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.
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.
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.