The chief spread his hands out in astonishment. “But, I did no wrong! It is the custom for the chief to mount all female captives. All chiefs do it.”
Anana had counted on avenging herself some day. She hadn’t known if she’d be satisfied with castrating him or also blinding him. However, if it was the custom… he really hadn’t thought he was doing anything evil. And if she’d been more objective about it, she would have known that, too.
After all, aside from making her nauseated, he hadn’t hurt her. She’d suffered no psychic damage, and there wasn’t any venereal disease. Nor could he make her pregnant.
“Very well,” she said. “I won’t hold that against you.”
The chiefs expression said, “Why should you?” but he made no comment.
The shaman said, “What about the two men? Are they your husbands? I ask that because some tribes, when they have a shortage of women, allow the women to have more than one husband.”
“No! They are under my command.”
She might as well get the upper hand on the two while she had the chance. Urthona would rave, but he wouldn’t try to usurp her leadership. He wouldn’t want to discredit her, since her story had saved his life.
She held out her hands, and the chief used a flint knife to sever the thongs. She rose and ordered the chiefs mother to be brought to her. Thikka approached haughtily, then turned pale under the dirt when her son explained the situation to her.
“I won’t hurt you,” Anana said. “I just want my jeans and boots back.”
Thikka didn’t know what jeans or boots meant, so Anana used sign language. When they were off, Anana ordered her to take the jeans to the channel and wash them. Then she said, “No. I’ll do it. You probably wouldn’t know how.”
She was afraid the woman might find the knife.
The chief called the entire tribe in and explained who their captives, ex-captives, really were. There were a lot of oh’s and ah’s, or the Wendow equivalents, and then the women who’d beaten her fell on their knees and begged forgiveness. Anana magnanimously blessed them.
Urthona’s and McKay’s bonds were cut. Anana told them how she had gained their freedom. However, as it turned out, they were not as free as they wished. Though the chief gave each a moosoid, he delegated men to be their bodyguards. Anana suspected that the shaman was responsible for this.
“We can try to escape any time there’s an opportunity,” she told her uncle. “But we’ll be safer if we’re with them while we’re looking for your palace. Once we find it, if we find it, we can outwit them. However, I hope the search doesn’t take too long. They might wonder why the emissaries of the Lord are having such a hard time locating it.”
She smiled. “Oh, yes. “You’re my subordinates, so please act as if you are. I don’t think that shaman is fully convinced about my story.”
Urthona looked outraged. McKay said, “It looks like a good deal to me, Miss Anana. No more beatings, we can ride instead.of walking, eat plenty, and three women already said they’d like to have babies by me. One thing about them, they ain’t got no color prejudice. That’s about all I can say for them, though.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ANOTHER DAY AND night passed. The thunder and lightning showed no signs of diminishing. Anana, watching the inferno from the pass, could not imagine how anything, plants or animals, escaped the fury. The chief told her that only about one sixteenth of the trees were laid low and new trees grew very quickly. Many small beasts, hiding now, in burrows and caves, would emerge when the storms were over.
By then the plains were thick with life and the mountains were zebra-striped with lines of just-arriving migrators. The predators, the baboons, wild dogs, moas, and big cats, were killing as they pleased. But the plain was getting so crowded that there was no room to stampede away from the hunters. Sometimes, the frightened antelopes and elephants ran toward the killers and trampled them.
The valley was a babel of animal and bird cries, screams, trumpetings, buglings, croakings, bellowings, mooings, roarings.