With the same edge of metal that had made the marks, he scratched through them, obliterating the record.
CHAPTER Twelve
THE LOST days multiplied into months. Duncan passed them in careful observance of maintenance schedules, stripped down units that did not need it and reassembled the machinery, only to keep busy played shon’ai what time Niun would consent; memorized the meaningless chants of names, and constantly rehearsed in his mind what words he had recently gathered of the hal’ari, the while his hands found occupation in the game of knots that Niun taught him, or in the galleys, or in whatever work he could devise for the moment.
He learned metalwork, which was a craft appropriate to the Kel; and carving made in plastic a blockish figure of a dus, for which he found no practical use in its beginning; and then purpose did come to him. “Give it to the she’pan,” he said, when he had done it as well as possible; and pushed it into Niun’s hands.
The mri had looked greatly distressed. “I will try,” he had said, with perplexing seriousness, and arose at once and went, as if it were a matter of moment instead of a casual thing.
It was late before he returned; and he settled en the floor and set the little dus-figure between them on the mat. “She would not, kel Duncan.”
No apology for the she’pan’s hatefulness; it was impossible that Niun apologize for a decision of the she’pan. Understanding came, why Niun had hesitated even to try to take the gift to her, and after a moment heat began to rise to Duncan’s face. He did not veil, but stared sullenly at the floor, at the unshapely and rejected little figure.
“So,” he said with a shrug. “It was bu’ina’anein you invaded,” Niun said.
“Presumptuous,” Duncan translated, and the heat did not leave his face.
“It is not the time,” said Niun.
“When will be?” Duncan asked sharply, heard the mri’s soft intake of breath. Niun veiled himself in offense and rose.
Discarded, the little figure lay there for two days before Niun, in a mild tone of voice, and after fingering it for some little time, asked if he might have it.
Duncan shrugged. “Take it,” he said, glad to have it gone.
It disappeared into the inner folds of Niun’s robes. Niun rose and withdrew from the room. The dusei went, and returned, and went again, restless.
There was a line drawn in main-corridor, an invisible one. Duncan knew the places within the ship that he could go, and those that were barred to him, and he did not attempt the forbidden ones. It was not from the ship’s workings that he was barred, so much as from Melein’s presence; and Niun came and went there, but he could not.
Duncan went now, impelled by humanish obstinacy, curious where Niun had gone with the figure; and his steps grew less quick, and finally ceased at the corridor that he had not seen in uncounted days: around the bending of the passage as it was, he had not even infringed so far as to come this way and the sight of it now cooled his anger and gave him pause.
The lights were out here, and faintly there was the reek of something musky that the filters had not entirely dispersed. A vast brown shape, and a second, sat in the shadows before an open doorway: the dusei Niun’s presence, he thought.
There was humanish stubbornness; and there was stubbornness mri-fashion, which he had also learned, which, in Niun, he respected.
There was the simple fact that, challenged, Niun would not back away.
But there were ways of pressing at the mri.
Silently, respectful of the barrier, Duncan gathered his robes between his knees and sank down crosslegged, there to wait. The dusei, shadows by the distant doorway, stood and snuffed the air nervously, pressing at him with their uncertainties. He would not be driven. He did not move. In time, the lesser dus came halfway and lay down facing him, head between its massive paws. When he stayed still it rose “up again, and halved that distance, and finally, much against his will, came and nosed at his leg.