Kickaha decided he might as well start his language lessons now. He pointed at the spear and asked its “name. At first the youth didn’t understand him. When he caught on, he said, “Gabol.”
Gabol, as it turned out, was not a generic term. It meant a spear with a fire-hardened tip. A spear with a stone tip was a baros; with an antelope-horn tip, ayava; with a lion-tooth tip, a grados.,
He learned later that there was no word for humankind. The tribe called itself by a word which meant, simply, The People. Other human beings were The Enemy. Children, whatever their sex, were summed under one word which meant “unformed.” Adult males were distinguished by three terms: one for a warrior who had slain an enemy tribesman, one for a youth who had not yet been blooded, and a third for a sterile man. It made no difference if the sterile man had killed his enemy. He was still a tairu. If, however, he managed to steal a child from another tribe, then he was a full wiru, a blooded warrior.
Women were in three classes. If she had borne a child, she was in the top class. If she was sterile but had killed two enemy, male or female, she was in the second rank. If sterile and unblooded, she was a shonka, a name which originally was that of some kind of low animal.
Two days and nights passed While the tribe traveled leisurely along the channel. This was, except for the great conical mountains far ahead of them, the only permanent feature of the landscape. Sometimes it broadened and shallowed, sometimes narrowed and deepened. But it continued to run straight as an Indian chiefs back for as far as the eye could see in either direction.
Hunting parties went out while the rest of the tribe either camped or moved at the rate of a mile an hour. Sometimes the younger women went with the men. Unlike the primitives who lived on the World of Tiers, the women of this tribe were not engaged from dawn to dusk in making artifacts, growing food, preparing meals, and raising children. They tended herd and shared the child-raising, and sometimes they fashioned wooden poles into spears or carved boomerangs. Otherwise, they had little to do. The stronger of the young women went hunting and, sometimes, on the raiding parties.
The hunters returned with antelope, gazelle, ostrich, and moa meat. Once, a party killed a young elephant which had been separated from its herd. Then the tribe traveled two miles across the plain to the carcass. There they stripped it to the bone, gorging on the raw meat until their bellies looked like balloons.
The cutting of the meat was done with flint or chert knives. Kickaha would find out that these rare stones came from nodules which occasionally appeared when the earth opened up to deliver them. Except for the boulders, these were the only solid mineral known.
The diet included fruit and nuts from various trees. These were usually knocked off by the boomerangs as the hunters rode out of range of tentacle or dart.
Kickaha, though an enthusiastic and quick-learning linguist, took more than a week to master the rudiments of the tribe’s speech. Though the tribe had a technology that an Ice Age caveman would have ranked as low, they spoke a complex language. The vocabulary was not great, but the shades of meaning, mostly indicated by subtle internal vowel changes, baffled his ear at first. It also had a feature he’d never encountered before. The final consonant of a word could alter the initial consonant of the succeeding word in a phrase. There was a rule to learn about this, but, as in all living languages, the rule had many exceptions.
Besides, the possible combinations were many.
Kickaha thought he remembered reading something about a similar consonant change in the Celtic languages. How similar, he didn’t know.
Sometimes he wondered if the Thana, as the tribe called itself, could be descended from ancient Celts. If they were, however, no modern Celt would have understood them. In the course of many thousand years, the speech must have changed considerably. A male moosoid, used for riding, for instance, was called a hikwu. Could that possibly be related to the ancient Latin equusl If he remembered his reading, done so many years ago, equus was related to a similar word in Celtic and also to the Greek hippos.