Orphan Tribe, Orphan Planet

by Jonathan Vick

  He pressed his hands against the thin flesh of the dead rinne grubb. It was a finely haired skin over a tough, bone exoskeleton. Whatever had killed the adult rinne had done so without cracking the shell. Thurl felt along the carcass, taller than him and about twice his length, until he found an opening where the bulbous head should have been. Instead of the tentacles and maw he expected, Thurl found only a gaping hole. Whatever beast had killed the creature had hollowed it out but left the exoskeleton intact, almost as though it were intentional.

  Thurl swallowed, and tried to shut his nostrils. Then, he pushed into the opening of the dead rinne grubb.

  It was warm inside the carcass. The thick, bony shell was still wet and slick. It smelled of blood and bile. The organs had been well excavated, leaving only the hard bone of the exoskeleton intact. Thurl pressed his hands on the bone walls over his head, and spread his feet to brace himself for the impact of the avalanche.

  There was something at his feet, groaning; breathing. Sohjos was tucked inside the dead beast, packed in a blanket of snow that was melting too quickly.

  Suddenly, Thurl understood what had killed and disemboweled the creature. When the chantimer had plucked the grubb from the snow, it must have uncovered a rinne den. Iassa had killed and hollowed out the exoskeleton of one of the adults and placed Sohjos inside to protect him from whatever dangers may come.

  CHAPTER twenty-five

  The face of the avalanche was breaking through the sparse tufts of bristlewind along the mountainside, rolling through plumes of plaka weeds and bonroot, letting nothing slow its descent toward the valley.

  Thurl clicked and tried to kneel beside his father to check his condition, but there was barely room inside the carcass of the rinne grubb for both of them together. Before he could maneuver into a useful position, the snow was crashing down around them as the avalanche rolled through the valley. In moments, the force of the snow slide was pushing the exoskeleton, then lifting it. Thurl widened his stance and straddled his father’s body to try and stabilize the movement. He put his hands over his head and pressed against the hard, boney segments, still held together with cartilage and sinew.

  Just as the vessel began to roll, Thurl heard Iassa slam into them, grasping with flailing arms at the remaining flesh of the deceased rinne, trying to pull herself out of the flood of crushing snow. The exoskeleton twisted and writhed before the crest of the avalanche, still rolling with the tide, creaking with strain but somehow staying atop the snowpack. Iassa’s arm reached into the opening and grabbed at the bone plate, searching for a handhold. Thurl could feel the warmth from her flesh and could smell the desperation on her skin.

  He grunted to echo back information, then grabbed her hand and guided her inside. The three of them were cramped together, pressed against the bone and each other.

  The exoskeleton was rolling now, tossing them top over tail, pressing snow into the opening, grinding over rocks and flattening tufts of amblewild. Thurl could hear the weight of the avalanche behind them. He listened to the pitch of the wind as it was squeezed out of the valley to make way for the snow. He could hear the echoes off the mountains as the shockwave reverberated through the air and triggered more avalanches from the surrounding mountains. He could hear swirling winds and the shift of the landscape triggering new currents of air, creating new peaks and valleys, whipping the winds into powerful new cycles, twisting them into terrifying vortexes. But, mostly, Thurl could feel Iassa’s breath on his cheek and her body pressed into his and intoxicating touch of her flesh on his own.

  His hatred for her when he thought she’d abandoned his father had been misplaced and misguided. Instead of abandoning him, she had found a much better protection for him than Thurl had achieved. Emotion swelled in Thurl; something he’d never felt before; something the Racroft didn’t have words to describe in their culture.

  The exoskeleton crashed into a boulder and buckled and bent. Thurl could feel the blood from his self-inflicted stomach wounds gushing down his legs; could hear the painful grunts of his father; could taste the screams of Iassa as she twisted with the shell. Then, the body of the rinne grubb pushed over the boulder and launched into the air, spinning and tumbling until it crashed back to the ground.

  The cartilage that held the boney plates together split and the exoskeleton began to pull apart. Thurl tried to reach his father, to lay on top of him, to protect him if the shell shattered around them and left them groping on the snow to confront the avalanche alone.

  Suddenly, they were hit from the side as another avalanche batted them in a different direction. The rinne grubb shell was upended, tossing Thurl and Iassa into one another, cracking and splitting and falling apart. This new avalanche pushed them over the edge of a ravine.

  They fell, screaming in their broken capsule, certain the impending impact would murder them all. The was the sound of something pounding against the shell, on the stones and ground around them. Before they hit the stone crowded bottom of the ravine, a vortex shrieked down around them and launched them back into the air, spinning them with sickening speed as it traveled through the chasm and vomited them up the side of a soft bluff.

  They slowed and crested the bluff, then rolled down an embankment, pushing through a thick copse of amblewild until their vessel finally came to a stop.

  For a long while, Thurl didn’t dare to move, to breathe, to shift his weight in case there was more to come.

  Finally, after what felt like hours, bruised and frightened, cramped and exhausted, Thurl and Iassa tentatively pushed the packed snow out of the gape left by the rinne grubb’s decapitation. Thurl stepped out first, cautiously, silently, and quietly grunted to get his bearings.

  Much of the upper Valley of Corpses was gone; filled in with the still settling snowpack. The lower valley, where the Racroft hunted, was devastated. The avalanche had pushed boulders and giant stones down the mountainside, which had rolled through the Valley of Corpses and rearranged the hunting grounds. The terrain had become almost unrecognizable. There were drifts building along new rock walls that hadn’t existed before. There were crags and dangerous gaps and places where the weakened crust had broken through to underground chasms and sinkholes. Steam from the warmth of these underground gaps rose into the air and turned into a thick, wet mist that coated Thurl’s follicles and blurred the air currents.

  Still, through all the confusion and wrecked landscape, Thurl could tell where the valley dipped, where the Racroft entered the Valley of Corpses for their hunts. He knew where he had to go to get Sohjos and Iassa to the safety of the resting cave. He’d lost his spear. It would be a long trek to the cave where he once slept while his father and the rest of the hunting party hunted.

  “He’s not breathing,” Iassa said behind him.

  She was kneeling in an opening of the cracked and broken rinne carcass, pulling at the piles of snow that covered Sohjos.

  Thurl crowded beside her and grabbed the edge of the sled, still wedged beneath his father. He tugged it out of the carcass, pushing Iassa aside as he did, so they could get full access to Sohjos’s prone and dying body.

  The Leader of the Hunt wasn’t breathing, but his body was still producing heat. There was warmth coming from his hands and the top of his head. Thurl pressed his large hand against Sohjos’s chest to feel for the heartbeat. It was still there, pounding with panicked fervor. He was alive; just not breathing.

  “Something is blocking his throat,” Thurl shouted, and pried open Sohjos’s mouth. His own fingers were too large to get to the back of his father’s throat; his fist too large to fit into the mouth. Without thinking, Thurl grabbed Iassa by the wrist and plunged her hand into his father’s mouth.

  “There’s something in his throat,” Thurl said. “I can’t reach it. You have to get it out.”

  Iassa reached in, while Thurl clicked and grunted frantically.

  “It’s just water,” Iassa shouted. “He’s drowning.”

  Before Iassa pulled her hand back
out of Sohjos’s mouth, Thurl was flipping over his body, letting the melted snow pour out of his father’s throat. He gave his father a few hard thumps on the back, trying to push the water out.

  Sohjos wretched and flushed a stream of slush from his lungs. He pressed his fists to the ground, gasping, letting his head roll forward as more fluid came up; then something else; some long, scaly serpentine thing that hit the snow and tried to slither away.

  Suddenly, Thurl remembered the creature he’d encountered in the tunnels; the thing that tried to give birth in his stomach; his own experience vomiting up its young.

  Thurl grabbed his father around the waist and pulled, shoving Sohjos’s stomach empty. More slithering beasts shot from the great warrior’s mouth; squirmed out his nostrils; fought to get back inside where the warmth of their carrier could protect them from the freeze of the outside air.

  Thurl lost count of the vile worms. They littered the ground, wet and dying and freezing where they lay. Thurl continued pumping his father’s stomach until Sohjos was retching air and gasping for breath.

  Finally, Thurl let go, and Sohjos dropped to his side, panting and delirious, but alive.

  Thurl grabbed the dying monsters and crushed each one of their heads in his fists, throwing their frozen carcasses with a triumphant scream with each one he killed.

  “Do you see how strong he is?” Thurl shouted to the sky. “He is the Leader of the Hunt! He is a Leader of the Racroft! He is a mighty warrior! And he is my Father!”

  Thurl screamed and stomped the ground and shook his victorious fists to the void above. Finally, exhausted, he fell into the snow and lay next to his father, trying to catch his breath.

  “We should get him back inside the rinne skin for protection,” Iassa said.

  “Too hard to move,” said Thurl. “These lands are our hunting grounds. There is a cave where the mountains meet that we use for resting. There are supplies and food and chunacat cloaks inside. We need to get him there before we rest.”

  Without waiting for argument or rebuttal, Thurl pulled his battered shield out of the carcass and laid it on the ground next to Sohjos. He maneuvered his father onto the shield sled, and twisted the ropes back around his shoulders. He clicked loudly in several directions, found the place where the mountains met, and began walking, dragging his father behind him.

  After a few minutes, he could hear Iassa trudging behind him. They left the front edge of the new-fallen avalanche behind, working their way toward the familiar cave and, soon, the Racroft home.

  CHAPTER twenty-six

  “The sky fires are amazing.”

  Iassa was sitting against a giant boulder. A small pile of fire was shifting before her. She had her head turned up, facing the void.

  “There’s nothing up there,” Thurl said “It’s just the void.”

  “No,” Iassa answered. “There is so much up there; more than you could ever imagine; more than I’ll ever get the Meson to believe.”

  They’d found a high boulder Thurl could climb. He was standing atop it, clicking and popping, trying to get echoes that made sense; that he recognized. They were all coming back a disorienting mess.

  He didn’t know the Valley of Corpses well, but there were landmarks he knew from Sohjos’s stories. There were places and landscapes he expected to hear, based on the tales and his few meager experiences. All those landmarks were gone. The avalanche and vortex winds had destroyed them all. The valley was unknown territory, and Thurl was beginning to lose hope.

  The winds still whipped through new ravines and chasms, blowing between boulders that had once been crests of mountains. Where Thurl and Iassa landed, they were protected some geologic form.

  “Any luck finding your cave?” Iassa asked.

  Thurl had been trying to find the break in the mountains where the Racroft entered the valley, but the valley was so immense, and the storms so intense, that his echoes were coming back with no information, or simply getting lost in the void.

  “No,” he said. “Nothing is right. The whole valley has changed.”

  “What are you looking for?” Iassa asked.

  Thurl didn’t answer. He didn’t know what ‘looking’ meant.

  “I can see the whole world in silhouette,” Iassa said. “I can see the shapes of the walls all around us, but there is no ceiling. Just millions of tiny fires.”

  “The walls are mountains,” Thurl said. Then: “Do you see a gap in the walls?; a place where the wall is lower?; low enough for us to pass through?”

  He could hear Iassa below him. She stood and moved her head around. Then she climbed onto the boulder with Thurl and turned slowly in a circle.

  “There,” she said, and raised her arm. “The fires look like they are falling into a crevice. The darkness of the walls disappears there.”

  “Turn me to it,” Thurl said.

  She grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him. He clicked and popped, but couldn’t get any echoes.

  “You’ll have to lead the way,” Thurl said. “We need to go in that direction until I can feel the gap.”

  Before they could leave, Iassa insisted she wrap Thurl’s wounds. He still had open, bloody gashes on his stomach from when he’d cut himself trying to detach the chantimer vine. She pressed it until she was certain the bleeding had stopped. Then she slathered it with some foul smelling paste she made with uanna sap and some strange root she pulled out of her pack of supplies. Then she wrapped the whole thing in strips of pocasta pelt.

  Iassa walked in front, brandishing her fire stick and heading toward the spot where she said the walls were lowest. Thurl expected this would be where the mountain gap sent back no echoes. As they trudged through the deep snow, he wondered if ‘see’ was just a silent way of receiving echoes and feeling air currents.

  They walked for several hours. Iassa struggled in the snow, pulling her chunacat cloak around her, but still suffering from the cold. Thurl didn’t mind the slow pace. He was having trouble pulling Sohjos on the sled behind him. His stomach hurt; his shoulders ached and bled; he was sore and tired and missed his home; his hammock; his brothers and sisters; his mother.

  The avalanche had changed the terrain of the Valley of Corpses; was still changing it as the winds whipped in different directions; as new boulders toppled and fell on one another; as unstable ground quaked from below and shifted and cracked to make new, menacing ravines. Thurl expected to encounter predators and prey, but there seemed to be nothing alive but themselves in the valley. Either everything else had died in the violence, or was cowering in their dens and nests, waiting for less dangerous conditions.

  Finally, Thurl clicked to check Iassa’s location and the echoes of the gap returned to him.

  “I know where we are,” he said, and ran to catch up to Iassa.

  Quickly, Thurl navigated a path that took them to the Racroft’s hunting cave. They were much closer than he expected. The avalanche and vortex had thrown them to the opposite side of the valley, closest to the cave. It only took a few hours of hiking before he was ushering Iassa inside the Racroft resting cave.

  Once safely inside, Thurl checked his father’s temperature. Sohjos seemed to be breathing more regularly. His fever had broken and he was, finally, cold to the touch. Thurl helped him onto a bed of fegion fur and lightly draped a thin pelt over his legs. There was food in the sheltered cave: kanateed seeds and mashed bonroot and the chewy deilla stalks. There were no warming rocks that were still warm, but Iassa made fire in a circle of gathered stones and it warmed the cave better than the freshest pile of warming rocks.

  Thurl wrapped himself in a chunacat cloak and lay next to his father. He was exhausted. He wanted to weep in grief for his misfortunes, and in relief for reaching the shelter cave, and in anger for all that had happened since he last left this safe refuge; everything from the storm to the narvai-ub to his adventures underground to the avalanche. It all seemed unbelievable; like a vast, unimaginable nightmare.

  “Are we close to
your village?” Iassa was asking.

  Thurl wanted to answer, but before he could think, he was asleep again.

  CHAPTER twenty-seven

  Thurl could hear the wind cutting past the cave mouth. He was waking slowly; could feel the warmth coming from where his father lay just off to his right; could hear him breathing in a steady, measured rhythm. He wanted to roll over and check on him, but there was a leg over his legs and an arm across his chest. The air smelled like frost and sweat and something sweet; something that made Thurl’s heart race.

  Iassa had wrapped her limbs around Thurl’s body for warmth or protection or affection. The fine hairs on his flesh reached out to feel her soft skin and embrace her where they touched.

  She was asleep. Thurl lifted his right arm and hovered his thick hand over her face, letting his follicles trace her features and play in the gentle breeze of her breath. His left arm was raised over his head, resting against a block of emergency supplies. Slowly, he worked it behind her head and beneath her shoulders until he was holding her. She mumbled something in her sleep and held him tighter.

  He guessed she was holding him for warmth. She was accustomed to the temperatures below the surface, where the heat from the center of the planet was more intense and the biting wind didn’t graze off the seas and chill the landscape. Her hide was thinner and more prone to frost. He could feel the pucker of her flesh beneath the chunacat cloak where the cold was reaching her uninsulated flesh. She didn’t seem to have the varying layers of whiskers and follicles to feel the shifting air currents or to protect her from the frost. Her skin was soft and smooth and unlike anything Thurl had felt before.

  He was feeling urges to mate; something he was forbidden to do with anyone but Oswyn, his chosen mate; the future mother of his children. He wondered if it was mating season already. He’d been gone for so long, he didn’t even know the season. He could have been gone for days, or weeks, or months. Without the rise and fall of the sea tides, Thurl hadn’t known when it was day or night. He felt like he’d been gone a lifetime. He felt like he was coming back a different person completely.