It was in the guise of a common-meal, the first that they had held on the ship, a sad mockery. It lacked all fellowship, and the food was bitter in the mouth. Duncan hardly ate at all, but sat silent when he was not being directly questioned; the dusei were banished, and he had nothing, no one, not even Niun thought wretchedly his own companionship, for he must sit at the she’pan’s right, taking her part.
There was a temptation to them all to over-indulge in the drink, the biting regul brew that filled the stores, ashig, fermented of the same source as soi. But at least, Niun thanked the gods, there was no komal, that had kept his last she’pan in thrall to drug-spawned dreams, illicit and shameful dreams in which she had laid the plans that had launched them forth; dreams that were as guilty as ever Duncan was in ruining the People, in creating the danger they now knew followed them.
He saw again the arrogance of the she’pan who had no mercy for her own children.
But such a thing as that he dared not say to Melein, could not quarrel with her, whom he loved more than life and honor, over a tsi’mri who had tangled them in so much of evil. It was only when he looked at Duncan’s face that it hurt, and the human’s pain gnawed at him.
Each evening for four days they ate common-meal, and talked little, for most questions had been answered. There was during that time a chill in the she’pan’s presence, and afterward a chill in kel-hall weapons-practice cold and formal and careful, concerned more with rituals than with striking blows, with the traditions of combat rather than the actuality of it. At times there was such sickness in Duncan’s eyes that Niun forbade him the yin’ein, and refused to practice with him at all.
Duncan had betrayed his own.
And there was no peace for such a man.
“Tsi’mri,” Melein said of him in Duncan’s absence, “and a traitor even to them, who shaped him blood and bone. How then should the People ever rely on him? This is a weak creature, Niun. You have proved that.”
Niun considered him, and knew his own handiwork, and grieved for it.
The venom-fever left, but the misery did not: the dus, rejected by turns and grudgingly accepted, mourned and fretted; the man grew silent and inward, a sickness that could not be reached.
The ship departed that star, and jumped again and again.
CHAPTER Fourteen
THEY PASSED close, this time, to the worlds of the System, dangerously close. For many days their course had been taking them for the yellow star and its worlds, until now the largest of the inner planets loomed before them, dominating the field of the screen in kel-hall.
Home? Niun wondered at first, and held his hope private in Melein’s silence: if she knew, he reckoned, she would have told him. But as days passed a worried look settled on Melein; and often now she looked on the screens with fear in her eyes. It ceased to look as though they were hurtling toward the world rather that the world filled their sky and was falling down on them, a half-world first, that lent Niun some hope they would hurtle just past it terrifying, but an escape, all the same: but the disc began to rise in the scanner.
They were caught, going earthward like a mote in a bur-rower’s sandpit: the image came unwelcomely to Niun as he sat by Melein’s side and stared at the starscreen she had set in her own hall, to look constantly on the danger. He felt his own helplessness, a kel’en whose knowledge of ships was all theory; all his knowledge told him now was that everything was wrong, and that Melein, who likewise had never set hands to ship’s controls, knew little more than he.
Perhaps, he thought, she knew the name of the world into which they were falling: but it was not going to stop them.
And the outrage of it grew in him that they should die by mischance. For a time he awaited a miracle, from Melein, from some source, certain that the gods could not have directed them so far only to this.