Sitting Up IP:2

Island People's 2

Isa 49:24  Shall the prey be taken from the mighty, or the lawful captive delivered?

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Seth’s head hurt. He was under the impression that bolts of lightning and herds of cattle were chasing each other around just behind his eyeballs. To add insult to injury, he was lying on his stomach, doubled over some object, and the whole world was moving rhythmically up and down. When one has a blinding headache, one prefers to be able to lay still and not bounce.

Eventually, despite his pain, Seth was able to evaluate his ‘position’ in life: He was blindfolded and gagged, hands tied behind his back, lying bareback on a horse, a horse which was trotting rapidly (and uncomfortably) along.

He began to struggle against his bonds. His struggle produced no discernible result as far as the ropes were concerned, but after a while, the horse stopped abruptly. He heard another horse come alongside and then felt a knife sawing away at the ropes around his wrists. He held still and soon found his hands free--free and extremely painful. He brought his hands in front of him and rubbed them vigorously. While he did so, he felt the knife busy at his feet and then felt the gag and then the blindfold being removed--giving him a marvellous view of a grassy field and the side of a horse.

When he felt his body could handle the feat, he reached up, grabbed the horse’s mane, and swung himself up to a sitting position… gaining for the first time a panoramic perspective of his situation. He was, as he had surmised, sitting on a horse in the middle of the northern plains. Next to him, also seated on a horse and staring at him dourly, was a Heroiini: a younger male and not one that he knew.

Not that he knew many Heroiini. By their very nature, they almost never came to towns and rarely visited his estates, even his father’s estate, which was located on the very edge of the plains where the Heroiini lived. Uncomfortable dismounting from their horses even for short periods, the Heroiini never lived in houses, let alone towns. And as, except for the young males, they lived in family groups, no one Heroiini ever did anything much.

The young males were, of course, the exception. Not yet having any Wives and sent out from their families of birth, they roamed the plain as solitary outcasts. While the Heroiini generally were content to use only what the plains could provide, they still required some necessities, such as metal objects, that they had difficulty making themselves. Thus, a young man, eagerly preparing for the day when he would gather his own Wives, would gain credit for himself in the towns--often as messengers--until the day when he could regain the life of the plains as an alpha male. Indeed, the King’s postal service consisted almost exclusively of such young males, who would come, work for a few years, and then ‘retire’. Having no vested interest in any of the mail and taking an extremely serious view of any oath they made, Heroiini were utterly trustworthy mail deliverers.

“So, as Seth stared back at this Heroiini, he knew that no amount of cajoling, threats, or bribery would be likely to change his commitment to whatever task it was to which he had agreed. Still, he didn’t see any reason not to try…

“Hello. I am Prince Seth. Who are you, and why are we here?” Seth said, using Kelii, the language of Heroiini… although he was forced to say ‘Prince’ in Human, as Heroiini had no word for such a title. While Wives within a herd had a hierarchy, the males were either children, outcasts, or the herd leader/alpha male. No male hierarchical title existed… and Seth didn’t think a term such as ‘Second Wife’ would communicate what he wanted to say.

The Heroiini, as Seth had feared, merely stared at him… a bit startled that he spoke Kelii. Almost no Human condescended to do so, choosing instead to communicate in their own language. Indeed, most would find it impossible to learn, as it was never spoken in any ‘civilised’ location. Seth’s Father had been hard-pressed to find a means for Seth and his siblings to learn it but had struck upon the happy “idea of having a series of Heroiini teach Seth riding while insisting that they use their own language while doing so. The Heroiini had seemed to find the concept of teaching riding bizarre, but the pay had been good, so Seth had eventually picked up a working knowledge of Heroiini.

The Heroiini handed him an extra water skin from his own horse, which Seth took and drank gratefully from. Then the Heroiini turned and, pulling on a rope that was tied around the neck of Seth’s horse, led them both off to the west.

Seth drank eagerly and then pondered his situation. He was obviously being kidnapped, perhaps to put pressure on his Father (a tactic Seth knew wouldn’t work). His duty at this point was clear: stay alive and escape. Immediate escape was impossible. While he might be able to jerk the rope out of the Heroiini’s hands with a sudden movement, he knew that it was impossible for him to outrun a Heroiini on horseback. The physical connection that a Heroiini had with his horse guaranteed that they could outrun any comparably “mounted Human. Seth was a bit lighter than the Heroiini, but not by much, and certainly not by enough to overcome the dramatic advantage the Heroiini’s linkage provided him.

But where there’s life, there’s hope. Perhaps somewhere along the way, other opportunities would arise. But what to do along the way?

Seth thought this through. Although he was being groomed for leadership, it couldn’t be said that he knew any great secrets. So, if the two of them got to talking, the odds were that he would gain more information than he might accidentally let slip. Besides this, this trip was going to be boring and nerve-wracking enough without it being held in complete silence as well!

So he began talking. It was a great opportunity for him to use his Kelii. He didn’t badger his captor or ask him his name; he just rambled on. In the beginning, the Heroiini said nothing. But Seth noticed, as he talked, that every once in a while, he would frown: just a quick tightening of his face.“Seth rambled on as he tried to figure out what was causing that reaction. And then he remembered his language teachers and how they had continually tried to correct his use of the ‘storytelling’ tense. Kelii was very strict on that tense, and it was hard to conjugate. Seth, in his rambling, had been using it, and was, obviously, still not getting it right. Perhaps…

He launched into a long tale from his youth, all about a time when he and his oldest Brother had gone for what was Seth’s first hunting trip. And he used the storytelling tense. And he deliberately used it incorrectly, staring openly at the Heroiini, as if certain he would be interested in the story. He was about five minutes into the story when his captor could take no more and, after a particularly egregious error, burst out with, “Tselnta, not Tselnya”!

Seth responded naturally enough, repeating ‘Tselnta’ several times to himself, repeating the entire sentence with the correction, and plunging on into the story. After several more corrections, which “came more and more frequently, until they were now immediately after each mistake, Seth pretended to be confused about one correction, “But, I thought that after ‘tui na’ you always said ‘nutuya’?”

Glaring at him, the Heroiini launched into a long discourse about when one did and when one didn’t use ‘nutuya’; with the tone in his voice that indicated that, among Heroiini, even a reasonably adept four-year-old was capable of correctly managing the differences. Seth nodded humbly and, after correcting his ‘mistake,’ went on. He was careful both to speak more accurately, but still not without error (which he was not even capable of, which made it easier) so that the Heroiini was ‘forced’ occasionally to correct him.

Over the next day, the conversation ranged more and more widely. Seth moved it from grammar mistakes to questions of culture and from questions of culture to more general subjects. The Heroiini still avoided any conversation regarding his own identity or the nature of the trip they were on, and Seth didn’t ask. For one thing, he thought he knew; for another thing, he was getting too interested in the conversations they were having; and for a third thing, he was beginning to feel rather ill.

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