And his blue grew suddenly lighter with a great deal of white. “To see for myself that she is truly a woman.”
My fear was drowned in anger and humiliation. It was an experiment then. The creature wanted to see for itself what it was like to make love with an ugly distorted woman. I was here to satisfy its curiosity. “I wish I had the words to tell you how deformed and ugly you are to me, Tehkohn Hao. No animal could be as terrible.” He would hit me. I didn’t care.
He did not hit me. He stood up and hauled me to my feet. “We have traded insults. Now we will go and prove to each other how little our differences matter.”
He led me into the other room where there was another fireplace-more luxury—more wooden chests and a wide wooden platform strewn with furs. It took me a moment to realize that the platform was actually the first bed that I had seen in the Tehkohn dwelling. I stood staring at it mindlessly until Diut opened my robe. Then I looked at him.
In that instant, he must have sensed just how much I suddenly hated him. He drew back warily.
“Be careful, Alanna.”
There had been a wild human on Earth—a man fast enough to run me down to get what he wanted. He got it. Then I smashed his head with a rock. As I faced Diut now, I hardly saw his ugliness. It was as though he was wearing the face of that wild human. It was as though he had brought me the pain that man brought me. He put his hands on me again and I lunged for his eyes.
He jerked his head back and in the moment that he was off balance, I came to my senses. I turned and ran for the corridor door. But he was fast—blindingly fast. I was fast myself and he caught me before I’d gone five steps.
He grabbed a handful of my hair and pulled me backward against him. I kicked back hard into his knee.
He flared yellow with pain and relaxed his hold on me for an instant. I broke free and ran again.
He was not so quick this time as he came limping after me, but I could not find the outside door. I could have found it if I had not been so frantic. I didn’t have much trouble with hidden doors any more because, normally, I memorized their location in relation to other objects. This one I had been too frightened to memorize.
Diut came up behind me, caught me by the neck, and threw me to the floor. “Will you make me kill you, Alanna?”
I had no doubt at all that he would do it. I lay there looking up at him.
“Get up.”
I rose slowly, faced him. He knocked me down again with a single openhanded blow. My head rang with the strength of it. And again:
“Get up.”
I stayed where I was, waiting for my head to clear. I wondered why he didn’t just grab me and rape me the way the wild human had. It would be simple enough. It would even be simple for me. I would not dare to kill him. I knew that now. Not unless I was also ready to kill myself—before his people caught me. My moment of unthinking rage had passed. Now why didn’t he just take what he wanted and get it over with.
He kicked me. “You will get up.”
Bruised and furious, I stood up, half expecting to be knocked down again. Instead, as though nothing had interrupted his earlier attempt, he opened my robe again, slipped it off me, and stripped off my other clothing.
He walked around me, inspecting me much as Gehnahteh and Choh had on my first day with them. I stood glaring at him. At least I could glare at him now, without turning away. He was becoming for me nothing more than an extremely ugly man. His size and strength were more impressive now than his appearance.
“Well, get on with it,” I said. “You are an animal and you want to mate. Mate then.”
His coloring whitened. “People kept coming to me telling me that you were a fighter.”
“I am a thing. A thing that you have become curious about. Satisfy your curiosity.”
He took me by the shoulder and led me back into the bedroom to the bed. I lay down among the furs waiting for him, not looking at him.
Nothing happened.
After a while, I looked at him, saw that he had sat down on the edge of the bed and was watching me. He spoke quietly.
“It is a custom among the Garkohn to capture Tehkohn fighters and force them to eat meklah.”
I frowned, wondering what that had to do with anything.
“Sometimes my fighters starve themselves, refusing to trust any food offered them. Sometimes the Garkohn let them starve themselves to death. Other times though, it’s more amusing to the Garkohn to wait until my fighters are weak, and then force meklah down their throats.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because your behavior with me is much like the behavior of my captured fighters. When they are forced to give in, they continue to speak arrogantly, challengingly. When they can no longer fight with their bodies, they continue to fight with words.”
“What else can they do?”
“Nonfighters submit at once. Abjectly.”
I sat up looking at him. “Garkohn humiliate Tehkohn because the two are enemies. Why do you humiliate me?”
“There need be no humiliation in this for you, Alanna. I am the leader of my people.” He paused for a moment,
