Next morning he found that which he was searching for. At first it appeared to be just another strip of torn leather, one among many. But when he pulled away the frozen black fragments he saw that there were bones inside. Carefully, so as not to disturb them to any greater degree, he picked away at the leathery hide. Long before he was finished it was obvious what he had found, nevertheless he continued until all of the tiny bones were uncovered.
A long, thin creature, with tiny and unusable legs. Many ribs, far too many ribs, and more bones in the spine than seemed possible.
A marag of some kind, there was no mistake, for he had seen their kind before. It did not belong here, no murgu could live this far away from the hot south.
South? Did that have a meaning? Herilak stood and looked west, where he had come from. No murgu there, that was impossible. He turned slowly to face the north and could see inside his head the cold ice and snow stretching away forever. The Paramutan lived there, very much like the Tanu although they spoke in a different manner. But there were very few of them, they rarely came south, and they fought against winter only, not Tanu or each other. East, out into the ocean—there was nothing there.
But south, from the hot south, murgu could come. They could bring death and leave again. South.
Herilak knelt in the frozen sand and studied the marag skeleton carefully, memorized all the details of it until he could have scratched its likeness in the sand and would remember forever every single bone of it.
Then he stood and ground its brittle fragments underfoot. Turned about and without once looking back started on the return trail.
* * *
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Kerrick never realized that it was age alone that had saved his life. Not that Vaintè had spared him because he was so young; she felt the most intense disgust for ustuzou of any age and would happily see them all dead. Ysel had been too old to respond naturally to a new language, particularly one as complex in construction as Yilanè. For her Marbak was the only way to speak and she used to laugh with the women when hunters from the Ice Mountains visited their tents and spoke so badly they could barely be understood. To her this was just stupidity, any intelligent one of the Tanu would of course speak Marbak. Therefore she had showed no interest in learning Yilanè, and was satisfied to memorize by rote some of the funny sounds just to please the marag and get food from it. Sometimes she even remembered to make body movements with her words. It was all just a stupid game—and she had died for believing that.
Kerrick never thought about language as a separate entity: he just wanted to understand and respond. He was still young enough to learn a language without conscious effort, by listening and watching. If he had had any idea that there were thousands of conceptual areas in the Yilanè language—that could be combined in over 125 billion ways—he would just have shrugged. The numbers were meaningless, particularly since he could not count nor visualize any number larger than twenty, the count of a man. What he learned he had learned without conscious effort. But now, as the lessons progressed, Enge did draw his attention to certain statements, ways of interpreting things, and made him repeat sloppy movements until he did them correctly.
Because of his inability to change areas of skin color he was learning what was referred to as graylight talk. In heavy jungle, or at dawn and dusk when there was very little light, the Yilanè communicated without color patterns, rephrasing expressions so that color was not necessary.
Each morning of their imprisonment he had expected death when the door had opened. He remembered the slaughter of the sammad far too well, the extinction of everything living, men, women, children—even the mastodons. He and Ysel would be killed one day as well; there was no alternative. When the ugly marag had brought food instead of death in the morning he knew that their slaughter had just been put off for one more day. After that he would watch in silence, trying not to laugh, as stupid Ysel made nothing but mistakes, day after day. But he had a hunter’s pride. He would not help her or the marag, would not answer when he was talked to, and he tried to accept the blows that followed in silence as a hunter should. After many days had passed he discovered that he could understand some of the things that Enge said when she spoke to the other marag that he hated the most, the one who beat him and tied him up. Keeping silent became more important after this, for it kept secret his knowledge; a small fragment of success where before there had only been total disaster.