I laid my hand on her arm. “An accident of nature, nothing more. The lizards live just inside the crater, high up where the heat can’t harm them. Naturally they’ve become identified with the volcano. To Geipgos and his warriors the ugly-looking beasts are Servants of the Mountain who can stay its wrath. Capture them, abuse them, and the wrath of the mountain will be unleashed in all its fury. The pattern is a primitive one, but completely logical from their point of view.”
Kallatah looked at me steadily for a moment. “It almost became a pattern of death for us,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “But don’t forget it’s an ugly pattern for them too. A pattern of never-ceasing terror, of semi-starvation.”
One of the warriors thrust his face close to us to ask if we were all right. I nodded, and he fell back with a gratified grin to resume his position in the procession.
“It’s tragic how one little taboo can hold a race back,” I went on. “You’ve seen how keenly intelligent they are. If that taboo hadn’t plagued them for hundreds of years they’d be truly civilized by now.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Kallatah said. “What do you mean by a pattern of starvation.”
“Those lizards eat the natives out of house and home,” I told her. “Literally—and it’s horrible. When we come to the village you’ll see what emaciated skeletons the women and children are. The lizards are so sacred they can’t be killed off without angering the mountain.”
It was then that Kallatah surprised me. She gave a low whistle.
“You mean that tribal law has decreed that?”
“Precisely. They breed fast and eat voraciously. You can’t have agriculture and the storage of fruits and grains—any kind of stable handicraft culture even—with vicious tyrants like that on every patch of cultivated land. By rough estimate those beasts consume millions of tons of food a year. Even the small animal life is vanishing.”
“And they don’t dare kill one,” Kallatah said. “It sounds insane.”
“All primitive fear taboos are insane,” I told her. “They’re symptoms of the stark lunacy which possesses the human mind before it gets hold of the tools it needs to grasp the real nature of the physical world. Even when it gets such tools,” I qualified, “a society can be psychotic in a more complex way. All societies are probably psychotic in one way or the other, but that’s another story entirely.”
“But the adult males seem well fed,” Kallatah said, her eyes on the trail ahead. “How could starved children grow up into such robust-looking adults?”
“Deprivation has left its marks,” I told her. “You’ve got to remember that only the strongest survive where the infant mortality skyrockets the way it does here. And those that do reach manhood have bad teeth, poor digestion—all kinds of psychosomatic ills. What you are seeing here is the warrior caste strutting its might. A warrior caste will always find a way to eat.”
She didn’t speak again until we were at the base of the mountain, and the village was coming swiftly toward us through the haze.
“You still haven’t told me how you managed to turn aside their wrath,” she complained. “Just what did you say to them? Why are they bringing us here? Did you expect me to understand the gibberish you used?”
Dared I be completely honest? I decided it would be tempting fate to tell her exactly what I had said to Geipgos. She’d find out soon enough. Meanwhile, I needed time to plan my strategy and come up with something workable that wouldn’t make her hate me too much.
The sudden appearance of the children saved the moment for me, sparing me the necessity of further evasion. They were playing on the plain directly in front of the village, racing to and fro with the eager abandonment of all children everywhere.
They used their five arms to good advantage, tossing mud cakes at one another, blinking and grimacing with a demoniac expressiveness, pretending to be dead from famine one instant, and then, in the twinkling of an eye, coming exuberantly to life again.
For an instant Kallatah’s face radiated only maternal solicitude, a gentle sweetness untouched by rancor. Then, all at once, she seemed to realize how emaciated they were, how completely different from ordinary children. Her head came up, and her eyes blazed with indignation.
The blaze grew hotter as the lizards added fuel to it. The revolting creatures were everywhere—on slanting mud banks lush with berry-laden vegetation, on fields that sloped away to mist-filled hollows, even within easy pouncing distance of the children.
They ignored us as we were borne past, their carrion-repulsive heads bobbing to and fro. They were devouring everything edible within reach of their forepaws, swaying back and forth and cramming the food into their mouths with a voracity which was sickening to watch.
Miraculously the children ignored them, and went right on playing.
The procession moved on in silence, straight toward a picture of human misery so tragic and pitiful that no man of good will could have contemplated it without a shudder.
The village consisted of twenty-five or thirty huts, each with its central supporting pole, and spreading straw roof. The women sat about listless and sullen in doorways, apparently not caring at all how unattractive they looked, or what a disillusioning impression their complete lack of amorous allure must have made on the returning, better-nourished warriors.
But there is something about the imminent prospect of a nuptial ceremony that infuses joy into even the most dispirited, and the instant they saw us they leapt up with one accord and came flocking around us. Old and young, tall and short, comely and ugly.
The warriors carried us to the central hut and set the litter down with prideful flourishes of their long arms and broad, straight shoulders.
