Then Diut stepped in and the confrontation was over. I was grateful to him but my gratitude did not make it any easier for me to look at him or be near him. He was a monster—as much a mutant as the Clayarks back on Earth—though among the Kohn people, his was a desirable mutation. He was huge and physically powerful, and hideous. No Missionary could have called him a caricature of the “true” human shape. He was more an intensification of everything nonhuman in the Kohn. And somehow, that made him seem alien even among them. With all that, though, I considered the fear and revulsion I felt for him to be foolish and dangerous. For one thing, he had done nothing to me, had shown no interest in me since that first night in Jeh and Cheah’s apartment. Clearly he meant me no harm. For another thing, the respect he received from the Tehkohn was far beyond anything even Jules could expect from the Missionaries. What would he and his people do to me if they realized how I felt about him? It would be as though the Missionaries had realized that T thought their God was so much air. Yet it was hard for me to control my feelings against Diut—especially now when he was so close to me.
“Find Gehnahteh or Choh,” he told me. “Tell them that your time with them is ended. Then go back to Jeh and Cheah.”
I left him quickly. I didn’t know why he was making the change, and I was worried. But I was so glad to get away from him that I didn’t stop to ask questions. I went straight to the apartment of Gehnahteh and Choh. Only Choh was at home when I went in. He was shaping a heavy stick into a handle for some farmer’s digging prongs. He looked up at me in surprise.
“What has frightened you?”
I told him about the hunter I had hit.
“You fought a hunter?” he asked incredulously. “You fought and won?”
I shook my head. “It wasn’t a fight. And I may have lost more than I won. Perhaps the Tehkohn Hao has some punishment in mind for me.”
Choh put his knife and wood on the floor and came to stand before me. “He’s not one to delay punishment, Alanna. If he had been angry with you, you would know.” Choh paused. “Alanna, you are a friend.”
He was saying good-bye to me. I touched the back of my hand to his face in the friendship gesture. I had seen others use the gesture but this was the first time I had used it myself—the first time I had wanted to use it. He covered my hand for a moment with a furry paw, then spoke once more.
“I will tell you a thing that perhaps I should not tell you because I’m not certain.”
“What is it?”
“The Tehkohn Hao has decided that you are a fighter. We told him you were, but he said, ‘Wait. Let her prove it.’ I think now you have proven it.”
“You told him?”
“You had already proven it to us.”
We looked at each other for a long moment, then I smiled. He had asked me once, “Do all your people bare their teeth to show pleasure?” I went to get the spare clothing I had accumulated and my few toilet articles.
“You have worked as one of us,” said Choh. “We will miss you.”
And I would miss them, I thought as I left him and walked out into the dim corridors. But as long as I was not to be punished, I did not mind returning to Jeh and Cheah—except for one thing. Jeh and Cheah did live in the fighter section of the dwelling. They lived near the outside where raiders would come first if they got past the guards, and they lived near the Tehkohn Hao. I would be seeing more of Diut and I would have to make a greater effort to get used to him.
Cheah welcomed me to her apartment, her small body blazing white.
“Ah-la-naaah!” she cried exuberantly. “I heard you fought Haileh—that you beat him to the ground!”
I stared at her in surprise. “You’re glad?”
“Glad! That one was an animal! He tried to humiliate you because he thought you were weak. He tried it with me once because I’m small. I almost broke his neck!”
I laughed because I could picture her doing exactly that. She was not the kind of person who would let her smallness make her a target for other people’s frustrations.
“You are back where you belong,” she said. “Jeh told Diut that you were a fighting woman.” She led me across the room. “Put your things here. We will make a pallet for you. Come!”
I spent five days with them. Easy days compared to what I had been used to. I had the work of the apartment to do—cooking and cleaning—because without any blue at all, I was the lowest-ranking person in the apartment. As I had relieved Choh, now I relieved Cheah. I didn’t like it particularly, but it kept me busy. And Cheah chattered and Jeh and I listened, amused. Jeh said once, “I take her with me to trade with the lake people, Mahkahkohn. She talks and talks and they are all white and at ease and she trades them out of their fur.” I believed it.
Then came the day when Jeh brought home gifts for me. There was a long robelike garment of fur dyed blue-green. It was made from the skin of a single large animal. The fur was coarser than Kohn fur but it was thick and the garment looked warm and comfortable. And there were new shoes of the same ankle-high boot type that I had been wearing, but these were fur-lined, and colored blue-green to match the robe.
“Put them on,” said Jeh. “They are yours.”
“You give them to me?”
“Diut gives them to you.”
I froze. “Diut?” In spite of my fears, I had hardly seen the Tehkohn Hao since moving back with Jeh and Cheah. And I did not want to see him.
“He made me go with him to get that thing,” said Jeh, gesturing toward the robe. “He said you and I were the same size. I had to put the thing on so that he could see whether it was as long as he wanted it to be on you.”
I stood listening to him, hearing what he was telling me, and what he was not telling me. I strove not to believe it. “Jeh, why is he giving me these things?”
“To please you, Alanna. He gives gifts sometimes, though yours are stranger than any I have seen. Get your other things. Gather them all. He’s waiting for you.”
“I…must go?” I managed to keep my voice almost normal.
“You are afraid?”
“Yes!”
“He said you would be. But you must go. Your fear will pass.”
Slowly, I gathered my belongings. But my hands were shaking so that I kept dropping things. Cheah came over, oddly silent, and helped me. Jeh led me out of the apartment and through the corridor for some distance to what appeared to be a solid wall. A hidden door.
Jeh felt for the handhold, found it, and pulled the door open. He spoke quietly.
“Go in, Alanna.”
I didn’t move. It was all I could do to keep myself from running away down the corridor. I had come this far by telling myself that I could talk to Diut—talk him out of this…experiment, or whatever it was. And I did not want to disgrace myself before Jeh and Cheah. Now though…
“Alanna!”
I jumped, looked at him.
“Go in.”
I went through the door and he shut it behind me.
There was no one in the room. It was a large room made of the same gray stone as the rest of the dwelling. There were two long chests of polished wood, one on either side of the room. I dropped my things atop one of these chests. There was a doorway on the opposite side of the room and I could hear someone moving around in the room beyond. So the Tehkohn Hao had at least a two-room apartment. Luxury. I could have lived my life happily without such luxury. There was a large animal-skin rug on the floor before the fireplace. I sat down on it and stared into the low fire trying to think. Everything had happened too quickly, too unexpectedly. It made no sense. Diut had hardly looked at me during my stay with the Tehkohn. And surely I could not have seemed sexually attractive to him.
He came into the room, his feet making almost no sound against the stone floor. I looked at him once, then looked away quickly, closed my eyes in desperation. I would keep still. I would not behave stupidly. We would talk, Diut and I, and end this nonsense.
“Tehkohn Hao,” I gree
ted. My voice was steady.
“Alanna.”
“Am I to have a liaison with you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Why do men and women usually have liaisons?”
He was standing over me off to one side, towering, huge. I felt powerless and afraid and angry at myself for being afraid. I had to keep calm.
“Are forced matings the way among the Tehkohn?” I asked quietly.
“Have I used force?”
“Have I accused you?”
He whitened slightly and sat down beside me. “We have no tradition of forced matings, Alanna.”
“Will you let me go then?”
“But I have chosen you.”
“I have not chosen you.”
“What man have you chosen?”
“I…none. I didn’t know I would be permitted to mate here.”
“Has any man approached you?”
“No.”
“No man would unless I ordered it. None but me.”
I said nothing.
“Your differences keep others away,” he said. “You come to me as a stranger, an alien in spite of all that you have learned. But when you leave me, you will be Tehkohn. When others see that I have accepted you, they will accept you.”
I began to tremble, and to believe, really believe, that there was no way out of this. I was afraid I would lose control of myself if he touched me. When he touched me.
He reached over, took my hand, and examined it much as the Garkohn huntress Gehl once had.
“The fingers are too long,” he said. “And too slender. The nails are too thin, too weak. You are right to keep them short. The hairlessness is ugly at first—wrong, a distortion of what should be. But the coloring is the greatest distortion. Brown. No blue at all. The lowest artisan has some blue, but you have none.”
I snatched my hand away from him, now more angry than frightened.
“There are* no customs here that apply to you,” he said. “You have no rights, no freedoms that I do not allow. Without the blue, you are like an animal among us.”
I glared at him. “How could you want a woman who is like an animal?”
And his blue grew suddenly lighter with a great deal of white. “To see for myself that she is truly a woman.”
My fear was drowned in anger and humiliation. It was an experiment then. The creature wanted to see for itself what it was like to make love with an ugly distorted woman. I was here to satisfy its curiosity. “I wish I had the words to tell you how deformed and ugly you are to me, Tehkohn Hao. No animal could be as terrible.” He would hit me. I didn’t care.
He did not hit me. He stood up and hauled me to my feet. “We have traded insults. Now we will go and prove to each other how little our differences matter.”
He led me into the other room where there was another fireplace—more luxury—more wooden chests and a wide wooden platform strewn with furs. It took me a moment to realize that the platform was actually the first bed that I had seen in the Tehkohn dwelling. I stood staring at it mindlessly until Diut opened my robe. Then I looked at him.
In that instant, he must have sensed just how much I suddenly hated him. He drew back warily.
“Be careful, Alanna.”
There had been a wild human on Earth—a man fast enough to run me down to get what he wanted. He got it. Then I smashed his head with a rock. As I faced Diut now, I hardly saw his ugliness. It was as though he was wearing the face of that wild human. It was as though he had brought me the pain that man brought me. He put his hands on me again and I lunged for his eyes.
He jerked his head back and in the moment that he was off balance, I came to my senses. I turned and ran for the corridor door. But he was fast—blindingly fast. I was fast myself and he caught me before I’d gone five steps.
He grabbed a handful of my hair and pulled me backward against him. I kicked back hard into his knee.
He flared yellow with pain and relaxed his hold on me for an instant. I broke free and ran again.
He was not so quick this time as he came limping after me, but I could not find the outside door. I could have found it if I had not been so frantic. I didn’t have much trouble with hidden doors any more because, normally, I memorized their location in relation to other objects. This one I had been too frightened to memorize.
Diut came up behind me, caught me by the neck, and threw me to the floor. “Will you make me kill you, Alanna?”
I had no doubt at all that he would do it. I lay there looking up at him.
“Get up.”
I rose slowly, faced him. He knocked me down again with a single openhanded blow. My head rang with the strength of it. And again:
“Get up.”
I stayed where I was, waiting for my head to clear. I wondered why he didn’t just grab me and rape me the way the wild human had. It would be simple enough. It would even be simple for me. I would not dare to kill him. I knew that now. Not unless I was also ready to kill myself—before his people caught me. My moment of unthinking rage had passed. Now why didn’t he just take what he wanted and get it over with.
He kicked me. “You will get up.”
Bruised and furious, I stood up, half expecting to be knocked down again. Instead, as though nothing had interrupted his earlier attempt, he opened my robe again, slipped it off me, and stripped off my other clothing.
He walked around me, inspecting me much as Gehnahteh and Choh had on my first day with them. I stood glaring at him. At least I could glare at him now, without turning away. He was becoming for me nothing more than an extremely ugly man. His size and strength were more impressive now than his appearance.
“Well, get on with it,” I said. “You are an animal and you want to mate. Mate then.”
His coloring whitened. “People kept coming to me telling me that you were a fighter.”
“I am a thing. A thing that you have become curious about. Satisfy your curiosity.”
He took me by the shoulder and led me back into the bedroom to the bed. I lay down among the furs waiting for him, not looking at him.
Nothing happened.
After a while, I looked at him, saw that he had sat down on the edge of the bed and was watching me. He spoke quietly.
“It is a custom among the Garkohn to capture Tehkohn fighters and force them to eat meklah.”
I frowned, wondering what that had to do with anything.
“Sometimes my fighters starve themselves, refusing to trust any food offered them. Sometimes the Garkohn let them starve themselves to death. Other times though, it’s more amusing to the Garkohn to wait until my fighters are weak, and then force meklah down their throats.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because your behavior with me is much like the behavior of my captured fighters. When they are forced to give in, they continue to speak arrogantly, challengingly. When they can no longer fight with their bodies, they continue to fight with words.”
“What else can they do?”
“Nonfighters submit at once. Abjectly.”
I sat up looking at him. “Garkohn humiliate Tehkohn because the two are enemies. Why do you humiliate me?”
“There need be no humiliation in this for you, Alanna. I am the leader of my people.” He paused for a moment, then flashed white blindingly. “And you have distinguished yourself. You are the only woman ever to try to refuse me.”
And he flashed white on that. It amused him.
“What do you want of me?” I asked. “Only the night?”
“Many nights. And many days. I’ll continue your teaching—help you live as a fighter among us. As I have said, you will be Tehkohn when you leave me. Tehkohn, and your own person, not dependent on others to guide or guard you.”
I frowned, re-evaluating him in spite of myself. “I will be free? It will be as though I had some blue in my coloring?”
“Yes.”
Watching him, I suddenly realized that if he clo
sed his eyes, they would probably vanish entirely. As it was, he seemed to look through slanted holes in thick fur. “You should have told me that before,” I said. “That I would be free, I mean.”
He hesitated. “It was what I had planned for you but I was not certain that it was what you wanted, that it would calm you.”
I said nothing. I was calmer now because I was able to control my reaction to his appearance, but there was no need to tell him that.
“And anyway,” he said, whitening, “I have never bargained for a mate before. I had to find my way.” He pulled me back on the bed, clearly ready now to see how good a bargain he had made.
He covered me with the thick, very soft blanket of his fur and hurt me as he forced his way into my body, an intruder too large and much unwelcome. Alien as we were to each other, he must have been able to read my pain in my expression.
“I always give pain before I give pleasure,” he said. “Your body will accustom itself to me.”
And if it didn’t, that was my problem. I put my teeth together and closed my eyes and waited for it to be over. He startled me once, bit me just at the throat. Not hard, not painfully, but he let me feel his teeth more than I would have preferred. I was surprised enough to grab a handful of his head fur to pull his head away. But in doing that, I looked at him and saw that his body had gone luminescent white. He continued to bite me, but more gently.
I let go of his fur, smoothed it unnecessarily. Left alone, it would smooth itself but I found it pleasant to touch. His one good feature.
“You like my fur,” he said later as we lay together, side by side.
“To touch,” I said. “It’s good to touch.”
He took one of my hands and put it into his mane. I felt the fur, the flesh beneath. There was a neck there, completely hidden. And broad as the shoulders were, they were not as broad as they looked.
“I find your smoothness pleasing too,” he said. “Good to touch.” He began to whiten a little and I realized that my hand exploring his mane was giving him pleasure. He closed his eyes—and they did vanish. There was no sign in what seemed now an even surface of fur that he had ever had eyes. Not even a slight indentation. I shuddered and put my head against his shoulder so that I would not have to look at him. I could get used to his strangeness. I was already getting used to it. But there were some things about him that would probably always be alien to me.