by D Des Anges
Unseasonable foul, commented his captor, as if they held pleasant conversation. In the normal manner of things even in this harsh misery of winter the volcanic rift keeps this valley warmer and supplied with running water; it even keeps us a clear channel through the sea ice, as you will have experienced. But this monstrous assault of snow is, I’m told, the upper claws of a terrible wind far to the south.
John stared, only half-comprehending, at his captor.
The arthropod was small, as the giant arthropods came, being little larger than a horse. He, or it, was the very spit of the large-snouted weevils that infested poor-stored flour. Its dusty shape seemed comical in the low, alien light of the snow-storm, and John, very much confused, wanted to laugh.
You have been ill-kept, I think, squeaked the weevil, raising its forelegs to hold John by the shoulders almost as if addressing an equal. For humans, mammals, are like plants, I’m told. You need air and light as much as food and water. It is ignorance, human-Lancaster, and not malice that has kept you in the darkness so. I hope it has not exacerbated the fever they tell me you had.
John, aware that even more so than usual nothing he said would be understood, said nothing, and watched from the corner of his bleary and underused eye the fierce dance of the snow storm.
However, human-Lancaster, I am not ignorant of your ways, continued the weevil, with a sharp hiss underpinning sudden, insidious aggression. We know of your Wireless. We know of your brutalities. Do not think that we are incapable of answering them, blow for blow, cry for cry, scream for scream, if cooperation is with-held.
John said, for himself alone, “Do Albion’s job for them. They’ll thank you for it in private and condemn your kind for it in public. Do them a favour.”
I thought that would stir you, squeaked the weevil, in evident pleasure. Our General shall serve me shortly, and you will tell us.
“I know nothing of use to you,” John said, quite aware that the weevil did not understand, and that El Miriápodo had doubtless conveyed this already to him. This would be a certainty if the weevil was, as it sounded, some superior in hierarchy to the General himself.
Even in the light, John scarce had means to mark the passing time, only to say that the sky did not darken through it that he could see, and that he began to shiver. There was a tiny epoch wherein the weevil chirped not and John spoke not and the light changed not.
It was ended by the swift insinuation of El Miriápodo into their group.
He came from the storm, moving as a river might, and without pause crossed the stark-shadowed rocks of the fissure’s floor. His great dark body was quick and flowed like the pouring of water, each leg in turn lifted, a ripple passing along them as a wave through the sea.
John thought, What power lies within, and thought of the doughy faces of Witegamot portraits, and found only weakness.
The great centipede greeted the little weevil with deference, and greeted John not at all.
The weevil asked: Will you speak for the human-Lancaster?
If he speaks, clicked El Miriápodo, and John realised with an uncomfortable jolt that this was his manner of a joke. He is not much given to conversation.
Then if he does not speak, you will wring speech from him, the weevil instructed, and John knew that the veiled threat was as much for his ears as El Miriápodo’s. Human-Lancaster, to what end was the beetle caught in Bergen interrogated, and what came from it?
“I don’t know,” John said. “I didn’t listen. We weren’t allowed on the rig, and I wouldn’t have listened had I been home.”
He says, his masters at the digging-platform did not permit the broadcast of this interrogation, El Miriápodo clicked.
He is lying. They encourage the suppression of dissent with the frequent broadcast of our tortures, the weevil hissed. We have confirmed. Human-Lancaster, do not lie to save your fellows, what have they ever done to save you? Did they not deliver you into our General’s boat without question?
“I’m not lying, and I’m not trying to protect them,” John said, quite cross. “They locked me up for half my life because I didn’t want to hear suffering. I don’t want to hear more. The broadcasts gave me night terrors. I was grateful to Super Rachelsson for curtailing our listening. Grateful.”
Well?
The weevil asked.
He says, El Miriápodo replied, he finds the broadcasts unbearable.
“Why did you take me?” John asked, the sour anger bubbling in his breast like bad soup, “I am the worst possible prisoner you could have taken. I don’t know anything. I don’t listen. I made a point of it, I let El Alacrán learn what he wishes wherever else he please. Why take me?”
What did it say?
Repeated the weevil, looking to El Miriápodo.
Nothing of consequence, El Miriápodo replied, He protests his ignorance of the broadcast.
“Do you mean to use me against him?” John asked, his legs sudden weak and his body cold as if bathed once again in ice. “Why? El Alacrán gives you all he finds.”
What is it talking about? It is agitated. Perhaps we should not have brought it to the light. The weevil in some excitement waved its antennae at John.
It wishes to know when it will be released, El Miriápodo replied.
Human-Lancaster, the weevil clicked, stern as a schoolmaster, addressing John direct. Your return to Albion is not ensured. You will go when we have what we require of you, and when we have suitable message for your masters concerning their intrusions into our seas. The base of which – the weevil squeaked, is that they are to keep to their own side of our fucking wall. If they want oil they will trade for it.
“I don’t know anything about any intrusions,” John said, “And I don’t think you took me because you wanted to send them a message back, either. You aren’t stupid. You choose more carefully than that – I am – I am the last person anyone would listen to.”
What now? The weevil made demand of El Miriápodo. It is cold.
Protestations of ignorance, nothing more, El Miriápodo replied. The human requires warmth also. This should end now. He is no use to us dead or in pain.
They talk more when distressed, the weevil assured him. I have seen.
Permit me to treat my prisoner with what kindness I see fit, El Miriápodo hissed. Without a reply from the weevil, John found himself rushed almost off his uncertain feet with the haste at which the great centipede pushed him back into the darkness.
* * *
Even without the marking of time John knew he had been left for little over an hour, for the cold had not yet full subsided from his aching bones, before El Miriápodo returned. The General rushed away the guard with a torrent of impatient hisses and clicks, threats, and cajoling which sent them scurrying as if in fear of a great inferno.
Then there was silence, and it was only this terrible silence and the absence of any distraction that allowed John to hear a stomach-churning schleup and scrrrrr and pop. He knew the sounds, though could not place them. He did not know why he associated their alien-familiar organic properties with anticipation until they passed from his ears again.
“You have Folded,” he said, unable to contain his discovery.
“Silence. Haste,” said El Miriápodo, in Albiontongue and in the same flat, blank voice with which he had spoken as the Amtsperson aboard the rig. “El Alacrán is absconded.”
“He is looking for me,” John said, with certainty. “I told you.”
“No,” said El Miriápodo. “He is no fool. He would come here. He has not. He has not called upon Ämblik and av-Ämblik to the South. He is absconded in the terrible wind. They spoke of a shadow.”
Though the chamber was warmed through the rocks of its construction, and the air which entered it was warmed in the hot, drowsying fires of the rift far below, John felt as cold as if he lay within the hospice ice-bath once more. His blood was as cold as he had died within.
“Why did you take me?” John asked, unable to say what have you done o
r give tongue to the hundred thousand possible ends to which the terrible wind had turned tragedy.
“He is scorpion,” El Miriápodo said in the same flat human voice.
For a moment John digested this non-sequitur, but he knew enough of the arthropods and enough of El Alacrán’s bitterness, to know that this was an explanation.
“If you think he would betray you because he is, then you don’t know as much about his kind as you think,” John said, with anger once more warming the desolate-cold of his liver. “He spoke of you, all right, with admiration. Is he not your friend?”
El Alacrán had also spoken, deep in thought, of their quarrels – many – over details of state and of slavery, which John did not understand. But the overall tone of these quarrels, as far as John had ever been able to make out, were those of disappointment in a favoured son who sees the flaws in his noble father, not the bitter wrangles of a partnership on the brink of dissolution.
He listened into the silence. He thought perhaps that El Miriápodo had once more unFolded, faced with too great difficulty or pain in maintaining this disguise of speech and body.
“We have endured,” El Miriápodo agreed, at last, “together.”
“He left me in Aberdeen,” John said, “to return to you with the fruits of his discoveries. He didn’t have to.”
“He left the spiders,” El Miriápodo said, “he did not join Ämblik. He stole their captives.”
“Released,” John said. He was certain of this as he was of his own tongue in his own head.
“He is missing,” El Miriápodo said. “A storm rages.”
John could add nothing to this, for his liver and heart both leapt into his throat and choked him.
He felt weight upon his chest and tried to think that El Alacrán was resourceful, and El Alacrán was cunning, and that El Alacrán was scorpion. Scorpion, and therefore hatched to survive from the second his first moult had swathed his running feet in chitin.
He was not dead, and if he was lost, he was trying to return.
“Do you fear him, then?” John asked, as he unstuck his organs from the back of his throat with a swallow.
El Miriápodo again was silent.
“Do you fear him? Does your weevil know him?”
El Miriápodo kept silent for so long that once more John thought he must have unFolded, or even left in the darkness without his hearing. The blood of his veins and the beat of his heart echoed so loud in his ears that John could not be sure he would hear him go.
“If he is lost,” El Miriápodo said at last, “I will have him found. This faction has allies. Feared allies. The mantid-women will find him.” There was another pause of terrible duration. “They listen to me, not … ‘my weevil’.”
John’s knees were sore again with the cold and the unusual exertion. He let them take him to rest on the rancid furs that made his prisoner’s-nest. The heat of his sickbed engulfed him and stupefied him as the fumes of the rift stupefied him. He said, “You fear him?”
“I fear for him,” El Miriápodo said, faint and constricted as if some vast hand squeezed his already-folded form. “The Continent is vast and wide. Factions hate factions. Scorpions hate scorpions. No one has love for the scorpions but you.”
John thought perhaps then that the centipede had at last left, but he had one last, low word in Albiontongue to impart:
“And I.”
Chapter 23
Until the sun's light had dwindled to something less than a faint glow at the rim of the world, every attempt El Alacrán made to leave the cover of the hot-forest was thwarted by the great birds. Twice he only just succeeded in returning to the trees with all his limbs under him and both his claws affixed. The birds seemed to learn of his weapons and where they might avoid their influence as the day wore on, and each return they gave was deadlier than before.
The humans, of course, were no help, but he had expected none.
The sky-woman’s demise was so similar to the death of young elk at the wolves, in how they came together and tore her apart, that after it he had been sure that mankind was ill-equipped for battle against such huge and formidable predators. His prisoners, or companions, he was then sure, would be best-served by taking themselves into the trees and staying there.
It was a position which required repeated representation to the Moors, though the parasitised Benjon seemed content to remain out of danger. Hajar and Ferdinand insisted on trying to help and in doing so did little but divert his attention, so often that he began to think it might even be their purpose.
At last, when the sun was near set and a whole disc of bright moon came into the sky, accompanied by an endless cloak of bright and unfamiliar stars, the birds departed. He thought he knew one constellation from his days, long-ago, in the Nubian Kingdoms far to the south of the Southern Moorish Empire, but the skies remained else alien.
Their continual screeches and ambushes had become so much normal to the order of things that their absence almost unsettled him. He came very cautious indeed out of the woods, expecting some stealthy new tactic.
“Stay,” he told the humans. His breathing had been so constricted now for so long that he was sure he might become drunken with air should he at last take it in through the means he was meant to. After so long unFolding only when he was certain he would not be called upon to give warning or make command, he felt he had grown stupid with the unnatural long journey each breath must take.
“They’ve gone,” Ferdinand said.
“It may be a stratagem,” El Alacrán warned, “I will draw them.”
“A stratagem?” Ferdinand echoed. “They’re birds.”
El Alacrán did not have the breath to spare on the ways in which these birds had learned him, how they came closer and closer to besting him each time he ventured forth. He was sure, too, that Ferdinand wanted none of this and only to reach the boat.
He scuttled with haste to the paved road, but the sky was without shadow. Either the birds feared something far worse at night than themselves or their eyes were unaccustomed to the dark and their hunting diminished by it.
He ran on, testing for ambush, and reached then the far side of the paved road. There the inadequate boat bobbed in the constructed harbour.
It was some distance from the shanty town, and El Alacrán could only guess at why. In all the human habitations he had infiltrated before, the boats were kept as near to the homes as the men could drag them: idleness was a matter not only of sloth but of survival.
“COME,” El Alacrán cried, hoarse in his every utterance. The glutinous ooze did not present itself in half-Folding, and for many days now he had wished that there was some way to induce it to cover the internal Folds as the outer. They chafed and scraped and ached him now, and he would have been grateful for the padding.
With admirable if belated caution, his small party of humans crossed the paved road. They grew bolder as they came to the wall without bird-attack.
“Your plan,” Hajar said, inclining her head to the boat. It was so very small that El Alacrán despaired of its ability to get them even from the shore to the deeper waters, “is to sail this, north. No knowledge of the currents, the tides, the rocks and wrecks we might encounter?”
El Alacrán knew himself that this was a thread so slender it might escape the eyes even of the birds they had spent all day in hiding from, but to hear her say it aloud fired him into a contrary stance.
The boat was small, but so was the ship his faction possessed. This might not pass beneath the waves and it might not possess an orgone engine, but it was still a boat. Even El Alacrán’s dislike of the sailing men could not obscure their prodigious achievement: to harness the winds and use them to draw a ship across the ocean as horses drew their carts across the land.
“Yes,” El Alacrán rasped. “Or we can stay here, and starve in the midst of plenty. Or die like Ærndís.”
“And can you sail?” Hajar asked. It was an honest question, he supposed, but he saw her frust
ration as clear as her fatigue.
“We can sail,” Benjon, or rather Benjon’s occupied body said. It looked down at the boat bobbing in the dark waters, the body as worn as the clothes that it bore. “We are able to sail.”
“Benjon couldn’t bloody sail,” Hajar said, and El Alacrán saw her sadness, too.
“Hugo couldn’t sail either,” Ferdinand said, and El Alacrán heard his suspicion as he saw his anger.
“Do you think we came to Albion-of-the-Britons in a rat?” Benjon’s voice asked, mocking them all. “Sailors sail, we acquire their knowledge from within. We wish to leave this barren shore and find ourselves a vessel which will endure beyond the fragile reach of the human form. We will succeed better in your company, but we are not afraid to go alone in that boat if you will not trust us.”
El Alacrán examined the occupied Benjon.
He seemed worn and pale, thinning and losing his hair: not just from his head, but from his face, and arms. The befouled garb and bloodstains did little to obscure the deterioration of his form, and he looked as one who might be found dead outside a besieged city.
El Alacrán supposed, though he hesitated to tell Hajar, that the urgency of the parasite to quit him was born of some knowledge of shortened life.
“We will drown or starve,” Hajar said. “This boat is too mean, the ocean too wide.”
“Do you want to stay here forever?” Ferdinand grumbled. “Come on. Birds or boat or poisoning yourself in that bloody tangle of trees?”
“You don’t care if you die,” Hajar said, blunt as the edge of a hammer.
She had the measure of Ferdinand exact, El Alacrán thought, but he let the thought pass through him unexamined. Whatever her precision, it was a harsh observation to make, and he could see it cut Ferdinand even as he failed to deny it.
“I, however, have no intention to perish at sea,” El Alacrán told her, with great honesty, “and none that you should either. This boat will serve. The next land may be just beyond the horizon.”