the ground until they found open sunlight. Then they anchored themselves to the ground and began growing into new trees—or new extensions of old trees. Aboveground, much of the valley was covered with roots as thick as the bodies of two or three men. Missionaries had blasted loose many of them. The Garkohn had watched the blasting with fascination.
Now though, the Garkohn woman I wanted to talk with was leaning back watching nothing at all. The coloring of her legs and lower torso blended into the rich yellow-brown of the wood she was sitting on so that she appeared to be growing out of it. Unconscious camouflage. Already we Missionaries had seen it too often to be surprised by it.
I walked over to the woman and when she saw me she stood up, her coloring darkening to its normal deep green. She was tall—only half a head shorter than I was—and even then I knew that because of her coloring she ranked high among her people. Her body was straight and stocky and her eyes were wary. She examined me as closely as I was examining her.
“Alanna,” I said, raising my hand to my chest. “Toh Alanna. Ehtoh kai?” I had learned that much just from living around Garkohn for two of Jules’s thirty-day months. On a world without a moon, Jules had decided to stay with thirty and thirty-one-day months at least for a while.
“Ah,” the woman said. “Toh Gehl.” She was silent for a moment, then said my name. “Ah-la-na?”
It was a start. I took her arm and sat down, pulling her down beside me. The Garkohn seemed always to be touching each other so I did not expect her to be offended. I was surprised, though, at the hardness of her muscle beneath her soft fur.
She caught my hand as I released her and looked at it, examined it really, seeing how much longer my fingers were than her own, bending my fingers at the joints, testing the strength of my fingernails. She brushed a furry finger over the short sparse hairs that grew out of the back of my hand.
Then she held my open hand flat between her own two and shook it once. “Tahncheah,” she said. Then she repeated it more slowly. “Tahn.” She grasped my fingers alone. “Tahn.” And she made a tight fist of my hand. “Cheah.” She let go of me for a moment and struck her open palm with a closed fist. Then she held up the fist. “Cheah.” And then the open hand, “Tahncheah.” She whitened slightly and extended one of her hands for me to examine.
I took it, smiling to myself. We were going to get along, Gehl and I. We would teach each other.
Every day we met at that tree root as the Mission settlement took shape around us. When we were communicating fairly well, I in Garkohn and she in English, she began bringing a hunter to her lessons. The two were almost identical. Later, I noticed that Gehl was darker, slightly more blue, but at first, I could tell them apart only when the hunter sat so that his genitals were visible. It was this man—Ihiateh, his name was—who taught me that Garkohn men were not as poorly endowed sexually as most Missionaries thought. Their genitals were simply more protected within their bodies than were those of Missionary men.
Ihiateh was Gehl’s temporary husband and once as the two sat talking with me, the huntress said something to arouse him. She spoke to him in a quick aside that I did not quite hear. Whatever the words were though, they gave Ihiateh an erection that no Missionary man would have had reason to be ashamed of. I stared at him in surprise, then sat back waiting to see how they would handle the situation. I had already heard much from other Missionaries about Garkohn lasciviousness and immorality.
Gehl went white with what seemed to be amusement. Ihiateh spoke sharply to her, then caught her arm and dragged her off into the woods.
The next day, Gehl came to me alone and immediately began questioning me in her careful English.
“You have no man?”
I shook my head. She had learned to interpret the gesture. “Not yet. I must choose very carefully before I accept a man because by our custom, I would have to go through a ceremony with him and be as firmly tied to him as you would be to Ihiateh if you and he had a child.”
Flecks of yellow mixed strangely with Gehl’s deep green. She glowed slightly, making an iridescence. Doubt. Confusion. “You have a ceremony before there is a child?”
“Yes. Before the man and woman are even permitted to…” I frowned. I was speaking Garkohn and she English as usual. I had no word now though for what I wanted to say. “How do you say, to come together as with a man and woman, to…?”
“To mate?” she said in Garkohn. It was exactly the same word I had heard her use in referring to animals. I had known it, but had not realized that it should also be applied to people. The Missionaries made careful distinctions in English. Animals mated or bred. Humans obeyed the first commandment of God: “Be fruitful and multiply.”
“Mate,” I said. “Yes.”
“But so often a union is childless… What do your people do? Must a man and woman stay together in sterile union?”
I thought about that and found myself wondering whether she was inadvertently telling me the reason for some of what the Missionaries called Garkohn immorality—the frequent coupling and uncoupling of Garkohn adults. Perhaps what the Missionaries had seen as a matter of morality was more a matter of necessity. Perhaps the Garkohn were just not as fertile as the Missionaries.
“They would not be held permanently in such a union,” I said. “But they would have to stay together long enough to be certain that their union was sterile. They are joined by our law. They are not permitted to seek other partners until their union is dissolved by law.”
Gehl flashed yellow disapproval. “I would not like to be trapped in such a union. Will you choose a man soon?”
I shuddered. I was young and could get away with my disinterest in Missionary men now. They were certainly not interested in me. They had been during my early days among them when I had known no better than to go with them to secret places where we could break Mission law together. I stopped that as soon as I understood that I was risking the comfort and security that I had found with the Verricks—as soon as I understood that the men and I were “behaving like animals” together instead of marrying and keeping true human tradition. Then the men and I had no more interest in each other. There was no one of them that I wanted a marriage with, and now they pretended to find me contemptible because I was not “pure.” I had shared pleasure with some of them. I was guilty of sin, but somehow, they were all still innocent. Foolishness! It disgusted me to think I would have to spend my life with anyone so foolish.
