The Wordsmiths and the Warguild (32 page)

      
 
"Sholabarakosh,"
said Togura, eager to appease the strangers who, he strongly suspected,
regarded themselves as his captors.

       
The casket opened. He
took out the triple-harp, played a few notes to demonstrate its use, then
offered it to the two men. They laughed uproariously, and, with air-slapping
gestures, declined.

       
"I'm not a trained
musician," said Togura, offended, thinking they mocked his failure to
produce a melody.

       
Still, he was glad that
they made it clear he was to keep the triple-harp. He was still thinking of the
money it would bring in Selzirk. One of the men scouted away, and before long
returned with the rest of the savages. The savages now totalled up to six. The
newcomers insisted on hearing Togura play the triple-harp, which he did,
provoking copious laughter.

       
"I still don't see
what's funny," said Togura. "I can't be that bad."

       
The language barrier
prevented anyone from enlightening him. Before he had left Sung, he had known,
for as long as he could remember, that Galish was spoken everywhere by
everyone; it was the universal trading language, the lingua franca of all the
world. He had done a lot of unlearning since then.

       
"When I get back to
Sung," said Togura, "I'll teach them a thing or two."

       
His optimism surprised
him. But then, the savages, with their easy laughter, seemed friendly enough.

       
There was still plenty
of daylight, but the savages were in no hurry to go anywhere. They camped by
the castle that night; Togura, gaining confidence with the triple-harp, played
to them by firelight. The next day, slowed by Togura's sprained ankle, they
tramped downriver; toward evening, they reached a large encampment on the edge
of rough, rolling lowlands. At this larger camp, there were horses.

       
As there were no women
or children, Togura guessed that the savages were still a long way from home.
Without surprise, he found himself put to work gathering firewood, gutting
fish, skinning animals, stretching hides to dry, gathering particular types of
bark for a use which could not be explained to him, and cooking food. He was
also called upon ot play music every evening, and to cut hair. He doubted his
own competence as a barber, but nobody objected to the rough and ready hairshaves
he managed with a sharpened knife; nobody even laughed.

       
After a number of days -
it could have been as many as twenty, though he could not say, for he soon lost
count - they broke camp and moved south on horseback with loads of meat and
skins.

       
Riding south, the
savages became tense. They travelled with scouts ahead and a rearguard behind,
posted sentries at night and kept their weapons at the ready. Twice they encountered
the tracks of other riders, which occasioned excited, animated discussion, and
led to increased vigilance. Togura did not have to be psychic to realise that
they were riding through enemy territory.

       
At last they saw a
stockade ahead, and, raising whoops and cheers, they charged. Togura at first
thought he had been caught up in an episode of tribal warfare, but the gates of
the stockade swung open, the citizens within greeted them rapturously, and he
realised that this, for the savages, was home.

       
Very shortly, as he
became acquainted with that home, he began to realise the big mistake he had
made - and the nature of his present predicament.

Chapter 29

       
The village, though it
was out on the open plains, was a crowded, noisy, smelly place. Lean yellow
mongrel curs scavenged, fought and mated in the mud-paved alleyways between the
mud-walled huts. Chickens, voicing a persistent chok-chok-chok, strutted about
underfoot, their heads bobbing forwards as they walked. Cats and rats played
games of pursuit and evasion by day and by night.

       
Worst were the children.
Togura, coming from a remarkably small family, had never had much to do with
them. Here they were in abundance. They were everywhere. They screamed,
squabbled, shouted, chased the chickens, harassed the cats, made excavations in
the mud walls, scratched obscene drawings on the ground, played with dung,
pulled each other's hair, stole food, told lies, committed acts of arson, and
experimented, with no sense of shame whatsoever, in gang warfare, sex and
torture.

       
By day, the place was
largely left to the women, the children and the old people. The men kept to the
open plains, hunting, racing horses, and tending the horse herds which were the
wealth of the village. Some of the men stayed out for days at a time, guarding
the herds or riding their territory on long, military-style patrols, but most
retired to the village in the evening, gathering in the village meeting hall to
eat, drink, tell jokes, wrist wrestle, throw food at each other, experiment
with strange drugs, show off their jewellery - which was only worn indoors - or
boast about their weapons and their kills.

       
Togura slept in a small,
windowless annexe to the meeting hall, and nightly attended these gatherings.
Nevertheless, he had no place in the society of men. His place was with the
women, and the triple-harp, an instrument now hateful to him, was the cause of
his exile from masculine affairs.

       
In Sung, the making of
music was stout, hearty, heroic work. At feasts and banquets, sweating,
beer-swilling men belaboured the krymbol or blew on the kloo; ancient warriors,
bearing the scars from many honourable feuds, tortured the air with the
skavamareen; battle stalwarts with walnut-crunching fingers manhandled the
thrums. Music making, like drinking, fighting, gambling and rampant
fornication, was one of the marks of manhood.

       
In the land of the
savages, however, the status of music was reversed. The younger, thinner women
with the least status were tasked with the job of music making. They rattled
husky gourds, blew on plaintive bone flutes, beat horsehide drums with little
whips, provided a supplementary background rhythm by shaking clickety-clackety
multi-jointed sticks, hit racks of little bells with human thigh bones, and
sang wailing little songs. Togura, with his triple-harp, fitted in as best he
could; his first beating had persuaded him it was best to show willing, and his
second had convinced him he must succeed or die.

       
The evening
entertainment ran right through the month except on the night of the full moon,
when the men - exclusive of Togura - barred the hall against all comers and did
something within which involved a lot of shouting, stamping and chorus singing,
and the occasional scream.

       
On all other nights,
Togura sat with the women, making music. He was always seated directly behind
the headman, a lean, alcoholic old gentleman with a war raising its monticulus
in the middle of his bald pate; Togura grew very familiar with that wart. He
was less familiar with the headman's face, which he saw less often, and which
always came as a shock to him. The headman had a hare lip, one good eye and a
deeply-seamed inflamed red scar channelling into his face where his left eye
should have been.

       
During the day, Togura
was not left in peace to practise with his triple-harp. Instead, he was put to
work with the women. Those of the highest status were, in this village, tall,
wide and hearty. And immensely strong. If he displeased them, they slapped him
about with hands which could have killed an ox by accident; he was terrified of
them.

       
All the women felt free
to express their contempt for him, but for one alone. She was plainer than
some, but slimmer than most. She was a little thick in the waist all the same,
and a little square-shouldered, but she was still, in his opinion, the most
womanly woman of them all. Her name was Namaji. She was a ltitle bit prissy and
very, very vain.

       
Togura courted Namaji as
best he could, though he had to be careful. If the other women caught Namaji
exchanging endearments with Togura, then both the young lovers would get
slapped about severely. There was precious little privacy in the village.
Togura was sure he could have got himself laid if there had been any long grass
to lie in, but there wasn't. He was still a virgin.

       
He was also an
overworked virgin. A woman's work is never done, and Togura now had a share -
and more than a fair share, in his opinion - of that unending labour. Could he escape?
No. Given a chance to venture the open plain on horseback, he might have tried
to break away. But he only got beyond the village walls when he was compelled
to go to the nearest stream to draw water, or spend an afternoon at the horse
corral, milking the mares in the company of stalwart amazons who would have
killed him without blinking if he had tried to steal a horse.

       
The sun whiled away the
last of the spring and began on the summer. Togura grew desperate.

       
- These are my golden
years. I have my life to live. I can't stay here!

       
He didn't have much
choice. Those horses used for riding and for the village milk supply were
coralled at night under guard; sentries watched from the village walls; foot patrols
roamed through the darkness, checking and double-checking; dogs barked at
strangers in the night.

       
So he stayed.

       
Really, he should have
counted his blessings. He should have been happy. He was integrated into a
closely-knit society living a properly balance life in harmony with the local
ecology and the surrounding environment. It was one of those traditional
societies where, or so we are told, servitude is painless because a rigid
hierarchical stucture leaves people with no choices. The village had its own
rich, unique culture, complete with song, dance, music, myth and legend.

       
The people deployed
efficient population control, without recourse to unnatural practices such as
chastity or abortion, by a simple and healthy expedient - they strangled unwanted
infants and ate them. They practiced warfare, of course, but mostly by way of
sport and ritual. War helped release unhealthy aggression, and helped bind the
community together, particularly when they had prisoners they could torture to
death.

       
It could be said that
they had no concept of land ownership; unlike the greedy, depraved peoples of
other civilisations, they did not build fences, dykes, ditches or walls to mark
off little fields and gardens as "mine" and "yours."
Instead, they had a healthy, spiritual attitude toward the land, which they
regarded as a communal heritage; they celebrated this healthy, spiritual
attitude by butchering anyone caught trespassing on their territory, and by
making such incompetent trespassers the main course at cannibal feasts.

       
The children, products
of a largely peer-based education system, grew up without any unhealthy
neuroses; they did not repress their basic urges, but delighted in expressing a
full and frank physical and emotional response to their natural and cultural
environment.

 
      
In
contrast to the rich, complex tapestry of village life, the daily life of Sung
could be seen as what it was: a thin, distorted parody of what life could be
and should be. The economy of Sung, heavily dependent on mining and organised
trade, was not properly integrated with the local ecology; the people of Sung,
their lives perverted by mercantile greed, did not have a spiritual attitude
toward land and the environment.

       
Togura, as one of the
unhealthy products of what is known in some quarters as
"civilisation," should have welcomed the opportunity to immerse
himself in the multi-faceted, communal and so-called "primitive"
lifestyle. He should have welcomed the opportunity to integrate himself with
the natural environment in a timeless, sustainable, communal mode.

       
But he didn't.

       
He hated it.

       
As far as he was
concerned, he was living in a stinking hole in the mud in a stinking dungheap
village filled with stinking jabbering savages who were making life hell for him.

       
Namaji was his only
comfort.

       
It was Namaji who
started to teach him the native language. Togura found this heavy going. For a
start, he was no linguist. Galish was all he spoke, and Galish was a coarse,
brutal creole, its grammar simplified by much use and abuse along the trade
routes. The villagers, on the other hand, spoke a subtle, reflexive dialect
full of difficult tenses, and using, as part of its daily vocabulary,
references to the local religion, which was entirely unknown to him.

       
One dy, under a hot,
blazing summer sun, Togura sat streamside with his true love, Namaji, trying to
work out whether "shomana shomo" meant "blue sky," "sun
at zenith" or "clear horizon"; his difficulties were due to the
fact that the words actually meant "God (is) manifest," and were
said, for good luck, at times when the sky was blue, the sun at zenith and the
horizon cloudless.