Daniel grasped his shoulder to jerk him back, and Tejef hit him with a violence that meant to kilclass="underline" but the human was quick and only the side of his arm connected, casting him sprawling across the polished floor. He rolled and scrambled up to the attack.
“No!” Arle wailed, stopping him, wisely stopping him; and Tejef turned his attention back to Margaret.
She was conscious, and sobbed in pain as he tried to ease her legs straight; and Tejef jerked back his hands, wiping them on his thighs, desiring to turn and kill the human for witnessing this, for causing it. But Arle was between them, and when Margaret began to cry Daniel moved the child aside and knelt down disregarding Tejef, comforting Margaret in her own language with far more fluency than Tejef could use.
Tejef seized Daniel’s wrist when he ventured to touch her, but the human only stared at him as if he realized the aberrance of an iduve who could not rule his own temper.
The amaut must be called. Tejef arose and did so, and in a mercifully little time they had Margaret bundled neatly onto a stretcher and on her way to Dlechish and the surgery. Tejef watched, wanting to accompany them, ill content to wait and not to know; but he would not be further shamed before the amaut, and he would not go.
He felt Arle’s light fingers on his hand and looked down into her earnest face.
“Can I please go with her, sir?”
“No,” said Tejef; and her small features contracted into tears. He cast a look over her head, appealing to Daniel. “What is your custom?” he asked in desperation. “What is right?”
Daniel came then, hugged Arle to him and quieted her sobs, saying all the proper and fluent human things that comforted her. “Perhaps,” he said to her insistence, “perhaps they’ll let you come up and sit with her later, when she’s able to know you’re there. But she’ll be asleep in a moment. Now go on, go on back into your apartments and wash your face. Come on, come on now, stop the tears.”
She hugged him tightly a moment, and then ran away inside, into the echoing hall of the dhiswhere neither of them could follow.
“I will honor your promises to her,” Tejef told Daniel with great restraint. “Now go up to surgery. I want someone with her who can translate for the amaut. Dlechish does not have great fluency in human speech.”
“And what happens,” Daniel asked, “when you lose your temper with Arle the way you just did with her?”
Tejef drew a quick breath, choking down his anger. “I had no wish to harm my kamethi.”
Daniel only stared at him, thinking, or perhaps receiving something from his asuthe. Then he nodded slowly. “You care for them,” he observed, as if this were a highly significant thing.
“ M’melakhiadoes not apply. They aremine already.” He did not know why he felt compelled to argue with a m’metane,except that the human had puzzled him with that word. He felt suddenly the gulf of language, and wished anew that he understood metanebehavior. Arastiethewould not let him ask.
“Call Ashanome,” Daniel said softly. “Surrender. The kamethi do not have to die.”
Tejef felt a chill, for the human’s persistent suggestion quite lost its humor; he meant it seriously. It was human to do such a thing, to give up one’s own arastietheand become nothing. The inverted logic that permitted such thinking seemed for the moment frighteningly real.
“Did I ask your advice?” Tejef replied. “Go up to surgery.”
“She might take it kindly if you came. That is our arastiethe,knowing someone cares. We also tend to die when we are denied it.”
Tejef pondered that, for it explained much, and posed more questions. Was that caring,he wondered; and did it always demand that one yield arastietheby demonstrating concern? But if human honor were measured by gathering concern to one’s self, then it was by seeking and accepting favors: the perversity of the idea turned reason itself inside out. In that realization the cleanliness of death at the hands of Ashanomeseemed almost an attractive prospect. His own honor was not safe in the hands of humans; and perhaps he wounded his own kamethi—and Margaret—in the same way.
“Will you come up?” Daniel asked.
“Go,” Tejef ordered. “Put yourself in the hands of one of the kamethi and he will escort you there at your asking.”
“Yes, sir.” Daniel bowed with quiet courtesy and walked away to the lift. It was kalliran, Tejef realized belatedly, and was warmed by the fact that Daniel had chosen to pay him that respect, for humans did not generally use that custom. It filled him with regret for the clean spaciousness of Ashanome,for familiar folk of honorable habits and predictable nature.
The lift ascended, and Tejef turned away toward the door of the dhis,troubled by the harachiaof the place where Margaret had lain, a dent in the metal paneling where her fragile body had hit. She had often disadvantaged him, held him from vaikkaagainst humans and amaut, shamed him by her attentions. It was not the deference of a kameth but the tenacious m’melakhiaof a nasith-tak—but of course there was no takkhenes,no oneness in it; and it depended not at all on him. She simply chose to belong to him and him to belong to her, and the solitary determination of her had an arastietheabout it which made him suspect that he was the recipient of a vaikkahe could only dimly comprehend.
He was bitterly ashamed of the grief his perverted emotion had brought her in all things, for in one private part of his thoughts he knew absolutely what he had done, saw through his own pretenses, and began now to suspect that he had hurt her in ways no iduve could comprehend. For the first time he felt the full helplessness of himself among a people who could not pay him the arastiethehis heart needed, and he felt fouled and grieved at the offering they did give him. The contradictions were madness; they gathered about him like a great darkness, in which nothing was understandable.
“Sir?” Arle was in the doorway again, looking up at him with great concern ( arastiethe? Vaikka?) in her kallia-like eyes. “Sir, where’s Daniel?”
“Gone. Up. With Margaret. With Dlechish. He can talk for her. She has great avoidance for amaut: I think all humans have this. But Dlechish—he cares for her; and Daniel will stay with her.” It was one of the longest explanations in the human language he had attempted with anyone but Margaret or Gordon. He saw the anger in the child’s eyes soften and yield to tears, and he did not know whether that was a good sign or ill. Humans wept for so many causes.
“Is she going to die?”
“Maybe.”
The honest answer seemed to startle the child; yet he did not know why. Plainly the injuries were serious. Perhaps it was his tone. The tears broke.
“Why did you have to hit her?” she cried.
He frowned helplessly. He could not have spoken that aloud had he been fluent. And out of the plenitude of contradictions that made up humans, the child reached for him.
He recoiled, and she laced her fingers together as if the compulsion to touch were overwhelming. She gulped down the tears. “She loves you,” she said. “She said you would never want to hurt anybody.”
“I don’t understand,” he protested; but he thought that some gesture of courtesy was appropriate to her distress. Because it was what Margaret would have done, he reached out to her and touched her gently. “Go back to the dhis.”
“I’m afraid in there,” she said. The tears began again, and stopped abruptly as Tejef seized her by the arms and made her straighten. He cuffed her ever so lightly, as a dhisaiswould a favored but misbehaving child.
“This is not proper—being afraid. Stand straight. You are nas.” And he let her go very suddenly when he realized the phrase he had thoughtlessly echoed. He was ashamed. But the child did as he told her, and composed herself as he had done for old Nophres.