Survivor (8 page)

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.