being.”
He gathered himself to sit, nemet-fashion, on feet and ankles, hands palm up in his lap, the most correct posture of a visitor at another’s hearth.
“This is not,” he answered, “the welcome I was accorded in Nephane, and some of them were my enemies. I am sorry if I have offended you, Methi.”
“This is not,” she said, “Nephane. And I am not Djan.” She sat down in the last of the chairs of the tribunal and faced him so, her long-nailed hands folded before her on the bar. “If you were to strike one of my people…”
He bowed slightly. “They have been kind to me. I have no intention of striking anyone.”
“Ai,” she said, “now you are trying to impress us.”
“I am of a house,” he answered, hoping that he was not causing Kta worse difficulty by that claim. “I was taught courtesy. I was taught that the honor of that house is best served by courtesy.”
“It is,” she said, “a fair answer.”
It was the first grace she had granted him. He looked up at her with a little relaxing of his defenses. “Why,” he asked, “did you call me here?”
“You troubled my dreams,” she said. “I saw fit to trouble yours.” And then she frowned thoughtfully. “Do you dream?”
It was not humor, he realized; it was, for a nemet, a religiously reasonable question.
“Yes,” he said, and she thought about that for a time.
“The priests cannot tell me what you are,” she said finally. “Some urge that you be put to death quite simply; others urge that you be killed by atia. Do you know what that means, t’Morgan?”
“No,” he said, perceiving it was not threat but question.
“It means,” she said, “that they think you have escaped the nether regions and that you should be returned there with such pains and curses as will bind you there. That is a measure of their distress at you. Atia has not been done in centuries. Someone would have to research the rites before they could be performed. I think some priests are doing that now. But Kta t’Elas insists you have a soul, though he could lose his own for that heresy.”
“Kta,” said Kurt with difficulty through his own fear, “is a gentle and religious man. He-”
“T’Morgan,” she said, “you are my concern at the moment, what you are.”
“You do not want to know. You will ask until you get the answer that agrees with what you want to hear, that is all.”
“You have the look,” she said, “of a bird, a bird of prey. Other humans I have seen had the faces of beasts. I have never seen one alive or clean. Tell me, if you had not that chain, what would you do?”
“I would like to get off my knees,” he said. “This floor is cold.”
It was rash impudence. It chanced to amuse her. Her laugh held even a little gentleness. “You are appealing. And if you were nemet, I could not tolerate that attitude in you. But what things really pass in your mind? What would you, if you were free?”
He shrugged, stared off into the dark. “I… would ask for Kta’s freedom,” he said. “And we would leave Indresul and go wherever we could find a harbor.”
“You are loyal to him.”
“Kta is my friend. I am of Elas.”
“You are human. Like Djan, like the Tamurlin.”
“No,” he said, “like neither.”
“Wherein lies the difference?”
“We are of different nations.”
“You were her lover, t’Morgan. Where do you come from?”
“I do not know.”
“Do not know?”
“I am lost. I do not know where I am Or where home is.”
She considered him, her beautiful face more than usually nonhuman with the light falling on it at that angle, like a slightly abstract work of art. “The hearthfire of your kind, assuming you are civilized, lies far distant. It would be terrible to die among strangers, to be buried with rites not your own, with no one to call you by your right name.”
Kurt bowed his head, of a sudden seeing another darkened room, Mini lying before the hearthfire of Elas, Mim without her own name for her burying in Nephane: alien words and alien gods, and the helplessness he had felt. He was afraid suddenly with a fear she had put a name to, and he thought of himself dead and being touched by them and committed to burial in the name of gods not his and rites he did not understand. He almost wished they would throw him in the sea and give him to the fish and to Kalyt’s green-haired daughters.