It was obvious to me that Koja had no understanding of why I wished to make little squiggly marks with the cut end of a thaptor feather* dipped in black substance and scrawled upon sheets of brownish paper that looked like coarse papyrus. But as I handled the implements with delicate care, he resolved to permit me to play with them as it seemed I had no intention of harming his "treasures."
Thus, able to compile a vocabulary of Thanatorian terms for my own study, I made quite rapid progress in my mastery of the language. We shortly progressed beyond simple nouns to verbs, and here we must have made a ludicrous spectacle, acting out various actions. I recall in particular one hilarious scene: Koja was giving me a verb which he illustrated by hopping up and down. It took me some little while to figure out whether he was giving me the word for "hop" or "walk" or "up" or what. And all the time the poor fellow, with his solemn and totally expressionless face, stood there on the beaten earth outside my tent, soberly jumping up and down like some ungainly grasshopper!
As I say, we encountered no real difficulty in our language lessons until we passed beyond simple nouns and verbs, colors and numbers, into the more baffling regions of the participles. I suppose this is a common difficulty in learning any language in this manner―how in the world do you illustrate such elusive terms as "and," "the," or "of"?―but then I had never before had to master a language without a text or at least a teacher familiar with my own tongue.
In the course of these lessons, which we pursued almost every single day from morning to evening, I picked up an enormous amount of miscellaneous information. I discovered that the arthropods were a race of warlike nomads, divided into several rival clans who were perpetually at war, each clan against all others. These clans, five of them in all, were―this internecine rivalry notwithstanding―all part of the same Horde, the Yathoon, and all under one common leader, who was known as the Arkon, which I suppose could be defined as "king." The Arkon, whose name was Uthar, lived far away at a certain secret place in the mountains. The various clans of the Horde went forth every few months from this hidden place to hunt for meat (and "treasure") , returning at a certain specific date. When they entered their capital―Koja called it "the Secret Valley of Sargol,"―they were instantly at peace with one another, regardless of the fact they were at each other's throats until they reached the very entrance stone of the Secret Valley!
I never found out the name of the clan that had taken me captive. I do not, in fact, believe the five clans had names to differentiate them―a fact which I found rather remarkable. Koja explained it to me in his usual solemn way.
"We know the clan to which we belong," he said. "And we know that the males of all other clans are our foes. And we know a strange male when we encounter him. What need have we, then, for labels?"
I could find nothing wrong with this statement; for all I knew it was by their different smell that the members of one clan identify a stranger. But I seized this opportunity to ask a question that had been puzzling me for some time.
"What, then, are the colored markings on the upper thorax of all Yathoon warriors?"
I should explain that on the front of the thorax a peculiar series of symbols were painted in bright colors: red, black, green, and gold. These were nothing like alphabetical symbols―for, as I learned from Koja's reaction to my use of the writing case, the arthropods have no conception of writing―but were instead geometrical symbols, lines, curves, and irregular splotches of raw color.
My tutor explained to me that these were―ah, but here I come to an untranslatable concept peculiar to the insect creatures. The glyphs, or whatever they were, served as markings to identify tribal rank, prestige, and the number of enemy kills―a strange combination of army rank insignia with the stickers on the fusilage of a fighter plane, I suppose, which indicate the number of enemy craft one ace has downed. I was glad to have my curiosity on this subject satisfied: hitherto I had assumed them to be in the nature of personal names or heraldic blazons, indicating family alliances. But I had discovered that the Yathoon warriors hold their females in common and have no conception of an individual mate. Indeed, paternity itself is unknown to them; all they know is that at regular intervals their females lay a grublike larva which eventually matures into male or female specimens of their race. Since no Yathoon knows who his father or mother were, and since all of the Yathoon larvae or young are raised in common, the arthropods are completely without anything like a family life. I have often wondered whether this total lack of family, or of mating, or of father― and motherhood, was the reason they lacked the more tender emotions.
Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Since they were not human―or even mammalian―I suppose it would be foolish to expect the warmer emotions from these weird creatures, and vain to feel them somehow lacking in that they know them not. And yet surely they were a stark cold race, devoid of religion, science, art, philosophy, and sentiment. They lived only for war and the hunt. They were an amazing people.
The servitors in a chieftain's retinue bore no such marking painted upon their thoraxes. I, however, did. Koja, when queried, explained at last my amusing position as an exotic "oddity" in his hoard or curio collection; all of his possessions were marked thus, to render impractical and difficult the theft of his treasures by a rival chieftain.
As I became more familiar with the Thanatorian language, I spent many hours conversing with my "owner." Koja, I learned, was one of the mightiest komors in all his clan, a warrior of great renown, a huntsman of enviable skill. The meat taken by the Yathoon on this long foray was salted or somehow pickled in kegs of spiced wood, which would be borne along in the midst of the war party in wains drawn by thaptor teams when at last they came to make their long trek home to the Secret Valley of their race.
This great homeward migration would commence in about three weeks, I learned. I was curious to see under what conditions the Yathoon females lived and how they reared their young, so it was with a certain eagerness that I awaited the signal to decamp.
Before the migration could begin, however, there occurred an unforeseen incident that resulted in my making my first friend among the strange and inhuman inhabitants of this distant world.
Koja had been absent from my language lesson for the greater part of this particular day, and I took the opportunity to roam the enormous camp of the Horde, exploring its peculiar ways.
Returning to the cluster of tents belonging to my owner, I saw the servitors of Koja's retinue in an unwonted agitation. The only one of the servitors whom I knew well enough to recognize―at this stage, frankly, one arthropod looked very much like another to me―I caught his attention. It was Sujat. I asked the reason for the flurry and confusion, and he informed me in his cold harsh voice that our mutual master, Koja, had been on a hunting party that morning and had been attacked by a rival hunting party from another clan nearby. The warriors of our clan had been defeated and driven away.
"And what of Koja?" I asked. His cold unwinking gaze bore no expression as he made reply.