“Perhaps they should spend their time analyzing themselves,” I suggested, receiving a smile of agreement in return.
We had no time for further conversation. We had come about halfway down the slope when a crowd of black-clothed figures swarmed out of the hive near the canyon wall and came hastily along a path that intersected our line of travel. Lutha moved up beside the left-lead gaufer to translate as necessary, and I saw her start with dismay when they came near enough that we could see them clearly.
They were like me! Like the members of the sisterhood! Missing ears, riven lips, tattered eyelids. It was not only faces with them. Fingers and hands were missing, as were feet. Bodies were contorted and thin as saplings. The one in the lead shouted in an out-of-breath voice, in a sort of dialect that was not clearly understandable, at least not to me. I took them to mean something on the order of “Halt, stop, come no nearer the sacred land.” Since we were already halted, his commands seemed superfluous.
Lutha held out her hands, empty, the universal gesture of peace.
“We have come to save the lives of the Dinadhi,” she said. “There is a threat from outside the planet.”
They began shouting fervently at one another. I gathered that one faction wanted to kill us immediately, while another, slightly larger faction was reminded that blood could not be shed near the sacred precincts without the gravest consequences. These antiphonal shouts went on for some time—during which Lutha muttered fragmentary translations—before the shouters reached a solution that all could agree to. They would pen us up during the ceremony, which was about to begin. After Tahs-uppi, they would take us somewhere else and kill us. Not one of them had paid attention to the threat Lutha had told them of. Either they didn’t believe her or they didn’t care. They were frightening in their single-mindedness.
I went to Lutha’s side.
“Are these your spirit people?” she asked me.
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “Nobody ever told me they were … like this. Why are they like this?”
My words drew the attention of one of them, who darted forward, twitched my veil to one side, then screamed as he turned and fled. The others chattered among themselves, backing slowly away. Lutha took hold of the left-lead gaufer’s halter and tugged him forward. The other gaufers leaned into the harness, and the wain creaked after. Trompe and Leelson dropped back to walk beside it.
“I am unclean,” I told her as we slowly pursued the spirit people, who were limping and stumbling away from us as fast as they could go. “He says the beautiful people have rejected me, and now that he has touched me, he must go out of the valley and cut his hand off at once.”
“You sound quite calm about it. Do you think he means to do it?” she asked.
“I don’t care if he does,” I said angrily. “They’re all men, Lutha. They’re eaten worse than I, but they’re not unclean! What right have they!”
The fleeing bunch split before us, creating an open aisle that led toward a stout pen set upon a small rounded hill.
“Gaufer pen,” I said, sidetracked from my annoyance. “They’re always set high like that, so they drain well and don’t cause a muck.”
Whether intended for gaufers or not, the pen was now to be used for us. There were already a dozen spirit people arrayed outside the fence, muttering angrily to one another over the bulk of several large and shiny weapons.
“I hope those fusion rifles are not charged,” Leelson said to the air.
One particularly clumsy guard (not his fault; he had no fingers on his right hand) chose that moment to drop his weapon.
Lutha said, “I’ve had arms dealers as clients, and I’ve seen diagrams of that weapon. It looks to me like an Asenagi product, but he had it set on standby. If it had been set in firing position, this whole place would be gone by now.”
Leelson paled. Trompe gulped, “We are probably the first outsiders they’ve ever seen. They’ve obtained weapons for protection against intruders, but they have no idea how to use them.”