“I cannot touch that thing.”
“You will have to.”
“No.”
Niun expelled a short breath, and rose and walked away, to stand staring at the starscreen, the dusty field that was all that changed in kel-hall. It was all there was to look at but a confused beast and a recalcitrant human. Duncan felt the accusation in that frozen black figure, total disappointment in him.
“Niun.”
The mri turned, bare-faced, bare-headed, looked down on him.
“Do not call me tsi’mri,” Duncan said.
“Do you say so?” Niun stiffened his back. “When the hal’ari comes easily from your mouth, when you play at the Game with weapons, when you can lie down to sleep and not fear the dusei, then I shall no longer call you tsi’mri. The beast will die, Duncan. And the other will be alone, if the madness does not infect it, too.”
Duncan looked at it, where it crouched in the corner. To have peace with Niun, he rose and nerved himself to approach it. Perversely, it would have none of him, but shied off and snarled. The dark eyes glittered at him, desiring what it could not find.
“Careful.”
Niun was behind him. Duncan gave back gratefully, felt the mri’s hand on his shoulder. The dus remained in its corner, and it did not seem the time to attempt anything with it.
“I will try,” Duncan said.
“Slowly. Let it alone for now. Let be. There is no pressing them.”
“I do not understand why it comes at me. I have tried to discourage it. Surely it understands I do not want it.”
Niun shrugged. “I have felt its disturbance. I cannot answer you. No one knows why a dus chooses. I could not hold them both, that is all. It has no one else. And perhaps it feels in you the nature of a kel’en.”
Duncan glanced at the dus, that had ceased to radiate hostility, and again at Niun, wondering whether he understood that in what the mri had said was an admission that he had won something.
That night, as they were settling to sleep on their pallets, Niun put away his weapons in the roll of cloth that contained all his personal possessions, and there, along with a curious knot of cord, was the ill-made figure of a dus, as if it were valued.
It pleased Duncan. He looked into the shadows at the living model that Jay some distance from him, eyes glittering in the light of the starscreen, head between its paws, looking wistfully at him.
He whistled at it softly, an appeal ancient and human.
A soft puff of air distended the beast’s nostrils. The small eyes wrinkled in what looked like anguished consideration.
But it stayed at a distance.
CHAPTER Thirteen
NO LONGER gold-robed, but white, Melein. She had made herself new robes, had made herself a home from the compartment nearest controls, plain and pleasant one chair, hers, and mats for sitting, and upon the walls she had begun to write, great serpentines of gold and black and blue that filled the room she had taken for her own hall, that spread down the corridor outside in lively and strange contrast to the barren walls elsewhere. From her haven she had begun to take the ship, to make it home.
Out of her own mind she had resurrected the appearance of the lost edun, the House of the People. She had recalled the writings; and of her own skill and by her own labor she had done these things, this difficult and holy work.
Niun was awed when he saw it, each time that he came to attend her, and found her work advancing through the ship. He had not believed that she could have attained such knowledge. She was, before she was she’pan, youngest daughter of the House: Melein Zain-Abrin, Chosen of the she’pan Intel.
He had utterly lost the Melein he had known, his true sister, his comrade once of the Kel. The process had been a gradual one, advancing like the writings, act by act. He put from his mind the fact that they had been children of the Kath together, that they had played at being kel’ein in the high hills of Kesrith. Hers became the age and reverence of all she’panei. Her skills made her a stranger to him. Being merely kel’-en, he could not read what she wrote, could not pierce the mysteries in which she suddenly spoke, and he knew to his confusion how vast the gulf was that had opened between them in the six years since they had both been of the Kel. The blue seta’al were cut and stained into her face as well as his, the proud marks of a warrior; but the hands were forbidden weapons now, and her bearing was the quiet reserve of the Sen. She did not go veiled. A Mother of an edun almost never veiled, her face always accessible to her children. Only in the presence of the profaning and the unacknowledgeable did she turn her face aside. She was alone: the gold-robed Sen should have been her servants; experienced warriors of the Kel should have been her Husbands; the eldest of the Kath should have brought bright-eyed children for her delight. He felt the inadequacy of everything he could do for her, at times with painful force.