she lived.
When the five-day period of cleansing was over, I went to the room where she and the others had been held. My fighters were cleaning the room and clearing out the corpses for burning. I saw her, strangely colored, furless, very thin after her ordeal, covered with filth. I thought she was dead, but as I was about to turn away from her, she moved. I brought her water from a pot on one of the carts my hunters had brought in. The water was for washing the room, but none of it had been used yet. I knelt beside Alanna, spoke to her in Garkohn.
“Can you understand me, Missionary?”
She turned her face to me weakly and I could see that it was cut and bruised. Her eyes were swollen shut. I supposed that she was still in pain. There is no gentle way to rid one’s body of the poison and become clean.
She made a sound that was not a word and I realized that she could not speak. She had become so hoarse from screaming in pain that her voice was temporarily gone. From my cupped hands, I gave her water to drink. She swallowed it eagerly. I would not let her have as much as she wanted or let her drink it as quickly as she wanted. I had seen enough of my Tehkohn survive the meklah to know how easily she could make herself sick again.
I looked around the room at my fighters. “Who captured this Missionary?” I asked.
“I did,” said one of my judges. Jeh. He was loading the body of a Garkohn huntress onto the cart that would take the dead out for burning. He threw the dead woman onto the cart and came over to us. He is a friend, Jeh. We were children together, though he is older. I sided with him when he broke tradition and began a liaison and then a marriage with the huntress Cheah. He is a well-colored judge, and she, a well-colored huntress. Neither of their clans wished to have them marry out. But they fought all challengers for their right to do so, in accordance with ancient custom. When they had each beaten their challengers and the people continued to complain, I said “Enough.” I was still very young then but the people obeyed me. Jeh and Cheah were left alone. Now Jeh looked down at the Missionary he had captured.
“I thought she might live,” he said. “She almost took my eyes when I caught her. And three days ago, Cheah and I found her crawling out of this room.”
“She found her own way out?”
“Yes. By accident perhaps.”
“Or perhaps not. Her people may not all be as blind as our watchers think.”
“None of them saw our watchers.”
I let my body whiten a little. “None saw them and knew them as Tehkohn, no. But to people as different as this one,” I touched Alanna with my foot, “Tehkohn and Garkohn must look much alike.”
“Our watchers say this one is the daughter of the Missionary leader.”
“So? That may be important in the future—if you can keep her alive now.”
“Cheah and I will care for her if you wish.”
I flashed positive white. “It would be best for fighters to care for her now. You will be able to handle her when her strength returns.”
He looked from Alanna to me. “Aside from tending her injuries, what care shall we give her?”
“Begin teaching her our language, our ways—as in the old stories. There was a time when Garkohn survived the cleansing and our ancestors made good Tehkohn of them.”
“But she is so different…”
“She is. But I wonder how much the differences matter. We will let her show us. Through her we will learn more of what her kind can do—more of what the Garkohn might use them for.”
Jeh flashed white assent, then bent and lifted Alanna. She moaned as though in pain. Her pain was almost at an end though, if she proved tractable. Jeh and Cheah would treat her kindly. Kindness was best. She might be a valuable hostage someday. Meanwhile, it would be interesting to watch her change—to help her change. I would take part in her re-education myself. And I would see to it that if she was ever returned to her people, she would greet them as an emissary of the Tehkohn. She would speak to her parents for me and against Natahk.
For the first time in two years, Alanna lay on her own bed at the Mission colony and slid uncomfortably into a meklah dream. She had intended to use these moments of privacy to think, to plan a way to thwart Natahk—and Gehl. They both knew of her marriage. The fact that they kept it secret indicated that they planned to use the information to control her somehow. Natahk could make her a pawn of the Garkohn whenever he chose. And as soon as he realized that she was undoing his work, bringing the Tehkohn and the Missionaries together in peace rather than in war, he would begin to apply pressure. Thus, Alanna’s first moves had to be direct and sweeping. She had to give the Missionaries a hard push so that if she was silenced or killed or abducted again, the Missionaries would go on along the path that she had pointed out to them. To guide them, though, she had to become one of them again—or as much one of them as she had ever been. Now, ironically, her renewed meklah addiction helped her slip back into the ways of her Missionary past. Meklah dreams had their uses.
Meklah dreams came to people who allowed themselves to reach the second stage of meklah withdrawal—the stage of remembering. The first stage was hunger, uncomplicated, but intense, and distinctly, hunger for one of the many meklah products of the valley. Another ripe sweet meklah fruit or tea made from the leaves of the meklah tree or bread made from the unripe fruit dried and ground to flour or . But the list was endless. Meklah was the staple of the valley. Even meat and fish were seasoned with it. The Garkohn fermented it to make a kind of wine. No one had trouble getting enough of it. The tree was an evergreen that grew wild all over the valley. People were not even conscious of being addicted unless they left the valley—went into the mountains where the tree did not grow. Or unless they simply chose not to eat.
Fine sweat appeared on Alanna’s forehead. She felt almost sick with hunger. The meklah was demanding. She was tempted to try to eat something that did not contain the meklah just to relieve her hunger a little. But she knew better. Eating anything other than meklah now would start her vomiting and bring her into full withdrawal. The time for her to risk that would come, certainly, but it had not come yet. Best to wait now and let the memories come as she knew they would.
She closed her eyes, let her thoughts drift into the past. It was not so much remembering as reliving. Only time was distorted so that she could experience the events of days, of months, in only minutes. In her mind, she returned to Earth.
There, she met a woman, small and slender with hair that was long and very black like Alanna’s hair, and with
