by Dino Parenti
No sooner had the words left her lips that she noticed the algae swell and part rapidly several dozen yards from the shoreline, the disturbance churning straight towards the harvesters.
She jumped to her feet and screamed down, but the sound arrived simultaneously with the star angler’s breaching, its quilled hump slicing the froth. The fiery tips of its dorsal spikes swept back in attack mode, so much like the hackles on a mongrel.
Two men managed to leap out of the way just as the beast rutted to a fast stop in the sand, slicing the air with its hooked frontal appendage and catching the third man’s lower leg as he tried to scamper back up the beach.
The others had recovered, and with their long-poles at hand struck at the bright antenna, the creature’s primary lure in the water. It kept dragging the third man towards its snapping, unhinging lower jaw, until finally, wary of losing its prized lure over prey, shook its hook free and wiggled its girth back into the swells before disappearing.
Luna realized she had held her breath throughout the episode only after they had hoisted their wounded man upon their shoulders and hurried back towards the lower hamlet road, leaving their coal torches behind to topple with the brimming tide in a rebuke for their betrayal.
She sat down and tried to corral a heart still racing over what she had just witnessed. Firelight had almost gotten them killed. As alluring and beautiful as it often was, it was also problematic beyond a heat source. Surely there existed better means to harness light, a conundrum she pondered as the second stanza of the folio quote slotted neatly into place in her mind.
“Couldn’t the heart of the ocean hide the last–remaining varieties of these titanic species, for whom years are centuries and centuries millennia . . . ?”
IV
In the weeks leading up to the fall equinox and the next Covenant, as Luna would arrive later in the evenings from her squiring duties at the armory, Pappy would leave out for her a piece or two of arcana before turning in. Artifacts of times gone by for her to assimilate and ponder at her leisure. Perhaps even condemn for their venal natures, as was her right as Gaffer heir.
There was the night he left out for her something called a flash-light. On first inspection it seemed little more than a curious cylinder made of metal, until Pappy described the following morning how it used to emit as much light as the largest coal torch, but without heat or danger of burns, nor for the need of a flint to ignite it.
Then there was the night he left out a peculiar object of frayed cloth and steel wires called an um-brella, which used to keep people dry when water fell from the sky. Luna could not imagine anything falling from the sky that did not scald or steam, to say nothing of people choosing at one time to deliberately walk beneath it.
And then there was the night he left out something called a lock-it, a mesmerizing round pendant of gold, attached by the thinnest of chains crafted of the same material. On its surface had been etched a concentric series of rays that Pappy explained to her was meant to represent the sun. Despite several nicks and one rather pronounced indentation, it was one of the most captivating objects Luna had ever seen. And then Pappy split it suddenly, each half pivoting open like a Folio to reveal the opposing likenesses of a man and a woman facing one another, sketched in a faded, blood-hued ink. He explained that wedded pairs often wore them so they could always keep the other next their hearts when separated. Luna found the thought so exquisite that she worried touching it again might negate such love, even across time. Her own roiling emotions and physical sensations of late have filled her with such a mistrust of herself and others that, like pestilence, she feared it might start to affect those around her just by contact or even proximity.
Pappy chuckled at her silliness before gently taking her hand, placing the locket on her palm, and closing her fingers over it.
But not all items he would leave out for her were simple trinkets. Often it would be a smaller folio, in which were chronicled different narratives from the past.
One night she read of the Soil Wars, seventeen centuries past, where a dwindling mankind bled their brother for a patch of dirt still viable for crop.
On another night, it was the monstrous recycling of products and ideas after the collapse. Man unable to create solutions, but only wealth for the strong and the wily.
On still another night, it was an impression tableau of a giant block of floating ice called a berg, atop which several men clutching weapons of unfamiliar function were planting their tribal flag.
The most impressive image was of an expanse of billowy proliferation as seen from a rise. It was something called a wood, and it was composed of trees and shrubs and grasses of varying species and sizes. She had never seen a tree before, though she had heard they still existed in the world in tiny, remote copses. If not for massive archipelagos of deadly plankton in the open seas, they would not be able to breathe. Unlike their eyes, which had grown through the centuries, their lungs have constricted steadily in order to compensate for the thickened air.
She knew of green from when her father had taught her color before he died. Some of the luminous insects and cuttlefish—as well as star anglers, she now knew—emitted the hue at fluctuating degrees. Even the Mother-of-pearl Way often cast a nimbus shade of it whenever a legion of fireflies streaked over it from the higher elevations towards the water to spawn.
But the green on her lap, preserved under clear melted plastic, nearly overwhelmed her. It seemed artificial somehow, as did the cyan of the sky, and the gold of the sun ladling the water.
As for knowledge regarding the animals, Pappy remained vague, dispensing information as often as the skies would dispense starlight. The mass importation of predators from a place called A-free-ka was the only literature he had provided, how they had been dispersed throughout the world to surviving settlements after The Great Fireball and the ensuing pestilence.
Often she failed to fall asleep afterwards, staring up at the ceiling while lying on her mat, counting the patches and fresh tallow seals Pappy had recently refashioned.
One evening, upon snuffing the coal pit and rendering their domicile pitch-black, her eyes became drawn to a single pinpoint of green from the south wall. Thinking at first that it was a hole in the tin seeping in light from the outside, she realized upon further inspection that the tallow seal Pappy had mended that early morning had trapped within it a firefly cured in mid-blaze.
At just past eighteen hours of spent time, it still raged as if alive and in full flight.
All night she pondered notions and probabilities under a ceaseless but invigorating restlessness, and she never slept.
The following morning, near blind from gazing at the shimmer of the firefly under tallow, she bled for the first time and felt a molting away of darkness.
V
The arrival of the fall equinox brought with it a sustained period lean of meat.
On this Covenant, a bald algae farmer named Randolph ascended the hill with a burly, muzzled hyena in tow.
As Luna took her place on the Mother-of-pearl Way, it was with the fresh knowledge that it was not centuries worth of crushed nacre after all that composed its surface, but pulverized remnants of glass from immeasurable quantities of miraculous tablets of light and movement once known as screens, discarded after being stripped of their useful wire and metals once the world turned dark. All hamlets had their own version of the Way, each named for a presumed material natural to their area. All built from the bones of the past.
After Randolph returned, minus three fingers and an eye, but tugging along two hyenas over the ever-sparkling crust of the Way, Luna returned to the domicile to find Pappy’s scroll of the Hamlet Laws sitting on her sleeping mat. Whenever she had snooped through his belongings, this rumored catalog was the item she had most sought and found the least evidence for. And now it sat before her, conjured from nothingness as a twin sibling lost at birth.
The air heavy with enigma and prospect, she unfurled the leather spool, mindful no
t to rouse a snoring Pappy, and began to read.
The first few segments dealt with civil hierarchy, lineage rules, districting of domiciles—knowledge she had long discerned on her own through basic observation. But as she read on she soon came upon the heading of prohibitions.
Past the decrees against theft and murder and all their parsed deviations, she at last found the edicts against the direct consumption of human flesh. She often entertained impressions of that long-vanished history. Fanciful, ghastly talk of the days when men ate men after The Great Fireball, and the world systematically shed itself of edibles, but she never expected to see it consecrated in words.
The word direct bothered her more than anything. How else could anything be consumed but directly? Was it wordlessly permitted in some other manner?
She read on.
Line after line, Luna found that she was anticipating the knowledge ahead of the words, foretelling the links in the chain before they drew from murky waters. So obvious was the complete picture afterwards that she cursed herself for allowing disavowal, fear, and apathy to cloud her eyes.
Not long after the Fireball pierced the earth from the sky, plants withered. Then the animals that ate the plants followed. Then the fish. Then the animals that ate other animals, virtually to the brink, as man began to eat them.
Then man on man, until man began to sicken from it and started dying anew, and the pestilence began.
It was the pigs that saved them. Used as disposal for the scraps man would discard of himself, they soon realized that the pigs did not sicken of their pestilence. Nor did man sicken from eating the pigs that had eaten them.
The end-zime. That infinitesimal spark that the meat-eating animals generated to survive our poisonous selves, killing that poison, thus providing them nutrition, and consequently saving what remained of humanity.
The system by which to maintain the balance of numbers, both of animal and man—the Covenants—was man relearning to think again. To relearn the necessity of temperance and abnegation.
When Luna reached the end of the scroll, her head thrummed and her eyes felt crushed between stone, but it held naught to the ache in her heart. History’s inevitabilities were only a small component though, a mere cramp to her realization that Pappy, by providing her this information, was in his own indelible way telling her that he would be taking the Way on the next Covenant.
Too agitated to bewail the anguish in her soul, Luna rerolled the scroll as best she could before marching out of the domicile.
Pappy, his own sleeping mat saturated by silent tears, listened to her fading footsteps until the wind’s keen absorbed them into the world.
***
By the time Luna had ascended to her spot on the cliff, the prevailing winds had slackened, causing the ever-churning veil above to slow enough so that a cleft opened momentarily in the sky, and the faint wink of a single star slithered through.
Ura-nus, it was called, appearing once every few years during the fall months when the effluvium was its weakest.
It was thought to bring luck to the hamlet that managed to view it.
But Luna cast aside such superstitions. Her mind had been wringing itself of the superfluous, and the inspiration which had been dancing about her mind’s periphery for months had finally begun to swirl inwardly until at last it augured at its core an idea she had to attempt. It could work, but the execution would have to be precise. First, she would need a large kettle. Then a portable coal pit. And then tallow. Lots of boar tallow. And the sturdiest, sharpest long-pole in the hamlet.
Finally, she would need to wait. Wait until the final moment, when the ensuing solstice brings in the star anglers to spawn.
She had taken to wearing the locket Pappy had given her more often these days, and she scooped it off her budding chest and broke it open to look at the long-gone faces within. Despite their nice clothes and ruddy complexions, they shared the same stern countenance, and she wondered what moments and vexations had loaded their young brows with such weight.
“I felt that my true vocation,” she whispered then, quoting Pappy’s last reading from the folio, “the sole end of my life, was to chase this disturbing monster and purge it from the world . . . ”
VI
On the eve of the winter solstice, Luna stood on the beach.
Four straight nights, and no star anglers. She had ample tallow, enough for five days, as it would be a moot exercise beyond that. Her pit fire burned hot, and when the wave spray reached far enough in to strike the kettle drum simmering over it, the hiss rivaled the serpent dens during their molt.
Each night she moved the pair of coal torches closer to the water before crouching behind rocks with long-pole in hand.
Davie’s long-pole, granted to Luna by his mother.
Two nights earlier, several jellyfish drawn by their light beached themselves at their base, wrapping their tentacles around the shafts in dying embraces. Luna used a knife to extract the luciferin from their hood sacs, pouring the waning fluid quickly within the iron molds and filling them with bubbling-hot tallow. An hour later she split the casts and out rolled two cylinders of translucent, hardened tallow with glowing-green hearts. The emission was dim, however. Too dim for her purposes. If she had cuttlefish ink, she could light an entire thoroughfare with a single lantern, but they ranged too far out in the open waters.
It had to be a star angler, or nothing.
But it had worked. Their puny glow only flickered for eight hours before eclipsing to nothing. The potency of star angler luciferin was fifty times the jellyfish’s strength at least. If she could only lure one.
Hours rolled upon the next with no sign of the beasts. Occasionally she would venture out to stoke the coals, and once she thought she saw something crest the radiant water not far out, but nothing came of it. She thought back to the single occurrence she had witnessed that summer, and what separated her situation from theirs, and it dawned on her as she swooshed the long-pole through the air in a practice thrust: noise.
She wasted no time engaging in loud prattling along the shoreline, certain that volume mattered more than diction.
When nothing happened, she placed a third torch between the first pair to intensify the light. Those men had clustered their torches in a similar fashion.
Again she waited, and again, nary a stir save for two more jellyfish dragging themselves across the sand, lured by the glow.
And then it hit her with a clarity that matched the changes in her body. Slow predators, especially scavengers like jellyfish, would only track prey equally as slow, or stationary. But faster hunters were stimulated by movement, and those algae farmers had small candle-lamps fashioned near the handles of their long poles . . .
Scooping up some of the leftover material of her experiment, she quickly improvised a tallow candle, which she then fixed to her long-pole and lit. She then edged herself to the water’s terminus and marched back-and-forth along it, waving the long-pole and narrowing her eyes into the radiant swells.
***
Thirty minutes before dawn, it finally happened.
Her legs were beginning to tire when she spotted the sudden igniting-and-distention of the water, and then the breaking dorsal fin and the angry red eye of its main frontal lure, followed by the fast sweeps of its smaller lure spikes burning in shades of viridian and jade.
In shuffling backwards, she nearly stumbled, the angler looming with great velocity until it plowed through a breaking wave and, using its developed pectoral limbs to further propel itself, skimmed smoothly atop the retreating water until it troughed to a stop in the glassine sand mere feet from a still retreating Luna.
The ground shook as it pounded its jointed fins into the sand to gain traction, shuffling ever closer before unhinging its lower set of scimitar-like teeth in attempts to snag its fleeing prey.
Without wasting a moment to gain her bearings, Luna swept blindly back with her long-pole, its bladed edge cutting the salt air and implanting perfec
tly into the black orb of the angler’s left eye.
Only then did she hazard to stare straight at it: as long as three men and at least as tall as one. It thrashed in the sand less than ten feet away, trying to shed itself of the massive talon that had dared to lash back at it.
Luna tasted her pulse, the ferrous cold of fear, even as she realized the angler was starting to torsion back towards the water, and to freedom.
At one point it whipped its head in a downward arc, anchoring the long-pole’s end into the sand. That unmoored Luna’s feet, and what followed was reflex and determined rage. She threw herself to the sand and grabbed hold of the pole at the base. Above her the angler was trying to twist its main hooked lure towards its eye, more set on freeing itself than bothering to lance a meal. Realizing this, Luna risked getting to her feet, and with the beast’s next lunge upwards from the sand, she yanked in the opposing direction, and the blade peeled itself from the angler’s eye.
It began to shimmy back in earnest, feeling with its jointed aft fins for the solace of the cold brine, angry under-bite still snapping the salty air.
Luna glared at the retreating beast, then unleased such a primal scream that even the creature’s primitive ears, built solely to detect sound under the thickness of water, paused at the dissonance.
“You will give me what I need!” she yelled, raising the pole high above her shoulder before charging.
***
Pappy, gaunt but determined, began his ascent up the Way, cradling the corpulent, hooded badger against his armor. As a Gaffer and Hamlet Elder, he was under no obligation to partake in any further Covenants, but dwindling stores and a need to maintain morale had spurred him on.
Anticipating Luna to be waiting for him near the pinnacle of the Way, he was stunned to hear her calling his name from behind. A murmur coursed through the crowd on either side of the Way, and when Pappy turned, it was to the sight of his granddaughter hastening up the Way, awash under an astounding aquamarine light that spilled from the pair of torches she hoisted in each hand.
People alternately gasped and applauded her as she neared him, and when he saw the blood streaking her arms, her torso, her face, he nearly let fall the equally frozen Ash from his arms.