“Like a dancerhorn, yes,” Konya put in.
Several times they lost him amid the tangles of the wilderness, but always the glint of the golden rays of his helmet revealed him in the distance. In the end they had trapped him in a pocket canyon that had no exit; and, though he was armed with a beautifully made spear and seemed capable of using it, he offered no resistance, but abruptly surrendered without a struggle and without saying a word.
Nor had he spoken yet. He met Koshmar’s gaze evenly, fearlessly, and kept his silence as she attempted to question him.
“My name is Koshmar,” she began. “I am the chieftain here. Tell me your name and who your chieftain is.”
When that produced nothing but a calm stare, she ordered him by the names of the gods to speak. She invoked Dawinno, Friit, Emakkis, and Mueri without success. It seemed to her that the name of Yissou drew some response from him, a quick quirking of the lips; but still he said nothing.
“Speak, curse you!” Harruel growled, angrily stepping forward. “Who are you? What do you want here?” He shook his spear in the stranger’s face. “Speak or we’ll flay you alive!”
“No,” Koshmar said sharply. “That is not how I mean to deal with him.” She pulled Harruel back beside her and told the stranger in a soft voice, “You will not be harmed here, I promise you that much. I ask you again to tell us your name and the name of your people, and then we will give you food and drink, and welcome you among us.”
But the stranger seemed as indifferent to Koshmar’s diplomacy as he was to Harruel’s bluster. He continued to stare at Koshmar as though she were uttering mere nonsense.
She tapped her breast three times. “Koshmar,” she said, in a loud, clear tone. Pointing at the two warriors, she said, “Harruel. Konya. Koshmar, Harruel, Konya.” She pointed now at the helmeted stranger and gave him a questioning look. “Thus we entrust you with our names. Now you will tell us yours.”
The Helmet Man remained silent.
“We can go on like this all day,” said Harruel in disgust. “Give him to me, Koshmar, and I promise you I’ll have him talking in five minutes!”
“No.”
“We need to find out why he’s here, Koshmar. Suppose he’s the lead man for an army of his kind that’s waiting out there, planning to kill us and take Vengiboneeza for themselves!”
“Thank you,” said Koshmar acidly. “It was a thought that had not occurred to me.”
“Well, what if he is? It’s almost certain that he means trouble for us. We’ve got to know. And if he won’t tell us anything, we’ll have to kill him.”
“Do you think so, Harruel?”
“Now that he’s been down here and seen everything, and he knows how few we are, we can’t just let him go back to his people and give them his report.”
Koshmar nodded. That had been clear to her all along, though only a brute like Harruel, she thought, would say such a thing to the stranger’s face. Well, perhaps they would have to kill him. The idea held little appeal for her, but she would do it without hesitation if the safety of the tribe was at stake.
A thousand conflicting thoughts collided in her mind. Strangers! Another tribe! A rival chieftain!
That meant enemies, conflict, war, death, might it not? Or would they be friendly? Conflict was not inevitable, whatever Harruel believed. Suppose they settled here — Vengiboneeza was big enough for a second tribe, certainly — and entered into some kind of amiable relationship with her people. But what would that be like, she wondered — friends who are not of our kind? The two terms were close to being contradictory: friends and not of our kind. Different beliefs, strange gods, unfamiliar customs? How could there be other gods? Yissou, Dawinno, Emakkis, Friit, Mueri: those were the gods. If these people had different gods, what sense was there in the world?
And would there be matings between people of the two tribes? Where would the children live — with the mother’s tribe, or with the father’s? Would one tribe grow large at the expense of the other?
Koshmar closed her eyes a moment, and drew breath deep down into her lungs. She found herself wishing that this were only a dream.
Where this man came from, there must be many more just like him, an army of strangers camped on the far side of the mountain wall. Everywhere in the world right now, very likely, other tribes were making the Coming Forth as the new warmth flooded the air. She had lived all her life in a world of sixty folk. It was almost impossible for her to grasp the truth that there could be six thousand in the world, or sixty thousand, even — all those names, all those souls, all those unfamiliar selves, each clamoring for some place in the sun. But that might well be the case.
There was a knocking at the door.
She heard the voice of Torlyri, saying, “Hresh has returned, Koshmar.”
“Bring him in,” she said.
Hresh looked odd: worn and dusty, tired, suddenly much older than his years. His eyes were in shadows. He seemed almost ill. But at the sight of the stranger in the helmet the old Hresh glow returned to his face. Koshmar could almost hear the questions beginning to pop and click in his mind.
Quickly she told him of the capture and of the interrogation thus far. “We can get nothing out of him. He pretends not to understand what we say.”
“Pretends? What if he actually doesn’t understand you?”
“You mean, that he’s stupid, like a beast?”
“I mean that he may speak some other language.”
Koshmar stared at him, baffled. “Another language? I don’t know what that means, ‘another language.’”
“It means — well — another language, ” Hresh said lamely. His hands groped in the air as though they were searching. “We have our language, our set of sounds that convey ideas. Imagine that his people use a different set of sounds, all right? Where we say ‘meat,’ his people may say ‘flookh,’ or maybe ‘splig.’”
“But ‘flookh’ and ‘splig’ are sounds without meaning,” Koshmar objected. “What sense is there in—”
“They have no meaning to us,” said Hresh. “But they might to other people. Not those sounds particularly. I just made them up as examples, you understand. But they could have some word of their own for ‘meat,’ and one for ‘sky,’ and one for ‘spear,’ and so on. Different words from ours for everything.”
“This is madness,” Koshmar said irritably. “What do you mean, a word for meat? Meat is meat. Not flookh, not splig, but meat. Sky is sky. I thought you might be of help, Hresh, but all you do now is mystify me.”
“These ideas are very strange to me too,” the boy said. He seemed to be extraordinarily weary, and struggling to express his thoughts. His hands groped the air, as if searching. “I have never known any language but ours, or even thought that there might be another. The notion leaped into my mind, out of nowhere, just as I looked upon this stranger. But think, Koshmar: what if the hjjk-men have a language of their own, and each kind of beast has its own also, and every tribe that lived through the long winter too! We were alone so long, cut off from others for hundreds of thousands of years. Maybe at first everyone spoke one language, but over so long a time, hundreds of thousands of years—”
“Perhaps so,” said Koshmar uneasily. “But in that case, how will we communicate with this man? For we have to communicate with him somehow. We have to find out if he’s friend or enemy.”