Survivor (16 page)

"So? And what did you see?"

"That you feared for them. That you were much interested in saving them."

Alanna met his eyes. "I am, yes. How could I not be?"

"You are one who bargains, Alanna. Are you bargaining with me now for the safety of your people?"

"Yes."

He stared at her for a long moment without speaking. Then he lay back on the bed. There was white suddenly in his coloring. Amusement. But she knew him now and she was not surprised. "You will never say what I expect you to say. You don't change."

"I've changed," she said.

"What do you want of me? Only help for your Missionaries?"

"What should I want of you? We've made a child together, you and I. What should I want of my husband?"

He sat up and pulled her close. "Tahneh spoke to me before I left the mountains." This was the other Hao, the old woman. "She comes with her advice, you know. She said, 'Let her go with her people if she wants to go. Show her yellow if she wants it and leave her. Let her go or stay of her own free will.'"

"She knew I wouldn't go," said Alanna. "She wanted you to know."

He said nothing.

"In a way, it will be harder for me now," she continued. "The Missionaries will be so far away… But I couldn't leave with them. I'm less one of them now than ever. And there is no man for me among them."

"I have already seen that."

She glanced at him sharply.

"All right," he said, reading her expression. "I'll leave you to insult them yourself."

"I wasn't insulting them. I only meant…"

He put a hand over her mouth, his coloring fading to white. "They are blue people, Alanna. All blue. Wholly admirable."

Alanna sighed and shook her head. He could be as condescending, as patronizing, toward the Missionaries as most Missionaries were toward the Kohn. But now was not the time to argue with him about it.

He smoothed her hair. "And worthy people that they are, they no longer need you." His tone changed, became more serious. "It would cause no real hardship among them if you left them now—went with the prisoners when they escape."

She spoke quickly, concealing her alarm. "No, Diut. It would cause worse than hardship. Natahk would tell Jules where I had gone and why. And whether Jules fully believed him or not, he would be in no mood to trust you when you visited him again."

"Natahk will speak eventually regardless of what you do. If he tells what he knows while you're here, the Missionaries will kill you."

"I know the risk," she said. "And I'm not eager to take it. But I don't want the Missionaries to die because my going made them too suspicious to trust you."

"It is not likely that they will. Verrick will not like having to trust me if Natahk plants suspicion in his mind, but he will have no choice. He can escape this valley only by co-operating with me. He will understand that—as you understand it." He looked at her silently for a moment. "You know your work here is done. Why do you resist leaving?"

"I cannot go until I know they are safe."

"You mean you will not go." There was a slight harshness to his voice.

"They can still make mistakes, Diut, with the Garkohn and even with you. Mistakes that can destroy them. Mistakes that I can help them avoid."

"They are not children, Alanna. You have set them on the right path. If they cannot follow that path now, without you, then perhaps they do not deserve to survive."

"I cannot desert them. For a while, they were my people."

"Perhaps they are still your people. Perhaps you were too quick to reject Tahneh's words. Are you so certain that you would not prefer to leave with them when they go north?"

She felt a rush of bitter anger. "I've already answered that. Why do you ask again? Do you want me to go?"

There was a long silence. He showed no yellow in his coloring, but she knew she had angered him. She hoped she had also made him feel ashamed. At first, she thought she had. His voice was mild when he spoke again.

"I have humiliated Natahk by walking away from his hunters as though they were blind and deaf. I will humiliate him again by taking the rest of his prisoners from him. Do you know what he would do to you to avenge himself if he learned that you were my wife?"

She stared at the floor, knowing and not wanting to know. "He will not find out."

"You will go with the prisoners tomorrow. You will leave your helpless Missionaries to me, and you will take yourself out of danger. Otherwise, I will abandon your Missionaries and let them fend for themselves."

She listened, dismayed. He had her. He had found the right weapon. However much she believed she could help the Missionaries, they did not need her nearly as much as they needed him.

"I will obey," she said softly. "But if the Missionaries are killed as a result of some foolishness that I could have helped them avoid, what will we do, Diut, you and I. We will not have a marriage. What will you have saved me for?"

"You have said enough."

"Not if I have failed to convince you! You were the prisoner of foreigners once—desert people. Didn't you decide then that it would be better to die than to serve them at the expense of your own people?" This was something that had happened when Diut was little more than a boy. It had been his first success after coming of age as the Tehkohn ruler. He had arranged a tie with the tough desert tribe and brought them and Tahneh, their Hao, to the mountains as allies against the Garkohn.

"You are not a prisoner," he said.

"Since we came together I have not been. But now…" Her voice trailed away and he said nothing for several seconds. He was not accustomed to people arguing with him when his decisions were already made. There was a time, Alanna remembered, when he would simply have slapped her and demanded that she obey. But he was changing.

"You are not a prisoner," he repeated softly.

"So?"

He sighed. "The Missionaries are still your people. You know it. They are like you, and that is important." He put his arm around her, toyed with her hair. "You want to be with them as long as they are here because you know that when they leave, you may not see them again."

She nodded, agreeing, glad he had understood. For a moment, she was overwhelmed by the thought that she would not have put into words herself. No more Earth-human faces. Ever. "If I can see them leave the valley," she whispered, "and know that they are free, then I will be free. I'll go home with you and be what both you and I want me to be."

"If you live." He grayed bleakly. "Stay. Do what you must do."

"And you will help?"

"So."

Gratefully, wearily, she leaned against him. After a while, she lifted her head, flattened his fur out of the way, and bit him just at the throat.

Diut

We had to learn to understand each other, Alanna and I—understand why there were times when neither of us seemed to react properly to the other. I knew, for instance, that she was more impressed with my size and strength than with my blue. On her savage homeworld where people preyed on each other freely and where coloring had little significance, sire and strength were important. She told me that a male of her kind who was my size would eat well and would be given a wide berth by smaller people.

"And a female?" I asked.

She curved her mouth in a way somehow different from the way she did it when she was amused. "Women fought more," she said. "Even those who were large and strong. If we lived, it was often because we were more savage than most men. Sometimes we were caught without warning though, and a man or many men would force us to mate with them. That was perhaps the least that could happen to us. Most often we survived it if we were not too badly beaten—and if there were not too many men. And if the men were not diseased."

"It happened to you?" I asked.

"Yes," she said bitterly. "It happened."

"And thus your anger with me when I demanded a liaison."

She said nothing. I had brought a little of her anger back, I think.

That was the way of her former home. She had learned all her respect for the blue since coming to us. I understood this with my mind, but somehow, I never completely accepted it. Respect for the blue was inborn with us. No one questioned it. It seemed impossible not to value it. I had grown up knowing myself to be highly valued for my blue. Even enemies like the Garkohn would have valued me.

Natahk and a few of his higher hunters pretended to be unimpressed by the blue but I would have gambled that they could not maintain their pretense before me or any other Hao. They knew better than I did how much they needed a Hao to unite them and make them a strong people again—a people worthy of respect.

But since Alanna's people had no such needs, Alanna could forget her learned respect for the blue whenever she wanted to. For instance, when she behaved foolishly and I beat her, she fought back. No Tehkohn would have done that—fought against me. And Alanna never seemed to learn that her fighting did no good. I always hurt her more than she hurt me. I told her that her punishment would be less if she stopped struggling against me, but she ignored me.

She was stubborn beyond belief. For a time, her body was constantly marked with bruises that showed on her naked skin as they never would have on a Tehkohn. The day came when I thought I would have to either send her away from me or kill her. And there were moments when I was certain that it would be better to kill her.

Our most serious confrontation came as we hunted jehruk, the largest flesh eaters of the mountains. I had already taught her much about the jehruk—how they invaded our territory, how they stalked and killed leaf eaters that should have been ours, how they hid in the vines, almost indistinguishable from the leaves around them, and leaped out on unwary people. They camouflaged themselves well, those great ones. Their natural coloring was like the deep judge blue-green. Judges refused to eat their flesh claiming that they and the jehruk shared a common ancestor. They saw the jehruk as their wild relative and they took pride in its ferocity. I saw the jehruk as a creature to test myself against. It grew to be at least my size and it fought me with every intention of smashing my head from my shoulders.

On an earlier hunt, I had fought a fairly small one weaponless and killed it while Alanna watched. And when the fighting was done, she stood back looking at me strangely.

Later when we were camped, she washed my few small wounds and rubbed healing ointment on them. As she worked, she shook her head from side to side and spoke in her own language.

"What are you saying?" I asked.

She answered without hesitation. "That I lost you for a while as you fought that creature. I watched closely, but most of the time I couldn't tell which was the animal."

I blazed white in spite of myself. Only Alanna would say such a thing seriously. She behaved like another Hao, this furless one. She thought she was blue. And though that made me angry sometimes, it also pleased me.

I pulled her down and got her wet with the ointment she had been rubbing on me. We rolled together on the ground like animals until she made her "laughter" sounds, and on until she made other softer sounds of pleasure. Her body had grown accustomed to me as I had told her it would. We pleased each other very much now. Sometimes during our nights together, we forgave each other for the days. Sometimes, but not always.

The jehruk hunt that forced me to decide what to do with her was a piece of foolishness that we took a long while to forgive each other for. Alanna would have been killed if I had not been with her. And perhaps I would have been killed if she had not done what she did. Perhaps. But at the time, I was in no mood to show gratitude.

We were alone, tracking a huge jehruk—a creature that, by the size of its tracks, had to be half again as large as I was. Alanna had her knife and the weapons that she had had Choh make for her. These were a collection of sticks called a bow and arrows. My fighters had shown much white over them until Alanna began to bring in impressive kills almost as soon as I began teaching her to hunt.

Now she carried her most powerful bow—the best that Choh had been able to make. More than once, I had rubbed the soreness from her arm after she practiced with it. Her arrows were straight and metal-tipped—also Choh's best. Alanna had brought down large leaf eaters with them. Now she wanted a jehruk—and I wanted to see her go after one. The hunt was hers. I only followed and watched. She understood that it was a test.

We had sought the jehruk for three days without luck. In fact, we had circled around and were nearing home when we came upon the tracks of Alanna's jehruk. And then Alanna, who had been so watchful for the three days, let the creature see her before she saw it.

It was on all fours and partly concealed by the tree? and vines growing near the small stream to which it had come for water. I saw it just before it saw Alanna. She was several paces closer to it than I was but she did not see it at all. Even as I called a warning to her, the jehruk charged.

She was quick with her bow. It was an old weapon to her. She put one arrow into the jehruk's chest just before the creature would have reached her. That slowed it, but did not stop it. I stopped it.

I reached her the instant before the jehruk would have, and knocked her out of the way. Then I met the jehruk. It reared onto its hind legs to greet me with long claws and teeth ready—and it did look like a somewhat deformed Kohn. Its face was long and almost as flat as ours. But its jaws were larger and more powerful. Its teeth were long and sharp. Also, its body was too long and its limbs too short to be Kohnlike. And it had no hands. Only the long claws of its feet.

The jehruk raked the air above my head as I hit its midsection hard, knocking it to the ground. Then, on the ground as we struggled, it raked my back. It brought up its hind feet to disembowel me but I twisted aside. All the while it screamed aloud and burned yellow from the pain of its wound. Once I had it by the throat, but it was too strong, too large, too much maddened by pain. On my own, I would never have chosen to fight it weaponless. Weapons were meant for animals as large as this. We rolled among the vines, biting and tearing at each other, hurting each other, but not enough. All I did, all I had time to do, was defend. I could not overpower the creature. I could not even free my hands for a moment to tear out its eyes. A moment's laxity on my part and it would tear out my throat. It was trying.