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  It had taken both Tarani and me to lift the cub and lay it across Keeshah’s shoulders. Keeshah walked between us carefully, and Tarani and I each kept a hand on the cooling body to keep it in place.

  Crowds parted silently before us as we entered the city, out of respect for our grief, awe of the sha’um, and fear. The people of Raithskar were not afraid of us, although we must have been a grim and bloody sight. They were afraid of creatures who could destroy a sha’um, the same creatures that had gathered their garbage and repaired their streets. They were afraid of the way things had changed.

  Thanasset opened the gate into the yard for us. His sister, Milda, waiting behind him, gasped and turned pale when she saw us. Markasset’s father was stunned. He reached out to me and pressed my shoulder. “I am glad to have you home again, son,” he said.

  It was almost more than I could take. Thanasset knew I was no longer Markasset, yet he cared for me as if I were. I put my hand on his shoulder and couldn’t speak.

  “We have heard, of course,” he said. “There is a bath ready for you.”

  “Let Tarani use the bathhouse first,” I said. “Milda, will you help her? She’s exhausted.”

  “And you are not?” the girl demanded, coming around Keeshah.

  I didn’t bother to deny it. “Your skills will be needed later, after the sha’um have cleaned themselves up so we can see how badly they’re hurt. Get what rest you can now.”

  She nodded, and we all moved through the gate so that Thanasset could close it against the silent crowd of onlookers. It was made like most things of wood in Gandalara, with layers and layers of small pieces of wood laminated together. When Thanasset closed the gate, I noticed that the inside was badly scarred, with two or three layers missing in spots.

  Tarani helped me lift the dead cub from Keeshah’s back and lower it to the ground, then she stood up, staggering. Milda—short, stocky, and balding—put her arm around Tarani’s waist, tense with concern.

  Tarani smiled wearily. “Thank you, Milda. I will appreciate your help.”

  They moved off toward the back of the yard, where a reservoir on the roof of the bath-house held sun-warmed water ready for bathing. I sat on the ground and stared at the dead kitten. Thanasset sat beside me quietly.

  The adult sha’um had moved away, each pinning a cub to the ground and licking it clean. The cubs protested weakly, then relaxed. They were asleep in minutes—two tiny warm presences in my mind. When the cubs were damp and shiny—and remarkably unhurt, I was glad to see—the adults began to groom one another.

  “I would have kept the cubs,” Thanasset said at last, “but she would not trust me with them. She was wild to go; she even tried to claw her way through the gate.” I remembered the scarring. “When I realized she was determined, and might hurt herself trying to get out, I opened the gate for her. She herded the cubs with her. I knew, of course,” he said, “that Tarani was in danger. But I never thought Yayshah would take the cubs into battle with her.”

  “She didn’t,” I said. “They were hidden in the fields, and I’m sure she ordered them to stay put. The vineh spotted them and attacked.” I looked up into the old man’s face, more lined than it had been a few days ago. “They dragged the cubs out into the road, where we could see them. And as I think of it now, they weren’t trying very hard to hurt them.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that they dragged the cubs into it to divide us and demoralize us. It worked.”

  “That’s not possible,” the old man said, showing real fear for the first time since I (as Ricardo or Rikardon) had known him. “You forget—” he began, then lowered his voice. “You forget that I have known their minds. They are beasts, I tell you; they are not capable of such reasoned planning.”

  “Wild vineh aren’t, I grant you that,” I said. “But these are the product of generations of inbreeding and behavior control that rewarded them for their successful imitation of men. They learned to sweep streets because someone showed them how. Why should that be the only thing they learned?”

  “They were not taught tactics,” he said sharply.

  “You said you’ve touched their minds; you know how they think,” I said. “Couldn’t that work both ways? Couldn’t they have learned how you think?” He looked so horrified that I added: “In general terms, I mean. Couldn’t they know, for instance, that although we live in large groups, we are more bound to family than to colony, and that we are each protective of our own young?”

  He considered that for a few minutes, his hand stroking the soft fur that covered the stiffening body in front of us.

  “I suppose it could be true,” he admitted. “But I have no wish to believe it. It paints the vineh in the role of a true enemy of Raithskar, rather than a nuisance to be controlled. If they can summon such numbers against a few, can we expect an all-out attack on the city?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “Zaddorn said it’s been fairly quiet, and I assume he meant that the ‘escaped’ vineh haven’t been giving anybody much trouble.”

  “That’s true,” Thanasset said. “The Council agreed to leave the grain fields and a herd of glith west of the city unguarded, so the vineh would have no need to fight for food. It has kept confrontations to a minimum—until today.”

  “Today doesn’t count,” I said. “I think the sha’um triggered the attack.” I felt the same nudge of oddness that I felt talking with Zaddorn, but I was able to identify it now. “It’s possible the vineh didn’t even realize it. There were two battles, you know—”

  “Two battles?” he asked.

  I took a few minutes and described both battles we had fought that day against the vineh. I tried to keep my emotions out of the description, but Thanasset made up for it by putting in his own while he listened. He looked thoroughly shaken by the time I finished.

  “I am afraid I still do not understand what you mean,” he said.

  “I think the sha’um and the vineh are natural enemies,” I told him. He looked blank, and I tried to explain. “Sometime in the past—a long time in the past—the wild vineh and the wild sha’um may have been constantly fighting one another. It went on long enough that the young were born with an awareness of danger in the other species. That awareness never went away.”

  “But Keeshah was never bothered,” Thanasset said. “My sha’um was never bothered.”

  “Because the vineh inside Raithskar were not in a natural state,” I said. “Your control blocked that instinct as effectively as it blocked their tendency toward violence. I think they attacked us in the desert because the sha’um triggered that instinct—but because the bulk of their conscious experience with enemies lay with men, they concentrated on Tarani and me. By the time they launched the second attack, they knew who they were really fighting.”

  “It makes a kind of sense,” he said. “Does it not mean, however, that they will persist in trying to reach the sha’um and destroy them?”

  “I’ll grant them cunning,” I said, “but not intelligence. They went after Keeshah because his scent stimulated their aggression. The scent of sha’um is lost in the center of Raithskar. And we won’t leave the city again until we’re ready to leave for good.”

  “Back to Eddarta,” Thanasset said. “I saw the sword Tarani carried. Did it—have the effect you anticipated?”

  I had confided in the old man that Tarani was a “visitor,” which was exactly what he understood me to be—a personality returned from the All-Mind to inhabit a living body. It was a concept he could comprehend, and it was as close to the truth as I dared get. Tarani, even with Antonia’s memories to help her, had a hard time accepting the real truth of the world from which we had come.

  I nodded. “The union took a different form with Tarani,” I said. “She is herself, with the memories of the visitor.” I stood up a little awkwardly—my sore muscles had stiffened while I was sitting. “I have a lot to tell you,” I said, “but there is something I need to tend to first. We
—” I choked up suddenly. “May we bury Yayshah’s cub in your garden?”

  “I will be honored,” he said, and went to get his digging tools.

  5

  My prediction of no further trouble proved, thankfully, to be true. Tarani and I and the sha’um went on vacation for a while, resting deeply. Milda fussed over us pleasantly and fed us constantly. Thanasset took charge of providing food for the sha’um; already Yayshah was chewing up bits of meat and leaving it for the cubs to work on, and their chewing action was stimulating the full emergence of their teeth.

  Tarani’s hypnotic skill hastened our physical healing to a degree that amazed Milda. Yayshah was the only one who had been immobilized long enough to suffer from the teeth, as well as the hands, of vineh. She had some painful gashes in her back and flanks, and some ugly scars in the paler fur of her still-tightening underbelly. Keeshah carried more wounds, but they were mostly surface scratches, quickly covered with new fur growth.

  Tarani and I needed new skins. I had reexperienced the pain when Thanasset had helped me peel off my blood-soaked clothes and bathe open the myriad of scratches. Milda smeared us daily with a skin salve to keep the newly forming scabs soft. After a few days of looking like walking horror-film monsters, the ridges of skin softened and closed, and finally dropped off to leave behind little more than faint marks in our skin.

  The wound left by the cub’s loss didn’t heal, but the pain faded as we took pleasure in the other two. They were, indeed, nearly unharmed, which seemed to confirm my feeling that the vineh who had held them had not been trying to hurt them.

  “Why did they kill the other one?” Tarani asked me one day, as we watched Yayshah rolling in the shade of the sha’um house, offering her paws as targets for the cubs’ stalking practice. Keeshah was in his favorite spot, snoozing on the roof of his house.

  The kittens were growing with a wild speed, leaving behind the pale-tipped fur of their babyhood. The male, whom we had named Koshah, looked like a smaller duplicate of Keeshah, right down to the nearly indistinguishable pattern of pale tan against pale gray in his fur. He was already bigger than his sister, with slightly awkward proportions that promised he would match Keeshah’s size, which was unusually large among sha’um.

  The female, Yoshah, moved with delicate grace, attacking any target with economy of movement and unerring accuracy. She was brindled like her mother, striped in varying shades of dark gray and brown. In the natural environment of the Valley, the markings would provide camouflage. Outside the cooler, highly overgrown Valley, however, the darker coats brought more discomfort from the heat to Yayshah and Yoshah than the males suffered.

  “I don’t know,” I told Tarani. “I may be giving them more credit than they deserve. They might have intended to kill the others, too, until they saw the effect the live, crying kittens had on the big sha’um.”

  “There is another thing I do not understand,” Tarani said. “I could spare little attention for anything but fighting, but I do remember a sudden change. One moment, Koshah and Yoshah were fighting their own battle with their captors; the next instant, they had joined Keeshah.”

  I don’t know why I hadn’t told anyone about the cubs and me. Perhaps it was only the human tendency to enjoy a secret delight more, on occasion, than a shared pleasure.

  The link with the cubs was of a different quality than my link with Keeshah. His was a continuing, comfortable presence often overlooked, like two people who had lived together for so long that accommodation and compromise were accomplished almost automatically on a daily basis. The cubs were volatile, sometimes unaware of me, sometimes offering a mental nuzzling of curiosity, now and then exploding into a full blend—jointly or individually—that brought me the unrestrained joy of romping childhood again. Yet even then, it wasn’t the full, binding, total experience that a blend with Keeshah produced.

  I had been careful not to exercise the link with the cubs more than to make them aware that I was the body associated with the mind they knew. Sha’um didn’t normally bond until they were at least a year old, and I was concerned that this early bonding, brought about by such a traumatic need, would affect their normal development.

  I chose to exercise it now, however—by way of explanation to Tarani.

  *Yoshah, come,* I said. *Koshah, come.*

  On the roof of the house, Keeshah raised his head. *Me?* he asked sleepily.

  *No, I call the cubs,* I answered him.

  *Good,* he grunted, and went back to sleep.

  The two young sha’um broke off the sneak-and-pounce game they were playing with their mother and ran over to the garden bench where Tarani and I were sitting. The male lumbered up, put his forepaws on the stone seat, and lifted his upper body until he was looking down at me. The female barreled straight at us and threw herself on her side at the last minute, arriving with four paws and a set of teeth in contact with my boots.

  “Whoa,” I said hastily, startled in spite of the fact that I could see from her mind she was only playing. I bent over and uncurled her, stroking her fur with my spread fingers, while Tarani reached over my back to attend to scratching Koshah’s ear.

  *Go on back to your mother now,* I told them. Yayshah was sitting up, watching us curiously—a little warily, I thought. *I love you. Have fun*

  They went, Koshah pausing to butt his forehead against my shoulder as he left.

  Tarani said: “They are darling creatures, are they not? I find it hard to picture them fighting vineh, though I might draw the image from my own memory… .” She stopped, and I knew she had connected back to our interrupted conversation. “You called them,” she said. “Just now, and during the fight.”

  “Keeshah was with me during the fight,” I said. “I feel sure that’s what made it possible—the cubs must have recognized his mind, on some level.”

  “And when Keeshah left you, when the danger was gone?”

  “The link remained.”

  “With both of them?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what of Keeshah? Is he linked to them directly, as well?”

  It was a possibility that had not occurred to me, and I felt myself getting as excited at the prospect as Tarani sounded.

  “I honestly don’t know,” I said, and in my eagerness woke Keeshah up, then and there, to test it out.

  *Say something to the cubs* I asked him, when he had grumbled awake. There was an unflattering picture in his mind of a crazy two-legged creature, but he complied. He snarled. The cubs jumped, and looked up curiously. Yahshah snarled back.

  *Not like that,* I said. *Say something to them the way you talk to me *

  Keeshah squirmed on the rooftop until his head lay across one paw. His silver-flecked eyes glowed as he blinked slowly at me.

  *Silly,* he said, and closed his eyes.

  I knew that mood; it was no use trying to rouse him now.

  “He won’t even try,” I said to Tarani, exasperated.

  “I am rather glad,” she said, surprising me. “Look at it from Yayshah’s point of view,” she explained. “Would you care to try to teach a child who could learn any needed thing directly from the mind of his father?”

  “It might be hard,” I admitted.

  “And it is hard enough to know that you can speak to them; I would feel even more deprived if Keeshah had acquired the ability, as well.”

  I took her hand, and we sat quietly for a while. I was feeling nearly fit, after all the rest and attention I’d been enjoying. I was feeling fit enough, in fact, to be a shade restless. Thanasset had forbidden us visitors until we were healthy again, and I knew nothing of what was happening in the city except what Thanasset brought home, and that was usually a relieved announcement that no vineh attacks had occurred that day.

  “How’s your leg doing?” I asked Tarani suddenly. Her most severe wound had been four lacerations dug from the outside of her right thigh by the nails of a vineh hand. She had limped a bit the first few days, but I hadn’t noticed the li
mp lately.

  “It is nearly healed,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

  “I think we deserve a little fun, as well as a lot of rest, don’t you.”

  “Yes, but—” she began, bewildered.

  “Come out with me tonight,” I urged her. “Dinner first, and then dancing. Well pretend we have nothing to do but have a good time.”

  Her face lit up like a child’s; she laughed out loud and threw her arms around my neck.

  “It is exactly what I want to do,” she said, and kissed my ear, sending a tingle down my chest. “I did not know I wanted it until you spoke. But yes, please, I want to dance again.”

  Tarani disappeared for the rest of the day. I played with the cubs, harassed Milda in the kitchen, napped, and finally bathed and dressed for the evening. Daytime dress in Gandalara was a haphazard sort of thing—usually long-sleeved or sleeveless tunics, with trousers added for adults if the tunic’s hem hit midthigh or higher. The most common fabric was made of a woven grain floss, the cost inversely proportional to the tightness of the weave. Raithskarians had a fondness for bright colors and were not particular about how they were combined. If you bothered to wear colors that matched or complemented each other, you were getting dressed up.

  Markasset had enjoyed dressing well, so that I had a lot to choose from. I looked at, but rejected, the green outfit I had worn when I had taken Illia dancing back in my “innocent” days, when I had not known the truth about the Ra’ira. The outfit reminded me of my hope, long since abandoned, of being able to settle into a quiet and contented routine in which to live this strangely acquired second life.

  I refolded the green outfit and put it on one of the higher shelves in Markasset’s closet. Digging around the back of the lower shelves yielded an unusual garment: a sleeved shirt of pale yellow, hip length, styled like a vest but large enough to wrap. I tried it on, looked into the polished bronze of a mirror, and decided Markasset must have saved this for very special occasions. The color accentuated the dark gold of my headfur; the opening exposed a long “V” of curly-haired chest. I found some trousers of a warm brown color and a matching vest. The vest belted to form a second “V” over the pale yellow shirt. I was satisfied that I looked special enough for my first date with Tarani.