I must never strike him, whatever the provocation, Hresh told himself. I would kill him if I struck him the way he struck me. I would snap his neck like a dry twig.
And then he thought, No, that would not happen. For I would be dead before my hand reached his face.
“Why did you hit me?” Hresh asked in wonder.
For answer, Noum om Beng hit him again on the other side of his face. This blow was as hard as the first, but it came as less of a surprise, and Hresh rode with it, lessening the impact.
Hresh stared.
“Have I displeased you?” he asked.
“I have just struck you a third time,” said Noum om Beng, though his hand had not moved at all.
The calm flat statement left Hresh mystified for a moment. But only for a moment; and then he realized what his error must have been.
“I am sorry to have given offense, Father,” he said quietly.
“Better. Better.”
“From now on I will show respect,” said Hresh. “Forgive me, Father.”
“I will strike you many times,” Noum om Beng said.
He was true to his word, as Hresh found him to be in all other things. Scarcely a meeting between them went by when Noum om Beng did not lift his hand to Hresh, sometimes lightly and almost mockingly, sometimes with astonishing power, and always when Hresh least expected it. It was stern and bewildering discipline, and often Hresh’s lip would swell or his eye would throb or his jaw would ache for days afterward. But he never struck back, and after a while he came to see the blows as an essential part of Noum om Beng’s method of discourse, a kind of punctuation or emphasis, to be accepted naturally and without demur. Though Hresh rarely understood at the moment what it was that he had said to merit a blow, he would usually comprehend later, perhaps half an hour afterward, perhaps not for several days. It was always some stupidity of his that was being called violently to his attention in this way, some error of reasoning, some shortsightedness, some failure of intellectual etiquette.
Eventually Hresh was bothered less by the blows themselves than by the awareness of inadequacy that they conveyed. What Noum om Beng showed him, as the months passed, was that he was clever but that the powers of his mind, in which he had always taken such great pride, had their limitations. It was a painful revelation. And so he sat tense and stiff through each of his meetings with the old man of the Helmet People, waiting gloomily for the next sudden proof that he had failed to come up to whatever mark it was that Noum om Beng had set for him.
“But what do you discuss with him?” Taniane asked, for now he and Taniane had begun to speak with each other again, though cautiously and without ever once referring to the ill-starred invitation he had offered her.
“He does most of the talking. Nearly all, in fact. And most of it is philosophy.”
“I don’t know that word.”
“Ideas about ideas. Very remote, very cloudy. I don’t understand a tenth of what he tells me.” Noum om Beng, he said, set all the themes and would not be led in any path that he had not chosen himself. Hresh longed to ask him about the origin and history of the Helmet People, about the downfall of the Great World, about conditions elsewhere in the world at this time, and many other things. Now and then Noum om Beng gave him tantalizing hints, but little more. “He’s let me know that the Helmet People have been out in the world much longer than we have,” Hresh told Taniane. “That there are many other tribes out there too, and that much of the world is ruled by the hjjk-men. But I get these things from him in a cloudy way, by listening for the answers behind the answers.” Indeed most of Hresh’s questions simply went unanswered; a few earned him blows, presumably for impertinence, though Hresh was never able to see a pattern in the things he said that led Noum om Beng to strike him. An inquiry into the nature of the gods might get him a slap one day, and a trivial and innocent question about the habits of vermilions might draw one the next. Perhaps it was that Noum om Beng preferred never to be questioned about anything; or perhaps he simply wanted to keep Hresh off balance. Certainly he succeeded in doing that.
“He hits you?” Taniane asked in amazement.
“It’s part of the instruction. There’s nothing personal in it.”
“But it’s such an insult. To have someone actually strike you with his hand—”
“It’s just a kind of philosophical statement,” said Hresh.
“You and your philosophy!” But she said it kindly, and her smile was a warm one. Then she added, “This is changing you, Hresh. These talks with that old man.”
“Changing me?”
“You keep to yourself so much. You hardly speak to me, or anyone else in the tribe, any more. When you aren’t with Noum om Beng you’re off alone in your room, or, I suppose, wandering around in the back streets of Vengiboneeza. And you don’t go out with the Seekers any more.”
“Koshmar doesn’t want us going out until we understand what the Bengs are up to.”
“But you do go out. I know you do. You go alone, though, and you don’t seem to be looking for anything. You’re wandering without purpose.”
“How would you know that?”
“Because once or twice I’ve followed you,” said Taniane, and gave him a shameless grin.
He shrugged and would not ask her why, and the conversation trickled toward a halt. But he couldn’t deny the truth of what she had said. There were changes going on within his soul that he felt he was unable to share with anyone, for he hardly understood them himself. They had to do with the revelation of the Tree of Life, which had so conclusively shown Hresh that the People had no claim to calling themselves human, and with the coming of the Bengs, and the departure of Harruel, and with the whole situation that the tribe found itself in in Vengiboneeza, and with many other things, not the least of them his own relationship, or lack of one, with Taniane. But these were too many things to grapple with all at once. As Torlyri once had told him, nobody can deal with more than one enormous thing at a time.
Now he was approaching the chambers of Noum om Beng once more, and he felt a band of uneasiness across the chest, a squirming in his stomach. These visits were becoming increasingly tense for him.
It had not been that way at the beginning, many months before. Noum om Beng had seemed just a strange-looking shriveled old man then, frail and remote and alien. To Hresh he had been nothing but a repository of new knowledge, a kind of casket of chronicles waiting to be opened and read. But now that they were able to speak one another’s language and Hresh was coming to have some truer understanding of Noum om Beng’s nature, he saw the depth and power of the man, and the chilly austerity of him, and he could not help a feeling of dismay at the thought of baring his mind to him. Not since Thaggoran had been alive had Hresh known anyone remotely like Noum om Beng; and Thaggoran had been too familiar a figure, and Hresh had been too young, for there to have been anything frightening about their conversations. It was different with Noum om Beng. He opened incomprehensible worlds to Hresh, and that was terrifying.
“You look troubled today,” Noum om Beng said, as Hresh entered his chambers on this dry, hot midsummer day. The offhand statement was almost as unexpected as one of the blows Noum om Beng dispensed so freely. Rarely did Noum om Beng show much awareness of Hresh’s state of mind, nor interest in it.
Taking his seat before the old man’s stone bench, Hresh said, “Koshmar has asked me once again to teach the Beng language to our people, Father.”
“Teach it, then! Why have you hesitated so long?”