“I SAY AGAIN, PRINCE Aranata,” said Knight-Tribune Smythe, “all we seek here is an end to the attacks against our people and colonies. No more.” She sat in a chair at the very center of our long table, directly opposite the Cielcin Aeta, hands steepled before her as she leaned forward. “Pursuant to that, we have a proposition.” She paused a moment, allowing the blank-staring slave to bark her translation, words ragged in the pristine air.

A false wind blew through the meadow, making the distant trees sway softly, lending an odd normality to the scene—as though hundreds of Sollan legionnaires and Cielcin scahari were not standing at attention to either side of that shallow hill. I felt almost that we might have been two armies meeting on any field of antiquity. As though it were Richard and Saladin there, or Bonaparte and Wellington, Scipio and Hannibal. Almost. Were it not that the xenobite opposite us was more Behemoth than Bonaparte. His crown of horn nearly scraped the canopy above our heads, and when he moved the chair creaked, and his sparse attendants quailed.

“Speak!” he said, black eyes utterly unreadable.

Unhappy with being so ordered about, Smythe glanced bemusedly at Crossflane a moment before clearing her throat. I knew what she was about to say, and so composed myself, seated where I was between Varro and Bassander. “We wish to send an emissary among you. To send some of our people to live among you. To learn from you. To teach.”

I listened to the slave translate: “Qulleti asvatiri o-cotelie ti-okarin.” We wish to give you an emissary. Give.

Varro was ahead of me, leaning toward the tribune to whisper in her ear. Smythe—nodding—placed a hand on the scholiast’s arm. “The emissary is to be yours only for a time. A term of some years. And then he should be returned to us.” She paused a moment, trying to gauge the xenobite chieftain’s face for a reaction, but was stymied in her understanding by the differing structure of the muscles in that alien face. No discernible expression was forthcoming, no understanding obvious, and so Smythe added, “Unspoiled.”

“Ondathanyu,” the slave finished translating. Untouched. I shivered, for I understood enough to guess at the connotations of that word.

Aranata glanced sidelong at his counselors before speaking, and almost I wondered if they could communicate by some medium other than speech, so intense was that exchange. “Tukanyi anwajjayan vonnari suh!” he exclaimed at last. You are strange creatures indeed! He emitted a high, croaking sound—such as I have heard from certain frogs and species of ape in the gardens of many a palatine lord—and I realized he was laughing at us. “You offer us a gift and put conditions upon it. You threaten us but do not bite! Are you sulan or huratimn?”

Varro turned to me and said, “Do you know what that is?”

I could only shake my head and frown. “I’m not sure.” After a moment, I recalled, “Didn’t Tanaran say something about sulan?”

The Chalcenterite scholiast turned his eyes down, thinking. “Some sort of predator?”

“Mmm.” I agreed, and with a flash of insight, said, “Are we wolves or sheep?”

Tigers and lambs.

Tor Varro delivered this translation to Smythe in a whisper. The tribune leaned back a ways in her chair, sitting as tall as ever I had seen her do, and she answered, “We are men.”

The majesty of that moment suffered in translation. “Ekanyi yukajjimn,” the slave-girl said. Yukajjimn. Vermin.

The Aeta bared his fangs in a wicked and fish-like smile, glassy teeth shining in black gums. His retinue—even the child, Nobuta—smiled with him as he said, “That you are.”

“Cielcin,” I said. People.

“No, you’re not!” Nobuta said, speaking out of turn for the first time. “Don’t you say that!” There was almost a recognizable petulance in its tone, a thing which called attention to itself by its simple familiarity. Varro translated this for Smythe, but I was left wondering once more as to the creature’s age. Very tall it was, and strong, but I had no notion of the creatures’ growth and maturation—I am not sure anyone did in those days—and so it might have been anywhere between a young adult and a very small child. Petulance was no indicator, for so often in the children of power—at least in the sons of Earth—is the petulance of childhood extended into maturity for want of struggle.

Aranata threw a hand across his child, moving Nobuta gently but firmly back into its seat with a snort that flared his four nostrils. “Iukatta, Nobuta-kih!” Enough! He made a humming sound low in his chest, calming the younger xenobite before turning back to us. “My uvattaya is right. You are not Cielcin, not people.” I looked at the smaller Cielcin, with its wide eyes and smaller, curling horns. There was something wrong with it, an angry quavering in its lips, a blueness in the skin around the eyes. Was that a sign of youth, perhaps? Or something else? I wondered if the child was infirm, if there might be some lever there for us to use.

But I shunted this aside a moment. Uvattaya, I thought. It was not the Cielcin word for child that I knew—or thought I’d known. I recognized the pieces of the term. Uvan and vatate, fruit and body. The pieces of a puzzle suddenly fitted together in my head, and I almost gasped. In the Cielcin language—at least in the one of their languages with which human scholars have had any contact—nouns have two modes. The akaranta, the masculine, and the ietumna, the feminine.

Or so we had believed.

Suddenly it seemed that in our haste to understand or to impute familiarity on the strange that we had looked into the face of that stranger and seen only ourselves. We had imagined they were like us, or perhaps could only imagine it was so. In the Cielcin tongue, nouns in the akaranta—masculine nouns—perform their verbs. They are active. The ietumna passive, feminine, or so we’d assumed. But this Aeta—who must always be spoken of in the akaranta way—had carried a child. Behind that pall of masculine seeming, behind the iron fist of competition, of authority, of competence and command . . . was the feminine.

But the akaranta and ietumna were not our masculine and feminine—even if they can perhaps be understood as each and admixture of our two—were rather things standing at right angles to our understanding, for though Aranata had stood at the head of war parties and doubtless conquered foes with tooth and claw, he had carried his child within himself, and birthed it, leaving the rearing and gentle care to his slaves.

“A gift,” Aranata mused, returning to the subject of Smythe’s offer. “You will give us this one.” He—she?—raised a hand glittering with jewels, the middle three fingers of her pale hand pointed to me. “The dark one who delivered my Ichakta from its torment. I want him.” I felt the blood drain from my face as the hammer fell. That indeed had been our plan, but to have the Aeta demand me was something else entirely. None of the others responded, and Prince Aranata continued, “Tanaran says he is one of your lords. That would be a worthy gift.”

He was not asking.

Unable to keep the edge from my voice and glad that our emotions were as lost on the prince as hers were on us, I said, “And you would give us Tanaran?”

The Aeta ducked her head and hissed, “Asvato ni o-Tanaran ti-tukanyi nesuh?”

“Yes,” I said, turning to look at the smaller baetan, “give us Tanaran. It already knows our tongue—and something of our ways.”

Aranata’s massive eyes narrowed to mere points. “You should not make demands, yukajji.”

“It’s not a demand. It’s an opportunity,” I said, and stood, pushing Tor Varro’s hand away as he grabbed at me. “One for the other, Prince. What say you?” Dimly I sensed two of Kharn’s floating eyes turn toward me, pulled from their classic orbit above our collected heads. I spared the old immortal a glance where he sat beneath the boughs of his tree. He might have slumbered, and those hopeless children beside him, so restful were his face and closed eyes.

Aranata Otiolo cleared her—its?—throat. “Tanaran has only just returned to me. Would you strip me of my prized possession so soon, having been separated from it for so long? You cannot have it.” The Aeta placed a hand on the back of Tanaran’s neck as it spoke, a possessive and horrifyingly tender gesture.

When the words were translated, Crossflane scoffed, “This is useless.”

Smythe put a hand on the table in front of her First Officer and oldest friend to quiet him, but the translator had heard perfectly well, and her rough tones skated on the air. “Raka vaayu ti-etan.”

Aranata tucked its head to angle its horns toward us, an obvious enough sort of threat. But just however it was the sinews pulled anger from that alien face, they smoothed it away, and the clan chief bared its teeth in what I thought a rather strained smile. “A gift for a gift, is it? You vermin are interesting. Give me the dark one, and I will consider your request.” He pointed once more at me. I wondered at what dark thoughts passed in the prince’s mind. I remembered those strong fingers on my neck and suppressed a shudder. He was not done with me.

“He wouldn’t go alone,” Crossflane put in. “He would have protection. Guards. And you must return him after a period of years.”

Responding subordinate to subordinate, the herald Oalicomn—silent through that whole day’s proceedings—spoke up. “You would send soldiers among us? Into our home?”

“Guards,” Crossflane insisted. “A retinue.”

“They would attack us as we slept, master,” it insisted, turning so that I could see only the tattooed half of its face as it turned to speak. I wished I could read the alien glyphs better, wished I could discern meaning from that pattern of whorls and interlocking circles. “I must discourage this. One of the yukajjimn in the Bahali imnal Akura is bad enough, but this is getting out of hand.” What the Bahali imnal Akura was—if it was the name of the ship or of some place within the ship—I was not sure, and told Varro and Smythe as much in muted tones.

Bassander turned around. “Sit down, Hadrian.”

Tanaran made a breathy noise, nostrils flaring, and slapped the tabletop. “Lord Marlowe can be trusted. He is not yukajjimn. He fought the yukajjimn to deliver me back to you, my master. We should take him.”

“Return?” Aranata asked, repeating the word from minutes before. “Is she not mine to do with as I please?”

The prince’s eyes swept over me, and I said, “No, he is not.” The very language was against us. So long as the Cielcin conceived of us as ietumna, inferior, we could not bargain.

“Your . . . your gift would have similar privileges among us,” Smythe said, “servants, guards. Whatever you need.” It was no use. Smythe and Crossflane were just plodding along, not comprehending the dissonance forming between their interpretation of the dialogue and the prince’s. Each party thought they were having a different conversation, and I could not make them see it.

The Aeta appeared to contemplate this, adjusting the thick braid of hair that hung over its shoulder. Twice it made the breathy sound that indicated a Cielcin yes, which Smythe seemed to understand without needing to be told. “We will accept your gift.” He made no reference to returning the gesture, and never did. For at that moment the child, Nobuta, made a small, racking noise and ducked its head. Aranata turned at once and murmured something to its young. A moment later, it turned to its herald. “Velenamma o-Nobuta ti-veletate, Oalicomn-do,” Aranata said, ordering the herald to leave with the child. “I will follow momentarily.”

The herald rose at once, bowing so that it retreated from its master-mistress with its head so lowered as to expose the soft bit of the skull behind the epoccipital crest. Turning with a muttered, “This way, little master,” the blue-garbed herald led Nobuta from the tent. One of Sagara’s drone-eyes peeled off to follow on.

“Is everything all right?” Smythe asked.

I translated this, and the prince replied, “It is of no concern.”

“We can send you one of our physicians.”

Aranata stood sharply, horns pushing up the cloth roof. “Rakayu aradaian,” he repeated, more sharply. The sight of the prince standing beneath that too-low pavilion might have been comical—the striped cloth belling about its head—were it not for the horror of its visage. Whatever there was feminine I had sensed in its relation to Nobuta dissolved, and I was again confronted with the massive size of it, the broad shoulders and the whipcord density of muscle clinging to limbs too long and thin to be human. The demon prince leered down at us, narrowing eyes the size of fists. Presently it relaxed, and gripped the hilt of the sword it wore at its hip. “Send the dark one to us at once.” And with that it turned and ducked out from under the lip of the pavilion. A false wind rose, gathering the prince’s cloak and flowing skirts in its fingers. His troops knelt as he approached, folding back to part ranks like the retreat of dark waters before the coming of the moon.

“We will not send you to the prince at once,” Smythe said, acid in her tone. She sat drumming the tabletop, watching the retreating backs of the Cielcin as they hurried back down the hill. She might have been the sun, unmoved at the center of a moving universe. Almost unheard, she said, “Thinks he can order us around, does he? How are we supposed to negotiate with that?”

“Maybe we can’t,” Bassander said, standing to better watch the retreat of the xenobites. How ominous those words seem to me now, casting their long shadow across the years between that moment and the now.

Silence fell, and no one offered a better answer. Sagara’s machine eyes orbited the pavilion, but the man himself sat unmoving as a stone. No one spoke. Into that silence I said, “Knight-Tribune, if I may?” I affected deference for the advantage it gave me for that moment, affected a posture of humility to help lend consideration to my request. Smythe did not answer. She did not move, and so I determined to speak. “Let me bring Valka—Doctor Onderra, I mean—just once. She spent a great deal of time with Tanaran after we left Emesh, and she’s made a study of xenobites all her life. She may have an insight here.”

Bassander and Crossflane both moved to protest, and from both their mouths I heard the word witch spew forth. I felt my fists clench involuntarily, but willed myself to stillness.

“The Tavrosi xenologist?” Varro said, running a finger over his lips. “It’s possible.”

Then to my astonishment another voice spoke up in Valka’s defense. Jinan was quietest at these conferences. Being not a representative of her Jaddian masters in any diplomatic sense, only their eyes, she had confined herself to but a few reflexive comments. A thousand thousand times I have been astonished by the actions of individuals and the choices they make. The way a soldier least-loved of his fellows will stay behind to guard the narrow way. The way a long loved and trusted friend will turn traitor in the name of some misbegotten truth. The way Jinan—who had always been jealous of my friendship with Valka and perhaps hated her for it—said, “We should be letting the doctor have a look.”

Smythe stood stiffly, swiftly, and took up her cane. “Very good. Marlowe, you will bring the woman tomorrow.”