Филип Фармер - The Stone God Awakens

The gates to the palisade were open, showing fields of corn and other plants outside. Females were working in them while younger children ran about and the older worked with their mothers. Armed males stood guard by the fields; others were on high watchtowers placed well outside the fields and also within the palisade.

The sun and the blue sky were those that he had known all his life.

The catmen evidently expected him to do something. He hoped that he was not going to do something that would change their awe into hostility. He was completely bewildered, and he might have gone mad if he had not had a thick bedrock of pragmatism in his nature.

The only way would be to learn the language.

He indicated the female whom he had first seen, the one who reminded him of his sister's Siamese cat. He pointed to himself and said, "Ulysses Singing Bear."

She looked at him. The others murmured and shifted uneasily.

"Ulysses Singing Bear," he said.

She smiled or at least opened her mouth widely. A scary smile. Those teeth could take a big chunk out of him with one bite. Not that they were as relatively large as those of a house cat. They were small, really, and the canines were only slightly longer than the other teeth. But they were so sharp.

She said something, and he repeated his name. It was evident that she was trying to repeat the words, though she may not have guessed that he was saying his name.

After a while, she was able to say, "Wurisa Asiingagna Wapiira."

That was as close as she could come to mastering English sounds.

He shrugged. It was up to him to adapt. He would learn their language.

"Wurisa," he said, and he smiled.

Most of them looked puzzled, and only much later did he find out why. After all, one expects one's god to be able to speak the language of his worshipers. But here was their god and saviour, the one for whom they had been waiting for hundreds of years, no more able than a newborn to speak the tongue of the gods.

Fortunately, the Wufea were as able to rationalise as human beings. Their chief priest and his daughter, Awina, advanced the explanation that he had been put under a spell by Wurutana, the Great Devourer, when Wuwiso, the god of the Wufea, had been turned to stone. Wuwiso had forgotten his language, but he would quickly relearn it.

Awina was his chief instructor. She stayed by him almost all the time, and since she loved to talk, even with a god who half-terrified her, she taught him swiftly. She was intelligent — sometimes he thought she was more intelligent than he — and she conceived of many ways to speed up his learning.

She also had a sense of humour, and when Ulysses understood a pun she made he knew that he was advancing swiftly. He was so pleased with himself, and with her, that he almost kissed her. And then he caught himself, as it were, by the back of the neck and pulled himself back. He had been growing very fond of this delicate, sinuous, laughing creature. But he did not intend to get that fond. Nevertheless, she was the focal point, an island in an unknown universe and a shifting sea, and she was very pleasant to be with. When she was gone, he felt unease ooze in, like lava beneath an iron door.

By the time he recognised her first pun, he had become acquainted with the interior of the village and the area a few miles around it. A dozen young warriors and a priest always accompanied him. They walked in any direction for several miles, but after a certain distance, they stopped him. He wanted to go on, but on the other hand he did not feel ready to force any issues with those who were, after all, his wardens.

North and west, the country was high rolling hills, lakes, and several small rivers and many creeks. It was like that around Syracuse. East, after a few miles of hills, was a large forest of evergreens. South, the country was hilly for two miles and then suddenly a plain began. It ran for as far as he could see from the top of a hill approximately eight hundred feet high. On the horizon was a great dark bulk that he thought might be a mountain range. Then, the second trip, he decided it was a cloudbank. The third trip, he concluded that he did not know what it could be.

He asked Awina about it, and she looked at him strangely and said, "Wurutana!" She sounded as if she did not understand why he would have to ask her about it.

Wurutana, he knew by then, meant the Great Devourer. It also meant something else, but he did not know the language well enough yet to catch certain subtleties.

According to Awina, there were other Wufea villages to the north and east. Their enemies, who called themselves Wagarondit, lived to the west and the north. There were about two hundred people in this village and about three thousand Wufea altogether.

The Wagarondit had their own language, unrelated to Wufea, but both groups used a third language, a trade language, for communication. This speech was called Ayrata.

The Wufea neither had metal of their own, nor had they heard of it. Singing Bear's knife was the first they had seen of steel.

Moreover, they did not know about the bow. He could not understand this. They might not know metal because there might not be any in this area.

But even Old Stone Age peoples should have the bow and arrow. Then he remembered the Australian aborigine, who had been so technologically backward that he had not discovered the principles of archery. There was no reason why he should not have done so. He was intelligent enough. But he had not invented the bow. And then there was the Amerindian, some of whom had made wheels for the toys of their children. Yet they had never applied the principle to making big wagons or wheelbarrows or carts.

On his trips, especially to the east, he looked around for suitable wood and found a tree that resembled the yew. He had his guards chop off branches with their stone axes, and they brought the wood back. There he got the gut and the feathers he needed and, after suitable experimentation, produced a number of bows and arrows.

The Wufea were amazed, but they caught on to the uses of the bow quickly enough. After a little practice on the grass targets he put up, they brought out a Wagarondit prisoner. They marched him to beyond the fields and there told him to get going.

Ulysses had hesitated, because he did not know how far he could extend his authority. He knew by then that he was some sort of a god. They had told him that and even if they had not, he could have guessed from their attitude. He had even taken part in several ceremonies in the not-as-yet-rebuilt temple. But just what kind of a god and how powerful he was, he did not know. Now seemed as good a time as any to find out. He had no reason to intercede for the Wagarondit, but he found himself unable not to. He could not stand by while the young warriors tried out their marksmanship on the racoon-man.

At first, some of the Wufea seemed inclined to argue. They looked hard at him and a few even muttered something. But nobody openly opposed him, and when the chief priest, Awina's father, Aytheera, stormed at them, waving his wand with its serpent and big bird heads and rattling pebbles in a gourd, he succeeded in scaring them. The gist of his speech was that they were under a new regime. Their ideas of what a god should be did not necessarily coincide with the god's own ideas. If they did not straighten out quickly, they might find themselves turned to stone by lightning thrown by the god. This would reverse the procedure by which the stone god had awakened, become fleshed, and once again walked among them.

This was the first time that Singing Bear had any hint of what had happened to him. He asked Awina about it later, couching his questions so that she would not know how deep his ignorance was. She smiled slyly and looked at him out of the corner of her huge, slit-irised eyes. Perhaps she had caught on to the fact that he did not know what had happened. But if she were intelligent enough to comprehend this, she was also intelligent enough to know that she should keep her mouth shut.