Siege of Stars: Book One of The Sigil Trilogy

by Henry Gee

  Chapter 18. Islander

   

  Tethys Ocean, Earth, c. 55,680,000 years ago

   

  Still is that fur as soft as when the lists

  In youth thou enter’dst on glass-bottled wall.

  John Keats—To Mrs Reynolds’ Cat

   

  Her voice came to him shrilly, over the thrash of surf and the noise they were both making.

  “Get that one... no, that one, there, Roland, heading up the beach!”

  Ruxhana hefted his pine-branch club and sloshed through the waist-high waves to where the creature was trying to scramble ashore. Ambulocetes were slow movers on land, even on a gently shelving beach like this, so this youngster—barely two meters long—had no idea that it was waddling into a trap. Ruxhana and Xalomé had played their strategy well, letting the pod of amphibious whales shamble shorewards before springing off the rocks, trapping them in the lagoon that had been their home for the past ten days.

  The aim was to drive two or three small ones ashore before clubbing them to death. Spilling blood in the water would have been risky—they did not want to add sharks to an already dangerous mix. Ruxhana remembered the scarier tales of Tethyan Thunder of his youth, in which the sea-dragon hunters had had to pull their quarries onto boats or ashore before the carcasses attracted these eternal oceanic predators. There was one monster in particular—the Tethyan carcharodon—that could reputedly smell blood from ten kilometers off, and could swallow a whole boat with all its crew in a single bite.

  Some of the older ambulocetes sensed trouble, dove to the bottom and surged back the way they had come, towards the open sea. This was dangerous for the assailants, who had to keep looking down in case four meters of fast-moving, muscle-bound, submarine menace bowled them over in the chest-high water and dragged them under. And although ambulocetes were peaceable creatures, for the most part, they were formidable if cornered, with sharp claws on their forelegs and long, well-stocked jaws wielded with far greater intelligence than any shark.

  Xalomé was further out in the lagoon than he was, and Ruxhana worried more than once when the air was rent with her screams and she disappeared from view. But she always came up again, defiant, laughing. Her hair flowed in the breeze; her body, lithe and brown; her pink-and-yellow sarong worn like a breech-clout, knotted securely around her middle. And she always kept her hat on.

  Ruxhana’s target was flopping about in barely an inch of surf when he caught up with it. Panting, legs splayed, it heaved itself onto the beach. A beady eye broadcast a message of supplication as Ruxhana brought his club down heavily on the creature's skull. He’d just hauled the carcass above the strand line when he heard Xalomé scream again. He turned, and saw, gaining on her, in the lagoon, a gray triangular fin at least two meters high, and an immense shadow in the water. Ruxhana could do little but watch. Xalomé flew up the beach, a bright, tiny figure before her pursuer, falling once in the waves in its shadow, picking herself up again, and racing through the wavelets, foam sparking from her feet like diamond shrapnel.

  She had just made it to the trees above the beach when the shape broke the surface just inches from the shoreline, a great gray cylinder, slashed with pink gill-slits, each one large enough to swallow a man—but before it all, a chasm, thrice man-high, fringed with wickedly serrated, triangular teeth, each the size of a tombstone. Realizing at last that it was out of its element, the giant shark scythed, half in the air, splashing back into the lagoon and disappearing in pursuit of easier prey.

  Ruxhana felt nerves reconnect in his legs and ran to her. She was standing, bent double, hands on knees, her breath shot with the wrack of terror and relief, sarong blotched with ugly crimson stains. A line of blood ran down the inside of one thigh and pooled on the ground. She stood up, pulled the hair from her face, and looked at him with her hard green eyes.

  “Baryonic matter. Fucking baryonic matter.” Then she collapsed into his arms.

  The moon rose above the beach. Ruxhana turned the whalemeat steaks frying on the hot rocks before him. “That smells good,” she said. She was huddled up, knees beneath her chin, wrapped in a quilt from the linen store aboard Shelly’s Shagpad, moored just offshore. Ruxhana felt his arms and legs—his whole body, in fact—flood with relief. It had been the first thing she’d said since she’d swooned almost thirty hours earlier. The memories—until then, squashed by pragmatic, military expediency—were now afforded the luxury of return.

  “Would Madame care to dress for dinner?”

  He’d laid her on the ground in the shade of a palm, he remembered, and then he’d stood up in the dappled shadow and queried his AI core on an emergency sideband.

  Wherever the fuck you are, you stupid machine, he yelled—or qubits to that effect—get your quantum ass over here, now. Please.

  I think I’ve worked it out now, was all it said. Ruxhana could have hugged it.

  Excellent, he replied. Welcome back. Nice break?

  Yes. Most refreshing. Also necessary.

  Good, good. Well, what we have here is a damsel-in-distress situation. Please get in touch with Shelly’s Shagpad and have them send over some medical supplies, immediately. Blankets, clothes. Some rum, too, would be nice. And—if they can spare it—some salt, herbs, and a few other things. Ruxhana squirted a shopping list at his newly refreshed AI core.

  “I’m sorry, Ruxie. Really, I am. I’m not very good at this. Still learning.” She pushed away her plate and looked across the table at him, the tapeta in her eyes reflecting the crystal, the candles, the silver candelabra and cutlery, and the moonlight on the sea. There was no sound but for the surf and a light breeze in the palm branches high above their heads. The air was cooler, now. Cool enough for Ruxhana to adjust the collar of his dress shirt without feeling uncomfortably sweaty. His waistband, though—well, he felt that they hadn’t had such a meal in ages. Over-full as he was, he thought her hair in the candlelight looked lovely, and said so.

  “Oh, you—you silly man,” she said, sweeping it out of her face with both hands and trying, yet again, to secure it at the back. He suspected that it was the wine talking, but he couldn’t help but notice the contrast of her straying strands of hair with the smoothness of her upper arms, and, as she moved, the play of her shoulders, collar-bone and the roots of her primary breasts beneath the black cocktail dress she’d chosen.

  “It’s just that I feel so embarrassed after yesterday.”

  “Embarrassed? Not many have been known to outrun a Tethyan carcharodon. I think you can be excused a few symptoms of shock.”

  “Yes, I know. But it shouldn’t have happened. It was all my fault. Mine. I know perfectly well about the sharks in these waters—I’ve done my homework! But I forgot something else just as important. About these bodies. About this body. You know I’d been feeling a bit gripey for a couple of days?”

  Ruxhana nodded, but said nothing. He remembered some small episodes of mulish taciturnity on her part but had chosen to ignore them, and had gone fishing on the other side of the lagoon.

  “It turned out that I was menstruating. Can you believe it? And it started, like a flood, while we were out there in the lagoon. Shark-bait, right where I stood. Honestly, I try so hard, but I just can’t seem to be everywhere at once.”

  Ruxhana smiled at the perceived helplessness of his dinner companion, who was quite capable of traveling across the Universe as easily as blinking.

  “What?” she asked, catching his amused expression.

  “Oh, just something you said. Why did you call me ‘Roland’?”

  Her eyes widened. “I did?”

  “Yes.”

  Her face changed.

  When the skiff from Shelly’s Shagpad had first made landfall on the island, Ruxhana had splashed ashore, laughing, accompanied by two female droids, a crate of fine Malabar rum, and three glasses.

  The hangover the next day had been salutary. He dismissed his companions and asked instead for a jerrycan of fres
h water, a machete and a few other simple tools, some fishing gear, and a tent. These articles were promptly sent over in the skiff, which skated back to the mothership as soon as it had been unloaded. Ruxhana thought he detected a note of reproach in its alacrity.

  By the evening of the third day ashore he’d created a raised palm-log platform with a commanding view of the beach, upon which he erected a pergola of poles with a palm-thatch roof, and detachable screen walls made from palm leaves woven together. Split logs served for chairs, and a more elaborate log-frame strung with vines made a fairly comfortable bed. The lagoon boiled with fish that leaped into his net without his having to make much effort at all. Only fresh water looked likely to be a problem, but being the tropics, it rained every day—a ten-minute sheeting downpour in the middle of the afternoon—and Ruxhana was able to use hollowed gourds and shells to collect enough for his modest needs.

  To be sure, he could always have asked for the Shagpad to have sent over fresh water or indeed anything else he wanted; but with the two voluptuaries of his first night sent packing and his AI still in an offline sulk, he’d have had to have yelled very hard, or swum for it. Therefore he decided to play the noble savage for a while.

  It was on the evening of the fourth day ashore that Ruxhana found himself on his platform, a glass of rum in hand, a brace of bass grilling nicely in the fire-pit on the beach below, looking out at the westering Sun, and wondering. This ought to be paradise. Instead his mind was full of foreboding. Is this it? The end? Stasis? What was all that about, anyway, that business with Xalomé? That elaborate gender-bending subterfuge? Just to drop him here as a fugitive on a desert island? It made no sense. And just who exactly was Xalomé, anyway?

  She’d told him that she was an exotic of a kind that neither he nor anyone else in the Imperium had ever encountered, something qualitatively different from anyone or anything he had known. It seemed to him that she wielded unimaginable power with the casual carelessness of a teenager. This, combined with what he thought was some kind of insecurity, made for a potentially explosive mixture.

  And then there were those dark hints that his AI core had dropped before it disappeared up its own address register, about ‘ongoing transformations’.

  Finally, there was this ‘job’ or ‘task’ that she wanted him to do. But despite his best efforts, he was never able to get anything specific out of her about what this might entail.

  In the end Ruxhana consoled himself with facts: as there was no way he could answer any of these questions, the only decisions he could make were small ones. In which case, his new life was as idyllic as he could want.

  He was thinking about a third glass of rum when he saw a speck in the lagoon to the northward, a fleck of white foam in the purpling sea. The speck got larger as he watched. The wind was beginning to freshen. He wondered whether he should put his clothes back on.

  The speck got closer and came ashore. He decided against the clothes but in favor of more rum.

  The speck was a figure. By the time it reached him, the sky was fully dark and the moon had risen behind the trees, casting long fingered shadows across the beach. The figure resolved into that of a woman in a sarong, loosely tied, its ends snapping like flags in the breeze. She climbed onto Ruxhana’s platform, and bent down to whisper in his ear. Ruxhana felt the sea-tang of warm flesh close to his.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Xalomé said. “Have I missed anything?”

  None of Ruxhana’s questions were answered in the days that followed, up to and including the ambulocete drive and shark-attack incident. Whenever he tried to ask her anything that might have been construed as serious, she would usually make some salacious suggestion and run away, as if he should give chase. Like they were teenage kits, discovering sex for the first time. Her lovemaking was passionate and frequent, but he detected in its fervor something more than the freshness of discovery. A desperation, perhaps, that it would all soon be over; and a way of filling the days and nights that would put off some nevertheless inevitable day of reckoning for as long as possible.

  Xalomé was clearly trying and failing to frame some stupendous plan using the pitiful tools of mere words. Trying to articulate, using the crudity of communication that relies on the analog, acoustic transmission of modulated air packets, themes and concepts too subtle to be shoe-horned into such a mode without losing vital quanta of meaning. Ruxhana decided that the only thing he could do was to let her work it out in her own time, in her own way. And in the meantime, he reasoned (being the pragmatic soul he was) he was a castaway in paradise with a girl whose charm was matched by her libido. In such a situation it would be churlish to complain.

  Xalomé.

  Working things out.

  One night, about five days after her arrival, Ruxhana woke up—or dreamed he had woken up—with the girl next to him. The Moon was bright, high in the west. Ruxhana sat up, trying to chase down a sense of foreboding he couldn’t quite frame for all that the answer was important, and looked down at her body, splayed in the blue light.

  It was Xalomé—his Xalomé—but then again, it wasn’t. Her face was the same, asleep, her long lashes guarding closed eyes; as was her long hair, spread awry in long strands, and the lean frame of her body. But she looked like she’d been flayed. Her skin wasn’t dark, but pale. It was smooth, almost all over, the soft fuzz over her shoulders and hips reduced to a very thin haze. The pungent mass of dark fur that spread between her hipbones and which clothed most of her body between navel and crotch was gone, revealing a gentle swell of bare lower abdomen and a small triangle of meager curls—almost prissily neat, he thought—in the angle of her groin itself. The hair was so sparse that he could see her external genitalia—but as a chaste, vertical slit, far from the usual extravagance of her pubic protruberances.

  Odder still was her torso.

  For a brief moment he wondered why he could see the lower margins of her ribcage, outlined like a corpse, until he realized that nearly all her breasts had vanished. The primaries were there, perhaps slightly fuller than he remembered. But all eight secondaries had gone, nipples and all, as if they had never been, explaining why he could see her ribcage and why she looked so shorn.

  Ruxhana was uncertain how to react to this apparition. Horror and fascination were evenly matched within him, but something about the mutilated form before him made him stir, and with redoubled horror he looked down at his prong—erect, but smooth as an earthworm, without any of the ridges, blades and serrations which he knew graced his own. He sat there, helpless, when the not-quite-Xalomé-thing stirred, sat up next to him, her breasts swinging freely before her in a way he couldn’t quite understand, given the absence of their companions. She swished the hair from her face, and spoke.

  “You should be asleep, you silly old thing!”

  And then she kissed him, no more than an affectionate peck, and the world changed again. Disoriented, he found himself lying down again but awake in the moonlight. This time he knew he really was awake, because the naked girl beside him was complete in all her furred, multi-mammate loveliness. He lay back and closed his eyes again, but his relaxation was not entirely complete, hindered by the memory of the dream-Xalomé as she spoke to him.

  The memory of her eyes. Eyes that did not have their customarily all-over green irises and almond-shaped, slit-like pupils. Eyes instead with brown irises, almost black and as round as moons, with penetrating, round pupils, and in bone-white sclera as plain as death. When morning came he decided to keep this nighttime adventure to himself.

  Xalomé’s reticence continued, even after the shark-attack episode, when she promised that answers to his questions would soon be forthcoming. Her sex-play became more edgy, more vigorous—more dangerous. As if she was daring him to pursue her to the edges of the reef; across the razored rocks; into sheer-sided sinkholes in the coralline limestone.

  She seemed especially skittish one morning about a week after the ambulocete barbecue. They had spent a leisurely breakf
ast of fruit (collected themselves) and fresh coffee and croissants (supplied by Shelly’s Shagpad), exchanging hardly a word. When Ruxhana tried to say anything at all, she’d giggle, slyly, like a kit intent on some naughtiness. On a sudden she pushed away her plate and fixed him with a glare of mischief.

  “Come and get it!” And then she ran off, northwards, down the beach, hair and bright sarong streaming.

  Ruxhana was beginning to tire of this game, and had meant to stay put, calling her bluff, in the hope that she might wander back, and have their serious discussion: now delayed long enough. At any rate, he decided to finish his second cup of coffee.

  But Xalomé did not return, and the bitter savor of his coffee turned to worry. Even paradise has its dangers—the shark attack had been proof enough of that. Sighing, he hauled himself from his chair and walked off in the direction Xalomé had taken, calling her name as he went.

  For two or three hundred meters there came no answer, but as he walked, Ruxhana noticed that the wind was freshening. Sand-devils blew along the shore, and he’d had to stop and brush grit from his eyes. White horses frothed in the lagoon to his left. To his right, the tops of the palm trees, some of them fifteen meters tall, were starting to swing and thrash. He heard a distant yell and realized with horror that it had come from above. Xalomé had climbed one of these swaying monsters and was now perched, triumphant, in the waving crown. The tree she had chosen stood alone, exposed, surrounded by a glade of bare trunks, standing like sharp spikes, marks of an earlier lightning strike and wildfire.

  He looked up and bellowed in return. “Xalomé, come down! Come down now!”

  “Not a chance!” came her reply, guttural, defiant.

  “It’s dangerous!”

  “Really? So come and save me, then!”

  There was no choice but to climb. The ridged trunk of the palm tree presented fairly easy purchase, but the wood was hard and sharp on his bare hands and feet, and he often had to stop and hold on tight when the tree was caught in a strong gust. These pauses became more frequent the further he climbed, his fatigue increasing as the trunk thinned and became more whip-like in the deepening gale. The wind was now edged with a stinging rain that made it hard for him to see. He was exhausted, wretched in the chill grayness, wondering if he’d ever get to the crown—and if he did, what then? Not a moment too soon, his head met the edges of palm leaves, and a hand rested over his, inviting, grasping.

  Xalomé sat at the top of the crown, hunkered down in a kind of cup-shaped nest, relatively sheltered from the wind, but which lurched alarmingly. She pulled him up and he pitched next to her with a jolt. Before he had a chance even to catch his breath, to nurse the bruises and cuts on his aching hands and feet, she was at him, arms around him, hair surrounding him like a cowl, lips on his, like these were the final kisses on Earth. Finally, she pulled away and looked at him as if for the very first time.

  “Oh, Ruxie, I’m so sorry...”

  “Sorry? For what?”

  “For this.” And she pushed him out of the tree.