At the end of the journey, a cluster of shabby buildings in the midst of endless grass, another Frossian led me, still roped, to the barn. The ceilings were low enough that I knew I could touch them by reaching up. I did not reach up, for I had already learned that any voluntary motion on my part brought a choking jerk on the leash. A long aisle ran down the center of the building between open pens on either side, pens without fronts, just three walls dividing the structure into equal areas filled by huge animals.
They were furry…no, woolly. Enormous brown eyes peered at me with unmistakable intelligence. The ears were long enough to be amusing, even funny, and the horns were long enough to be dangerous. And the tails! Curving upward and forward, each of them spread long, fine wool in a perfect parasol above each animal or, when lowered, a blanket, so evenly distributed it might have been spread by some domestic who had just changed the linens. I could not see their feet, for the hind legs were bent under their bodies and the front feet were curled against the ponderous chests. Four-legged. Not unfamiliar, as though I might have seen their like in a book, or more likely their attributes. Horns like cattle. Faces like buffalo. Coat and ears like poodle dogs. Those marvelous umbrella tails? Giant anteaters came to mind, though as I recalled, their tails had been more brushlike. Of course, I knew them only from books.
The Frossian spoke in his own language. “You are responsible for feeding them, and watering them, and cleaning up after them and taking them to pasture and bringing them back. Any one of them gets hurt or dies, you get hurt or die. You stupid humans don’t understand anything Frossians say, but the whip will teach you.”
“On the contrary,” I said in only slightly halting Frossian, “I understand very well.”
The Frossian’s eyes widened momentarily, before his arm lashed out, clubbing me across the face as he hissed, “I explain! We don’t talk to slaves, and we don’t want them talking to us, especially if they contradict what we say!”
He left me lying in the straw, facedown, half-stunned, realizing suddenly that the word for contradict in Frossian was the same word as insult, that the word for explain was from the same root as the word demean oneself. From the umox nearest me, a strange, whistling call rose up. Still dazed, I looked at the creature and saw that it fluted the sound through its nose. Within moments, I was surrounded by a group of people who looked so like me, I would have sworn they were family. They were Ghoss, they said, speaking to me in Frossian.
“Oh, girl, umox say you spoke to overseer. Such a bad idea to speak where any overseer can hear you!”
“Why did you do such a thing?”
“Didn’t they warn you. The doctors? Didn’t they say not to speak? Not to move or speak? Surely they warned you!”
“Ummm? Here, let us see your eyes, let us see your arms.”
“Not too bad. You’ll have a strange-colored face for a few days.”
“Now you can count on that one’s enmity so long as you are here.”
Finally, then, I remembered the doctor telling me not to speak, and I cursed myself silently. So proud of my ability to speak, I had to do it! Pride. Rotten pride. Obviously, pride was something to be forgotten.
“Who are you?” I asked.
One of the women spoke. “I am Deen. We are Ghoss, dear girl, as you no doubt are yourself.”
“I’m not Ghoss, whatever. I’m human.”
“Well, of course, Ghoss are human. Tsk. Here, let me put some salve on that. Don’t worry, the doctors gave it to us. It won’t harm you.”
And so my servitude began with the first lesson: Do not speak unless among the Ghoss and where no Frossian could hear. With the Ghoss I spoke Frossian while I learned their own language, one with strangely familiar words in it, an old language, they said, dating back to the time they had been brought from Earth by the Gentherans and given to the Gibbekot, the indigenes of Fajnard.
“The indigenous race? You mean, this isn’t a Frossian home planet?”
“The Frossians have no home planet except one place where the queens live. Frossians eat up planets as a plether of umoxen eat a field of hay.” Deen snorted her derision.
“What’s a plether?”
“So many as will fit into a pen, Mar-agern. A plether of umoxen is fewer than a plether of Gnar, but both take the same barn space. As I was saying, the Frossians take everything they can take without triggering action by ISTO, then they go ruin some other world. When they came here, our Gibbekot friends went into the mountains, but some of us…well, let us say we do not hide as well as they. The Frossians forced us to stay here and work for them.”
I thought this last was less than truthful. The Ghoss had nothing about them of abasement or servitude. I conjectured that they might be here for some other reason. What that reason might be, I had no idea, and it wasn’t explained, even though I became woven into the life of the Ghoss, almost one of them.
I would have been quite content to be Ghoss
