The Faded Sun Trilogy (29 page)

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.

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.

“Did you rest long?” he asked of her.

“So long as I needed. I was shaken yesterday. I think I shall still find a long walk difficult. But we will walk today.”

He heard this, and knew that she had come to some ultimate decision, but it would not be respectful to ask, to go on assuming that he was her kinsman, which he could not be any longer.

“We are ready,” he said.

“We are going by the way of Sil’athen,” she said, “and further into the hills; and we will find a shrine of which the Kel has known nothing in our generation. Before we two were born it was ordered forgotten by the Kel. The Pana, Niun, never rested in the Edun. It was a time of war. The she’pan did not think it good that the Pana be in the edun, and she was right.”

He touched his brow in reverence, his skin chilled even to hear the things that she said; but his spirit rose at what she said. It changed nothing, had no bearing on their own bleak chances; but the Holy existed, and even if they went to destroy it with their own hands, it would not have perished by enemies.

The gods’ mission, then. That was something worth doing, something he could well comprehend.

“Know this,” she said further. “We will recover the Pana for ourselves, and we two will bear it to a place where we can be safe. And we will wait. We will wait, until we can find a way off Kesrith or until we know that there can be none. Does the Kel have an opinion?”

He considered, thought of Duncan’s offer, of bringing it to her, and put it away in his thoughts. There would be a moment for that, if they lived to do the one thing. “I think,” he judged carefully, “that we will end by killing humans and then by being hunted to our end. But for my part I had as lief go to the human authorities and contract with them against regul. I am this bitter.”

She listened to him attentively, her head tilted to one side, and she frowned. “But,” she said, “there is peace between regul and humans.”

“I do not think it will last. Not forever.”

“But would humans not laugh—to consider one kel’en alone, trying to take service against all regul?”

“The regul would not laugh,” said Niun grimly, and she nodded, appreciative of that truth.

“But I will not have this,” she said. “No. I know what Intel planned: to take us into the Dark again, to take the long voyage and renew the People during that Dark. And I will not sell you into hire for any promises of safety. No. We two go our own way.”

“We have neither Kath nor kel’e’ein,” he cried, and dropped his voice at once to half-whisper, for he did not want Duncan waking. “For us there are no more generations, no renewing. We will never come out of that Dark.”

She looked up tranquilly at the dawning. “If we are the last, then a quiet end; and if we are not the last, then the way to surest extinction for the People is to waste our lives in pursuit of tsi’mri wars and tsi’mri honors and all the things that have occupied the People in this unhappy age.”

“What is there else?” he asked; which was a forbidden question, and he knew it when he had spoken it, and
canceled it with a gestured refusal. “No, do as you will.”

“We are free,” she said. “We are
free,
Niun. And I will commit us to nothing but to find the Pana and to find whether others of our kind survive.”

He looked up and met her eyes, and acknowledged her bravery with a nod of his head. “It is not possible that we do this,” he said. “The Kel tells you this, she’pan.”

“The Kel of the Darks,” she said softly, “is not wholly ignorant; and therefore it is a harder service. No, perhaps it is not possible. But I cannot accept any other thing. Do you not believe that the gods still favor the People?”

He shrugged, self-conscious in his ignorance, helpless as a kel’en always was in games of words. He did not know whether she played ironies or not.

“I cast us both,” she said then.
“Shon’ai.
”

This he understood, a mystery that Kel easily fathomed: he made a fist, a pantomime of the catch of
shon’ai,
and his heart lightened.

“Shon’ai,”
he echoed. “It is good enough.”

“Then we should be moving,” she said.

“We are ready,” he said. He gathered himself up and went to Duncan and shook at him. “Come,” he told Duncan, and while Duncan began to stir about he made a pack of their remaining belongings. The water he meant to carry himself, and a small light flask also he meant for Melein, for it was not wise to make Duncan independent in that regard or to make her dependent, should it come to trouble—though neither he nor she, whole of limb and untroubled by enemies, needed a flask in a land where they knew every plant and stone.

He threw the bundle of supplies at Duncan’s feet.

“Where are we going?” Duncan asked, without moving to pick it up. It was a civil question. Niun shrugged, giving him all the answers he meant to give, with the same civility.

“I am not your beast of burden,” Duncan said, a thin, under-the-breath piece of rebellion. He kicked at the bundle, spurning it.

Niun looked at it, and looked at him, without haste. “The she’pan does not work with the hands. Being kel’en. I do not bear burdens, while there are others to bear them. If you were dead, I would carry it. Since you are not, you will carry it.”

Duncan seemed to consider how seriously that was meant, and reached the correct conclusion. He picked it up, and slid his arms into the ropes of the pack.

Then Niun did find some pity for him, for the man was a manner of kel’en, and avowed he was not of a lower caste, but he would not fight for it. It was a matter of the yin’ein,
a’ani,
honorable combat; and he reckoned that with mri weapons the human was as helpless as a kath’en.

Perhaps, he thought, he had been wrong to insist upon this point, and to have taken some small part of the weight for himself would not have overburdened his pride. It was one thing to war against the tsi’mri kel’en’s species; it was another to break him under the weight of labor in Kesrith’s harsh environment.