He made no reply, but sat staring at me expressionlessly. All about me his warriors stood or sat their saddles, bending upon me their inscrutable gaze in a tense silence.
A silence that began to seem ominous …
“May I ask the name of him to whom I am indebted?” I ventured.
“I am Borak, a komor of the Horde,” he said. A komor is a rank akin to chieftain in the military aristocracy of the Yathoon nation; a chieftain leads a retinue of warriors and is responsible for a section of the Horde in war. There are sometimes as many as sixteen or twenty komors in any given Yathoon clan, depending on its size and might, and these serve directly under the akka-komor, or high-chieftain, who is inferior only to the Arkon or “warlord.”
“Then I am indebted to Borak the komor,” I said. I used the word uhorz which connotes indebtedness; it happens to be one of the few feelings akin to friendship or gratefulness that are known to the cold, unemotional Yathoon.
“And now … if I may … I must be about my journey. I have a long way to travel, and my mission is one of the utmost importance,” I said. It was worth a try, anyway.
But not this time.
“Your mission, whatever it may have been, ends here,” he said harshly. °`I care naught for Shondakor the Golden, whose power does not extend to the Great Plains. You are now an amatar of Borak the chieftain; bind him!”
They bore me back to the main body of the Horde, a helpless prisoner, my wrists bound behind my back with thongs. I was sunk in a black mood of depression, and yet my position, grim as it was, was not without a certain touch of humor. For I knew why Borak had made me captive―it was because of my yellow hair, blue eyes, and fair, tanned skin. I was a creature unique in his experience―a rare object, a curiosity. And that made me a thing of value in Borak’s way of thinking!
The Yathoon are very low on the scale of civilization; they are barbarians, nomads, like the Mongols or Tartars of Earth’s ancient history. They wander the plains in migrant clans, scorning to dwell in cities, and hence their culture is extremely primitive because they have never had the leisure to develop or discover the civilized arts. They neither read nor write, and thus have no literature, not even songs or sagas. Since they do not indulge in trade, they have no use for money and no conception of a system of currency. But, for all the world like great solemn jackdaws or pack rats, they prize their individual hoard of treasures.
These treasures are sometimes gems and precious metals, but not always. They can be comprised of anything rare or unusual or curious: a bright feather, an oddly colored pebble, a bone, a bit of shell. I, with my peculiar coloration, was just another curio to their primitive way of thinking. Thus I was not even so high in the social scale as to have the dignity of being a captive or a slave. I was an amatar―a “possession”―a soulless thing!
And where the element of humor entered into my condition, was that this was the second time that this had happened to me―and for precisely the same reason. For during my first period of captivity in the Yathoon Horde I had been captured for the same reason―my peculiar coloring!
Once the war party rejoined the main body of the Horde, the vast number of warriors and animals rumbled slowly into the march again, bearing me with them, lightly but securely trussed and tossed into one of the huge wains that belonged to Borak’s retinue. The Horde was coming out of the extreme south, wandering north and east, and from this I gathered that they were returning from one of their periodic visits to the Black Mountains near the southern pole of Callisto.
Somewhere in those unknown mountains, in a Secret Valley whose whereabouts is jealously hidden,
reside the females and the young of the Yathoon nation. The warrior clans roam the Great Plains, hunting meat and warring on each other, but periodically they journey south to the Secret Valley, the hidden heartland of their race, where, under a never-broken truce, the warriors of fiercely rival clans mingle peacefully for a time. There they breed and there the females rear their young.
A strange, savage, grim people, the Yathoon! They know not the meaning of peace or friendship or love or fatherhood. Eternally at war with each other and with all other people of this jungle Moon, they live out their stark, humorless lives like cold machines, devoid of kindness or loyalty or worship or comradeship or any of the softer, warmer, more human emotions and values that make life worth living for such as we. Almost I could find it within my heart to pity them ….
However, the grim emotionlessness of the Yathoon has another side beyond mere deprivation. If they know not love or kindness or mercy, at least they are equally immune to jealousy or hatred or cruelty. Unlike those same Mongols and Tartars to whom I have just compared them, the Yathoon never torture their victims and take no pleasure in the sufferings of others.
So my captivity would be lighter and less perilous than it might have been, had I been taken prisoner by one of the more “civilized” of the human races of Thanator, among whom torture is common. I recalled the high civilization of the Zanadarians to whom, as to the ancient Romans of my own world, savage and bloody gladiatorial games were a popular form of entertainment; or the sophisticated mercantile empire of the Perushtarians, who have made a commercial success of the cruel and ugly practice of human slavery. Yes, I was perhaps lucky to have fallen into the hands of the weird and inhuman insectoid creatures … they at least were kinder to their “possessions” than were most of my fellow human beings to their unfortunate slaves!
Rolling along in the wain, I pondered my situation, which was dismal enough. Out of the frying pan into the fire, as the old apothegm has it. From captivity in Tharkol, to slavery among the Yathoon. And where were Darloona and Ergon and the others? Had they survived the crash of the balloon safely, or were they injured or even dead? It was torment to me, not knowing whether my beloved Princess lived, and not knowing her whereabouts.
The clan who held me captive reminded me in many ways of Koja’s clan. But I doubted that they were the same. There was no reason why they should be, for the mighty Yathoon nation was divided into many clans, all strikingly similar. The Yathoon culture, such as it is, achieved its present level of social development uncountable millennia ago, and froze in stasis. Little has happened to change their ways in all those ages. In this respect, as in their physical being, they closely resemble the social insects―ants, bees, termites―who achieved a social organization on Earth millions of years ago, and have developed no further in all that time.
Koja’s clan roamed the Plains below the jungle country of the Grand Kumala. That was something like three hundred and fifty korads (or about 2450 miles) from here. I knew the warrior clans of the Yathoon Horde held hereditary tribal rights to certain clearly demarcated areas of the Great Plains. Thus it was unlikely, if not actually impossible, that this should be the same clan as that which took me prisoner when first I arrived on Callisto nearly two years ago.
That night we made camp, drawing the wains and chariots into a great double circle, patrolled along the outer perimeter by mounted guards, while the retinue of each chieftain staked out a portion of the inner area for his uses and erected his tent. The ordinary warriors slept on the bare ground, rolled in hides and furry cloaks, while the chieftains slept within the tents, surrounded by the hoard of jackdaw’s treasure. That included me, of course.
They fed me a thin, watery gruel and, leashed to an underling named Hooka, I was led out into the open to perform my natural functions before being bedded down for the night. This was humiliating but, again, not without an element of humor: I was to be walked on a leash to relieve myself, for all the world like some rich Park Avenue matron’s pet poodle!