The Felines of Pern Chapter 10
F'lessan's friend, the one called Mirrim, brought me my food the next day. She had a green dragon named Path for a friend, and that dragon stayed nearby while I ate, and while Mirrim watched me. The human tried to engage me in conversation several times, and her dragon translated just like Golanth and Ruth did. But my sole concern at the time was eating, and I wasn't about to take a break from that, just because a human wanted to talk.
As I was finishing my meal, Ballora approached me. "I need to check your stitches again," she told me. I allowed her to examine me. Her fingers caused me little or no pain this time. As she finished, she sniffed the air several times. "I think I know that scent, or something very much like it. Are you coming into season?" she wondered.
Of course I was! I'd been so distracted with all the other issues and problems I was facing, I'd lost track of time. It was definitely my time, though. How could I do something about that when my flank was still sore from the stitches?
"Can you do something for me?" I asked through Mirrim's dragon. Ballora looked startled. This was probably the first time since I arrived here that I had asked for anything from any of these humans.
"What do you want me to do?" she asked.
"Can you put some kind of covering on those stitches?" I said.
"They will heal better if they got some fresh air today," she replied.
"it's not about the healing," I admitted. "It's about needing a pad on that part of me. As you say, I'm coming into season, and we… I mean he..."
She made the bared-teeth sign that meant she was happy, or that she found something funny. "Oh, I get it! Yes, Rit, I think I can do something for you. Just for today and tonight, right?" I nodded my head 'yes' the way the humans do. She left, and returned after a few minutes with a white cloth. She folded the cloth to make it smaller and thicker, and fixed it in place with something sticky. "I'll remove this in the morning." She added in a whisper, "If your boyfriend is as good-looking as you are, then your cubs are going to be beautiful!"
Beauty is not a major concern to a hunter; it matters more that her cubs are strong, healthy, and quick learners. But the humans seem to have different priorities. I accepted this from her as a compliment, then turned to Mirrim, who was showing human signs of impatience.
"There is something I need you to do for me," I told her dragon, who passed my words on to her.
"What do you need?" she asked, visibly glad to be noticed.
"F'lessan has asked me to hunt tunnel snakes in your building at night," I began. "I tried it last night, and it was too dark to see. I need to walk your halls in the daylight, so I can see what objects are in each room. That way, I won't bump into them in the dark."
"Tunnel snakes – awful things!" she burst out. "If F'lessan told you to hunt them, then hunt them! Why do you need my help?"
"Many of the humans are still nervous about my presence," I answered. "If I just walked in and started exploring, they would fear me, and I don't want to start a panic or a fight. If someone like you walks with me, then all the others will know that my presence is normal and expected."
"I guess that makes sense," she nodded. "Did you want to go right now?"
"I need to relieve myself in the forest first," I told her. "I will be back soon." I went into the woods and returned quickly, as I had promised. When I got back, Mirrim and Ballora were both gone, and F'lessan was waiting for me.
"Mirrim says you want a guided tour of my Weyrhold," he said.
"Was she unwilling to do it herself?" I asked.
"She wasn't comfortable doing it. Honshu isn't her Weyr, and she felt odd explaining the place when it isn't her place. It's definitely my place, and I don't mind showing you around. Shall we begin?"
"Did you build this place?" I asked as we entered the courtyard.
"Oh, goodness, no!" he burst out; he seemed to find the question amusing. "Honshu was built by the first colonists who came to Pern, thousands of Turns ago. They had science and tools that we can only guess at. But even they couldn't predict the eruption of a volcano, and their defenses against Thread were badly lacking at the time, so they had to abandon this place. We rediscovered it a few Turns ago, and we've been cleaning it up and learning to live in it ever since."
"How do you know so much about the distant past?" I wondered.
"We are able to write things down," he answered. When I just stared at him, he went on, "We make special marks on things; we call them letters. Each letter stands for a certain sound. We read the letters, one after the other, and the sounds run together to make words. Those words tell us what the writer wanted us to know, even if the writer has been dead for many, many Turns."
"That could be very useful," I agreed. But was it useful to us? If our kind was able to make and read marks like that, would it bring a benefit? What information from the past could be preserved for the future? Would my great-grandcubs care who my Ted was, or how many littermates I had? The way we lived, we had no need for such things. Still, if we ever did, it would be good to know.
Perhaps I could learn this skill and teach it to others. Perhaps… but not today. We had reached the main doorway. We made an undignified pair – he was still limping from his leg injuries, and I had a cloth pad over my flank to cover my own injuries. But we entered his building together.
I was startled to realize – it was quite possible that each of us was the cause of the other's injuries, and yet we were going side by side into his lair, neither one fearing the other. My perception of the humans was changing quickly. Evidently, their perception of me was also changing.
He explained the purpose of each room, while I made mental notes about possible obstacles to hunting at night. Some of his rooms were nearly empty, except for a few man-made things to sit on, around the edges of the room. Others, like the "kitchen," were filled with things for me to trip over in the dark. The kitchen was the room where I had tried to pounce on something last night; the thing I'd run into was a box full of some kind of root crop.
I didn't understand much of what I saw. The humans used some rooms in this place for eating and sleeping, which made sense, but they used other rooms for purposes that meant nothing to me. One thing was very clear, though. As we met other humans in the hallways, they all greeted F'lessan with varying amounts of respect and happiness, and they all were very surprised to see me walking beside him. Some of them asked him if I was his "pet." Golanth tried to explain to me what that meant, and I did not like the implications. But F'lessan firmly told them all that I was not his pet, that I was something else instead. He called me a friend.
The word "friend" has many meanings in our language. Most often, it means a hunting partner, someone who cooperates with you to bring down prey that is too big for one hunter. Sometimes we use it to refer to a hunter with whom you share your kill because she caught nothing. It implies cooperation for a mutual goal. What did F'lessan mean when he called me a friend? I would have to ask him, but this was not the time. He was encouraging me to climb up a stepped ramp to a second level. This was not difficult, but it was definitely unfamiliar.
This second level was mostly used for sleeping spaces. The humans' resting places were soft and padded, and easy to get into out and out of. They offered little safety from creeping creatures, the way a tree branch would do. I pointed this out to F'lessan.
"That's why I'm hoping you can hunt some of those creeping creatures," he told me. "The last thing I want is something else taking a bite out of me."
I realized that he was referring to the injuries that I, or one of the members of my band, had inflicted on him. I was beginning to feel bad about that. F'lessan had meant no harm to us; he simply had not understood that he was trespassing in our hunting grounds. I would have to talk to him about that soon. At the same time, his desire to not be bitten was sincere, and I was in a position to do something about that.
We explored each level of the building together. I doubted that I'd do much hunting above the second level, because the tunnel snakes wouldn't climb that high, but I still made mental notes of everything I saw. Some of it might be important someday, and some of it simply piqued my curiosity. There was one room with colorful designs all over the walls and ceiling; that one was quite pleasing to the eye, even though I didn't understand what the designs meant. Some rooms were still dirty and filled with the debris of centuries. We spent little time on those.
At last, we reached the very top. Several dragons were perched here; the ones who were awake greeted me politely in my head. I looked over the edge, and I realized that I was higher off the ground than any of my kind had ever been before. I could actually look down on the tops of some of the trees. The humans, going about their business in the courtyard and the grounds around us, looked tiny. Even huge Golanth, who still translated for us as he remained in the courtyard, didn't look so big now. I felt no fear of falling. I felt like I could sit and enjoy this sight for hours.
"It's quite a view, isn't it?" F'lessan said as he stood beside me. "It's almost as good as the view from a dragon's back."
"This is a good place," I agreed. "If I somehow became stuck inside your building, I could sleep here."
"You don't like having a roof over your head, do you?"
I shook my head "no" in the human style. "My kind do not like enclosed places. Do your dragons like them?"
"There aren't many enclosed places for dragons to sleep in Southern," he said, "but the Northern weyrs are all caves carved out of stone. Each dragon and rider share their own cave together. They like it just fine. Golanth and I used to live like that, before we came to Southern." He looked at something on the horizon and sighed.
"You are regretting your dragon's injuries," I guessed.
He looked down at me. "Rit, once you've ridden a dragon in the air, nothing else will ever satisfy you. It's Golanth who can't fly anymore, but I feel like my wings have been clipped, too."
Cautiously, I said, "I regret what happened between us."
He said "yes" in my language and looked away. "So do I."
We returned to ground level without saying anything more to each other.
I spent the afternoon sleeping, waiting for the evening. As the sun disappeared, I rose, stretched, took a drink from the bowl of water that the humans kept full for me, and headed into the forest. As I left, I heard Ballora talking to F'lessan. I paused and asked Golanth to translate their words for me.
Ballora observes that you are going into the forest. She thinks that you go to seek a mate, and she wonders if you are going to come back.
F'lessan says, "I hope so."
There was no danger of my getting lost in the forest. I knew exactly where I was going. It took hours, though. The large moon was high in the sky by the time I reached the center of my hunting band's resting places. Moving perfectly silently, I approached Oclo's place. I called his name softly.
"Who is it?" he asked sleepily. Then he caught my scent and came fully awake. "Rit?"
"Come away into the forest with me," I suggested quietly, but my scent was all the suggestion he needed. We found a quiet place, far from the others. There, he performed a Ted's most important function (and did it rather well, if I'm any judge).
When we were done, we lay on the ground, face to face. "I worried that I might never see you again," he said. "I was afraid for you."
"The humans have taken good care of me," I answered. "I will not die. Their Healer thinks I will recover fully. It will be as though I was never injured."
"I wasn't just worried about your injury," he admitted. "I feared that the humans would kill you as soon as they saw you."
"The humans are a curious band," I told him. "They are healing my injury, they have offered me food, they have allowed me to hunt the beasts that belong to them, and they have allowed me inside their large building."
Oclo's eyes went wide. I could hear his tail lashing the undergrowth behind him. "You've been inside their buildings?!"
"I didn't understand much of what I saw there," I went on, "but they showed me everything and they made no attempt to trap me inside. Oclo, we need to rethink our plans to get rid of them. They are firmly entrenched there, they are more numerous than we realize, they are strong, and…" I paused, wondering how to finish that sentence, and realized something I'd been denying. "…and they are not prey."
"Woo and Dess won't like the sound of that," he said.
"If Woo and Dess want to leap head-first into a tree trunk, then they are free to do so," I said scornfully. "Fighting against the humans would be just like such a leap. We can't defeat them, Oclo. It will be the end of us if we try."
"So what are we going to do about them?" he asked.
"I have lived among them for one short week," I said. "In that time, I have completely changed my thinking about them, and they are changing their thinking about me as well. They aren't just intelligent; they are reasonable. If we just talked to them, we could probably find a way for all of us to live without fighting and without threatening each other's way of life."
"That is not the way of the hunting band," he reminded me. "They are intruders in our lands and they need to be expelled."
"Oclo, if all the hunting bands within a week's journey from here got together as friends, we still couldn't expel them!" I burst out. "We might deal them a setback or two, but if we start a war, they have the strength and the determination to finish it. What good is it to do things the traditional way if it's going to get us all killed?"
"The traditional way is all we know," he said. "I don't think I could persuade the hunters to try any other course of action. For them, it's not whether we fight the humans or not; it's just a question of when and how we'll fight them."
"Then let me persuade them!" I exclaimed. "I know more about them than anyone else of our kind." I glanced back at the pad that covered my injury. "They have power over life and death, in ways that we cannot grasp. They've used that power to save my life. They can use it just as easily to take our lives away. I don't want to see my friends killed and my hunting band wiped out in a battle that we have no chance of winning."
He looked into my eyes. "I'd like to let you try it," he began. "But our hunting band is becoming two bands. Some want to follow Woo's advice and attack as soon as we find the opportunity. Others follow San's advice to learn more before we strike. It's all I can do to keep the two factions from fighting. I'm trying to find a middle course, and I'm starting to think that there is no such course. I'm leaning toward San's way of thinking, and Woo doesn't like it. If you step up and tell them the things you've just told me, it will rip our band apart."
"What you're telling me," I said sadly, "is that, no matter what I say or do, this band is doomed."
"I haven't given up hope yet," he answered. "The battle isn't over until the fat cat sings." He paused. "We don't have any fat cats in this band, but that might change. We've been finding dead horned beasts and wooly herdbeasts lying on the ground. Most of us are eating quite well lately."
I recalled the last time I'd found such a random kill. "Do these dead beasts have an odd smell to them?"
"Yes, they do," he answered without hesitation. "There's a faint unpleasant smell in them that we can't identify. I don't trust them, and I don't eat them unless I'm really hungry. Woo says the humans and the dragons are offering us a bribe to not attack them. She's happy to eat their animals at every opportunity, while telling us over and over that she's not really accepting their bribe, that she's still totally hostile toward them."
"I can verify that the dragons are dropping those dead beasts," I told him. "I've seen them taking off by the dozen every few days with dead animals hanging underneath them. What they're up to, I don't know."
"Tell me more of what you've learned about the humans," he urged me. I spent the next hour summing up the things I had seen and heard and done. He asked questions several times.
When I was done, he shook his head. "I think I'm more confused now than I was when you got here. Even a Ted who had led his band for years would be hard-put to sort this situation out, and I haven't been here for a month yet! I'm really afraid that this situation is going to get out of control, and I won't be able to stop it. Hunters are going to get hurt; some of you are probably going to get killed; and all I can do is stand there and watch it happen, or join in and get killed myself." He paused. "At least I've got you beside me again."
"Oclo… I can't stay," I said softly.
"You can't?" He was clearly dismayed.
I shook my head 'no.' He looked at me strangely. I realized that I'd shaken my head side-to-side in the human style, instead of the back-and-forth way that our kind do. I shook it again, like a hunter this time.
"The Healer says I need to stay with them for another week so she can finish healing me. After that, another human wants to take me to his land far away because he thinks his runnerbeasts are faster than I am, and he wants to prove it."
"Do the humans tell you what to do?" he asked sharply.
"When it comes to healing, I've learned to take their advice," I answered. "As for the other human, he made a challenge out of it, and I accepted. I can't go back on my word."
"The humans would never know about that!" he burst out.
"But I'd know," I said softly. "I'm still a hunter, and my honor still means something to me."
Oclo looked downcast. "When you appeared under my tree branch, I thought everything was going to be good again. You'd help me solve all of our problems, and the issues that are dividing us would be settled, and we'd all be happy together." He looked away for a moment. "Do you prefer the company of humans to your own hunting band?"
"Of course not!" I exclaimed. "I have to stay with them for a while longer, so they can finish healing me. But I'll be back, and I'll return to stay. I promise."
He looked up. "You promise?"
"If I can return, then I will return. I give you my word. I just don't know when it will happen."
"I'll be waiting for that day," he said, and there were traces of hope in his eyes again. "But until then, could we…?"
"Oh, go ahead," I smiled, and positioned myself so he could take me a second time. What a typical male, I thought, but I kept the thought to myself. I didn't really mind.
