Kingdom

by Andy Tilley

  ‘Come on Rose, pick one!’

  The two options conspire and cause me to delay until they both are slammed shut by thundering gallop from either side. The only way is down now and so I hit the ground moments before two sets of stomping hooves are raised above me then dropped, slamming heads together. I can do nothing but cower here as the bellowing beasts rattle and battle antlers above me. I’m caged by their legs until one animal manages to lock the others antlers and twist him off balance, not quite enough to topple but enough to open a gap! Instinct kicks in but no sooner have I started my crawl toward the river than the larger stag sees me, stomps on my leg! I try again and again the animal rams his hoof onto my calf. There’s a stabbing pain, another snapping noise and this time my leg is broken. I know this to be so but there’s no pain to confirm it; adrenaline has taken care of that as well as given me the strength to dig my fingers into the ground to begin again and drag myself away from the center of the melee. Unexpectedly though I’m no longer dragging myself now but flying! I‘m actually in the air and as I tumble forward I can see the young buck that tossed me. He’s watching me fly, waiting for me to land. I do, with a clumsy roll to one side that scrapes my back across the glass hard ground more than three feet away from where the smaller stag stands. The animal is looking at me still as if checking that I’m okay! Too long though, he takes too long and it’s too late for him to dodge or brace himself against the mighty slash that gouges upward into his gullet, ripping his neck and lower jaw to shreds. His back legs buck and the momentum of the attack spins them around in my direction. I have to get further away! But the ground is slippery, too hard to hold and before I can gain purchase to begin my backward scramble I’m showered with warm blood an instant before the already dead animal slams onto my legs and chest. Vertebrae crack and nerves sever and my body melts away. Now is a good time to scream but there isn’t enough breath in my paralyzed chest to raise even a murmur.

  The victor is standing over me now, bending down and considering me. I can feel his heavy quick breath; damp and warm, snorting onto on my face but cooling as the moisture in it pools under my neck. It’s nice to feel something. His head is so close to mine now, so wild and yet so engaged by me that in spite of these terrible circumstances I can’t help but forget my crushing pain and forgive him. I have never felt closer to nature and even the fire in his huge eyes is reassuring, its swirls and flashes strengthening our connection. I would have stayed here like this too, absorbed by the wonder we share, had it not been for the bright blue discs that begin to blaze in front of my eyes. My initial reaction is to turn my head but the bright lights follow and I realize that they’re not in front but actually on my eyes; diamond discs fluoresced by something that bounces around and off them. Snap! The connection breaks and the stag raises himself high on hind legs, rallies his front hooves and dips his neck. Ready for the drop. Ready for the kill. Best to close your eyes for this Rose, but the next thing I feel isn’t the slash of an antler. It’s a rush of hot air laden with shot. The bang and the blood are here soon after and together they rip apart the stag’s chest fur in a hundred places. Slain by the shotgun the stag slumps to his knees, twitching nose only inches from mine, dead eyes black as carbon.

  It’s dark now. Dark and still and so quiet.

  A man once told me that this could be whatever I wanted it to be. Well, Mr Cristian Chevalier, I choose this. I choose the silent dark; safe behind my diamond discs where you can’t break my heart anymore and where the silkies can’t find me.

  Chapter 14

  ‘Come away from the water Christine! The waves are a little too big today darling.’

  Thomas is shouting at himself as much as his blind daughter. He’s more than a little guilty about not having noticed sooner how close she had gotten to the under tow, already nipping at her toes and only needing to grab an ankle to claim her feather light frame into its pulverising churn. Thomas shudders at the thought of losing her completely, so close to the day when he will finally get her back too. It’s always the same when he is studying his notes though, hours lost in his own deliberations, his obsession with the thick dossier on his knee. And although he knows better, although Christine has retreated less than two short skips away from danger, he can’t help but to return to them.

  Thomas Chevalier knows a lot about silkies. In truth he shouldn’t do. No modern man should even know that there are such things because if nothing else they have been disciplined and covered their trail well over the millennia. But there’s one important difference between this dedicated father and other men of our age for Thomas Chevalier has lived with a silkie inside him. Ten days he shared his mind with it. Two hundred and thirty three hours to be precise, and not once did it feed because Thomas and the silkie had been reluctant partners back then, shared a common purpose (hastily dealt), each needing the other if they were to get their precious cargo safely away from Hartford Manor and delivered to Aunt May’s house on the Isle of Wight.

  ‘Symbiotic not parasitic’

  This was the first thing that Thomas Chevalier ever wrote about silkies, a phrase he had used to describe the encounter as they had traveled south. It hadn’t been anywhere near accurate of course but it remained in his book to this day, scribbled words on a tatty scrap of paper now taped to the inside cover to serve as a reminder of how devious such creatures can be. Aunt May certainly wouldn’t describe silkiesthem as symbiotic and there wasn’t a day passed that Thomas didn’t cringe at the thought of what he had done to his sister-in-law. But a father can only ever follow instinct and instinct has no time for reason or compassion. Thomas surmised that it must have been like this for the silkie too. Distraught at having witnessed such brutal damage to a daughter, breeched and left vulnerable by a hardwired duty to protect her son. She had bared herself to Thomas Chevalier back then (in the days following the dreadful events at Christine’s birth) and told him things to earn his trust. She had had no choice but to break her kindred’s code of conduct. Instinct had made her do it, that irresistible force of nature.

  In truth to describe the thing lodged inside him as female had been wrong, an assumption corrected by Thomas early on in his records once the fact that these creatures are asexual had been realised. It was those torrid first few hours at the manor house, spent listening to its wailings and rabid threats (putting Thomas in mind of a grieving mother) that had sexualized it then. To call it silkie, well that should be contested too for these entities have had many titles through the centuries. In the steaming jungles of the Philipines the Batak people whisper tales and live in fear of aswang. Further east, high amongst the mist shrouded mountains of Japan is where bakenko roost, raiding the fishing villages by night to feed. Spawned in the heat of the African deserts are maita, hunting down the native Hausa, sapping the strength of their warrior men until nothing is left but bone and flesh for scavengers to scrap over. It is only in the medieval Celtic lore of northern Europe that silkie hunt. But changing a name does nothing to alter the nature of the beast. Aswang, bakenko, maita or silkie; beneath his list of references, illustrations and notes, Thomas Chevalier’s dossier underlines their common heritage.

  The Soul Eaters

  There used to be three, thick and doubting question marks written after this entry but they had been blocked out a long time ago. For ThomasMr Chevalier, life before the silkie invaded it had been busy but straightforward. A business man back thenhe had been, and a very successful one too. Principled and practical in every aspect of family and work, that was Thomas Chevalier and there had been no room for any creed other than self belief. Certainly the idea that the spirit of that same self roams inside each of us would never have been considered. But Setantii changed all that.

  Setantii is what the silkie inside that particular doubting Thomas calleds herself, a name taken from iron age settlers of millennia past. Those unfortunate families that had originally populated the country side where Hartford Manor now stands were the people whom Setantii first coveted. They
do this silkies. They covet the tribes of the place where they first come into existence and take their name. But let’s be clear here; silkies are not alien or unnatural. They aren’t even supernatural. They are a part of nature, perhaps the biggest part too if that was to be measured by understanding and connectivity. Maybe Setantii would have drawn the explanation of what she was (and how she came to be) to a close at this point, had it not been for the educated pragmatism of the mind that she shared coupled with her rising frustration at being distracted from her task by the continuous line of questioning that Thomas put to her.

  It was on day seven of their journey that Setantii eventually conceded to explain more, a week since the carnage at the manor house. The fugitives had by this time taken a route deep within the New Forest, hidden there behind fresh spring foliage. Whilst a young Cristian had climbed trees and splashed rocks in a nearby stream, his father sat down to listen to the voice in his head and so become the first human in history to be given understanding. Thomas allows himself a rare smile as he remembers how Setantii had drawn him in so easily that day. The cold damp rock he sits on now reminds him of the slab that had so completely numbed his seat back then and as he closes his eyes it is easy for him to go there again to listen once more.

  Setantii began with a question.

  ‘Tell me Thomas Chevalier, how is that you came to be?’

  Thomas thought long and hard about his answer, convinced that there must be something behind what he knew it to be but, unable to uncover anything more profound, he offered it anyway.

  ‘I was born. Seeded by my father and nurtured by my mother.’

  ‘And your mother? How was it that she was alive in order to create you?’

  A light went on in Thomas’s head, so bright that Setantii saw it too.

  ‘That’s right man. You are the result of a thousand mothers and fathers, each coupling improving your design to make you stronger and more ready to survive this world. Evolution is the answer to why you are here Thomas but tell me, can you answer this simple paradox? Why would evolution select for you an increasingly larger brain if mankind neglects to use most of its capacity? Doesn’t it seem strange to you that life should expend so much effort in order to develop something so under utilized?’

  ‘But that’s a myth! This idea that humans use only ten percent of their brain simply isn’t true. Of course the human brain is complex but every bit of it is used. Not all at the same time grant you but used it is. Along with performing millions of mundane acts, it composes concertos, issues manifestos and comes up with elegant solutions to equations. It's the wellspring of all human feelings, behaviors, experiences as well as the repository of memory and self-awareness. So whilst it's no surprise that to me that the brain remains a mystery unto itself, it is a surprise that you don’t know this Setantii!’

  ‘Ah the arrogance. Where would we be without it? The very thing that gave my kind the opportunity to evolve and ascend.’

  Thomas was confused that his neat and factual attempt to discredit Setantii’s argument had such little impact. On the contrary, it seemed more like he had clumsily sprung some philosophical trap placed in front of him. Of course he had.

  ‘It’s true that you use all the bits of your brain but what isn’t true is that that you use its full capacity. Remember, just because you and your bitch of a dead wife used every room in Hartford Manor doesn’t mean that you couldn’t fit another hundred guests in there does it?’

  ‘Hey now just a….!’

  The widower had his protest slapped back down before it could rise fully.

  ‘Your family doesn’t increase in size or effectiveness just because you live in a big house and it’s the same with your brain. The fact that there are more synapses to fire doesn’t seem to have made human kind any more valuable than it was a thousand years ago does it Thomas? The truth of it is that humanity blew it and nature grew tired of evolving a species that squandered every opportunity she presented it with.’

  A loud splash yanks Thomas back to Sule Skerry where his daughter has somehow managed to roll a rather large rock to the brink of a flat rock slab and heave it over, mercifully not following it into the Atlantic.

  ‘Cristian, move away from the water please! I won’t tell you again!’

  On hearing her father’s voice say this name, Christine turns away from the sea and back toward him, clambers down from the rocks and dashes up the beach as fast as the loose shale and her memory of it allows her too. She can hardly breathe by the time she reaches him but it’s excitement, not exertion that’s making her pant and Thomas knows what’s coming.

  ‘Is he daddy! Is my brother really here!?’

  Thomas sighs heavily, cursing himself for this simple mistake made as he drifted back from memories and onto Sule Skerry. Reaching out to lift, twist and sit his daughter on his knee he explains that her brother isn’t here just yet but that he will be soon. After a rough and tumble hug and tickle, topped off with a huge raspberry kiss on her cheek, Thomas releases his daughter and smiles proudly after her as she makes her way to feed the mice as he has asked. She has barely entered the lighthouse keep before his attention returns to the dossier. This is what he reads from the notes that he wrote after his discussion with Setantii that day.

  ‘The silkie has told me that nature does indeed have design but so more than just those ‘survival of the fittest’ rules tailored for a particular species, as the evolutionists would lead us to believe. And whilst there is no doubt that there exists this battle between life forms for territorial supremacy (in their struggle to the top of the food chain) the numbers and form of any one genre will only ever progress as long as it fulfils a more fundamental set of criteria; a higher order if you will. It is this plan, the ultimate goal of natures laws that decides the who, what, when and where’s of evolutionary success in order to ensure that the planet, not its inhabitants, will thrive. So yes, natural selection will evolve a selected animal toward supremacy but ultimately, if that species veers too far from the master plan then that’s where it stops to become either extinct or at best irrelevant.’

  Thomas looks up from his notes and out to sea in order to contemplate nature’s master plan once more. Ten years have past since he first heard it and the sublime simplicity still makes him shiver. And here it was; the answer to the biggest question ever asked by man, word for word and scribbled inside a set of scruffy, loose leaf papers upon the trembling knee of a man that most people would consider crazy.

  It’s the energy of the stars that populate this universe Thomas, not the organisms that blink in and out of existence within it. The earth is nothing more than a seed of our sun; a seed that will have gestated for 5 billion years by the time she is ready. And when this planet has fully evolved a life form advanced enough to transcend this solar system, then our Mother Earth will release her offspring into the galaxy and in doing so assure her sun’s lineage. Only then will she return to her star and begin the cycle over. Do you understand what I am telling you Thomas? There can be only one Earthling in each cycle. This is the prize that has slipped through man’s grasp.

  So man as nothing more than a supporting act with no purpose other than to nourish and assure the dominion of another, higher species? A failed evolutionary step? Is this the holy grail (in reality a badly chipped holy mug) implicit within the master plan that Setantii had outlined? Thomas Chevalier alone had burdened this quandary as he went about his decade long, relatively mundane quest to rescue his daughter. Setantii had elaborated on her revelation toward the end of their journey south as Thomas and Cristian Chevalier braced themselves in the wind of the bow of the ferry that sailed the Solent toward the Isle of Wight. Bathed in the cool, salty sunshine, it was to be Thomas’s and Setantii’s last day together. With time running out the man had asked nothing of the silkie, simply listened intently as she explained man’s part in the creation of her genus.

  Setantii had began her explanation with ideas that could be found in any school boy text
book. How, as a species, the hominoids had done well with one amongst them winning the race against the chimps and gorillas, orangutans and gibbons. Rapid cranial development had given this animal the edge, made room for its brain to swell and as the number of neurons multiplied so human kind climbed to claim its place at the head of the family. Standing proudly he emerged as a new species, armed with a large brain that buzzed with activity, heightened his capacity to reason the information that his senses reported about the environment he roamed through. But there had been a price to pay, for this improved brain was ravenous, needing ever more energy, heat and food. For Tomhais this is the point where Setantii’s teachings had lifted from the page, facts taking wing to become fantastic. She explained how for some time this need to feed slowed his development. A balance had been struck between hunger and the mortality of those young hunters who were having to take ever greater risks with their own lives before their genes could be sown. The problem was fundamental. What good was it to see or hear an animal at distance if the ensuing hunt might result in more energy being drained by the body, a bludgeoning stumble over rocks or a freezing chill from rivers crossed? Evolution ploughed on. More neurons were added, more power to the brain until finally a sixth sense emerged that revealed to man a set of previously hidden natural rhythms in the world outside and so broadening the spectrum of energies that man could see, hear and feel. It was these energy streams that some men latched onto, learnt to control and direct in order to carry their thoughts into the minds of the organisms that they lived amongst. Man’s rise accelerated once more, became meteoric as this skill was honed to search for food through the eyes of birds, trick the minds of deer to bring meat and fur to his spear. Meat and fur that he desperately needed to nourish and warm the brain that he now served. Setantii herself had admitted that this creature had become a magnificent animal but Thomas could sense a smugness in her tone as she undid him. For at even as man reached for his he was condemned to fail, unable to shake a niggling urge to cut free and replace what the earth provided with his own ideas of how things should be. It was his perverse belief that nature was not his master but a tool for him to wield that eventually led him down a very different path, one which definitely wasn’t part of the master plan. Technology became man’s folly and as he turned his back on the natural world he disconnected himself from it, claimed victory and convinced himself that he had broken free from the forces of creation to take control of his own destiny. But mother earth had a different agenda and would not be denied what she had designed for her purpose. Evolution acted quickly to make the adjustment. From the brain of man another branch budded on the tree of life. A new species, built from energy, not matter. A species designed to thrive amongst the souls of the living, take from each whatever it needs to ensure that when the cycle closes Earth can release its contribution; a single entity, blown onto the winds of space-time by a dying sun in the hope that its essence will flourish once more, warmed by the nurturing glow of whichever new star accepts her gift.