by J M Hemmings
Then there was the PTSD. The nightmares of violence and death that tortured her mind every night were so vivid and horrifying that she would, more often than not, do her utmost to avoid falling asleep. She could handle combat and shooting well enough; instinct seemed to take over when action was required – and this surprised her just as much as it did the beastwalkers. It was when she was alone, when everything was quiet, that it was worst. She would break into cold sweats, and waves of debilitating panic would crash against her mind like the ocean pawing relentlessly at the dark shore. When it got really bad, she would start to hyperventilate, and would begin to lose touch with reality, slipping into a hallucinatory state. Back in California, Lightning Bird had helped to soothe her troubled mind on such occasions … but now Chloe really was on her own, and there was no magic to help ease the terror. Njinga and William did what they could to help, but often Chloe couldn’t do anything but ride out these attacks.
At this moment, however, her mind was clear and her reflexes were sharp. She was ready to do whatever needed to be done.
Drawing in a deep breath as she prepared to shoot, she focused on the target ahead, and as she did, the two-dimensional figure began to morph, the black outline both sinking into and popping out of the paper at once to create a three dimensional being: a man, dressed in the SWAT-style gear in which Huntsmen troops were commonly attired. And before him, kneeling on the ground, her wrists handcuffed behind her back, her broken spectacles lying shattered on the floor, and tears and blood, intermingled, streaming down her cheeks as she begged for her life, was the ghostly figure of Paola.
The Huntsman paid no heed to her plaintive cries. He pressed the muzzle of his M-16 rifle against her forehead and squeezed the trigger.
Gunshot after gunshot rang out in rapid succession, but there was no empty trigger click at the end of it when the pistol clip was empty; Chloe had long since learned to count every shot. When she lowered her smoking pistol, the Huntsman soldier, riddled with blood-oozing bullet wounds, looked up at her with a leering grin.
‘You’re next,’ he rasped, chortling mockingly before melting into the air and drifting into the trees like a foul fog.
Growling a wordless snarl at the fading apparition, Chloe slammed the warm pistol into its holster on her hip, and then turned around and began making her way back to the camp, dabbing at her perpetually sweating forehead with a handkerchief as she walked. She stuffed the damp cloth into a side pocket of her camouflage-pattern military trousers, and then, bucking to an old habit that had not yet been overcome, put her hand up to her head to run her fingers through a thickness of hair that was no longer there. Gone was the neon hair she had proudly sported before; her skull was covered now with hair in its natural dark chestnut hue, buzzed all over in a number two cut.
Little serpents of sweat slithered down her bare arms and glistened in salty beads on her shoulders, and the black tank top she wore clung to her torso with its warm dampness. This forest was quite different to the North American one they had spent time in near Graeagle. Looking around and keenly taking in details of her surroundings, Chloe noted, as she always did, small minutiae that others may have overlooked; the twist of a tree trunk here, the shape of a rock recalling a crouched rabbit there, or seeing a portal to another world through a rare gap between intermeshed plants competing for restricted streams of sunlight.
This Asian jungle, she mused, was an interesting paradox in action, at once welcoming yet simultaneously alien and threatening. Far hotter, more foliage-crowded and sweaty than the Northern Californian forest, the oppressiveness of the humidity here was something that she was still not used to, despite having been in Cambodia for three weeks now.
She rounded the final bend in the trail that led to their camp and saw Zakaria squatting next to a camping kettle boiling on a gas stove, while William was heaping spoonfuls of instant coffee into mugs on the flat rock that served as their table, and Njinga was stripping and cleaning an AK-47 at the edge of the clearing.
Chloe paused, hovering at the final curve of the trail, observing the three of them. It was apparent that each was still grieving the loss of Paola, as was she. She was intimately familiar with every striation, outcrop and gash on the cliff-faces of the chasm that was sorrow and grief; she had been there – was still there, languishing in its dark depths, where the rays of the passing sun never quite reached.
In the first days after Paola’s death, Chloe had been a tangled mess of grief and rage, and for a week or two afterwards had regarded the beastwalkers’ expressions of grief as fake, as put-on and ingenuine. Paola had her had been friends since elementary school, while these imposters had known her for all of a few weeks. What right did they have to grieve – or, worse, to pretend to grieve? Once the initial pain of her friend’s loss, like a third degree chemical burn, had grown less fierce and immediate, however, Chloe had begun to look at the beastwalkers’ grief in a different manner, and she had come to realise that their sadness at Paola’s passing was every bit as indubitable as hers. Between beastwalkers, the bonds of friendship were in many ways different to those forged between mortal humans, with their short lifetimes and their support systems of lovers, families and children. In the lonely existence of a beastwalker – an existence in which one was permanently forced to exist in the murky twilight of society – flitting always from shadow to shadow to remain as invisible as possible, one’s only family was made up entirely of friends; other rare individuals who knew all too intimately the pervasive fear of being constantly hunted, the grief of seeing mortal friends and lovers consumed by age, disease and death, and of having to tear up one’s roots from the earth the moment they started drinking of its deeper waters, over and over and over again. Even if the bonds of friendship these beings forged were created in a short time, they were dense and strong, and as genuine as anything she had felt for her friend. And, what was more, she had come to understand that the beastwalkers were saddled with an additional burden: that of guilt, of having dragged her and her friends into this war, and of now having to deal with the fact that an innocent child had died because of it.
Each had dealt with the pain, sorrow and guilt differently. Zakaria, the warrior monk, the perfect soldier, the ascetic, had plunged himself even further into the rigours of discipline, prayer, combat training and meditation. Every day he was up long before dawn to practise katas and weapons drills, and he slept on his own on the depths of the jungle, speaking to the others only when he had to issue commands and instructions, or to oversee their training.
William had dealt with it in his own manner too. He had become more withdrawn and less gregarious, and his gaze would often seem to drift off in the middle of conversations, focusing on invisible phantoms wafting through the trees. He would leave sentences half complete and trail off before finishing what he wanted to say. Some nights he would disappear on his own in his tiger form, and return muddied and bloodied up, often a day or two later, with no explanation as to where he’d been or what he’d been doing. Any concern about his erratic behaviour was swiftly deflected, and the topic firmly changed.
Njinga had become calmer and gentler, not just with the men, but with Chloe especially. This was something that the teen was starting to resent, though; here she was, the only child among adults, and all she wanted was to be treated as one of them, but Njinga’s persistent coddling of her was making her feel even more singled out and isolated from the others instead of allowing her to feel as if she was integrated into the group.
‘The training is going well,’ Zakaria grunted as he filled up the mugs, one by one, with boiling water.
‘Aye brother, we’re almost ready for the assault,’ William muttered, dumping a spoonful of instant coffee into the last of the mugs.
There were ten mugs on the rock; four for Chloe, Zakaria, William and Njinga, four for the other Rebel beastwalkers who had joined them, or were about to join them in Cambodia, and one each for the Thai Army colonel and his assistant who would smuggle
them across the border into Thailand in a few days. Lightning Bird, Jun and Daekwon were still in North America, protecting Parvati. Jun would have been more of a risk than an asset for this mission, and while Daekwon’s athleticism and natural talent for combat would have made him a perfect addition to the Rebels’ ranks, the fact was that as a nearly seven-foot-tall black man with vitiligo, he would have stood out like a sore thumb in this part of the world, and the Rebels could not afford to draw attention to themselves.
There was something else bothering the beastwalkers, though – something they had not told Chloe. A few weeks earlier they had lost all contact – or, perhaps, all contact had deliberately been severed on the other end – with Lightning Bird. They did not know whether he, Parvati, Jun and Daekwon were safe or not. They had elected to keep Chloe in the dark about this worrying fact; the girl was stressed enough as it was, and they did not want to add weight to her already hefty emotional burden. They could only hope that no news was good news.
Chloe and the beastwalkers had been training intensively in the Cambodian jungle from sunrise to sunset each day, with a few hours of night training thrown in on top of that. Breaks were few and far between; the importance and dire risk of the mission demanded peak physical performance, an acute level of alertness and extreme mental and emotional endurance. For a new recruit like Chloe it had been a process of learning entirely unfamiliar actions, movements and skills, as well as new ways of thinking, observing and analysing, and unlearning old, unhelpful habits.
In addition to the physical training, Chloe had been learning a number of languages, as well as the skills of moving unseen through the shadows, and the arts of stealth and deception. Her teacher in this was a beastwalker named Ranomi Indrawati, an Indonesian woman who could transform, in stark contrast to her tiny and almost childlike frame, into a six-hundred-kilogram Sumatran rhinoceros.
Chloe could not help but smile as she thought of her teacher. She would be coming back from her training in a few minutes, and she looked forward to seeing the petite woman’s crooked smile, so full of lively mischief, and her almond eyes, creased permanently around their ends with lines from too much laughter. Ranomi’s innate joy was a welcome respite from the gloom that hung like a shroud of unmoving fog around the others.
Ranomi had had the rare gift, among beastwalkers at least, of having lived a full mortal life before a fateful attack by a wild animal had ended her previous existence and given her this new gift of almost perpetual physical youth – and all the heartache, sorrow, fear and loneliness that came with it. She had been a great-grandmother in the twilight of her years when the attack had taken place and the magic had worked its wondrous passage through every cell in her body, repairing, revitalising and rejuvenating. She had gone, in a few miraculous months, from looking wizened, grey and bent as an old willow, to looking as youthful as she had in the prime of her mortal life.
A simple peasant prior to her transformation in the early nineteenth century, Ranomi had stayed true to her simple roots, even though she had been forced to leave her home village and family behind, after being condemned to death for being a supposed witch. Despite having travelled the world, she had chosen to spend the majority of her life in her native Java, living as bucolic an existence as she could, but having to move on to a new area every decade or two, both to avoid Huntsmen and to escape the ever-present threat of being persecuted for witchcraft in communities that were steeped in old superstitions and throttled by religious fervour.
Despite the enormous gulf in their life experiences, Ranomi and Chloe had been able to find a surprising amount of common ground, upon which the foundations of a friendship were solidifying. Momentarily caught up in a recollection of one of their recent conversations, Chloe stared up at the green mesh of tree boughs and vines and palm fronds, detached from the present. William’s voice, however, sliced through the haze and snapped her back to reality.
‘Here’s your coffee, Chloe,’ he said, offering her a steaming mug.
‘Thanks.’
‘You looked like you were having a bit of daydream there, lass. Ah, well it’s to be expected, yeah? The jungle is so full of wondrous life. All these scents and sounds and sights around us, all these creatures and plants and insects competing and cooperating at once in this beautiful symbiosis. Poetry in motion, if I’ve ever seen it.’
Chloe took a sip of coffee and stared at the foliage.
‘It’s an amazing place, even if I can’t stop sweating.’
‘You’ve done a decent enough job of acclimatising so far.’
William stopped and craned his neck to look past Chloe’s shoulder. She understood that this meant that he had sensed another beastwalker nearby, so she turned around and saw Ranomi heading down the trail towards them, her characteristic smile a bright sickle of ivory on her tea-skinned face.
She was a notch or two under five foot in height, and slender of frame and limb. Her petite size was deceptive, however. Even aside from the fact that her diminutive body could transform into that of a hulking rhinoceros, in her limbs there was a wiry strength and dangerous speed. There was not an ounce of excess fat to be found on her androgynous frame; her tawny skin was stretched tight over hard muscle, thin and taut like clingwrap over carved stone. In her almond eyes was there simmered an electric spark of wit, while behind that shiv of mischievous light a signal flare of defiant, fiercely independent zest burned in her dark irises. Chloe beamed out a broad grin, snatched the extra coffee cup from William’s hands and hurried up the trail to greet Ranomi with a hug.
Chuckling softly, William turned and headed back to the flat rock at the centre of their camp. Zakaria was already there, conversing with another beastwalker who had come to meet them in the Cambodian jungle, a three-hundred-year-old Dayak shaman from Borneo named Awang Anak Langkau. Unlike most beastwalkers, Awang bore a strong physical resemblance to the animal into whose form he could shift: an orang-utan. Like his ape form, Awang’s body was lanky, with his limbs having an almost rubbery quality to them, with their knotty muscles and protruding, lumpy joints. He was bow-legged, and carried himself with a hunched-over, round-shouldered posture. His arms were almost disproportionately long, and a broad, jutting lower jaw, a sloped forehead and heavy crimson lips added a somewhat simian air to his face.
He was not a physically attractive man by any means, but he was kind, quiet and gentle in nature, and, moreover, he was extremely wise. He had grown up in the heart of the Bornean rainforest, and there he had spent most of his life, yet even now every leaf, every insect, every bird and every creature that crawled, walked, swam, flew or slithered still held a fascination for him that verged on the childlike in its intensity. He and Zakaria were engaged in a philosophical discussion on the nature of spirituality and religion.
‘In this region,’ Awang said in his slow, measured tone of voice. ‘I’ve seen the brutality of almost all of the major religions as each came here in turn, fighting each other and slaughtering countless innocents – human and non-human – in the name of some vengeful, petty God or gods who seem to demand absolute obedience, and a complete surrender of the higher faculties of the mind to instead embrace ignorance, blind tradition and dogma. It makes no sense.’ Awang paused to shake his head sadly. ‘My friend, I cannot for the life of me understand it. The human animal has no true need to convene in vainglorious structures of stone, dead wood and metals torn with violence from the bosom of the Great Mother. Look around you! Feel the life pulsing through every square centimetre of this place! It is hundreds, if not thousands of times older than both the human species and our own kind, and surely if some higher creator exists, that being could never be some humanlike deity, nor indeed would it be like any individual living organism upon this planet. No, it would be a collection of all of them, for all were formed originally from the same substance; the same elements that we stand upon, that surround us, that over millions of years were beaten by fire and force and ice and ocean, and time – above all, yes, the stran
ge, unfathomable power we call time – into this planet, which in turn gave birth to the microbes and plants and then the trees, who facilitate all life on land. This, my friend, this is the same substance of which we are composed. The life-fire seems, to the deceptive sense of sight, to burn far greater in us than it does in this soil, but that too is just an illusion.’ He squatted down on his haunches to dig his fingers into the earth and pull up a clump of dark, crumbly soil. ‘This soil is alive, alive with the mystery and wonder of everything. We bearers of the Five Fires need no carved rock, no burned and despoiled trees fused together, no molten, reshaped ores to find higher power and love. It is already here! It always has been. I follow the truths of love, compassion, joy, peace and empathy. I have senses, and I have a brain that can fathom, through empathy, what it is for another to be suffering and in pain, and this is what informs my beliefs.’
Zakaria smiled, his gaze fixed on a distant bank of clouds in the sky, which was visible in a few ragged patches of blue through the dense green canopy of tree limbs and spiderweb vines above.
‘Once, there were more religions that shared our beliefs,’ he said. ‘I still remember the days when the Western Council still existed, and what I was when I joined them. In a sense, I am the last living Cathar, as I simply merged my Cathar beliefs with the spiritual teachings of the Council when I joined. The Catholic Church thought they had exterminated all of us all those centuries ago, but one Cathar, or former Cathar, at least, still draws breath.’