenly that she almost spoke it aloud. But she caught herselE in time. This was not a thing for her to say to her foster father. He had already looked at her with suspicion. Let her husband tell him—if she could ever bring the two together, if the Garkohn had not destroyed all hope of an alliance.

They were not taking slaves, the Garkohn, although Jules would see it that way. He had said himself what they were doing, although he did not know it. He had complained that Natahk treated the Missionaries as though they were just another branch of the Garkohn. Well, by now, according to Kohn custom, the Missionaries were exactly that. The abducted Missionaries were in the southern part of the valley at the Garkohn farming town. And like Alanna, they had found out for themselves how human the Kohn people were. She spoke to Jules.

“For the sake of the people we have left here, Jules, talk to the Tehkohn Hao.”

“Form an alliance with him?”

“Yes, if he’ll co-operate.” He would try. Surely he would try.

“And if he won’t?”

“Then we have no chance. You know it. We can’t fight either tribe alone. We can’t even run with both tribes considering us fair game. Not that we’d know where to run anyway—to avoid running into people worse than the Tehkohn or the Garkohn.”

Jules sat staring downward at his clenched hands, and Alanna imagined what he must be feeling. The Missionaries looked to him for leadership. They had ever since he had brought them together as a colony. He had always been much aware of his responsibility to them. Now the best he could do for them was choose which of the many dangers he would expose them to. And he had to choose quickly. His prime prisoner might escape even that night.

“Jules, I’m pushing, I know. I have to push. Will you see the Tehkohn Hao?”

He sighed. “Tell me about him, Lanna. Make me understand why you trust him so much.”

If only she could, she thought wearily. But no, the half truths had to go on. “I trust his ability to handle his people,” she said. “If he decides we’re worth helping, we’ll get help.”

“One Tehkohn,” said Jules. “What would it take to make some other Tehkohn challenge him and get rid of him?”

“The same thing it would take to make you overrule the Bible words of Jesus Christ.”

“Alanna!” said Neila, shocked.

“The Hao are not overruled except by other Hao. And the only other Tehkohn Hao is old and not active in governing the people any longer. Diut’s word will stand.”

“His kind are considered gods?”

“No. The Kohn don’t pray to him. They don’t expect him to perform miracles—exactly. But they obey him as though they thought he was a god. Even the Garkohn are glad to obey him when they can. It’s more… more comfortable than disobeying. He’s like a symbol that God or fate or something is on your side if you have him.”

“A walking good luck charm.”

“Maybe. Whatever he is, his power is in the natural reaction of the Kohn people to blue—to that special kind of blue. No Kohn other than the Hao can attain it and all Kohn seem to be in awe of it.”

“But if the Garkohn are in awe of him…”

“But he’s not their Hao. In things that don’t matter much, they’ll obey him, honoring his blue. Remember when they were knocking some of their prisoners around just after the raid? He told them to stop and they stopped.”

“I saw that. I wondered about it. And they wouldn’t let my men paint him.”

“It would be sacrilege to mar the blue.”

Jules looked at her strangely. “Yes, that’s what they said.”

“They mean to have that blue for themselves. They intend to keep him—damage his legs so that he can’t escape. They might not force the meklah on him, but they would call him Garkohn Hao. A captive Hao doesn’t lead unless he renounces his former people and shows that he has joined his captors. But whether that happens or not, his presence gives his captors unity and strength that they’ll turn and use—in this case, against the Tehkohn. Diut won’t let that happen. And he’s a man in need of allies now, Jules. Even if he breaks free, you can be of use to him, and him to you.”

Jules was silent for a long moment. Finally, he said, “I’ll talk to him, girl. I won’t promise anything or bow down to his blue, but I’ll talk to him.”

“Nobody bows. They call him Tehkohn Hao instead of his name and they look at him. No more formality than that.”

“What do you mean, they look at him? What’s special about that?”

“It’s insulting to look away from him when he’s talking. What he’s saying with his coloring can be as important as what he’s saying with his mouth. Even if you don’t understand, it’s best to look at him.” This was a small thing. Diut did not demand it of his close friends or his family. He would not have demanded it of Jules. But he would notice if Jules seemed to be refusing to look at all—as Jules surely would without this warning. The Hao appearance took some getting used to, especially at close quarters, and for the sake of the colony, Jules had to get used to it quickly. If he did not, Diut would sit and talk to him and listen and learn whatever he could about the Missionaries. He would behave with respect as Kohn custom demanded that he behave toward the father of his wife, but he would promise Jules nothing. Eventually, he would make his escape and abandon the Missionaries to their fate.

CHAPTER FOUR

Alanna

My first memories as I came out of withdrawal were of pain, cold, hunger, and thirst. Someone gave me water—not enough. Someone lifted me and carried me to a place that was warm.

Someone tore my filthy ragged clothing from my body and washed me. I felt as though I was again under the care of the Verricks and the Mission doctor—as though I was reliving my first hours with the Missionaries. I kept listening for Jules’s voice or the voice of Dr. Bartholomew. But the voices I heard were strange to me. They spoke in a language I could not quite understand. Then I remembered that I had been captured, that the speakers must be Tehkohn. I couldn’t see. My eyes were swollen shut. I was able to take a little more water though, and something that must have been a kind of soup. Finally, I fell asleep under the care of my captors.

When I had slept for a time—I had no idea how long—I was awakened by people talking near me. I tried to open my eyes, found that I could, a little. The swelling was going down. Through the blurred screen of my own eyelashes, I could see two Tehkohn. Cold dim light came from patches of luminescence scattered on the wall behind them and the Tehkohn themselves radiated some light—glowed softly. One was blue-green and about my size, and the other was blue. Deep blue all over and huge—larger than any native I had ever seen, and perhaps larger than any of the Missionaries. He had the powerful stocky build of a hunter, but no hunter could have been as tall. And there was something different about the way the native looked. I couldn’t see him clearly enough to know just what, but something besides his size was bothering me, frightening me. I moved a little, trying to see him better. My movement attracted his attention and he came over to me.

He knelt beside me and I tried to see his face clearly. But he had ceased to radiate light now and his deep blue was swallowed in the shadows of the room. He seemed only a shadow himself there beside me, and in spite of my fear, I reached out to touch him—to find out for certain whether or not I was dreaming.

The blue-green man in the background spoke to me sharply in Garkohn, but the blue one silenced him with a gesture. Then he held out a dark shadowy arm to me. I felt the thick soft fur and the hard hand with its thick clawlike nails. The huge Tehkohn was real. And he was clearly a person of authority. He was probably deciding now what was to be done with me.

And what might he decide? What else would I have to face now that I had survived meklah withdrawal? I lay still, feeling even more frightened and helpless than I had during my first hours among the Missionaries. But I was too weak to sustain even fear for long. I drifted off to sleep.

When I awoke again, I was stronger. I could see better though the room was only a little brighter than it had been. There were no windows. The irregular wall patches still gave off their dim light and now there was also light from a low fire in a large fireplace. The fireplace was rounded and deep, protruding farther into the room than it would have in a Missionary house. I lay on the floor near it, wrapped in furs. Not far from me lay a Tehkohn man and woman quietly making love.

I slept again, awoke, and finally got a good look at two of my captors. I recognized them. There was a huntress, unusually small, very quick, her coloring a deeper green than I had seen among the Garkohn. With her was her husband or temporary mate, the blue-green man. The man was the same one who had captured me at the Mission colony. I remembered that now—his coloring, his height. I would have killed him if I could have. As it was, I had nearly blinded him. But he had won. And later, during my withdrawal, he won again, he and the huntress. I had searched for hours—at least for hours—to find a way out of the prison room away from the sickness and the dying. Away from people who could think of nothing better to do than wait to die.

Finally, I found the hidden door and got out. Then this man and woman found me. I was not strong enough to fight them. They simply lifted me and threw me back into the room. I swore to myself then that I would kill them. Of all the Tehkohn I had seen, I could think of none who deserved death more.

And yet here I was alone with them in their apartment, weak as a child, and totally at their mercy. I lay watching them and wondering what they would do to me.

The huntress came over and knelt beside me. She spoke in Garkohn. “Can you understand me?”

“Yes,” I said. I was still hoarse, but my voice was returning.

“Ah. Good. Do you have pain?”

“When I move.”

“Pain in your muscles, yes. That goes away easily. I have ointment. No pain here?” She laid a hand on my stomach.

“No.”

“Good. You’re, healing.” She rubbed my body with a pungent-smelling ointment that felt cold at first, and then very warm. Almost at once, I began to feel better. And I became less apprehensive. Clearly, these people wanted me healthy. I wondered why.

I managed to sit up and the blue-green man brought me a wooden bowl filled with a kind of stew that I had never tasted—stew thick with tender chunks of meat. I ate slowly, savoring it.

“What are you called?” the man asked.

“Alanna.”

He repeated my name courteously, then added, “I am Jeh.”

“And I’m Cheah,” said the huntress.

I repeated both names.

“We are husband and wife,” said Jeh. “You will stay with us for a while. We will teach you Tehkohn ways.”

I closed my eyes and drew a deep breath in relief. It would be only the Missionary experience again then. In exchange for food, shelter, and safety, I would learn to say the right words and observe the right customs—change my cultural “coloring” again and fade into Tehkohn society as much as I could. If I could. If I couldn’t, at least I would be able to bide my time until I was strong again. Strong enough to try to find my way back to the valley—or at least to take my revenge.

“I will learn,” I told Jeh quietly.

He whitened, pleased. Then he said something in Tehkohn to Cheah and turned and left the apartment.

“Is he a hunter?” I asked Cheah when he was gone.

She flashed white and I thought she was telling me yes, that Jeh was a hunter. But she was laughing. “He is a judge, Alanna. You should have said that when he was here.”

I was glad I hadn’t. There would be time enough for me to make insulting errors. “Judges are higher than hunters then?” I asked.

“Higher, yes. From the judges come the Hao.”

“Hao?”

“You saw Diut last night—one of our Tehkohn Hao.”

“The blue man?”

“So. We have one other, Tahneh, but she is old.”

“And these are your leaders, Diut and Tahneh?”

“More than leaders. Judges can lead, or hunters. But when they do, there is dissension, sometimes fighting. It happened that way with the Garkohn because their Hao died childless and no judges had produced a new Hao from the air.”

“From the…”

“The Hao come either from other Hao, or from nowhere into the families of judges. Never from hunters or nonfighters. The Garkohn have thrown away their only source of the blue. Now, without unity or honor or power, they will die slowly.”

The mention of dying sent my thoughts off in another direction. “Cheah?”

She looked at me in a way that seemed friendly.

“The Garkohn here, and the other Missionaries—are any of them still alive?”

“None,” she said quietly. “Only you.”

I lowered my head, realizing that this was the answer that I had expected. I could remember now crawling from corpse to corpse near the end of my withdrawal, groping blindly, hoping to find someone alive. But I had been alone even then. Now I looked up at Cheah’s furry face and knew that I was still alone. Flexible as I was, how could I hope to blend in among these people. At least among the Missionaries, there had been others who looked almost like me. But here…

I found myself suddenly longing to see another furless Earth-human face,. I hadn’t even liked any of the Missionaries who had been captured with me but if one of them had been brought in to me now, alive, I would have welcomed him, as the Missionaries said, like a brother.

“Alanna.”

I made my eyes focus on Cheah.

“What are you thinking? That you are alone now because the others are dead?”

I did not answer.

“You are,” she continued. “And being alone among a strange people is hard. But you are clean now, and we want you with us. Why should we be a strange people to you any longer. Learn. Become one of us.”

“Shall I grow fur then? Or turn green?” I was feeling just bitter enough to be foolish. I was thinking that in the end, I would have to make do with the bleak satisfaction of revenge after all. And even that offered less attraction than it once had. I found Cheah likable. She reminded me of Gehl.

“You will do whatever you can do,” she said quietly. “Were you lying when you told Jeh you would learn?”

“I…no.”

“Learn then. Don’t use your differences to isolate yourself. If we are not offended by them, why should you worry?”

She was right, of course. And though that didn’t stop me from worrying, it did help.

I regained my strength quickly and stayed with Jeh and Cheah for many days. I learned as much of the language as I could from both of them. Tehkohn and Garkohn were similar, derived from the same root language, and sometimes I mixed the two, strangely forgetting which was which. But I struggled to learn.

“Your Garkohn is offensive,” Jeh had told me. “We are your people now. You must learn to speak as we do.”

I did my best to obey. I was still learning when Jeh and Cheah suddenly turned me over to a pair of artisans.

“Learn from them,” Jeh said. “We have seen that you can learn, and that you will. The artisans will teach you more.”

“I’ll live with them?”

“Yes. And help them in their work.”

I looked away from him frowning, not wanting to leave. I knew it was a good sign that they were sending me to artisans. Artisans cared for the young children of the tribe. Jeh and Cheah had two sons who spent most of their time with their artisan second-parents. And I, in my ignorance of Tehkohn ways, was like a child. But still, I had grown secure with Jeh and Cheah. They were not like Jules and Neila at all except in their acceptance of me, but that was enough. Since I had to stay with the Tehkohn, I would have preferred to go on living with these two.

Yet I said nothing. I was being favored, trusted. Silence was best no matter what I felt. Jeh took me to the apartment of the artisan couple and left me there. The artisans were Gehnahteh, a slender golden-green woman, and her husband Choh, who had slightly more yellow in his coloring.

These two walked up to me without a word and began to undress me. I resisted without thinking at first as they seized my short, fur-lined tunic and my pants. Jeh had only recently taken me to another artisan to have the clothing made. That had been my first experience with being stripped by an artisan. But at least that artisan had had good reason for what she did. She had taken away the skin blanket that I had wrapped myself in and looked at me and measured me with knotted strips of hide and listened while I described the garments I needed. I hadn’t minded. But I did mind this sudden unnecessary stripping by Gehnahteh and Choh. After a moment, I stepped away from them and finished undressing myself so that they could satisfy their curiosity and leave me alone.

They did not touch me as I stood naked before them. They looked at me. They walked around me, staring at my body while I stared back angrily. I was used to Kohn curiosity, abruptness, and lack of privacy by then, and normally, it didn’t bother me. But this time Gehnahteh and Choh had taken me by surprise, and had unwittingly come into conflict with my own wildland habits. Wild humans who were seized unexpectedly, suddenly, by strangers fought for their lives. It was an automatic reaction. I had grabbed Choh and very nearly hit him before I caught myself. But with Gehnahteh’s first words, my anger began to die.

“Do the skins keep you warm enough?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You need nothing more?”

“Shoes,” I said hopefully. But I had spoken in English. I translated. “Coverings for my feet to protect them from the rocks outside.” The Missionaries had taught me to wear shoes because, as they said, only animals and savages went without them. To please Jules and Neila, I had tolerated them, had slowly become used to them. I had even stopped taking them off when I was out of their sight. That was why I had had them on when I was captured. But somehow, in the prison room, the cleansing room, I had lost them. Apparently, they had been cleared away with the sand that had covered the floor. Jeh and Cheah had brought me three pair from the Missionary corpses, but all of them were too small. I had not cared enough to ask to have others made at first, but after one trip outside with Cheah, one trip down to the little mountain valley where the Tehkohn grew their crops, I knew my feet would need protection.

Choh stepped to my side, bent, and lifted one of my feet as though he was a Missionary examining the foot of a horse.

I grabbed a handful of his fur to keep from falling. He didn’t seem to mind. He probed my foot with a hard hand, then let me go.

“Her feet are not as hard as ours,” he told Gehnahteh.

“Best to give her the coverings then,” said Gehnahteh. “We cannot use her if she is lame.”

“Coverings as though she was already lame?”

“Yes.”

Choh took me to an artisan whom I had not met before. He looked at my feet and felt them, then spoke to Choh in Tehkohn too rapid for me to follow. Choh gestured toward me and the artisan looked at me and spoke again, very quickly.

I frowned, not understanding enough to answer.

“Speak slowly,” said Choh. “She’s just learning our language.”

The artisan spoke slowly, simply. “Do you have pain in any part of your feet now?”

“No.”

“It’s only the softness that you want protected then.”

“Yes.” Softness! The Missionaries said my feet were like hooves.

The artisan flashed white and turned away from us back to a piece of leather that he had been cutting when we entered his apartment. Choh and I left him at his work.

Choh showed me around the nonfighter section of the huge mountainlike building that was the Tehkohn dwelling. The dwelling mimicked the mountains around it in its interior as well as its exterior. The rough stone corridors were much like caves except for their random patches of luminescent material. There were deep, wide cisterns of clear water so that the people did not have to haul water up from the river in the Tehkohn valley below. There were deliberately deceptive corridors that led nowhere and that ended abruptly at stone walls against which invaders could be trapped. Some corridors wound higher or lower into other parts of the dwelling, and some led us around the nonfighter section and back to our starting place. Some corridors were not meant to be noticed. Entrances to these were formed by careful overlapping of the stone walls. The overlapping made the entrances completely invisible from one direction. From the opposite direction in the dim light, I found that I could see only what looked like one more irregularity in a rough irregular wall. Until Choh opened the hidden door.

“There was much fighting here once,” he told me. “Our ancestors built a dwelling that could help them in their fighting. Then, from here, they made the Kohn people. They drew together warring tribes and ruled them for generations.

“Do the Tehkohn still rule other tribes?”

“No, no longer. We had too many ties—people spread over too much territory. One by one, the ties were broken. The people made themselves separate tribes again. But through all that, this dwelling has protected us, fighter and nonfighter.”

I turned to look at him. His head reached just above my elbow, and his slenderness made him look more like a young boy than a man. He and his wife looked like adolescents together, yet Jeh had told me that these two had an adolescent son—a boy in the midst of his first liaison.

Artisans and farmers were naturally small people, members of a race different from those of the stocky hunters and the tall lean judges.

“Did artisans build this dwelling?” I asked Choh.

He glanced up at me and his body whitened. “Yes. The Hao came to them—to my ancestors—and said, ‘Build us a home that will help us fight by concealing itself as we do.’ And for the time it took to build this dwelling, artisans ruled. Others obeyed them—hunters, judges, even the Hao listened when artisans spoke. And when the building was finished, the Hao looked at it and saw that there was greater value in nonfighting people than they had thought.”

He had a low quiet way of speaking that I liked, and he was at ease with me now that his curiosity about my differences had been satisfied. I began to think that my stay with him and Gehnahteh would not be as bad as I had feared.

After the general tour, Choh took me to the heavily draped doorways of three apartments. These were visible doorways with only the hides of animals serving as doors. Hidden doors of stone and metal were used only for special purposes. Choh stopped at each of these doorways and called out a name. He introduced me first to a hunter, then to a pair of judges, then to a pair of farmers who were just leaving their apartment. These were the trade families of Gehnahteh and Choh. They performed special services for each other and considered themselves to be related as though by blood. Now I was part of their group. From now on, the hunter—he was a widower—would supply Choh’s artisan friend with leather for my shoes.

Choh made me guide him once to each of these three apartments. When he saw that I knew the way, he took me down to a lower level of the dwelling where wood had been cut and stored in great piles. There were wooden handcarts there much like the Missionaries’ carts. I was surprised because the Garkohn did not use such things in their dwelling or even on their trails through the meklah-tangled valley.

“Load a cart,” Choh told me. “Take one load of wood to each of the three apartments, and to our apartment. When you have finished, leave the cart here, and come home.”

He turned and left me. And I did my work, and went home.

Thus began my life as a Tehkohn—a life of working and learning through my work. I ran errands for Gehnahteh and Choh. I learned to cook Tehkohn foods over the fire in the fireplace of their apartment. I learned to clean the apartment with a soap made from the roots of one of the mountain plants. I learned to make the soap and the brushes I used. I was loaned to the trade-family farmers to help with the planting. The farmers put me to work with the adolescent children who were breaking up clods of earth while the adults plowed with a tool that looked like a long narrow version of an Earth-made shovel. The tool had a strong wooden handle and a flat narrow metal head that tapered to a point. On one side of each handle, down near the metal, there was a footrest that the farmers used to push the metal deep into the ground. My farmers watched me for a half day, then gave me a shovel.

Their main crop was a kind of tuber that they ate in some form with almost every meal—their nonaddictive version of the meklah. They also raised a small sweet melon, sweet berries, other fruit, and at least three kinds of bean or pea that grew in pods underground. They had no domestic animals. The native animals would not breed in captivity. Usually, they sickened and died soon after they were caught. The Tehkohn simply did what they could to insure a plentiful supply of wild game. They killed off all the non-Tehkohn predators they could, and they diverted rivers and streams to irrigate the territory around them more evenly and make it lush for the plant eaters. Then the hunters killed as much game as they could when they could, and preserved large amounts of it. Both they and the farmers were skillful. The people did not go hungry.

All the Tehkohn were skillful. They were absorbing me. They kept me working harder than I had ever worked with the Missionaries, and when I was not working, I was either learning or sleeping. There seemed to be no time for anything else. Gehnahteh and Choh made sure there was no time.

I felt myself slipping away not only from the Missionaries, but from the wilds. The wild human within me who watched and cautioned and alerted me, who kept me ready to do and be whatever I had to do and be to survive, was becoming Tehkohn. Too Tehkohn. If the Tehkohn had not been so different physically, that might not have been a bad thing. I had found more acceptance among them in my short time with them than I had in more than three years with the Missionaries. But I could not spend my life among people so alien, no matter how accepting they were. Now and then, in spite of the work, I found myself still longing to see another Missionary. Furless skin, black or white or brown. I spoke aloud to myself in English and it sounded strange to me. I began to resent the Tehkohn, their work, their customs. I grew careless. There was one night in particular…

I was not yet used to the cooking and I had an accident. I had cooked over an open fire for most of my life, but it had been a haphazard kind of cooking. I had never had a heavy kettle to contend with. I burned myself, and in sharp reaction, dumped most of the stew into the fire.

Gehnahteh said several Tehkohn words that I had never heard before and seized a stick of firewood. Her body flared angry yellow as she hit me once, twice. I scrambled away from her more startled than hurt.

She followed me, beating me across the back and ribs, hitting the arm I held up to protect my head. The blows were jarring and painful, but strangely, I did not want to hit back if I could avoid it. I wasn’t afraid, or even angry. I was annoyed—and much aware of Gehnahteh’s smallness. Surely, I could handle this one furious little artisan—whom I happened to like—without hurting her.

Finally, I seized her arm, wrenched the stick away from her, and threw it into the half-smothered fire. Then I caught her by the throat, shook her once warningly, and let her go. She stumbled back from me and we stood glaring at each other. Choh, watching us, had stood up, but he had not had time to interfere. Now he stood looking at me uncertainly. In that moment, I knew I could kill them both if I wanted to. I couldn’t get away with it, but I could do it. They were small and strong and I was large and stronger. Also, untrained as I was in the ways of their hunters and judges, I was still what they would call a fighter.

The knowledge gave me a security I had not had since my capture. I relaxed. Without a word, I took a basket from beside the door and went down to one of the storage rooms for more tubers, vegetables, and dried meat. I cleaned the kettle and cleaned the mess out of the fireplace, and I made more stew.

Nothing was said about the incident, but neither Gehnahteh nor Choh ever tried to beat me again. I began to refuse work when I didn’t want it. Not often, but when I was tired. The first time I did it, Gehnahteh swore at me. I sat listening until she finished and went away. After that, she and Choh began to ask me to do things instead of telling me. They had handled young fighters before—had been second-parents to several. They understood what was happening better than I did.

Neila Verrick had gotten as close a look at the Tehkohn Hao as she wanted before the prisoners were locked up. As soon as she realized that Jules intended to have him brought to the cabin, she retreated next door to wait with the neighbors.

Alanna had not risked suggesting such a private meeting with Diut. That was something Jules had thought of himself. The only alternative was to meet in the storehouse where the prisoners were being kept—meet surrounded by other Tehkohn and watched by Garkohn guards. Apparently, Jules had decided that even being alone with the largest and least human-looking Tehkohn was preferable to that.

He had had some difficulty persuading the Garkohn to bring Diut to the cabin. And once they had brought him, they did not want to leave him there alone with Jules and Alanna. But finally, Jules persuaded them to go.

Alanna watched them very carefully as they filed out. Neila had lit two lamps in the main room before she left, but there were still areas of shadow, places where skillful Garkohn could conceal themselves almost invisibly. There must be no chance of the conversation Jules and Diut were about to have being overheard. Apparently Diut was checking too. It was he who spotted the intruder first—and again, the intruder was Gehl. But this time her camouflage was excellent. Diut’s coloring yellowed minutely when he saw her and Alanna, every sense alert, spotted the change. Only then did she see Gehl.

Diut spoke softly. “Huntress, your kind and I have respected each other until now.”

Gehl dropped her camouflage. “You are a prisoner,” she said.

“So,” admitted Diut.

There was yellow in Gehl’s coloring. Alanna wondered what it signified in her—anger or fear. “I’m one of your captors,” said Gehl. “Do you think you can command me as you do your Tehkohn?”

“Have I commanded you?”

Gehl flared pure yellow. “I will stay here as long as you are here.”

“No.”

“You cannot say…”

“Now you ask to be commanded. You will wait outside until I have spoken with the Missionaries,” Diut’s blue became luminescent. “Obey!”

For a long moment, the huntress faced him, not quite challenging, not quite giving way. She gazed into his blue and Alanna knew she was at war with her own instincts. This was only a small thing that Diut wanted. It would be so easy to obey. And what harm could it do? The house was surrounded by Garkohn. Finally, her instincts won. She turned and left.

Relief flooded Alanna. She knew, though Jules did not, how easily the confrontation might have ended in Gehl’s death and immediate trouble with the Garkohn. But it was over.

Diut now made himself as unimpressive as he could. He muted his coloring so that his face and body seemed to be veiled in shadow. He had kept it that way—quietly unobtrusive—through most of the trip down from the mountains. His height, well over two meters, made him a giant among both Missionaries and Kohn. That he could not disguise. There were two or three Missionaries almost as tall, but so large a native, especially a Tehkohn, had to be startling and threatening to the colonists. Facing Jules now, Diut seemed to understand this. He sat down as soon as he could. He was not so much trying to avoid alarming Jules, Alanna knew, although his general “dimming” would have that effect. He was trying to see that attention would be focused on the subject at hand rather than on his rank and his—to Jules’s mind—unusual physical appearance. He did this with his judges when he needed opinions from them that were honest rather than “respectful.” Jules would not understand the sign, but he would respond to it in the way Diut wanted.

Seeing Diut take such care, Alanna relaxed slightly. She felt more confident now that she had done the right thing in urging this meeting.

They sat at the dining table, and Diut stared at the bowl of meklah fruit that Alanna had forgotten to remove. He had glanced briefly at Jules, then at Alanna. Neither glance was significant. It simply acknowledged their presence. Jules spoke to him in Garkohn to Alanna’s surprise. She realized that Jules must have learned the language during her absence. During that same period, she had taught Diut English, but there was no need for Jules to know that.

“My daughter has told me a little about you, Tehkohn Hao,” Jules said. “Not much. But enough with what I’ve just seen, to make me wonder why you’re here. What do you want?”

Diut raised his large head and gave Jules his attention. This was disconcerting in spite of the shadows he cast about himself. Diut was the only Kohn Alanna had seen who managed, in spite of the humanoid arrangement of his features, to seem frighteningly alien. No Missionary would see him as simply a caricature of the Sacred Image. Alanna saw Jules jump, saw him sit up straighter in his chair. But he continued to look at Diut.

“Perhaps only to find out whether you would be able to ask that question,” Diut said. His voice had depth without hollowness or harshness. It was clear, but somehow, not pleasing, not human. Like his appearance, it took getting used to. “To see whether the Garkohn would let you,” he continued, “and whether you would bother.”

It was an admission! Alanna stared down at the table, her expression carefully neutral. Just as she had guessed, Diut had come to see whether the Missionaries were worth the trouble it would cost him to let them live.

“I bothered,” said Jules, “because I want the hostilities between your people and mine to end now before there is more killing. As for the Garkohn, their authority is over their own people. They don’t give orders here at the Mission settlement.”

“So?” Diut watched Jules silently for a moment. “Do we not discuss matters too important to be obscured by ritual lying, Missionary?”

Jules looked startled. Then he leaned back and sighed. He seemed resigned rather than offended. “You’ve come to understand our situation here very quickly.”

“I’m still learning. Just before you sent for me, for instance, I learned that you rather than Natahk planned the raid in which I was captured.”

Pride burned for a moment in Jules’s eyes. “My people were going to be involved. I had none that I could afford to lose.”

“Neither had I,” said Diut. “Yet from your point of view, it was a highly successful raid.”

“As was yours two years ago. I hope, Tehkohn Hao, that we can make this the last such hostility between our peoples.”

“Peace, Verrick?” Diut reached out and took a meklah fruit from the bowl. He held it before him—between them. “And what of the Garkohn? What if we two sit here and decide not to fight each other again? How would you stop Natahk when he next decides to use your people?” As he spoke, he replaced the fruit in its bowl. During the instant that the bowl completely hid his hand from Jules, that hand was the same brown as Alanna’s own skin. Alanna understood the sign, realized that he knew of her readdiction. And did he condemn her, she wondered. She found herself examining his coloring for any trace of yellow disapproval. She found none. Perhaps he felt none. But he could hide his feelings when he wanted to.

Oblivious to the exchange, Jules answered Diut’s question. “Things are bad, Tehkohn Hao, but not as bad as that. We were not simply used by Natahk. We helped him willingly. I had been losing people steadily for two years and I was convinced that you were responsible.”

“And do you know now that I was not?”

Jules glanced at Alanna. “My daughter has told me that you were not. I believe that she reports the truth as she has been allowed to see it. But I find it hard to believe that she has not been deceived in some way.”

Diut said nothing for several seconds. Jules sat glaring at him, waiting impatiently for his defense. Finally, Diut spoke. “Do you understand the way we group ourselves, Verrick—our clans?”

“Clans? Yes, I understand, but what have they to do with—”

“Farmer, artisan, hunter, judge, and Hao. Five. The Garkohn are only three.”

“Yes?” Jules was frowning.

“The Garkohn Hao died years ago—I hope from the wounds given to him by my people. The Garkohn have twice as many people as the Tehkohn, but they have never had as much of the blue. The Garkohn Hao had been childless, and the Garkohn judges did not produce another Hao child. As it often happens when people have no Hao to unite them, the Garkohn fought among themselves. The hunters rebelled against the judges’ rule and killed the judges. Now the hunters rule themselves—badly. They had almost ceased to be a threat to us until Natahk gained power, and until your people arrived, Verrick.”

“But we haven’t helped the Garkohn until now,” protested Jules.

“You’ve helped them. Their artisans are even relearning the shaping of metal because of you.”

“But we haven’t shown them!”

Diut only looked at him.

After a while, Jules nodded. “I see. I knew they watched us, though I didn’t think that was the reason—or one of the reasons.”

“You help them in another way also.”

“How?”

“Your people know many things. Things that the ancestors of the Garkohn knew—things that the Tehkohn still know. And yet you are crippled. You cannot conceal yourselves. You cannot see what is in front of you. You fight badly…”

“We fought well enough against you to win!”

“You fought hardly at all, Verrick, and you know it.”

Jules glared at him angrily, but to Alanna’s surprise, he did not deny the charge.

“Natahk gave you information and you shaped it into a plan. Your part in that plan was to make noise, kill a few unwary farmers, and lure my fighters down from the upper levels of the dwelling to the floor of our valley where they could be killed more easily. You made your noise, and it was new and terrifying to my people. But when my fighters arrived, you had to be protected by Garkohn hunters.”

Jules was quietly furious. “We let them protect us so that we wouldn’t shoot them by accident, mistaking them for Tehkohn. Your people were not hurt nearly as badly as we could have hurt them—as we might still have to hurt them.”

“Threats, Verrick? Even as we talk of peace?”

With an effort, Jules controlled himself. “You are here to talk peace. Why do you talk of fighting instead?”

“Because you must understand what you are—why you are of value to Natahk. You can think, but you cannot fight. You are judges to whom hunters need not be subject. There are few traditions to protect you because you have no blue.”

“We are human beings! We…”

“You are Garkohn now in Natahk’s eyes. Your people were stolen to make you Garkohn. Look for them at the Garkohn farming town where they form the tie that joins you to Natahk.”

Slowly, Jules’s expression changed from indignation to comprehension. “Do you mean they’re hostages? Does Natahk intend to use them to force us to obey him?”

“That would be unnecessary. You obey him now. The tie is custom. Two peoples are not truly united without it. You might find it distasteful custom though.” He gestured toward Alanna. “This one has told me of your beliefs.”

“What are you saying?” demanded Jules.

“That Garkohn-Missionary children exist now. That more will be ‘born.”

There. It was out. Alanna waited for Jules’s reaction. It came, explosively, a shouted jumble. Alanna recognized some of the milder arguments. That it was not possible. That the differences between Kohn and human were too great… They were the same arguments that she had repeated to herself when she realized she was carrying Diut’s child.

She was glad she had been open with Diut, had told him just how strong the Missionary prejudice was. Now he was hearing it again much more vehemently from Jules. He was hearing that he was an animal, and he seemed more amused than angry. His coloring whitened slightly. Then he seemed to become bored with the tirade. He stood up and looked around the cabin. Near the fireplace, Jules’s ax leaned against the wall. Diut walked to it, picked it up, and examined its double-edged steel head.

Jules had fallen silent the moment Diut left his chair. Now he watched warily as Diut handled the ax. He probably knew that Diut needed no weapon to kill him. Most Kohn fighting was weaponless, in fact. Fighters leaped on each other from camouflage. Weapons made their camouflage less effective. Nevertheless, the sight of the Tehkohn Hao armed with an ax was undoubtedly terrifying. Alanna watched Jules, hoping that he would not give way to his fear.

And Jules watched Diut until Diut put the ax back in its place. Jules did not sigh with relief then, but his hands did loosen their convulsive grip on the table. Diut returned to his seat.

“Your artisans know their craft,” he said quietly. “There are things you could teach even us about the working of metal.” It was the first overture of anything resembling friendliness that he had made, but Jules was in no frame of mind to notice it.

“I can’t believe the kind of crossbreeding you’re talking about is possible,” said Jules. “I must have proof.”

“Ask Natahk for it. Perhaps he will give it to you now while he is still drank with his victory. What will you do if he does?”

Jules looked stubborn, said nothing.

“Or perhaps it would be better if you did not ask him. He has shown surprising gentleness in his handling of you so far. As long as you obey him, you are left alone to live as you wish. He does not have to waste large numbers of his hunters controlling you and you have at least the illusion of freedom. You might be more comfortable holding on to that illusion.”

Jules could not have missed the scorn in his voice. It seemed to bring back his reason. He spoke quietly. “Is it beyond your understanding, Tehkohn Hao, that I have borne this humiliation to keep my people alive?”

“And are you ready now to watch them die?”

“I would rather watch them die than see them stripped of their humanity.”

“So? And what of those who have already been… stripped?”

“No true Missionary could ever submit to such a—”

“I am weary of your raving, Verrick!” He paused as though daring Jules to speak. When Jules did not, he went on. “I will explain what I should not have to explain. Your people are all meklah slaves. When they hunger enough, when their pain is great enough, there is no price they will no; pay for the meklah poison. Do you understand me?”

There were several seconds of silence. Then Jules answered softly. “Yes.”

“And do you accept what I say as truth?”

There was another long silence. Alanna watched Jules, hoping that he would give an honest answer even if that answer was “no.” A “no” would disgust Diut, but he had reason to be patient. He would try again. But if Jules said “yes,” and lied, it would take Diut no time at all to realize that he was lying—again. At that point, Diut might give up on (he Missionaries altogether. Jules answered finally, his voice flat, dead.

“Yes. I believe you.”

“Then there will be no more talk of animals.” There was an edge to Diut’s voice. Apparently, he had not been as completely tolerant of Jules’s insults as he had seemed.

Jules nodded dumbly.

Now Alanna spoke up, asked the question Jules seemed too beaten to ask. “Is there a way out of this for the Missionaries, Tehkohn Hao?”

Diut glanced at her, then turned back to Jules. “Is that what you want, Verrick? A way out?”

“If one exists…”

“There might be one. But you must convince me first that it is truly what you want—that you would be willing to abandon the Garkohn if I opened a way. And you should know exactly what you run from.”

“From the Garkohn…”

“Wait. You should know that Natahk has probably already taken as many of your people as he needs for the tie. The union of tribes can be mostly ceremonial. They need not live together nor continue to intermarry. In your case, the Garkohn would probably not want much intermarriage. Your physical differences would be more a hindrance than a help to their way of life. Natahk will continue to let you live as you wish as long as you obey the few commands he gives.”

“Could you ask your people to live under such conditions, Tehkohn Hao?”

Diut flashed negative yellow. “But I have both personal and tribal reasons for hating the Garkohn,” he said. “We are old enemies. You are their ally. You would benefit as much from their protection as they would from your knowledge.”

“You said my daughter had told you of our beliefs,” said Jules. “If you understood her, you must realize that there is no way that I could ask my people to consider themselves subjects of Natahk.”

“Have not your own beliefs changed as we have talked?”

“Not enough to make me willing to become Garkohn.” He looked hard at Diut. “You may not understand me, Tehkohn Hao, but my people gave up their homework! for their beliefs. If now they had to give up those beliefs as well, they would have nothing left. They would be destroyed.”

Diut flashed white approval. “That is what I thought you might say. But I had to hear it. I had to see that you were not already too much absorbed into the Garkohn to have the will to save yourselves.” He leaned back in his chair and relaxed. His coloring returned to its normal blue without concealing shadows. Jules stared into the blue as though seeing Diut for the first time. Diut’s shadows lulled people as they were intended to. Even his quick conversational color changes did not disturb the relaxed mood the shadows encouraged. He wove a spell of normalcy, and then shattered that spell simply by relaxing and permitting his body to emphasize his lack of normalcy. Diut spoke quietly.

“I don’t envy you your work, Verrick. I hope you know your people. I hope their beliefs are as strong as you say they are. Because there is a price on the freedom you want.”

“What price?”

“The only way for your people to escape Natahk is to do what he would not risk doing for any long period. They must leave the valley.”

Jules nodded. “That’s exactly what I want them to do. We would already have done it if we had thought we had any chance of escaping Natahk.”

“Natahk will let you go as soon as he is busy enough with other matters. He is not your problem. Your problem is the meklah.”

“But… surely there are other places where the meklah grows.”

“So. It grows beyond the eastern mountains in the jungle. With it there are savage animals, diseases, and people far more deadly than the Garkohn. You would be better here. You would be better dead.”

“Nowhere else?”

Diut laid his hands flat on the table. “Not enough. To the south, beyond the Garkohn farming town and beyond the mountains, there is water. A lake as wide and twice as long as this valley. To the west, beyond our mountains, there is a desert and the sea. I have been to that country myself and seen that even the people who live there have difficulty surviving. The only direction open to you is north. Once you cross the mountains, the land is as flat as this valley, but it is higher. Meklah trees grow only sparsely there. They keep low to the ground and bear little fruit.”

“But we can use the leaves,” said Jules, “and the new roots.”

“You can. But to put yourselves beyond the reach of the Garkohn, you must go as far north as you can before you settle. The farther north you go, the less meklah there is. The country is good. There is game and other safer edible plants, and perhaps your own crops will grow. Only the meklah is missing.”

“And without it, we’ll die. I don’t think we can afford to go as far north as you believe we should, Tehkohn Hao.”

“Your daughter lived for two years without the meklah.”

“While how many others of my people died?”

“All those that the Garkohn could influence.”

“What?”

Diut turned toward Alanna. “Tell him.”

Alanna had deliberately said almost nothing. Knowing, as she did, that Diut would not hurt Jules, she had kept safely silent. She had depended on Jules’s reasonableness to win him over when he understood the threat. But now Diut wanted her co-operation and she had to give it—however carefully. She spoke to Jules in her unpracticed Garkohn so that Jules would expect Diut to understand her.

“The Garkohn prepared us all to die,” she said bitterly. “When we arrived at the Tehkohn dwelling two years ago, we were all, Garkohn and Missionary, shut in one large room together without meklah. We were given food and water, and we were left alone. At once, the least blue of the Garkohn asked to die. We Missionaries were told that it was their right to demand a quick, relatively painless death at the hands of those bluer than themselves.

“We watched while they were killed, their necks broken. Then the surviving Garkohn told us how we were to die—what being deprived of the meklah would do to us. After watching so many Garkohn die voluntarily, we believed them. At least, we believed that was how they were going to die. We hoped we were different enough physically to survive. As it happened, though, two of us were the first to go into convulsions. Those two got worse and more of us sickened. In a matter of hours, everybody but me was certain that the Garkohn were right. They all sat around waiting to die. Eventually, they died.”

“And you lived,” said Jules. “Why?”

“I think… because I wanted to.” She had known it would sound foolish. Abruptly, she switched to English. “The others were ready to die, Jules. They were convinced that they were in the hands of animals who would murder them. They were completely cut off from the settlement, and they knew they wouldn’t be able to find their way back to it without Garkohn help. And the Garkohn were lying around waiting to die.”

“What were you doing?”

Alanna switched back to Garkohn. “I was looking for a door.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Diut whiten slightly with amusement. She explained to Jules.

“The few doors that exist in the Tehkohn dwelling are concealed. This door was so well concealed that the room seemed to be just a rough-hewn bubble in solid stone. I could not even see where the fresh air was coming from. I tried to remember which way the Tehkohn had gone when they left, but the room was circular and empty except for us. The wall looked the same all the way around—rough stone. So I went around the room again and again, feeling the wall, looking at it. But by the time I found the door and got it open…”

“Wasn’t it fastened shut somehow?”

“No. Only hidden. By the time I got it open, I was too sick to do anything but fall through it.”

“What had you intended to do?”

“Get out of the dwelling if I could. Kill some Tehkohn before I died if I couldn’t.”

Jules threw a startled glance at Diut but Diut continued to show white amusement—and perhaps admiration. Alanna knew that she had first attracted his attention simply by surviving withdrawal. She went on.

“A couple of Tehkohn found me lying half in and half out of the doorway. They threw me back in and shut the door. I tried to memorize their faces so I could kill them later. In my mind, I was in the wilds again, Jules. Things were very simple. I would live so that I could kill those two Tehkohn—at least those two.”

“But, of course, you didn’t…?”

“No.” They had become her best friends, in fact. “But I lived.”

“Most of my people also live through the wanting,” said Diut. “Of those whom the Garkohn addict, many escape. If they can get back to the mountains, back to their families, back to where they have a reason to live, most live. The ones who die are usually those who have been tortured, or those who have been forced to do things they cannot live with.”

“I suspect that that may already have happened to most of my abducted people even without withdrawal,” said Jules.

“Do you mean that you think they’re dead?”

“Yes.”

Diut yellowed apologetically. “From what I have heard, Verrick, they are all alive. They have submitted.”

Jules glared at Diut, then shook his head. “You were saying…” He had to stop and start again. “You were saying that we could survive withdrawal if we were prepared for it. If we wanted… to live badly enough.”

“Most of you should survive.”

“Should.”

“Unless you want to stay within easy range of the Garkohn and have them come after you someday to kill you or bring you back, you have no choice. You must begin withdrawing your people. Let the strong try—the healthy adults—so that the weak can share what little meklah you find in the north.”

“No,” said Jules thoughtfully. “We have one other choice. Our doctor…” He stopped, realizing that he had used the English word, and groped for a Garkohn equivalent. “One who cures disease?”

“A healer,” supplied Diut in Garkohn.

“Yes. Perhaps he can find a way to make withdrawal easier, less dangerous.”

“There is no easier way. My healers have sought one for generations and failed to find it. You must begin withdrawing your people now.”

Jules looked hard at Diut. “Must begin?”

“The disturbance that will occupy the Garkohn and allow you to escape will come soon. You must be ready to leave.”

Jules was no more accustomed to being commanded than was Diut. Abruptly, he had had enough. “I won’t order my people to commit suicide, Tehkohn Hao. We don’t know enough about meklah withdrawal. Until we do, until our… healer has found a safe way for us to withdraw, we’ll remain as we are. And we’ll remain here. We won’t go north until I can see that we’ll have some chance of surviving there.”

Diut was silent for a moment. Then he spoke softly. “I thought we understood each other, Verrick.”

“So did I. But you don’t seem to realize what you’re asking me to do to my people. I’m willing to go north—eager to go as soon as it’s safe.”

“They are your people, Verrick.” Diut’s tone was deceptively gentle. Alanna spoke up urgently.

“Tehkohn Hao, his ways are different. He doesn’t realize…” She stopped at Diut’s yellow flash of annoyance. Diut went on speaking to Jules.

“You have the right to make decisions for them.”

Diut’s resignation and Alanna’s obvious alarm seemed to reach Jules. “And you think I have made a bad decision,” he said, “even though I made it to save my people’s lives.”

Diut leaned forward, his forearms on the table. “I have told you the only way to save their lives. I have spoken to you as I would speak to the leader of another Kohn tribe. But perhaps as your daughter says, your ways are different. You don’t understand. Listen then. I blame the Garkohn for the trouble between us. You have been lied to and used. But even so, I cannot afford to have your people remain here and be used again. And they would be used again, with your consent or without it. I admit that you and the Garkohn together are a formidable combination. But you must admit what a childishly vulnerable people your Missionaries are alone. Do you understand me now?”

Jules looked surprised. Clearly, he did understand. “I only wanted a little time,” he said.

“You will have some time. I cannot say how much. Do whatever you wish with it. Begin to withdraw your people at once, or wait and hope that if your healer does find his cure, there will still be Missionaries left alive to use it.”

Jules spoke low, as though to himself. “Am I to tell my people then that if, while they are writhing in agony, they can think in a positive enough manner, they might survive?” He shook his head. “We are doomed if you force this on us. Your people might save themselves the task of murdering us outright, Tehkohn Hao, but they will be killing us just the same.”

Diut rose, walked around the table to Jules. Jules, his expression uncertain, also stood up. They faced each other and Jules, who had never seemed small or slight to Alanna, seemed so now. Diut seemed to tower over him, dwarf him not only in size, but in sheer awesome presence. Alanna’s mind flickered back to an earlier time when she had fled from Diut, when she herself had called him animal and monster. Diut spoke softly.

“At this distance, Verrick, I could kill you very easily, so be still.”

Taken by surprise, Jules froze, stood staring at the tall native with fear and anger.

“You could not move quickly enough, or attack strongly enough to prevent me. I am certain death. Withdrawal from the meklah is possible life. Which would you choose?”

Jules relaxed, leaned against the table. In English, he said, “All right, you bastard, you’ve made your point.”

Diut did not react.

Jules switched languages. “Again, I understand you, Tehkohn Hao.” The sarcasm in his voice was too heavy to be missed.

“There is one more thing that must be said.” Diut spoke quietly, apparently neither taking, nor trying to give offense.

“You will find the words.”

“Natahk will ask you what was said between us. He may not ask gently. The choice of what you tell him is entirely your own. Nothing you say to him could stop my people from dealing with him. I was willing to leave the Garkohn to themselves to murder each other before this last raid, but I can no longer afford to do that. The only people you can hurt in speaking to Natahk are your own.”

Jules shrugged, deliberately turned his back, and sat down. “I understand.”

Diut did not speak for several seconds. Alanna could not tell whether he was angry or perversely admiring. His coloring remained a steady blue. He turned and spoke to her. “Your readdiction may serve some purpose now. Be the first to withdraw from the meklah. Show your people that it is possible.”

“That’s what I had planned to do.”

He looked at her for a moment longer, then turned and walked out of the door to his Garkohn and Missionary guards.

The next morning a shaken Missionary guard brought Jules word that Diut had escaped.

CHAPTER FIVE

Diut

I decided to push Alanna into a liaison with one of my judges. She had stayed with the artisans for a full season—long enough. It was time for her to be treated as the adult she was. I thought a judge would be best for her because the proportions of her body were much like those of a judge. She was tall and slender. Her bones were large, but because of her height, they did not seem so. She presented a false image of fragility. I would choose a judge for her. So.

But I chose no one. Other matters held my attention and I left Alanna with the artisans until she got into trouble. A hunter—a low hunter, but not as low as he should have been—chose to make her the victim of his frustration. Her season with the artisans probably helped him to believe that she was of no importance. Else why had she been left in subjection to others for so long? And her coloring gave her no protection. The hunter could not see her as blue enough to be dangerous to him or yellow enough to be a nonfighter whom he must not harm.

Thus, there was the foolish confrontation.

Alanna had been ordered to help the farmers down in our hidden valley. They were digging up the year’s first harvest, and at the same time, sowing the seeds of the second. Alanna was carrying a large basket of ohkahs when her trouble began. She was taking them to the storerooms. The hunter, also drafted temporarily into helping with the harvest, was in a foul mood and eager to humiliate another person since he felt himself humiliated by such “low” work. As Alanna walked past him, he thrust his digging prongs between her feet.

She tripped and fell onto the rocks, scattering spilled ohkahs over a wide area. I was standing not far away talking to a pair of judges. I saw Alanna look up at the hunter and see the white in his coloring. Her hand closed on what I first thought was a small ohkah, and she hurled it hard into his face.

The hunter shouted, fell, and did not get up. As I walked toward them, I saw blood on his face. I realized that the woman had thrown a stone not an ohkah. The hunter moaned, tried to get up, and fell back.

Another hunter was advancing on Alanna as I reached her. I spoke to him quietly.

“What do you want with her?”

Anger had driven yellow into his coloring. “Didn’t you see, Tehkohn Hao? She struck Haileh with a stone, a weapon, as though he was an animal.”

“I saw. And what weapon did Haileh use to provoke her?”

The hunter sputtered. “She is a foreigner! She has no right…”

“To defend herself? The lowest animal has that right. You will not interfere with her in any way.”

There was a silence that I did not like and I let my coloring flare.

“I will obey, Tehkohn Hao,” the man said quickly.

I turned to face Alanna and saw that though she had shown no fear of either hunter, she was afraid now. Of me. That was not surprising. I am much larger than any hunter—much larger than Alanna herself. And I am blue. Jeh had said that the blue was not important to her—that she had had to be taught to respect it. But I had other differences—Hao differences. I could not remember a time since my adolescence when there had not been people who stood before me in fear. I spoke to her in the same tone I had used on the hunter.

“Find Gehnahteh or Choh and tell them that your time with them is ended. Then go back to Jeh and Cheah.”

She looked at me for a moment—seemed to force herself to look at me. Then she murmured, “Yes, Tehkohn Hao,” and went away quickly.

I did not like the way she had looked at me. There had been more than fear in her eyes. There was something of the horror that I had seen in the eyes of a friend when he saw for the first time a loathsome poisonous desert animal. My differences repelled her. Her differences interested me. She was ugly almost beyond description, and yet her appearance was as natural to her as mine was to me. She wore it with assurance that was unmistakable, clearly secure in her private belief that we were the ones malformed and ugly. I in particular did not meet her standards.

I felt my coloring flow to white as these thoughts came to me, and I knew—perhaps I had known all along—that I would not choose a judge for her. Not until I had tried her assurance and her strangeness myself.

The morning after Diut escaped, Alanna came to breakfast not to eat but to talk to Jules’s guest, the Mission doctor. She wanted to tell him of a possible solution to the problem of how to bring the Missionaries safely through withdrawal. She had gotten her idea from the Tehkohn, but Dr. Bartholomew wouldn’t care about that. If it made sense to him, he would try it. If it didn’t make sense, he would be able to tell her exactly why. She had always liked that about him, and liked him. He was practical and bluntly honest. He had made no secret of the fact that he disapproved of her at first, but she had won him over. He was one of the few Missionaries whose respect she had worked to win. But he did not arrive.

In his place came his assistant, Nathan James, a man Alanna hardly knew. Nathan was young and thin and balding. Dr. Bartholomew had thought one of the younger people should begin learning to replace him. Just before Alanna had been captured, Nathan had volunteered. But still…

“Nathan,” she said, “isn’t Dr. Bartholomew coming?”

Nathan stared at her, then looked at Jules, who was eating a piece of meklah bread. Alanna looked at Jules and saw that he too was startled.

“Two years,” he muttered. “Of course, how could you know. And it’s such old news to us that I didn’t even think to tell you. The Tehkohn killed Bart, Alanna. They killed him when they took you.”

“But…” Alanna frowned, disbelieving. “Last night, you told Diut… you said the doctor…”

“I meant Nathan. He’s served as our doctor for the past two years. He had some teaching from Bart and he’s been studying Bart’s books.”

“I’ve done the best I could,” said Nathan. “I’ve had time enough. The Tehkohn killed my wife in that same raid.”

Alanna sat down at the table and stared at Jules bleakly. Couldn’t Jules hear the utter loathing in Nathan’s voice when Nathan mentioned the Tehkohn? Nathan had reason to hate, of course. An irreplaceable teacher lost, a wife lost… Nathan and Ruth James had been married for less than a year. What would Nathan’s reaction be to a Tehkohn idea, to an alliance with the Tehkohn, to information given by the Tehkohn Hao?

Full of misgivings, Alanna listened as Jules told Nathan of his meeting the night before with Diut. Nathan sat frowning as though he could not quite believe what he was hearing. Finally, Jules questioned him.

“Have you done any research at all on the meklah—found out anything that will help us?”

“Wait,” said Nathan. “First, are you assuming that everything that murdering Tehkohn said was true? Our people crossbreeding with… with…” His face was a twisted mask of revulsion. Alanna watched him with growing concern. Jules must have had some reason for trusting him. If that trust was misplaced, Nathan already had enough information to destroy the colony. All he had to do was give it away, deliberately or accidentally, to one of the more hotheaded Missionaries, or to any Garkohn.

“I was going to ask you for your opinion on the interbreeding too,” said Jules. “I wondered whether you thought it was possible…”

“I don’t!”

“But that’s secondary. We have to get out of this valley, away from the Garkohn and the Tehkohn if we’re to survive as a people. And to do that, at least some of us must break free of the meklah.”

“According to the Tehkohn Hao.”

“According to Diut,” Jules agreed. “And frankly, I believe him.”

“He must have been convincing.” Nathan did not bother to keep his sarcasm out of his voice.

Jules looked annoyed. “You haven’t answered my question, Nathan. The meklah.”

Nathan’s smugness faded. “I’ve done some experiments with my rabbits. I don’t know what they prove. Maybe nothing. Rabbits aren’t people.”

“Did you withdraw the rabbits?”

“I tried.”

“Well?”

Nathan shrugged. “It would have been simpler to slaughter them outright.”

“You lost them? None survived?”

“Of the ones I tried to help, none survived.” Nathan massaged his forehead. “I tried tapering them off the meklah slowly. They died. I tried sedating them with drugs that had already proved harmless to them while they were getting enough meklah. They died faster. By then, I knew what they were dying of and I immobilized some of them and began intravenous infusion. These died too.”

“Are you sure you knew what you were doing with that last?” asked Jules.

“Frankly, no. I think I did it right. I had books and diagrams to guide me but…” He shrugged again. Jules did not press him.

“You said you knew what the rabbits were dying of,” said Neila. “What was it?”

“Thirst,” murmured Alanna. “Dehydration.” The others looked at her.

“Yes,” said Nathan. “You would know something about it, wouldn’t you.”

“A little,” admitted Alanna.

“You should know quite a bit. You watched several Missionaries go through it.”

“I watched one Missionary go through it, Nathan. Me. And most of the time I didn’t even know what I was doing.”

He was silent for a moment, then he nodded. “Does it bother you to talk about it, Alanna? It’s awfully soon for you and I don’t want to…”

“It doesn’t bother me to do anything I have to do to help the people get free of that poison.”

He smiled briefly, then looked apologetic. “The others… do you know how long it took them… to die?”

“No. But the Tehkohn left us shut up together for what they told me was five days. By the end of that time, everyone else was dead.”

“Only five days?” said Jules.

“I don’t think it took me even that long to get through it. But five days is the traditional Tehkohn cleansing period.”

“But so little time…”

“You dry up,” said Alanna. “You lose water in every way you can and drinking doesn’t do any good because you can’t keep anything down until it’s over—or until you get more meklah. What you feel first though, before the thirst, is hunger, craving.” She let herself remember for a moment. “I know what it’s like to starve. Back on Earth, before I came to the colony, I got hungry enough to eat some things you’d probably think were pretty disgusting. But I think coming off the meklah is about the worst kind of hunger I’ve known.” She shuddered more with apprehension than from remembering. “But it’s the water loss that kills. The Tehkohn said they had seen some Garkohn die of it in only one day. Sometimes it hits them harder than it does us—hits them all at once.” She looked at Nathan. “The Tehkohn have made the same experiments you have—except for the intravenous feeding. They made them on volunteers from among their own people who had been addicted by the Garkohn. I would have told you about their results if you hadn’t already found out for yourself.”

Nathan’s calm vanished. “You saw Tehkohn animals making experiments?” he demanded. “You saw them using drugs to sedate each other?”

“No,” said Alanna. “I heard some of them talking about it and I went to a healer to see whether or not it was true. It turned out to have happened generations ago. The healer read it to me from her grandfather’s records.”

“Image of God! Now you’re saying they read and write as well as practice medicine.”

“Yes,” said Alanna quietly.

“It’s impossible. They couldn’t…”

“You have reason to hate them, Nathan. I don’t blame you. But can you afford to underestimate them? Can any of us?”

He looked at her strangely and she met his gaze. She spoke softly. “The Tehkohn have a civilization that is hundreds of years old at least. They were once part of an empire that covered more than half of this continent. They work metal and stone and wood. They read and write. They make medicines from herbs and from the body parts of certain animals. And most important, Nathan, they only rarely die in meklah withdrawal.”

“Because they have such a strong will to live,” said Nathan with heavy sarcasm.

“Are you saying that the will to live isn’t important?”

“Of course not. But it isn’t the cure-all that your Tehkohn friends think we’ll be stupid enough to believe it is. If we followed Diut’s advice and depended on nothing more than will power to keep us alive, we’d be committing mass suicide.” He looked at Jules. “Sounds convenient, doesn’t it? We kill ourselves off, then the Tehkohn only have the Garkohn to deal with.”

Nathan’s voice had been rising as he spoke. Jules answered him quietly. “If that’s so, Nathan, we’ll need your help more than ever. We need any answer you can come up with.”

Nathan closed his eyes for a moment and seemed to calm himself. Then he looked down at his plate of thin brown meklah pancakes, stared at them grimly. He reached for his cup and took a swallow of hot meklah tea. Finally he spoke, his voice low. “Jules, of the rabbits I withdrew cold, over half died. Now that’s better than the figure for Alanna’s prison room, but it’s still nothing that either of us would like to see happen to the settlement.”

“Are you saying there’s no way to break free?” asked Jules.

Nathan continued staring at his plate. “No quick way, certainly.”

“Shall we wait then?” said Alanna. “Shall we see whether the Garkohn can absorb us faster than the Tehkohn can kill us?”

Nathan raised his head to glare at her but it was Jules who spoke.

“What are you holding back, Lanna?”

She looked at him in surprise.

“I’ve seen you desperate,” he said. “And you aren’t now, though you’d have reason to be if things were as bad as they seemed.”

She moved uncomfortably in her chair. She didn’t like being read so easily. But at least it was only Jules doing the reading. “What I was holding back—in the hope that someone else would come up with it first—was an idea that may not help, but at least it will give us something else to try.” She drew a deep breath. Now was her only chance to present what she knew as her own idea rather than as Tehkohn custom. But there was hope for the Missionaries in the success the Tehkohn had had with their custom. A history of success. If only Nathan could be made to see its value and accept it. She had to take the chance.

“It’s something Diut didn’t tell you about because we’re not a Kohn people. He probably didn’t think it could be applied to us. It’s the returning ceremony that the Tehkohn give one of their own who escapes from the Garkohn. They have it just before the tehjai… the…” She stumbled searching for the right English word. “The returnee. They have it just before the returnee is left alone for withdrawal. It’s a religious ceremony really.”

“A heathen ceremony, you mean,” muttered Nathan.

Alanna turned to face him, looked at him silently as though waiting.

Nathan took another swallow of tea, then spoke angrily. “All right, get on with it. What do they worship? The sun? A stone idol? The Tehkohn Hao himself, perhaps?”

Only Alanna’s memory of Nathan’s loss and of his importance to the colony kept her from exploding at him. “The returnee is not accepted at once,” she continued. “He’s unclean. No one speaks aloud to him. No one touches him. The only communication with him is through a code of brightening and darkening coloring. Light signals, they call it, because some of the time they’re using their natural luminescence.

“The returnee goes to the home of the First Member of his clan and his First Clansman escorts him to one of the prison rooms. Then, no matter what time of the day or night it is, the First Clansman summons the returnee’s family, his friends, and Diut. With this group, he returns to the prison room and the group forms a circle around the returnee. They’re all seated on the floor. One by one, each person in the circle goes before the returnee to give him some personal message of encouragement in the code. That his wife or mate awaits him, that he has proven his fighting strength by breaking free of the Garkohn, that as he has survived some other difficult struggle, he can survive withdrawal, whatever. The successes of his life are recounted; the failures aren’t mentioned. When each message has been delivered, when the returnee has been reassured that his people want him back in spite of the humiliation he has undergone, the whole group begins a kind of prayer—a plea to the returnee’s strength, to his power as represented by the blue in his coloring to free him from the poison and restore him to his people. If the plea was verbal, it would be a chant. It’s repeated over and over, always ending with the assurance that the returnee is Tehkohn, and therefore, he will prevail.

“It goes on and on until the returnee is caught up in it. Until he is flashing it himself, apparently without realizing what he’s doing. Finally, he collapses. When that happens, the ceremony is over and the others leave quietly. I’ve heard that it’s usually several hours before the returnee even moves.”

“And then,” said Nathan, “because he’s had his returning ceremony, he survives. Right?”

Alanna ignored him, spoke to Jules. “It’s not only the message that the circle gives, but the light signals themselves—the steady rhythmic flickering. And the circle sways as though to music. I talked my way into one of the ceremonies so that I could watch. Then I sat there bored, watching, feeling superior.” She glanced at Nathan. “But after a while it started to get to me. I hadn’t learned to read the light signals yet—I did later—but after a while, I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I might have collapsed right along with the prisoner if I hadn’t started to look away.”

“Hypnosis,” said Jules softly.

Alanna nodded once. “Exactly.” She went on quickly before Nathan could say whatever he had his mouth open to say. “Remember how Dr. Bartholomew used it? Women had babies under it. People had dental work done, even had surgery with no anesthetic but hypnosis.”

Jules looked at Nathan and Nathan was at once on the defensive. “Jules, hypnosis is no more a cure-all than having a strong will to live. It can’t…”

“You do know how to use hypnosis, don’t you, Nathan?” asked Jules bluntly.

“Listen to me,” said Nathan. “Yes, hypnosis can ease pain sometimes. But no matter whether a person feels uncomfortable or not while he’s dying, he’s still dying!”

“You heard how the Tehkohn use it,” said Alanna. “It’s not just a pain killer. They use it to instill confidence, to give the returnee a goal and positive assurance that he can achieve it.”

Jules was frowning. “Nathan, back on Earth, I read quite a bit of pre-Clayark era literature. I know that our ancestors had powerful addictive drugs, and that sometimes people became enslaved by them. What I don’t know is whether hypnosis was ever used to ease their withdrawal. Was it?”

Nathan rested his elbow on the table and his head on his hand. “I don’t know.” He shook his head. “I haven’t read anything of its being used. And I’ve already tried everything I have read about.”

“I see.” Jules spoke more gently. “Do you know anything about hypnosis, Nathan?”

“Yes. The basics are so simple… it was one of the first things Bart taught me. Then he spent the rest of the short time that was left to him teaching me not to use it as though it was magic. I kept wanting to suppress symptoms without knowing anything about what was really wrong.”

“Do you think you could hypnotize our people here?”

“Well, nearly everyone is hypnotizable to some degree, but…”

“Do you think you could hypnotize me?”

Nathan stared at him. “God, Jules, will you slow down? Are you really thinking about risking your own life?”

“This isn’t something you can test on animals.”

“It’s not something I ought to test on the most important man in the settlement either.” He appealed to the silent Neila. “Talk to him! Talk him out of this for his own sake.”

Neila lookd at Jules. He met her eyes for a moment, then shook his head. “You know I have to do it,” he said softly. “And you know why.”

“Well I don’t,” said Nathan. “It makes no sense! Call for volunteers. You could get almost anyone else to do it just by asking.”

Jules shook his head. “It has to be me. I’m the one who’s going to order the people to walk away from everything they’ve accomplished on this world, walk away from the drug they’ve become addicted to, go to an unknown land on the advice of people who’ve been our enemies until now and who may still be enemies… As long as I’m their leader, that’s what I’m going to order them to do because I believe that’s their only salvation as a people. Am I still valuable, Nathan?”

Nathan stared at him helplessly.

“But I won’t even begin asking them to take those risks until I’ve taken the first risk myself.”

“But if you die…”

“Then I die. You and Jacob [his second-in-command] can decide what to do then. You can go on with the way I’ve chosen, or you can try another way.”

“You sound like a man trying to commit suicide,” said Nathan. “And you’re not going to get me to help you.”

Jules shook his head. “No, I’m not trying to kill myself. But I have to withdraw. I have to do that much before I ask the people to do so much that may be suicidal.”

“No!”

“Then you’ll sit back and watch me withdraw without whatever help you could give.”

Nathan sighed, frowned. “You don’t know what you’re doing. And I wish to heaven that was the worst of it.” He looked directly at Jules. “You’re wrong in this. You’re a brave man, but you’re wrong.”

“Will you give me what help you can with hypnosis?”

“You know damned well I will. What else can I do? Just give me a couple of days to clear up some other things—and to check through my books. There might be something in them on pre-Clayark era drug addiction that I missed.”

“Two days then,” said Jules.

“I’m already in withdrawal,” said Alanna quietly. She noticed that only Nathan appeared startled. Evidently Jules and Neila had guessed why she was not eating. And, of course, Jules had heard her promise to Diut the night before. “You can try hypnosis with me if you want to,” she told Nathan. “I’m not asking you to, but you can try.”

“But I’d want you to undergo some conditioning first,” he said. He seemed almost eager. Anything to avoid making the first experiment on Jules. “You should have a few sessions with me before you withdraw so that I can give you the necessary post-hypnotic…”

“If you can’t do it now, Nathan, you can’t do it at all. I’m going off.”

“For God’s sake, will somebody in this family please be reasonable!” He looked at Jules, at Neila, at Alanna again. “What’s your hurry? What are you trying to do?”

“Escape, Nathan. I don’t like being a prisoner. I’ve developed a real dislike for anything that holds me against my will.” And there was another reason. She had to be free when she saw Diut again. He had clearly demanded that much of her. He would want to move fairly quickly to free the Tehkohn captives and she was certain that he would want to see her before he freed them. But since she could not tell Nathan that, he would just have to think that she was being stubborn. “Do you want to try hypnotizing me?” she asked.

He swallowed the last of his tea and glared at her. Finally he shrugged. “I might as well. And we’d better try now before you’re too far gone.”

He tried—tried hard—and Alanna tried. Perhaps Alanna tried too hard. Perhaps she was simply afraid to let him have what appeared to be open access to her thoughts. She had too much to hide. He explained carefully that she would not be giving over control of herself, that she could not be influenced to do or say anything against her will. She tried to accept this, but some part of her did not believe him. She could not relax. She could not accept his suggestions.

“You will feel confident of your ability to live without the meklah,” he told her over and over after going through the motions of putting her under. “You will feel no need of the drug.”

And she thought, Yes I will.

“You will be relaxed and without pain.”

No I won’t.

And so on. The failure was hers rather than Nathan’s. But by the time the session was finished, she was too uncomfortable to care. She got up without a word and went to her room. Already she felt tired and hounded by the meklah products she could see and smell around her. She was not much more than normally hungry, but her memory and imagination made it seem worse. Nathan’s suggestions had caused her to remember just how bad her first withdrawal had been. She considered the irony bitterly. She was probably the only person in the colony whose combination of perversity and past experience made the technique she had suggested more a hindrance than a help.

Time crawled by. She found herself thinking of Diut, feeling glad that he could not see her as she was now, as she would be shortly. When he saw her again, the ordeal would be over and he would be able to speak more than his few illegal words to her. She would be clean. Not that her situation was directly comparable to that of a Tehkohn captured by the Garkohn, and not that Diut was subject to every rule that bound other Tehkohn. He could hardly have spoken more with her before Jules anyway. But still, addiction was a shameful stigma in his culture. An addict who did not withdraw as quickly as possible could not expect to remain in favor with him. She was surprised to realize how important that had become to her—that she keep his favor. She had expected him to suffer in comparison with Missionary men—men of more human appearance. He had not. She could no longer see him as the monster he had once appeared to be.

He would return for her as well as for the Tehkohn captives. She was certain of that. And he would kill Natahk both because Natahk was too dangerous to be left alive, and for another more personal reason. As she withdrew, she would think of Natahk dying as Tien had died. Natahk, who was the reason for her past suffering and for the suffering she faced now. She would think of it while she could think.

After a while her awareness of time grew distorted. She seemed to move too quickly, or in slow motion. She lay down on her bed and before she realized it, she had fallen into a meklah dream. A bad dream this time. The nightmare of her first withdrawal.

She could feel the cold sand beneath her and hear the convulsive gagging of those Missionaries who had tried to eat the meklah-free mountain food that the Tehkohn had left them.

There were Garkohn huddled silently around the mound of their yellowed dead, waiting for their own deaths. They maintained what dignity they could until their senses left them. Then they groveled unknowingly with the Missionaries in the filth on the floor.

Alanna remembered searching for the door, finding it too late. Remembered the two Tehkohn who lifted her like a sack of grain and threw her back into the cleansing room. Remembered hatred. Remembered landing on someone who groaned and tried feebly to crawl away. Remembered the pain of awakening once and finding her head pillowed on a yellowed Garkohn corpse. Remembered crawling away sickened, dragging herself to a Missionary man and finding him equally dead. Remembered terror and fury that she should be abandoned in such a place—she who was not dead.

The entire experience was there, replayed in seconds, or in hours. Alanna did not know which, but it held her, gripped her. It threatened to replay again and Alanna strained away from it. The present flickered before her, stable for a moment. Her bed, her room, shadowy figures nearby.

Then heavy gluey sleep sucked her away from them. Sleep held her tarlike, though she tried to waken. She could not open her eyes. She struggled, not knowing whether her struggle was physical or mental. She fought and seemed to hear animal sounds around her. Her own voice gibbering.

She awoke sweating and vomiting and choking. Her body heaved convulsively again and again and again and there were moments when she was aware of being covered with her own filth.

And there was the pain. The agony that would not stop. As though her body, having been denied the meklah, had somehow begun to consume itself.

She trembled, convulsed, trembled…

She was aware briefly of other people with her, staring at her. She felt her breath ragged, knife-edged against a throat already raw from screaming. Her voice was a mere husk of itself, her tongue dry, thick, choking. Remembered anger exploded anew within her at the one responsible for her ordeal. Natahk. The one who would pay. She could hear her own voice, a harsh whisper, cursing.

Over and over again, waves of pain, convulsions, pain…

Peace.

Someone was wiping her face with a damp cloth. She opened her eyes—was surprised to find that she could open them—and saw that it was Neila. Disoriented, she tried to think. Was it only a few moments ago that she had left her foster mother in the other room?

“How long…?” She could only mouth the words; her voice was gone. But Neila understood.

“Four days.”

Alanna closed her eyes again, not thinking about the time gone, not thinking about anything. Only enjoying the sensation of peace, the near-absence of pain.

“I have water,” said Neila, “and some broth, meklah-free. Do you think you can take it now?”

She could. Somehow she forced herself to drink slowly. She was as weak as though she had fasted for weeks, but even at that, her condition was not as bad as it had been after her first withdrawal.

Jules came in as she was swallowing a little broth, and for some reason, Natahk was with him. Alanna could only stare her hatred at the Garkohn and wonder why he was there.

Jules said small meaningless things and managed to let her know that he was glad to see her alive. Natahk only shook his head—one of the Missionary gestures he had picked up. He spoke quietly.

“It is unthinkable that anyone should be able to do this twice.” He came closer and touched her with his offensive careless intimacy. “How is it that we did not notice you before we lost you to the Tehkohn?”

She was not yet alert enough for his openness to frighten her. She only glared at him, then appealed with her eyes to Jules and Neila to get him out of her room. Natahk saw the appeal and understood it.

“You would like them to send me away? I will go soon. I only wished to see for myself that my hunters’ reports of you were true.” He was secure. He did not even look at Jules, who was now behind him. He spoke again, softly. “Shall I leave you as you are now, free of the meklah, the only one of your kind granted such freedom?”

She turned her face away from him, wondering furiously who had given her away. Jules? Neila? Nathan? Who had failed to notice the concealed listening Garkohn. The thought of yet another withdrawal made her sick with fear. She would readily have begged, groveled before Natahk if she had thought it would do any good. The four-day ordeal had drained her pride away. But it had not stripped her of her knowledge of the Kohn. She faced him again, carefully showing only her real anger and hatred. She managed a whisper.

“Leave me free or kill me!”

He stared at her silently for a long moment, giving no sign of his feelings. “And still you challenge,” he said finally. “When you’re fully recovered, Alanna, we must talk. You have much to tell me. I’m leaving now, but in a few days, I’ll return with questions for you. Keep your freedom until then, and think on what you would do to keep it longer.”

He turned and left the room. Jules moved so quickly to follow him that Alanna almost missed the look of cold rage on her foster father’s face.

For a moment, she was aware of loud arguing from the next room. Jules’s voice and Natahk’s raised against each other. She did not understand what they said, nor did she care. She could not even make herself worry about Natahk’s threats now that he had left her alone. She was too tired. She drifted off into much-needed sleep.

Not until noon the next day when Alanna got up—against Nathan’s orders—did she begin to take a real interest in anything outside herself. She was still weak, still hoarse. She had bruises and sore muscles, but none of that mattered. Something had happened between the Garkohn and the colonists. She had to know what it was. She found Jules sitting alone in the cabin’s main room.

“It’s simple,” he told her. “Natahk’s guards reported my meeting with Diut. Then they reported Diut’s escape. Natahk connected the two and decided that I had let his prize prisoner escape.”

“With all his guards looking on?”

“Oh yes,” said Jules bitterly. “It was all some Tehkohn trick, you see, and I was in on it. I told him it was a lot more likely that some of his own people had let Diut get away—out of respect for the blue.”

“And?”

“He lit up the room. Brightest yellow I’ve ever seen. I think a lot of his rage came out of his knowledge that I might be right. He questioned me about my talk with Diut. I had to tell him something so I told him Diut had accused him of kidnapping our people. He not only admitted that it was true, but he told me he had us too. Confirmed everything Diut said against him.”

Alanna sighed, nodded. “Well, at least now you can be sure.”

Jules went on with increasing bitterness. “He said he wanted me to understand exactly what the situation was so that I wouldn’t endanger my people by following any instructions Diut had given. He said it was unfortunate that I couldn’t have been content with things as they were, because now he had to take away even the limited authority that he had let me exercise over my people.” Jules took a deep breath and the rage that Alanna had only glimpsed the day before was back, intensified. “My people! People I worked over half my life to save. People who trusted me! I’ll kill Natahk before I let him get away with this!”

Alanna sympathized silently. But Jules’s anger, like her own, would have to wait. Now the Garkohn would watch him more closely than ever, and they would be less tolerant about what they permitted him to do.

“Jules, this means you can’t go through with your withdrawal.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”

“They’ll be watching you! My God, if they found out about my withdrawal, you know they’ll find out about yours.”

“Possibly.”

“They’ll readdict you—at least. They might not even let you get all the way through. You’re a lot more important to them than I am. Natahk will see your freedom as a threat to his control over the settlement.”