He silently acknowledged the force of that argument, and to Chimele he bowed in respect. “Thank you,” he said, meaning it.
Chimele waved a hand in dismissal. “I know this kalliran insanity of joy in being disadvantaged. But it would be improper to let you assume I do this solely to give you pleasure. Do not begin to act rashly or carelessly, as if I were freeing you of bond to
Ashanome
or responsibility to me. Be circumspect. Maintain our honor.”
“Will we receive orders from you?”
“No.” Again her violet nail touched the button, this time forcefully, “Ashakh! Wherever you are, acknowledge and report to the
paredre
at once.” She was becoming annoyed; and for Ashakh to be dilatory in a response was not usual.
The door from the corridor opened and Ashakh joined them; he closed the door manually, and looked to have been running.
“There was a problem,” he said, when Chimele’s expression commanded an explanation. “Mejakh is in an argumentative mood.”
“Indeed.”
“Rakhi has now made it clear to her that she is also barred from the control center. What was it you wanted of me?”
“Take Aiela and Isande to their quarters and let them collect what they need for their comfort on Priamos. Then escort them to the lab; I will give Ghiavre his instructions while you are at that. Then arrange their transport down to Priamos; and it would not be amiss to provide them arms.”
“I have my own weapon,” said Aiela, “if I have your leave to collect it from storage.”
“Armament can provide you one more effective, I am sure.”
“I am kallia. I’m afraid if I had a lethal weapon in my hands I couldn’t fire it. Give me my own. Otherwise I can’t defend myself as I may need to.”
“Your logic is peculiar to your people, I know, but I perceive your reasoning. Take it, then. And as for instruction, kamethi—I provide you none. I am sure your knowledge of Priamos and of Daniel is thorough, and I trust you to remember your responsibility to
Ashanome.
One thing I forbid you: do not go to Khasif and do not expect him to compromise himself to aid you. You are dismissed.”
Aiela bowed a final thanks, waited for Isande, and walked as steadily as he could after Ashakh. Isande held his arm. Her mind tried to occupy his, washing it clean of the pain and the weakness. He forbade that furiously, for it hurt her as well.
In his other consciousness he was being handled roughly down a ramp, provided a dizzying view of a daylit sky: he dreaded to think what could happen to Daniel while he was helpless to advise him, and he imagined what Daniel must think, abandoned as he had been without explanation.
We’ll be there,
Aiela sent, defying orders;
hold on, we’re coming;
but Daniel was fainting. He stumbled, and Isande hauled up against him with all her strength.
“Ashakh!”
The tall iduve stopped abruptly at the corridor intersection a pace ahead of them and roughly shoved them back. Mejakh confronted them, disheveled and with a look of wildness in her eyes.
“They are killing me!” she cried hoarsely and lurched at Ashakh. “O
nas,
they are killing me—”
“Put yourself to order,
nasith,
” said Ashakh coldly, thrusting off her hands. “There are witnesses.”
Mejakh’s violet eyes rolled aside to Aiela and back again, showing whites at the corners, her lips parted upon her serrate teeth. “What is Chimele up to?” she demanded. “What insanity is she plotting, that she keeps me from controls? Why will no one realize what she is doing to the
nasul? O nas,
do you not see why she has sent Khasif away? She has attacked me; Khasif is gone. And you have opposed her—do you not see? All that dispute her—all that protest against her intentions—die.”
“Get back,” Ashakh hissed, barring the corridor to her with his arm.
Aiela felt the
idoikkhe
and doubled; but Ashakh’s will held that off too, and he shouted at the both of them to run for their lives.
Aiela stumbled aside, Isande’s hand in his, Mejakh’s harsh voice pursuing them. He saw only closed doors ahead, a monitor panel at the corner such as there was at every turning. He reached it and hit the emergency button.
“Security!” he cried, dispensing with location: the board told them that. “Mejakh—!”
Through Isande’s backturned eyes he saw Ashakh recoil in surprise as Mejakh threatened him with a pistol. It burned the wall where Ashakh had been and had he not gone sprawling he would have been a dead man. His control of the
idoikkhei
faltered. Isande’s scream was half Aiela’s.
The weapon in Mejakh’s hand swung left, drawn from Ashakh by the sound.
Down!
Aiela shrieked at Isande and they separated by mutual impulse, low. The smell of scorched plastics and ozone attended the shot that missed them.
Ashakh heaved upward, hit Mejakh with his shoulder, sending her into the back wall of the corridor with a thunderous crash; but she did not fall, and locked in a struggle with him, he seeking to wrest the gun from her hand, she seeking to use it. Aiela scrambled across the intervening distance, Isande’s mind wailing terror into his, telling him it was suicide; but Ashakh maintained a tight hold on the
idoikkhei
now so that Mejakh could not send. Aiela seized Mejakh’s other arm to keep her from using her hand on Ashakh’s throat.
It was like grappling with a machine. Muscles like steel cables dragged irresistibly away from his grip, and when he persisted she struck at him, denting the wall instead and hurting her hand. She swung Ashakh into the way, trying to batter them both against the wall, and Aiela realized to his horror that Isande had thrown herself into the struggle too, trying vainly to distract Mejakh.
Suddenly Mejakh ceased fighting, and so did Ashakh. About them had gathered a number of iduve, male and female, a
dhisais
in her red robes, three
dhis
-guardians in their scarlet-bordered black and bearing their antique
ghiakai.
Mejakh disengaged, backed from them. Ashakh with offended dignity straightened his torn clothing and turned upon her a deliberate stare. It was all that any of them did.
The door of the
paredre
opened at the other end of the corridor and Chimele was with them. Mejakh had been going in that direction. Now she stopped. She seemed almost to shrink in stature. Her movements hesitated in one direction and the other.
Then with a hiss rising to a shriek she whirled upon Ashakh. The
ghiakai
of the
dhis
-guardians whispered from their sheaths, and Aiela seized Isande and pulled her as flat against the wall as they could get, for they were between Mejakh and the others. From the
dhisais
came a strange keening, a moan that stirred the hair at the napes of their necks.
“Mejakh,” said Chimele, causing her to turn. For a moment there was absolute silence. Then Mejakh crumpled into a knot of limbs, her two arms locked across her face. She began to sway and to moan as if is pain.
The others started forward. Chimele hissed a strong negative, and they paused.
“You have chosen,” said Chimele to Mejakh.
Mejakh twisted her body aside, gathered herself so that her back was to them, and began to retreat. The retreat became a sidling as she passed the others. Then she ran a few paces, bent over, pausing to look back. There was a terrible stillness in the ship, only Mejakh’s footsteps hurrying more and more quickly, racing away into distant silence.
The others waited still in great solemnity. Ashakh took Aiela and Isande each by an arm and escorted them back to Chimele.
“Are you injured?” Chimele asked in a cold voice.
“No,” said Aiela, finding it difficult to speak in all that silence. He could scarcely hear his own voice. Isande’s contact was almost imperceptible.
“Then pass from this hall as quickly as you may. Do you not see the
dhisais?
You are in mortal danger. Keep by Ashakh’s side and walk out of here very quietly.”
8
It was done at last. From his vantage point behind the glass Tejef watched the human grow still under the anesthetic and trusted him to the workmanlike mercies of the amaut physician—not an auspicious prospect if the wounds were much worse, if there were shattered joints or pieces missing. Then it would need the artistry of an iduve of the Physicians’ order. Tejef himself had only a passing acquaintance with the apparatus that equipped his ship’s surgery, a patch-and-hope adequacy that had been able to save a few human lives on Priamos. He had not sought them out, of course, but occasionally the
okkitani-as
brought them in, and a few rash humans had actually come begging asylum, desperate and thirsty in the grasslands that surrounded the ship. Most injured that Tejef had treated lived, and acknowledged themselves mortally disadvantaged, and, in the curious custom of their kind, bound themselves earnestly to serve him. He was proud of this. He had gathered twenty-three humans in this way. They were not kamethi in the usual sense, for he had no access to
chiabres
or
idoikkhei;
still he reasoned that their service gave him a certain
arastiethe,
and although it was improper to hold
m’metanei
by no honorable bond of loyalty, but only their own acknowledged disadvantage, that was the way of these beings, and he accepted the offering. He had also a hundred of the amaut attending him as
okkitani-as,
and had others dispersed into every center of amaut authority on Priamos. The amaut knew indeed that there was an iduve among them and they took him into account when they made their plans. In fact, he had directly applied pressure on their high command to give him this surgeon, for it was not proper that he practice publicly what was to him only an amateurish skill. He had been of the order of Science, and although it was his doom to perish world-bound, he still had some pride left in his order, not to soil his hands with work inexpertly done.
As his glance swept the small surgery his attention came again to the small yellow person who had defended the man so bravely. He remembered her hovering on this side and on that of the wounded man as he was borne across the field to the ship, darting one way and the other among the irritated amaut to keep sight of him while they brought him in, actually attacking one—a mottled, thick-necked fellow—who tried to keep her out of the surgery. She had gone for him with her teeth, that being all she had for weapons, and being batted aside, she darted under his reach and ensconced herself on a cabinet top in the corner, defying them all. Tejef had laughed to see it, although he laughed but seldom these days.
Now the wretched little creature sat watching the surgeon work, her face gone a sickly color even for a human. Her hand clutched her rag of a garment to her flat chest; her feet and knees were bloody and incredibly filthy—by no means proper for the surgery. She had not stopped fighting. She fairly bristled each time one of the amaut came near her in his ministrations, and then her eyes would dart again mistrustfully to see what the surgeon was doing with the man.
Tejef opened the door, signed the amaut not to notice him. Her eyes took him in too, seeming to debate whether he needed to be fought also.
“It’s all right,” he told her, exercising his scant command of her language. She looked at him doubtfully, then unwound her thin legs and came off the countertop, her lips trembling. When he beckoned her she ran to him, and to his dismay she flung her thin dirty arms about him and pressed her damp face against his ribs: he recoiled slightly, ashamed to be so treated before the amaut, who wisely pretended not to notice. The child poured at him a veritable flood of words, much more rapidly than he could comprehend, but she seemed by her actions to expect his protection.
“Much slower,” he said. “I can’t understand you.”
“Will he be all right?” she asked of him. “Please, please help us.”
Perhaps, he thought, it was because there was a certain physical similarity between iduve and human: perhaps to her desperate need he looked to be of her kind. He had schooled himself to a certain patience with humans. She was very young and it was doubtless a great shock to her to be hurled out of the security of the
dhis
into this frightening profusion of faces and events. Even young iduve had been known to behave with less
chanokhia.
“Hush,” he said, setting her back and making her straighten her shoulders. “They make him live. You—come with me.”
“No. I don’t want to.”
His hand moved to strike; he would have done so had a youngish iduve been insubordinate. But the shock and incomprehension on her face stopped him, and he quickly disguised the gesture, twice embarrassed before the
okkitani-as.
Instead he seized her arm—carefully, for
m’metanei
were inclined to fragility and she was as insubstantial as a stem of grass. He marched her irresistibly from the infirmary and down the corridor.
A human attendant was just outside the section. The child looked up at the being of her own species in tearful appeal, but she made no attempt to flee to him.
“Call Margaret to the
dhis,
” Tejef ordered the man, and continued on his way, slowing his step when he realized how the child was having to hurry to keep up with him.
“Where are we going?” she asked him.
“I will find proper—a proper—place for you. What is your name,
m’metane?
”
“Arle. Please let go my arm. I’ll come.”
He did so, giving her a little nod of approval. “Arle. I am Tejef. Who is your companion? Is he—a relative?”
“No.” She shook her head violently. “But he’s my friend. I want him to be all right—please—I don’t want him to be alone with them.”
“With the amaut? He is safe.
Friend:
I understand this idea. I have learned it.”
“What are you?” she asked him plainly. “And what are the amaut and why did they treat Daniel like that?”