But she suffered him then to put his hands on her waist, and to lift her up, by far the easiest and least hurtful way for her: but she could not lift her hands to reach Niun's, and protested painshe once kel'e'en. "Wait," Niun objected, and with a turn of cord and a knot fashioned a sling and cast it down. He wrapped it about hand and arm and took the weight carefully as she settled in the sling he had made: Duncan helped lift, but for a time the thin, cutting cord and an upward pull bit into Niun's hands. He tried not to rake her against the jagged opening, pulled ever so carefully, and braced his feet and ignored the pain of his hands. She came through and levered herself out onto the sunlit dust, tried to rise: he had her, he had her safe; and he hugged her to her feet and held to her as he had held to no living being since childhood, they both entangled in the cord. He brushed dust and tears from her face, she still gasping in the outside air.
"The ship is destroyed," he said, to have all the cruelty done with while wounds were still numb. "Everyone else is dead, unless there is someone else alive down there."
"No. None. They had no time. They were too old to runthey would notthey sat still, with the she'pan. Then the House"
She began to shake as if in the grip of a great cold; but she was once of the Kel, and she did not break. She controlled herself, and after a moment began to disentangle them both from the cord.
"None," he said, to be sure she understood it all, "could have possibly survived on the ship."
She sat down on the edge of the section of wall that blocked the doors, and smoothed back her mane with one hand, her head bowed. She found her torn scarf at her shoulder and smoothed it and carefully covered her head with that light, gauze veil. She was quiet for a time, her head still turned from him.
At last she straightened her shoulders, and pointed over to the hole in the rubble, where Duncan waited. "And what is he?" she asked.
He shrugged. "No matter to us. A human. A regul guest. They tried to kill him when we met; then" The surmise that it was this, partly his own action, which had killed the People and left them orphan, was too terrible to speak. His voice trailed off, and Melein arose and walked from him, to look at the ruin, her back to him, her hands limp at her sides. The sight of her despair was like a wound to him.
"Melein," he said to her. "Melein, what am I to do?"
She turned to him, gave a tiny, helpless gesture. "I am nothing."
"What am I to do?" he insisted.
Sen and Keclass="underline" Sen must lead; but she had become more than Sen, and that was the heaviness on her, which he saw she did not want, which she had to bear. He stood waiting. At last she shut her eyes and opened them again.
"Enemies will come here," she said, beginning clearly to function as she had been prepared for years to function, to command and to plan: she assumed what she must assume, she'pan of the People, who had no people. "Find us what we need for the hills; and we will camp there tonight. Give me tonight, truebrotherI must not call you that; but tonight, that only, and I will think what is best for us to do."
"Rest," he urged her. "I will do that." And when he had seen her seated and out of the direct sun, he bent down over the hole and cast the cord down. "Duncan."
The human's white face appeared in the center of the light, anxious and frightened. "Lift me up," he said, laying hand on the cord, which Niun refused to give solidity. "Mri, I have helped you. Now lift me out of here."
"Search for the things I name and I will draw them up by the cord. And after that I will draw you up."
Duncan hesitated there, as if he thought that, like humans, a mri would lie. But he agreed then, and sought with his tiny light until he had found all the things that Niun then requested of him. He tied each small bundle on the cord for Niun to draw up: food, and water flasks, and cording and four bolts of unsewn black cloth, for they could not reach better without delaying to pierce a new opening, and Duncan avowed he did not think it safe. A last time the cord came up, with a bolt of cloth; and a last tune he cast it down, this time for Duncan, and braced it about his body and his arm.
It was not so hard as with Melein's uncooperating weight: he leaned and braced his feet, and Duncan hauled himself upgained the lip of the hole and heaved himself to safety, panting, bent double, coughing and trying to stop the bleeding. The coughing went on and on, and Melein came from her place of rest to look down on the human in mingled disgust and pity.
"It is the air," Niun said. "He has been running, and he is not acclimated to Kesrith."
"Is he a manner of kel'en?" asked Melein.
"Yes," Niun said. "But he does not offer any threat. The regul hunted him; likely now they would cease to care unless this man's superior is alive. What shall we do with him?"
Duncan seemed to know they spoke of him; perhaps he knew a few words of the language of the People, but they spoke the High Language, and surely he could not follow that.
Melein shrugged, turned her head from him. "As you please. We will go now."
And she began, slowly, to walk through the ruin, picking her way with care,
"Duncan," said Niun, "pick up the supplies and come."
The human looked outrage at him, as if minded to dispute this as a matter of dignity; and Niun expected it, waited for it. But then Duncan knelt down and made a bundle of the goods with the cord, heaving it to his shoulder as he arose.
Ninun indicated that he should go, and the human carried the burden where Niun aimed him, his footsteps weaving and uncertain in the wake of Melein.
No firing had touched the hills. They came into a sheltered place that was as it had been before the attack, before the discords of regul or mri or humansa shelter safe from airships, withdrawn as it was beneath a sandstone ledge.
With a great sigh Melein sank down on the sand in that cold shadow, and bent, her head against her knees, as if this had been all that she could do, the last step that she could take. She was hurt. Niun had watched her walk and knew that she was in great pain, that he thought was in her side and not her limbs. When she was content to stop, he took the supplies from Duncan, and made haste to spread a cloth for a groundsheet and a cover for Melein. He gave her drink and a bit of dried meat; and watched, sitting on his heels, as she drank and ate, and leaned against the bare rock to rest
"May I drink?"
The human's quiet request reminded him he had another charge on him; and he measured out a capful of water and passed it to Duncan's shaking hands.
"Tomorrow maybe," said Niun, "we will tap a luin and have water enough to drink." He considered the human, who drank at the water drop by drop, a haggard and filthy creature who by appearances ought not to have survived so far. It was not likely that he could survive much farther as he was. He stank, sweat and sulphur compounded with human. Niun found himself hardly cleaner.
"Can you?" he said to Melein, almost having fogotten that her personal name was not for him to speak freely now. He offered her his pistol. "Can you stay awake long enough to watch this human a time?"
"I am well enough," she said, and drew up one knee and rested wrist and pistol on it in an attitude more kel'e'en than she'pan. By caste, she should not touch weapons; but many things ought to be different, and could not be.
He left them so, and went out of sight of the ledge, and stripped and bathed, as mri on dry worlds did, in the dry sand, even to his mane, which when he shook the sand out recovered its glossy feel quickly enough. He felt better when he had done this, and he dressed again, and began to retrace his steps toward the cave.
A heavy body moved behind him, an explosive breath and plaintive sound: dus. He turned carefully, for he had left his gun with Melein, and nothing else could give a ha-dus pause.