“Ah,” she said. She had spoken of Koshmar as her friend. “And friendship between man and woman? What does that mean?”
He looked even more uncomfortable. “It means — you must understand — it — means — oh, Torlyri, must I say, must I say? You know! You do!”
“I gave myself in friendship to a man and he hurt me.”
“It happens. But not all the time.”
“We are of different tribes — there is no precedent—”
“You speak our language. You will know our ways.” He proffered the shining helmet again. “There is something between us. You know that. You knew it from the first. Even when we could not speak with each other, there was something. The helmet is for you, Torlyri. Many years have I kept it in this box, but now I give it to you. Please. Please.”
Now he was trembling. She could not have that. Gently she took the helmet from him, and held it above her head as though trying it on, and then, without putting it on, she pressed it against her bosom and carefully laid it to one side.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “I will treasure it all my life.”
She touched his scar again, lightly, lovingly. His hand went to the white stripe that began at her left shoulder, and traveled down her body as far as her breast, and paused there. She moved toward him. Then he embraced her and drew her down toward the pile of furs.
Under the hot cutting wind out of the south Taniane felt her soul stirring with yearnings both of the body and the spirit.
There was a throbbing all along her belly and thighs and inward to her sexual parts that was easy enough to understand. It would be good to couple today. Haniman was probably around somewhere, or else Orbin would do. Orbin was never unwilling.
Then, too, she felt a tension in her forehead and at the base of her neck and downward through her spine that appeared to argue in favor of a twining. She had not twined in a long time. Indeed, it was something she rarely did, for lack of a partner who touched her spirit. But today the need seemed urgent. Perhaps, she thought, she was only confusing it with coupling-need, and that other pressure would go away once she had found the pleasure her body craved.
But there was something else troubling her that was neither coupling-need nor twining-need: a restlessness, a deep sense of impatience and uneasiness, that sprang from no specific cause. She felt it in her teeth, behind her eyes, in the pit of her stomach; but she knew that those were mere outward manifestations of some ache of the soul. That was not an unfamiliar sensation for her, but it was more intense today, as if fanned to kindling-heat by the unceasing maddening gusts of the dry wind. It had something to do with the departure of Harruel and his followers — Taniane by now had come to believe that they must be undergoing the most marvelous adventures in dazzling far-off lands, while she remained trapped here pointlessly in dusty crumbling Vengiboneeza — and it had something to do also with the expanding presence of the Bengs. The Bengs pretended friendship, but it was friendship of a strange kind. In their friendly way they had slowly but steadily taken full possession of nearly every quarter of the city as though they were the masters of the place and Koshmar’s tribe a mere raggle-taggle band of amiably tolerated intruders. Taniane was bothered, too, by Koshmar’s passivity in the face of this displacement. She had not tried to deal with the Bengs at all. She had done nothing to limit the spread of their power. She simply shrugged and let them do as they pleased.
Koshmar barely seemed to be Koshmar any longer. It seemed to Taniane that the secession of Harruel must have broken her. And there were problems of some sort between Koshmar and Torlyri, evidently; Torlyri was hardly ever to be found in the settlement now, but spent most of her time off among the Bengs. The rumor was that Torlyri had taken a Beng lover. Why did Koshmar tolerate that? What was wrong with Koshmar? If she lacked the strength to be chieftain any longer, why didn’t she step down, and let someone with a little vigor take over? Koshmar was past the old limit-age now. If the tribe still lived in the cocoon, Taniane thought, Koshmar would have gone outside to her death, and very likely I would be chieftain now. But there was no longer a limit-age and Koshmar refused to relinquish power.
Taniane had no desire to overthrow Koshmar by force, nor did she think the People would support her if she attempted it, even though she was the only woman of the tribe who was of the proper age and the proper spirit to be chieftain. But something had to be done. New leadership is what we need, she thought, and soon. And the new leader, Taniane told herself, must find some way of halting the encroachments of the Bengs.
She crossed the plaza and entered the storehouse where the Great World artifacts were kept. She hoped to find Haniman there, and deal with the simplest of the needs that were assailing her this morning.
But instead of Haniman she found Hresh, morosely prowling among the mysterious ancient devices that he and his Seekers had collected, which had largely been neglected since the coming of the Bengs. He looked up at her but did not speak,
“Am I disturbing you?” she asked.
“Not especially. Is there something you want?”
“I was looking for — well, it doesn’t matter. You look unhappy, Hresh.”
“So do you.”
“It’s this filthy wind. Will it ever stop blowing, do you think?”
He shrugged. “It’ll stop when it stops. There’s rain in the north and this dry air is rushing to meet it.”
“You understand so much, Hresh.”
Looking away, he said, “I understand hardly anything at all.”
“You really are unhappy about something.”
She moved closer to him. He stood with shoulders slumped, saying nothing, idly toying with some intricate silvery device whose function no one had ever been able to determine. How thin he is, she thought. How slight. Suddenly her heart surged with love for him. She saw that he might actually be afraid of her, he whose great wisdom and mysterious skills of the mind had been so frightening to her. She wanted to put her arm around him as Torlyri might do, and comfort him, and draw him into a warm embrace. But he was hidden away behind a curtain of distress.
She said, “Tell me what troubles you.”
“Did I say that anything did?”
“I can see it on your face.”
He shook his head irritably. “Let me be, Taniane. Are you looking for Haniman? I don’t know where he is. Possibly he and Orbin went down to the lakefront to catch some fish, or else—”
“I didn’t come here looking for Haniman,” she said. And then to her own great surprise she heard herself saying, “I came here looking for you, Hresh.”
“Me? What do you want with me?”
Desperately improvising, she said, “Can you teach me some words of the Beng language, do you think? Just a little of it?”
“You too?”
“Has someone else asked you that?”
“Torlyri. That Beng of hers, the one with the scar that she’s always laughing and flirting with — she’s in love with him, do you know that? She came to me a few days ago with a funny look in her eye. Teach me Beng, she said. You have to teach me Beng. Teach me right away. She insisted. Have you ever heard Torlyri insist on anything before?”
“What did you do?”
“I taught her how to speak Beng.”
“You did? I thought you didn’t yet know enough of it yourself to teach anyone anything except a few words.”
“No,” Hresh said in a very small voice. “I was lying. I know Beng like a Beng. I used the Barak Dayir to learn it from the old man of their tribe. I was keeping it all to myself, that was all. But I couldn’t refuse Torlyri when she asked like that. So now she knows Beng too.”
“And I’ll be the next one to learn.”
Hresh looked flustered and immensely ill at ease.