The Lawgivers: Gabriel Page 25

  Gah-re-al felt his face redden.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” Raphael drawled wryly.

  Gah-re-al glared at him and Raphael laughed, throwing up his hands in a warding-off gesture. “Hey, don’t kill the messenger. I never suggested you should.”

  The comment irritated Gah-re-al, enough so that it redirected his mind from one concern to another. “She wouldn’t be safe here if she was,” he said thoughtfully, “not when everyone in the group I brought with her is already certain … uh … thinks ….”

  Raphael held up his hand. “I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings here, but there’s been a lot more jaw flapping than you think. It isn’t just everyone in the group that came with her that thinks it. Pretty much everybody thinks it.” He frowned. “You wouldn’t think with the stupid social workers driving them like slaves that they’d have time to do a lot of talking, but it’s almost like they’re telepathic. One of them hears or sees something first thing in the morning, all of them know it by dusk.”

  He frowned, all humor vanishing. “There’s something in the wind here, Gah-re-al. I’m not sure what it is, but I’ve heard rumors. That’s one of the reasons I took Claire away.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  Raphael shook his head. “I wish I could. Worst case scenario, I’m thinking. From some of the things I’ve overheard, I get the impression that they have a leader and they’re gearing up for war.”

  Gah-re-al stared at him in angry disbelief. “They can’t possibly think they have a chance in hell of winning!”

  Raphael’s lips thinned. “Someone has convinced them they do.”

  Surprise flickered through Gah-re-al. “This leader?”

  Raphael shrugged, frowning. “Maybe. But I think there’s a strong possibility he, whoever he is, got the notion because one of ours convinced him.”

  Gah-re-al gaped at him in total disbelief. “One of our people?”

  Raphael uttered a disgusted grunt. “Or some. Hard to believe, I know, but think about it. From the start, there were some that thought the best solution to the problem of the natives was extermination—not many, granted, but they argued long and loud against everyone else when the khabler insisted the natives were the remnants of the builders, that they’d once had a great civilization and could rebuild given enough time. The social workers argued that time wasn’t what they needed but rather interference in the guise of guidance and protection because they’d been thrown so far back by the conditions on the planet that they were in danger of exterminating one another in their battle for survival. They couldn’t recover without some help because they’d lost too much of the knowledge they’d once had and there was no order that would allow for rebuilding. There were no leaders among them—just tyrants determined to retain control by ensuring that everyone was totally dependent on their whims for survival.

  “That’s when the ruling body decided to form the lawgivers—for minimal interference. They thought the lawgivers could bring the order needed to allow the natives to rebuild.

  “It didn’t work,” he added dryly, “because no matter how many of the bastards we killed there was another hopeful waiting to take up where that one left off.”

  “I wasn’t here when all that took place,” Gah-re-al reminded him pointedly. “I got the short version.” He paused. “I got the distinct impression that you agreed with extermination.”

  Raphael looked uncomfortable. “There was a time when I did—to a degree. I never thought they should, or that they would, but I was convinced that nothing we could do—short of that—would change things. It never helps to do things for people. They have to do it for themselves. They have to make up their minds that it needs to be done and then they have to do it—especially when the people are like these natives. They’re some hard headed bastards and the more you push the more determined they are to push back. If we’d confined ourselves to merely guarding our interests as we did in the beginning, I don’t think they would ever have become more, or less, of a problem. We would simply have had to accept that that was the cost of colonizing here. I don’t think any of our people ever understood that and I think it’s going to come back to haunt them.”

  “All of us if there’s anything to what you’ve heard and what you think will happen,” Gah-re-al said grimly.

  Raphael studied him. “Except Claire,” he agreed. “I’ve taken steps to keep her as far from this as I can. My offer stands if you want to remove Lexa from what’s probably going to be a battle zone sooner or later.” His lips tightened. “If nothing else I can protect Claire from enduring the constant slights from both sides for accepting me as her man. Lonely is better than being a pariah. And if the tension keeps building the natives might not stop at slinging insults.”

  Since that was what Gah-re-al feared, that comment hardened his resolve. He was going to remove Lexa whether she wanted to go or not.

  Of course, if she didn’t, he was going to have his work cut out for him in keeping her there, he thought angrily. “Thanks. I think I’ll see what I can do to persuade Lexa,” he muttered.

  Raphael chuckled. “Good luck on that. My advice would be to remove her and then persuade her.”

  “I don’t suppose you also have some advice on how to persuade her?” Gah-re-al said dryly, then added uncomfortably. “She’s pretty pissed off at me at the moment.”

  Raphael grinned. “As a matter of fact I do. Nesting. If she’s pregnant, her prime consideration is going to be to find a safe place for the baby.”

  “And you know this because …?”

  Raphael shrugged and turned to go. “That was the only thing that convinced Claire.”

  Gah-re-al watched his departure, wondering how Raphael could be so damned cheerful about it when the idea scared the hell out of him. He didn’t believe the Raphael he’d once known almost as well as he knew himself would have been, but then time changed people, he reminded himself.

  And apparently some women could completely change a man’s views on settling and having a family.

  He didn’t think his own views had changed, but then again a lot of what Raphael had said on the subject was true of him, he realized abruptly. He’d thought his impatience and his weariness was just that, the certainty that he was making no headway and no appreciable difference in his mission to bring order. Maybe that was only part of it, though? Maybe not even the biggest part of it? Maybe most of it was because he, too, had reached a point in his life when wanderlust had ceased to have the appeal it had once had and the constant battling had none?

  He didn’t have to examine those thoughts hard to realize that the discovery that Raphael had built a homestead appealed to him far more than the hazy future he’d been looking at. He didn’t know why, now, that he hadn’t thought of it himself. He didn’t consider that he was past his prime, but he damned well wasn’t young anymore. If he was going to take another path, now seemed a better time than later—particularly since he’d become increasingly convinced that he was going to run out of luck if he continued.

  The skirmish in Maura’s village had brought that home as nothing else had before.

  Unfortunately, Gah-re-al didn’t know whether Raphael’s suggestion would work for him or not. He didn’t know whether or not Lexa was pregnant or if she even knew if she was, and he was damned if he knew how to pry the information out of her even if she was pregnant and knew it. Perhaps more to the point, he didn’t know if he could accomplish it if she wasn’t or even if he wanted to accomplish it if by some miracle he hadn’t managed to impregnate her already.

  And he thought it would be a miracle if he hadn’t. It had been his experience in life that fate was contrary like that. If one wanted something to happen, it didn’t. If one didn’t want it to happen, it did.

  That thought cheered him insensibly. The goal at the time hadn’t been to get her pregnant, therefore it must have happened!

  He considered that for a few moments and realized two things—he did want it to h
appen, which meant it probably hadn’t, but it also meant that he’d already made his decision even before he talked to Raphael.

  He wasn’t completely easy in his mind about it, but he became more firmly convinced as he turned once more to study the encampment and his mind began worrying over some of the other things Raphael had said. The encampment seemed peaceful enough from his viewpoint, but for the first time he really looked at the sheer mass they’d gathered together and began trying to calculate just how many there were. He’d brought several hundred himself. If he multiplied that by the number of lawgivers, there were thousands of humans gathered below him.

  And maybe fifty to a hundred guards and a similar number of social workers—who were also armed.

  Strategically speaking, it was a disaster, he realized abruptly, just waiting to happen. It would take no more than a spark to set off a bloody war if the tension he’d already sensed wasn’t pure imagination, and he didn’t think it was.

  * * * *

  Lexa’s parting with Kyle had soothed her wounds and lessened the raging guilt she felt for having been responsible, inadvertently or not, for Maura’s grief. It had also helped to harden her resolve to at least attempt to interfere despite the disastrous results of her prior interference in their lives.

  It still took a while for that resolve to form. She was too distressed at first and too fearful of making things worse, not better, to convince herself even to try, but she realized that trying was all that she could do. She’d failed them before—twice—when she’d been a child and too afraid to do anything at all to try to protect them and when she’d asked Gabriel to help her find them.

  She’d told herself she wouldn’t allow her fear ever to prevent her from trying again if she saw them in danger. And they were in danger. She neither completely agreed or disagreed with their view of the situation. She wasn’t blind or stupid. She could see that the udai, even those who were there to help, thought humans were beneath contempt. They didn’t like humans, but they were still trying to do what they believed to be the right thing.

  She’d had her own doubts before and she couldn’t say that the attitude of the social workers was something to endear them. She didn’t even know if what the udai had apparently set out to accomplish would work, but she was convinced that they thought so, that this hadn’t been conceived as a way to torture humans to death, even though it felt like it at times.

  Much against their will, they’d been taught to make tools to work with to make more things. The tools were crude, even more primitive than the things they’d managed to make before using things they’d found in the rubble, but they worked. The temporary shelters they’d built when they first arrived hadn’t been much if any better than the shanties they’d put together for shelter before, but the cabins they’d begun building were certainly an improvement. They were tight and dry even when it rained—unless it rained really hard—and cool when the sun was hot and not freezing when the sun set—because they could build fires inside to cook and to warm themselves and didn’t have to deal with the choking smoke.

  Lexa wasn’t any happier about having to walk so far to get water or to relieve herself than anyone else but there was no getting around the fact that it was nice not having to watch your step and to smell dirt and growing things rather than shit and the stink of unwashed bodies packed too tightly together.

  There was still plenty of that particular stench, unfortunately. Everyone worked hard from the crack of dawn until it was too dark to work anymore, and they sweated profusely, but more and more people were getting used to the idea of bathing.

  She didn’t know why it was that everyone was still so angry with the udai. They had to see that they’d kept their word, that things were getting better—very slowly, true, but noticeably. She was still hungry and thirsty most of the time, but she knew where she could get a drink of good water and she knew there was going to be something to eat at least once a day, even if the udai had to bring something in—and they did—begrudgingly—but they made sure there was enough food in the cook pots to feed everyone when they came up short in hunting and gathering. The food they were growing and the animals they were being taught to tend, according to the udai, would eventually make that unnecessary.

  They said that in a tone of voice that made it clear that it damned well better come to that because they had no intention of continuing to feed them, but even the attitude didn’t change the facts.

  She thought people just didn’t want to credit the udai with helping. They didn’t want to see any good in them at all because even though the udai were helping, it made them feel inferior to need help and they weren’t about to admit that.

  Most of them didn’t, anyway. She thought there were some, like her, that thought not all of the udai were bad or to be hated, but they were afraid to speak up because they were outnumbered by the ones who despised them.

  It still took a great deal of courage for Lexa to seek her brothers and sister out once she’d made up her mind to try to reason with them. Even Kyle had seemed to say that he still loved her in spite of everything—that he disapproved of her, but he loved her enough to ignore it. He wasn’t going to be any easier to convince than Maura or Will.

  She still had to try. Fortunately, since Maura and Will seemed determined to remain elusive and aloof, Kyle came to her.

  She’d just dropped into the coma she usually fell into at the end of a very long, very exhausting day when a light touch brought her awake. Sheer terror threatened to overcome her when a hand was clamped over her mouth.

  “It’s me, Kyle,” the figure holding her down said on a breath of sound. “I didn’t want you to wake the others.”

  It seemed reasonable given the fact that she slept in a shelter with a half a dozen other women, but it took a few moments for the panic to subside even so. “What are you doing here?” she demanded when he finally released her. “You scared the shit out of me!”

  “Sorry. I wanted to talk … to give you something.”

  Lexa hesitated, but she’d trusted Kyle before and although he’d scared the hell out of her when he’d led her to Will, she didn’t believe he meant her any harm. Nodding, she got up as quietly as she could and followed him out of the shelter.

  When she was outside, she looked around for him and saw that he was heading toward the path to the stream. The guards rarely interfered with trips to get water, but she looked around to make sure none were watching her before she headed in the same direction. Kyle was waiting for her in the shadows as she stepped onto the path. “What is it?” she asked, somewhat uneasy in spite of her certainty that Kyle wouldn’t hurt her. She wasn’t convinced that Will wouldn’t, not after the way he’d threatened her.

  “It’s a book.”

  Lexa’s heart leapt. “A real book? I haven’t seen one in years.”

  “Me neither,” Kyle said cheerfully. “Ma … Will’s friend gave it to him and he gave it to me after he’d read it.”

  Surprise flickered through Lexa. “He read a whole book? I didn’t think I’d managed to teach him to read. He hated it when he was little.”

  Kyle chuckled. “I didn’t say it was easy, but then I never learned much neither.”

  “You were really little when ….”

  Kyle ignored the reference to the raid. “You said I was old enough.”

  “To start learning,” Lexa reminded him, relieved that he’d dismissed that horrible experience so readily, but then he had been really little. Maybe he didn’t remember it as well as she did? “What kind of book is it?” she asked curiously as she followed him along the path. “Like the one mama had?”

  “Sort of, I guess. It’s not supposed to be a storybook, though. Will’s friend said it was a history. Neither one of us knew what that was, but she said it was about things that happened before the day, about us—our people, I mean.”

  Lexa searched her memories, but she couldn’t recall anything either Sir or their mother had said about it. Not that Sir had
seemed interested in teaching them anything but how to do the chores he wanted done. He’d told stories about when he was a child, before. “’U’ ‘S’?” Lexa asked when she abruptly recalled something Sir had said.

  Kyle glanced at her and frowned. “Don’t that spell us?”

  “Yes, but … never mind,” she ended when she saw he was holding a very large, thick book. She settled on the bank with the heavy volume when Kyle gave it to her, trying to angle it so that the moonlight illuminated the pages. As bright as the moon was, though, it was a struggle to try to make out any of the words.

  “Can you read it to me like you used to?”

  Lexa’s throat closed as those memories of holding the baby he’d been instantly rose in her mind, but she forced a teasing smile. “You’re too big to get in my lap like you used to.”

  He looked a little offended and embarrassed, but the comment surprised a chuckle out of him. “I just meant read. I tried, but I don’t know the words.”

  Lexa hugged him impulsively. “I know. I’m sorry. I was just teasing.”