“Help us,” she said then, thinking this was one of the neighbor men come to aid them. “Please come and help us.”
His hands on her shoulders hurt her. He stood there for a moment, while she trembled on the verge of tears, and then he gripped her arm in one cruel hand and began to walk down the road away from the house, dragging her with him, making her legs keep his long strides.
She stumbled on the rocks as they descended from the road to the orchard and turned her ankle in the soft ground among the apple and peach trees; and there were thorns and cutting stubble on the slopes of the irrigation ditch. He strode across the water, hauling her up the other side by one arm as a careless child might handle a doll, and waited only an instant to let her gain her feet before he walked on, dragging her at a near run, until at last she did stumble and fell to her knees sobbing.
Then he drew her aside, into the shadow of the trees, set her against the low limb of an aged apple tree, and looked at her, still holding her by a firm grip on her arm. “Where were you going?” he asked her.
She did not want to tell him. The scant light there was filtering through the apple leaves showed the outline of boots, loose trousers, leather harness, clothing such as no farmer wore, and his lean, hard face was strange to her. But he shook her and repeated the question, and her lips trembled and clear sense left her.
“I was going to hide and come back.”
“Is there any help you can get to?”
She jerked her head in the direction of the Berney farm, where Rachel Berney lived, and her brother Johann and the Sullivans, who had a daughter her age.
“You mean that house five kilometers west of here?” he asked. “Forget it. Is there anywhere else?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I—could hide in the rocks.”
He took her hand again, a dry, strong grip that frightened her, for he could crush the bones if he closed down harder. “And where would you go after? There’s not going to be anything left back there.”
“I want to go home.”
“You can’t. Think. Think of some place safe I could leave you.”
“I don’t know any.”
“If I left you right here, could you walk down from the heights to the river? Could you walk that far?”
She looked at him in dismay. The river was visible from the heights, far, far down in the valley. When they went, it meant taking the truck and going a long distance down the road. She could not imagine how long it would take to walk it, and it was hot in the daytime—and there were men like him on the roads. She began to cry, not alone for that, for everything, and she cried so hard she was about to be sick. But he shook her roughly and slapped her face. The hurt was already so much inside that she hardly knew the pain, except that she was afraid of them and she was going to be sick at her stomach. Out of fear she swallowed down the tears and the sickness with them.
“You have to think of somewhere I can put you. Stop that sniffing and think.”
“I want to go home,” she cried, at which he looked at her strangely and his grip lessened on her arm. He smoothed her hair and touched her face.
“I know you do. I know. You can’t.”
“Let me go.”
“They’re dead back there, can’t you understand that? If they catch either one of us now they’ll skin us alive. I have to get rid of you.”
“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Then she thought he would hit her. She screamed and flinched back. But instead he put his arms about her, picked her up, hugged her head down into his shoulder, rocking her in his arms as if she had been an infant. “All right,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Aiela took the corridor to the paredre,his mind boiling with frustration and smothered kalliran and human obscenities, and raged at Isande’s gentle presence in his thoughts until she let him alone. For fifteen precious days he had monitored Daniel’s every movement. The human language began to come more readily than the kalliran: human filth and human images poured constantly through his senses, blurring his own perception of what passed about him, cannibalizing his own life, his own separate thoughts.
Now, confronted by an iduve at the door of the paredre,he could scarcely gather enough fluency to explain his presence in any civilized language. The iduve looked at him sharply, for his behavior showed a mental disorder that was suspect, but Chimele had given standing orders and the man relented.
“Aiela?” Chimele arose from her desk across the room, her brows lifted in the iduve approximation of alarm. Aiela bowed very low. Courtesy demanded it, considering the news he bore.
“Daniel has encountered a difficulty,” he said.
“Be precise.” Chimele took a chair with a mate opposite and gestured him to sit.
“The Upweiss raid,” Aiela began hoarsely: Chimele insisted upon the chronological essentials of a thing. He forced his mind into order, screened against the random impulses that fed from Daniel’s mind and the anxious sympathy from Isande’s. “It went as scheduled. Anderson’s unit hit the Mar estate. Daniel hung back—”
“He was not to do so,” Chimele said.
“I warned him; I warned him strongly. He knows Anderson’s suspicions of him. But Daniel can’t do the things these men do. His conscience—his honor,” he amended, trying to choose words that had clear meaning for Chimele—“is offended over the killings. He had to kill a man in the last raid.”
Chimele made a dismissing move of her hand. “He was attacked.”
“I could explain the human ethical—”
“Explain what is at hand.”
“There was a child—a girl. It was a crisis. I tried to reason with him. He shut me out and took her away. He is still going, deserting Anderson—and us.”
There were no curses in the iduve language. Possibly that contributed to their fierceness. Chimele said nothing.
“I’m trying to reason with him,” Aiela said. “He’s exhausted—drained. He hasn’t slept in twenty hours. He lay awake last night, sick over the prospect of this raid. He’s going on little sleep, no water, no food. He can’t expect to find water as he’s heading, not until the river. They can’t make it.”
“This is not a rational human response.” That was a question. Chimele’s voice had an utter calm, not a good sign in an iduve.
“It is a human response, but it is not rational.”
Chimele hissed and rose, hands on her hips. “Is it not your duty to anticipate such responses and deal with them?”
“I don’t blame him,” he said. Then, from his heart: “I’m only afraid I might have done otherwise.” And that thought so depressed him he felt tears rise. Chimele looked down on him in incredulity.
“ Au,by what am I served? Explain. I am patient. Is this a predictable response?”
Aiela could have screamed aloud. The paredrefaded. He shivered in the cold of a Priamid night, the glory of spiraling ribbons of stars overhead, the fragile sweet warmth of another being in his arms. Tears filled his eyes; his breath caught.
“Aiela,” Chimele said. The iduve could not cry; they lacked the reflex. The remembrance of that made him ashamed in her sight.
“The reaction,” he said, “is probably instinct. I—have grown so much into him I—cannot tell. I cannot judge what he does any longer. It seems right to me.”
“Is it dhis-instinct, a response to this child?”
“Something like that,” he said, grateful for her attempt at equation. Chimele considered that for a moment, her eyes more perplexed now than angry.
“It is difficult to rely on such unknown quantities. I offer my regret for what you must be feeling, though I am not sure I can comprehend it. Other humans—like Anderson—are immune to this emotion where the young are concerned. Why does Daniel succumb?”
“I don’t live inside Anderson. I don’t know what goes on in his twisted mind. I only know Daniel—this night—could not have done otherwise.”