Alanna
Diut made me known to the people who were important to him. Jeh and Cheah, who were his friends, now became true friends of mine rather than superiors. It was an easy transition. I was not surprised when Cheah told me how concerned she and Jeh had been when Jeh took me to Diut. They had seen the terror in me and they were afraid Diut would be offended, yet they could do nothing. Cheah grayed just slightly when she told me: “It is never easy to see one friend kill another.” She spoke as though from experience and I wondered what pain she was remembering.
I met Diut’s First Judge, a woman as tall as Diut himself but, of course, without the heavy Hao musculature. Her coloring was excellent and her strength and fighting ability second only to Diut’s. She was Kehyo, the first Tehkohn woman to make me feel small—and not only with her larger size.
“You are Alanna,” she said when I met her. The occasion was a traditional gathering held to announce her third pregnancy. It was not the formal welcoming ceremony that would be held after the child’s birth, but only a gathering of friends that a couple held to share their joy and receive the good wishes of the bluest people they knew. I had not been invited, but Diut had. He took me along. Now Kehyo had come to sit near me.
“I have heard about you,” she said. “You are Diut’s furless one.”
I smiled a little. “Yes.”
“I hear that you hunt very well.”
“I’m learning.”
“But only with weapons.”
I hesitated. “Yes.” All Kohn who hunted used weapons sooner or later, but only I used weapons all the time. For that reason more than any other, Diut was teaching me to fight in the Kohn way. Other fighters would see my weapon, he said, and they would think I was nothing without it. I would be challenged as soon as he pronounced me a fighter and a judge as he planned to do. I was lucky. The Kohn way of fighting was only slightly more restrictive than the no-holds-barred wildland fighting that I had known on Earth. I was forbidden from snatching up a stone, knife, or other object to use against a weaponless person, but all else was permitted. All the things the Missionaries said were wrong—and some things the Missionaries did not even seem to know about.
“You’re unfortunate,” said Kehyo. “Alone and weaponless, you would surely die. You must stay close to the dwelling so that others can protect you.”
I turned to glare at her. Her coloring was absolutely neutral, as though she had spoken out of true concern for me. But I could feel her malice. Her even blue-green was a lie.
“First Judge,” I said, “I was left alone and weaponless in a land far more savage than this when I was no older than your young daughter. As you can see, I survived very well.”
“It was not a place where the jehruk roamed, apparently. I have heard that you have difficulty even seeing the jehruk.”
Before I could answer that, Diut was there kneeling beside Kehyo, his hand resting seemingly casually on her shoulder. Kehyo’s body tensed. She knew the threat of that hand.
Diut said nothing, only looked at her. Her haughtiness fell away as she met his eyes and her coloring faded to submissive yellow.
“The child within you protects you,” said Diut. “It will not protect you again.”
She lowered her head.
Diut looked at me. “Let it end here.”
I nodded. But later that night when we were alone, I tried to find out just what the trouble was.
“She has an old quarrel with me,” said Diut. “Or with herself. It does not concern you. She came to insult you only because we are mated.”
“But what…”
“Not now, Alanna. She won’t bother you again. Sleep now. In the morning you have a mock duel with Jeh.”
I slept, and still managed to lose my mock duel. The antiweapon rule hurt me more than I liked. Kehyo’s words returned to sting me.
In the afternoon, I went to see another of my new acquaintances, the most powerful of them, Tahneh, the older Tehkohn Hao. She had the Hao stockiness and height and she held her body straight in spite of her age. The people obeyed her, respected her, but her blue was marred by splotches of yellow, some as large as her open hand, and some smaller. Age spots, they were called. They came to all Kohn who lived past middle age, and when they came, Kohn who had been fighters fought no longer. They retired to the inner apartments and helped to instruct the older children in the ways of their individual clans. Also, they helped keep the records that gave continuity to Tehkohn history. They worked as much as they wished and only if they wished. No one drove them.
Tahneh was working now on an interweaving of the history of her original people, the Rohkohn, and the Tehkohn, who had become her people. Years before when Diut was only a boy, he had crossed the mountains to the desert and the sea, and been captured by the Rohkohn. He was a valuable thing to them—a young Hao to succeed Tahneh, who was already in her middle years and childless. But Diut had had the good luck to stumble upon the Rohkohn while they were in the midst of a drought. What rivers there had been in their territory had dried up and the Rohkohn faced slow death. Conditions in the mountains had been dry also—thus the lesser runoff from the snows down to the Rohkohn—but the Tehkohn still had the rivers at their altitude. They had no real problem. In spite of Diut’s youth, he had talked Tahneh into joining him in the mountains—this instead of maiming him to keep him in the desert. The two Hao began a liaison—the first of several—and there were other Tehkohn-Rohkohn matings, some of which produced children. A tie was formed and the two tribes became one. Now, in the multicolored ancient Kohn script, Tahneh wrote of that blending. She was still childless but she had a more or less permanent liaison now with Ehreh, her old Rohkohn First Judge. She obviously cared for him, but there was still a great deal of love between her and Diut. I wondered whether it was their physical similarity—the fact that they were both Hao—that made them close. I already knew how lonely it was to be one of a kind among more homogeneous people—even people who were kind.
I found myself liking Tahneh at once even though I envied her closeness with Diut. I understood myself well enough to realize that I would have envied anyone who was close to Diut. Because Diut had slowly become my
