Joel had stayed with me a little longer, holding my hands between his. “Are you afraid?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Nervous, but not afraid. I wish it were over.”
He grinned. “You’ll impress the hell out of them.” He kissed the palms of my hands—each of them—then went back to sit one seat from Wright, my former seat empty between them.
No one had told them they couldn’t sit at the table with me, and I would have been happy to have them there. Even before I sat down at the table, it had looked like a lonely place. But both men had seen, as I had, that there were only Ina at the tables, and they had drawn their own conclusions. They were probably right. Moments later, Brook came in and sat down between them.
Then Preston stood up, introduced himself, welcomed everyone, and asked Milo to bless the meeting.
Milo stood up and, microphone in hand, began to speak.
“May we remember always that we are Ina,” he said in his deep, quiet voice. “We are an ancient and honorable people with more than ten thousand years of recorded history. We are a proud and powerful people, well aware of our duty to our families, to our kind, and to the truths that make us who we are. May we look after our human symbionts with kindness and firmness. May we care for them and keep them from harm. May we be loving, loyal, and generous to our mates. May the proceedings of this Council of Judgment be carried on with honor, justice, and truth. May we remember and honor the Goddess as we strive to do and to be all that she expects of us. May we put aside those things that do not honor her. May we put them aside and take care never again to be touched by them, never seduced by them, never soiled by them. May we remember always that our strength flows from our uniqueness and our unity. We are Ina! That is what this Council must protect. Now, then! Let us begin.” He closed his straight line of a mouth and sat down.
Milo had looked directly at me as he spoke his last few sentences. He was straight bodied and white haired, six and a half feet tall, and even leaner than most Ina. He was sharp featured and fierce looking somehow. If he were human, I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that he was sixty, perhaps sixty-five years old. He had, I thought, spoken condescendingly of human symbionts and contemptuously of me, and yet in his deep voice, his words had had a majestic sound to them.
Preston Gordon straightened in his seat at the center of the arc. I got the impression Preston was actually enjoying his position. He repeated his welcome to the members of the Council, their deputies, and their symbionts. He assured them that if they needed or wanted anything at all, they had only to speak to a member of the Gordon family. Then he introduced each Council member, although probably everyone knew them except me, some of the newer symbionts, and, ironically, some of the younger Silks. I listened carefully and remembered. Preston had already told me a little about each of the visiting families. Now I was getting a chance to put faces to the names.
There was Zo? Fotopoulos, whose family had once lived in Greece, but who, for a century now, lived on a cattle ranch in Montana.
There was Joan Braithwaite, whom I was glad to see again and whose family lived in western Oregon where they raised, among other things, Christmas trees.
There was Alexander Svoboda, whose family had come from what was, at the time, Czechoslovakia a few years before World War II to establish a community in the northern Sierra Nevada Mountains where they now owned a vacation resort.
Peter Marcu had come down from British Columbia where his family owned several tourist-oriented businesses, including one that helicoptered tourists to isolated areas and guided them on memorable mountain hikes.
Vladimir Leontyev and his family had lived in Alaska since Alaska was still Russian territory. They owned a fleet of fishing boats and interests in a cannery and a plant that processed frozen food.
Ana Morariu’s family were neighbors of the Gordons, living only about two hundred miles away in Humboldt County where several of her people were teachers, writers, and artists and owned two hotels that served people visiting the national and state parks.
Katharine Dahlman’s family ran a ranch that was a tourist resort in Arizona, but they were planning to move to Canada, away from the sun and toward the longer nights of northern winters. Katharine and her sister Sophia were noticeably short for Ina women. In fact, that was the first thing I noticed about them. Other Ina females who had come to the Council were at least six feet tall. But the Dahlmans were only Celia’s height, and Celia had told me she was five feet seven inches tall. She’d said she liked being around me since other Ina females made her feel short. She had measured me gleefully and discovered I was an inch under five feet tall. But I still had some growing to do. I wondered how Katharine and Sophia Dahlman felt about their height.