“Before you sleep, wenda,” he said softly bending over me, “there is a word I was told to say to you. The word means nothing to me, but perhaps it has meaning for you.” He said the word and I heard it, but it didn’t register in my consciousness. Then I could fight the waves of exhaustion no longer and I slept.
7
When I opened my eyes, light streamed in from the camtah’s leather curtain, and I could see that I was alone. There was a vast excitement within me, and I dressed quickly in the clean yellow imad and blue caldin near my furs, then went outside.
The sky was still grey through the trees, but the rain had stopped falling. The barbarian was nowhere in sight, and one of the seetar was gone, too. The other stood hobbled and tied to a tree, grumbling to itself in vague annoyance. There was a flying thing in the tree above it, waiting patiently for something, and another flying thing shied nervously in the air at the sight of the seetar below the tree.
The world was wonderful, and I gloried in being fully alive again. I strolled away from the camtah, reaching out to the living minds around me, feeling their emotions and experiencing them. The blindfold was gone, the earplugs were gone, and I was whole once more, free to be what I was.
The ground was still soggy underfoot, but I didn’t care. I walked on for a few minutes, then finally stopped and leaned against the trunk of a tree, feeling the clean breeze on my face, the rough bark against my back. The night before, the barbarian had said the triggering word that released me from the repressive conditioning that kept me from using my gift, from even knowing that I had it. All XenoMediators had to have the gift of full empathy the ability to read the emotions of others and also influence those emotions, but Primes were the strongest of all. Bitter misunderstandings and bruised sensibilities weren’t possible with an awakened and alerted Prime in attendance, and agreements and treaties were easily reached.
Many, many years ago, it was decided that awakened empaths, no matter how valuable they were to Central, couldn’t be allowed to move about freely on Central. Even if the government had permitted it, the population would have been too uneasy for peace to last very long. Riots would have started, and even the strongest of the Primes would have been unable to save himself from a mob that screamed for his blood. To avert such a disaster, empaths and Central government had made a pact: the empaths agreed to live half lives when on Central, and in return they received everything else that they wanted. In a carefully formulated program, the people were told from their first days of education that XM’s, and especially Primes, were giving up the equivalent of sight and hearing just to live among them and serve them. The indoctrination produced pity and awe in the people, and they all did what they could to make the lot of an empath easier.
I moved away from the tree, smoothing the back of the caldin with a quick stroke so I could squat down without dipping it in the mud. There was a small, dirty pool of water near my feet, and I could almost see myself in it.
“Why do you keep going back there?” I asked my distorted reflection. “Why don’t you live elsewhere so you can stay alive?”
My reflection didn’t answer, but it didn’t have to. I already knew that after every assignment was completed, someone came by with the counter-trigger that took my gift away from me again, along with the very memory of it. You can’t resent the loss of something you don’t know you have, something you can’t even wonder about, and you become dependent on the people who can give you your life back. We’d long since passed the need to fear the people of Central, but the government was much too fond of the leash it had on us to turn us loose again.
“What do you do so far from the camtah?” the barbarian demanded suddenly wrenching my thoughts back to the present situation. I looked up at him, cursing myself for being so deep in thought that I hadn’t felt his approach. He blazed with anger, but there was a residual of fear there, too. Had he been afraid that he’d lost his Prime?
“I felt like taking a walk.” I told him, standing straight and brushing at the caldin. “You didn’t say I couldn’t.”
“I do say so now,” he growled, staring down at me with the anger cooling a bit. “You are not to leave the camtah save with me. These woods are not safe.”
I opened my mouth to say that I would have warning of any danger, but was hit so hard with a solid wave of hunger and viciousness that I staggered as if I’d been struck physically. The barbarian took a step toward me, but I waved him away, pointing frantically in the direction that the emotion was coming from. He whirled around, sliding his mighty blade out of its sheath as he turned, bringing it up just barely in time to meet the charge of the beast I had felt.
The thing raced from the brush on four legs, but it was taller at the shoulders than the top of my head. It was a tawny gold in color, with short, bristly hair all over it, long, flexing claws on its legs, sharp, slavering teeth in its mouth. Its eyes and mind were mad with kill lust, and I backed away a few paces, trembling more from the mental onslaught than from its physical appearance. A gentle, intelligent being may be housed in the most grotesque of bodies, and it doesn’t matter in the least. The mind is the thing that counts.
The barbarian swung his blade at the beast as it closed with him, cutting deeply into its shoulder. It screamed out its pain and turned briefly aside, then charged again in renewed rage. The wound was a serious one, but I knew from its mind that the berserk beast would not slow down until it was dead. The barbarian cut at its other shoulder then jumped aside, barely escaping the teeth and claws that hungered for his blood.
I forced calm and control over myself, then reached out toward the beast. As I’d suspected, there was a small node of fear behind the insane rage, a fear that in large part produced the rage. I touched the fear, encouraging it and causing it to grow larger, unpenning it from the beast’s denial.
The beast had scrabbled around as Tammad backed up to a tree, preparing to launch itself at him in a desperate attack. The barbarian’s sword was red with gore, his body so splattered with it that it was hard telling whether or not he was hurt. The animal took three short steps toward the man, then the fear flowed out into the beast’s mind, causing it to howl in an agony that tore at me. It stopped still with its legs spread and its head back, howling its fear and pain, and the barbarian stepped forward and swung his sword, cutting the beast’s throat and almost severing its head from its body. The howling cut off as the body collapsed, but the agony faded more slowly
The barbarian paused to look down at the dead beast, then turned away from it and walked to me. There had been no fear in him during the battle, but only, I thought, because there had been no room for it. His emotions had been filled with the need to win, the determination to win. Fear is accompanied by doubt, and there had been no doubt in him either. He carried his bloody sword in his hand, and he walked slowly to where I stood.
“Your warning was timely” he said, staring down at me speculatively. “We are fortunate that you saw the beast as it attacked. I must have been distracted indeed not to have detected it myself. A strange fazee it was, insane as they all are, yet something more. Come, we will return to the camtah.”
I went with him, walking slightly ahead as I followed the grumbling of the seetar that was clearer than any trail. We reached the camtah without further incident, but the barbarian threw his sword down on the tent’s veranda, then put his hands on my shoulders so that he could stare down into my eyes. I could feel his curiosity as if it were an itch as yet unscratched.