“If we could live there all the time, we would get fat and our children would thrive and our tribe would become more numerous and powerful. But the Lord, in his great wisdom, has decreed that we can only live there for a little while. Then the clouds gather, and his lightning strikes, and the land is no place for anyone who knows what’s good for him.”
Anana did not, of course, understand everything he said. But she could supply the meaning from what phrases she had mastered.
She went to Urthona and asked him why he had made such an arrangement in the sea-country.
“Primarily, for my entertainment. I liked to send my palace into that land and watch the fury of the lightning, see the devastation. I was safe and snug in my palace, but I got a joy out of seeing the lightning blaze and crack around me. Then I truly felt like a god.
“Secondarily, if it weren’t for their fear of being killed, the humans would crowd in. It’d be fun to watch them fight each other for the territory. In fact, it was fun during the stormless seasons. But if there were nothing to keep them from settling down there, they’d never go back into the shifting areas.”
“There are, if I remember correctly, twelve of those areas. The seas and the surrounding land each cover about five million square miles. So in an area of 200,000,000 square miles there are 60,000,000 square miles of relatively stable topography. These are never separated from the main mass, and the splitoffs never occur near the seas.”
“The lightning season was designed to drive beast and human out of the sea-country except at certain times. Otherwise, they’d get overcrowded.”
He stopped to point at the plain. Anana turned and saw that it was now covered with herds of animals, elephants, moosoids, antelopes, and many small creatures. The mountains were dark with birds that had settled on them. And the skies were black with millions of flying creatures.
“They migrate from near and far,” Urthona said. “They come to enjoy the sea and the wooded lands while they can. Then, when the storms start, they leave.”
Anana wandered away. As long as she didn’t get very far from the camp, she was free to roam around. She approached the chief, who was sitting on the ground and striking the ground with the axe. She squatted down before him.
“When will the storms cease?” she said.
His eyes widened. “You have learned our language very quickly. Good. Now I can ask you some questions.”
“I asked one first,” she said.
He frowned. “The Lord should have ceased being angry and gone back to his palace before now. Usually, the lightning would have stopped two light-periods ago. For some reason, the Lord is very angry and he is still raging. I hope he gets tired of it and goes home soon. The beasts and the birds are piling up. It’s a dangerous situation. If a stampede should start, we could be trampled to death. We would have to jump into the water to save ourselves, and that would be bad because our grewigg would be lost along with our supplies.”
Grewigg was the plural ofgregg, the word for a moosoid.
Anana said, “I wondered why you weren’t hunting when so many animals were close by.”
The chief, Trenn, shuddered. “We’re not stupid. Now, what tribe is yours? And is it near here?”
Anana wondered if he would accept the truth. After all, his tribe, the Wendow, might have a tradition of having come from another world.
“We are not natives of this … place.” She waved a hand to indicate the universe, and the flies, alarmed, rose and whirled around buzzing. They quickly settled back, however, lighting on her body, her face, and her arms. She brushed
them away from her face. The chief endured the insects crawling all over him and into his empty eye-socket. Possibly, he wasn’t even aware of them.
“We came through a …” She paused. She didn’t know the word for gate. Maybe there wasn’t any. “We came through a pass between two … I don’t know how to say it. We came from beyond the sky. From another place where the sky is … the color of that bird there.”