Neither of Fralk’s casts hit the leaf stuffed massi-hide target. Neither missed by much, though. He consoled himself with the thought that if the target had been a male caught in a volley, maybe he would have dodged someone else’s spear and been brought down by one of these.
He was also glad none of the humans had been watching. They did watch the Skarmer males drill fairly often; the sound of their picture-makers clicking away had become a familiar part of the exercises. At first Fralk thought they were filled with awe at the might and savagery of the Skarmer forces.
Most of the males still thought that. Juksal certainly did; whenever a human came around, he urged his warriors to show the strange creatures how fierce they were.
But Fralk, unlike his fellows, had learned to read expressions on the humans’ strange, boringly colored features. When the corners of their odd mouths curved up, they were amused. Fralk did not know why the Skarmer drills amused them, but he was sure they did.
Well, he thought, still feeling the ache under one arm, he’d like to see how a human would fare, attacked by four spears at once. Attack a human on the side where he had no eyes and he was yours-he wouldn’t even know he was in trouble until he was dead.
Fralk stopped. A couple of human concepts he had been having trouble with suddenly made sense. Right and left had given him no problems; they were just opposites of one another, what he thought of as three arms apart. But behind…, behind was the direction where humans had no eyes, the hidden direction. Made as they were, poor strange creatures, no wonder they needed a special word for it.
Behind… it even had a weird kind of logic to it, or at least economy, which to Fralk’s mercantile mind was about the same thing. Like those of any reasonable language, Skarmer prepositions classified objects through their relative distance outward from oneself. Sometimes that led to clumsy ways of thinking and of speaking: Juksal, for instance, was closer to Fralk than the male named Ising, but farther from Fralk than the one called Kattom.
How much easier to say-and to think-that Juksal was behind Kattom. And how much easier to wish the miserable drill leader were behind Ising, and behind a good many more males as well, so he could neither see nor bother Fralk anymore.
Fralk knew what wishes were worth. If wishes were all that mattered, every starving tenant farmer would become a clanfather overnight. Most times, Fralk knew that too well to need to remind himself of it.
But wishing Juksal would disappear was too pleasant a thought to slap down. Fralk’s eyestalks quivered with guilty pleasure as he walked back toward Hogram’s town.
IV
Reatur had left a piece of hide with some writing on it in the mates’ quarters. It had been there a few days. Most of the mates paid no attention to it. A couple scribbled on the blank parts. Then Lamra rescued it. She could not read, not really, but she did know that the written signs had sounds that went with them and knew what some of those were.
If you made one sound, and then the next one right after it- why, you’d just said ice! That was what those two signs had to mean! Ice! Lamra was so excited at her discovery that she stared at the hide with all six eyes at once, paying no attention to anything going on around her. She might have heard the door to the mates’ chambers opening, but if she did, she ignored that, too.
She was taken by surprise, then, when Reatur asked from right beside her, “What do you have there?”
Three eyestalks jerked up from the hide. Not only was Reatur standing there, but Sarah the human, as well. How had they managed to sneak up on her? Well, no matter. She was glad they were here, Reatur especially. “Look!” Lamra said, pointing to the signs she knew. “This means ‘ice,’ doesn’t it?” None of the mates cared about anything like that.
Reatur bent an eyestalk down to see what she was talking about. “Why, yes, it does,” he said slowly. “How did you know that?” He kept one eyestalk on the word she had figured out and moved another around so he could see what was going on; the remaining four peered straight at Lamra.
“If you say the sounds of these two signs together, they make the word,” she explained. Reatur did not answer. He just kept looking at her with those four intent eyestalks. She began to worry. “Am I in trouble?” she asked. She had never heard of mates knowing what writing meant. Maybe they weren’t supposed to.
After a long pause that made Lamra worry even more, Reatur said, “No, you’re not in trouble.” She watched herself go from alarmed blue to the green of relief and happiness.
“What?” Sarah asked. The talk had passed her by.
“I know what these two signs say,” Lamra told the human proudly, showing which ones with a fingerclaw. She pronounced them separately, then together.” ‘Ice!’ Do you understand?”
“Yes. Understand,” Sarah said. She beat her two hands together, again and again. The noise startled Lamra, who pulled her eyestalks in halfway. “No, no,” Sarah said quickly. “With humans, noise means, ‘good for you.’”
Humans were very strange, Lamra thought, not for the first time: trust them to scare someone when all they meant was “good for you.” The mate let her eyestalks come out again, though.
She watched Sarah turn her head so her eyes pointed at Reatur. “You see?” the human said. If a person had been talking, Lamra would have thought that was triumph in her voice.
Maybe it was. Reatur’s grunt lay between annoyance and resignation. “I told you once already, did I not?” he said sharply. The human bent her head down-a person would have widened himself instead.
“You see about what, Reatur?” Lamra asked.
“About you,” the domain master said. Seeing that Lamra did not follow him, he went on. “The human will try to see that you don’t die when your time comes to bud.”
“Oh,” Lamra said, and then, louder, “Oh!” She still did not know what to think about that and was surprised that Reatur would even let Sarah try. “Are you sure?” she asked him.
“No,” he said. “I don’t know if I should be doing this at all. I don’t know if Sarah can keep you alive. But I do know I don’t want you to die. If it turns out you don’t have to, good. If not- the sorrow of the mates.”
If Reatur thought things might turn out all right, Lamra was willing to accept that. The same curiosity that had helped her begin to figure out written signs made her turn a couple of eyestalks on Sarah and ask, “How will you go about keeping my blood inside me? It comes out very quickly.” She had never watched a budding; Reatur didn’t let mates do that. But once or twice she had seen the chamber afterward, before it was cleaned, and she had picked up ideas from overheard snatches of talk. She more or less knew what happened in there.
Sarah turned her head back to Lamra. “Not know. Try to find out.” Then the human’s head swung toward Reatur again. “Mate knows good questions to ask, yes?”
“That she does,” the domain master said. “She always has, ever since she learned what words are for. It’s one of the reasons I would like to see her stay alive.”
“I wish the two of you wouldn’t talk about me like that, as if I weren’t there,” Lamra said indignantly.
Reatur and the human both stood quite still for a moment. Then Sarah started making the odd noise humans used instead of honest, eyestalk-wriggling laughter, while Reatur widened himself as if he were a mate and Lamra the domain master. “I humbly crave your pardon, clanf-ah, clanmother,” he said.
“Don’t you make jokes at me.” Now Lamra really was angry, angry enough to turn yellow.
Reatur’s voice changed. “I’m sorry, little one. I didn’t mean to tease.”