Tempted to let him go ahead, she kept silent for a long moment. She did not want to talk to anyone about her experiences with the Tehkohn, did not want to talk to a Garkohn about anything at all. She had no doubt that the Garkohn were responsible for involving the Missionaries in this raid that had so endangered them—just as two years before, the Garkohn had made the Missionaries vulnerable by using their settlement as a base from which to raid the Tehkohn. The valley natives were not the friends the Missionaries thought them to be. Alanna had learned much about them from their Tehkohn enemies. And she had seen some of what she had learned proven in the raid just past.
The thought of having to go to Natahk now and feign ignorance and friendship sickened her. But for that reason more than any other, she had to do it. She had to let him ask her in carefully veiled words where her loyalties were. What had two years among his enemies done to her? Had he freed a Missionary prisoner, or a Tehkohn spy?
“I’m well enough, Jules,” she said finally. “I’ll talk to him.”
Jules shrugged. “All right, girl. It’s your decision.”
After perhaps another hour of walking, Jules and Natahk called the noon rest stop. Alanna sought out Natahk at once.
The Garkohn leader was a tall stocky humanoid who easily matched Alanna’s own unusual height—nearly two meters. His height and his deeper-than-usual green coloring showed that although he was of the hunter clan, he had had a judge ancestor or two. It was only within Natahk’s own lifetime that the last of the Garkohn judges had been killed, victims of interclan fighting with the more numerous hunters.
Natahk’s eyes were narrowed by a Kohn version of the epicanthic fold. His fur grew longer and thicker on his head and around his neck and shoulders, forming a kind of mane. Even his face was furred all over, though the fur was shorter. But the face was long and flat and his body and limbs were humanly proportioned. He was not apelike. The Missionaries saw him and his people as strangely colored, furred caricatures of human beings.
The Missionaries had made a religion of maintaining and spreading their own version of humanity—a religion that had helped them to preserve that humanity back on Earth. Now, though, their religion had gotten in their way. It had helped them to justify their belief that the Kohn were lower creatures—higher than apes, but lower than true humans who had been made in the image of God. The trouble was, the Missionaries had known such “intelligent animals” before. Missionary prejudices were long established and, as far as Alanna was concerned, dangerous. If she had accepted them herself, the Tehkohn would have rid her of them. The natives were human enough. And they were powerful humans.
Their greatest weapon was the fur that the Missionaries condemned them for. It was unlike any fur that the Missionaries had known back on Earth—fine thick alive stuff that changed color and seemed to change texture. It permitted the natives to blend invisibly into their surroundings whenever they wished. It could permit the Tehkohn to camouflage themselves as they scaled the Missionaries’ wall. It could permit them to murder half the colony before anyone noticed them.
Alanna found Natahk seated on the ground, his back against a tree. She noticed that he had moved as far from the Tehkohn prisoners as he could get without leaving the group entirely. Many of the prisoners were bluer than he was and would have outranked him had they been Garkohn. As the bluest of the Garkohn, he must have felt that they detracted from his impressiveness. And they did, even in Alanna’s eyes. She smiled at the thought of his discomfort as she approached him.
“Natahk,” she greeted quietly as she sat down opposite him.
He startled her by drawing his lipless mouth into a smile. “Alanna.” It was something he had copied from the Missionaries, not a Kohn expression. And he did it badly. He made it an expression of condescension, of contempt, rather than one of friendliness.
“Jules said you had questions.” Alanna concentrated on speaking English. She did not attempt to speak Garkohn, knowing how easy it would be for her to offend Natahk by slipping into the more familiar Tehkohn dialect.
“I have several questions,” said Natahk. “But first, I want to tell you that I know of your loss, and that I’m sorry.”
Alanna froze, stared at him in disbelief. Suddenly, she was fighting to maintain her self-control. But the wound the Garkohn had prodded was too raw, too new. How could he know? How could he?
Natahk went on. “We tried hard to prevent your daughter’s death. I’m sorry we failed.”
Alanna felt her control cracking, falling away. Abruptly, she folded forward and down as though in physical pain so that her face was hidden by the black veil of her hair. She made no sound. Her grief was not something to share with the Garkohn liar, the Garkohn murderer! What tricks had he used to make Jules join him in raiding the Tehkohn—join him indirectly in the murder of her child?
Still silent, unmoving, Alanna decided that Natahk would die. No matter what else happened, no matter what other revenge the Tehkohn managed to take, this Garkohn would die.
She held her position of distress several seconds longer than necessary so that when she rose, the last signs of anguish were gone from her face. Replacing them was cold hatred.
“We did not kill your child,” said Natahk. “You know that.”
She said nothing, wondered again how Natahk could possibly have known that one of the children killed in the raid had been hers. As though to draw away from its pain, her mind worried at the question.
Her daughter Tien had not been the bright golden-green of most Kohn infants. But the child’s darker strangely shaded green was not beyond the Kohn spectrum—especially not beyond the Tehkohn spectrum. It might have meant no more than that Tien was destined for higher rank than the children who had more yellow in their coloring. And Tien had looked Tehkohn—almost. Her eyes were rounder than Kohn eyes, and her hands and feet promised to be too large, too long for a Kohn. Small things, especially in such a young child. Natahk’s people would almost have had to be looking for such a child. And even having found Tien, they could not have been sure. Natahk could not have been sure…
Alanna looked at him with Tehkohn-trained eyes. At once, she detected the slight brightening of his coloring— lighter toward white. That was the only sign he gave of his triumph, his success at tricking her into confirming his suspicions. And he was not used to Missionaries reading such small signs. He seemed to think he was still adequately maintaining his facade of solemnity and concern. He had tricked her so easily. Now he sat waiting to do it again.
“Do you know how my daughter died?” she asked. She kept her voice low and calm.
