Chapter 13
"Ssam khue."
Merritt rolled over as the guard shook at his ankle, still bewildered with sleep and momentarily unable to recall what his situation was. But Rejkh's heavy hand had lately taught him how short their tempers were, and that reflex had him crawling out of the burrow before his mind was clearly working. It was a strange male that had summoned him. He reached into the burrow on hands and knees and pulled his clothes out, partially dressed before the fellow lost patience with him; he shrugged shirt and jacket on while he walked.
From the hillside path he could look down on the center of the village, on the top of the aged tree with its awful ornaments. There was a gathering beneath its branches, apparently most of the population of the village, and he did not like the prospect of that.
When he reached the foot of the path and the bottom of the hill he could hear somewhat of the proceedings: it was a chant, one speaker alternating with a rhythmic slapping of thighs and palms, the group seated now on the ground about that tree. The guard pushed him forward and he went perforce toward it, more than apprehensive. There was a sudden hush, the chant broken at his approach.
Sazhje sprang up from among them and met him, seized and held his arm in a gesture of comfort; and now Otrekh rose to his feet and assisted a very old male to rise. There was a great deal of chattering of a sudden, but Rejkh shouted something and things grew quieter. Otrekh delivered a vehement address to the group and to the elder, and Merritt watched reactions anxiously; but beside him Sazhje remained unperturbed.
At last the others began to beat their hands upon their thighs and to chant one syllable over and over. It was bedlam, and Merritt would have stepped back but for Sazhje's forbidding hold on his arm.
Suddenly the commotion ceased, and the group fragmented, scattering in all directions, the young quickly and the elders in their own time, until what remained was a group of young males, all fitted with weapons; and this too Merritt regarded with mistrust, but Sazhje kept firm hold of his arm and hugged it with all her might when Otrekh spoke to her. There was a sharp exchange; she bounced one taut gesture of seeming triumph, looked up without letting go.
"Ssam come," she said, "Sazhje people come Gairh people. Ssam ahhrht. Ssam come ahhrht."
The young males were grouping for a journey, on a track back the way they had come; and he was going, and Sazhje was going with him. He understood finally, not where they were going, unless it was some other, more important camp, but that he was safe for the duration of the journey and Sazhje believed it. Rejkh was with them, and Otrekh: Rejkh would have come near him, but Sazhje hissed at him and Rejkh changed his mind at once. They started to move, making an irregular column going out of the village, with the young scampering along beside until they reached the first shadow of the trees. And Rejkh cast sullen glances, but Merritt gave him none back, reckoning that to be free to walk, with Sazhje holding his hand and walking with him was as much as he could ask and more.
"Where?" he asked Sazhje, making a snaking gesture to the winding trail before them. "Where Sam-Sazhje go?"
"Gairh people," she said again." She turned her head to look at him as they walked, her face touched with deep concentration. "Gairh people no good, no good Ssam people."
That was ominous enough, if the words put themselves together in a straight line.
"Friends to Sazhje?" he supplied the word he thought she might want.
She frowned. No, that was not it. She took her hand from his to make a pyramid of her fingers."
"Yes, the dam. I understand."
The pyramid fell down. "Kill tarn."
"What, kill the dam?"
"Ah. Ah. Gairh people kill tarn. Kill Ssam people."
Merritt frowned, searched for words. For the next several moments, until Sazhje quite tired of the conversation, he tried to learn what she meant; but it was beyond their composite vocabulary. Even Otrekh joined them and fell into the argument; and Rejkh tried to explain by signs and symbols and angry gestures, but at last Merritt had to conclude only that people at their destination were going to kill the dam. It would come out no other way.
And when he tried to ask what would become of him, Otrekh and Rejkh drew out of the conversation.
"Kill Sam?" he asked.
"Ssam ahhrht." That was all that Sazhje could manage to tell him, and she seemed to say it with less than complete conviction.
A little before camp that evening it began to cloud over; and twilight came early, but there was no rain. They were on high ground already, having branched off the trail they had used on the way in sometime earlier, and they settled down for what, among their kind, was a normal stop, short, according to human need for sleep.
Rejkh pushed Merritt over to a convenient tree, in what had become nightly ritual, intending to secure him for sleep; and Sazhje fairly exploded with outrage. She screamed and gestured wildly, disturbing the whole camp, and snarled first at Rejkh and then at Otrekh, and at others who joined the quarrel, so that Merritt began to fear for both their lives in all the spitting and growling. The males swung at her and twice actually struck her with their open hands, to no avail. But finally Otrekh dealt her a blow clearly audible, and she staggered and whimpered and slunk aside.
"Otrekh!" Merritt shouted, and the big fellow lowered his ears and growled, still not offering to attack. It was all show: Merritt had almost learned to tell, and this was purely face-saving. Sazhje evidently thought so, for she gave a scornful snort and sidled her way back to take Merrill's arm.
Olrekh still had something to say; and he was not moving. This time there was hardness in his attitude, and stalemate was on them, apt to end in someone getting hurt Merritt weighed the profit on either side and finally pushed Sazhje away, quietly went and sat down against the tree where Rejkh wanted him, and Rejkh saw to his securing with the cord, no less roughly than his habit. Sazhje watched in disapproval with much fretting and fuming, and when Rekjh was done and all the camp began to settle for the night, she came and settled at Merrill's side, worked her head under his chin and lay there hard-breathing and still angry.
"I'm sorry," Merritt told her, and her long hand patted his side comfortingly.
"Sazhje ahhrht," she assured him. "Sazhje ahhrht"
"We go to the dam, Sazhje?"
"Ah," she affirmed, and shivered against him. A few drops of rain were starting to fall. "Go tarn, Gairh people tarn. Ssam ahhrht. Ssam people no ahhrht Kill Ssam people. Ssam ahhrht Sazhje."
"I don't understand, Sazhje. "
"Gairh people no good Ssam people. Kill tarn."
Merritt shook his head in frustration. Sazhje at her most communicative was the hardest to understand; and she looked up at him in mutual distress, knowing she had failed to make him understand all of what she was saying. At last she simply put her head down on his chest and patted him comfortingly.
The weather had been threatening all evening when they arrived at their destination, soft sea clouds slipping overhead carried on the west wind, gathering darker and darker, and the air tinged with warmth. They came early into this hillside camp, but most of the inhabitants had already sought shelter for the coming night.
There was here, as at the other location upriver, a group of burrows dug into the clay hillside. But this place had not the look of permanence such as Sazhje's village had had. Here were no stone-bordered paths, but oozing clay banks tracked into footpaths; no tidy stone-fronted residences, but rush-mat windbreaks thrust into the irregular fronts of the dwellings. All that remained the same was the centering of the camp around a particularly aged tree, which Merritt began to suspect had some religious symbolism: this one, too, was hung with skulls, whether collected from enemies killed or some grisly form of honor to their own dead.