Yuen-Mong's Revenge by Gian Bordin Read Free Book Online Page B

no-man’s-land between
two groups."
            "Can you still sense them?"
            "Yes, but they are moving away."
            "Have you really killed one of them?"
            "Yes, several. But for the last three years it has never been necessary.
They now avoid me."
            "Even large groups?"
            "Those even more, because that is when I may have to kill. With
small groups we simply go around each other. They have learned that."
            She again knew that he did not believe her.
          "When you said ‘for the last three years’, what kind of years did you
mean? Years of Aros?"
            "No standard years." She noticed his surprised look. "It is easy to
convert Aros years to standard years. My father calculated that four Aros
years correspond very closely to three standard years."
            "I see… How old are you? In standard years."
            "A bit over 19."
            "So you claim that you were sixteen and younger when you killed
savages? This is hard to believe."
            "The savages killed my parents when I was twelve. I killed the first
three savages when I was fourteen." Again this hint of disbelief.
          "How?"
            "I shot them with my bow."
            "Why?"
            "To revenge my parents."
            "Did they kill your parents? Why?"
            "They tried to kidnap me and my mother, and my father came to my
help so that I could escape, knowing that it would be his death. There
were too many of them, and they always kill the males."
            "But why didn’t your father kill some to scare them away."
            "He did not believe in killing humans. He always tried to befriend
them."
            "But they’re barely human. And your mother, didn’t she escape with
you?"
            "No. They surrounded her and when she fought them off, they killed
her." In her mind, she again saw four of the savages wrestling her down,
while the headman tried to rape her. She closed her eyes, trying to block
out that image, trying to replace it with her mother’s loving face. She had
sworn then that she was going to revenge her mother and had burned the
faces of these men into her brain. It took her two years to achieve. The
headman was her first victim.
          "How did you then get away?"
            "I could easily outrun them even at that age."
            She handed him a bread with a cold slice of yesterday’s meat on it. He
ate it, nodding approvingly.
          In the afternoon, they fetched the remaining branches. They left the
trunk since cutting it into usable portions was far too difficult. While
Atun broke some of the branches into four to six pieces, she pounded
lime clumps into a fine powder in a deep wooden tub. Then she added the
squashed timoru fruit, covered them with water, and mixed the mash
thoroughly. She would let it leach for three or four days before washing
out the lime with clean water and allowing the mash to ferment for a day.
          Over dinner, she learned a bit about him, his home world Palo, the
reason for coming to Aros, that he was 25. But by the end of the meal,
she again felt like being crushed by the unrelenting surge of the vibes
emanating from him, and when he went into the cave to refill his mug of
bark tea, she fled to her refuge on top of the rock. There she meditated,
ignoring his calls, slowly calming her mind and gaining back her inner
peace.
     
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    "Why didn’t you answer last night when I called?" He was still annoyed
that she had just disappeared without a word.
          "I was up there, meditating. I needed to be alone."
            "Why? Don’t you like company?"
            "I have lived alone for seven years. It is hard for me to be with somebody for a long time. It feels a bit like being dragged under water, and I
need time to think and reflect."
            He could understand that, but was surprised by