A muscle jerked in his face. He fought for control. “Hlil arranged this.”
“Hlil would not,” she said. “I. My kindred. I ask.”
He gazed at her, kel’e’en of the second rank; daithe, kin of the last kel’anth and blood-tied to no knowing how many kindreds. A chill settled into him.
“I hear you,” he said, understanding. He bowed his head then, soothing the restive dus with the touch of his fingers . . . felt her touch against the other side of it, so that the animal shivered.
It was a mutual trap, that contact. There were no lies possible, no half-truths. He laid his hand firmly against the beast.
And yielded, point by point.
Chapter Fourteen
“There have been arguments,” the she’pan conceded, facing the Council. Niun sat nearest her, cross-legged on the mats, no Husband, but the she’pan’s, own kel’en, and kel’anth at once, doubly owning that place of honor. The Husbands of ja’anom sat ranged nearest, and the several highest of the five tribes settled by them, a black mass. The ja’anom kath’anth was there, Anthil; and the whole ja’anom Sen, in a golden mass, beneath the lamps which they used in Council even in daytime. Sen’anth Sathas was foremost of them, but there were sen’ein of the five strange-tribes there too, who had come in yestereve with the kel’ein.
“There have been strong dissensions,” Melein continued, “within the ja’anom . . . for the losses we have suffered, for the choices we face. But Sen, has agreed in my choices. Is it not so, sen’anth?”
“So,” Sathas echoed, “Sen has consented.”
“Not easy, to come home. The pan’en which is holy to us . . . what can it mean to you? A curiosity, full of strange names and things which never happened to you? And the holy relics of your wanderings on Kutath . . . how shall my kel’anth and I understand them? We struggle to do so, you with us and we with you. We of the Voyagers, we who went out . . . we want a place to stand; and you who stayed to guard Kutath so many millennia ago—perhaps you look about you and hate us, that we were voyaged out at all. Is that not part of it? Is that not a little part, that you blame us two, that of all Kutath sacrificed . . . we are all that have come home, all who will ever come home?” Her eyes moved to the Kel, traveled down to Niun. “Or is it perhaps for what we brought home with us, for what we call one of us?”
Niun glanced down. “Perhaps. It is many things, she’pan, but both may be so.”
“And the ja’anom Kath?”
“Kath,” said Anthil’s soft voice, “blames no one. We only mourn the children, she’pan; those lost and those to come.”
“And the songs you have taught those children over the ages . . . look for what, kath’anth? For the returning of those who went out when the world was younger and water flowed?”
“Some songs—hoped for that.”
“When our ancestors were one,” Melein, said, “not alone the tribes, but yourselves and my ancestors . . . that was a great age of the world; and there had been many before. The cities were standing, already old, built on the ruins of others, and our ancestors walked on the dust of a thousand civilizations and forgotten races. The four races who walked the world at the beginning of that age dwindled to two, and them you know. After so long there was building again: elee cities were standing, already old, built on the ruins of others, green of an olds old plant that the sands had long buried . . . but its roots were deep and it stood in the winds again. It was the last of everything that nourished it; it took from all else, so that it was the last greening . . . mri saw this; and we who had loved the land . . . knew. We built . . . the great edunei; and the great machines of the elee we appropriated to our own purposes.
“We and the elee,” Melein’s voice continued, low and vibrant. “We knew, and they wanted only what had always been. Shon’ai! we cast ourselves—to chance and the great Dark. ‘Go out,’ we advised the elee, in the World’s bright hour. ‘We have risen on all the world’s strength; now we go out, shon’ai! now . . . for the world’s wind is at our backs, and we feel it.’
“‘Go then,’ said the elee, for all they hated such an idea and pleased themselves to turn their faces away. We went and we brought greater and greater things, bringing them comfort, so that for an age the elee were very content, seeing the chance of more and more comfort and long life. We went further: we took stars for the elee, in stow years of voyaging, and brought knowledge.
“But the elee began to be afraid. They feared the Dark and hated anything strange. They wanted only Kutath, and to live with their comforts and their cities and to use up the wealth we could bring. They cared only for that. They let the stars go.
“And they let us go. They put us increasingly out of their thoughts. Had they been able, they would have sealed us up on this world.
“Some of us . . . stayed; you held this world for mri you entered on a holy trust, to save the standing place from which we launched, to save the precious things and to honor the service that we served.
“Hard for us . . . to keep our ways, in our slow voyaging, always out of touch with the visible, the physical Kutath. We had to keep it in our hearts, and yet to protect the knowledge of it: only she’panei and Sen of the voyagers were permitted to remember; Kath and Kel knew only; the ships . . . or between the Darks . . . the hundred twenty-five homeworlds-of-convenience. Aye,” she said when Niun looked up at her in stark bewilderment. “They were ours. Ours, our homes, Niun.
“And hard for you who stayed behind,” she said, “—to live with the visible, among the monuments, with Kutath a reality about you—and to keep contact with the invisible, with the dream.
“When we must, we moved on, shedding each world’s taint, renewing ourselves like something born always new, young again and strong: we kept nothing of the Betweens. We boarded our ships and Kutath was born anew aboard them, the old language, the ways, the ancient knowledge during generations of voyage.
“When calamity fell here, you had no means to veil what resulted: the sights—were before you. You lived in the visible and looked to the promise . . . so long, so very long.
“To go on believing . . . and clinging to old ways . . . when elee mocked them; to teach the young the promise . . . which they might never see, while the seas sank further, and the world had no more strength for a new beginning, and the elee interest only in the moment To remember skills which had passed beyond use; to sing the old chants; to look for hope, when all the sights about you counseled that the world was ending, and that there was no sane hope that this year or the next thousand years would bring what millennia before did not.
“Hardest, surely, when ships did come . . . when after centuries of waiting . . . ships came down on you—not ours—and then the elee wanted protection; then they surely wanted what they had cast from them. The world was laid waste and mri and elee were slaughtered, the land ruined so that even the enemy fled it. Enemy . . . it was the collapse of the empire which we had made; it was the last tremor of a dying power, in which the elee had refused to involve themselves, which had gone its own way; and that power died and their worlds with them perhaps. At least they did not come again.
“After that, what was there left, but to live narrowly, to find elee fighting among themselves for water and for less substantial things? Some mri took hire in these wars; some left the promise and involved themselves in the immediate and the visible. But the she’pan Gar’ai s’Hana, may her name live to all castes so long as there are mri to sing it—led a retreat from the cities and the wars, into the open land. I know her,” Melein added, and there seemed not a breath in Council, the while tears flowed openly down her face, across the kel-scars. “I know such a she’pan, to do the unreasonable, and to lead others where she would fear to send even one. She foresaw, perhaps, the death of the children and the elders, of all the vulnerable ones; and for what? For what hope? To exist, and wait, singing the old songs, while the mountains wore away.
“And we Voyagers . . . .
“We served—oth
er services. Darks intervened. To my sorrow, the passing of the she’panate of the Voyagers to me was in calamity, the massacre of us all on a world named Kesrith. Some things my she’pan had no time to teach me. Most of all—the reason why, the reason why we went out at all, and why after so many, many ages . . . we never returned. The reason why at least . . . the she’pan who prepared me for the she’panate . . . had decided it was time to turn the People homeward.”
There was disturbance in the Kel. Niun glanced that way with a forbidding frown and unfocused his eyes and stared through them, his heart leaden within him, the confirmation of doubts he had held from the beginning.
“Is it this,” Melein pursued, “for which we were met with doubt? That dreams are better than what we can touch? That Niun and I are the too-mortal flesh of a great hope? That the dream brought you destruction, and the death of friends and children, and tsi’mri, as it was in the world’s worst hour?
“Why did my she’pan refuse the offer the tsi’mri of our last service made, of a green and living world, and choose instead Kesrith, which was desolation? The Forge of the People, she named it, and gave the Sen no other answer. Why did she speak even before the danger came on us . . . of leaving the service that we served, which was to regul and against humans; and why was her mind set toward this homecoming?
“It might have been the diminishing of our numbers: we were very few when the regul decided to betray us and kill us, in the knowledge that they could no longer control us.
“It might have been that my she’pan was mad; there were some who believed so, even among her children. And do you think that I was not afraid, when I took up the robes, when I knew that I was charged to come home, and that I had not been told the last secret, the great why of all the she’panei before me. I tell you that I was greatly afraid.
“I gained the pan’en for my guide; and in the beginning I believed blindly, reading the record it holds, that guided our ship . . . the way that the People had passed, viewing world after world which our ancestors had known, and thinking them beautiful.”
“She’pan,” Niun objected, a breath, a pain which wrung at him.
“But they were all dead.” Her voice faltered and steadied. “Dead worlds, every one. And do you think then that I was not afraid?
“I walked this world. I found the place, the very city from which most of my ancestors came . . . for we kept our chants and our lineages. And after all that time, I have found my own: the ja’anom are my far, far kindred, An-ehon’s children; as are you all, even ka’anomin of Zohain . . . blood-kin to me. I spoke with the city; and with the Sen of the ja’anom, and with the sen’ein who have come from other tribes . . . and I know; I know the nature of the promise, and most of all what turned us homeward . . . in ships, in ships, my distant children, which cross the great Darks in an eye’s blinking.
“Enemies have followed us. They have destroyed our ship and our city, but to destroy us, no, the gods forbid and the Mystery forbids. Tsi’mri do as they will. We—Niun and I—we have done what we set out to do. The dream is true. We have it in our hands. Tsi’mri are here, within reach of our hands, and nothing in a hundred thousand years . . . has promised such as we bring you.”
It was back, that fierceness of her first night among the ja’anom it glittered in the eyes of the Kel, ja’anom and stranger alike; even in the eyes of the Sen, and shone in the mild face of the kath’anth. Of this the shameful flight had cheated them, driving them hunted across their own land; of this they had been frustrated, hiding and cowering from tsi’mri weapons, not alone in these, days but in earlier days and on other worlds, dying helpless and uncomprehending of purpose. They were suddenly Melein’s, hers, clenched in her fist.
This hope . . . within reach, Melein had said.
Duncan.
A great cold washed over Niun, realization why Melein had been willing to cast even himself from her hand in the chance of finding Duncan, why she had remained silent while the tribe fell apart in quarrel, and had no answer—until she could find Duncan again, knowing full well where he had gone, as she had known about the messages to humans which Duncan had tried to send, which the regul had destroyed.
O my brother, he mourned, but grief stayed from his face, the habit of the Kel, that there was no link between heart and countenance, not before the adversary.
“Kel’anth,” said kel Seras of the Husbands, “say to the she’pan that she is our Mother and that the ja’anom Kel is with her, heart and hand.”
“And that we hear,” said the kel’anth Rhian, “a message we are anxious to bear to our she’panei.”
“Aye,” muttered other kel’anthein.
This should have given him the most profound, the uttermost joy. It did not. He looked up into Melein’s eyes, glad that there was no dus by them, to catch up the she’pan’s inexorable and calculating coldness and hurl it into him, keener than any blade. “You hear,” he echoed hoarsely. “And in all matters . . . I am the she’pan’s Hand.”
“Kel’anth,” she said, “the message which came to us from tsi’mri, that we should come and speak with them . . . tell me, kel’anth of the ja’anom, what will tsi’mri do if we should fail that rendezvous they ask? Will they attack?”
“Am I tsi’mri, to answer what they will do?”
“Your knowledge of them is best of all but Duncan’s. What will they do if their expectations are thwarted? What would kel Duncan have done, when he was human?”
He glanced down, lest the membrane betray his disturbance. “I would expect of a human . . . first, distress; puzzlement that things did not agree with his hopes; then anger. But—humans are more likely to come probing at us than to launch devastating attack, unless cornered. Regul . . . regul are another species; and they are up there too; and that is different. Duncan believes humans are restraining them—but humans reckon patience from moment to moment, and a day is soon to them. That is what I dread, that their patience is top short even to comprehend how slowly a man must walk in this land. They live with machines, and expect everything to come quickly.”
“And once challenge has been made?”
Niun sat still, eyes unfocused, seeing a place he was forbidden to recall, fire and night, ships lacing back and forth above ruin. “Humans fight in masses; so do regul, no single combat. The People lost thousands before we learned this fact and the thinking behind it. But—” He struck his palm upon the floor, looked suddenly at Kel and Sen. “But they make other replies. Duncan is one. When it was all over, when regul had effectively finished us and humans had fought us to our ruin . . . Duncan came alone, as none of them had ever come alone to our challenges; and handed us himself, and struggled for us, gave us the ship in which we came here. Ask him why. He has no idea that he can express. Instinct? A response of his kind? He did not know the answer when he was human. Now he is mri. Perhaps he remembers enough that Council might call him, ask him why, or how humans think. Ask him.”
“No,” Melein said softly. “No, Can mri give a tsi’mri kind of answer? We are ourselves, kel’anth. Do not look so deeply into the Dark that you lose your balance.”
He caught his breath, looked up at her, his heart beating against his ribs.
* * *
The dus stirred. Duncan caught up something, vast sorrow, and stopped in mid-word, looked about at the Kel and shivered in a sudden breeze.
Others gathered it up without understanding it. Duncan looked toward the door of the she’pan’s tent, knowing direction, and a great fear bore down upon him.
“Kel’en,” said Peras, and Peras in leaning forward touched the dus. The spilling of emotions touched him top, and the veteran’s eyes nictitated, amazed and chagrined.
“What is wrong?” asked old Da’on. “Peras?”
The feeling faded, like something passing out of focus. It was hard to imagine that it had been there. Duncan stroked the velvet fur with both his hands, bowed against it, lifted his face again.
“The tsi’mri called regul,�
� kel Ras prompted him.
“Dead,” Duncan said hoarsely. “I killed her. She stirred her younglings to attack, and I killed her and gave the matter over to humans. Only—” He found himself saying more than he wanted to and ceased, but the dus betrayed him, gathering up feelings and weaving them together, himself and his hearers, himself and Ras who sat against the beast. A dread was on him and they shared it, perhaps without knowing why.
“O my brothers.” It was the idiom of the hal’ari, and he meant it in that moment. “The Dark is very wide out there, and all about this world, there is no life, none at all. They have seen it. And they are afraid.”
* * *
“We move on,” said Melein, “as we have been moving. I will say no more of it; I do not bind myself with words; I do as the Now asks. Tell your she’panei we move with the dawn. A double hand of Kel’ein will hunt outward from our column to feed us. If any she’pan will draw back and not lend to me, I do not permit: I challenge. If any will challenge me, well, there is honor in that, and if she will take up my robes and stand where I stand, that is well. But I do not believe the gods will permit me to fall; I shall absorb that tribe and take them for my children. The gods have not preserved me through so much to fall in tribal rivalry. If any she’pan will lend me her children in my need, I shall write her in the Holy’s last table, and in the beginning of the new; and the mri who stood with me, living and dead, will mark a new beginning in the songs of their line. All things begin and end from this coming day. When I have done what I will, I shall give their children back to them with gratitude and Honors: the law prevents us of the White from standing face to face . . . but apart, we are each a point strength on Kutath’s wide face. I am she’pan’anth, she’pan-senior of the Voyagers . . . she’pan’anth of all mri; and I have need. Say that to them. Is there question?”
Silence hung in the air, trembling with force.
“Go,” she said, a whisper like a sword’s slash. “And come back to me.”
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