Chapter Nine
The importance of being able to communicate well had never been more evident. Zhor felt the frustration Ah-na must feel as he struggled to explain what he had witnessed with mime. There were just some things that simply could not be expressed with grunts and gestures!
Oneof them had to learn the language the other spoke, at the very least!
He understood abruptly and very clearly why Ah-na had decided he was little more than an animal.
He had nothing to show her that he had evolved well beyond being merely an intelligent beast.
He did not even have the ability to try to convince her with words!Thatwould have been enough even without the trappings of a civilization that had been lost!
Without it, he had nothing.
He scrubbed a hand over his face. Maybe he was relying too much on the gestures because he did not expect her to understand? She would never even begin to understand—theywould never begin to understand one another—if he could not give her words to use and convince her to share her language with him.
“I did not see all that happened. I was drawn by the sound of an explosion, but I did see that there was a party of zorph below the ship and launching arrows and stones at it, so perhaps they caused the crash? I saw several smaller explosions and then the ship began to fall. When it landed here, it broke into many pieces.
“I think that I had already begun to approach when you came out and then fell. I do not know how I would have caught you otherwise, though I do not actually recall moving closer or thinking that I would.
“I am certain, though, that this is where the ship crashed.”He shrugged.“Very likely the zorph took it. Even if they did not bring it down, they saw, and they would have come as quickly as they could to scavenge what was useful. Or any number of others might have seen it and come.
“This is a world that has lost all semblance of civilization and, I think, in some ways it is worse than before we were civilized.”
Annika stared at him, hard, trying to absorbsomethingfrom what he was saying.
Naturally enough, she couldn’t. The best she could do was try to make a note of words he repeated.
He’d used the wordzorphseveral times. “Zorph? What iszorph?”
He frowned thoughtfully. Finally, he used his hands to frame his upper body, waist to the top of the head and then dropped to all fours.
She stared at him blankly for a moment before she remembered thinking the creatures she had seen on top of the plateau had reminded her of myths of centaurs. The excitement of thinking she understood filled her. “Up there?”
He frowned and glanced up, following her pointing finger with his gaze. He was still frowning when he looked at her again. “Ah-na ….” He pointed at his eyes. “Zorphdere?”
Thatshe got! She nodded eagerly. “Yes! I saw them. When we circled the plateau just before we crashed, I saw several of them. They look like—at least from that distance—a mythological creature we called centaurs. Probably not all that much like them—because they were supposedly half man and half horse, but the torso looked like it must be a lot like yours—or actually ours—and then it had a lower body that looked like a four-legged animal of some kind.”
“You went up there when you’d seen zorph there?”he bellowed furiously.
Annika stared at him, dismayed and stunned at the abrupt transition to anger.
Zhor struggled with his temper. “Zorph.” He growled and made a pantomime of killing something by chopping at it.
Annika gaped at him, unnerved for several moments before it finally sank in that he was acting out aggression not expressing it.
She thought.
She was fairly certain that he was trying to say that he thought thezorphwere dangerous and viciously aggressive and that made her very, very uneasy as soon as she began to think she understood.
Because she thought he might have been telling her that it was thezorphthat had carried away the ship, and that would mean they had also found Phillips and Stoddard. And that might mean they were dead now even if they’d survived the crash.
According to Zhor.
Thezorphmight not be as hostile toward humans as they were toward Zhor and his people.
Or, they might bemorehostile.
But she didn’t see that she could rule out the possibility that thezorphhad rescued them just on Zhor’s word alone.
