“Stavros, Stavros, do you read?”
Clear, he said. All clear; and cut them off, for of a sudden there was a grayness before his eyes and he was content only to stay still, to breathe, to wait until the labored beating of his heart and the roaring in his ears subsided.
There is a window out on the second floor, Stavros advised Hulagh. Injuries there, I think.
“Younglings will attend to it.”
They neither one mentioned the dus. Flower was still trying to advise him what its operations were doing. He heard them talking to the aircraft, that had drawn off in advance of the storm, shepherding their lost searchers home again to the city.
And one of the aircraft answering, the rough accented voice of Hada Surag-gi. “Favor, favor, seeking return to mission, Flower- bai, seeking return to search.”
And a human voice, also from an aircraft, cursing and demanding an explanation of the jamming.
Stavros wiped his face, cut off the chatter, and looked at the bai.
“Never in my experience,” said the bai. “Never, reverence.” And Hulagh jabbed at buttons and summoned a youngling servitor, ordering soi, and records; and cursed the slowness PC youngling wits. His breathing was at an alarming rate. It was several moments before he seemed in control of himself. “They have all gone mad,” he said.
Their world, said Stavros. Theirs, before the mri.
The soi came, borne by a youngling so agitated that the cups danced on the tray; and Stavros drank his unsweetened and drew the welcome warmth into his chilled belly.
At length he had the courage to touch the controls to open the stormshields again, remembering the beast even as he did so; and the square was deserted. Of a surety no regul and no humans would venture out until it was known where the dusei had gone.
He felt that he would see the apparition that had attacked the window in his nightmares thereafter; if the regul were prone to bad dreams the bai would share it.
“I am very old,” said Hulagh in a querulous tone. “I am too old for such things, bai Stavros. The regul who took this world were mad.” He sipped at his soi. “The mri controlled them. Now nothing does.”
There can be barriers, Stavros said. We can build them.
Hulagh was silent a long time, throughout most of the cup of soi. His nostrils worked rapidly. At last he blew a sigh and turned his sled from the window. “Holn,” he said.
Reverence?
“Holn concealed records. I did not ask, and they did not say and I know now.” Nostrils worked in great flaring breaths of air “Stavros-bai, you and I have failed to ask questions. Now, now, you and I, Stavros-bai, we have teen handed only fragments of what we should have known about Kesrith. We are together in difficulty; and we share an enemy, Stavros-bai.”
Holn.
“Holn,” said Hulagh. “They were clever, human reverence; and I shall not be able to face the anger of my doch if I come back destitute. Ship, equipment, everything, reverence Stavros. I am ruined. But likewise Hoi has cheated you.”
Bai Hulagh, you have a purpose in volunteering this information.
“The fortunes of doch Alagn,” said Hulagh, “are here, with myself, with these surviving younglings. I will not be sent back in disgrace on a human ship. We shall deal, Stavros.”
An alliance, reverence?
“An alliance, bai Stavros. Trade. Exchange. Ideas. —Revenge.”
Stavros met the dark, glittering eyes. From Kesrith, he said, there are territories to be explored.
“It is first necessary,” said Hulagh, “to hold Kesrith.”
As the Holn and the mri held it, said Stavros, with its resources. Even the dusei. Even them.
And he fell to staring out the window, at the roiling; sky, and saw the rain of the port, and the rain, and considered the resources with which they had to work; and for the first time his hopes began to hold a taint of doubt.
When he shut his eyes he still saw the beast at the window, irrational, uncontrollable as the elements: he hated them, the more so perhaps because they were without rationality, because they were, like the storm, of the elemental forces.
Antipathy to all that was regul and Kiluwan, the dusei.
But they were a part of Kesrith that could neither be ignored nor destroyed.
A combination of random elements, the world, of Kesrith; and hereafter, he foresaw, was not under the control of George Stavros. He could no longer control. He shared Kesrith with beasts and with regul.
He clenched his hand on controls and listened to Flower again,’ hearing the babble PC search craft that were bound out yet another time on their continuing patterns, trying to find one lost soul in all that wilderness, where dusei ran wild and the storms raked the land with violence.
Almost he bade them give it up.
But he had already given Flower irrational orders enough. He did not make the move. He saw one of the aircraft circle far out over the ruins of the edun and continue west, a speck quickly lost in the haze.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Melein was asleep finally. Niun, wiping the weariness from his eyes, settled the heavy metal ovoid into his lap and leaned his head back against the warm, breathing side of the dus. Duncan lay sprawled in the sand, on his stomach, his tattered and makeshift robes inadequate to afford him much protection from scrapes and sand-sores. His skin, bare above the boots, was scored with abrasions and sunburn. His eyes, unprotected by the veil, without the membrane to ease them, ran tears that streaked a perpetual coating of dust, like a dus gone miuk.
Duncan was exhausted for the moment, beyond causing them any trouble: Niun noted that a jo had settled against the rock, its luin-camouflage a little too dark for the red sandstone, where it clung for shade in this hottest part of the day. The name meant mimic. The creature harmed nothing. It waited for snakes, which were its natural food. It was not a bad campmate, the jo.
Niun nodded over his charge, his arms clasped about it, and rested his head, and finally relaxed enough to sleep awhile, now that Melein had settled. She had almost fainted before they stopped in this shelter, overburdened and hurting more than she wanted to admit. She had gone aside from them, into the privacy of the rocks, and taken cloth with her, in long strips: “I think it will help my side,” she said; and because there was no kath’en or kel’e’en to attend her, she attended to herself. The ribs were broken, he much feared, or at the least cracked. He was worried, with a deep cold fear, that would not leave him.
But she had come back, hand pressed to her side, and smiled a thin smile and announced that she felt some better, and that she thought she could sleep; and the tension unwound from Niun’s vitals when he saw that she could do so, that her pain was less.
The fear did not go away.
He bore Duncan’s presence, his dread of anything Duncan might do to him far less than fear for Melein, for losing her, for ending alone.
The last mri.
He dreamed of the edun, and its towers crumbling in fire, and woke clutching the smooth shape of the pan’en to him in the fear that he also was falling into the Dark.
But he sat on the sand, the dus unmoving behind him. The jo, with a deft swoop, descended on a lizard, and bore it back to his upside-down perch on the rock, shrouding his meal with his mottled wings, a busy and tiny movement as it fed, swallowing the lizard bit by bit.
Niun set the pan’en beside him so that he could feel it, constantly, against him, and leaned his head against the dus. He drowsed again, and awoke finding the heat unpleasant. He looked toward the advancing line of the sunlight, that had crept up on Duncan, and saw that it had enveloped him to the waist, falling on the bare skin of his knee and hand. The human did not stir.
“Duncan,” said Niun. He obtained no reaction, and reluctantly bestirred himself, leaned forward and shook at the human. “Duncan.”
Brown eyes stared up at him, bewildered, heat-dazed.
“The sun, stupid tsi’mri, the sun. Move into the shade.”
Duncan dragged
himself into a new place and collapsed again, ripped aside the veil and lay with the cooler sand against his bare face. His eyes blinked, returning sensibility within them, as Niun resumed his place.
“Are we ready to move on?” he asked in a faint voice.
“No. Sleep.”
Duncan lifted his head and looked around at Melein, lay down again facing him. “Somewhere,” he said in a faint whisper, “my people will have come to Kesrith by now. She needs medical help. You know that. If it were sure that those up there are humans—we could contact an aircraft. Listen: the war is over. I don’t think you know us well enough to believe it, but we wouldn’t pursue matters any further. No revenge. No war. Come with me. Contact my people. There would be help for her. And no retaliation. None.”
Niun listened to the words, patient, believing at least that Duncan believed what he was saying. “Perhaps it is even true,” he said. “But she would never accept this.”
“She will die. But with help—”
“We are mri. We do not accept medicines, only our own. She has done what can be done under our own ways. Should strangers touch her? No. We live or we die, we heal or we do not heal.” He shrugged. “Maybe our way of doing things is not even a wise one. Sometimes I have thought it was not. But, we are the very last, and we will keep to the things that all our ancestors before us have observed. There is no use now for anything but that.”
And he fell to thinking how Melein had planned; and that they had won this last small victory over tsi’mri that they had gathered to themselves the holiness and the history of their kind; and his fingers ran over the smooth skin of the pan’en that he kept by him.
“I have broken two traditions,” he admitted at last. “I have taken you and I have carried burdens. But the honor of the she’pan I will not compromise. No. I do not believe in your doctors. And I do not believe in your people and your ways. They are not for us.”
Duncan looked at him, long and soberly. “Even to survive?”
“Even to survive.”
“If I get back to my own people,” said Duncan finally, “I’m going to make sure it’s known what the regul did what, really happened that night at the port. I don’t know whether it will do any good; I know it can’t change anything for the better. But it ought to be told.”
Niun inclined his head, a respect for that gesture. “The regul,” he said, “would see you dead before they would let you tell those things. And if you hope on that account that I will let you leave our company and go to them, I must tell you I will not.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“I don’t believe you know what they will do, either your kind or the regul.”
Duncan was silent thereafter staring into nothing. He looked very worn and very tired. He rubbed at a line of dried blood that had settled into an unshaven trail; and he was quiet again, but seemed not apt to sleep.
“Don’t run again,” Niun advised him, for he disliked the human’s mood. “Don’t try. I have made you too easy with us. Do not trust it.”
Brown eyes flicked up at him, tsi’mri and disturbing. Duncan gathered himself up to a sitting position, moving as if every muscle ached, and rubbed his head with a grimace of discomfort. “I had rather stay alive,” Duncan said, . “like you would.”
“I know that,” Duncan said. “A truce. A truce: a peace between us it least until you’ve got her to somewhere safe, until she’s well. I know you’d kill for her; I know that under other circumstances: you might not. I understand that whatever she is she’s someone very special—to you.”
“A she’pan,” said Niun, “is Mother to a house. She is the last. A kel’en is only the instrument of her decisions. I can make no promises except for my own choice.”
“Can there not be another generation?” Duncan asked suddenly, in his innocence, and Niun felt the embarrassment, but he did not take offense. “Can you not—if things were otherwise—?”
“We are bloodkin, and her caste does not mate,” he answered softly, moved to explain what mri had never explained to outsiders; but it was simply kel lore, and it was not forbidden to say. It lent him courage, to affirm again the things that had always been fixed and true, “Kath’en or kel’e’en could bear me children for her, but there are none: There is no other way for as. We either survive as we were, or we have failed to survive. We are mri; and that is more than the name of a species, Duncan. It is an old, old way. It is our way. And we will not change.”
“I will not be the cause,” said Duncan, “of finishing the regul’s handiwork, I’ll stay with you. I made my try. Maybe again, sometime, maybe, but not to anyone’s hurt, hers or yours. I have time. I have all the time in the world.”
“And we do not,” said Niun. He thought with a wrench of fear that Duncan, wiser than he in some things, for human kel’ein were able to cross castes—suspected that Melein would not live; and it answered a fear in his own heart. He looked to see how she was resting; and she was still asleep. The sight of her regular breathing quietly reassured him.
“With time and quiet,” said Duncan, “perhaps she will mend.”
“I accept your truce,” said Niun, and in great weariness, he unfastened his veil and looped the end of the mez over his shoulder, baring his face to, the human. It was hard, shaming to do; he had never shown his face to any tsi’mri; but he had taken this for an ally, even for the moment, and in the tightness of things, Duncan deserved to see him as he was.
Duncan looked long at him, until the embarrassment became acute and Niun flinched from that stare.
“The mez is a necessity in the heat and the dryness,” Niun said. “But I am not ashamed to see your face. The mez is not necessary between us.”
And he curled himself against the pan’en, and against the solid softness of the dus and attempted to rest, taking what ease he could, for they would move with the coolness and concealment of evening, at a time when surely regul trusted even a mri would not dare the cliffs.
* * *
There was the sound of an aircraft, distant, a reminder of alien presence in the environs of Sil’athen. Niun heard it, and gathered himself up to listen, to be sure how close or how far it was. Melein was awake, and Duncan stirred, seeking at once the direction of the sound.
It was evening. The pillars had turned red, burning in the twilight. Arain was visible through them, a baleful red disk, rippling in the heat of the sands.
Melein sought to rise. Niun quickly offered her his hands and helped her, and she was no longer too proud to accept that help. He looked at her drawn face and thought of his own necessary burden. His helplessness to do anything for her overwhelmed, him.
“We must be moving,” she said. “We must go down again, to Sil’athen. There is no other exit I know from this place. But with the aircraft—” Her face contracted in an expression of anger, of frustration. “They are watching Sil’athen. They believe that the place hides us—and if they have men afoot—”.
“I hope they are afoot,” said Niun. “That would give me satisfaction.” And then he remembered Duncan, and was glad that he had been speaking in the hal’ari, as she had used with him. But it was likely enough that they were regul that they had to deal with, who would not go afoot.
“The climb down,” she said, “—I think it would be best to move just at the last light, so that we can see to climb. There will not be a moon up until sometime later. That will give us some dark to cross the open place at the beginning.”
“That is the best we can do,” he agreed. “We will eat and drink before we go. We may not have another chance to stop.”
And what that journey would cost Melein weighed heavily on his mind.
“Duncan,” he said quietly, while they shared food, both of them unveiled, “I will not be able to do more than carry what I must carry. On the climb.”
“I will help her,” Duncan said.
“Down is easier,” Melein said, and looked askance at Duncan, as if she found their arrangement far from he
r liking.
It was the last of the food that they had brought with them. Thereafter they must hunt, and quickly they must find water again, in this place where him were not frequent. Niun’s mind raced ahead to these things, difficulties upon difficulties, but ones more pleasant than those most immediate.
They set put again toward the trail they had used, and when they stood finally looking down that great chasm, dim and unreal in the faded light, shading into black at the bottom, he held the pan’en close to him and dreaded the climb even for himself. When he considered Melein, he turned cold.
If she falls, he thought to warn Duncan; but it would do no good, to dishonor what small trust there was between them, and he thought that the human must know his mind. Duncan returned that stare, plain and accepting the charge that was set on him.
“Go first,” Niun bade him, and the human looped the trailing mez across his face and secured it firmly as Niun had already done with his own. Then he set his feet on the downslope, bracing them carefully, offering his hand up for Melein’s.
“Niun,” Melein said, a glance, a patent distress, It was the only thing at which she had shown fear committing herself to the hands of a human, when she was already in much pain.
Then, her hand pressed to her side, she reached her fingers toward Duncan’s, and carefully, carefully, she set her feet on the downslope, beginning the descent with Duncan’s hand to steady her, he bracing his body against whatever security there was, his arm extended to give her a firm support should she slip. In small stages they descended; and Niun stood with the pan’en a cold and comfortless weight in his arms, watching while they disappeared together into that shadow.
The dusei waited behind him, shifting weight nervously.
And then something intruded on his hearing, from behind him.
Aircraft, slamming above the pillars.
He grasped the carrying-bar of the pan’en, the only way to carry it in the descent, and hissed to the dusei and started the descent, terrified lest he cause them to have been seen, lest in his haste now he slip and come down on Melein and Duncan.
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