They had been hung on meat-hooks such as were common in any kzinti dead-meat locker. There were other hooks with strips of dried stuff hanging from them. Rosalind collected some samples for further analysis. He wondered whether to leave a couple to watch the door while he led the rest on to investigate the other companionways. No, all military training spoke against dividing a small force, especially in the face of an enemy whose deadliness was now plain.
Brief, cautious forays into the other companionways revealed nothing. His companions might be his soldiers, but they were also his fellow-students, and he had a consciousness of his responsibility to them along with his lust for vengeance and battle. To go, leaving some unknown behind that locked door, seemed a bad idea, as well as violating all kzin instincts and precepts of honor. To sit tight and wait upon the enemy to make the next move seemed a bad idea also. Anyway, it was a good idea to eat, but not in the presence of these dead. Off one of the companionways was another room, empty and relatively dry. They retired there and ate and drank. The small blocks of compressed food from their belt-pouches did not need preparation and in a situation like this humans and kzinti could eat together. It was, however, a very unsatisfying meal. It provided energy but would hardly assuage kzin hunger-pangs much. They should, Vaemar thought, have made sure they had a proper meal earlier. He filed the thought away for next time.
What would Honored Sire do? Vaemar wondered. Or Honored Step-Sire? He also thought of the cleverest humans he knew—Colonel Cumpston, or Professor Rykermann, or Brigadier Guthlac, or the abbot. Even the manretti—Dimity with whom he talked long and who beat him at chess, or Leonie, whose adventures in the caves with Honored Step-Sire Raargh when he received his rank and Name he had often been told about. This compartment seemed at first a good place to wait. It had but a single door. But it would be dark eventually. That meant less to the night-eyed kzinti than to the humans, but it would still be a disadvantage in dealing with the unknown. And the single door meant there was no line of retreat.
Vaemar's ears twitched violently at a sound. Motioning the others to stillness, he moved silently to the door and into the companionway, in a stalking crouch with his stomach-fur brushing the deck. He leapt. There was the sound of a hissing, spitting struggle. The others burst out behind him, weapons levelled. Vaemar was holding a kzinrett.
“Be still!” he hissed at her in the Female Tongue.
“Be still yourself!” she replied, and not in the Female Tongue, but in the Heroes' Tongue, in the tense of equals. “Release me! I am not an enemy.”
Vaemar was nonplussed. The Heroes' Tongue, with its complex tenses and extensive technical vocabulary, was far beyond females' comprehension. And what female, even if she had the intellectual equipment to do so, would speak to any kzintosh in the tense of equals?
His surprise made him forget for a moment their whole position. Then he saw how thin she was, how tensely she held her body. Her great eyes were violent-edged and wild. But one kzinrett, alone, could hardly be a threat. He released his hold on her. She stood poised to run or fight. He gestured to Swirl-Stripes and the humans. “These… companions,” he said. He gestured more explicitly: “Humans,” he said, “you know?”
“Yes,” she said. “I know.”
He saw that she was older than he, but not old. She would have been at the end of adolescence when the human hyperdrive armada swept in to reconquer Wunderland a decade before. She would have spent her formative years with humans as her slaves and prey. If she was the daughter of a noble—and most kzinti had been the sons and daughters of nobles—she might have been cared for by a gloved, padded and otherwise protected human nurse. But her vestigial female mind was unlikely to see humans today as sapients and companions. He would have to be careful.
“My name is Karan,” she said. She looked at him as if the information might convey something significant.
A quite common female name. What was not common was for a female to enunciate it in a clear and grammatical sentence. There were things about her eyes, her whole posture, that were not normal. Then her eyes narrowed. Vaemar knew that she was seeing his ear-tattoos. A kzinrett of upper-normal female intelligence might dimly know them as betokening Quality.
“Riit!” she said. Swirl-Stripes, he saw, jumped a little at the word. Even the humans, whose childhood had been under the kzin Occupation, knew it. He picked up the glandular responses. But there was no awe or reverence in her voice. She spoke, and all his senses reinforced this impression, like one recognizing and challenging an enemy.
“My name is Vaemar,” he said. It was “name,” not “Name.” Some odd scrap of memory recalled to him a sentence from a literature course: “His sensitive ear detected the capitals.” Then he added: “I am a student.” He realized as he said it that such a word could have no meaning to her. Or could it? She had recognized the ear-tattoos.
“I also hunt killers of kzinti,” he told her, still in the soft, simple syllables of the Female Tongue. “Who has killed Heroes and kzinretti here?”
“You do not know? You are bold to stick your nose into a cave where you know nothing.”
Clear, grammatical sentences. Imagery. Abstract conceptualization.
A kzinrett telling a Hero he knew nothing! Vaemar felt bewilderment and rage in almost equal proportions. He fought both down. Living with Raargh and among humans had taught him self-control. It had also instilled in him a determination that, however he died, it would not be of culture-shock. But this was something he felt he must handle alone as far as he could. He ordered Swirl-Stripes and the humans to guard the entrances to the corridors. Then he turned back to her.
“No,” he said, and not in the Female Tongue this time. “I do not know. But that is why we are here in arms.”
“'We'…” she repeated. She looked the kzinti and the backs of humans up and down. She seemed, whatever else, to take this in without surprise.
“We are no longer at war with humans on this world,” he told her, slipping into a more complicated vocabulary before he realized it. “And they are no longer our slaves. We work together.”
“I worked with humans before you were born,” she replied. Then she added, “I am small enough to hide in the ducting. You kzintosh are not. If you do not wish to be like those”—she gestured in the direction of the flayed corpses—“by the time the sun goes down, I suggest we are far away. You will take me with you.”
How exactly we are going to get away is another matter, he thought. Aloud he said: “You tell me nothing. Who are the enemies we have come to destroy?”
“Enemies you kzintosh have destroyed already. The Jotok.”
“I do not understand. Say on!”
“There were adult Jotok in this ship when it came down, serving as slave-mechanics. Most died. But enough survived to breed. The whole ship here in the swamp could have been designed as a giant nursery for Jotok—full of sheltered, water-filled compartments and with unlimited food that could be fetched from close by.”
“But adult Jotok were decorous slaves!”
“Only to their trainers, and those to whom they bonded when young.”
Vaemar had read and been told of the Jotok but, except perhaps in those barely-remembered days as a kitten at the palace, he had never seen a live one. Many kzinti had had Jotok slaves, but those that survived the fighting on Wunderland had been killed by their masters at the time of the Liberation as part of the general destruction of military assets. Kzin Heroes going out to die would not leave their slaves for victorious humans. He knew, however, that wild Jotok could be savage. Hunting them was a favorite sport on kzin worlds—they were generally a far better challenge than unarmed humans and other monkeys—and even relatively small artificial habitats had boasted Jotok-runs.