"Hungry?" she said as he limped toward her.
He had been given small amounts of milk during the day but now received a portion of raw meat in the second bowl. He ate slowly this time, savoring the flavor of a fleet grazing animal called ma. They were extremely hard to catch and it occurred to him that there must be some good hunters among the psi-folk.
Adriel murmured soothingly and examined each one of his bandages as he ate.
"Looks like you're coming along fine. You'll be back to your old self in no time." She sobered. "Then I suppose you'll take off into the bush again. You don't have to go, you know. We'll treat you well here, really we will. You'll have food and shelter and a friend: me."
The tery considered this.
#
Later, well fed and freshly bandaged, he followed Adriel to the community dining area but remained at a respectful distance, accepting the occasional table scraps the psi-folk offered him, almost enjoying the game of playing a dumb animal.
The progress of the meal, however, was an awe-inspiring sight: Bowls went in all directions, crisscrossing the table in dizzying patterns, hands reached and were filled, portions were dispensed into goblets and onto plates – all without a single word. Only Adriel's tiny voice and an occasional belch broke the silence.
When bellies were full, and the tables and pottery cleaned and cleared away, the group gathered around the central fire for what appeared to be some sort of conference. Adriel hung back, looking indecisive, unaccountably hesitant. Finally, after two or three deep breaths, she strode forward to where her father sat in silence. The big man smiled as she knelt beside him. The tery remained in the background at the perimeter of the firelight, watching, listening.
"We were just discussing the future," her father told her, "and it looks as if we'll be spending years in these forests."
He glanced sharply at Dennel, whose face flickered on the far side of the flames.
In Komak's eyes, the tery could almost read his message to the younger man: Haven't I asked you to use your tongue when my daughter is present? If not out of kindness, then at least out of courtesy.
Grudgingly Dennel spoke. "But you haven't given my idea due consideration, Komak. We could make ourselves very useful to Kitru – and to Overlord Mekk himself. Think of the intelligence network we could form for him. Why, he could know what was going on in any one of his provinces at any time."
"Spies for the Overlord?" someone shouted. "Never."
"Listen to me." Dennel said. "It could save us, and be beneficial to Mekk as well!"
"You're dreaming," Komak said. "Practicality can't touch Mekk these days. He's become a religious fanatic. The priests have poisoned him against anything that does not bear True Shape – and that now seems to include our minds. No, Mekk is unreachable, I'm afraid."
"What about Kitru?" Dennel said. "We could make him very powerful lord."
Komak shook his head. "Kitru fears Mekk and dares not disobey him. I should know after spending years as his advisor. Kitru is a cruel, venal, greedy man, hungry for power, but he's a coward where Mekk is concerned. He won't question a single aspect of the new extermination decree. In fact, he'll enforce it with a single-mindedness as fanatical as Mekk's, just to impress the Overlord."
"But we could be useful."
"You mean ‘used,' don't you?"
"No. We're humans. Citizens. We shouldn't be treated like teries! There has to be a way!"
"A man is only what he proves himself to be," Komak said with an abrupt note of finality. "Right now we're fleeing for our lives, but your alternative strikes me as worse. Should we prove ourselves to be slaves? Tools of a tyrant? I think not, even if he permitted us to live that long. We can only run for now, but Rab promised that someday we'd return – and on our own terms!"
Dennel snorted. "Rab! The mystery Talent."
"But where is Rab?" Adriel said. "The answer means more to me than the rest of you. Most of you heard from this man by way of the Talent. I have only second-hand knowledge – yet here I am in the middle of the forest, fleeing from everything I know. Where is he? I thought he was supposed to join us out here."
"He was," her father said. "I don't know what happened to him. It's quite possible he met with the very fate he warned us all against. If only we knew more about him, maybe we could learn if anything happened to him."
"I'm leery of this Rab," Dennel said. "Where did he get all his advance information? And why haven't we ever heard from him before?"
Komak shrugged. "I can't possibly answer those questions. Perhaps he comes from Mekk's fortress – maybe that's where he got his information. One thing we do know: his warning was timely and correct. Need I remind anyone of the slaughter we experienced second hand on the third night after fleeing the keep, the slaughter we might have experience first hand were it not for Rab?"
No one met his searching gaze.
"I'm still suspicious," Dennel said. "How did Rab manage to contact those who were not publicly known to possess the Talent? Adriel is the only Finder in the province...I fear a trap, Komak."
"Well, if there's a trap, Rab will have caught himself – because he contacted us via the Talent, which puts him on Mekk's extermination list along with the rest of us. And there is something you all should know: There are still a number of Talents hiding undiscovered in Kitru's keep."
Dennel gasped. "There are? How do you know?"
"The morning after the slaughter, before we fled the area, I asked Adriel if she could pick up any traces of survivors." He turned to Adriel. "Tell them."
Adriel blushed and cleared her throat. "There were still a few left. Not many. Maybe four, certainly no more than six."
"Kitru has probably found them by now," Dennel said.
"Perhaps not," Komak said. "They may have been latent Talents, unaware of their gift, and therefore not publicly known."
"And to think," Dennel said morosely, "it used to be such a badge of pride to be known as a Talent. Now it's the equivalent of a death sentence."
Someone said, "Kitru will be nailed up outside his own gates if Mekk should come across any Talents in the realm during his inspection tour."
"I'd love to see that!" said another.
Dennel said nothing.
"That won't help us, however," Komak said. "It's best we learn to like the forest. I fear it will be home for a long, long time."
On that depressing note, Adriel retired to her tent and verbal conversation ceased.
The tery considered what he had learned. The world of the humans was in turmoil. He sympathized with Adriel's plight but had little sorrow to spare the rest of them. He had too great a sorrow of his own, and humans were to blame.
He settled near the fire and tried to doze. He would need his strength tomorrow. For tomorrow he would have to go back.
-V-
He was well enough to travel on his own the next day, so he slipped away from the train of the psi-folk as it moved deeper into the forest. He was not deserting his rescuers; he intended to stay with them, for he had nowhere else to go now and they seemed fairly well organized.
The raw meat and milk of the night before and again this morning had restored his strength. Moving steadily if not quickly through the lush foliage, he knew where he was going and what he would find. He hadn't wanted to leave Adriel. It would have been so easy to stay by her side and leave all the pain behind. But he couldn't. He had to face the horror.
Memories crowded around him…sights, sound, odors he could no banish…
#
The hunting had been particularly good two days ago. The tery hunted with a club. He was fast and strong, and could move as silently as an insect when he wished. A club was all he needed.
That day, he returned early to the clearing around the cave that served as home for him and his parents. He intended to surprise them with the two large dantas he had bagged. But the surprise was his: A squad of steel-capped, leather-jerkined strangers had invaded their clearing.
&
nbsp; Keeping low, he crept through the small plot where they tried to grow a few edibles. Halfway through the garden the tery noticed something huddled among the cornstalks to his left. He crawled over to investigate.
His father lay there. A big, coarse brute who was happiest when he could sit in the sun and watch with eternal wonder the growth of the things his mate had taught him to plant. His eyes stared sightlessly from a face frozen in bewildered agony. He had been pierced by a dozen or more feathered shafts and the pooled red of his life was congealing on the ground beside him.
Rage and fear exploded within the tery, each struggling for dominance. But he dug both hands into the ground and held on until the dizzy sick feeling swept over him and passed on, leaving only the rage.
Then he grabbed his hunting club.
Holding it tightly, he kept low to the ground between the rows of stalks and moved slowly toward the cave, following the sound of human voices, hoping...
The soldiers stood around the mouth of the cave, laughing, joking, sampling some of the wine his father had been fermenting.
"I wonder where they stole this," one trooper said, his beard dripping purple fluid. "It's good."
At their feet lay the tery's mother, her head nearly severed from her twisted body.
All control had shattered then. Screaming hoarsely and swinging his club before him, the tery charged. The utter berserk ferocity of his attack was almost as startling to him as it must have been to the soldiers. He heard their shouts of fear, saw the terror in their eyes as he leaped into their midst.
Good! Let them know some of the terror and pain his parents must have felt before they were slaughtered.
The archers were caught with their bows unstrung, but the troopers' swords were already bared and bloody. The tery didn't care. He wanted their blood on his club. The first of the group lifted his blade as the tery closed, but the creature batted it aside and swung his club for the trooper's head. The man ducked but not quickly enough. The club sank into his left cheek. Blood jetted from his nose, and the tery had one less opponent facing him.
Movement to his right. He swung again in a backhanded arc with most of his body behind it. The club connected with the shoulder of an archer, who went down screaming, then a two-handed blow into the throat of another swordsman.
For a moment, he had the advantage as they milled about and tripped over each other. The idea briefly danced in his head that he would kill them all and completely avenge his parents. But there were too many of them, and all were seasoned warriors. Before he could inflict any more real damage, the club was sliced from his hands and a sword point bared three of his ribs.
Wounded, weaponless, the tery ran. And he would have escaped easily had not the captain thought to order his men to their mounts.
"Don't run him through!" he heard the captain yell. "Just keep slicing at him!"
It must have been great sport. The troopers were all excellent riders. They would cut him off, then surround him and slice away. When each had added fresh blood to his sword, they would let him escape the circle and run a short distance, only to cut him off and start slicing again. He was an exhausted bloody ruin by the time he finally collapsed in a field of tall grass.
"Shall we burn him and the others?" he heard a trooper say.
"It will take too long," the captain panted as he stared down from his mount.
"But Mekk's decree is to burn –"
"We don't have time. Besides, if he's not dead now, the carrion eaters will finish him off. They do as good a job as fire, but they're slower."
Laughing, they left him for the scavengers.
The tery remembered that captain's face.
#
He found the clearing much as he had left it – except for the scavenger birds. He chased them away from the decomposing, partially devoured things that had been his parents.
Mother...Father...
His throat thickened and tightened as he stumbled through the clearing. Until now h0e had never realized how much he loved them, how much they meant to him, how much he cherished them. The thousand tiny kindnesses lost among the clutter of the daily routines, the caring, the worries for him – he had never appreciated these things, never realized how much they meant to him until it was clear that there would be no more of them. Ever.
Did they know? Did they know how much he loved them? Did they die unaware of what wonderful parents they had been?
At the risk of reopening some of his deeper wounds, he went about the grisly task of placing the cadavers inside the cave. The stench, combined with the knowledge that these rotting horrors were all that was left of the two beings who had meant everything to him, made him retch a number of times before the task was completed.
As he rested to regain his strength, he thought of his parents, picturing them alive in his mind – he could keep them alive there, at least – and recalling their pasts which he knew by heart from the countless times his mother had sat him on her knee as a child and told him whence he came.
His father had been a wild, bearish creature, born of equally wild parents and raised in the forests where he had spent all his life. Yet he was a gentle sort, preferring berries to meat, and sleeping in the sun to hunting.
His mother was different in both appearance – no two teries were alike unless directly related – and social history. Graceful in a feline way, she had been captured as an infant and brought up in the keep when Kitru's father was lord here. That was in the time before Mekk issued his proclamation calling for extermination of everything that did not bear True Shape. Having a tery or two around the court to speak and recite was considered fashionable then.
His mother was one of those teries. She would delight visitors with her singing, her recounting of history, and the reciting of the many poems she had memorized. But in time, despite the luxuries around her, she tired of the empty existence of a pet and escaped to the forests in her early adulthood.
There she met her mate, who could speak not at all. For although he had the intelligence, he had gone too long without ever speaking. He did manage to communicate in other ways, though, and soon a child was born to them.
The little tery's mother taught him to speak and taught him of his origin – how the Great Sickness had caused changes in many of the world's living things. His ability to think was one of those changes. These were things she had learned during her stay at the keep, and the cub absorbed everything she could pass on to him. He was bright, curious, and eager, and readily learned to speak, although his voice had a gruff, discordant tone.
He said nothing now as he climbed the hillside above the cave and pried loose stone after stone until a minor landslide covered the mouth of his former home. When the rumble of the slide had echoed off into the trees and the dust had settled, he sat alone on the cliff and surveyed the clearing that had been home for as long as he could remember.
So heavy...his chest felt so heavy...like a great weight pressing down on him...
He didn’t understand the turbulent emotions that steamed and roiled within his chest, making it hard to draw a deep breath without it catching halfway down. His placid life had not prepared him for this.
He had been wronged – his parents had been wronged. Injustice. The concept had never occurred to him, and he had had no experience with it during his life. He had no injustices to draw on. For there was no justice or injustice in the forest, only the incessant struggle to go on living, taking what was needed and leaving what was not. Things tended to balance out that way. Carelessness was redeemed in pain and mishap, vigilance rewarded with safety and a full belly.
More stealthy images crept unbidden from the past as he sat there. He had managed to hold them at bay while going about the task of interring his parents' remains, but now that that was done and he was gazing at the cold, dead, empty piece of earth that had once held warmth and security for him, he began to remember hunting and swimming lessons from his hulking father, and sitting curled up at his mother's side
at the mouth of the cave in the cool of the evening.
His chest began to heave as a low, broken moan of unplumbed sorrow and anguish escaped him. He began to scramble blindly down the cliffside, nearly losing his footing twice in his haste to reach the clearing.
Once there, he ran from one end to the other, sobbing and whimpering, frantically casting about for something to break, something to hurt, something to destroy. As he approached the garden area, he found one of the crude hoes his father had used for tilling. He grabbed it and scythed his way through the stalks of maize and other vegetables growing there. When that was in ruins, he raced back to the base of the cliff and picked up any stones that would fit into his hands and hurled them with rage-fueled ferocity at the rubble-choked mouth of the cave. Some caromed crazily off the pile, others cracked and shattered with the tremendous force of impact. Whining and grunting, he threw one after another until a number of his wounds reopened and his strength faded. Then he slumped to his knees, pressed his forehead against the ground, and released the sobs that echoed up from the very core of his being.
After a while, he was quiet. After a while, he could think again.
Another new concept for which he had only a name grew in his mind: revenge. Had his parents been killed for food by one of the large feline predators that roamed the forests, he would never have thought of retribution. That was the way things worked. That was existence in the wild. His parents would be dead – just as dead as they were now – but the balance would not have been disturbed.
The tery raised his head. Neither his mother nor his father had ever threatened or harmed a human; in fact, they had avoided any and all contact with them. Yet the soldiers had come and slaughtered them and left them to rot. Such an act was not part of the balance. It skewed everything, and nothing would be right again until the balance was restored.
The tery vowed to remember that captain's face.
He stood and surveyed the ruins of what had once been his home. He would cut all ties with the past now. From this day on, he was a fugitive tery and would stay with the fugitive humans he had met. His parents would be left behind, but he would not forget them.