by Maurice Gee
How do they –? Duro began.
They make it with their minds the way they make their song, Xantee said.
I can hear their song.
We’d be dead already without it, Lo said, pointing at a tree tiger lashing its tail on a branch ahead. As they approached it gave a howl of rage and leaped away into the cavernous dark.
They walked until midnight, safe in the double circle of light and song.
That’s enough, Xantee, let’s sleep, Lo said.
Let’s eat first, Duro said.
They swallowed their meal, washed it down with water, laid out their mats, and slept until dawn lit the jungle enough for them to make out tree trunks gathered round like pillars and branches slanting down like a lean-to roof. Food again, then they went on, following the notes of the song like beads on a string.
Xantee counted the days: three gone, five, seven – and with the hours gained by night-walking she worked out that seven made nine. So, three to go. Then they lost a day and night in a storm that attacked the jungle with great fists of wind and torrents of rain, and lightning that broke from its parent stem into a rain of bolts that brought trees crashing down. The people made them safe in a rock overhang, where they huddled behind a sheet of falling water – but each of them felt that this was a place where a gool might break out.
The next day they reached a river washing over its banks and running through the trees, so more time was lost.
Xantee gave up counting, but Duro, with his practical brain, worked the numbers out – time lost, time gained – until, as they settled down to sleep one night, he said, Two more days.
How do you know?
The Peeps told me.
They did not. They don’t do sums.
All right. I’m keeping count. And maybe you haven’t noticed but we’re climbing. The creeks are running faster. Two more days.
Then where’s the gool the Peeps said was here? It must be close, Lo said.
They’ll tell us.
As if in answer, the people spoke for the first time in several days: A gool is on the mountain beyond the trees. A day, a night, a day, as Duro says, and you will see.
Is it big? Xantee whispered.
You will see.
They slept, then went on for two marches, with the land rising more sharply and the trees thinning out. Several times Xantee thought she saw a flicker of people moving in the trunks, but she could never be sure – and she sensed that it was harder for them; they were nearing the edge of their domain.
A glimpse of mountain showed: an ice field shining, high.
The jungle under-storey gave way to fern, then to sharp grass that cut their legs. They wrapped them in cloth from their packs and struggled on.
Xantee, Lo, Duro, this is the place where we must stop, the people said.
Is there – is there any way we can thank you for your help? Xantee said.
Kill the mother gool. She comes from the other side.
Of what? Duro said.
That lies beyond our knowing. But find where it is born, and learn what you must do.
Easy to say, Duro said.
Cross the mountains through the pass beyond the peak lifting like the bow of a sunken canoe. We cannot pass, but Dwellers who have come this way say it’s hard but sure. On the other side the land lies easy to the jungle. Call for our brothers and sisters there.
Thank you.
What about the gool we have to pass? Duro said.
It lives below the peak. You must stay on the lower side of the gully. Unless it has grown the way lies open.
Will we see it?
See, and smell, and taste it in the air, and hear it mewing like a sick tree tiger. Don’t go close. It lashes with its arms, and took a woman from a Dweller family passing through.
Xantee felt sick, remembering the gool that had dragged Sal and Mond towards its mouth and tangled Hari in its arms. This one would be bigger if it almost blocked the pass. And they would see it. It had no need to make itself invisible like the one Sal and Mond had found.
She thanked the people again but wasn’t sure they heard. The suddenness of their going would offend her if she let it – but what they had done, keeping them safe, guiding them, went beyond friendship. They might never come close, never be seen or named, but Xantee felt her kinship with them.
Let’s get out in the open. I want to breathe again, Duro said.
Don’t forget to keep watch. We’ve got no help any more, Lo said.
They kept on through the dwindling trees into hills climbing to the face of the mountains. Looking back, they saw the jungle stretching north and east and west – the same jungle, Xantee realised, that Pearl and Hari had seen from another vantage point on their escape from the city. It had vanished into the distance, Pearl said, and seemed never to end. It still seemed never to end in the eastwards direction, and yet a great ocean lay beyond, the ocean that the Fish People, the Wideners, had sailed across to find a new home. She felt there was too much of everything – jungle, mountains, sea, too much space, too much past and future, too much time. She felt it crushing, not releasing, her and wanted to be home in the kitchen.
So do we all, Duro said.
Keep out of my head, she snapped.
The peak that jutted over the pass matched the people’s description: the prow of a sunken canoe. The path to its base was strewn with boulders. Pools of water lay where it levelled out, but turned to grey mud as the travellers climbed.
It’s made from dust, Duro said. See, it’s everywhere. It must be what the gool shits out after it’s eaten.
There’s nothing for it to eat up here, Lo said.
It eats the rock. It eats anything. Smell it now? Taste it? Like fish bait ten days old.
I can feel the cold, Lo said.
I can hear it, Xantee said.
Stay here. Duro went forward and peered round a boulder, then recoiled. He looked again.
It’s here. It’s huge. I can’t see how we can get past.
His face was white.
It’s ten times bigger than the one that got Hari.
Lo and Xantee joined him.
The gool had been born from an oily crack in the mountainside. It bulged from darkness into the morning light, undulating beneath its skin. The main part of its body lay on the slope down from the crack, spreading, flattening, busy at its edges with a thousand tiny mouths eating whatever they found. Except for that ant-like busyness, and the organs turning under its skin, it was like a dead jellyfish on a beach – but larger, a thousand times larger than any jellyfish ever seen. The mewing Xantee heard was the sound of hunger coming from the mouths as they fastened on the living stone of the mountain slope. Every now and then a pit like a whale’s blowhole opened in the gool’s skin – there was no one place – and a puff of grey dust shot into the air.
Xantee, Duro, Lo could not speak. Each felt the same: there was no way they could fight this beast. There was no way it belonged in the world. Yet Xantee clung to one thing:
Barni found a way. Barni killed it, she whispered.
Barni was a story, Duro said.
Stories start in something real.
Maybe. What worries me is how we get past.
There’s room, Lo said.
Remember it puts out arms like a grabfish, Duro said.
There’s still room. We keep up hard against the opposite slope, where it widens out.
Can we climb those rocks? Xantee said.
If we have to.
Does it know we’re here? Does it have eyes?
Does it have a brain? I can’t feel one.
It’s got hunger, that’s its brain, Xantee said.
It’s got eyes, Duro said. See those white things floating under its skin.
They look like a blind man’s eyes, Xantee said.
They can see. They’ve seen us.
The thousand tiny mouths were still. The hungry undulations ceased their movement under the skin.
If we’re going we g
o now, Duro said. Ready?
Ready, Lo said.
Yes, Xantee said.
They drew their black Dweller knives.
Duro led, going fast on the path while they were out of range, then veering a dozen of its body lengths away from the gool, climbing into the boulders on the side of the pass opposite the crack it had been born from.
The gool gave a loud mew – a dozen screeching cats. All its mouths had vanished and a maw the size of a brine tub opened in the part of its body nearest Duro. It grew six arms, each coiled like a rope. They unrolled heavily, then fattened and leaped, and ran like hungry stoats across the path and through the boulders. Yet they thinned as they approached, as if the creature could not force enough of its bulk into the tubes it was shooting out.
‘Come on,’ Duro yelled. Come on: a silent cry, even louder. He scrambled a dozen steps clear of the probing arms. Xantee came behind him, also clear. She felt in greater danger from the stink and taste of the creature, and from its malevolence – it had a mind and hated them – than from its tentacles. Then, behind her, Lo gave a yell of fright. She turned and saw him overbalance, grab at the air – at nothing – then fall backwards from the boulder he had jumped to, and vanish into a crevice. She heard his cry of agony, and a long-drawn wail.
Lo!
She turned back, jumped, peered down, with Duro quickly at her side. Lo lay wedged between boulders that seemed to squeeze and crush him like closing hands. His face was turned up, agonised, his fingers clawed the rock.
My leg. My leg.
They climbed down to him, legs and arms braced on the slanting sides.
My leg. The gool.
They pulled him and slid him free, Lo screaming with pain. Below him, in the crack, a blind grey tentacle crawled upwards, seeming to sniff.
We can’t lift him, Xantee yelled. He’s too heavy.
Rope. In my pack, Duro said.
She scrabbled for it, pulled it out, uncoiled it, as Duro hauled Lo another metre.
Round him, under his arms. Tie it. Now take it up.
She climbed to the top of the boulder.
Lo, Duro said, we’re going to pull you out. It’s going to hurt.
But Lo had fainted. Xantee felt his consciousness blink out.
Duro swore. He drew his knife, slashed at the tentacle that had found his heel. Its stub fell away. He climbed the boulder crack to Xantee.
Right, pull. As hard as you can.
Painfully, slowly, they drew Lo to the surface and laid him on the smooth top of the boulder. Xantee freed the rope, which had bitten into his chest. Then she saw his leg. It was bent halfway down the shin, almost at right angles. A long gash in the calf welled blood. She thought she saw a gleam of bone.
Duro was busy scraping gool-slime from his heel.
Duro, his leg.
Yeah, broken. We’ve got to get him back to the Peeps. No, don’t touch it. Let them.
Can they? Will they?
He’ll die if they don’t.
They stopped Lo’s bleeding with a tightly bound cloth, then hoisted him, dragged him, back through the boulders away from the gool. Then they carried him, one on each side, down the path towards the jungle. Xantee dosed him with a pain-killing drug Tealeaf had given them, but still he wept and groaned with pain.
The western sky turned red. Darkness closed in. They were in the mountain scrub, not yet in the jungle. Xantee made a torch from twigs twisted round a shard of rock and they went on, with Duro carrying Lo on his back. She felt for animals with her mind, and sent out cries for the people. It was midnight before an answer came.
Stay where you are. Lay the hurt one down.
His leg is broken.
Lay him down. Then go.
I can’t. He’s my brother, Xantee cried.
Go. We’ll take care of him.
His leg’s smashed. He’s bleeding.
We will take care. Go quickly or he’ll die.
I can’t –
Xantee, Duro said, trust them. They’ll fix him. They said they would.
I want to see. I need to know.
You can’t. You can’t see them. And Xantee, they’ll be letting him see them. No one else has, ever. So let them do it. Xantee, come.
They laid Lo down carefully. Xantee kissed him on the brow, on the lips. Her brother. She felt she was tearing her mind in half, leaving him – tearing her heart too.
Lo woke.
Xantee?
Lo, the people are going to look after you. They’ll fix your leg.
Xantee, he whispered.
We’ve got to go.
He closed his eyes. Faintly, in a voice that drifted way, he said, Kill the gools. All of them.
We will.
She kissed him again.
The people were singing. With light and harmony they led Xantee and Duro up the track. Looking back, she saw another light dome settle on Lo, and thought for a moment she saw small figures moving in it.
We’ll come back for you, Lo, she said, but felt no throb of consciousness in him.
An hour up the track the people left them. They made camp and ate and slept. In the morning they climbed to the pass. The gool was feeding on stone. Carefully they climbed and leaped past its tentacles. Without looking back – the beast seemed to suck in even a glance – they went on. The pass would take three days, the people had said. They ran when they could, trying to make up the time they had lost.
No one can come this way again. The gool’s growing too fast, Xantee said.
Unless we kill the mother, Duro said.
She made no answer. This beast was only one of hundreds loose in the world. And she had lost her brother – abandoned him – Lo, who was part of her.
Tears streamed on her face as she ran behind Duro.
I hate you, gool. I hate you, she said.
SIX
Three days and nights of wet and cold. Painful scrambling followed by painful sleep. The view at the end of it was of a magic land: brown slopes, warm in the sun, forested hills falling away. Then a band of jungle, simmering with heat. Beyond that they could not see, but had a sense of plains and water. Clouds like puffballs drifted across the sky.
But look, Xantee said, pointing west. Coldness, like a flattened dome, uncoloured and painful to the eyes, floated on a pillow of grey mist. It was almost beyond the range of sight.
Another gool, Duro said.
It’s the city. It’s some sort of cloud hanging over Belong. I wish we had Hari. We need Hari.
No wishing. What we need is the Dog King. But first we have to rest.
He was right. She was exhausted. She had travelled too hard. She looked at her legs and arms – stained, bruised, stringy, scabbed; and she was the same inside, bruised in her mind.
Sleep for a while. For the afternoon. Otherwise you can’t go on, Duro said.
Nor can you.
We’ve done the first part. Let’s get ready for the second.
And after that the third.
Yes, the third.
He looked away at the cone of coldness and shivered.
They rested not one day but two, on a bank beside a stream flowing from an icy waterfall. They washed, then ate and slept, taking turns to listen for prowling animals. Xantee felt the pain of leaving Lo recede. She must trust the people. They would heal him. And he was free from the danger she and Duro must face. She watched Duro sleep through the second afternoon, turning her eyes from time to time over the forest. Somewhere in that huge land the Dog King had his camp. She had no idea what he would be like. All she could picture was a man with a furry body and the head of a dog, yet he was human like her. She expected him to be savage although, at times, like a father, she imagined he opened his arms to her. Pearl had told him Tarl could not ‘speak’, except with dogs, so she practised what to say: ‘Tarl, I’m Xantee, Hari’s daughter. Help us save Hari, Tarl.’
Duro stood up and stretched and she took her turn at sleeping. He shook her awake as the sun went down and gave her
a meal of tubers he had found, baked in the embers of a fire. They broke the night into watches, then started south in the dawn, fresh and ready and fearful. The hills gave way to forested slopes, where trees with silver trunks and canopies of spoon-shaped leaves and tribes of shrieking, berry-eating birds reminded them of the forests by the Inland Sea. Their confidence returned. They did not need the people. The people were stupid to live in the jungle when they could live here.
But help Lo, look after Lo, Xantee whispered, contrite.
The next day they reached the edge of the plateau where the forest ended. The strip of jungle ran below like a wide, black river.
Climbing down took another day. They faced the close-packed, damp-leaved, indifferent trees – their third jungle. Neither wanted to go in. Perhaps alone, they would find their way through – eating berries and grubs, making paste from toadstools to ward off poisonous insects, making a wall with their minds to lock animals out; but there might be some new animal, too strong for them, or animals that hunted in packs – or, or . . . Xantee could not number the dangers. Snakes too quick for their defences, swamps that might suck them down, rivers too dangerous to cross – all the things the people had guided them past. They needed the people.
Call them, Duro said.
Join me. You’ve got to help.
They sent their voices out – their knitted voice. The answer came at once. The people had been waiting.
Tell us what you need.
Each word was like a breath of wind rounded at the edges.
Take us to the Dog King, who will guide us to the city to find the gool, Xantee and Duro said.
Follow us.
Wait, Xantee said. My brother, Lo. He’s with your people on the other side of the mountains. He was hurt. Is he all right?
Our brothers and sisters told us you were coming. The word travelled far ways, through the narrow jungles at the mountains’ end, by the sea coast, but no word of a human. Follow us.
Please –
Xantee, they don’t know, Duro said.
They can find out.