I would, however, I insisted, be listened to.
And so they listened. And I used my newly acquired power to change our world. And this I have done; all the good that exists on my world, the clear blue waters of the lake, the comradeship, the use of cabins, the division of labours, the fertile plains, the Rhythm of Life itself-all this I caused to be.
Sharrock had no knowledge of all this; he arrogantly assumed I was merely a gullible and docile pawn of the Ka’un.
But in fact, I had defied the Ka’un, without them ever realising. I had turned their nightmare slave ship into a place where sentients of many species could live, and love, and share the joy of friendship.
So I have done; of this I am proud.
I found Cuzco on a crag, on Day the First, looking down at our world.
“The views,” he told me, “are wonderful up here.”
I looked at the views. They were indeed wonderful.
“Are you brooding?” I asked him.
“Fuck away,” Cuzco advised me.
“You are.”
“I am, indeed, you ignorant ugly monster, brooding,” he conceded.
I sat with him, in silence, for an hour.
“I’m still worried,” I said eventually, “about Sharrock.”
Cuzco snorted. “No need; he’s doomed. Forget the little cock-faced biped, for he’ll be marble soon enough. You worry too much, Sai-ias.”
“But I care about him. And it was a hard time for all of us, remember? The first few years. You must have-”
“You are so fucking pathetic!” Cuzco raged at me, cutting off my words. “You’re like a fucking mother to the new ones! You’d feed them the food from your mouth if you could. You sad ingratiating suck-arse! You can’t coddle creatures like this. Fly or die, that’s the way of the world.”
“I helped you. ”
“No one helped me.”
A lie, of course. Cuzco had also been an angry, bitter new one; I had spent many hours trying to teach him how to bank down his rage, and to find the moments of joy concealed in the bleakness of his life. Now, of course, he denied that he had ever needed me, or received any help from me; such was his pride.
“He reminds me a little of you, in fact,” I ventured.
“Go fuck a cloud!” said Cuzco. “He’s a biped. I’m a-a-” And he used a word that the air could not translate, but I knew it meant he had status. He was a giant among beasts, even on our interior world.
And, indeed, I often felt that Cuzco was a truly magnificent creature. He was a land giant with the power of flight; his armoured wings made him somehow lighter than air, and so he was able to effortlessly dance among the clouds, though he weighed more than Fray and myself put together. And his body was beautiful, in its own eerie fashion: he had two torsos, linked by bands of armoured flesh, and orange scales that glittered in the light. And claws on his haunches and torsos that could, when he so chose, be as delicate as hands. And no head; his face was on the breast of his left body, and he had features that were expressive and flexible and eyes that seemed to me to twinkle with delight when his mood was cheerful; though that was, in all honesty, not often.
“I fear Sharrock is harbouring a secret plan,” I admitted “He thinks he knows a way to defeat the Ka’un.”
“Perhaps he does.”
“You know he doesn’t. It’s folly.”
“I once,” said Cuzco, “had ideas like that.”
In his first year on the ship, Cuzco had, like me, attempted to attack the Tower. And to do so he had gathered a formidable army of aerials who had joined Cuzco in his attempt to breach the Tower’s invisible barrier from above. But storms had battered them and Cuzco’s six wings had been ripped off him so that he crashed like a rock in the lake, and the savage gusts of air had ripped the entire flock of aerials into shreds. Blood had rained upon us all that day; blood and beaks and feathers and scales and fragments of unrecognisable internal organs that pelted downwards and left our bodies soaked and stenched. Many of Cuzco’s followers were still mutilated after their mauling by the storm; and none of the aerials ever spoke to him now.
“Perhaps you could talk to him,” I said. “Counsel him to be-”
Cuzco stood up and his hackles rose, and terrifying spikes emerged from his body.
“I will tell him nothing of the sort! What do you take me for, you cowardly colon-full-of-shit? You do not comprehend,” said Cuzco, “what it is to be a warrior!”
“I comprehend it totally.”
“My kind were masters of all creation! We vanquished all the lesser breeds in our galaxy, and we were proud of it!”
“Your words bring you shame. You are nothing but a monster, Cuzco,” I told him, wearily.
Cuzco snarled; and then he stood; and leaped off the cliff top; and with grace and majesty he flew above the clouds, a patch of orange blurring the blue sky.
“Monster,” I said sadly, knowing it was true. If I’d met Cuzco in any other setting, he would have been my enemy, not my friend.
BOOK 5
Sharrock
I was tired of running; I had been running for days; yet still I ran.
I knew that in the trees they were faster than me; so I seized my moment and broke through into a clearing, and knew it was just a few more minutes to the lake But then I whirled and saw that the wretched monkeys had me surrounded. They had clubs and knives; there were a hundred or more of them. An army. They cackled and screamed with delight; and were clearly convinced I was not capable of causing them any further trouble, with the odds so heavily in their favour.
They did not, it seemed, know Sharrock!
I clutched the stone in my hand, relaxed my body, and calculated the distance between myself and Mangan and his regiment of tree-huggers. My eyes quietly scanned the mob. I identified the dominant beasts who needed to be slain first; and then I cleared my throat so I could deliver a battle-roar to confuse and paralyse the more timid ones.
I also considered how I could use the monkeys themselves as weapons; using the bodies of the dead ones to club the live ones, whilst using my teeth to bite and sever arteries. I recalled the time on Latafa when I was faced with a baying mob of two hundred highly trained four-armed centurions, and slew them all. All in all, I concluded, my task here was difficult, but by no means impossible. For as the historians of Maxolu all agree-with only those two irksome exceptions-I am indeed the greatest Northern Tribe warrior of all time!
The monkeys roared more rage, and started to slowly move towards me. I thought for a few moments more. Calculating all my options. Plotting my various potential battle moves.
Then I quietly let the stone drop out of my hand.
“Do your worst,” I said calmly.
And they did.
Sai-ias
I laid Sharrock’s bloodied body down upon the grass, and I bathed him in water from the water-of-life well; oozing the healing moisture on him through the spiracles in my tentacle tips.
“Can you speak?”
He grunted, and opened his mouth; inside was a bloody void. As I’d suspected, his tongue had been ripped out. His torso was bruised and bloody, and I suspected there was severe internal damage. They’d also eaten one of his eyes.
He grunted as the water drizzled on to his naked body.
Just as I’d feared, Mangan and the arboreals had taken their revenge.
For twelve cycles I tended to Sharrock; nursing his wounds, talking to him; telling him stories. His wounds healed, and his tongue grew back quickly; but he was not communicative even when he did speak.
After six cycles he was able to walk.
After ten cycles he made a sword out of a tree branch; the wood was tough and the point was viciously sharp. He killed a non-sentient grazer and skinned it and fashioned himself a scabbard. He used the hooves to make knuckle guards, to help him with hand to hand combat. For days he collected stone remnants at the quarry and from then on always carried a bag of stones and a sling.
“Will you
take revenge?” I asked him.
“You want me not to?” he said mockingly; for his tongue was now regrown.
“I want you to forgive them,” I said.
“You know I cannot do that,” Sharrock said sternly.
“Please, Sharrock. For me?”
“Never!” he snarled. “Those branch-fucking savages tricked me. Ambushed me! I was trying to do as you told me, live in peace. But they attacked me anyway.”
“And now,” I said sadly, “you will attack them?”
Sharrock looked at me; his pale blue eyes were calm. And he never, I noticed, felt the need to blink as many bipeds did.
“No,” he said, calmly. “These weapons are just for self defence. I gave a beating, I took a beating. Further violence would be folly, so now I’m done. From this point on, I embrace the way of peace.”
“You really mean that?”
“I really mean it,” Sharrock avowed.
I felt so proud.
Over the next twenty or so cycles, I got into the habit of spending the early mornings with Sharrock by the lake side.
He loved to fish; he had fashioned lines and nets and captured dozens of fish each day, all of which he released back into the water. And he was a gentler spirit now, after the mauling from the arboreals. A status quo had been achieved; indeed, Mangan and Shiiaa and the other arboreals occasionally invited Sharrock to share their cabin at night, and there they told each other tales. Sharrock had passed, and survived, his brutal initiation.
Sharrock talked often to me about his family-his love-partner Malisha and his daughter Sharil, and Malisha’s brothers Tharn and Jarro, and their love-partners Clavala and Blarwan, and their assorted children-with love and tenderness. And he told some delightful stories about the stupid things that young Sharil used to do, and the even stupider things he used to do to make her laugh.
And I told him that I had been merely a child when I was taken by the Ka’un. I had never had sex, or known adult love; my adolescence ended when I was captured by alien invaders and brutally beaten by the then occupants of the Hell Ship.
He was clearly shaken by that story; it affected him sorely for days.
I talked to him also about Cuzco and his warrior code, and I tried to get him to see how unutterably foolish it was.
“My people were not like that,” Sharrock protested. “Cuzco is just a savage; from all you say, no better than the Ka’un. But we were a cultured and a civilised people.”
“Truly?”
“Truly.”
“Then tell me; how many Maxoluns have you killed in single combat?” I asked him,
Sharrock was shaken by the question. “Hundreds,” he admitted.
“And in war?”
“Thousands.”
“And you feel no guilt?”
“None.”
“You should.”
“Perhaps I should,” Sharrock conceded.
He was silent for a while, made pensive by my words.
“How can that be?” I asked him. “How does a child become so ruthless a warrior?”
“When I was eleven,” he said, “I was sent into the desert, to spend three days and three nights alone. And,” he said, his eyes sparkling at the recollection, “it was hot. Fierce hot, with air that scorched the lungs. I drank water from roots. I hid from predators, including the great Sand-Baro. And I fought the Quila. These are four-legged creatures, the size of my hand, with vicious teeth, who live in the sand itself. And every dawn on our world the Quila would emerge from their sandy burrows and bask in the sun and feed on the flesh of unwary creatures who strayed their way. I killed six thousand of them before my father came to fetch me.”
“And what did that teach you?”
“Ha! That Quila will die, if you hit them hard enough with a club. And furthermore, if you judge it right, they will squirt blood from both ends.” He laughed bitterly. “It taught me nothing. No, not true, it taught me how to survive.”
“Yours is a brutal culture.”
“I’d never,” admitted Sharrock, “thought so, before I met you.”
“Imagine,” I told him, “a world where sentient species collaborated, and helped each other, and cared for each other. Where discovery mattered more than victory. Would that be so bad?”
“Not possible.”
“We achieved it. My people.”
“Then the Ka’un came and your people didn’t know how to fight,” Sharrock taunted me.
“At least we lost a civilisation,” I said. “You lost-what?-a barbarism?”
Sharrock’s features were pale with shock; my words had hit home.
“Perhaps,” he said, and I marvelled at his courage in accepting that his entire life might have been founded on moral error.
And so, buoyed with confidence at Sharrock’s new attitude, I decided he was finally ready to learn the real truth about our terrible world.
“It is time,” I told Sharrock, “for you to meet your own kind.”
Sharrock and I travelled up past the lake to the mountain ranges, and thence into the deep Valley where the smaller bipeds and the Kindred dwelled. The air was darker here, and clammy in the throat, and the high ground was just rock without any covering of soil. But the valley itself was rich and fertile, and twin rivers trickled and gurgled their way through it.
I had built these rivers with my own teeth and claws and the help of all the giant sentients. We created channels that were pumped with waters from the lake; and to our delight, the lake could refill itself by some unknown automatic means, so the rivers always flowed.
And further down the valley there were fields, fresh ploughed, and grazing animals on the grasslands. We proceeded on a pebbled path down a steep slope, as giants walked below us; I, slithering down on my segments, Sharrock running along beside me.
And at the gateway to the village of the Kindred, we were greeted by Gilgara, their chief warrior: a bearded colossus who was twice as tall as Sharrock, and who, like Sharrock, had upper arms as large as his head and strongly defined muscles upon his torso.
Sharrock bowed, clearly impressed by Gilgara’s military bearing and physique, and avariciously eyed the metal sword that the giant wore in a fine leather scabbard.
“You have weapons?” Sharrock said.
“Forged with fire; the metal comes from walls in cabins that we have pillaged,” said Gilgara.
“Impressive,” said Sharrock, respectfully.
Next to Gilgara was Mara; a glowering female warrior with one eye larger than the other. Mara peered at Sharrock, and a smile grew.
“Fresh meat,” Mara said, looking at Sharrock, and Sharrock’s own smile faded.
Sharrock then started to warily look around him. There were twenty or more Kindred warriors strolling out of the village to join us, each twice as large as he, wearing furs and hides over their shoulders and groins, leaving legs and arms and midriffs bare; and many were ornately tattooed.
And there were a considerable variety of smaller hairless bipeds too; some with three eyes, some with two, or five; some with two arms, some with four, some six arms, some eight; some with soft skin, some with tough hide; some were grey in colour, many pink, some blue, some purple, quite a few black, many were bronzed, and a handful of exceptional specimens had colourful striped skin. But all were of a similar morphology to Sharrock; comprising minor variations of what I firmly believed was an archetypal biological form.
And some of these small bipeds wore loose shackles with chains at their feet, to prevent them running away, and bore a haunted look. While others wore rich leathers and strode proudly; but still wore metal shackles around their upper arms, and kept their eyes averted from the members of the Kindred.
Sharrock was studying it all, with that attentive and curious look on his face; I knew it would not take him long to work out the power balance here.
“These peoples live side by side?” he whispered to me. “The giants and the similar-to-Olarans?”
“In a manner
of speaking,” I explained. “The smaller bipeds are slaves to the Kindred.”
“Slaves?”
“They have no freedom; they fetch and carry; they are flogged if they disobey; slaves,” I clarified.
The sharp and angry intake of breath from Sharrock alarmed me.
“We came here,” I explained to Sharrock, “for you to see this, and to absorb the lessons it holds about the reality of power on this world, and then to leave.”
“Have you brought this squalid wretch to join us?” asked Gilgara, interrupting our private conference with arrogant brusqueness; as if we were the food on his plate that had dared to converse.
“Not so,” I explained, “Sharrock has come merely to pay his respects.”
“He must stay. All bipeds live in the Valley,” Gilgara said fiercely.
“Fuck away,” I said calmly. “This one is protected by me.”
“You’d live with this monster, not with your own kind?” roared Gilgara to Sharrock.
Sharrock stared up at the giant warrior. “Why do so many wear metal bands on their arms?” he asked.
“Each band bears a name; it denotes the master of the slave,” Gilgara said, matter-of-factly.
“We are all captives here,” Sharrock said calmly. “But none should be slaves of-”
Gilgara spat at him; it was a vast gob of green, and I admired the giant’s aim; it struck Sharrock on his forehead, and dripped down his face; but Sharrock’s stare did not falter an instant.
“We are the Kindred,” said Gilgara. “We are no creature’s slaves. We serve the Leaders of this ship freely, and voluntarily.”
It took Sharrock a few moments to comprehend what he was being told. He looked at me; I waved my tentacles to indicate agreement, and realised that made no sense to him, so I said: “That is so.”
“The smaller bipeds, however,” said Mara proudly, “ are slaves, And you shall be too.”
“Never!” Sharrock said angrily.
Mara drew her finely forged metal sword, and pointed it menacingly at Sharrock. Gilgara did the same, in a swift gesture as fast as lightning spanning the sky. Sharrock tensed, ready to fight.
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