“Heh.”
Somehow, she could tell that the sound was the equivalent of a necrotizing gastric stink. He looked straight across at the red lecturing figure, as though waiting for something. He considered the people of the village, and his face’s muscles contorted drastically once more.
“Is that human not saying what she is supposed to be saying? Or is there something she is saying that she is not supposed to be saying?”
That got a little twitch from Eihks, and he turned more fully to face Ktsn.
Wow, but he was tall. If she stood on her rear feet and braced herself on a sturdy wall, she’d be able to stretch above his head, but not while actually walking anywhere.
“Is that human…?” she began, but petered off.
He tilted toward the creature which had been the first alien presence of the village.
“Oh. For the record,” he said slowly enough to be easily legible, “I’m a human. She’s a pohostinlat. And what she’s saying is accurate and true and necessary. It’s also incomplete.”
The man placed his arms over and under each other in a way that looked uncomfortable. He took a long gaze at her, up and down, and those eyes slimmed in her direction.
“Where did you… Never mind. Anyway, I’m waiting for her to admit something. Look, let’s get something straight here.”
“Do what you will; just let me have the same luxury.”
THAT got a reaction from him; like most of the others, she gathered a certain sense of its intensity from the violence of his facial rearrangements, but not its nature.
“We need to be operating on the same level of comprehension. You get that we-”
A wide gesture indicating the collection of foreigners.
“-could, in theory, have ill intent toward you. I claim that we don’t, but that might easily be me deceiving you. For that matter, my pointing out this fact could be a gambit meant to ensure you see me as trustworthy. This all make sense so far?”
Ktsn gave affirmation.
“Good. So long as you don’t blindly trust me. Conviction isn’t meant to do away with thought; it’s supposed to complement it.”
“I understand,” said the farmer whose understanding was very far from complete.
“Correction,” said the human, tone of voice shifting around in a fashion that seemed like it surely had SOME significance. “You understand part of what we’re discussing. I’m sure there are many parts of it that still lie in vagary’s shadow.”
A thumb stroked sharply sideways, across the part of his face above those little fuzzy lines.
“I don’t know,” he said, which was evidently the vocalization of the body language. “Frankly, anyone who says they really get what’s going on, when they’re dropped in this kind of scenario - entire world uprooted, totally deprived of commonality with any part of the life you used to know - then they’re either lying, or have a very different concept of ‘getting’ something.”
“How… common is ‘this kind of scenario,’ in your experience?”
A languid blink.
“In scope, having your entire planet involved with a massive against-your-will relocation? This isn’t the first time it’s happened. It’s the first time I’ve been a part of it, though.”
Hearing those words, seeing those outer-toothless stretches of lip quirk up and down as the weighty phrases were ejected, and contemplating the way that colossal if silent heads still stitched the sky in every point of the compass… suddenly, a vessel of some kind shattered in Ktsn’s brain. A flood of panic washed out. It was the sort of panic that drives an entire village to sacrifice themselves, in the name of making the world safer for the generations to come. It was the need to join combat without the sure foreknowledge of combat being futile. It was too much. Just too much.
She reached out for her pickax, gripped the handle near the head, and loosened its binding. Just as she pulled the thongs keeping the length of the tool in place, she saw Eihks’s eyes widen, and he took a short jerky step forward.
Suddenly he gave voice to a strange sharpened sound, and turned away from Ktsn for just an instant, looking down at his weird chiral foot. It was an instant long enough that, under normal circumstances, she should have been able to sink the hard bevel into his head. Far faster than he ought to have been able, though, he whirled back, making a split-face expression. Without him touching it, without anything touching it, her pickax abruptly whisked itself from the intended course, slewing away and steeply down.
When it arced out, though, its new trajectory put the head to the inside of his nearer leg.
The sound of a clank, metal-on-metal. Cloth was torn apart, and fluttered noiselessly as it cleft. It revealed largely hairless flesh and a breechcloth wrapped around the man’s pelvis, as well as a lustrous wedge of an unknown dim red alloy.
Nothing happened, for a long long time.
Then the human slowly bent down, hauled the clothing back together around his legs, and made a deep-in-the-throat noise. His eyes almost danced over the rest of the scene, and Ktsn noticed that he was staring not at the other villagers, but his fellow foreigners. Many of them returned the favor.
“No.”
The phrase from the human’s lips was a negation, a denial, and a chastisement, all three in the fullest possible range of implication. It arrowed past the culture-language barrier and straight through Ktsn. The farmer found herself unable to even contemplate a repeat performance, should she have still possessed the opportunity to employ her pickax. That was all without even looking in her direction.
She startled at the sight of the lecturer, when she saw the woman spontaneously standing less than two body-lengths distant. The… pohostinlat, keeping distance and under the scrutiny of most of the crowd, was very very emphatically saying something to Eihks, with both of her arms stretched out.
Eihks responded by closing his eyes, rocking back on the edges of his feet, and replying in a monotonous measured dictation. He pointed at the shining red shape on his leg, and traced some of the symbols on its surface. The thin even pelt on top of his head licked the wind with stiff stubbornness.
Another human in the crowd shouted. It was accompanied by a flurry of steps forward toward the tall human beside Ktsn. Another shout. Another. A couple more of the sources moved toward him. More moved away.
Ktsn managed one quick eye-contact with her father, before things suddenly got overly loud.
“Ktsn. Ktsn.”
She looked back up at Eihks. A shivery haze played around his torn lower clothing, and she saw it coming back together one clump of fabric at a time. She didn’t even remember she was still holding her pickax until he poked the end of it with one forceful digit. Her nearer eye drew up to the set of straight lines ridging his face.
“Wh-”
“We should go,” said the human. “Now.”
It was soft enough that she had to really work at hearing the statement.
She began to rub her hands together in a negative, but he halted her before she could refuse.
“I am encouraged, and required, to stay with you for right now. If you don’t like me, then we can lodge a complaint soon enough, and you’ll get someone else to take over my duties.”
When he whipped upright once again, a wordless look across the gradually more agitated crowd of his associates - and the increasing confusion and irritation of her own people - quelled the noise substantially. A few firm words and hand gestures that made little sense to her. Placating, and at least minimally effective, judging by how the foreign audience grew a tad less restive.
He turned back.
“Things are getting a bit ugly, and this isn’t a good place to be seen right this moment. If you have a residence or private accommodations or the like, it is best that we retreat there. They’ll calm down. In time.”
When she still hesitated, he seemed to project audial force from his mid-body region like a stomped bellows.
“You and I are joined at the hip for a little while yet. Now, we need to get gone. The phrase ‘anywhere else but here’ is a beautiful thing.”
Without thinking, enraged at the disorder and unfairness and simple fatiguing distance of it all, she whirled, rolling herself over by accident in her haste, and started galloping from Goskec Tktl for her home. The thin missing-beat rhythm of a bipedal gait following after her was the farewell drumbeat to her village, and the rest of her life.
And that was how Ktsn Wdondf Daephod first played a part in shifting the course of a certain pioneer’s existence.
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