by D Des Anges
It all came to her again and weighed her down as a bellyful of stones might drown a woman. The taste of dried fruits still lingering in her mouth was the bitter taste of rage, and she sat upon the shelf without speaking, or wondering why Ferdinand did not speak.
“You are sure?” asked John Lancaster, and by the shake in his voice and the silence of the arthropod Hajar knew he spoke for himself.
She only nodded, dumb as a beast and of no use, in the darkness, and thus it was Ferdinand who gave reply:
“Yes. We saw it.”
“You are sure–” John Lancaster persisted, with terrible calm as the ocean over some great depth.
“He is rent to pieces,” said Ferdinand, his own voice cracked. “We saw. He fought ‘til he was scattered like leaves before the wind.” He said, in the authoritative voice of the Wireless making proclamation of how all things were and must be, “No courage was greater.”
There came then a hail of clicks and hissing without translation, for John Lancaster fell into silence. Hajar heard him draw breath once or twice, as shaken and wet-sounding as those of a dying man, but he gave no answer to the arthropod’s repetitions.
There came then a break to the click and hiss of arthropod speech, and in this unwelcome pause Hajar heard full well the stifled, soggy sob of a broken man’s breaths. She heard then too strange crackling and rustling which filled her with uncertain dread.
“Took the mantid’s body how?” came a flat and accentless voice in the dark. It was unfamiliar to Hajar.
At first she only jumped, alarmed out of understanding. The impatient question came again, with no seeming identifier to the voice.
“How did it take the mantid’s body?”
Hajar cleared her throat and closed her eyes and tried to speak without thinking, to recall without remembering. She achieved none of the desired trance-like state. “The parasite had worn Benjon as a cloak, his body as a disguise or living place, as it ate him down. We know not how. It deceived us. It threatened El Alacrán until he brought it a ‘new vessel’ –”
“El Alacrán captured a Mantid Woman?” asked the flat, empty voice Hajar could only assume must be the ‘Folded’ El Miriápodo.
“Yes. He brought her to the parasite. The parasite split open the mantid and poured out her guts. It split open Benjon’s skin –” Hajar found herself reciting the memory as she might recite an unflattering report of a new development in the experiments’ progression to those who provided the monies which paid for it.
She kept from her mind all fear, all thought, and spoke only of that which her mind had perceived. It was not enough to keep her voice from quavering, but it was enough to keep her back straight and her stomach still, if hollow.
“– And poured from Benjon’s skin into the emptied body of the mantid. When Benjon’s skin fell from the mantid there was no rent. The parasite then kept a moment or two to adjust to the body it now inhabited. That is how the skin-stealer took a mantid’s body.” She breathed out, slow and shaken. “I do not know mantids enough to know if there is a way to tell it from another of its kind, but I know there was little way for a stranger to determine the parasite in Benjon or… or in Hugo.”
“How came you to the South-East faction?” asked the Folded El Miriápodo in the dark, without indication one way or another that he had heard, understood, or cared for her explanation.
“By the sea,” said Ferdinand, his voice stronger than Hajar’s, and she thanked him in silence for his rescue, for she felt weakened even by the memory of that last fight. “From an island farther south. We crossed by boat, above the body of a vast sea monster.”
“And how came to the island?” asked El Miriápodo.
Behind his voice Hajar could still hear the wet, sad breaths of John Lancaster, and had her heart not already broke on its own account she might have found it breaking again at the sadness of the sound. Such sympathy was not in her nature, and it dizzied her as it drained her.
“By the skies,” said Ferdinand. “We were taken up, all, from our passage to the dwelling of one El Alacrán called – Ämblik, I think – by a great colony of flying arthropods and humans who dwell in halls suspended in the sky.” He paused, and said in a less pompous voice, “I am aware of how mad that sounds.”
“Suspended how?” asked El Miriápodo, giving no cue whether he thought this mad or not.
“Sacks of smoke drawn from the effluvia of the volcano,” said Ferdinand. “They were drawing from the vent when they came upon us.”
“How did these Halls propel themselves?” El Miriápodo asked. Though his Folded voice was flat as fresh-milled paper, it conveyed nevertheless a great and terrible urgency of the question.
“I do not know,” said Ferdinand. “Some manner of engine.”
“Orgone?” asked El Miriápodo.
“I do not know,” Ferdinand repeated.
“Yes,” said Hajar.
“From whence did they draw it?” El Miriápodo asked, with urgency once more.
“I know not,” Hajar said.
“Will you not return us to Albion?” Ferdinand asked, hopeless in his voice. “Or at least return Hajar, and John here.”
“The earth—” Hajar began, recalling the pock in the forest in suddenness as her mind sought to escape other memory from their journey.
“I think that’s enough,” Ferdinand said, cutting across her. “Will you return us? Or them?”
But it was not El Miriápodo who replied, but John Lancaster in a voice hollow and damp, drained of all life and given the hue that might have arisen from the throats of the dead, were they to speak.
He said, and it was plain he spoke not to them but to El Miriápodo: “With this you have more than any other faction to build upon. El Alacrán has served you well.”
El Miriápodo did not reply. Neither Hajar nor, it seemed, Ferdinand, could think of another thing to say.
“You ought just have trusted he would return,” said John Lancaster, in a voice whose back was as broke as El Alacrán’s carapace. “He left me to come to you. You ought just have trusted he would come.”
Chapter 28
As John at last prepared to leave the underground caverns of El Miriápodo’s people, he gave himself little room to grieve.
He thought only of the terrible cold and snow that would await them when they left the valley; of how hard it was to move under the heap of furs he thought it best to wear for this walk to the shore; of how few places his clothing afforded for the storage of what food there was to be carried.
He thought with near-relish of the nightmare-like suffocation and delirium induced, he knew now, by the fumes of the orgone engines that would attend their voyage ‘home’. To think of this was to escape if only for a second the image that Hajar’s halting description had implanted in his mind.
He did not know what a mantis might look like, and the two travellers could not tell him, save to say it was ‘some great monster, as from a bad dream’ and that he was better not to know. Right quick John came to agree with this, for his mind was capable enough of conjuring monsters.
El Miriápodo came not to them while they fumbled in the dark, groping for supplies and feeling for food, bundling themselves up in furs for the journey ahead. John scrambled and scraped for what dried meat there might be had, trusting only in his bettered hearing to steer him away from beating his head upon the wall or upon his fellows. Even so, his fingers clutched blind, once, at a great rough hand he guessed to be Ferdinand’s.
Ferdinand only muttered, “Not today, mate,” and left John to founder in confusion at this cryptic utterance.
It was not until some time later that John understood his meaning, and took some small offence at the belief that was its cause.
When at last El Miriápodo came to lead them from the tunnels, there came also a great cacophony of voices to accompany them. It was again the chatter and chitter of the arthropods of his faction, curious or exultant, murmuring about the mystery that El Miriápodo k
ept from them.
John heard them squeak of humans and mantids and snows and flying cities, but he heard not one click in El Alacrán’s name. He knew then, as he had always known, that should he not return to Albion-of-the-Britons he would not be missed there.
The ghost-light of the fissure burned again at his eyes like the midday sun, after so long in the dark. John stood a moment to adjust, watching the faint grey highlights on the carapaces of the beetles and bugs, the crawlers and creepers. They came to the entrance of their safe haven to see away their General.
He had guessed from their names that the travellers who joined him might be Moorish.
Being unfamiliar with their race he was still shocked, if only for a moment, to see a very tall and broad Iberian Moor, his skin as dark as night and scraped and his garb stained and tattered, on the one side of him. This Ferdinand was handsome, and perhaps forty. John had not suspected him so old.
To the far side of Ferdinand stood Hajar; a plain Moorish woman of maybe twenty-five, maybe thirty-five, with half her thick black hair slashed ragged-short at the back, as if by some terrible jaws. Her shift was stained and her boots worn, and she bore the remains of a fine silk headscarf about her neck. As he squinted, she tied the scarf about her head, and pulled her furs closed over herself, in cold and not in modesty.
El Miriápodo preceded them, winding through the uneven rock floor like a great shining river.
Perhaps it was the motion of his legs, like a wave; perhaps it was the chitin plates of his back; perhaps the first pangs of the terrible cold to come, but it was then that the sadness came back to John like a blow to the sternum. It near doubled him over with the sudden pain of it.
When he could see again, Hajar had followed the centipede, her shaken legs taking great strides from rock to rock, like a child who has not yet learned to be ashamed of her strength. Ferdinand, however, watched him, and patted John upon the back with one large, dark hand.
“Courage, John Lancaster,” said Ferdinand. His hand was very warm, even through the furs which lay upon John’s shoulder. “It will get no worse after this.”
For a moment John believed he meant their journey, and opened his mouth to protest: the road ahead was hard and cold and might kill them all before they came to the shore. This much farther into the winter the weather was more vicious, and the poison air of the undersea boat was hard enough to breathe alone, without being stacked side on side like the dead.
But he perceived this was not Ferdinand’s meaning, and on looking upon the Moor’s face he knew that he spoke with the shattered spirit of loss, too.
He pulled himself straight, and together they came down through the rocks to the vent into the valley.
The valley was free still of landed snow with only here and there a white lump atop a boulder to suggest the winter storms had kissed the ground at all. The river steamed so that it near-obscured the valley’s far side: the light was low and dark from a sun that scarce ascended above the lip of the rift.
“Why is it so warm?” Ferdinand asked, pulling furs across his mouth and nose.
“The fires of the earth,” John mumbled. He hugged his own furs to him as close as he could without dislodging the food he carried inside his canvas suit.
None of them spoke again on the way to the shore. As soon as they had ascended the crest of the rift the winter kept from the fissure by the rent in the rock returned to them with such ferocity that all three humans were blown from their feet.
John scrambled with froze hands across the thick snow until he groped upon the protruding legs of centipede, and clung to the arthropod without thought or shame. By this means he pulled himself into the lee of the General with shivering-numb legs. He dared not open his eyes to see had the other travellers found their own footing, but as El Miriápodo began to walk again he was sure that they must.
The great centipede came slow as a funeral procession, and though he tried to keep the association from his mind he could not.
As before, his stumbling steps across the frozen and windswept plain, sinking into the snow and turning this way and that to keep to El Miriápodo’s leeward side, filled the world and his mind.
Though he had seen no light for so long, he screwed closed his eyes again to keep his eyes from freezing. With his free hand he covered his face, holding a corner of the noisome furs across his mouth and nose that he might keep the warmth of his lungs about him.
As before, the cold and dark took John so complete that he lost almost all notion of time’s passage, or that he had life before the freeze and the trudge.
Unlike before, John had now no mystery before him, only sorrow surrounding him.
It chilled him deeper than the cold in the air and the cold in the ground, which travelled through his legs with more speed than his blood.
It cut him deeper than the wind. It rent his will from him as the wind tugged him time and again from the safety of El Miriápodo’s side. It left him asking as he struggled to put one foot before the other, if he should drop his step, fall from El Miriápodo, and let the winter take him.
There seemed no great reason he should take each step. He walked only to the madhouse, he knew, or to the unceasing ache of empty days that ran into each other like raindrops to a pool. There could as well be no sunrise for all the purpose of his days to come.
But his legs walked on without his will behind them, a step at a time. After countless footfalls that which lay beneath his boots changed from snow-stacked grass to snow-stacked pebble, and he fell once more.
Nearly there, came El Miriápodo’s click in the screaming wind: or perhaps John imagined it, and he startled to hear encouragement in this wasteland. With difficulty, and with the shivering hands of Ferdinand and Hajar to raise him, John came again to his feet. He thought: it is only in the frozen places that they lift you when you fall, and remembered the rig.
He did not see the black boat. He only knew of it because Ferdinand’s voice came over even the shriek of the wind in its incredulity: “How are we going to fit in that?”
With care, clicked El Miriápodo, though he must have known that Ferdinand could not understand him.
The belly of the boat was filled with snow when they came to it, and it took the efforts of all four to tip it wrong-side up, to make the thick white to fall from it. John could no longer feel a single finger nor his hands below the elbow, and to grasp the Mitarbeitertransport’s side while he could scarce see it was no simple matter.
At last they came to the echoing thick hull of the craft. Like John had before them, Hajar and Ferdinand seemed scarce able to believe that they should travel upon such a mean conveyance.
“We shall freeze upon the sea ice –” Ferdinand began
“How does this propel itself—?” Hajar asked. “I see neither engine nor sail.”
Make them stop asking questions, El Miriápodo complained. Or we shall all of us freeze. Humans!
It was the first sign of exasperation that El Miriápodo had given, and John had no chance to acknowledge this nor the flare of sympathetic feeling in his breast. The centipede reared up, even in the hateful wind, and shoved John head over heels into the boat.
Dizzied and off-balance, John had only the opportunity to roll to one side to avoid Ferdinand’s body. That fell upon the bottom of the boat with a great oof of air and a sound more of anger than of pain. Ferdinand was large, and John could scarce see how any of them might breathe or even fit beneath the great plated roof, until the man hunched and bent about him with an apologetic grimace.
John was struck then by the warmth of this smile, even a half-mast forced thing in the face of the wind came like a ray of sunlight, and made himself drop his complaint and disbelief. There would be some way.
Whatever else El Miriápodo might be – and John scarce knew, even now, what to make of his thoughts – the centipede was not without resource or wit.
“I can get in myself!” Hajar yelped above, and she stumbled into the boat beside them. She
was hesitant but quick to bend out of the howling snow-wind. It was the vicious cousin of the Winterzeitwinde, or perhaps its forebear.
They had not yet arranged themselves into some pattern that might afford them comfort before El Miriápodo pushed the boat across the slippery pebbles with a great heave, and poured his long brown body into the boat in a single sinuous stream. Though, to John’s relief, the combining of their bodies and of the furs brought at least some alliance against the cold.
He fitted himself about them as smoke fitted itself into a closed room, and when they were so snug together that three humans and one centipede were as one mass of flesh and chitin, El Miriápodo clicked:
Down.
“Keep down,” John translated.
“What’s happening –?” cried Hajar. The clanking and hissing of the strange engines of conveyance of the undersea boat set up and their noise – though muffled now by so many bodies – filled their ears in a roar.
“Head down,” John repeated. “You will see soon enough.”
And they lay, tense and sullen, as the plates unfolded over them in a great roof.
Each curved black scale seemed to hang in the air as it slid out, supported only by its shape and the last of the scale before it, clanking and clipping into place. John lay back with the weight of Hajar and Ferdinand upon him pushing him down no doubt more than they knew. He watched as the last of the very dim and dark light once again shuttered from his world.
He thought, in sudden irreverence, that should he return to his flat in Aberdeen, he might not turn out the gaslight for a month.
John remembered then that he should have no other means of chasing from him the night terrors now, and trembled with the undersea craft without any will of his own.
The craft, which had until now bobbed sluggish on the surface of the open channel, began to tip, and to sink. John felt fingers – he knew not whose – dig into him in panic, and could offer no comfort to their owner.