Crystalline streams roared through rocky channels, fed by perpetual snows far above. Beyond the snowcapped heights hung a mass of heavy clouds that spread out at least once a day to dump heavy rain over us and the rest of the land, which kept the vast majority of Pangea looking like a very large, tropical island.
“So the world is divided into tribes,” I asked our little group.
“Yes,” Nova said. “I’m from the Nyala. In Sa Fasi.”
Bruk reacted strangely, though no one saw it but me.
“It’s mostly a village built into the cliffs above the Usayasa Um,” Nova continued, “the shallow sea beyond the Land of Endless Dark.”
“How did you wind up here?” I asked her.
She sighed, and looked around at the others as if preferring not to speak in front of them.
“I was running away from Gudra, The Ugly,” she answered, as though that was explanation aplenty.
“Who’s Gudra, The Ugly?” I asked, “ And why did you run away from him?”
She looked at me in surprise, then spoke to me as if I were an infant.
“He’s called ‘Gudra, The UGLY! Do I really need to say more than that?”
I laughed. “I suppose not. But why is he ‘The Ugly’?”
“He was in a fight with a bear. Gudra lived, the bear died, but the bear won, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah. I think I do.”
“Gudra placed his trophy before my father’s house,” she said, continuing to explain. “The head of a very large Endevak.”
“The head of a … what’s an Endevak?”
“An Endevak? Big, hairy… long, curving tusks.” She looked at me very strangely. “You must be from very far away. Everyone knows what an Endevak is. Anyway, it sat there in front of our door, stinking terribly, collecting flies, for a long, long time. No one placed a bigger trophy beside it, so… Gudra, The Ugly was going to have me as his mate, and I didn’t want to be his mate.”
I stared blankly, waiting for more.
“So I left Sa Fasi,” she said, simply.
“I would have put a… what’s bigger than an Endevak?”
“Just a bigger Endevak. Maybe a Hakchata.” She saw my confused expression. “Like what you saved me from many sleeps back?”
“I would have put the head of a Hakchata at your father’s door. Two Hakchatas. Maybe a baby Hakchata as a bonus.”
Bruk laughed, and I smiled at him. Nova leaned in against me and squeezed my upper arm, as if finding it wanting.
“Oh, would you, now? Well, then. Go ahead and get me one.”
I grabbed the links of chain connecting us.
“Sadly,” I said, not really sad at all, “I am unable to, at present.”
“Well, then you’d better hope Gudra doesn’t find me, because he has rightful claim.”
“I can take him.”
She laughed. A little too hard.
“I would fight for you,” I said, wounded.
“I would rather you lived for me. You haven’t seen Gudra.”
“Well,” I said, not liking her lack of faith in me, “no point in dying needlessly. It is a very weird kind of custom.”
“It’s the only custom we know,” Nova said, looking at Bruk. “Do your people have a similar custom?”
“Doesn’t everybody?” he shrugged.
“Not my people,” I admitted. “We have to actually ask the girl. Usually with an offer of a ring for her finger.”
Bruk laughed so hard I thought he might choke. When he saw I wasn’t kidding, he stopped, and looked embarrassed.
“Oh,” he said. “You were serious.”
“Yes, I was serious.”
“And what if the girl says ‘no’,” Nova asked, playfully.
“You have to find another girl.”
“I like that custom,” she said, leaning against me, again. “But you would not have to find another girl. I would not say ‘no’.”
Bruk and Milton smiled along with me, but I noticed that Hajah—who apparently had a thing for Nova—was not so pleased with her obvious devotion to me.
“When Gudra made his offer to my father,” Nova said, “no one as powerful wanted me. My name… is from a hopeful parent, an old man who is no longer much of a hunter. He was once, but a Durik threw him, and he lost the use of his right arm and one side of his head. My brother, Naga, The Mighty, had gone to the land of the Hilleya to steal a mate for himself. So there was no one—no father, no brother, no lover—to fight Gudra for me, so I ran. After a few adventures and a lot of sleeping alone, I ended up down near the sea watching some idiot do a strange, circular dance with a young Hakchata and a Nyame. I foolishly speared the Hakchata and now look at me.”
“Well, I’m sure he meant well… hey! Who you calling an ‘idiot’?”
She and Bruk laughed. Even Milton was amused.
“So now you and this idiot are chained together,” Bruk said, playfully. “Who’s the bigger idiot?”
“That would be me,” she said, leaning lovingly against my chest.
“Slaves of the ‘Grigori’,” I said. “So what are the Grigori, exactly?”
Again their faces gave away their obvious shock.
“I can almost believe you are from another world,” she said, “because the alternative is that there’s something wrong with your brain. Are you serious, Brandon, the Mack? Do you really mean to tell me that you don’t know what a Grigori is—the mighty Grigori who think they own all of Pangea and everything that walks or grows, or creeps, or burrows, or swims, or flies within it—you and me included?”
“I really mean to tell you.”
She shook her head, sadly. After a confused glance toward Bruk, who again, only shrugged, she tried valiantly to explain to me what a Grigori was. Unfortunately she could only use comparisons to other things I didn’t know about or understand, and so I was lost. In this way they were like Ingonghus, in that way they were like the hairless Peeli. They were smart, but couldn’t speak. They were old, but their skin was sleek and smooth.
About all I learned was that they were hideous, had wings, and webbed feet; they lived in cities built underground; could swim beneath the water for long distances, and were very, very intelligent—much more than most Pangeans.
The Angara were their soldiers and slavers, weapons of offense and defense, while the weaker races like Nova’s and Bruk’s were their hands and feet—subservients who performed all their manual labor. The Grigori were the dominant species of the inner world… the supreme masters of Pangea.
And the only way to stop being their slaves… was to die.
* * *
LOVE AND LOSS
* * *
HAJAH, PRETENDING TO TRY and help with Nova’s explanations, occasionally forced his way into the conversation. Most of his remarks were directed toward her as he offered words that might—supposedly—help me better understand. It didn’t take half an eye to see that he had it bad for the girl, and not knowing the customs of this world, I had no idea if it was as clear to everyone else as it was to me that it was a pointless thing—Nova was mine, and I was hers.
For her part, she appeared completely oblivious to Hajah’s thinly veiled advances. Wait. Did I say thinly veiled? Supposedly there was a time when cavemen used to show interest in a mate by hitting her over the head with a club. By comparison to that Hajah’s interest might be considered thinly veiled.
I had been making assumptions about the customs of this place because of Nova’s sexual freedom, and ease with admitting her feelings for me. But I could clearly no longer afford to do that. At the next opportunity for privacy I had to ask her what it would take to make everyone else understand that I loved her, and would stand against anyone, Gudra, Hajah, the entire population of Grigori—if necessary—to keep her beside me forever.
I wanted her to understand that she would be protected from the Nyames and the Hakchatas, and the whatever elses. I wanted to grow old with her, have many beautiful children with her
, and though back on the more prudish outer Earth, still somehow continue the practice of having sex with her anywhere and whenever the urge arose. I didn’t know how I was going to work that one out, but I was motivated.
She spoke easily with me, with Milton, and with the taciturn Bruk because we were respectful, and kind, and friendly; but she couldn’t even see Hajah the Wily, much less hear him, and by ignoring his interest and obvious attraction to her, she only made him furious. On the outer world he would have qualified as a stalker, and I had to make certain I never left Nova alone and unprotected with him. At one point, he tried to get one of the Angara—the one I’d nearly drowned—to switch her place in the chain with Bruk, moving her further from me and closer to him, but the panther man only jabbed him with his spear and warned him off.
“I will buy the girl from the Grigori,” The Angara said, arrogantly. “She is ugly, but she has good hips for children, and likes sex. When we get to Emibi, she is mine,” he said, glaring at me. “And no one else’s.”
Bruk glanced at me with an ‘I told you so,’ expression, and shook his head sadly.
Nova pretended she was unfazed by the comment, but the way she clung tightly to me told a different story. At the next rest stop our lovemaking was quiet and sad, and at the end Nova curled her face into my chest and cried, softly.
“Nova,” I said, gently, “No, sweetie, don’t cry. Look. You know I’m… that I’m not from around here… that my customs are different from yours. So, I want to know… can you… what exactly do I need to do…” I paused and realized I was confusing myself, so she must be hopelessly lost. “I want to marry you, Nova. How would I do that? How I would take you as my… whatever… my mate.”
Her face turned quickly up to mine, her eyes sparkling in the constant noon of the sun.
“You would… really want me?” she asked as if it were the craziest thing she’d ever heard, and so unexpected that it was breaking her heart.
“More than you can possibly know,” I said, kissing her.
When our lips separated, she again buried her head in my chest, and held me tight. I felt tears on my skin.
“You cannot have me. The only way is to fight Gudra, and he would kill you. I would rather lie under Gudra the rest of my days than watch him kill you.”
“I might beat him. I’m tougher than I look.”
“He is twice your size, and well-trained in all the weapons of war.”
“Well, then,” I said, sighing, and deciding I should give up trying to convince her, “maybe we’ll just avoid him entirely. Would you mind if it meant you would never see your village—never see your father or brother, again. Would you be okay with that?”
She shook the chain that bound us.
“I will never see my village, or father, or brother again. I’m on my way to become a slave to the Grigori. And they decide who will have me.”
“What if we could escape—be together, and not as slaves. Would that be enough to make you happy?”
She lie down and curled up close to me.
“We have a saying in Pangea,” she said, trying to force a smile. “‘Death takes you whether you laugh or cry. So you may as well die laughing.’ I will be happy with you wherever we are, Brandon the Mack. For however long that will be, and be happy with the memories when we are finally pulled apart.”
AFTER PASSING OVER the first string of mountains we skirted a flat, salty sea, whose surface churned with immense life, and fantastic underwater battles. We watched a fight between plesiosaurs with long necks stretching ten or more feet above their enormous bodies, snake-like heads splitting wide with gaping, fang-filled mouths whose sole purpose seemed to be shredding another plesiosaur’s dark skin, lining it with rips and tears of red blood and dead, white flesh. Milton waxed poetically on all the astounding discoveries, the world-altering possibilities that would shock the scientific community if we ever made it back home.
None of it mattered to me. Only Nova mattered. I needed to find a way to get us out of this, and keep her with me.
Perhaps in an effort to distract me Nova explained that we were watching Endevakuum, or Endevaks of the sea, and that the other, more fearsome reptiles that occasionally rose from the deeper waters to battle them were called Umnyames, or sea-Nyames—what Milton called Ichthyosaurs. They looked like a cross between a whale and an alligator to me. I wondered absently if they were better, or worse looking than Gudra, The Ugly.
“Brandon,” Milton called, after we had marched for too damn long beside that wild, insane sea. “Brandon, I used to study paleontology, and I believed what I learned—I really did; but now I can see that I didn’t believe it—couldn’t really; that it’s impossible for people to believe anything like this until they experience it with their own eyes, and all their senses. We take things for granted, I suppose, because people tell us about them over and over again, with no real means of proving or disproving them—like religion, for example; but we don’t really buy into these ideas, we only think we do. If I were faced with the living God right now I don’t think I would be any more stunned than I have been seeing these living, breathing creatures from a child’s pop-up book!”
At the next rest, as Milton and I discussed an idea for escape, Hajah the Wily managed to find enough slack in his chain to allow him to worm his way back, very close to Nova, who was sitting in the shade of a tree. The rest of us were all standing, and as he edged nearer to the girl I wanted to protect more than anything, she turned away from him in way calculated to make it clear that she didn’t even want to acknowledge his existence, let alone his interest, and the gesture made me smile.
But in the next instant he grabbed her roughly by the hair, and forced her down with one hand while pressing her legs apart with the other, kneeling hard on her opposite inner thigh to give himself force and leverage. His pulsing erection sprang up, clearly visible to me and everyone around us. I nearly screamed as he maneuvered the thing between her legs.
Nova struggled, shot a pleading look in my direction, and it was done.
I moved explosively, my right fist denting the side of his head, my left breaking his ribs. He dropped like a bolted steer. The instant he hit the ground I was on top of him, pounding his face viciously as he tried desperately to block me. I never meant to kill Jessica’s boyfriend, but in that moment, I would gladly have ended Hajah.
A roar of approval went up from the other prisoners and a few Angara who had absently watched the little drama unfold; not, apparently, because I had defended Nova, but simply for the neat and—to them—astounding method I’d used to fell my opponent.
Forcing myself to be done bloodying Hajah, I backed away from him, and carefully lifted Nova to my side, looking around at the others as if saying, ‘she’s mine. Touch her, and you’ll get the same.’
Warning sent, I turned to her as she looked at me with wide, wondering, hopeful eyes. But after a few seconds of tense waiting during which I could feel every eye digging into me, her own eyes moistened with tears, and she slowly dropped her head, a delicate flush coloring her cheek. I looked around at the others, some smiling, some embarrassed, and many—mostly the women—furious with anger. What had happened? What had I done?
For a moment Nova stood completely still, in absolute silence. Then she lifted her head high, tears streaming down her face, and turned her back on me the same way she had on Hajah. Some of the prisoners laughed, a few made embarrassed sounds, and I watched the face of Bruk, the Hairy, turn dark with anger, bitterness and confusion.
“What?” I asked. “What did I do?”
But no one answered. Shortly we were resuming our march, and though I realized I had—in some way—offended my beautiful Nova I could not get her to talk to me. Sometimes she cried, sometimes she was angry, but all the time she was silent.
“I want to fix it,” I said. “Let me fix it. Nova, please!”
Eventually my anger and pride took over, and I stopped any further attempts to communicate. What had felt like
the love of my life had ended as abruptly as it had started. From that point on I confined my conversation to Milton. Hajah—face bruised, eyes swollen shut—avoided me, and because he tightened the chain to stay as far from me as possible, Bruk could not get near me to answer my questions. So it was Milton and I, alone again, at the center of this mad, mad world.
The endless marching now became a perfect nightmare for me. Though Nova and I were never more than five feet from one another, we were never closer than two worlds apart; the more she avoided me, the more I resisted talking to her; two disparate cultures, one similar kind of pride. I longed desperately to get close enough to Bruk to beg for the explanation I was sure he’d give, the simple thing I could do that would make everything right between Nova and I. But Hajah kept us too far apart for any reasonable conversation.
Eventually I became desperate, determined to swallow my anger, and once more beg her to please explain how I had offended her, what stupid thing I had done, and how I might make it all better. I decided to insist at the next rest stop. Force her to talk to me. Ahead, I could see us approaching another range of mountains, but when we reached it, instead of winding around and through the slopes over some windy and difficult path, we entered the mouth of a huge, natural tunnel—a series of twisting caverns as dark as a pit.
Just before we descended away from all visible light, Hajah turned and looked back at me, glanced once meaningfully at Nova, then returned his attention to me, grinning that shit-eating grin of his. He stopped just short of winking at me.
My heart collapsed.
“Nova,” I said, trying to take her hand as darkness enveloped us. “Nova, stay close to me.”
“Get away from me!” she said, yanking her hand free of my grasping fingertips.
The Hollow World: (Pangea, Book 1) Page 10