As Simple As Hunger

by D Des Anges

  He regretted already boarding one of the older, engineless ships that caught the wind instead of chugging remorselessly through the waves with their coal boilers grumbling, but the sailing ships’ crews had less call to explore the bowels of their craft, and this was the only vessel bound from Aberdeen to the Frankish coast this month.

  And for a moment, braced against the stern of the ship with his tail pressed into the ceiling timbers for greater stability, his feet digging into both wall and floor, and his claws gripping the window frame all conspiring only to make him even more seasick, El Alacrán wondered why the bloody fuck he’d thought it would be a better idea to come down from Aberdeen by sea than by land. Maybe it was quicker by sea. Maybe it was less dangerous, stretched out in an unused section of an underfilled ship, and less taxing to lie up than to run the length of a country, moving only at night. Maybe.

  But if he’d scurried, scrambled, and slipped through the shadows, Folded himself passable at towns’-edge and clung to the roof of trains at the risk of finding himself scraped off at the first tunnel he came to, he at least wouldn’t feel so sickly and pathetic now.

  Above El Alacrán, men’s footsteps reverberated through the timbers, each footfall a hammer. When they fell in the right rhythm they sounded like John’s heartbeat: one loud, one faint, a pause, one loud, one faint. Though they never seemed to notice it, so much of what humans did kept pace with the rhythm of their hearts.

  El Alacrán pressed his chitin closer to the window, grappled with his seasickness, and watched Aberdeen shrink into the distance. John would be alright, he thought, unsure if his uneasiness was unaddressed suspicion or just the motion of the ship acting upon his ichor. John was safe: El Alacrán had taught him as many of his tricks as could be employed by the warm-blooded, by the two-armed and floor-bound. He would be careful, sweep away the signs as shown, and escape the watchful eyes of the Albion Amtspersons as El Alacrán did, as he had himself before.

  He would be alright, El Alacrán’s fragile little pale human in his soft body with his soft voice. He would be alright.

  The ship pitched at the roll of a larger-than-usual wave, and El Alacrán only just hung onto a squeak of alarm and miserable-sickness by the limit of his willpower. John would say ‘skin of his teeth’, which made no sense at all, teeth had no skin, and after a careful examination of John’s for confirmation of this fact El Alacrán had put it to him that perhaps the Albionmen meant skim of his teeth, a light bite, and John had laughed and told him not to be a pedant, and –

  Clattering feet across the deck above pulled El Alacrán swiftly from his memories and through sharp self-admonishment: pay attention, you fool, we’re not dry yet. He might let himself drift through the past on land, where he could outpace any sudden discoverer (‘less they came on horseback), but at sea it was suicide to let down his guard.

  He might Fold himself man-shaped, if they came, but at such short notice the gelatinous ooze would not set and he would horrify them and leave himself vulnerable, crippled by his own twisted crush into such a tight shape; should it set he would still have to explain the presence of a naked strange man stowing aboard their ship: they would toss him overboard and that would be the watery end of El Alacrán. There was no mercy for male stowaways, and El Alacrán had little faith that his approximation of a woman would fool them at the closeness of encounter sailors would doubtless require as the cost of ‘safe’ passage.

  No, his only solution if discovered, as it had ever been, was to slaughter all of them as they came for him.

  El Alacrán repositioned his hindmost legs and the tip of his tail, and felt for the direction of their travel. Even if El Miriápodo had not said, a low profile, kill as few as possible; even if John did not reek of disapproval at the old echoes of past executions (even those in the pursuit of his own survival), El Alacrán would have little taste left for the murder of men. They were mad and dangerous and greedy, to be sure, but they also bore better qualities, and barely lived seventy years a piece in which to exercise them.

  On the whole El Alacrán would be content to let them live out their short spans, intent on murdering each other.

  These sailors, however, seemed to have a determined love of death.

  Their heavy, sea-booted feet and rolling step brought them toward the ladder he had swarmed the hour before, and their intention seemed to be to make use of the unused stern room in which he perched.

  El Alacrán twisted about to follow the motion of their legs. It was all too soon out of harbour: if he was forced to impale them close to the end of the voyage the ship might be relied upon to drift near shore, and the little boats would bring it in. It would be a monstrous, troublesome endeavour involving scores of deaths by the time he escaped into the Frankish woods, to be sure, but it was possible. This was not: there could be no certain drift toward any shore but that which he had left, and most like the ship would just lose itself on the ocean and he would starve to death.

  The sailors came still, and as they moved to the hatch he could hear their voices, raised in some joke or taunt. They spoke Frankish, not Albiontongue, and their talk was all of the barren pickings of Aberdeen and the ugliness of its women, the foulness of its food, the meanness of its paymasters. They made mocking imitation of the tongue and accents, barely out of harbour, and scoffed at the bovine populace, all huddled about their Wireless receivers, laughing like facile fools at a man who made bird sounds. Albionmen and their birds, the Frankish sailors said, lifting the hatch cover away, Albionmen and their stupid birds.

  There were among the excess lying beneath the rafters, a pair of single-piece canoes, hollowed out from some great oak; it was a practice at which the Albionmen had far outstripped the Frankish, and the import of such goods was common. They hung suspended from the ceiling rafters as they would float in the rivers later, packed down with bottles of herb spirits and salt boar, and whelks already on the turn. One (El Alacrán tasted its scent) was at least half-way full of oiled seal hides.

  Both were too mean for a scorpion, and he had disregarded them when he came aboard as unworthy hiding places, but with the Franks taking to the ladder in the next room he knew desperation would make the inventor of him. He scaled the wall and crushed his too-big body atop the sealskins.

  With the pitching of the ship the process became even more uncomfortable.

  El Alacrán expelled air from between the cracks in his chitin and Folded inward his body, Folded inward his legs, Folded, and Folded inward his tail, and Folded and Folded. The creaks and groans of chitin under punishing pressure seemed loud as hammer blows ringing on plate metal, but there was little to be done about them: he Folded, and he Folded, and his body grew tighter and too tight, and the grotesque inversions that made up a false model of a man’s figure began to form, and he Folded.

  One Frankish sailor made a quip about the stench of Albionmen and the other laughed uproariously and said, “Poo, poo,” with great relish.

  El Alacrán laid in the body of a half-formed man, a man like a wax figure melted by flame, and adjusted to the new ingress of air into his body. For Folded, like a man, he breathed through one narrow aperture and felt he was suffocating to death.

  The oiled sealskins lay about him, in the belly of the hanging canoe, but he felt too weak and too stiff to pull them over him.

  Though it was scarce needed now, the gelatinous ooze (a borrowed symbiote) began to seep from his Folded joints. It sloughed outward over his exposed surfaces and encased him. The feeling of suffocation grew more overpowering.

  One Frankish sailor made a disparaging comment about Albion-of-the-Faeroes, where men lived on whale meat and women looked like men, and the other corrected him with a laugh and swore the women looked like whales, and both set off laughing again.

  El Alacrán tried his best to ignore the belief that he would soon suffocate, and to lie as still now as he would lie in his own comfortable form.

  You are scorpion, he told himself, as the canoe swayed with the r
ocking of the ship and combined with the asphyxia made him wish momentarily for death, you are cousin to the spiders, though they’ll never admit it. You could wait a thousand days in the burning desert without flinching. It’s just for an hour or two. You’re not dying. Breathe.

  The Franks helped themselves to something which smelled like sweet biscuit (it was hard to scent things properly, Folded inward and drenched in the scent of dead seals). They toasted sarcastically the generosity of their late hosts, and with more sincerity the bounty of the Frankish Empire, shrunken though it was.

  The Franks fell about swapping stories of the mad Prussians and their mad internal wars: garbled stories which El Alacrán had the first hand of, and which were both more and less crazed than the sailors believe. They went about chewing merrily on their stolen repast and giggling to each other at how the Prussian dialect had mangled Frankish into something so bizarre in but a pair of short centuries.

  The canoe rocked and El Alacrán was grateful, at least, that in this form he could hardly squeak his discomfort. It was all but impossible to hiss the obscenities the sickness brought to mind. This was a form for a different speech.

  He lay still as a fallen stone among the sealskins, and thought, John will be alright. He will listen to the absurd man on the Wireless whistling his bird chirps, and he will be alright, and when I come again he will welcome me, and I will be alright too.

  Chapter 7

  It was Hajar al Fihri’s ordinary habit to call on Benjon at least the day after his visits to Edinburgh, to dissect the progress of his debates with the various delusionists they put him against on the Wireless and, in part, to defuse whatever vile temper they’d left him in. Benjon wound himself up like the spring of a clockwork toy, and without somewhere to point all the force he fed with his unceasing coffee consumption, he was apt to explode.

  She had seen the scars from his public flogging only once – he had pulled off his shirt and shown her, to make a point – but they stuck in her memory as if he had scarred them there, as they had been scarred into him. Benjon’s ire, undirected, led him to injury and danger.

  This morning, dawning cold but clear for once, there was no aftermath of debate. Benjon’s pilgrimage to the city of Wireless and Press had been a matter for a presumed scolding from Greytooth and his lackeys, not a broadcast discussion.

  Dressing in her bedroom to the sound of the house birds abusing her with cheerful peeps, Hajar was uncertain if this would wind him up more or less than trying to reason with the kind of mind that thought, that honestly thought, the future was to be read in the trails of snails upon damp bread.

  She chose her scarf from the three her mother had left for her. They were all shades of red, a colour she hated, but there was doubtless some meaning in it. Hajar did not ask, for she knew if it was some significance she had forgotten Hana would be disappointed: you remember nothing that matters and yet you know every idiotic bird sound and joke the Wireless sweeps out to sedate these people.

  Of course, he had also been travelling to examine Hugo Waldren, which seemed dreamlike in its serendipity. Supposing the man had actually agreed? Supposing he was willing to tweak, if only a little, the direction of his satires and the force of his opprobrium? Surely Hugo Waldren was entrenched enough now that if he mocked the Yorkists as Benjon had, he would be tolerated rather than flogged.

  You are an over-optimistic imbecile with unrealistic goals, Hana’s voice whispered inside her head, you will unsettle the alliances we have and you will throw off what hopes we have of freeing your cousins. Concentrate on your researches.

  She had not, after this scolding, tried to explain that with a clearer field of understanding and greater subscription to Non-Occult Method, the researches she was to concentrate on would be a great deal more fruitful. Hana did not see the stifling net of Methods competing to hold the attention and money of Albion, only the ways in which they might be twisted.

  Hajar threw some seed to the finches – one, a little smaller than the others, was showing bald patches and missing feathers, and it was almost certain the poor little bugger would be dead by the end of the week – and pulled on her thick boots. Her mother preferred her to wear slippers, as befitted a woman of her standing both in Albion and in the long-dead Emirate, but Hana was visiting their neighbours and Hajar, thank you, liked her toes dry and warm if she was to stand on them all bloody day.

  She made straight for the School of Non-Occult Sciences; if Benjon had any news to impart of Hugo Waldren’s assent, dissent, or overall condition he would meet her there anyhurr. If she called on him he would no doubt tell her, but his house smelled of death and fly shit and she would rather not.

  There was no likelihood of Benjon making his way to the modest stacks of flats in which the great Princess (Hajar snorted internally at the title her mother still insisted was hers, for it sounded more like a derisory cry than a marker of nobility) dwelt with her preoccupied mother. It was out of his way – for Benjon made the same way every day, come hail or shine or errand boys – and he was, as he confessed, scared rigid of Hana.

  Hajar wrapped herself deeper in her coat, tucking her headscarf into the stiff woollen collar, and huffed a cloud of breath as she stepped onto the canal path. It was slippery and neglected, wet with fallen leaves and churned mud, and there were drownings here every week as unfortunates strayed into the path of the gangs at night; but in the mornings, the canal boats moved along it like silent shadows.

  At the door to the School of Non-Occult Sciences, Klonos was on duty. Klonos, Hajar recalled, was oddly-named because somewhere in his ancestry a woman had come to Albion-of-the-Britons from the Romish Lands, and married his father: a sailor, an explorer, a man of many words but few means, Gooddaughter al-Fihri, few enough means. She had stood patient and listened to his story, as Hana had always said she must, but if there was use in it she failed to see it, and now he thought she liked him.(YES)

  “Morning, Gooddaughter al-Fihri,” Klonos said pleasantly, moving aside for her. “Are you well? Are you hale?”

  He asked the same thing every single bloody morning she saw him on the door.

  “Well and hale, Goodman Klonos,” Hajar said with a stiff smile borrowed from her mother’s warehouse of the same, “Has Gooddoctor Silverstein come in yet this morning?”

  “When’s that grumpy bastard ever in this early?” he rumbled, crossing the doorway again behind her. “Try ten. Try after ten. When’s he seeing that weird child? Try an hour after that.”

  “Thank you,” Hajar said, meaning quite the opposite, and she hurried down the corridor.

  There was, she guessed, a good chance that Benjon had simply been felled by sleep a second time. He had such an unwieldy pattern of rest that he had been seen dropping off mid-meeting with colleagues or students, sometimes in his researches, and once while listlessly consuming a pie. Magda enjoyed relating these incidences to Hajar, presumably in the hope that simply mentioning Benjon to her often enough would make her develop an affection for him and stop ‘trying to steal’ whomever she had decided she was in love with now.

  Hajar pushed open the door to the laboratory. The valve component box was out, meaning Irenbend had stopped by and gone for breakfast to wake himself up, and the notice of experiment responsibility had been amended to include Odo Berensen, which meant that he either no longer had the whooping cough or no longer cared if he gave it to the rest of the School.

  The curtains remained drawn, the gas lights lit, and though Magda’s coat hung on the back of the door, she was not lurking in the dim spaces between the metal-topped benches, waiting to talk Hajar’s ear off about … Hajar narrowed her eyes, unable to recall the name of this week’s unwitting husband-fodder. Something with an S. Eric of Lancs was out of favour.

  The room was cold, as always, and she was reluctant to remove her coat at all.

  Irenbend had very kindly laid out her diagrams for her, and somewhat less kindly written, I don’t think that works next to the calculations
for the new aperture diameter. It was all the more galling that she had proven it worked better than the old, and that it would require a re-examination of the rest of the delivery system, and that he’d agreed until Albion Locomotive Force had metaphorically cleared their throats and mentioned that they wanted to see some sort of physical object by midwinter.

  “Well if it blows up in your face don’t blame me,” Hajar muttered, rolling up her sleeves and pinning them to her shoulders briskly. She lifted free the first divided tray of components: the inner valve ring had been replaced by one fractionally smaller.

  The laboratory door opened and closed.

  “I’m working there,” Magda whined.

  There were eight benches in the Albion Locomotive Force piston-and-fuel engineering laboratory in the School of Non-Occult Sciences. There were, at most, three to four people using the room.

  My diagrams are here, Hajar thought, but she said nothing and lowered her head, picking up the component tray and the papers without looking at Magda. She turned to the bench behind her to lay them down again.

  “Are you taking my diagrams? Don’t take my diagrams! I have to finish that today!” Magda squealed, crossing the laboratory like a wrathful bargepole, her narrow hips still bumping the bench as she passed. “Why are you taking my diagrams? Get your own diagrams!”

  Oh fuck off, thought Hajar, but she handed the three sheets of paper with her own very distinctive left-handed writing on them to Magda without expression. “The valve aperture diameter’s wrong,” she said, as Magda snatched the papers from her with a wounded look, as if she struggled to believe the terrible crime she had caught Hajar in the middle of.