Chanur's Homecoming

“Move,” she said, gasped. Gasped again when he tried, and fought and moaned her way to the edge of the bed, reaching for the console, involved in the edge of the safety net. “This is Pyanfar. We all right? Where’s that gods-be com? Give us com, hear?”

There was delay. “Aye, captain,” a strange voice said. And waited, by the gods waited during some on-bridge clearance, while a rag-eared bastard of a Tauran com officer asked her captain for clearance to report, that was what was going on. “Gods-be-”

Khym moaned in that way he had when he was about to be sick. And rolled over to the other side of the bed.

Com came through, a busy crackle of voices.

Khym was not sick. But she did not bother him either. She lay there listening to the data-chatter and the heavy machine-sounds of the ship.

“We’re not getting buoy-output, from Kura,” someone said. And sent ice water flowing through her gut.

Someone swore over com.

“Standby number two dump,” a voice said then.

And the ship cycled down again, a lurch half into hyper-space—

—no buoy at Kura.—in hani space.

“I came here to wait,” Khym said, on that path, beside the way she would have had to take. Perhaps someone had just phoned. He was perhaps another romantical fool, having come this long trek to sit alone and wait on a prospective wife. His face had a kind of wistful vulnerability: she had not known it then, but when she remembered that look afterward, she knew what it was, of experience. It was hope. It was Khym’s gentle and earnest self, open to everything, entranced with her.

And he had escaped his sisters and his wives and gotten away alone. Or they did not care for him the way they ought: that had been her first thought when she believed he was who he claimed to be:

“You alone?” Anything might have happened to him. Some bandit might have attacked him. Some Chanur hunter might have taken him for a bandit and asked questions later. Or he might have fallen in with a group of Chanur herders who might have taken a fancy to him, and precious much they would have believed his claims to be their neighbor. A lord never got out in public. Except at challenge. And Chanur and Mahn, old allies, would never challenge each other. In those days.

Gods, she had thought atop it all, I’m betrothed to a fool in a house of rump-sitting fools who can’t keep track of their own lord.

“It isn’t far,” he said, pointing back toward Mahn land.

Gods if I don’t keep you better, she had thought; and then knew she could indeed do no better. Home was not a place she stayed. She had to trust the other wives and his sisters and his female cousins, who clearly could not handle him.

I’ll have to knock heads in this house. Do I really want to get into this? If I weren’t a fool I’d go home right now and leave him out here.

Gods, he’s good-looking, isn’t he?

But so’re a dozen more I could find in the bushes.

“I don’t do this all the time,” he said earnestly. “I told them-” A gesture back toward the heart of Mahn land. "-1 was going to the garden. I guess no one’s looked. I wanted to see you-”

He knew he was in the wrong. He knew he had made a bad impression. He knew he had even made a dangerous mistake, if she had a notion to take offense and go back to her clan, figuring a fool of a man was an easy mark for her lord; then he might die a young fool, and Mahn was in danger, if she were either unscrupulous or truly outraged. He knew this and he worried, now, when it was too late. Break her neck, he might, if he could get his hands on her. But it was not likely that he could. She was fast, in those days, and looked it; and might have a knife or even a gun (she had); and had the advantage of her clan, who could kill him under any circumstances for being where he was, but under felony charges, could dispossess his sisters and his kin and send them out homeless. He knew all of this. ("I thought you would go back,” he had said to her in after years. “I thought if you did I would have to challenge. And you would hate me. And so I couldn’t do that either. I’d spend all my life trying to get you back.")

She set hands on hips and looked him up and down. Here in this isolated place where only they knew what might happen. And flattened her ears at him and slowly pricked them up again when his drooped. “Huh,” she said. “Well, you got your border wrong.” Even a man would know where that was. The flick of his ears showed he had indeed known. And deliberately trespassed, by the difference of two hills. The one in Chanur land just happened to have better vantage. And she came up close to him and up next to him and laid hands on him, which only his wives and his sisters could do without offense.