Niun listened as he searched below, through things that rattled and moved, through the shifting of rock. He leaned close and tried to see the tiny glow of the light he held.
“I have found her,” Duncan’s voice floated up out of that cold. And them “She’s alive.”
Niun wept, safe, where the human could not see him; and wiped his eyes and sat still, fists clenched on his knees. He knew that the human could claim her for hostage, could harm her, could exact revenge or some terrible oath of him; he had not thought through these things clearly, a measure of his exhaustion and his desperation to reach her in time; but now he thought, and poised himself on the edge of the pit, to go down.
“Mri! Niun!” Duncan stood in the light with a pale burden in his arms, a gold bundle of robes that lay still against him. “Let down the cord. I will try to guide her up.”
Even while he watched, Melein stirred, and moved, and her eyes opened on the light in which he above could be only a shadow.
“Melein,” he called down. “Melein, we will pull you up. This is a human, Melein, but do not fear him.”
She struggled when she heard that, and Duncan set her feet on the floor. Niun saw her look at his face in the dim light and draw back in horror.
But she suffered him then to put his hands on her waist, and to lift her up, by far the easiest and least hurtful way for her: but she could not lift her hands to reach Niun’s, and protested pain—she once kel’e’en. “Wait,” Niun objected, and with a turn of cord and a knot fashioned a sling and cast it down. He wrapped it about hand and arm and took the weight carefully as she settled in the sling he had made: Duncan helped lift, but for a time the thin, cutting cord and an upward pull bit into Niun’s hands. He tried not to rake her against the jagged opening, pulled ever so carefully, and braced his feet and ignored the pain of his hands. She came through and levered herself out onto the sunlit dust, tried to rise: he had her, he had her safe; and he hugged her to her feet and held to her as he had held to no living being since childhood, they both entangled in the cord. He brushed dust and tears from her face, she still gasping in the outside air.
“The ship is destroyed,” he said, to have all the cruelty done with while wounds were still numb. “Everyone else is dead, unless there is someone else alive down there.”
“No. None. They had no time. They were too old to run—they would not—they sat still, with the she’pan. Then the House—”
She began to shake as if in the grip of a great cold; but she was once of the Kel, and she did not break. She controlled herself, and after a moment began to disentangle them both from the cord.
“None,” he said, to be sure she understood it all, “could have possibly survived on the ship.”
She sat down on the edge of the section of wall that blocked the doors, and smoothed back her mane with one hand, her head bowed. She found her torn scarf at her shoulder and smoothed it and carefully covered her head with that light, gauze veil. She was quiet for a time, her head still turned from him.
At last she straightened her shoulders, and pointed over to the hole in the rubble, where Duncan waited. “And what is he?” she asked.
He shrugged. “No matter to us. A human. A regul guest. They tried to kill him when we met; then—” The surmise that it was this, partly his own action, which had killed the People and left them orphan, was too terrible to speak. His voice trailed off, and Melein arose and walked from him, to look at the ruin, her back to him, her hands limp at her sides. The sight of her despair was like a wound to him.
“Melein,” he said to her. “Melein, what am I to do?”
She turned to him, gave a tiny; helpless gesture. “I am nothing.”
“What am I to do?” he insisted.
Sen and Kel: Sen must lead; but she had become more than Sen, and that was the heaviness on her, which he saw she did not want, which she had to bear. He stood waiting. At last she shut her eyes and opened them again.
“Enemies will come here,” she said, beginning clearly to function as she had been prepared for years to function, to command and to plan: she assumed what she must assume, she’pan of the People, who had no people. “Find us what we need for the hills; and we will camp there tonight. Give me tonight, truebrother—I must not call you that; but tonight, that only, and I will think what is best for us to do.”
“Rest,” he urged her. “I will do that.” And when he had seen her seated and out of the direct sun, he bent down over the hole and cast the cord down. “Duncan.”
The human’s white face appeared in the center of the light, anxious and frightened. “Lift me up”, he said, laying hand on the cord, which Niun refused to give solidity. “Mri, I have helped you. Now lift me out of here.”
“Search for the things I name and I will draw them up by the cord. And after that I will draw you up.”
Duncan hesitated there, as if he thought that, like humans, a mri would lie. But he agreed then, and sought with his tiny light until he had found all the things that Niun then requested of him. He tied each small bundle on the cord for Niun to draw up: food, and water flasks, and cording and four bolts of unsewn black cloth, for they could not reach better without delaying to pierce a new opening, and Duncan avowed he did not think it safe. A last time the cord came up, with a bolt of cloth; and a last time he cast it down, this time for Duncan, and braced it about his body and his arm.
It was not so hard as with Melein’s uncooperating weight: he leaned and braced his feet, and Duncan hauled himself up—gained the lip of the hole and heaved himself to safety, panting, bent double, coughing and trying to stop the bleeding. The coughing went on and on, and Melein came from her place of rest to look down on the human in mingled disgust and pity.
“It is the air,” Niun said. “He has been running, and he is not acclimated to Kesrith.”
“Is he a manner of kel’en?” asked Melein.
“Yes,” Niun said. “But he does not offer any threat. The regul hunted him; likely now they would cease to care—unless this man’s superior is alive. What shall we do with him?”
Duncan seemed to know they spoke of him; perhaps he knew a few words of the language of the People, but they spoke the High Language, and surely he could not follow that.
Melein shrugged, turned her head from him. “As you please. We will go now.”
And she began, slowly, to walk through the ruin, picking her way with care.
“Duncan,” said Niun, “pick up the supplies and come.”
The human looked outrage at him, as if minded to dispute this as a matter of dignity; and Niun expected it, waited for it. But then Duncan knelt down and made a bundle of the goods with the cord, heaving it to his shoulder as he arose.
Niun indicated that he should go, and the human carried the burden where Niun aimed him, his footsteps weaving and uncertain in the wake of Melein.
* * *
No firing had touched the hills. They came into a sheltered place that was as it had been before the attack, before the discords of regul or mri or humans—a shelter safe from airships, withdrawn as it was beneath a sandstone ledge.
With a great sigh Melein sank down on the sand in that cold shadow, and bent, her head against her knees, as if this had been all that she could do, the last step that she could take. She was hurt. Niun had watched her walk and knew that she was in great pain, that he thought was in her side and not her limbs. When she was content to stop, he took the supplies from Duncan, and made haste to spread a cloth for a groundsheet and a cover for Melein. He gave her drink and a bit of dried meat; and watched, sitting on his heels, as she drank and ate, and leaned against the bare rock to rest.
“May I drink?”
The human’s quiet request reminded him he had another charge on him; and he measured out a capful of water and passed it to Duncan’s shaking hands.
“Tomorrow maybe,” said Niun, “we will tap a luin and have water enough to drink.” He considered the human, who drank at the water drop by drop, a h
aggard and filthy creature who by appearances ought not to have survived so far. It was not likely that he could survive much farther as he was. He stank, sweat and sulphur compounded with human. Niun found himself hardly cleaner.
“Can you—” he said to Melein, almost having forgotten that her personal name was not for him to speak freely now. He offered her his pistol. “Can you stay awake long enough to watch this human a time?”
“I am well enough,” she said, and drew up one knee and rested wrist and pistol on it in an attitude more kel’e’en than she’pan. By caste, she should not touch weapons; but many things ought to be different, and could not be.
He left them so, and went out of sight of the ledge, and stripped and bathed, as mri on dry worlds did, in the dry sand, even to his mane, which when he shook the sand out recovered its glossy feel quickly enough. He felt better when he had done this, and he dressed again, and began to retrace his steps toward the cave.
A heavy body moved behind him, an explosive breath and plaintive sound: dus. He turned carefully, for he had left his gun with Melein, and nothing else could give a ha-dus pause.
It was the miuk’ko, gaunt, forlorn, scab-hided. But the face was dry and it shambled forward with careless abandon.
His heart beat rapidly, for the situation was a bad one in potential, for all the dusei were unpredictable. But the dus came to him, and lifted its head, thrusting it against his chest, uttering that dus-master sound that begged food, shelter, whatever things mri and dus shared.
He knelt down there, for the moment demanded it, and embraced the scrofulous neck and relaxed against the beast, letting it touch and be touched. A sense of warmth came over him, a feeling deep and almost sensual, the lower beast functions of the dus mind, that could be content with very little.
This it lent him. He looked up, aware of presence, saw two stranger-dusei on the sandstone ridge above; he was not afraid. This dus knew them, and they knew him, and this, like the warmth, came at a level too low for reason. It was fact. It was dependable as the rock on which they stood, mri and dus. It absorbed his pain, and melted it, and fed him back strength as slow and powerful as its own.
And when he came back to the cave, the great beast lumbered after him, a docile companion, a comical and friendly fellow that—beholding the human—was suddenly neither comic nor friendly.
Distrust: that reached Niun’s mind through the impulses of the dus; but that subsided as the dus felt the human’s outright terror. This one feared. Therefore he was safe. The dus put thought of the human aside and settled down athwart the entrance, radiating impulses of ward and protection.
“He came,” said Niun, gathering his pistol from Melein’s hand. “There are more out there, but none even vaguely familiar.”
“The old pact,” she said, “is still valid with us and them.”
And he knew that they might have no better guardian; and that he could sleep this night, sure that nothing would pass the dus to harm Melein. He was overwhelmingly grateful for this. The exhaustion he had held back came down like a flood. The dus lifted his head and gave that pleasure moan, a gap-mouthed smile, tongue lolling. It flicked and disappeared into a dusine smugness.
Niun spoke to it, the small nonsense words the dusei loved, and touched its massive head, pleasing it; and then he took its paw and turned it, the size of it more than a man could easily hold in his hands. The claws curled inward, drawing his wrist against the dew-claw: reflex. It broke the skin, admitting the venom. He had sought this. It would not harm him in such small doses; by such degrees he would become immune to this particular dus, and need never fear it. He took his hand back and caressed the flat skull, bringing a rumbling sound of contentment from the beast.
Then, because he could not bear thought of bedding down with the human’s filth, he took up an armload of cloth and bade the human come with him, and took him out beyond the ledge.
“Bathe,” he told Duncan, and, casting down the cloth when Duncan seemed dismayed, he bent and with a handful of sand on his own arm, demonstrated now; he sat with arms folded, eyes generally averted somewhat, while the human cleansed himself, and the curious ha-dusei watched from the heights, grouping and circling in alarm at the strange pale-skinned creature.
Duncan looked somewhat more pleasant when he had scrubbed the blood from his face and the tear streaks had been evened out to a dusty sameness. He shook the dust from his hair and picked up his discarded clothing and started to dress; but Niun tore a length from the cloth and tore it in such a way that it could be worn. He thrust it at the human, who doubtfully put it on, as if this were some intended shame to him. Then he thought to search the clothing that the human had taken off, and found pockets full of things of which the human had not spoken.
He opened his hand, demonstrating the knife that he had found. Duncan shrugged.
Niun gave him credit at least that he had not attempted any rashness, but bided his time. The human had played the round well, though he had lost it.
Niun thrust a second wad of black cloth of him. “Veil yourself,” he said. “Your nakedness offends the she’pan and me.”
Duncan settled the veil over his head, ineptly attempting to make it stay, for he had not the art. Niun showed him how to twist it to make a band of it, and how to arrange the veil; and Duncan looked the better for it, decently covered. He was not robed as kel’en, which would have been improper; but he was in kel-black and modestly clothed as a man and not as an animal. Niun looked on him with a nod of approval.
“This is better for you,” he said. “It will protect your skin. Bury your clothing. You will find when we travel in the day that our way is best.”
“Are we moving?”
Niun shrugged. “The she’pan makes that decision. I am kel’en. I take her orders.”
Duncan dropped to his knees and dug a hole, animal fashion, and put his discarded clothing in it. He paused when he had smoothed it over, and looked up. “And if I could offer you a safe way off this world—”
“Can you?”
Duncan rose to his feet. He had a new dignity, veiled. Niun had never noticed the color of his eyes. They were light brown. Niun had never seen the like. “I could find a way,” Duncan said, “to contact my people and get a ship down here for you. I think you have something to lose by not taking that offer. I think you would like very much to get her out of this.”
Niun moved his hand to his weapons, warning. “Tsi’mri, you do assume too much. And if you make plans, present them to her, not to me. I told you: I am only kel’en. If something pleases her, I do it. If something annoys her, I remove it.”
Duncan did not move. Presumably he reconsidered his disrespect. “I do not understand,” he said finally. “Evidently I don’t understand how things are with you. Is this your wife?”
The obscenity was so naively put, in so puzzled a tone, that Niun almost laughed in surprise. “No,” he said, and to further confound him: “She is my Mother.”
And he motioned the human to cease delaying him, for he grew anxious for Melein, and there were the ha-dusei about them, that snuffed the air and called soft cries from their higher perch. One came down as they left the area. Doubtless the clothes would not stay buried, but neither would there be much left of them to catch the eye of searchers.
The dus at the entry of their refuge lifted his head and pricked his tiny ears forward at their approach, radiating feelings of welcome; and Niun, already feeling the flush of the poison in him, and knowing he would feel it more in the hours of the night, offered his fingers to its nose and brushed past, putting his body between it and Duncan.
Melein took note of the human and nodded in approval of the change; but no further interest in him did she show this night. She settled down to rest in peace now that they had returned. And Niun drank a very small ration of water and lay down and watched as the human likewise stretched himself out as far from them and the beast as he might in the little space.
In time Niun let his eyes close,
his mind full, so overburdened that at last there was nothing to do but abandon all thought and let go. The dus-fever was in him. He drifted toward low-mind dreams, that were the murky, sometimes frightening impulses of the dus; but he feared no harm from the impulses because it was in the lore of the Kel that no kel’en had ever been harmed by his own dus, it being sane.
And he was owned by this beast, and the beast by him; and he compassed his present world by this and by Melein. He had been utterly desolate in the morning, and at this evening he rested, kel-ignorant, with a dus to guard his sleep and touch his mind, and with once more a she’pan to take up the burden of planning. His heart was pained for Melein’s burden, but he did not try to bear it. She would have her honor. He had his, and it was vastly simpler.
To obey the she’pan. To avenge the People.
He stared at the human during his waking intervals and once, in the dark, he knew that the human was awake and looking at him. They did not speak.
Chapter Nineteen
The day came quietly, with only the sounds of the wind and the dus’s breathing. Niun looked and found Melein already awake, sitting cross-legged in the doorway, outlined by the dawn. She was composed as if she had sat so for a long time, arranging her thoughts in private in the last hours of the night.
He rose, while Duncan still lay insensible; and came to her and settled on the cold sand, near the fever-warmth of the drowsing dus. His legs were weak with the poison and his arm was stiff and not to the shoulder, but it would pass. His mind was still calm, with the muddled thoughts of the dus still brushing it; and he was not afraid, even considering their situation. He knew this for dus courage, that would melt when crisis came and a man needed to think; but it was rest, and he was glad of it. He thought perhaps Melein had enjoyed something of the same, for her face was calm, as if she had been meditating on some private dream.
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