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 equusl 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 b£ 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 amerk, 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 flickering 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 Wergenget 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 shoud 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 but at a safe distance away.
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 chiefs 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.
So he read everything he could get his hands on.
His schoolmates had kidded him about "always having his nose stuck in a book." Not nastily and not too jeeringly, since they respected hi
s quick temper and quicker fists. But they did not comprehend his lust for learning.
An outsider, observing him from the ages of seventeen through twenty-two, would not have known that he was often with his peers but not of them. They would have seen a star athlete and superior student who palled around with the roughest, raced around the country roads on a motorcycle, tumbled many girls in the hay, literally, got disgustingly drunk, and once was jailed for running a police roadblock. His parents had been mortified, his mother weeping, his father raging. That he had escaped from jail just to show how easy it was and then voluntarily returned to it had upset them even more.
His male peers thought this was admirable and amusing, his female peers found it fascinating though scarey, and his teachers thought it alarming. The judge, who found him reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in his cell, decided that he was just a high-spirited youth with much potentiality who'd fallen among evil companions. The charges were dropped, but Paul was put on unofficial probation by the judge. The young man gave his word that he would behave as a decent respectable citizen should-during the probation period, anyway-and he had kept his word.
Paul seldom left the farm during the probation period. He didn't want to be tempted into evil by those companions whose evil had mostly come from their willingness to follow him into it. Besides, his parents had been hurt enough. He worked, studied, and sometimes hunted in the woods. He didn't mind being alone for long periods. He threw himself into solitariness with the same zest he threw himself into companionship.
And then Mr. and Mrs. Finnegan, perhaps in an effort to straighten him out even more, perhaps in an unconscious desire to hurt him as he'd hurt them, revealed something that shocked him.
He was an adopted child.
Paul was stunned. Like most children, he had gone through a phase when he believed that he was adopted. But he had not kept to the fantasy, which children conceive during periods when they think their parents don't love them. But it was true, and he didn't want to believe it.
According to his step-parents, his real mother was an Englishwoman with the quaint name of Philea Jane Fogg-Fog. Under other circumstances, he would have thought this hilarious. Not now.
Philea Jane's parents were of the English landed gentry, though his great-grandfather had married a Parsi woman. The Parsis, he knew, were Persians who had fled to India and settled there when the Moslems invaded their homeland. So ... he was actually one-eighth Indian. But it wasn't American Indian, among whom his step-mother counted ancestors. It was Asiatic Indian, though only in naturalization. The Parsis usually did not marry their Hindu neighbors.
His mother's mother, Roxana Fogg, was the one who'd picked up the hyphenated name of Fogg-Fog. She'd married a distant relative, an American named Fog. A branch of the Foggs had emigrated to the colony of Virginia in the 1600's. In the early 1800's some of their descendants had moved to the then-Mexican territory of Texas. By then the extra "g" had been dropped from the family name. Paul's maternal grandfather, Hardin Blaze Fog, was born on a ranch in the sovereign state, the Republic of Texas.
Roxana Fogg had married an Englishman at the age of twenty. He died when she was thirty-eight, leaving two children. Two years later she went with her son to Texas to look over some of the extensive ranch property he would inherit when he came of age. She also met some of the relatives there, including the famous Confederate war hero and Western gunfighter, Dustine "Dusty" Edward Marsden Fog. She was introduced to Hardin Blaze Fog, several years younger than herself. They fell in love, and he accompanied her back to England. She got the family's approval, despite his barbarian origins, since she announced she was going to marry him anyway and he was a wealthy shipping magnate. Blaze settled down in London to run the British office. When Roxana was forty-three years old, she surprised everybody, including herself, by conceiving. The baby was named Philea Jane.
Philea Jane Fogg-Fog was born in 1880. In 1900 she married an English physician, Doctor Reginald Syn. He died in 1910 under mysterious circumstances, leaving no children. Philea did not remarry until 1916. She had met in London a handsome well-to-do man from Indiana, Park Joseph Finnegan. The Foggs didn't like him because, one, he was of Irish descent, two, he was not an Episcopalian, and three, he had been seen with various ladies of the evening in gambling halls before he'd asked Philea to marry him. She married him anyway and went to Terre Haute, which her relatives thought was still subject to raids by the redskins.
Park Joseph Finnegan made Philea happy for the first six months, despite her difficulty in adjusting to a small Hoosier town. At least, she lived in a big house, and she suffered for no lack of material things.
Then life became hell. Finnegan resumed his spending of his fortune on women, booze, and poker games. Within a short time he'd lost his fortune, and when he found out his thirty-eight year old wife was pregnant, he deserted her. He announced he was going West to make another fortune, but she never heard from him again.
Too proud and too ashamed to return to England, Philea had gone to work as a housekeeper for a relative of her husband's. It was a terrible comedown for her, but she labored without complaint and kept a British stiff upper lip.
Paul was six months old when the gasoline-burning apparatus used to heat an iron exploded in his mother's face. The house burned down, and the infant would have perished with his mother if a young man had not dashed in through the flames and rescued him.
The relative whose house had burned died of a heart attack shortly after. Paul was scheduled to go to an orphanage. But Ralph Finnegan, a cousin of Park's, a Kentucky farmer, and his wife decided to adopt Paul. His fostermother gave him her maiden family name, Janus, as his middle name.
The revelation had shaken Paul terribly. It was after this that he began to suffer from a sense of loneliness. Or perhaps a sense of having been abandoned. Once he'd learned all the details he wanted to know about his true parents, he never spoke of them again. When he mentioned his parents to others, he spoke only of the man and woman who'd reared him.
Two years after Kickaha learned about his true parents, Mr. Finnegan fell ill with cancer and died in six months. That was grief enough, but three months after the burial, his mother had also fallen victim to the same disease. She took a longer time dying, and now Paul had no time to do anything except farm, attend school, and help take care of her. Finally, after much pain, she had died, the day before he was to graduate from high school.
Mingled with his grief was guilt. In some mysterious fashion, he thought, the shame they'd felt when he'd been arrested had caused the cancer. Considered rationally, the idea did not seem plausible. But guilt often had irrational origins. In fact, there were even times when he wondered if he hadn't somehow been responsible for his real father's having deserted his real mother and for her death.
His plans to go to college and major in zoology or in anthropology-he couldn't make up his mind-had been deferred. The farm had been mortgaged to pay for the heavy medical expenses of his parents, and Paul had to work the farm and take a part-time job in Terre Haute as a car mechanic. Nevertheless, despite the long hours of work, the lack of money, he had some time to express his innate exuberance. He would drop in occasionally at Fisher's Tavern, where some of the old gang still hung out. They'd go roaring off into the night on their motorcycles, their girls riding behind them, and finally end up in Indian Meadow, where there'd be a continuation of the beer blast and some fighting and lovemaking.
One of the girls wanted him to marry her, but he shied away from that. He wasn't in love with her, and he couldn't see himself spending the rest of his life with a woman with no intellectual interests whatever. Then she got pregnant, though fortunately not by him, and she departed to Chicago for a new life. Shortly thereafter, the gang began to drift apart.
He became alone and lonely again. But he liked to ride a horse wildly through the meadows or his chopper over the country roads. It was a good way to blow off steam.
Meantime, he had
visits from an uncle who was a knifethrower, juggler, and circus acrobat. Paul learned much from him and became proficient at knife-throwing. When he felt gloomy he would go out into the backyard and practice throwing-knives at a target. He knew he was working off his depression, guilt, and resentment at the lot cast for him by the fates with this harmless form of mayhem.
Five years went by swiftly. Suddenly, he was twenty-three. The farm still wasn't paid off. He couldn't see himself as a farmer the rest of his life, so he sold the farm at a very small profit. But now it was evident that his hopes of entering college and becoming an anthropologist-he'd decided by then his choice of career-would once more have to be set aside. The United States would be getting into the war in a year or two.
Loving horses so much, he enlisted in the cavalry. To his surprise and chagrin, he soon found himself driving a tank instead. Then there was a three-months' period in officers candidate training school. Though he wasn't a college graduate, he'd taken an examination which qualified him to enter it. Pearl Harbor tilted the nation into the conflict, and eventually he was with the Eighth Army and in combat.
World of Tiers 05 - The Lavalite World Page 6