“Yes.”
“You need nothing more?”
“Shoes,” I said hopefully. But I had spoken in English. I translated. “Coverings for my feet to protect them from the rocks outside.” The Missionaries had taught me to wear shoes because, as they said, only animals and savages went without them. To please Jules and Neila, I had tolerated them, had slowly become used to them. I had even stopped taking them off when I was out of their sight. That was why I had had them on when I was captured. But somehow, in the prison room, the cleansing room, I had lost them. Apparently, they had been cleared away with the sand that had covered the floor. Jeh and Cheah had brought me three pair from the Missionary corpses, but all of them were too small. I had not cared enough to ask to have others made at first, but after one trip outside with Cheah, one trip down to the little mountain valley where the Tehkohn grew their crops, I knew my feet would need protection.
Choh stepped to my side, bent, and lifted one of my feet as though he was a Missionary examining the foot of a horse.
I grabbed a handful of his fur to keep from falling. He didn’t seem to mind. He probed my foot with a hard hand, then let me go.
“Her feet are not as hard as ours,” he told Gehnahteh.
“Best to give her the coverings then,” said Gehnahteh. “We cannot use her if she is lame.”
“Coverings as though she was already lame?”
“Yes.”
Choh took me to an artisan whom I had not met before. He looked at my feet and felt them, then spoke to Choh in Tehkohn too rapid for me to follow. Choh gestured toward me and the artisan looked at me and spoke again, very quickly.
I frowned, not understanding enough to answer.
“Speak slowly,” said Choh. “She’s just learning our language.”
The artisan spoke slowly, simply. “Do you have pain in any part of your feet now?”
“No.”
“It’s only the softness that you want protected then.”
“Yes.” Softness! The Missionaries said my feet were like hooves.
The artisan flashed white and turned away from us back to a piece of leather that he had been cutting when we entered his apartment. Choh and I left him at his work.
Choh showed me around the nonfighter section of the huge mountainlike building that was the Tehkohn dwelling. The dwelling mimicked the mountains around it in its interior as well as its exterior. The rough stone corridors were much like caves except for their random patches of luminescent material. There were deep, wide cisterns of clear water so that the people did not have to haul water up from the river in the Tehkohn valley below. There were deliberately deceptive corridors that led nowhere and that ended abruptly at stone walls against which invaders could be trapped. Some corridors wound higher or lower into other parts of the dwelling, and some led us around the nonfighter section and back to our starting place. Some corridors were not meant to be noticed. Entrances to these were formed by careful overlapping of the stone walls. The overlapping made the entrances completely invisible from one direction. From the opposite direction in the dim light, I found that I could see only what looked like one more irregularity in a rough irregular wall. Until Choh opened the hidden door.
“There was much fighting here once,” he told me. “Our ancestors built a dwelling that could help them in their fighting. Then, from here, they made the Kohn people. They drew together warring tribes and ruled them for generations.
“Do the Tehkohn still rule other tribes?”
“No, no longer. We had too many ties—people spread over too much territory. One by one, the ties were broken. The people made themselves separate tribes again. But through all that, this dwelling has protected us, fighter and nonfighter.”
I turned to look at him. His head reached just above my elbow, and his slenderness made him look more like a young boy than a man. He and his wife looked like adolescents together, yet Jeh had told me that these two had an adolescent son—a boy in the midst of his first liaison.
Artisans and farmers were naturally small people, members of a race different from those of the stocky hunters and the tall lean judges.
“Did artisans build this dwelling?” I asked Choh.
He glanced up at me and his body whitened. “Yes. The Hao came to them—to my ancestors—and said, ‘Build us a home that will help us fight by concealing itself as we do.’ And for the time it took to build this dwelling, artisans ruled. Others obeyed them—hunters, judges, even the Hao listened when artisans spoke. And when the building was finished, the Hao looked at it and saw that there was greater value in nonfighting people than they had thought.”
He had a low quiet way of speaking that I liked, and he was at ease with me now that his curiosity about my differences had been satisfied. I began to think that my stay with him and Gehnahteh would not be as bad as I had feared.
After the general tour, Choh took me to the heavily draped doorways of three apartments. These were visible doorways with only the hides of animals serving as doors. Hidden doors of stone and metal were used only for special purposes. Choh stopped at each of these doorways and called out a name. He introduced me first to a hunter, then to a pair of judges, then to a pair of farmers who were just leaving their apartment. These were the trade families of Gehnahteh and Choh. They performed special services for each other and considered themselves to be related as though by blood. Now I was part of their group. From now on, the hunter—he was a widower—would supply Choh’s artisan friend with leather for my shoes.
Choh made me guide him once to each of these three apartments. When he saw that I knew the way, he took me down to a lower level of the dwelling where wood had been cut and stored in great piles. There were wooden handcarts there much like the Missionaries’ carts. I was surprised because the Garkohn did not use such things in
