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"I can torture the chant from you."
Deyv sweated even more heavily. He said, "Not this chant. It is set up so that I forget it if someone tries to force it from me. Only if I use it willingly will it stay with me."
"You're very glib," Fat Bull said. "Well, we'll see what we'll see. In the meantime, learn our speech even better. It may serve you well, perhaps save your life, maybe even free you."
The shaman rose from his squat to his over-seven-foot height. The painted beast-prognathous face poked its nose through the bars. The huge dark eyes stared into Deyv's.
"My sticks tell me that you queer strangers may be able to understand the god's language. I sincerely hope so, since I want Phemropit to come dwell in my house and tell me his secrets. Sometimes, I have bad dreams about him. Then he comes to me, walking legless, armless, and headless, and he speaks to me in his blinding ma
When the shaman had left, Deyv said, "I wish I knew what he was talking about."
"We'll find out sometime," the Yawtl said. "I hope that they take some more captives soon. That'll give us more time, though our death is inevitable."
Hoozisst began prowling around again, looking for a weak place in their prison. He knew he wouldn't find any, but useless action was better than just sitting.
A moment later, the ground shook and rumbled and the walls of the cabin swayed. After balancing themselves on the jellylike earth until nauseated by the motion, they threw themselves down. After a short time, the temblor ceased to affect the surface. But Deyv, his ear to the ground, could detect a very faint thunder. He got up and looked out a window. The leaves of the few trees nearby were still shaking.
The Tsimmanbul were up off the dirt, piping excitedly, but ready to resume their routine.
Their guards inspected the cabin to make sure that the ends of the logs were still tightly interlocked.
Satisfied, they took their stations again.
Some time later the big temblor was succeeded by two smaller ones. Nobody bothered to comment on them.
Close to bedtime there was some excitement among the Tsimmanbul. The two log gates facing the path down the cliff to the sea swung open. Several warriors rushed in, loudly piping. The shaman was summoned, and he talked for a few moments to the warriors. Then he led the entire population, except for the guards, through the gateway. Time passed. Deyv was about to go to sleep when he heard the loud chatter of the returning natives. He got up and listened while the wife of a guard told him what had happened.
Some males had come back from a hunt, and one had noticed a large fissure about twenty feet back from the cliff's edge and forty feet from the stockade. Investigation showed that the temblor had cracked the rock from side to side. Another such quake, and the mass overhanging the sea might fall off.
The shaman threw his sticks and shook his rattle. Would the gods say if it was best for the village to be moved back, far from the crack? No, the shaman said, after a dozen stick throwings. The gods say that there is no danger—yet.
Six sleep-times later, a war party brought in another captive, a Yawtl. He was stuck in the hut that had kept the previous enemy, and the giant firefly was also taken in to him. Sloosh asked Deyv to ask a guard if the captured Yawtl spoke Naraka
I thought so." He wouldn't say why, however.
The time came when the Yawtl was painted black and carried out in the palanquin. Seven sleep-times later, he returned in it. Sloosh commented again on the hole in the breastbone and the holes in the skull.
The prisoners were not to get another stay of execution. Fat Bull told them that even if other captives were taken, they would have to face the god next.
"You know our language well enough now."
He turned and snapped his fingers. A guard brought in a large bamboo cage holding nine giant fireflies.
Fat Bull removed a firefly and held it up so they could see it closely. The insect did not struggle, though it turned its multifaceted eyes this way and that.
"See this green spot on its back?" the shaman said. "Notice now how I control the flashing of its tail. I place my thumb on the green spot. I press down gently."
The insect's tail glowed with its cold light, strong enough to dispel some of the twilight of the cabin.
"Now I lift my thumb. The firefly immediately becomes dark. It has been trained to respond to pressure.
If you were to hold your thumb on that spot, the bug would emit light until its source was exhausted.
"But its power is much, and you won't be burning it out. Observe me closely now. See the length of the four pulses I make this fly emit. Four lengths of light, each a little longer than the other. With practice you'll be able to make the lengths exact. And then you'll learn how to speak our language without speaking. You will translate each word into a certain number of pulses, each word a group of so many pulses of so many lengths. Do you understand?"
"Easily," Deyv said. "The fireflies do with light what the Archkerri does with sound when he talks. All of us have had much experience with his buzzes. We won't have any trouble transferring to light pulses."
"Very good," Fat Bull said. "Bluebird-woman has been teaching you our speech, so she might as well teach you how to use the fireflies. You will become almost as fluent with the light as with the sound.
And then you will have the great honor of talking to Phemropit."
"I'm not worthy of the honor," Hoozisst said.
The Tsimmanbul piped laughter. "If that is so, then we might as well kill you now. After you've had a chance to demonstrate your bravery by not crying out during the torture."
"Perhaps I was being too modest," the Yawtl said.
Gri
The practice started at once. Within six sleep-times, the prisoners were just begi
Meanwhile, Sloosh got from a guard some information that excited him. The others found it slightly interesting. What did they care if there was a giant lake only three sleep-times' walk inland? Or that it had been formed from a crater made by a colossal meteorite?
"It fell many, many human generations ago," the Archkerri said. "The various sapients had highly advanced civilizations then, though nowhere near as high as those that moved the Earth and that made the moon and the great outer planets into small suns.
"If they had been, they would have been able to deflect or disintegrate the meteor long before it collided with Earth. This fell near here, and the explosion and earthquake that followed burned or knocked down the forests halfway across the land mass. It slew a quarter of the animal life and tumbled all the great cities. The civilizations were destroyed within a few minutes. And the few survivors became savages.
They forgot their knowledge, and their descendants never recovered it. This coastline was shattered; the sea poured into the hot crater. But since then smaller cataclysms have lifted up the sea-bottom to form a new shoreline."
"All tribes have tales of this," Vana said. "Though the reasons for the cataclysm and the details vary much."
"I'm surprised that after such a long time there would even be a memory of it in the folk tales. But then the fall of the meteor was so terrible that some dim traces of the event have persisted. It had a numbing effect upon my brothers, the trees and the grass. Their own memories are vague, distorted. All plants went into shock, and many species died from this shock.