She could not answer. She stood bent slightly backward against him by the pressure of his arm across her throat.
He pushed and guided her the rest of the way toward the tree, then spoke quietly into her ear. “What I intend to show you is a truth about yourself. I cannot believe that a Missionary can become Tehkohn in only two years. Now many Tehkohn would truly prefer death to the meklah. I know because I have watched them starve themselves to death when they reali/e that they cannot escape—that death is the only alternative to becoming Garkohn. But I have never seen Missionaries deliberately kill themselves for any reason.” He moved his arm from hei throat and suddenly she could breathe again. As she stood gasping, she felt his hand caress her throat, now obscenely gentle. “Pick a meklah fruit and eat it, Alanna, or I will kill you.”
She started to speak but he raised his hand to touch her mouth.
“Make no pleas and no outcry. Do exactly as I say, and you will live. Do anything else, and you will die. Now. Pick the fruit.”
One small fruit. Only one. It seemed so harmless. Yet the Tehkohn had warned her, She had been addicted once. Even one fruit would mean readdiction.
She had watched a room full of people, Missionary and Garkohn, die very slowly in meklah withdrawal. She had not been able to watch too carefully because she had been in withdrawal herself. For days, she had been near death. She could no longer remember all that had happened to her during that time, but she remembered the pain.
Her hand seemed to reach up against her will to pick a ripe yellow fruit.
She looked at the fruit and wondered whether it would kill her this time the way it had killed the others. Because she would have to withdraw again. She would have no choice.
She bit into the fruit, found it firm and sweet, delicious against all reason. No wonder the Missionaries had welcomed it so warmly .when the Garkohn introduced them to it. It had been one of the first gifts of the Garkohn to the new colonists three years before. The Mission doctor had tested it and declared it safe to eat. No one had thought that it might not be safe to stop eating.
She finished the fruit and the Garkohn released her. She did not move, did not even turn to look at him. “When the Tehkohn come to kill you, Natahk, I hope they do it slowly. I hope they take away your meklah and let me watch.”
“So?” He smiled again grotesquely. “You should use your time thinking of things that are possible. Your husband, for instance, freed and cleansed of the red stigma.”
She ignored him, started to walk back to where the raiding party rested. He moved after her quickly.
“Why do you continually force me to threaten you?”
“What more do you think your threats can do?” Her voice was flat, dead. “I’ve told you that you don’t have my husband. You can’t force me to point out someone who isn’t a captive. If you try, I’ll choose one of your judges and claim him to please you. And you will be pleased with a lie.”
She walked faster and left him behind. He did not call her again. She skirted widely around the prisoners and returned to the Missionaries, who were just preparing to resume their homeward march.
CHAPTER TWO
Alanna
We were busy cannibalizing the ship, clearing land, and building our cabins when I decided to learn the Garkohn language. It bothered me, frightened me to live among people I couldn’t understand-especially since they were learning to understand us so quickly. To the disgust of several Missionaries, Jules not only agreed with me, but he lessened my share of the work so that I would have time to learn.
Next, I had to find a teacher. I asked around. Missionaries were often approached by Garkohn who had been ordered by their leader Natahk to learn English. Most Missionaries did not want to learn the Garkohn language, but sometimes they condescended to teach English. Industriously, the Garkohn learned. Now, I was told that there was a persistent huntress who had been living in the woods near our settlement for days trying to get someone to teach her. A Missionary man pointed her out to me.
She was sitting on the thick exposed root of a meklah tree. Such trees spread some of their roots vinelike over 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.