The Faded Sun Trilogy (30 page)

He said nothing, all the same. It troubled him, the while they started out together, the three of them, and the dus lumbering along by his side. It was a difficult question, how it was honorable to deal at close quarters with a human.

It had been the death of the People, that humans refused
a’ani
and preferred mass warfare; and he began to realize now that humans simply could not fight.

Tsi’mri.

He felt fouled, deeply distressed by what he had discovered. He wished to change what he had said, and could not, for his pride’s sake. And he began to think over and over again how bitter the war had been, that so many had perished without knowing the nature of the enemy.

But it was not his to change this, even now. He was not a caste that made ultimate decisions. He reminded himself of this, wondering how much Intel had known.

*   *   *

By the Deog’hal slash they ascended into the high hills, not following the usual track to Sil’athen, lest some
survivor down in the city find them the more easily and finish what they had begun at the edun. It was a hard climb, and one which took a great deal from Melein, and from Duncan, laboring as he was under his burden.

“I was too long sitting in the she’pan’s tower,” Melein breathed when they had come to the crest. She coughed and tried to smother it, while Duncan sank down in a heap, disengaged himself from the ropes and lay upon his pack. Niun poured a little water to ease Melein’s throat, and deep in his heart he was afraid for her, for Melein was not wont to be so easily tired; and he marked how she limped, and sometimes held her arm to her side.

“I think that you are hurt,” he said softly.

She made a deprecating gesture. “I fell, closing the door to the storeroom. It is nothing.”

He hoped that she was right in that. He gave her to drink again, spendthrift with the water, but it was likely that they would come on more soon enough. He drank enough himself to moisten his mouth; and saw the human looking at him with an intent gaze, unwilling to plead.

“For moisture only,” he said, giving him half a measure. “Be slow with it.”

The human drank as he had drunk, beneath the veil, keeping his face covered, and handed back the cap with a nod that achieved some grace.

“Where are we going?” Duncan asked again, his voice gone hoarse.

“Human,” said Melein, startling them both. “Why does it matter to you to know?”

Duncan drew a breath to answer at once; Niun reached out and caught his arm in a hard grip.

“Before you speak,” Niun said to him, “Understand that she is a she’pan. The Kel deals with outsiders; the she’pan does not. You are honored that she even looks at you. If you speak a word that offends her, I will surely kill you out of hand. So perhaps you will be more comfortable to direct your words to me, so that you will not offend against her.”

Duncan looked from one to the other of them, as if he thought they were making mock of him, or threatening him in some way he could not comprehend.

“I am very serious,” said Niun. “Direct your answer to me.”

“Tell her,” said Duncan then, “that I’m more interested in returning to my own people alive. Tell her what I
told you last night. That offer still stands. I may be about to get you off world.” “Duncan,” said Melein, “I already know what you would like to ask, and I will not answer yet. But you may tell us when your people will come. You know that, surely.”

Duncan hesitated in evident distress, surely weighing their purposes, “A matter of days,” he said in a low voice. “A Very few days—maybe sooner than I would figure. And they’re going to find ruins at the city; and the regul will be left to tell them whatever story they like about what happened night before last.”

“Tsi’mri” said Melein deprecatingly, which Duncan did not understand.

“The she’pan means,” Niun answered that look, “that what outsiders do is not our concern. We have no brothers and no masters. We do not serve regul any longer. Perhaps you do not understand, Duncan, that we are the last mri. The ship
Ahanal
contained all the survivors of the war and the edun contained the rest; and the regul know us, that if they do not finish what they began at the port, then we are likely to deal them hurt. Being regul, they will not wish to meet us face to face to do this, and they will probably try to convince your species to do the work for them. You see how it is. Yon do better not to press us with questions. There are things to be thought of in their time, if this happens or if that happens—but you do, well not to ask so that we will not have to think of it.”

Duncan absorbed all that answer in silence, and sat with his arms wrapped about his knees, hands clenched until the knuckles went white.

“Duncan,” Melein said then, “it is a saying among us that
Said is done.
So we do not say, so that we are not obligated to do. We do not trap with words like the regul do. Ask no more questions.”

And she held out her left hand to Niun, gesturing that she wanted help to rise. It hurt her, though he was very careful.

“There are clouds,” she observed, looking toward the east. “May it descend to the regul.”

*   *   *

By afternoon the sky was entirely overcast, sparing them the heat of the direct sun, bringing a chill to the air; and it became clear that the clouds were doing as Melein had wished they would do: that upon the ruin of the city and
the port would come storm.

Once, when she gazed over her shoulder toward the plain and looked upon the lightning that flashed in that shadowed quarter, she held some impulse that made the dus moan in startlement and shy off from her: it was Melein that had done it, for Niun knew himself innocent, and the dus sought his side afterward.

*   *   *

But the clouds shed no water on them, and their flasks were only a quarter full when they came to the end of the long upland rise and entered the flat highland. By late afternoon Duncan was staggering with weariness and would gladly have stopped at any time, but Niun considered the possibility of aircraft seeking them and was not willing to stop in the open, not for Duncan’s sake.

He looked often at Melein, anxious for her, but she walked without appearing to suffer overmuch.

And toward sunset there was a luin-cluster on the horizon, twisted trunks like a mirage against the red sun, bare limbs tufted with small leaves only at the ends.

“There is water,” Niun told Duncan. “Tonight will be an easy camp and you will have enough to drink.”

And Duncan, who had begun to lag, expended a last effort, and kept the pace they, unburdened, set toward the trees.

And walked among them, careless.

“‘Ware!” Melein cried, seeing it, even as Niun did, the glassy strands spread in the evening light.

Niun whipped up his pistol and fired before Duncan had time to know what had befallen him: and the windflower died, a stench, glassy tendrils blackened. But where it touched Duncan’s flesh, on hands and forehead, the red sprang up at once, and Duncan, his clothing covered with the tendrils, fell and writhed on the sand in agony.

“Ch’au!”
Niun cursed his stupidity. “Still! Lie still!” And Duncan lay quietly then, shuddering as with the
av-tlen’s
point he lifted the tendrils from Duncan’s flesh. He pulled them from the cloth too, and urged Duncan to his feet, there to stand while he inspected the black cloth for any transparent remnant.

Then Duncan went a few feet away and was dryly sick for some few moments.

Niun cleansed the
av-tlen
in the sand and with it cut the trunk of a luin that had not been poisoned by the windflower. He took from his belt a small steel tube and drove it easily into the soft woody, and the sweet liquid began to flow, pure and clean of Kesrith’s dust.

He filled the first flask and gave it to Melein, so that she might indulge her thirst to the full, for there were many luin. He drank the second, rapidly filled from a second tree; and the third he filled he took o Duncan, who had not succeeded in being as sick as he doubtless wished to be after his shock. The human simply lay on the ground and shuddered.

“It is a point worth remembering,” Niun echoed Eddan’s words to him on a less painful encounter, “that where there is water on Kesrith, there are enemies and predators. The pain is all, and you are lucky. It will pass. If you had been alone, you would have been wholly ensnared and the windflower would have been the end of you.”

“I saw nothing,” Duncan said, and swallowed a sip of the water, fighting the pain.

“When you walk among luin, walk with the light in your face, so that the strands of windflowers cast across the sup and shine; and mind where you step.” He indicated where a little burrower had his lair, a place marked by a flat and a tiny depression. He flung a pebble. The sand erupted, and there was a flash of a pale back, gone again as the little burrower dived and fluttered his mantle, settling sand over himself again.

“They are venomed,” said Niun, “and even a little one can make a man very sick. But since they grow large enough to engulf a dus whole, the venom does not matter much to us. Burrowers lair among the luin, and in shadowed places and among rocks where there is sand to cover them. There are not many large ones. The ha’dusei eat them, if they do not eat the dusei, before they grow to great size. There is a very large old one by the way we will pass tomorrow. I think he has been there all my lifetime. Burrowers are like regul: when they grow so big, they do not move much.”

The little one, disturbed and angry, fluttered off under the sand, a moving ripple, to settle again deeper among the luin.

There was a general shifting about of others of his kind, and a jo, harmless, detached itself from its successful bark-imitation on a luin and fluttered away through the twilight.

“Drink your fill,” Niun said to the distressed human, feeling pity for him, and Duncan slowly did so, while Niun made them a supper of the supplies they had brought. They would make many a meal off the burrowers themselves, meat unpalatable and tough as rubber; but this night Melein was suffering, and they had starved the night before and most of the day. He was extravagant, and gave to Duncan an equal share with them, considering that he had confiscated what of Duncan’s gear was useful, including his rations.

Across the sky toward the lowlands there was continued lightning, ill luck for the regul.

And they rested with the dus for warmth, and with its ward impulse to keep the ha-dusei at bay, so that they slept secure in the luin grove.

In the morning they gathered up their gear once more; and Niun considered the matter with a gnawing of his lip and a frown, and finally, brusquely, snatched several rolls of cloth and the food from the human’s burden and did them up himself.

“In the case that you do not watch where you walk,” Niun said in a harsh tone, “the burrower that gets you will not have our shelter and our food.”

The human looked at him, marked across the brow by a bloody stripe of his encounter with the windflower; and Niun did not think that the human would have forgotten his words of the day previous, that he would carry no burden. He glowered at Duncan, discouraging any reminder of this.

“I learn quickly,” Duncan said, and Niun reckoned that among the things Duncan had learned was the art of answering a kel’en civilly.

The air was unimaginably foul, tainted by so many frightened regul. It was dark, save for the lights on the two sled consoles and the four life-battery lamps the shelter provided. Power elsewhere was out. The water plants were down. There was talk of seeking water Kesrithi style, from the land, but none of the younglings were sure that they could accomplish this; and they were not anxious to go but into the contaminated exterior, or across the seeming flats.

Hulagh had not yet ordered them. He would do so, Stavros did not doubt, when he himself began to thirst.

The sleds were on battery. To this also there was a limit; but Stavros and Hulagh, elders, consumed vital power as they consumed food and water unrationed, because it was unquestioned that elders must be supported by the young. Stavros found it in him to pity the harried secretary, Hada, who dispensed food and water that remained to 300 other younglings, and likewise ministered to Hulagh and himself. They were jammed into the shelter so tightly that the youngest and least could not lie down to sleep; but the sleds were accorded their maneuvering room. The younglings gave back from them with deference that was next to worship; indeed their whole hope for survival centered on the presence of elders among them. They talked little. They all faced Hulagh, row on row of bone-shielded faces and blunt heads, and eyes glittered in the almost-dark and nostril-slits worked in a slow rhythm that seemed to Stavros, in a moment of bizarre humor, to be tending toward unison.

And in the long hours he noted something else, that there were not a few who fell asleep and did not waken.

Bai, favor,
he signaled, spelling slowly in regul symbols on the screen.
I think some of the younglings are ill.

Hulagh’s great body heaved as he looked, and heaved again with a hiss of mirth; “No, reverence-human, they ate asleep. They are to sleep until your assistance comes. They consume less in that state.”

And in increasing numbers the young, beginning with the youngest, slipped into that state, until almost all were dormant.

And bai Hulagh himself began to drowse. He recovered from this with a jerk and a rumbled curse, and called to Hada. “Food,” he ordered. “Be quick, witless.”

The thick, sour-smelling soup was offered likewise to Stavros, but he declined it, almost retching. This troubled Hada, but it gave the portion to Hulagh, between whose thin lips the paste disappeared rapidly.

“You do not eat,” Hulagh observed.

I do not need to eat,
Stavros replied, and in honesty:
Your food does not agree with me. But I would have soi.

Hada scrambled to accommodate this wish, feverish, almost maniac in its desire to please. It offered the hot liquid to Stavros’ good hand, with a straw for his ease, and hovered near him.