The men were naked from the waist up, wearing leather trousers which kept their legs from chafing. Some of them had feathers affixed to their long hair, but they were not Amerindians. Their skins were too light, and they were heavily bearded. As they got close enough, he saw that their faces bore tribal scars.
Some of the spears were poles the ends of which had been sharpened and fire-hardened. Others were tipped with flint or chert or antelope horns or lion teeth. There were no bows, but some carried stone axes, and heavy war boomerangs in the belts at their waists. There were also round leather-covered shields, but these hung from leather strings tied to the saddle. Evidently they thought they didn’t need them against Kickaha. They were right.
The first to arrive halted their beasts. The others spread out and around him.
Their chief, a gray-haired stocky man, urged his animal closer to Kickaha. The moosoid obeyed, but his wide rolling eyes showed he didn’t like the idea.
By then the main body of the tribe was beginning to come from around the bend of the mountain. They consisted of armed outriders and a caravan of women, children, dogs, and moosoids drawing travois on which were piled heaps of skins, gourds, wood poles, and other materials.
The chief spoke to Kickaha in an unknown language. Of course. Not expecting them to understand him, Kickaha used test phrases in twenty different languages, Lord, English, French, German, Tishquetmoac, Hrowakas, the degraded High German of Dracheland, several Half-Horse Lakota dialects, a Mycenaean dialect, and some phrases of Latin, Greek, Italian, and Spanish he knew.
The chief didn’t understand any of them. That was to be expected, though Kickaha had hoped that if their ancestors came from Earth they might speak a tongue that he at least could identify.
One good thing had happened. They hadn’t killed him at once.
But they could intend to torture him first. Knowing what the tribes on the Amerind level of Jadawin’s world did to their captives, he wasn’t very optimistic.
The chief waved his feathered spear and said something to two men. These got down off their beasts and approached him warily. Kickaha smiled and held out his hands, palms up.
The two didn’t smile back. Their spears ready for thrusting, they moved toward him slowly.
If Kickaha had been in his usual excellent physical condition, he would have tried to make a run for the nearest moosoid with an empty saddle. Even then, he would have had only one chance in twenty of fighting his way through the ring. The odds had been heavier against him in past situations, but then he had felt capable of anything. Not now. He was too stiff and too tired.
Both men were shorter than he, one being about five feet six inches tall and the other about an inch higher. The bigger man held his spear in one hand while the other reached out. Kickaha thought that he wanted him to hand his knife to him.
Shrugging, Kickaha slowly obeyed. There was a second when he thought of throwing the knife into the man’s throat. He could grab the spear, snatch the knife out, run for … No, forget it.
The man took the knife and backed away. It was evident from his expression, and those of the others, that he had never seen metal before.
The chief said something. The man ran to him and gave him the knife. The graybeard turned it over, gingerly felt its edge with his palm, and then tried it on a leather string holding his warshield.
All exclaimed when the string fell apart so easily.
The chief asked Kickaha something. Probably, he wanted to know where his captive had gotten it.
Kickaha wasn’t backward about lying if it would save his life. He pointed at the mountains toward which he had been traveling.
The chief looked as if he were straining his mind. Then he spoke again, and the two dismounted men tied Kickaha’s hands in front of him with a leather cord. The chief spoke again, and the scouts moved on ahead. The chief and the two aides got down off their beasts and waited. In about fifteen minutes, the front of the caravan caught up with them.
The chief seemed to be explaining the situation to his people, making frequent gestures with his spear toward the direction indicated by his captive. There was a babel of excited talk then. Finally, the chief told them to shut up. During this Kickaha had been counting the tribe. Including the scouts, there were about ninety. Thirty men, forty women, and twenty children.
The latter ranged from several babes in arms to preadolescents. The women, like the men were black- or brown-haired. The general eye color was a light brown. Some had hazel; a few, blue eyes. Some of the women weren’t bad-looking. They wore only short kilts of tanned leather. The children were naked and, like their elders, dirty. All stank as if they’d been bathless for a month or so.
Some of the beasts of burden, however, carried big water skins of water. A woman milked a cow during the brief stop.
The travois, in addition to the piles of skins and weapons, carried a form of pemmican. There were no tents, which meant that when it rained the tribe just endured it.
While several men pointed spears at him, he was stripped by others. The chief was given the ragged levis and worn boots. From his expression and the tones of his voice, he had never seen anything like them before. When he tried to put on the levis, he found that his wide buttocks and bulging paunch would not accommodate them. He solved this problem by slitting them with the knife around the waist. The boots were too large for his feet, but he wore them anyway.
Finding the package of poison darts in the rear pocket of the levis, he passed them out to men whose spears lacked flint or chert tips. These tied the darts on the ends with rawhide cords and then had a good time play-jabbing at each other, laughing as they leaped away.
The only possessions left to Kickaha were his ragged and dirty jockey shorts.
A big female moosoid was pulled out from the herd, fitted with reins and a saddle, and Kickaha was urged to mount it. He did so, holding the reins in his hands. The chief then said something, and a man tied the ends of a long thong under the beast’s belly to Kickaha’s ankles. The caravan started up then, an old woman—the only old person he saw—blowing a strange tune on a flute made from a long bone. Probably it was the legbone of a moa.
The ride lasted about an hour. Then the tribe camped—if you call such a simple quick procedure camping—by the channel. While Kickaha sat on the animal, ignored by everybody except a single guard, the people took their turn bathing.
Kickaha wondered if they meant to keep him on the moosoid until they moved on. After half an hour, during which time he was savagely bitten by a horde of blue flies, his guard decided to untie the leg thongs. Kickaha got down stiffly and waited. The guard leaned on his spear waiting until he was relieved to take a bath.
Kickaha gestured that he would like a drink of water. The guard, a slim youth, nodded. Kickaha went to the edge of the channel and got down on his knees to scoop up water with his hands. The next moment, he was in the water, propelled by a kick on his buttocks.
He came up to find everybody laughing at this splendid joke.
Kickaha swam forward until his feet touched the bottom. He turned around and cast one longing glance at the other side. It lay about three hundred feet away. He could get over to the opposite shore even with his hands tied before him. His pursuers could swim or ride across on swimming beasts. But he could beat them. If only there had been a wood nearby or a mountain, he would have tried for escape. However, there was a plain about two miles broad there. His captors would ride him down before he got to it.
Reluctantly, he hauled himself onto the bank. He stood up, looking expressionlessly at the youth. That one laughed and said something to the others, and they broke into uproarious laughter. Whatever it was he said, it wasn’t complimentary to the prisoner.
Kickaha decided he might as well start his language lessons now. He pointed at the spear and asked its name. At first the youth didn’t understand him. When he caught on, he said, “Gabol.”
Gabol, as it turned out, was not a generic term. It meant a s
pear with a fire-hardened tip. A spear with a stone tip was a baros; with an antelope-horn tip, a yava; with a lion-tooth tip, a grados.
He learned later that there was no word for humankind. The tribe called itself by a word which meant, simply, The People. Other human beings were The Enemy. Children, whatever their sex, were summed under one word which meant “unformed.” Adult males were distinguished by three terms: one for a warrior who had slain an enemy tribesman, one for a youth who had not yet been blooded, and a third for a sterile man. It made no difference if the sterile man had killed his enemy. He was still a tairu. If, however, he managed to steal a child from another tribe, then he was a full wiru, a blooded warrior.
Women were in three classes. If one had borne a child, she was in the top class. If she was sterile but had killed two enemy, male or female, she was in the second rank. If sterile and unblooded, she was a shonka, a name which was also that of some kind of low animal.
Two days and nights passed while the tribe traveled leisurely along the channel. This was, except for the great conical mountains far ahead of them, the only permanent feature of the landscape. Sometimes it broadened and shallowed, sometimes narrowed and deepened. But it continued to run straight as an Indian chief’s back for as far as the eye could see in either direction.
Hunting parties went out while the rest of the tribe either camped or moved at the rate of a mile an hour. Sometimes the younger women went with the men. Unlike the primitives who lived on the World of Tiers, the women of this tribe were not engaged from dawn to dusk in making artifacts, growing food, preparing meals, and raising children. They tended herd and shared the child-raising, and sometimes they fashioned wooden poles into spears or carved boomerangs. Otherwise, they had little to do. The stronger of the young women went hunting and, sometimes, on the raiding parties.
The hunters returned with antelope, gazelle, ostrich, and moa meat. Once, a party killed a young elephant which had been separated from its herd. Then the tribe traveled two miles across the plain to the carcass. There they stripped it to the bone, gorging on the raw meat until their bellies looked like balloons.
The cutting of the meat was done with flint or chert knives. Kickaha would find out that these rare stones came from nodules which occasionally appeared when the earth opened up to deliver them. Except for the boulders, these were the only solid mineral known.
The diet included fruit and nuts from various trees. These were usually knocked off by the boomerangs as the hunters rode out of range of tentacle or dart.
Kickaha, though an enthusiastic and quick-learning linguist, took more than a week to master the rudiments of the tribe’s speech. Though the tribe had a technology that an Ice Age caveman would have ranked as low, they spoke a complex language. The vocabulary was not great, but the shades of meaning, mostly indicated by subtle internal vowel changes, baffled his ear at first. It also had a feature he’d never encountered before. The final consonant of a word could alter the initial consonant of the succeeding word in a phrase. There was a rule to learn about this, but, as in all living languages, the rule had many exceptions.
Besides, the possible combinations were many.
Kickaha thought he remembered reading something about a similar consonant change in the Celtic languages. How similar, he didn’t know.
Sometimes he wondered if the Thana, as the tribe called itself, could be descended from ancient Celts. If they were, however, no modern Celt would have understood them. In the course of many thousand years, the speech must have changed considerably. A male moosoid, used for riding, for instance, was called a hikwu. Could that possibly be related to the ancient latin equus? If he remembered his reading, done so many years ago, equus was related to a similar word in Celtic and also to the Greek hippos.
He didn’t know. It didn’t really matter, except as an item of curiosity. Anyway, why would the original tribe brought in here have named a moose after a horse? That could be because the hikwu functioned more like a horse than any animal the tribe had encountered.
During the day, Kickaha either rode, his hands bound, on a merk, a female riding-moosoid, or he lazed around camp. When he was in the saddle, he kept an eye out for signs of Anana. So far, he didn’t know the language well enough to ask anybody if they had seen pale strangers like himself or a black man.
The tenth day, they came through a mountain pass which seemed to be a permanent feature. And there, beyond a long slope, beyond a broad plain, was the ocean.
The mountains on this side and the flat land were covered with permanently rooted trees. Kickaha almost cried when he saw them. They were over a hundred feet tall, of a score of genuses, plants like pines, oaks, cottonwoods, many fruit and nut-bearing.
The first question occurring to him was: if this land was unchanging, why didn’t the Thana put down their roots here? Why did they roam the evermutating country outside the ocean-ringing peaks?
On the way down, clouds formed, and before they were halfway down the slope, thunder bellowed. The Thana halted, and the chief, Wergenget, conferred with the council. Then he gave the order to turn about and pass beyond the mountains.
Kickaha spoke to Lukyo, a young woman whose personality, not to mention her figure, had attracted him.
“Why are we going back?”
Lukyo looked pale and her eyes rolled like a frightened horse’s. “We’re too early. The Lord’s wrath hasn’t cooled off yet.”
At that moment, the first of the lightning struck. A tree two hundred feet away split down the middle, one side falling, one remaining upright.
The chief shouted orders to hurry up, but his urging wasn’t needed. The retreat almost became a stampede. The moosoids bolted, riders frantically trying to pull them up, the travois bumping up and down, dislodging their burdens. Kickaha and Lukyo were left standing alone. Not quite. A six-year old child was crying under a tree. Apparently, she had wondered off for a minute, and her parents, who were mounted, were being carried off against their will.
Kickaha managed to pick up the little girl despite the handicap of his bound wrists. He walked as fast as he could with the burden while Lukyo ran ahead of him. More thunder, more strokes of lightning. A bolt crashed behind him, dazzling him. The child threw her arms around his neck and buried her face against his shoulder.
Kickaha swore. This was the worst lightning storm he had ever been in. Yet, despite the danger of the bolts, he would have fled into it. It was his first good chance to escape. But he couldn’t abandon the child.
The rain came then, striking with great force. He increased his pace, his head low while water poured over him as if he were taking a shower. The frequent bolts showed that Lukyo, propelled by fear, was drawing ahead of him. Even unburdened and in good physical condition, he might have had trouble keeping up with her. She ran like an Olympic champion.
Then she slipped and fell and slid face down on the wet grass for a few feet uphill. She was up again. But not for long. A crash deafened him; whiteness blinded him. Darkness for a few seconds. A score or more of blasts, all fortunately not as near as the last bolt. He saw Lukyo down again. She was not moving.
When he got near her, he could smell the burned flesh. He put the child down, though she fought against leaving him. Lukyo’s body was burned black.
He picked up the little girl and began running as fast as he could. Then, out of the checkerboard of day-turned-night he saw a ghostly figure. He stopped. What the hell? All of a sudden he was in a nightmare. No wonder the whole tribe had fled in panic, forgetting even the child.
But the figure came closer, and now he saw that it was two beings. Wergenget on his hikwu. The chief had managed to get control of the beast, and he had come back for them. It must not have been easy for him to conquer his fear. It certainly was difficult for him to keep the moosoid from running away. The poor animal must have thought his master was mad to venture into that bellowing death-filled valley after having escaped from it.
Now Kickaha understood why Wergenge
t was the chief.
The graybeard stopped his beast, which trembled violently, its upper lip drawn back, its eyes rotating. Kickaha shouted at him and pointed at the corpse. Wergenget nodded that he understood. He lifted up the girl and placed her on the saddle before him. Kickaha fully expected him to take off then. Why should he risk his life and the child’s for a stranger?
But Wergenget controlled the hikwu until Kickaha could get up behind the chief. Then he turned it and let it go, and the beast was not at all reluctant. Though burdened with the three, it made speed. Presently, they were in the pass. Here there was no rain; the thunder and the lightning boomed and exploded at a safe distance.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Wergenget handed the child to its weeping wailing mother. The father kissed his daughter, too, but his expression was hangdog. He was ashamed because he had allowed his fear to overcome him.
“We stay here until the Lord is through rampaging,” the chief said.
Kickaha slid off the animal. Wergenget followed him. For a moment, Kickaha thought about snatching the knife from the chief’s belt. With it he could flee into a storm where no man dared venture. And he could lose himself in the forest. If he escaped being struck by lightning, he would be so far away the tribe would never find him.
But there was more to his decision not to run for it just now.
The truth was that he didn’t want to be alone.
Much of his life, he’d been a loner. Yet he was neither asocial nor antisocial. He’d had no trouble mixing with his playmates, the neighboring farmers’ children, when he was a child nor with his peers at the country schoolhouse and community high school.
Because of his intense curiosity, athletic abilities, and linguistic ability, he’d been both popular and a leader. But he was a voracious reader, and, quite often, when he had a choice between recreation with others or reading, he decided on the latter. His time was limited because a farmer’s son was kept very busy. Also, he studied hard to get good grades in school. Even at a young age he’d decided he didn’t want to be a farmer. He had dreams of traveling to exotic places, of becoming a zoologist or curator of a natural history museum and going to those fabulous places, deepest Africa or South America or Malaya. But that required a Ph.D. and to get that he’d have to have high grades through high school and college. Besides, he liked to learn.
The World of Tiers, Volume 2 Page 26
