They were well; that was enough to know, to take from him some of the anguish. He kept them in sight for the rest of that day, and when they at last paused at evenfall, he came to them.
Niun knew his presence. The dus went first, and Niun turned,, looking for his approach. Duncan settled quietly near them. "You are all right?" Niun asked him. He nodded.
Melein turned her face from him. "Doubtless," she said finally, "your wish was good, Duncan; I believe that. But it was useless.”
"She'pan," he murmured with a gesture of reverence, grateful even for that; he forbore to argue with her: among so many dead, argument had no place.
Niun offered him a bit of pipe. He showed his, and declined, and with his av-tlen, cut off a bit of it that was sickly sweet in his mouth. There was a knot at his stomach that would not go away.
A cry went up from the Kel. Hands pointed. What looked like a shooting star went over, and descended toward the horizon.
"Landing," Duncan murmured, "near where the ship was. There will be a search now.”
"Let them come into the mountains looking," said Niun. Duncan put a hand to his stomach, and coughed, and wiped his eyes of the pain-tears. He found himself shaking. He also knew what had to be done.
He rested. In time he made excuse, a modest sort of shrug that denoted a man on private business, and rose and moved away from the column; the dus followed him. He was afraid. He tried to keep that feeling down, for the dus could transmit that. He saw the desert before him, and felt the weakness of his own limbs, and the terror came close to overwhelming him, but he had no other options. The diissoddenly sent award-impulse, turned. He looked back, saw the other dus. There was a black shadow a distance to the side of it. Duncan froze, remembering that Niun, like him, had a gun. Niun walked across the sand toward him, a black shape in the dark. The wind fluttered at his robes, the moon winked on the brass of the yin'ein and the plastic of the visor, and on the j'tai that he had gained. The great dus walked at his side, turn-toed, head down.
"Yai," Duncan cautioned his, made it sit beside him.
Niun stopped at talking distance, set hand in belt, a warning. "You have strayed the column widely, sovkela.”
Duncan nodded over his shoulder, toward the horizon. "Let me go.”
"To rejoin them?”
"I still serve the she'pan.”
Niun looked at him long and closely, and finally dropped his veil. Duncan did the same, wiped at the blood that began to dry on his lips.
"What will you do?" Niun asked.
"Make them listen.”
Niun made a gesture that spoke of hopelessness. "It has already failed. You throw yourself away.”
"Take the People to safety. Let me try this. Trust me in this, Niun.”
"We will not surrender.”
"I know that. I will tell them so.”
Niun looked down. His slender fingers worked at one of the several belts. He freed one of the j'tai, came toward Duncan, stood and patiently knotted the thong in a complicated knot.
Duncan looked at it when he had done, found a strange and delicate leaf, one of the three j'tai that Niun had had from Kesrith.
"It was given me by one of my masters, a man named Palazi, who had it from a world named Guragen. Trees grew there. For luck, he said. Good-bye, Duncan.”
He gave his hand.
Duncan gave his. "Good-bye, Niun.”
And the mri turned from him, and walked away, the one dus following.
Duncan watched him meet the shadow, and vanish, and himself turned and started on the course that he had plotted, the sand and rocks distorted in his vision for a time. He resumed the veil, grateful for the warmth of the beast that walked beside him.
Chapter Twenty-Two
BEAST MIND, beast sense. It protected. Duncan inhaled the cold air carefully and staggered as he came down the gentle rise an ankle almost twisted: death in the flats. He took his warning from that and rested, leaned against the dus as he settled to the cold sands and let the fatigue flow from his joints. A little of the blue-green pipe remained in his belt-pouch. He drew his av-tlen and cut a bit of it, chewed at it and felt its healing sweetness ease his throat.
It was madness to have tried it, he had to realize in the burning days, madness to have imagined that he could make the wreckage in time, that they would have stayed where there was no life.
But there was no choice. He was nothing among the People, but a problem that Niun did not need, an issue over which he might have to kill; a problem to Melein, who must explain him.
He served the she'pan.
There was no question of this in him now: if he walked and found nothing, still it only proved that his own efforts were worth nothing, as those of An-ehon had been nothing, and the burden passed: the she'pan had other kel'ein.
He gathered himself and began to walk again, staggered as the dus suddenly lurched against him with a snarl. He blinked in dull amazement as a cloud of sand purled up from the side of a rock and something ran beneath the sand, not like a burrower's fluttering broad mantle, but something lithe and narrow that like the burrower dug a small pit, a funnel of sand.
"Yai," he called hoarsely, restraining the dus, that would have gone for it and dug it into the light with its long ven-omed claws. Whatever was there, he did not know the size of it, or its dangers. He caught the hunt-sense from the dus, put it down with his own will, and they skirted the area, climbed up the near ridge. When he looked down, he saw all the area dotted with such small pits. There was regularity about them, like points on concentric circle. They formed a configuration wide enough to embrace a dus.
"Come," he wished the beast, and they moved, the dus giving small, dissatisfied whuffs, still desiring to go back.
But of other presence there had been no sign. There was the cold and the wind and the streaming light of Na'i'in; there was the track of their own passing swiftly obliterated by the wind, and once, only once, a tall black figure on a dune-crest.
One of the kel'ein, an outrunner of the People, another band, perhaps, insolently letting himself be seen. Duncan had felt exposed at that, felt his lack of skill with the yin'ein… the unknown under the sand did not frighten him half so much as the thought of encounter with others.
Of encountering a she'pan other than Melein. It was, he thought, a mri sort of fear a hesitance to break out of that familiarity which was Melein's law. With that fear, with mri canniness, he kept to the low places, the sides, the concealments available in the land, and his eyes, dimmed by his lowered visor, carefully scanned the naked horizons when he must again venture across the flat.
The great rift of the lost sea came into view at noontime. He looked away into that hazy depth where sand ribboned off into the chasm in wind-driven falls, and lost his sense of "height and depth in such dimensions. But scanning the horizon, he knew where he was, that was not far from the place he sought.
He kept moving, and by now the lack of solid food had his stomach knotting. The ache in his side was a constant presence, and that in his chest beat in time with the ebb and flow of his life.
Dus.
He felt it, and looked up as if someone had called his name. Niun? he wondered, looking about him, and yet did not believe it. Niun was with the People; he would not have deserted Melein, or those in his charge. There were the Kath and the Sen, that could not make such a trek as he had made, kel'en and unencumbered.
Yet the dus-feeling was there. Left. Right. He scanned those horizons, stroked the velvet rolls of flesh on the neck of his own beast, sent question to its mind. Ward-impulse went out from it. No illusion, then.
With his nape hairs prickling he kept moving, constantly aware of that weight against his senses.
Brother-presence.
Dus-brother,
The dus beside him began to sing a song of contentment, of harmony, that stole the pain and stole his senses, until he realized that he had walked far and no longer knew the way he walked.
No, he projected at it, no, no, no. He thought of the ship, thought of it again and again, and desired, urged toward it
Affirmation.
And threat.
Darkness came then, sudden and soft and deep, and full of menace, claws that tore and fangs that bit and over it all a presence that would not let him go. He came to awareness again still walking, shivering periodically in the dry, cold wind. His hands and arms were sandburned and bloody, so that he knew that he had fallen hard at some time and not known.