‘Here we are, here you are, rather, you humans. In the unimaginable time you’ve been on Earth, you’ve changed your physical form very little. There was no evolutionary need for it, since you are generalized and so very fit for survival. Like the ant, cockroach, pig and rat. You have had, however, a vastly more complex brain structure.
‘Yet, though you’ve developed many great civilizations, you haven’t been able to make yourself thoroughly co-operative or free yourself of the diseases of body and mind. It’s true that you’ve conquered many, but new ones come to replace them. You’re incapable of inventing a panacea for body and mind; you’re still selfish, greedy, short-sighted and illogical outside a few fields of thought, and sometimes too emotional in those.
‘So here you are near the end of the world, savages, beings who, given the time, would build up a great civilization again. You don’t have the time, and the long long story, the many-aeons tale of humankind, will end. For what reason? I don’t know. The universe, looked at logically, is, despite all its intricate order and irresistible physical principles, senseless.
‘Or is it? Perhaps it’s been made for emotional satisfaction, not intellectual, though the two aren’t always separate. The question is: for whose?
‘But if it is emotional satisfaction that is the basis of this universe, the prime reason for the existence of sentients, not immortality, then perhaps you humans are superior to us Archkerri. I shudder at the idea, but I consider it.
‘What I know, or think I know, is that the existence of questions implies answers. Otherwise, we have an unbalanced equation – if there can be such a contradictory thing -and that doesn’t appeal to my scientific mind. But then perhaps the universe is one cosmic unbalanced equation. It would be the only one; all lesser equations can be balanced. Perhaps it is the very lack of balance that creates space-matter.
‘Do I know what I’m talking about? Perhaps. I do know that this type of thinking gives me a brain-ache. But I get emotional satisfaction from this pain.’
The Yawtl had walked away during this discourse. Deyv was fascinated, but he was glad when Sloosh turned to a more mundane matter. Which now was what route they should take to get to the land of The Shemibob. After a conference which even the slaves attended, though they had no voice in the decisions, the shoreline was chosen. It would be the longest way round, but they could too easily get lost in the vast jungles. Also, it was much easier walking on the beach.
‘Eventually, following it, we’ll get to the far end of the land,’ Sloosh said. ‘Then we can turn back into it. The Shemibob lives somewhat inland from the ocean. But we will come to a place on the beach where The Jewelled Wasteland grows. All we have to do is to enter it there. Feersh the Blind will show us – rather, tell us – where the House of The Shemibob is.’
‘No, I can’t do that!’ the witch shrilled. ‘I fled from her House to the opposite end. I wouldn’t know the path from which we’ll enter. Moreover, I’m not sure that I’d recognize now the path I took. It was many, many sleep-times since I ran with brain-freezing terror at my heels. Besides, The Wasteland has been growing since then. It’s not only spread outwards, it’s grown upward. The landmarks which I only vaguely remember are probably covered over now.’
Sloosh’s reply to this was, ‘I wonder why the stones are growing out of control?’
Thoroughly rested, they packed up and set out. By then The Beast had come around again and slid past half of the sky. Ten sleep-times passed without much incident. They saw during the eleventh a village on the beach and detoured into the jungle. On the twentieth they were warned by Deyv, who was the scout, that a House was ahead. It lay on its side, its base sticking out from the jungle onto the sand. Deyv had run into the jungle and got close to it to spy.
‘They are not human,’ he said. ‘They’re even stranger-looking than you, Hoozisst.’
‘I’m not strange-looking,’ he growled. ‘It’s you humans who look so peculiar.’
Sloosh heard Deyv’s description of them.
‘They’re Tsimmanbul,’ Sloosh said. ‘I’ve met some tribes that were friendly; some that were downright hostile. We’d better go round these. No use taking chances.’
The next inhabited place was a village of bamboo huts, round and with conical grass-thatched roofs, surrounded by a log stockade. Like the previous Tsimmanbul, they seemed to be engaged chiefly in fishing. This was all to the good, since it meant that the chances of encountering their hunters in the jungle were less. However, going around the fourth village, they were almost surprised by four warriors carrying a deer suspended from two poles. They dived into the bush and waited until the hunters were long gone.
The shortest of the Tsimmanbul was at least six feet six inches tall. Their skin was hairless and a dark slate grey colour with white bands running from below their armpits to halfway down their legs. In form, the bodies were human enough, though their long toes were webbed. The heads were about a third larger than those of a human of the same height, and they were beastish. Deyv thought they looked both dog-like and fish-like, yet their faces were intelligent and expressive. The forehead looked as if it covered a very large brain. The mouths were very wide, curving round almost to the quite human-like ears. These looked small but only because the huge heads dwarfed them.
They were certainly exotic in appearance. What made Deyv’s neck hairs seem to bristle, though he’d seen Tsimmanbul before, were the tops of their smooth glossy grey heads. Fat and muscle bunched up on the skin, and there were openings at the peaks. These moved like lips, as if they were breathing through them. Sloosh had told him that they were air-entrances, although once they had been blowholes.
They talked with their mouths, however, in a series of modulated pipings. Sharp teeth flashed whitely in the dark faces; their gums and tongues were a fish-belly white.
‘They, too, had a mighty civilization once, though it was mainly confined to the ocean,’ Sloosh said. ‘Their cities rose on pylons from the bottom or floated on the surface. At that time, they lived in peace with the humans. But, after a catastrophe, they reverted to savagery.’
The Dark Beast made its circular patrol of the Earth unwearyingly. The group that walked along the ocean-shore below it was not so untiring. They stopped frequently and rested. At other times they had to flee long distances or hide to escape humans, Yawtl, Tsimmanbul, hordes of beetles or ants, and on one river a horde of poisonous serpents that poured from they knew not whence to they knew not where.
Earthquakes of varying intensities shook, rocked and threw them. The Earth opened up before and behind them, and twice almost below them.
Storms slammed down giant trees that had endured for thousands of sleep-times; rains knocked them down before they could get into the expanded vessel; lightning struck so close it knocked the Yawtl senseless. Deyv said, however, that that was no new condition for Hoozisst.
Once, a very cold wind came, the first Deyv had felt, though there was said to have been a terrible one shortly before he was born. With it came another new phenomenon, hail. The large hard ice balls bruised them after tearing through the leaves overhead and might have killed them if they had not taken refuge in the vessel.
There were also many times when the sandy or rocky beach ran out and they had to climb the cliffs abutting on the waters.
Feersh’s family and the two slaves became as tough as the others, though Jeydee continued to whine and complain. Finally, Deyv got so tired of it that he told them they would have to carry the cube between them unless they ceased complaining. They did not stop, but they confined their remarks to their own language. Since Deyv did not understand it, it did not bother him.
Sloosh estimated that they had travelled four thousand miles along the shore. This curved so much, however, that they were still perhaps three thousand miles from the land of The Shemibob. The distance did not utterly dishearten them. They had no keen sense of time.
In the meantime, Deyv had sought relief from his ever-increasing te
nsion by approaching the female slave, Tishdom. To his utter humiliation and abysmal frustration, she refused him.
‘No, I will talk to you and eat with you, but I won’t go into the bushes with you. I’d like to, if circumstances were different, even if you are a savage. But I can’t, I just can’t. You have no soul egg.’
Deyv felt like hitting her.
‘What nonsense is this? You’ve been bedded by Feersh and her children. They don’t have eggs!’
‘I was their slave and had to do what they wished. I loathed every moment of it – well, almost every moment. Now I can tell them to go suck a sheekrook.’
Deyv stamped off, angry yet feeling as if he were something unclean. Which he was.
Tishdom must have told Vana about the conversation. She came to Deyv. Instead of the jeers he’d expected, she seemed sorry for him.
‘Now you know how I felt when you didn’t ask me. And how I felt when Shlip rejected me. A slave!’
Sloosh, hearing of all this, said, ‘I’m glad I’m not a human. But then I couldn’t be. The I of me is unique. It is the singular body which forms the singular identity, the psyche. Flesh is the origin and shaper of that entity which you call the soul. Or, in my case, flesh and vegetable.’
The bright sky and The Beast leisurely chased each other as if they had eternity to run. The witch and her people learned Sloosh’s language.
And then, shortly after breakfast, as they were going down a jungle path to avoid a settlement, what they’d feared for so long happened.
They had no warning, no growls from the cat or dog, no evidence of the trap. The leafy ceiling seemed to fall in on them, and they were covered with a great heavy net entangled with foliage. They struggled until the leaves were picked off by a dozen grinning Tsimmanbul.
29
‘At least, they didn’t kill us at once,’ Vana said. ‘Though we may regret that they didn’t.’
They were in a small, one-room building, the only one built of logs. The rest were the round bamboo huts that seemed prevalent throughout this country. A log stockade surrounded the village, which was on top of a high cliff. The sea boomed against its base, but near by was a wide sandy beach which held the fishing boats. Sloosh thought they’d built the village so high to avoid the tsunamis.
All their captors except the children were painted with green and red stripes, six-pointed stars and circles enclosing swastikas. The latter, Sloosh told his uninterested audience, were ancient symbols, so old that the earliest men had painted them on rocks and on the walls of their tents or hogans. However, the symbolism attached to them had varied greatly.
‘Will the symbols enable us to escape?’ the Yawtl asked sarcastically.
The Archkerri said, ‘Who knows? Almost anything can be a tool if it’s used correctly.’
The only entrance was a heavy log door with a thick log as a bar on the outside. There were four windows, all too small for any but a child to wriggle through. Two Tsimmanbul males stood guard at the door and one outside each window. Otherwise, the village seemed to be in its usual routine. The young were running round playing, the females were cooking and gossiping, males were coming in with fish, game or fruit or were empty-handed.
The shaman sat on a bamboo stool in front of his hut. He wore a tall feathered headdress, a green and purple egg on a cord around his thick neck, a white and black checked fibre kilt and fringed leather bands just below the knee. A thick film of rancid fat glistened over the paint and the bare skin.
On the packed earth at the shaman’s feet were six half-foot-long sticks. Every now and then he’d pick these up, shake a large gourd rattle while shrilling some sort of a chant, and then throw the sticks into the air. Afterwards he would study the pattern they made on the ground.
The prisoners had been in the cabin for three sleep-times. Apart from a beating by children and women when they had been brought in, they had not been ill-treated. The food was good and plentiful. Their evacuations were regularly emptied from large bamboo buckets, which were washed out before being returned. And they were let out, one at a time, to exercise.
Shortly after they had been locked up, a female had started language lessons. She stood outside the door and held up objects, giving each its name. It was not easy to imitate the pipings, but it could be done. Sloosh could only buzz. The teacher, however, was soon able to make a correlation between his modulated sounds and hers.
The lessons made the cat and the dog, who had also been shut up with them, nervous at first. After a while, they became used to them.
A good part of the time, the shaman sat casting his sticks. At other times he would leave the village on some business, no doubt sinister. When he was absent, the children used to come close to the door and talk to the prisoners. The captives made more progress conversing with the youngsters than with the teacher.
A Tsimmanbul captive, whose paint showed he was of an enemy tribe, was brought in by a war party. He was put in a hut and stayed there, except for exercise, for ten sleep-times. The shaman visited him frequently, always taking in with him a fibre cage that held a giant firefly. At the end of this period, the captive was taken away. The whole village celebrated this, beating drums, blowing whistles, playing flutes, twanging tortoise-shell harps, chanting and dancing and taking turns daubing the captive until he was a solid black colour.
Then he was bound and carried out of the stockade in a palanquin. Everybody but the guards went with him. At the end of seven sleep-times, they returned. The palanquin still carried the prisoner, but he was only a skull and skeleton. The clean-picked bones were dumped onto the ground. The shaman took the skull into his house, and the bones were burned in a huge bonfire amidst another wild celebration.
Sloosh said, ‘Note that there was a small hole in the breastbone and several in the top of the skull.’
‘What does that mean?’ Vana asked.
‘I don’t know, but we’ll find out, though I suspect we won’t like it.’
He paused, then said, ‘Still, why should they go to the trouble and expense of feeding us and teaching us their language only to kill us? It doesn’t seem logical. I’ll admit, though, that this conclusion is based on insufficient data. Their prisoner, from what I heard of his pipings as he was carried off, spoke the same language as the others. Perhaps the victim is required to give certain responses in a ritual. That might explain why we’ve not been killed – as yet.’
This speculation seemed to be wrong. What the Tsimmanbul wanted, at the moment, anyway, was satisfaction of their curiosity. When the captives were fluent enough to answer detailed questions, they received a barrage of them. Where did they come from? What was their tribal fire like? What were they doing here so far from their homes? Was the plant-man a god, a demon or just what he seemed to be?
The idea that they thought he might be a god and yet could be so easily caught intrigued Sloosh. He asked the shaman, Fat Bull, their main inquisitor, why this was.
Fat Bull replied that catching gods and demons was the main business of his kind, the Narakannetishaw.
This was the generic name of this species, Tsimmanbul being the Yawtl’s name for them. Their captors’ speech had no consonants or vowels. The prisoners had arbitrarily assigned these sound-values to the modulation units so that they could use the Narakannetishaw names in their own speech.
Fat Bull explained that, in the beginning, when their ancestors left the sea, they had had no gods. So, feeling the need for them, they had captured them and made them into their own.
That’s a myth,’ Sloosh said in his own language, so that the shaman would not understand him. ‘Very interesting, though.’
‘We make raids on the other villages and Houses,’ the shaman continued. “Be they Narakannetishaw, Yawtl, human, or Skinniwakitaw, we raid them, take their gods, and bring them here.’
He pointed at his house, the largest in the village.
‘And our enemies also raid us, though so far we’ve been more successful than they. How
ever, we have caught a god who seems to have turned the tables on us. He’s caught us. I don’t mean that he’s taken any of us captive, but he might as well have. We can’t move him, and he insists that we sacrifice someone every thirty sleep-times. When we have no enemies to give him, we have to use one of our own tribe. We don’t like that at all.’
‘I don’t blame you,’ Deyv said. ‘Nobody likes to be killed. But I must admit I don’t really understand what you’ve said. How can a god force you to take sacrifices to him if he stays in one place? Which I assume isn’t close to here?’
‘Who can read the minds of men, let alone the minds of the gods? He has some reason, Phemropit does. Actually, we can’t talk to him. So we don’t really know what he wants. But it’s much safer to assume that he does require sacrifices. He hasn’t rejected any, so he must want them.
‘We’ve been economical, though, killing two birds with one stone, as it were. We make the sacrifices, ask the god certain things. We think that if the god does finally reply, he may come to dwell in my house. And then I, I mean we, would have great power. With this we could exterminate our enemies and from then on live in peace. We’d also be able to use their fishing space and to have more babies. In time, we’d become so numerous and powerful that no wandering tribes would dare settle down here.’
‘An old story,’ Sloosh said in Archkerri. ‘The once too-peaceful Tsimmanbul are now as savage as you humans.’
Deyv said, ‘So we’ll be the next sacrifices?’
The shaman smiled, a ghastly thing to see.
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