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?”
The questions were overwhelming. He struggled to think in her language and abandoned the effort. “I am iduve,” he said. “Ask your kind. I don’t know enough words.” He paused at the entrance of the lift and set his hand on her shoulder, causing her to look up. It was a fine face, an impossibly delicate body. A creature of air and light, he thought in his own language, and rejected it as an expression more appropriate to Chaikhe than to one of his order. As an iduve this little creature would scarcely have survived the dhis, where the strength to take meant the right to eat and a nas of small stature or nameless birth needed extraordinary wit and will to live. He had survived despite the active persecution of the dhisaisei and of Mejakh, and he had done so by a determination out of proportion to his origins. He prized such a trait wherever he found it.
“Are you going to help us?” she asked him.
He took her into the lift and started it moving downward.
“You are mine, you, your friend. You must obey and I must take care for you. You stand straight, have no fear for amaut or human. I take care for you.” The door opened and let them out on the level of what had been the dhis, sealed and dark until now.
There was Margaret, whom he had not seen in two days. He did not smile at her, being put off by her instant attachment to the child, for she exclaimed aloud and opened her arms to the child, petting her and making much of her with all the protective tenderness of a dhisais toward young.
In some measure Tejef was relieved, for he had not been sure how Margaret would react. In another way he was troubled, for her accepting the child made her inappropriate as a mate and made final a parting he still was not sure he wanted. Margaret was the most handsome of the human females, with a glorious mane of fire-colored hair that made her at once the most alien and the most attractive. He had taken her many times in katasukke, but she troubled him by her insistence on touching him when they were not alone, and in her display of feelings when they were. She had wept when he admitted at last at great disadvantage that he did not understand the emotions of her kind in this regard, and did not know what she expected of him. He had been compelled to dismiss her from the khara-dhis after that, troubled by the heat and violence she evoked in him, by the emotions she expected of him. She certainly could not hold her own if he forgot himself and treated her as nas. He would surely kill her, and when he came to himself he would regret it bitterly, for her irritating concern was well-meant, and he had a deep regard for her, almost as if she were indeed one of his own kind. That was the closest he dared come to what she wanted of him.