Survivor

by Octavia E. Butler

  “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.

  Artisans and farmers were naturally small people, members of a race
different from those of the stocky hunters and the tall lean judges.

  “Did artisans build this dwelling?” I asked Choh.

  He glanced up at me and his body whitened. “Yes. The Hao came to them—to my ancestors—and said, ‘Build us a home that will help us fight by concealing itself as we do.’ And for the time it took to build this dwelling, artisans ruled. Others obeyed them—hunters, judges, even the Hao listened when artisans spoke. And when the building was finished, the Hao looked at it and saw that there was greater value in nonfighting people than they had thought.”

  He had a low quiet way of speaking that I liked, and he was at ease with me now that his curiosity about my differences had been satisfied. I began to think that my stay with him and Gehnahteh would not be as bad as I had feared.

  After the general tour, Choh took me to the heavily draped doorways of three apartments. These were visible doorways with only the hides of animals serving as doors. Hidden doors of stone and metal were used only for special purposes. Choh stopped at each of these doorways and called out a name. He introduced me first to a hunter, then to a pair of judges, then to a pair of farmers who were just leaving their apartment. These were the trade families of Gehnahteh and Choh. They performed special services for each other and considered themselves to be related as though by blood. Now I was part of their group. From now on, the hunter—he was a widower—would supply Choh’s artisan friend with leather for my shoes.

  Choh made me guide him once to each of these three apartments. When he saw that I knew the way, he took me down to a lower level of the dwelling where wood had been cut and stored in great piles. There were wooden handcarts there much like the Missionaries’ carts. I was surprised because the Garkohn did not use such things in their dwelling or even on their trails through the meklah-tangled valley.

  “Load a cart,” Choh told me. “Take one load of wood to each of the three apartments, and to our apartment. When you have finished, leave the cart here, and come home.”

  He turned and left me. And I did my work, and went home.

  Thus began my life as a Tehkohn—a life of working and learning through my work. I ran errands for Gehnahteh and Choh. I learned to cook Tehkohn foods over the fire in the fireplace of their apartment. I learned to clean the apartment with a soap made from the roots of one of the mountain plants. I learned to make the soap and the brushes I used. I was loaned to the trade-family farmers to help with the planting. The farmers put me to work with the adolescent children who were breaking up clods of earth while the adults plowed with a tool that looked like a long narrow version of an Earth-made shovel. The tool had a strong wooden handle and a flat narrow metal head that tapered to a point. On one side of each handle, down near the metal, there was a footrest that the farmers used to push the metal deep into the ground. My farmers watched me for a half day, then gave me a shovel.

  Their main crop was a kind of tuber that they ate in some form with almost every meal—their nonaddictive version of the meklah. They also raised a small sweet melon, sweet berries, other fruit, and at least three kinds of bean or pea that grew in pods underground. They had no domestic animals. The native animals would not breed in captivity. Usually, they sickened and died soon after they were caught. The Tehkohn simply did what they could to insure a plentiful supply of wild game. They killed off all the non-Tehkohn predators they could, and they diverted rivers and streams to irrigate the territory around them more evenly and make it lush for the plant eaters. Then the hunters killed as much game as they could when they could, and preserved large amounts of it. Both they and the farmers were skillful. The people did not go hungry.

  All the Tehkohn were skillful. They were absorbing me. They kept me working harder than I had ever worked with the Missionaries, and when I was not working, I was either learning or sleeping. There seemed to be no time for anything else. Gehnahteh and Choh made sure there was no time.

  I felt myself slipping away not only from the Missionaries, but from the wilds. The wild human within me who watched and cautioned and alerted me, who kept me ready to do and be whatever I had to do and be to survive, was becoming Tehkohn. Too Tehkohn. If the Tehkohn had not been so different physically, that might not have been a bad thing. I had found more acceptance among them in my short time with them than I had in more than three years with the Missionaries. But I could not spend my life among people so alien, no matter how accepting they were. Now and then, in spite of the work, I found myself still longing to see another Missionary. Furless skin, black or white or brown. I spoke aloud to myself in English and it sounded strange to me. I began to resent the Tehkohn, their work, their customs. I grew careless. There was one night in particular…

  I was not yet used to the cooking and I had an accident. I had cooked over an open fire for most of my life, but it had been a haphazard kind of cooking. I had never had a heavy kettle to contend with. I burned myself, and in sharp reaction, dumped most of the stew into the fire.

  Gehnahteh said several Tehkohn words that I had never heard before and seized a stick of firewood. Her body flared angry yellow as she hit me once, twice. I scrambled away from her more startled than hurt.

  She followed me, beating me across the back and ribs, hitting the arm I held up to protect my head. The blows were jarring and painful, but strangely, I did not want to hit back if I could avoid it. I wasn’t afraid, or even angry. I was annoyed—and much aware of Gehnahteh’s smallness. Surely, I could handle this one furious little artisan—whom I happened to like—without hurting her.

  Finally, I seized her arm, wrenched the stick away from her, and threw it into the half-smothered fire. Then I caught her by the throat, shook her once warningly, and let her go. She stumbled back from me and we stood glaring at each other. Choh, watching us, had stood up, but he had not had time to interfere. Now he stood looking at me uncertainly. In that moment, I knew I could kill them both if I wanted to. I couldn’t get away with it, but I could do it. They were small and strong and I was large and stronger. Also, untrained as I was in the ways of their hunters and judges, I was still what they would call a fighter.

  The knowledge gave me a security I had not had since my capture. I relaxed. Without a word, I took a basket from beside the door and went down to one of the storage rooms for more tubers, vegetables, and dried meat. I cleaned the kettle and cleaned the mess out of the fireplace, and I made more stew.

  Nothing was said about the incident, but neither Gehnahteh nor Choh ever tried to beat me again. I began to refuse work when I didn’t want it. Not often, but when I was tired. The first time I did it, Gehnahteh swore at me. I sat listening until she finished and went away. After that, she and Choh began to ask me to do things instead of telling me. They had handled young fighters before—had been second-parents to several. They understood what was happening better than I did.

  Neila Verrick had gotten as close a look at the Tehkohn Hao as she wanted before the prisoners were locked up. As soon as she realized that Jules intended to have him brought to the cabin, she retreated next door to wait with the neighbors.

  Alanna had not risked suggesting such a private meeting with Diut. That was something Jules had thought of himself. The only alternative was to meet in the storehouse where the prisoners were being kept—meet surrounded by other Tehkohn and watched by Garkohn guards. Apparently, Jules had decided that even being alone with the largest and least human-looking Tehkohn was preferable to that.

  He had had some difficulty persuading the Garkohn to bring Diut to the cabin. And once they had brought him, they did not want to leave him there alone with Jules and Alanna. But finally, Jules persuaded them to go.

  Alanna watched them very carefully as they filed out. Neila had lit two lamps in the main room before she left, but there were still areas of shadow, places where skillful Garkohn could conceal themselves almost invisibly. There must be no chance of the conversation Jules and Diut were about to have being overheard. Apparently Diut was checking too. It was he who spotted the
intruder first—and again, the intruder was Gehl. But this time her camouflage was excellent. Diut’s coloring yellowed minutely when he saw her and Alanna, every sense alert, spotted the change. Only then did she see Gehl.

  Diut spoke softly. “Huntress, your kind and I have respected each other until now.”

  Gehl dropped her camouflage. “You are a prisoner,” she said.

  “So,” admitted Diut.

  There was yellow in Gehl’s coloring. Alanna wondered what it signified in her—anger or fear. “I’m one of your captors,” said Gehl. “Do you think you can command me as you do your Tehkohn?”

  “Have I commanded you?”

  Gehl flared pure yellow. “I will stay here as long as you are here.”

  “No.”

  “You cannot say…”

  “Now you ask to be commanded. You will wait outside until I have spoken with the Missionaries,” Diut’s blue became luminescent. “Obey!”

  For a long moment, the huntress faced him, not quite challenging, not quite giving way. She gazed into his blue and Alanna knew she was at war with her own instincts. This was only a small thing that Diut wanted. It would be so easy to obey. And what harm could it do? The house was surrounded by Garkohn. Finally, her instincts won. She turned and left.

  Relief flooded Alanna. She knew, though Jules did not, how easily the confrontation might have ended in Gehl’s death and immediate trouble with the Garkohn. But it was over.

  Diut now made himself as unimpressive as he could. He muted his coloring so that his face and body seemed to be veiled in shadow. He had kept it that way—quietly unobtrusive—through most of the trip down from the mountains. His height, well over two meters, made him a giant among both Missionaries and Kohn. That he could not disguise. There were two or three Missionaries almost as tall, but so large a native, especially a Tehkohn, had to be startling and threatening to the colonists. Facing Jules now, Diut seemed to understand this. He sat down as soon as he could. He was not so much trying to avoid alarming Jules, Alanna knew, although his general “dimming” would have that effect. He was trying to see that attention would be focused on the subject at hand rather than on his rank and his—to Jules’s mind—unusual physical appearance. He did this with his judges when he needed opinions from them that were honest rather than “respectful.” Jules would not understand the sign, but he would respond to it in the way Diut wanted.