“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.
“I’m in no hurry to choose a man,” I told Gehl. “I don’t want to be trapped either.”
“I will break with Ihiateh soon,” she said. “Natahk has asked me to come to him.”
“Gehl, will you help me learn to hunt?”
Her narrow eyes widened, and for the first time, her furry face seemed to show expression. Surprise. “To hunt?” she said. “But you have food. There is meklah over all the valley, and we bring you meat. And in time, you can kill some of your own animals and plant your own crops.”
“It will be awhile before we can slaughter many of our animals,” I said. “And though it is good of your people to help us, bring us meat, we should learn to help ourselves. We should learn what we can of your ways of hunting just as we learn to speak with you.”
“Most of your people are not learning to speak. We learn your English.”
“Then we should change.”
“You need not. We are content and your people are content. Why should there be change?”
“Will you help me learn to hunt?”
She gazed downward, answered softly. “No. Natahk has forbidden it.”
“Forbidden…“I frowned. “Why?”
“He has not said.”
She was lying. There was no new yellow in her coloring but there was suddenly an odd tension in the way she held her body. She was suppressing emotion, holding her coloring normal as Missionaries might hold their faces placid in spite of fear or anger. But I knew her well enough now to see through the deception.
“I speak your language well enough now,” she said. “I think we need not meet again.”
I stared at her. In spite of whatever had suddenly fallen between us, I had come to think of her as a friend. I had felt more comfortable with her in the short time that we had been meeting than I had felt with many of the Missionaries after three years. She was more like me somehow. Freer, less concerned with appearances.
“You know English,” I said, “and I know Garkohn. In the exchange, haven’t we become friends?”
Now she yellowed, just slightly. “I think you are a fighter.”
“When I have to, I fight. You know that we don’t divide ourselves into clans as you do.”
“I know.” She sighed, then suddenly flared yellow. “Sometimes it is foolish to make individual friendships among foreign fighters. But we will try a little foolishness.” Her coloring settled back to normal. “Perhaps soon you will have a friend highly placed.”
“So?”
“I… you will say nothing of this to anyone?”
“I’ll say nothing.”
“I’m going to challenge the Third Hunter. I can beat him. I know I can.”
I was impressed. I had seen the Third Hunter and he was impressive. If Gehl really thought she could beat him…
“Natahk knows,” said Gehl. “He says my ambition will kill me. He knows that if I beat the Third Hunter, I will take on the Second.”
“But you will not challenge Natahk himself, after that?”
She gave me a look of yellow disgust. “I do want to live, Alanna. I only challenge where there is a chance for me to win. No Garkohn would challenge Natahk until he is old and weak.”
I grinned. I had not seen anyone among the Missionaries who would have dared to challenge the massive Garkohn leader either. Not without a gun in his hand, at least.
“Come tonight and eat with my parents and me,” I told her. “Soon you may be too busy for such things.”
She looked thoughtful. “I can bring Ihiateh?”
I tried to hold back, but suddenly I found myself laughing aloud. “Bring him, Gehl, but…”
“I know.” She whitened. “He already knew some Missionary ways and he told me. I think he would have beaten me yesterday if he could have. I won’t provoke him here among your people again.”
Alanna passed through the high gates of the stockade with the raiding party and saw before her a town far more finished than it had been when she was abducted. There were more houses now. The settlement was much like the walled town the Missionaries had lived in back on Earth. As on Earth, the houses and storage buildings were grouped comfortably around a wide expanse of open land held in common by all the people. The common was landscaped as it had been on Earth with one difference. For some reason, there was no grass—no neatly cut lawn for.the people to sit or lie on. There were a few flowers—Earth flowers—nourishing in the alien soil. There was bare hard-packed ground, and there were tall meklah trees connected to each other by thick benchlike roots. Clumps of trees formed natural gathering places. Or the people could gather in the open as they were doing now around the raiding party. The Missionaries who had stayed behind and the several Garkohn who happened to be at the Mission settlement gathered around the raiding party just in front of the largest fragment of the ship that was left intact—the great, nearly hollow shell that served as the Mission Church.
Alanna found herself struggling to comprehend the words of welcome and congratulation that came both in English and in Garkohn. Both languages spoken quickly and carelessly sounded oddly foreign to her. More than once, she found herself mentally translating them into Tehkohn as though Tehkohn was her native language.