“But ‘flookh’ and ‘splig’ are sounds without meaning,” Koshmar objected. “What sense is there in—”
“They have no meaning to us,” said Hresh. “But they might to other people. Not those sounds particularly. I just made them up as examples, you understand. But they could have some word of their own for ‘meat,’ and one for ‘sky,’ and one for ‘spear,’ and so on. Different words from ours for everything.”
“This is madness,” Koshmar said irritably. “What do you mean, a word for meat? Meat is meat. Not flookh, not splig, but meat. Sky is sky. I thought you might be of help, Hresh, but all you do now is mystify me.”
“These ideas are very strange to me too,” the boy said. He seemed to be extraordinarily weary, and struggling to express his thoughts. His hands groped the air, as if searching. “I have never known any language but ours, or even thought that there might be another. The notion leaped into my mind, out of nowhere, just as I looked upon this stranger. But think, Koshmar: what if the hjjk-men have a language of their own, and each kind of beast has its own also, and every tribe that lived through the long winter too! We were alone so long, cut off from others for hundreds of thousands of years. Maybe at first everyone spoke one language, but over so long a time, hundreds of thousands of years—”
“Perhaps so,” said Koshmar uneasily. “But in that case, how will we communicate with this man? For we have to communicate with him somehow. We have to find out if he’s friend or enemy.”
“We could try doing it by second sight,” Hresh said after a moment.
Koshmar stared at him, shocked. “Second sight is not used among people.”
“In extreme cases it can be,” said Hresh, looking uncomfortable. “We’ve got the tribe’s safety to think about here. Shouldn’t we use whatever abilities we have to find out what we need to know?”
“But it’s such a violation of—”
Koshmar halted, shaking her head. She looked toward Torlyri, standing by the door.
“What do you say? Is it proper to attempt such a thing?”
“It seems strange. But I see no harm in it,” the offering-woman said, a little doubtfully, after a moment’s consideration. “He is not of our tribe. Our customs need not apply. No sin will attach to us on this account.”
“The gods gave us second sight to help us where language and vision fail,” said Hresh to Koshmar. “How could they object if we used it in a situation like this?”
Koshmar stood silent, examining the matter. The stranger, impassive as ever, gave no sign that he had comprehended anything of this. Maybe he really does speak an entirely different language, Koshmar thought. The idea made her head hurt. It seemed as strange to her as the idea that someone could be a man today and a woman tomorrow, or that rain would fall upward from the ground, or that the blessing of Yissou might be withdrawn from her in the twinkling of an eye and someone else named chieftain in her place. None of those things was possible. But this is a time of many strange things, Koshmar thought. Perhaps it was true, what Hresh said: that here was one who spoke with other words, if indeed he spoke at all.
After a time she turned to Hresh and said brusquely, “Very well. You’re the expert on language here. Use your second sight on him, and find out who he is and what he seeks here.”
Hresh stepped forward and confronted the stranger in the helmet.
He had never felt so tired in his life. What a day this was! And not finished yet. They were all watching him. He was far from sure he could muster second sight again, so tired was he.
The Helmet Man looked down at him from his great height in a cool, distant way, as though Hresh were nothing more than some bothersome little beast of the jungle. His eerie red eyes were disturbingly intense. Hresh imagined that he could see anger in them, and contempt, and an abiding sense of self-worth. But no fear. Not a trace of fear anywhere. There was something heroic about this helmeted stranger.
Hresh gathered his strength and sent forth his second sight.
He expected to meet some sort of opposition: an attempt to block his thrust, or to turn it aside, if that was possible. But with the same cool indifference as ever the stranger awaited Hresh’s approach; and Hresh’s consciousness sank easily and deeply into that of the Helmet Man.
The contact lasted no more than a fraction of a second.
In that instant Hresh had a sense of the great power of this man’s soul, of his strength of character and depth of purpose. He saw also, for the briefest flicker of a moment, a vision of a horde of others much like this one, a band of warriors gathered on some heavily wooded hill, all of them clad in bizarre and fanciful helmets like his, but each of an individual design. Then the contact broke and everything went dark. Hresh felt his limbs turning to water. He staggered, tumbled backward, pivoted somehow at the last moment, and landed on his belly in a sprawling heap at Harruel’s feet. That was the last he knew for some time.
When he awakened he was in Torlyri’s arms on the far side of the room. She held him close, crooning to him, reassuring him. Gradually he brought his eyes into focus and saw Koshmar holding the stranger’s helmet in both her hands, regarding it quizzically. The stranger was limp on the floor and Harruel and Konya, gripping him by the ankles, were dragging him out of the room as unceremoniously as if he were a sack of grain.
“Don’t try to stand up yet,” Torlyri murmured. “Get your balance first, catch your breath.”
“What happened? Where are they taking him?”
“He’s dead,” Torlyri said.
“Fell right down the moment you touched his mind,” said Koshmar from across the room. “So did you. We thought you were both gone. But you were just knocked out. He was dead before be hit the floor. It was to avoid being questioned, do you see? He had some way of killing himself with his mind alone.” She slammed the helmet down angrily on the ledge of her trophy shelf. “We will never know anything about him now,” she said. “We will never know a thing!”
Hresh nodded somberly.
The thought came to him that this was somehow his fault, that he should have anticipated some defensive maneuver of this sort from the stranger, that he should never have allowed himself to talk Koshmar into using second sight in this interrogation.
Perhaps it would have been a better idea to use the Wonderstone instead, he told himself.
But how was he to have known? Thaggoran might have known; but he, as he continued to discover, was not Thaggoran. I am still so young, Hresh thought ruefully. Well, time would cure that. A great sadness spread through him. He might have learned new and remarkable things from this man of another tribe. Instead he had merely helped to send him from the world.
Best not to think of it.
He went to Koshmar’s side, where she stood glowering above the helmet, running her hand repeatedly along its golden rays in a stunned, angry way. After a moment she glanced at him. Her eyes were dull and sullen.
“I need to tell you something,” Hresh said. “I’ve just come back from the heart of the city. Haniman and I. We went down into a vault beneath a building, where there is a machine of the sapphire-eyes, Koshmar. A machine that still works.”
Koshmar looked at him more closely. The light of her spirit returned to her eyes.
“It’s a machine that was meant to show pictures of the Great World,” Hresh told her. “More than pictures. It was meant to show the Great World itself. I put my hands on it, Koshmar, and I used the Barak Dayir on it.”
“And could you see anything?” she asked.
“Yes! Wonderful things!”