Other than that, no one mentioned Blade's first night among the Fak'si. He was quite happy to let it be forgotten. There was just too much else to do, if he was going to learn about this Dimension and its people. He was also going to have to learn about them without as much help from the Fak'si as he'd expected. It wasn't that they were hostile, or even reluctant to speak when he asked them questions. It was just that he had to think up all the questions himself, find the people to answer them, then put the answers together into some sort of reasonable picture.
It wasn't really surprising that the Fak'si weren't experts at explaining themselves to outsiders. They probably didn't have much practice doing so. But it meant some delay, and it would have meant even more if Blade hadn't been a fairly good rule-of-thumb anthropologist. He wouldn't have been alive otherwise. He was better than any college professor at looking over a primitive people and learning their ways, particularly the ways which might be dangerous to him. It didn't take him long to learn his way around the Fak'si and learn about their world.
Exactly how large this Dimension was, Blade could never even guess intelligently. The question always nagged at Lord Leighton, and also at J and Blade. Was each Dimension X something the size of the whole Earth, with many lands beyond the one Blade found? Or were they each only a partial alternate reality? Certainly some of the Dimensions were complete alternate Earths, or even complete alternate universes. But with many others there was no way of telling, and that was the case in this Dimension.
What Blade did learn about was what the Fak'si called the Forest-as though there were no trees anywhere else in the world. It spread many days travel in all directions, with mountains to the west, ocean to the east, and no man knew what to the north and south. Through the Forest the Great River flowed from west to east, fed by the rains and by dozens of tributary rivers and streams.
In the Forest lived the four Great Tribes-the Fak'si, the Yal, the Banum, and the Kabi. There were also minor tribes, mostly founded by men who'd fled from one of the Four Great Tribes. No one took these seriously. There were so many of them that no one could keep count from year to year, let alone from generation to generation. Also, some of them had the habit of changing their names whenever the whim took them, apparently so that the Forest Spirit shouldn't know who they were.
«I do not know if they confuse the Forest Spirit,» said one warrior, explaining this to Blade. «But I know they confuse us. Think no more of the Little Tribes of the Forest, Blade. A warrior and friend of the Fak'si has nothing to do with them.»
So Blade abandoned any hope of learning about these odd-men-out of the Forest and concentrated on learning about the four Great Tribes. The only one he had in front of his eyes every day was the Fak'si, but apparently the other three were very similar.
Each tribe lived in a part of the lower valley of the Great River, with villages scattered along the tributaries. No one lived permanently along the Great River itself, and only brave men with urgent business traveled on it at all.
«When it is in flood, Blade, no man can see from one bank to the other,» said Swebon. «It rises so that trees higher than those where I built my roofs vanish beneath the water. We do not fear much in the Forest, but we do fear the Great River in its anger.» Other descriptions of the river agreed with Swebon's. To Blade, the Great River began to sound more and more like the Amazon-vast, powerful, and deadly. However, the Forest gave a good life to those who kept their distance from the Great River. Each of the tribes had at least a dozen villages, and each of the villages could send out two hundred warriors without leaving itself defenseless. The Forest People had domestic animals and fowl for meat, plenty of fish, small garden plots in most villages, and everywhere around them the Forest with its leaves, fruits, seeds, roots, and game animals. Food was so plentiful in the Forest that a child might grow gray-haired without ever knowing an empty belly.
The tribes added their own skills to the Forest's offerings in making a good life for themselves. They were masters at working any sort of wood their tools could handle, as well as leaves, grass, animal hides, gourds, and anything else that came to hand. Blade was sure they could have built much more substantial dwellings than they had, except for the danger of flood and the need to keep cool.
Their weapons were adequate, though not particularly sophisticated. There were the shields made from the hides of Horned Ones and smaller reptiles, the spears, the bows, and the clubs Blade had already seen. The quality of the iron in the spear points was surprisingly good, but the bows were weak. Blade guessed they had perhaps a twenty-five or thirty-pound pull, half that of a Home Dimension hunting bow and a third that of an English longbow. The clubs were really beautiful pieces of work, perfectly balanced and weighted with stones or chunks of pig iron. They were the most popular weapon in the wars against other tribes.
This warfare hardly seemed to deserve the name. In some ways it was a wide-open affair-the tribes raided where they wanted, when they wanted, and against any other tribe it took their fancy to bother. There was nothing like permanent alliances, or for that matter permanent hostilities.
On the other hand, when warriors of the tribes did meet, the fighting was comparatively formal and restrained. Bows were often not used at all, and spears usually only when defending or attacking a village. Much of the fighting was done with clubs and shields, and this led more often to broken bones than to broken heads.
Accidents happened, of course, and people did get killed. Women and children were frequently kidnapped from one tribe and carried off to the villages of another. Livestock was slaughtered or stolen, canoes set adrift, and even houses burned.
Yet no raid ever destroyed more than a small part of any tribe's wealth. Houses and canoes could be replaced within weeks. Even the kidnapped women and children found themselves at home in their new tribes within a year or two. Lokhra herself had been captured as a girl from the Yal, and one of Swebon's grandmother's had been the daughter of a chief of the Banum.
So the warfare among the tribes of the Forest People was really a sort of rough outdoor sport, occasionally bloody but hardly dangerous to the future of the tribes. No doubt the Forest People would start fighting more seriously if their population ever grew large enough, but right now there was a great deal of Forest and not very many Forest People.
The fighting against the Sons of Hapanu was another matter. Here the Forest People were deadly serious, and would have gladly killed much more often than they did. Unfortunately, the Sons of Hapanu were too strong.
The brown-skinned people who called themselves the Sons of Hapanu were from a land across the ocean to the east. They'd come to the mouth of the Great River about two hundred years ago and built a city there. By now the city was enormous-half the world lived in Gerhaa, according to the tales of the Forest People. To Blade, this meant at least fifty thousand people. It was also called the Stone Village, because it was strongly fortified with stone walls and towers. Most important, it was a deadly and growing menace to the Forest People.
The Sons of Hapanu raided up the Great River in search of two things-slaves and firestones. When they caught Forest People, all those too young or too old to be useful were killed. Warriors became gladiators who fought in the Games of Hapanu, and other able-bodied men became laborers. Women became household servants, unless they were young and beautiful. In that case they were trained as prostitutes.
The firestone was a jewel found in large chunks on the bottom of many of the smaller streams in the Forest. It had the rich blood color of the finest rubies, but it was considerably harder, too hard for the Forest People to work. The Sons of Hapanu could work the firestone, and valued it highly both as a jewel and for religious purposes. They eagerly sought it in the streams and carried it off to Gerhaa in large quantities. They called it the Blood of Hapanu. The Forest People had no particular use for the firestones themselves, but they felt that the Sons of Hapanu were offending the Forest Spirit.