I stood listening to him, hearing what he was telling me, and what he was not telling me. I strove not to believe it. “Jeh, why is he giving me these things?”
“To please you, Alanna. He gives gifts sometimes, though yours are stranger than any I have seen. Get your other things. Gather them all. He’s waiting for you.”
“I… must go?” I managed to keep my voice almost normal.
“You are afraid?”
“Yes!”
“He said you would be. But you must go. Your fear will pass.”
Slowly, I gathered my belongings. But my hands were shaking so that I kept dropping things. Cheah came over, oddly silent, and helped me. Jeh led me out of the apartment and through the corridor for some distance to what appeared to be a solid wall. A hidden door.
Jeh felt for the handhold, found it, and pulled the door open. He spoke quietly.
“Go in, Alanna.”
I didn’t move. It was all I could do to keep myself from running away down the corridor. I had come this far by telling myself that I could talk to Diut—talk him out of this… experiment, or whatever it was. And I did not want to disgrace myself before Jeh and Cheah. Now though…
“Alanna!”
I jumped, looked at him.
“Go in.”
I went through the door and he shut it behind me.
There was no one in the room. It was a large room made of the same gray stone as the rest of the dwelling. There were two long chests of polished wood, one on either side of the room. I dropped my things atop one of these chests. There was a doorway on the opposite side of the room and I could hear someone moving around in the room beyond. So the Tehkohn Hao had at least a two-room apartment. Luxury. I could have lived my life happily without such luxury. There was a large animal-skin rug on the floor before the fireplace. I sat down on it and stared into the low fire trying to think. Everything had happened too quickly, too unexpectedly. It made no sense. Diut had hardly looked at me during my stay with the Tehkohn. And surely I could not have seemed sexually attractive to him.
He came into the room, his feet making almost no sound against the stone floor. I looked at him once, then looked away quickly, closed my eyes in desperation. I would keep still. I would not behave stupidly. We would talk, Diut and I, and end this nonsense.
“Tehkohn Hao,” I greeted. My voice was steady.
“Alanna.”
“Am I to have a liaison with you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Why do men and women usually have liaisons?”
He was standing over me off to one side, towering, huge. I felt powerless and afraid and angry at myself for being afraid. I had to keep calm.
“Are forced matings the way among the Tehkohn?” I asked quietly.
“Have I used force?”
“Have I accused you?”
He whitened slightly and sat down beside me. “We have no tradition of forced matings, Alanna.”
“Will you let me go then?”
“But I have chosen you.”
“I have not chosen you.”
“What man have you chosen?”
“I… none. I didn’t know I would be permitted to mate here.”
“Has any man approached you?”
“No.”
“No man would unless I ordered it. None but me.”
I said nothing.
“Your differences keep others away,” he said. “You come to me as a stranger, an alien in spite of all that you have learned. But when you leave me, you will be Tehkohn. When others see that I have accepted you, they will accept you.”
I began to tremble, and to believe, really believe, that there was no way out of this. I was afraid I would lose control of myself if he touched me. When he touched me.
He reached over, took my hand, and examined it much as the Garkohn huntress Gehl once had.
“The fingers are too long,” he said. “And too slender. The nails are too thin, too weak. You are right to keep them short. The hairlessness is ugly at first—wrong, a distortion of what should be. But the coloring is the greatest distortion. Brown. No blue at all. The lowest artisan has some blue, but you have none.”
I snatched my hand away from him, now more angry than frightened.
“There are* no customs here that apply to you,” he said. “You have no rights, no freedoms that I do not allow. Without the blue, you are like an animal among us.”
I glared at him. “How could you want a woman who is like an animal?”
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.