Duncan refastened the mez just beneath his chin, and came inside with him, hesitated in the middle of the room until Melein herself held out her hand in invitation, and showed him where he should sit, at her left hand, where the lesser dus rested.
Duncan went, fearing the dus, mortally afraid of that beast. Niun opened his mouth to protest, but he thought that he would shame Duncan if he did so, and make question of his fitness to be here. Carefully Duncan settled where he was asked; and Niun sat down in his own place at Melein’s right, within arm’s reach of Duncan and the other animal. He touched the smaller dus with his fingertips, felt it settled and was relieved at what he felt.
“Duncan,” Melein said softly. “Kel Duncan. Niun avows you are able to understand the hal’ari.”
“I miss words, she’pan, but I understand.”
“But then, you did understand somewhat of the mu’ara before you came into our company.”
“Yes. A few words.”
“You must have worked very hard,” she said. “Do you know how long you have been aboard?”
“No. I do not count the time anymore.”
“Are you content, Duncan?”
“Yes,” he said, which Niun heard and he held his breath, for he did not believe it. Duncan lied: it was a human thing to do.
It was wrong thing to have done.
“You know,” said Melein, “that we are going home.”
“Niun has told me.”
“Did your people surmise that?”
Duncan did not answer. The question disturbed him greatly: Niun felt it through the dusei, a shock of fear.
“Our outward journey,” Melein continued softly, “was long ago, before such ships as this were available to us, no such swift passage, no; and we delayed along the way that brought us to you, sometimes a thousand years or two. Usually there is time that the People in truth do forget, that in the Dark between suns there are generations born that are not taught the Pana, the Forbidden, the Holy, the Mysteries—and they step out onto a new earth, ignorant of all they are not told. But this time, this time, kel Duncan, we carry our living past with us, in your person; and though this is against every law, every wisdom of she’panei before me, so is this voyage different from other voyages and this Dark from other Darks. I have permitted you to remain with us. Did your people surmise, Duncan, that we are going home?”
There was a forbidden game the children of the Kath would play, the truth-game: touch the dus and try to lie. When the Mothers knew it, they forbade it, though the great beasts were tolerant of the children, and the children’s innocent minds could not disturb the animals.
Find where I have hidden the stone.
Is it near? Is it far?
Touch the dus and try to lie.
But not among brothers, not within the Kel or the Sen. “Melein,” Niun protested. “He fears the beast.”
“He fears,” she echoed harshly. “Tell me, Duncan, what they supposed of the record they put within this ship.”
“That it might be—that it might be the location of mri bases.”
The feeling in the air was like that before a storm, thick and close and unreal. The great dus shivered, lifted its head. “Be still,” Niun whispered in its blunt ear, tugging at it to distract the beast.
“Ah,” said Melein. “And humans have surely duplicated this record. They will have taken this gift that was in the pan’en, that rested within their hands. And to make us trust it, they gave us you.”
The dus cried out suddenly, moved, both of them. It hurled Duncan aside, away—he rolled to the wall, sprawled at the impact and both dusei were on their feet, their panic tangible. “Yai!” Niun cried at his own, clapped his hands, struck it. It reacted, threw its weight against its lesser companion, and kept the confused dus at bay, constantly shifting to remain between it and him; and Niun flung himself to Duncan’s side, forcing his dus to shield them both.
The panic crested, subsided. Duncan was on his knees, holding his arm against his body, shuddering convulsively; his face was white and beaded with sweat. Niun touched him, dragged the arm outward and pushed up the sleeve, exposing the ugly, swelling wound.
Dus-poison.
“You will not die of it,” Niun told him, holding him, trying to ease the sickly shuddering that wracked the human. He was not sure that Duncan could understand him. Melein came, bent down, touched the wounded arm; but there was no pity in her, only cold curiosity.
The dusei crept back. The little one, abused, hung back and radiated distress, blood-feelings. The greater one nosed at Duncan, snorted and drew back, and the human flinched and cried aloud.
“You have hurt them both,” Niun said to Melein, thinking that she would feel remorse for one or the other, the dus or the man.
“He is still tsi’mri,” she said. “And Niun, he has lied to us from the beginning; I have known it; you have seen it.”
“You do not know what you have done,” said Niun. “He feared the dusei, feared this one most especially. How could you expect to get truth from him? The dus is hurt, Melein; I do not know how far.”
“You forget yourself.”
“She’pan,” he said, bowed his head, but it did not appease her. He took Duncan’s good arm and helped him to stand, and flung his arm about him, holding him on his feet. The human was in utter, deep shock. When Niun began to move, the dus came, and slowly, slowly they left the presence of the she’pan.
* * *
Sometimes the human fought his way out of the fever, became for a moment lucid; at such times he seemed to know where he was, and his eyes wandered his surroundings, where he lay against the dus, in the corner of the kel-hall. But it did not last. He could not hold, and retreated again into his delirium. Niun did not speak to him, did not brighten the lights too much; it was best to keep both man and dus as free of sensation as possible.
Finally, when by night-cycle there was no improvement, Niun went to Duncan, and, as a kath’en might undress a child, took from him his mez and zaidhe, and his robes too, so that he might take warmth from the dus. He bedded him between his own dus and the afflicted one, and covered him with a double blanket.
The poison was strong in him; and a bond had been forced between two creatures that had not been able to bear each other. The wound was a deep puncture, and Duncan had taken more venom from the hollow dewclaw than was good even for a mri who was accustomed to it. But the old ways said (and being kel’en, Niun did not know whether this was truth or fable) that a dus knew its man by this thereafter, that once the substance had gone into a man and he had lived, then he would nevermore be in danger from the venom or the anger of that particular dus, which would never part from him in life. This was not entirely so, for a man who handled dusei frequently received small scratches from the dewclaw; and occasionally deeper ones, which might make him fevered. But it was also true that a man not accustomed to a particular dus might react very strongly, even fatally, to a bad wound from it.
Melein had known better than what she had done: kel-trained and sen-trained, she knew dusei, and she knew that she was provoking the beast dangerously, worrying at Duncan, drawing panic from him. But like the other she’pan that he had served, Melein had coldness for a heart.
And Duncan, his naked skin exposed to the heat and the secretions of the dus’s hot hide, its venom flowing in his veins, would adapt to the dus and the dus to him—if he did not die; or if the beast did not go miuk, into that madness that sometimes came on stressed dusei, that turned them killer. That was what Melein had risked, and knew it.
If the beast went, Niun did not know now whether he could prevent the human from going with it. He had heard of it happening: a mri dragged into insanity by a miuk’ko dus; he had not, he thanked the gods, seen it.
The warning siren sounded.
Niun looked frantically at the starscreen, and cursed in anguish. It was the worst of all possible times that they should prepare to transit.
The bell sounded. The dusei roused, te
rrified, and Duncan for his part simply flung his arms about his beast’s neck and bowed his head and held on, lost, lost in the dus-fears and the mind of the beast.
Perhaps it protected him. They jumped, emerged, jumped again within half a night. The man and the dus clung together, and radiated such fear that the other dus could not stay by them.
It was said of the dusei that they had no memory for events, only for persons. And perhaps it was that which drew the human in, and provided a haven from which he would not emerge.
* * *
“Duncan,” Niun said the next morning, and without pleading with him, held a cup to his lips and gave him water, for he was not a dus, to go without. He bathed the human’s face with his fingertips.
“Give me my robe,” Duncan said then softly, startling him, and he was glad, and drew the human away from the afflicted dus, helping him to stand. Duncan was very weak, the arm hot and swollen still; he had to be helped into his clothing, and when he was given the headcloth and veil, he veiled himself as if he earnestly wished its privacy.
“I will speak to the she’pan,” Niun offered earnestly. “Duncan, I will speak to her.”
The human drew a great breath, let it go with a shudder, and pushed away the that nosed at his leg. It nearly threw him with its great strength. He caught himself with Niun’s offered hand, then pushed help aside a second time, stubborn in his isolation.
“But you are wrong,” Duncan said, “and she was right.” And when he had drawn another breath: “There are ships on our trail. My people. Warships. I lied, Niun. I was no gift. They have the same series of directions we do, and they will come on our heels. What they will do then, I do not know. I am not in their confidence. They put me aboard for the reason the she’pan guessed: to make you trust the gift, to learn things the tapes cannot tell, to get me and the information back if I could. I tore the ship out of their hands and ran. Tell her that. It is all that I know. And you can do what you like about it.”
And he walked off, to the far side of the room, and curled up in the corner. The dus padded over, head hanging, and wearily flung its bulk down against him. Duncan put his arms about its neck and laid his head against it, and rested. His eyes were blank and weary, and held such a look of despair as Niun had never seen on any face.
* * *
“Bring him,” Melein told him when he had reported the things Duncan had admitted.
“She’pan,” he protested, “he has helped the People.”
“Be silent,” she answered. “Remember that you are kel’en, and kel’anth; and that you owe me some loyalty.”
Right was on her side, the rightness of mri, the rightness of their survival. He felt the impact of it, and bowed his head against her head and acknowledged it—and sat by in misery that evening while she began to question Duncan, and to draw forth from him all that he could tell.
It was in the guise of a common-meal, the first that they had held on the ship, a sad mockery. It lacked all fellowship, and the food was bitter in the mouth. Duncan hardly ate at all, but sat silent when he was not being directly questioned; the dusei were banished, and he had nothing, no one, not even—Niun thought wretchedly—his own companionship, for he must sit at the she’pan’s right, taking her part.
There was a temptation to them all to overindulge in the drink, the biting regul brew that filled the stores, ashig, fermented of the same source as soi. But at least, Niun thanked the gods, there was no komal, that had kept his last she’pan in thrall to drug-spawned dreams, illicit and shameful—dreams in which she had laid the plans that had launched them forth; dreams that were as guilty as ever Duncan was in ruining the People, in creating the danger they now knew followed them.
He saw again the arrogance of the she’pan who had no mercy for her own children.
But such a thing as that he dared not say to Melein, could not quarrel with her, whom he loved more than life and honor, over a tsi’mri who had tangled them in so much of evil. It was only when he looked at Duncan’s face that it hurt, and the human’s pain gnawed at him.
Each evening for four days they ate common-meal, and talked little, for most questions had been answered. There was during that time a chill in the she’pan’s presence, and afterward a chill in kel-hall—weapons-practice cold and formal and careful, concerned more with rituals than with striking blows, with the traditions of combat rather than the actuality of it. At times there was such sickness in Duncan’s eyes that Niun forbade him the yin’ein, and refused to practice with him at all.
Duncan had betrayed his own.
And there was no peace for such a man.
“Tsi’mri,” Melein said of him in Duncan’s absence, “and a traitor even to them, who shaped him blood and bone. How then should the People ever rely on him? This is a weak creature, Niun. You have proved that.”
Niun considered him, and knew his own handiwork, and grieved for it.
The venom-fever left, but the misery did not: the dus, rejected by turns and grudgingly accepted, mourned and fretted; the man grew silent and inward, a sickness that could not be reached.
The ship departed that star, and jumped again and again.
Chapter Fourteen
They passed closed, this time, to the worlds of the system, dangerously close. For many days their course had been taking them for the yellow star and its worlds, until now the largest of the inner planets loomed before them, dominating the field of the screen in kel-hall.
Home? Niun wondered at first, and held his hope private in Melein’s silence: if she knew, he reckoned, she would have told him. But as days passed a worried look settled on Melein; and often now she looked on the screens with fear in her eyes. It ceased to look as though they were hurtling toward the world—rather that the world filled their sky and was falling down on them, a half-world first, that lent Niun some hope they would hurtle just past it—terrifying, but an escape, all the same: but the disc began to rise in the scanner.
They were caught, going earthward like a mote in a burrower’s sandpit: the image came unwelcomely to Niun as he sat by Melein’s side and stared at the starscreen she had set in her own hall, to look constantly on the danger. He felt his own helplessness, a kel’en whose knowledge of ships was all theory; all his knowledge told him now was that everything was wrong, and that Melein, who likewise had never set hands to ship’s controls, knew little more than he.
Perhaps, he thought, she knew the name of the world into which they were falling: but it was not going to stop them.
And the outrage of it grew in him—that they should die by mischance. For a time he awaited a miracle, from Melein, from some source, certain that the gods could not have directed them so far—only to this.
He waited on Melein; and she said nothing.
“You have two kel’ein,” he reminded her at last, on the day that there was hardly any darkness left in the starscreen.
Still she said nothing.
“Ask him, Melein.”
Her lips made a taut line.
He knew the stubbornness in her: they were of one blood. He set his own face. “Then let us fall into the world,” he said, staring elsewhere. “Surely there is nothing that I know to do, and your mind is set.”
There was long silence between them. Neither moved.
“It would assure,” she said at last, “that one danger did not reach our destination. I have thought of that. But it would not stop the other. And in us is the knowledge of it.”
Such a thought shook at his confidence. He felt diminished, who had thought only of their own survival, who have been forward with her. “I spoke out of turn,” he said. “Doubtless you have weighed what we ought to do.”
“Go ask him,” she said.
He sat still for a moment, finding her shifts of mind as unsettling as transit, and his nerves taut-strung at the thought that the matter did indeed come down to Duncan.
Then he gathered himself up, called softly to his dus, and went.
* * *
&
nbsp; Duncan sat, beneath the screen that held the scanner image, eternally whetting away at the blade of an av-tlen that he had made out of scrap metal: it was laser-cut and of a balance that Niun privately judged would never be true, but it kept Duncan’s hands busy, and perhaps his mind, whatever darkness hovered in it. The dus lay near him, head between paws, eyes following the sweep of Duncan’s hands.
“Duncan,” Niun said. The noise of the steel kept its rhythm. “Duncan.”
It stopped. Duncan looked up at him with that bleak hardness that had grown there day by day.
“The she’pan is concerned,” Niun said, “about our near approach to this world.”
Duncan’s eyes remained cold. “Well, you do not need me. Or if you do, then you can find some means to work around me, can you not?”
“I respect your quarrel with us.” Niun sank down on his heels, opened his hands in a gesture of offering. “But surely you know that there is no quarreling with the world that is drawing us into it. We will die, and you will have no satisfaction in that. As for your cause with us, I do not want to quarrel at all on this small ship, with the dusei in the middle of it. Listen to me, Duncan. I have done everything I know to give you an honorable way to put aside this grievance with us. But if you threaten the she’pan, then I will not be patient. And you are doing that.”
Duncan went back to his task, sweeping steel against steel. Niun fought with his temper, knowing the result if he laid hands on the tsi’mri: a dus that was already precariously balanced on the verge of miuk, and the ship plummeting toward impact with a world—with some things indeed there was no quarreling. It was likely that the human was no more rational than the dus, affected by the ailing beast. If the dus went over the brink, then so did the mind that held knowledge of the ship.
Melein’s handiwork. Niun clenched his arms about his knees and sought something to say that would touch the man.
“We are out of time, Duncan.”
“If you cannot deal with this,” Duncan said suddenly, “then you certainly could not land safely when you reach your home. I do not think you ever intended to be rid of me. You two seem to need me, and I think the she’pan has always suspected that. That was why she let you have your way. It was only a means of making me less an inconvenience than I would have been, a way of getting past my guard and getting from me what she wanted. I am not angry with you, Niun. You believed her. So did I. She had what she wanted. Only now I am needed again, am I?” The ring of steel continued, measured and hard. “Become like you. Become one of you. I know you tried. You armed me—but you never reckoned on the beast. Now you cannot deal with me so easily. It and I . . . make something new on this ship.”