They searched by torchlight, moving outward from the village, all the Treeci and all the human occupants, all but the youngest children.
They found Treemi first. Alive, but barely. Body bloodied, sexual parts ravaged and mutilated. Burg gathered the body into strong arms and carried it back toward the village, Sterf close behind him, weeping.
Later, down a long, leaf-strewn gully, they found Arbsen. Her body was broken, as though she had been buffeted with heavy clubs, but her eyes opened when they spoke to her.
“Arbsen, why?” Saleff murmured in a heartbroken voice. “Why? You knew. You knew.”
“I didn’t believe it,” she whispered, blood running from the corner of her mouth. “He is my child. He loves me.”
“Oh, Arbsen, they only love if they die in the loving. If they live, it isn’t love.” He leaned across her, weeping, not seeing her eyes, glazed and staring forever at the darkness.
It was dawn when they found Taneff at last, a golden dawn, gloriously alive. They heard him first, crowing at the sunrise. They saw him then, tumescent, flushed red as blood, eyes orbed with triumph, dancing upon a small elevation above the forest floor. Around him the trees were shredded; beneath his feet the earth was a ruin.
Medoor Babji was among the first to see him, all disbelieving. It could not be Taneff. She called his name in her disbelief, careless of her safety. When he turned toward her, she saw that it was he. Taneff as she had never seen him. He saw her, knew her, spoke her name with a kind of brute inevitability.
“Come,” he called. “Come!”
He danced on the mound, beckoning.
She stopped, horrified at the sight of him. There was blood on his talons, blood on the wing fingers, which twitched and snapped.
“Why?” she cried, unable to contain it. “Why did you kill Arbsen? Why did you kill your mother?”
“Told me to stop,” he crowed at her. “Told me to stop. The young one said stop! Nobody tells Taneff to stop!”
He leaped high, rushed down the slope at her without warning. He attacked her, wings out, fingers clutching, sex organ bulging and throbbing. He did not see the torch she held; she had forgotten she held it; her Noor-trained reflexes did the rest. It was not Taneff who blazed as he fought. It was horror.
Then there were men and Treeci all around. Someone had a spear. There was a long, howling struggle, and a body at the end of it. No one she knew. No one she had ever known.
“Why?” she sobbed on Saleff s breast. “Why?”
The Talker stroked her as though she had been one of the Treeci young. “Because they are meant to die, Medoor Babji. They are meant to die.”
He took her back to the house where Treemi lay, barely breathing, Burg working over her. They built a pyre on the shore for the other two, and somehow the night and the day following passed.
A few days later, Burg showed her the Cheevle, mended, as sound as when it had been built. “Word has come,” he told her. “We can lead you to the Gift. You will find it east of here, nearby a great island where our people do not go, but where the strangeys have brought your people.”
“Will someone go with me?” she asked, feeling suddenly very lonely at the thought of leaving them.
“Cimmy and Mintel are taking a boat out. They wish to be gone for a time. It is hard—hard for nest mates to lose one of their number at the time of mating. It is harder still to lose one asthey lost Taneff.”
“He was mad,” she said sadly. “Mad, Burg. The whole experience broke his mind.”
“Is that what you think?” He laughed harshly. “Oh, Medoor Babji, you are far from the mark. No, no. Listen, I will tell you a little story. Something men have pieced together from tales told by the Treeci and excavations made long ago, before we left Northshore.
“Evidently in the long-ago, the males did not die when they bred. The male Thraish, that is; there were no Treeci then. They lived. As you saw Taneff, they lived. After the first mating their blood boiled with the desire for power. They took females, more than they could possibly need, held them as slaves; they took territory and held that. And they fought. You saw. That is how they fought, competing with one another. Male against male. Tribe against tribe.