Unexpected Stories (3 page)

“I want no special watch kept on Diut,” she told him. “Do nothing to frighten him or make him suspicious and we’ll have no trouble with him.”

“I’ll see that no one bothers him,” Ehreh promised. “He’ll be safe as long as he’s with you anyway.”

Tahneh looked at him sharply. He was too quick. Another time, his speed in understanding her would have been amusing—another time, but not now.

His eyes seemed to hold no expression at all as he spoke again. “Later, Tahneh, when you give him to us, he’ll see you as his betrayer.”

“So?” His words angered her and her tone was bitter. “And to avoid that, you would rather I give him to you now.”

“I would. But I know you won’t. In your place, I probably wouldn’t either.” Ehreh sighed. “He would hate you anyway because you symbolize us. But he’s young. Perhaps he’ll get over his hatred.”

Tahneh looked past him at a dimly glowing patch of wall. She could speak more freely to Ehreh than she could to others. She could talk to him—as much as she could talk to anyone. “I surprised myself,” she said softly. “I looked at Diut and I decided that I had been alone long enough. That I would have him, tonight, while he was still whole and free. I gave no consideration at all to what he might feel later. I didn’t care.”

“And now you do care,” said Ehreh. “But not enough to stop.”

She refocused her eyes to look at him. “No. Not enough to stop. I tell myself that I’m giving him a few more hours of … freedom.”

“You are.”

She flashed yellow denial, disgust.

He laid a hand on her shoulder with the familiarity of a close friend. “You yourself feel that you’re betraying him. I didn’t realize that. You’re not, of course.”

She said nothing.

“This is the succession, Tahneh!” His voice became hard. “You have responsibilities, but for once you have no rights. You’re duty bound to help us, or at least not to interfere with us. You didn’t catch him for us, and you can’t release him. So how can you be his betrayer?”

She took his hand from her shoulder, held it for a moment, then let it go. “Not all feelings are reasonable, Ehreh. It doesn’t matter.”

“It will matter. If you go to him feeling as you do now, you’ll have the bones of a liaison. He’s Hao, and yet your guilt could cause you to find less with him than you could with some hunter.” Ehreh’s blue-green body glowed with the intensity of his feeling. “Make yourself two people, Tahneh; you know how. You need not to be tonight the person that you must become tomorrow.”

Later, as she ate, surrounded by the best of her fighter and nonfighter castes with Diut beside her, she struggled to follow Ehreh’s advice. She knew he was right. And it would not be the first time that she had had to split herself in two. She was no stranger to unpleasant duties. It was just that none of them had ever touched her so deeply before. None of them had ever concerned another Hao.

The two companions of the Tehkohn Hao provided her with an unexpected diversion when they mentioned that they were married.

Intercaste marriages were so rare among the Rohkohn that Tahneh would have had to go to the tribal records to find out when the last one had taken place. She looked at the huntress and the judge with more interest now and saw by their coloring that both were high in their respective castes. Jeh was a deep quiet blue-green no more than a shade or two yellower than Ehreh. It was possible that if the young judge lived up to the promise of his coloring he could become a chief himself someday. And Cheah, his wife. Although she was unusually small for a huntress, she was almost exactly the same dark green as Tahneh’s chief hunter. It was possible that Diut had plans for them both … Tahneh refused to think further in that direction. She questioned Cheah curiously.

“Didn’t you have trouble in your liaison? Weren’t there challengers?” People who joined in intercaste liaisons were nearly always challenged by members of their own caste—members who chose to be insulted that one of their own had turned away from them.

Cheah whitened, remembering. “I had three challengers, Rohkohn Hao. Only three.” The number was unusually small, probably due to Cheah’s high coloring. The little huntress was boasting. It was not necessary for her to say what had happened to her challengers. She was still alive; therefore they must be dead. She looked at her husband.

“I had five challengers,” said Jeh. He showed no white in his coloring but in his eyes there was a look of cold satisfaction.

“You would have had more here,” Ehreh said quietly from his place at Tahneh’s left. Ehreh’s prejudice against hunters and against hunter-judge intermarriage was at least one of the reasons why there had been no such intermarriage in recent Rohkohn history.

Jeh let his dark eyes travel over the chief judge silently, almost insolently, measuring. “I think not,” he said softly. “I would have had more at home, but I made certain that many people saw each of the five. By the end of the fifth, all disapproval had vanished.” His coloring had brightened with his intensity, and his tone had been one of confident challenge.

Tahneh was surprised at how easily the situation amused
her. “Peace, young one,” she said quickly. They were still savage young animals, these two. But then, that was why they were still alive. “Your people accept your union now?”

“Some said first that we were a bad example to the children,” said Cheah. “But by the time our son was born to make our liaison a marriage, most had accepted us.”

Tahneh turned to look at Diut, who had ignored the conversation around him and concentrated silently on his food. “Tehkohn Hao, what did you think of your friends’ marriage?”

“I was too young for my thoughts on the subject to matter,” he said. He shifted uncomfortably. “I hadn’t yet been acknowledged.”

He was acknowledged now, then. That answered one question no one had gotten around to asking him. He continued eating as though he expected his answer to satisfy her.

“What the Hao thinks is always important,” she said. “I
don’t believe they would have dared anything as lengthy as a marriage if you had objected to it.”

“No … I didn’t object, Rohkohn Hao.” He did not look at her.

He seemed ill-at-ease, she thought. As though the gathering that she had arranged to honor him had only made him nervous. But no, that wasn’t likely. He would be used to dealing with people of high rank. It wasn’t the presence of her chiefs that was bothering him. It was her own presence.

Deliberately, Tahneh continued to look at him as though she expected him to say more, as though she might even disapprove of his liberal attitude.

He became defensive. “There was no reason for them not to marry. Not after they had defeated their challengers.”

“So,” Tahneh said noncommittally. She looked away from him and took a bite of fish. She could almost feel his relief. He could not have been around Hao before, she decided. Of course, neither had she for some time, but she had at least had her father to guide her while she was growing up. Diut acted as though he had had no Hao example at all to follow. Also, there was the matter of his youth. Tahneh could remember what it was like to be a newly acknowledged uncertain young Hao, afraid of a misstep, afraid of shaming oneself, afraid even of the Hao responsibilities. It occurred to her that such fears might have been the reason for his leaving home.

Others had begun carrying on their own quiet conversations when she spoke to him again.

“You were acknowledged just before you left home, Tehkohn Hao?”

He glanced at her. “Yes,” he said quietly.

Tahneh whitened in spite of herself. “And when you insisted on traveling away from home, your council of judges and your chiefs became angry enough to take back their acknowledgement if they could have.”

Diut’s coloring became faintly blue-green as it took on a small amount of yellow. Then he caught himself, restored his normal blue, and looked at her angrily.

She realized that he had misread her. He thought she was trying to humiliate him. She deliberately kept amusement in her voice and coloring as she continued.

“After my acknowledgement, I explored the ruins here myself. I found a place where one of our passageways connected with a network of natural caverns, and I followed the caverns through the northern hills until I emerged on a cliff overlooking the sea. I was gone for days. My people were frantic.”

The memory was surprisingly pleasant. She had all but forgotten it—her own assertion of independence. She glanced at him and found him watching her. He turned away, a little too quickly, and picked up a piece of fruit. But at least he had lost his anger.

He was far too sensitive, she thought. But Hao, especially Hao raised by judges, were never treated as roughly as they should be. They were too valuable, and as they grew past puberty, too dangerous.

She continued to watch him, enjoying beauty that he probably did not realize he possessed. That was another attribute of the Hao, although Tahneh did not see that she herself possessed it to any unusual degree. He was well-muscled and deep-chested in the way of mountain people. His eyes were mountain-narrow and his face was angular and lean with none of the roundness of her own. This would have made him seem older, grimmer, had he not been so obviously unable to cope with another Hao on equal terms. His age made no difference now though. Only his blue was important. The color drew Tahneh’s eyes as her blue had always drawn the eyes of her people. And now that he understood that her mocking had not been malicious, she could see that her blue was affecting him too. He could not help turning now and then to look at her. She chose one of these stolen glances to meet his eyes with a look of quiet invitation. In his eyes then, just for a moment, she saw hunger as intense as her own. She made herself look away and continue eating, but the food was abruptly tasteless.

She waited impatiently until the meal was over. Only then, after her people had gone home and his friends had been taken to their nearby guest apartment, did she permit her body to express the joy she felt in blinding luminescence. He was more hesitant. Perhaps he found her overwhelming—not that it mattered. She drew his hard flat young body to her and immediately gave the caress that directly preceded coupling. She lowered her head and gently bit the tender flesh of his throat.

Her suddenness seemed both to startle and to excite him, as she had intended. As she pulled him down to the pallet of furs before her fireplace, the uncertain iridescence of his coloring resolved itself and became, like her own, a blinding blue-white.

Later, it was as though they had been liaison mates for a full season. They lay content, close together, without the tension that had earlier separated them, and Tahneh asked the questions that had drawn her curiosity. Was Diut alone among his people, a Hao born of judge parents?

“I’m alone now,” he told her quietly. “But my parents were both Hao. And I had a Hao uncle. My people have always produced an abundance of the blue.”

“They must also lose it in abundance if only you are left.”

“So,” he agreed. “We had a war. My father was captured and … given poison. He died writhing in the dust instead of honorably in combat. That was before I was even old enough to know him. My mother and uncle fought to avenge him but finally, they were killed too.”

“Who were your enemies?”

“Gahrkohn. People who live in one of the mountain valleys.”

The name meant nothing to Tahneh. “You grew up with no Hao teacher then.”

He moved slightly beside her. “I did, although it didn’t mean much to me until I was nearly ready to be acknowledged. Then I realized that on the day of my acknowledgement I would have a problem that my upbringing had not prepared me to handle.” He looked at her to make sure that she was listening. Seeing that she was, he went on.

“In the war, my people hurt the Gahrkohn, but not decisively. Their Hao was injured, but not killed, and though they lost more fighters than we did, they had many more to begin with. Their losses didn’t begin to bring them even with us. My people were afraid to continue fighting with no Hao to lead them. They agreed to a humiliating peace with the Gahrkohn and ignored most of the raids that the Gahrkohn
made in violation of that peace. They would have accepted a tie with the Gahrkohn and become Gahrkohn themselves if there had not been so much hatred on both sides.”

He stopped, and Tahneh looked at him questioningly. “The Gahrkohn are still raiding?”

“So.”

“And now that you’re acknowledged, your people want you to renew the war against them.”

His body flared yellow. “They want it, yes. They expect it.”

“And you don’t want it.”

He let his coloring darken back to a cold metallic blue. “I want to stop the raiding. I will stop it. But to begin the war again would be utter foolishness. Even if we could win it wouldn’t gain us anything. We don’t want the Gahrkohn valley or their people—not even their children!” He made a sound of disgust. “But that’s meaningless; we couldn’t win. I’m not even sure we could survive this time. The Gahrkohn still outnumber us vastly. And they seem to be making none of the mistakes that they so obligingly made for my family.” He paused for a moment. “But in spite of all that, cousin, do you know why my otherwise sensible people still believe we should fight?”

“I can guess,” Tahneh said softly. “The Gahrkohn—they’ve lost their Hao?”

Diut yellowed once more, spoke harshly. “That is our whole advantage.
I
am our whole advantage! The Gahrkohn Hao died while I was growing up. Perhaps the injuries my people gave him helped him along, I don’t know. Anyway, he left no successor. That alone is supposed to weaken the Gahrkohn enough for us to defeat them.”

“Diut, that’s no small thing. It may very well weaken them enough.”

“So?” said Diut bitterly. “For the lack of only one fighter, they become vulnerable to a tribe half their size—a tribe led by a Hao whose only knowledge of war has come from reading and listening to others? My chief judge is more fit to lead in such a war than I am.”

“But he didn’t. He waited and gave the problem to you—because he’s only a judge, and you’re Hao.”