But as they got closer, he noticed that it was in fact floating in the sky and that it was a creature, or more accurately, a group of creatures, like a pod. He could sense Sendra’s fear as its shape and form became more evident. He looked to his friend who was standing slightly behind him and tried to reassure him with a look, but Sendra’s apprehension was written all over his face.
They were grey with great folds of overlapping skin that waved in the air and probably provided their means of propulsion. There was no sense of a head or even a body, though by pulling back a fold of skin from their centre, a sort of face was revealed with a mouth. Myka was convinced that they could sense him. When they got closer he realised that they were many, though all interwoven with possibly a leader at their head. Though it was hard to tell how high they were, Myka estimated that the leader by itself could probably cover their craft. They hovered right over them and Sendra became doubly scared. Myka knew that this concerned the creatures so with his head craned right back, he reassured them with his thoughts and then turned to Sendra.
‘Sendra, stop being scared, you’re upsetting them.’
‘What are you talking about? I’m upsetting them. To tell you the truth, Myka, if you weren’t here, I’d be in the water by now.’
Then as he watched, a long thin tendril dropped from the leader near its centre. It was like a vine or rope, only grey and leathery looking, and it lingered just in reach of Myka. He instinctively touched it and it wrapped around him, only gently. Myka knew that if he wanted, he could be carried off the craft but he told it no and just stroked it instead. Sendra looked on in awe; he would never have expected such behaviour from Myka, and for a moment he was reminded of their encounter with the igram that had happened just prior to the Ocean Woman’s arrival.
Myka turned to Sendra. ‘There is land just over the horizon, more land than you can imagine.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I can sense it.’
There is danger there too, but Myka kept that to himself.
He let the tendril go and it recoiled away from him back to its home.
The whole group wandered off to their left and then they witnessed another extraordinary sight. A whole nest of tendrils dropped into the sea, and to both Sendra’s and Myka’s amazement, they came up with freshly-caught fish which they raised into gaping mouths. Then the whole group returned back over their heads and dropped some of their catch onto their craft. Sendra and Myka chased after them as the fish bucked about on the deck trying to return to the sea, but some of them were already dead, as if stunned.
When they looked up again, the flying waves, as Myka would later call them, had flown away to their left again, but further away now and eventually disappeared over the horizon.
‘What were they?’ Sendra asked.
‘I don’t know, but they are the most powerful creatures around here, of that I am sure.’
‘How did you know it wouldn’t hurt you?’
‘I just did, although at first they were quite scared of us.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘I don’t know, Sendra, I just can.’
And Sendra knew that was the only explanation he was going to get. Sometimes, he had to admit, Myka was pretty scary himself.
Myka saw the grey airborne creatures as a sort of welcoming party, as he knew now that land was just over the horizon, and it appeared to them just as he had predicted.
There were enormous cliffs and Myka knew that they needed to find a beach so he sailed north as the winds made it easier for him to do that. But as he sailed along the coast, the cliffs gave way to rolling hills, and against a blue sky at one stage, he thought he saw smoke. He pointed it out to Sendra who squinted at the distant horizon.
‘I don’t know Myka; you have much better eyes than I have. It could be mist or just cloud beyond the hills.’
Eventually they found what they were looking for: a sandy stretch of coastline where they could safely beach their craft. Beyond the beach was a thicket of low-lying bushes, but from out at sea they knew that behind them lay rolling grey-coloured hills. By this time the sun had passed midday, but after securing their craft they walked through the thicket-covered sand dunes and came to an open vista of rolling green hills. It was a windswept place with few trees but on the most distant hills there was a darker green, and Myka recognised it as a forest, though what lay beyond that he could only guess.
‘What are we going to do?’ Sendra asked.
‘We just have a look around. If there’s nothing to hunt around here we just move further along. This isn’t an island, Sendra; there’s a lot of coastline we can explore.’
They walked inland but they soon realised that it was a long way to the treeline and they didn’t want to leave their craft unattended at night. They didn’t find anything to hunt, but food wasn’t a problem as they still had the fish that had been dropped on their craft that morning.
Back on the beach they found some driftwood and lit themselves a fire before the sun went down. It was strange, Sendra thought, to see the sun setting over the sea instead of rising over it, as it had done back home. Also the sheer expanse of the beach and the land that ran inwards further than he could walk, made him realise how far from home he really was.
He turned to Myka. ‘We made it, didn’t we?’
Myka smiled at his friend. ‘Yes. Sendra, we did.’
‘What are we going to do tomorrow?’
‘I’m not sure. I’m thinking it might be better to sail further north and see what else we can find. If we don’t find anything more promising, we can always return.’
Even though their craft was beached it was more comfortable to sleep on than the ground. Sendra went to sleep before Myka because they were still used to sleeping in shifts, and Myka built up the fire before he retired around midnight.
He was awoken by Sendra at first light, and he knew even before he opened his eyes that something was wrong. They were surrounded by a group of men holding spears. Myka counted six. They were different from Myka and Sendra in that they wore thicker clothing made from animal skins covered in fur. When one of them spoke, both Sendra and Myka struggled to understand them, though his words were familiar, they sounded strange to their ears.
It took a while for Myka to realise he was asking where they were from.
‘We come from far away.’ Myka pointed towards the ocean.
There was no response from his interrogators. The Kiri measured time by the constellations, so Myka drew in the sand, using Kiri symbols, the constellations that they had travelled under since they had left.
‘That is how long we have travelled over the sea,’ he explained.
The men, all older than Sendra and himself, looked at each other. Myka was not sure if he was believed, or if they simply didn’t understand him.
‘Where are the rest of your people?’ The same person, obviously the leader of the group, was asking all the questions. Myka noticed that he was also the heaviest built and most aggressive looking.
‘We left them behind, we have travelled alone.’ Myka gesticulated a lot when he talked, in the hope that he was more readily understood.
Again, there was a look of disbelief, and Myka had the sense that his interrogator had a fierce temper barely controlled. However, he knew he could do no better than tell the truth, whether it was believed or not.
The leader waved his spear at them in a beckoning motion. ‘You come with us.’
‘What about our craft?’ Myka asked.
But the leader simply repeated himself and his entourage moved forward to physically remove them. Myka and Sendra stepped onto the beach before they could be manhandled.
The leader gave further instructions, and to Sendra and Myka’s astonishment, four of his party started to push their craft towards the water. Sendra yelled, ‘What are you doing?’, and rushed to stop them, but the nearest simply pushed him onto the sand.
Myka raised his hand. ‘Let it be,’ he said in
a surprisingly calm voice, and there was no more violence.
Sendra could see that Myka had a tight rein on his emotions and realised that there was nothing they could do. They watched the men push their craft into the ocean and let it drift away. Myka knew that it might well end up back on the beach, but could also end up broken up on rocks depending on the whims of the sea. But more significantly, he knew that the leader of this group was giving him and Sendra a message: they had no independence here.
With no possessions of their own, Myka and Sendra were forced to walk surrounded on all sides. The leader of the group actually brought up the rear and walked directly behind them. Myka realised that he did this so that he could observe them without them knowing his intentions.
Myka had never observed psychological power games like this before but he was learning quickly.
They walked along the beach in a northward direction. At the end of the beach, they climbed over a hillock and then followed a gully. Myka wondered how far they needed to go and why they had seen no signs of these inhabitants the day before. As they walked, the sun climbed over the hills to their east and bright shafts of light gave new relief to the landscape. The gully continued to track north and east, with the sea following them on their left, and Myka realised that it had been hidden from view when they had conducted their quick foray the previous day. They eventually came to a well-worn track; the sun climbed higher in the sky but they didn’t stop walking and no one spoke. The silence alone was a strange sensation for Myka and Sendra. There didn’t seem to be any friendliness in this group, either towards them or between themselves.
The track led them into a deeper gully until they found themselves in a dry valley floor. Eventually, when the sun was almost overhead, they rounded a corner and they could finally see where they were heading. The valley seemed to come to a blind end and rose about them on all sides. As they got closer, they made out people walking along tracks that crisscrossed the slope, and Sendra and Myka came to realise that there were openings in the ground, not unlike the caves their own people lived in back home. All along, the ground had appeared dry, covered in a tough mud-coloured grass, but above the valley Myka noticed there was a ridge line crowned by trees. Of course, the location gave the inhabitants a good view of the area seawards.
Their approach naturally produced a lot of curiosity and people stopped and pointed. The group kept walking up a zigzag path, and people quickly got out of their way. They were mostly women and children, but they were all very solemn. Sometimes they spoke amongst themselves but Myka couldn’t hear them. The children clung to their mothers and there was no laughter or play, but the sight of strangers in this place, Myka thought, would probably be enough to silence anyone.
They climbed right to the peak of the valley without rest. They were led to the entrance of one of the biggest caves, and while they stopped outside, the leader entered alone. Myka noticed that there were two guards standing outside and next to them were lit fires even though it was almost midday. This cave was situated so high that the treeline started just above it. When they looked back the way they had come, Myka noticed that the sea was clearly visible. He hadn’t realised that they had climbed so high. He saw that even from here, smoke from the fire that he and Sendra had lit the previous evening would have been visible against the setting sun, albeit they had beached further south.
They didn’t have to wait long before the leader of the group returned. Behind him came an even bigger man, both in height and girth. He walked right up to Myka and Sendra to intimidate them with his size. He examined them closely and walked around them as if they were specimens before he said anything.
He asked the same questions that his offsider had asked when they first met. ‘Where are you from?’ His dialect was thicker and his voice was deeper and rougher.
Myka squatted on the ground to draw a map. ‘We come from over the sea,’ he explained and drew the islands that they had come across. Next to the islands he drew the constellations again to show the time that they had travelled. He was going to say, do you understand? but thought better of it.
‘Where are your people?’ the man asked.
‘They are here,’ and Myka pointed at the mark he’d made to represent the start of their journey. He still wasn’t sure he was understood.
‘How many years are you?’
Myka counted his fingers off on both hands and then the toes on his right foot, plus one toe on his left, which was the Kiri method of counting. He then sliced one finger in half with the other to indicate he was another half year older again, as if it really mattered.
The man looked at him suspiciously but when he spoke next, he spoke to his men. He used some words that Myka and Sendra didn’t understand, then he turned back to them. ‘We will keep you here until your people come for you.’
‘They won’t come,’ Myka said and then the man hit him with the back of his hand so forcefully that he fell to the ground. Myka was absolutely stunned. He put his hand to his mouth and noticed it was bleeding, but the pain had already been replaced by numbness.
‘I didn’t ask you to speak,’ was the explanation he was given.
The look in Myka’s eyes made the man smile; it was the look of surprise mixed with fear. He turned his back on them without another word. Myka was yanked to his feet by the original leader of the group with the one command, ‘Move.’
Only then did it occur to Myka that no one had asked them for their names and no one had given them one. Sendra looked at Myka but didn’t say a word. Myka could feel Sendra’s anger building up so he said to him, ‘I’m okay, don’t worry.’
He was prodded by the blunt end of a spear for speaking. The leader said, ‘You are a slow learner, aren’t you?’ After that they said nothing.
Myka had never been hit like that by anyone. In his clan it was unthinkable that an Elder would hit someone like that, even for insolence. It was the shock of the man’s behaviour, as much as the actual physical blow, that contributed to Myka’s deepening sense of unease.
They were led to a nearby cave and told to wait inside. Two men were left to guard the entrance and inquisitive onlookers were chased away. Sendra and Myka noticed that the cave had been largely excavated and was not natural, but this did not surprise them, as people had done the same on their own homeland. Eventually they were brought some food and water but no one spoke to them or even made eye contact. When they started to whisper to each other, one of the guards entered and told them to be silent or the food would be removed.
Elvene had set herself a territory where she believed there would be enough food, and where she had found a shelter against the colder weather. This part of the planet was richer in both flora and fauna and very hilly, even mountainous, though nothing was familiar to her. Many of the smaller animals were adapted to flight, though there was nothing feathered, and many of the plants were more mobile than she had seen in other environments. Even so, despite its complete foreignness, the landscape had a certain beauty that she would have found hard to explain. She put it down to the stark contrast from the subterranean world that she had recently escaped from.
She hunted with her crossbow mainly, but she also found plants that she could dig out of the ground, as well as some fruit-bearing plants above ground. She ate the fruit and she ate the small animals that ate the fruit. There were smaller variants of the flying wolf she had seen with Myka and smaller animals that burrowed under the ground, most of which were nocturnal. Many of the trees on this planet, she noticed, were carnivorous and were not a source of food or shelter.
She knew the danger of eating out her habitat and she knew that if it snowed then finding food would become more difficult. She had crossed under a mountain range after escaping from the marauders, and she knew it was impossible to cross back over it with winter imminent. She had found a cave that had obviously been occupied by something much larger than her, but it made an ideal shelter. Its previous owner had been a large six-legged animal with a thi
ck furry coat, and when it came to reclaim its home she killed it with her stun guns. The animal was most reminiscent of a bear but it walked on four legs and used the front two for grasping, so it looked like a centaur with a bear’s torso. She concluded that it probably used the cave to hibernate through winter and that did not augur well for her. Nevertheless it was a source of protein and its skin could prove very useful if she could make it durable.
She kept herself busy by scouting for food and learning about her environment, noticing the signs of changing weather, and watching the stars as the Kiri did, only they were different on this part of the planet. She wondered how long she could survive like this and even if she would survive the coming winter, the severity of which she could only speculate about.
Physically, humans required food and protection from the elements to survive, but psychologically, they required hope. Elvene knew that without hope the will for life was easily extinguished. She knew that her only hope now was a rescue from the Corps. But the fact that she hadn’t seen or heard any sign from the Corps since their departure made that an increasingly remote possibility. Elvene realised that she was in denial, but denial, she told herself, was another survival mechanism that must have evolutionary value, for it was one of the most resilient of human traits.
In the evolutionary scheme of things, humans had gone off on a branch of their own a long time ago, pre-space travel even, the result of which was a complete dependency on technology that only grew and never diminished. The humans on this planet, she realised, were an aberration in that regard, and that was a mystery in itself. Living without technology was now the biggest challenge a human could face. But worse than that, given her current circumstances, humans had never evolved to live alone or in isolation.
Every night she lit a fire, using a spark from her stun guns to ignite dry kindling, and that was her greatest comfort, like it was some sort of surrogate company. Just lighting a flame gave her a sense of control over her environment, but only after many frost-laden nights, did she realise that the flames from her fire had become the sole source of her hope.
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