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"They are not human," he said. "They're even stranger-looking than you, Hqozisst."
"I'm not strange-looking," Hoozisst 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 around 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-gray color with white bands ru
These looked small but only because the huge heads dwarfed them.
They were certainly exotic-appearing. What made Deyv's neck hairs' seem to bristle, though he'd seen
Tsimmanbul before, were the tops of their smooth glossy gray 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. 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 where 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 bom. 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 hadn't 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'd have to carry the cube between them unless they quit complaining. They didn't stop, but they confined their remarks to their own language.
Since Deyv didn't understand it, it didn't bother him.
Sloosh estimated that they had traveled 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 didn't utterly dishearten them. They had no keen sense of time.
In the meantime, Deyv had sought relief from his ever-increasing tension 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 don't have a 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 stomped 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 this matter, 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 gri
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"AT least, they didn't kill us at once," Vana said. "Though we might 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 nearby 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 if 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 ru
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 fiber kilt, and fringed leather bands just below the knee. A thick film of rancid fat glistened over the paint and the bare skin.