by Marc Secchia
Hunagu’s hand stopped her. “Pip no hurt self. Pip sad?”
“She Hunagu-mother. Pip sad-sad-sad.”
“Hunagu sad-sad-sad. But she better now. No pain. Still sad.”
Since their capture, Hunagu’s mother had never been fully well. Pip and he both knew that, but still, the loss clawed wounds in her heart. She could barely remember a time without her. She had nursed both Hunagu and Pip at times, fed her, picked lice out of her hair, and kept them both warm in the cold season nights. Now, she lay so still. Pip wondered if she had broken her neck.
As if to underscore her grief, fresh snow began to sift down from the lead-grey skies.
* * * *
The zookeepers gave them food containing strange herbs. Pip and Hunagu slept. They awoke in a new, larger cage, which they shared with fourteen flying vervet monkeys. The walls were even higher than before. A huge net hung over the wide enclosure, held up by six tall poles. Pip immediately began to consider if she could climb those poles and scamper across the net to freedom. But each had a circular platform near the top to discourage such an idea. The top of the wall sloped inward, making a climb from beneath difficult, if not impossible.
Pip gazed about her. The metal door was present. But this area had five windows, and a wide ditch ran around the inside of the wall, even beneath the metal gate. She saw that a bridge could be swung into place over the ditch. Now, Hunagu would be unable to reach the walls.
The flying vervet monkeys had pink, heart-shaped faces and beautiful long fur, more silver than grey, which rippled in the wind as they leaped and glided from pole to pole and handhold to handhold. Large flaps of skin extended between their arms and legs, giving them surprising agility in the air. They were vocally unimpressed by the new arrivals, but they stopped baring their fangs at Pip the moment Hunagu stirred.
Glazed of eye, he gazed about as she had. “New walls?” he grunted, at last.
“New,” said Pip.
Hunagu seemed unconcerned about the vervet monkeys. Instead, he lumbered down to the ditch to look into it. “Huh. Trap.”
Pip peered in. The bottom of the deep ditch bristled with sharp stakes–like a Dragon’s fangs, waiting to pierce unwary prey.
“Cage home now.”
How could he accept it so easily? Did Hunagu not yearn for the freedom to run and play beneath the jungle boughs? Could he yearn for a home he had never really known?
Pip sucked on her lower lip. The practical Oraial was making an examination of their new quarters, checking the berry bushes, shooing away the vervet monkeys with deep, booming grunts. He was right. The cold was upon them. Survival first. Survival, always.
As the freeze unclenched its grip on the land, big people began to return to the zoo. Pip grew weary of the endless parade of faces past their window. She formed an uneasy truce with the vervet monkeys, and learned something of their speech.
One bright, frosty morning in the spring season following the mother Oraial’s death, as four moons wrestled for space in the sky, Pip noticed a man outside, observing them with what seemed to her an unusual degree of interest. He had brought a chair. His exaggerated limp first caught her eye, then his wooden leg, which he eased out before him as though it somehow caused him pain as he sat. He wore a great fur coat and a furry covering on his head which flapped down over his ears.
As she watched, the man opened a worn leather satchel and unpacked a multitude of unfamiliar implements–pots and sticks, feathers and scrolls. The man had a bushy beard and hairy caterpillar eyebrows like many of the big people, but his eyes were green rather than brown, and seemed to take in every detail as though he lived and breathed to understand the essence of everything he saw.
His gaze never wavered from Pip and Hunagu.
The next day, he returned. Pip stuck out her tongue at him and groomed Hunagu’s ruff. The big person made many marks on his scrolls.
Pip dreamed about his intense green eyes watching her from the darkness of a jungle cavern. So she was disappointed when he did not return for several days thereafter. Just when she had forgotten the dream, however, there he was–sitting at his ease, chewing one of his sticks and smiling at her when she noticed him. Pip bared her teeth in return. He scratched busily with his feather. Pip made a few experimental cuts with her bamboo sword in the air. The man’s eyebrows crawled up his broad forehead. She made a motion toward her mouth, ‘I’m hungry.’ She was always hungry. Hunagu said she was growing. The way he said it, gently scoffing, she wanted to smack him sideways. The man only wrote on his scroll.
Monkey poo to him. Pip rooted in the soil for grubs. The man looked on with alert interest.
Two mornings later, Pip was taking a little water from the barrel beside the metal gate when she suddenly became aware of the strange man standing there, together with the zookeeper, within touching distance. She leaped back several paces before catching herself with a hiss of annoyance. Through the bars, he offered her a bread roll.
Pip eyed it suspiciously. Her stomach clenched like an angry fist. Fruit had been scarce, lately, and rats even scarcer. Right. She was no coward.
She took the bread roll with a bow of her head she had observed the big people using. “Pip thunk big pigson,” she said, solemnly, in her best Island Standard.
He showed his teeth, but a snort of laughter made her realise he was pleased. “Eat,” he said.
She repeated, “Eat.”
Then he said, in her language, “Big person gets … greets, uh–Pygmy thing.”
She was so surprised that she choked on the bread. Finally, she managed to splutter, “You’re a big person, but you speak Pygmy? Where did you learn? Why are you here?”
He laughed again, switching to Island Standard. “Slowly. Teach me. I’m Balthion.” He tapped his chest. “Balthion. What’s your name?”
Pip chuckled in return as he started the naming game. She knew what to do. She had played it with Hunagu, and learned to speak Ape. “Pip,” she said. “Big pigson … Balthi-Balthiorn …”
“Bal-thee-on. Person,” he agreed. “Pip? You’re Pip? Well, we’re going to learn a great deal together. I’m studying the ancient Island cultures, you see, and–you don’t see. Well, I’d like it very much if we talked together every day. You’ll teach me Pygmy, ay?”
Pip chirped her agreement at him. He had a nice smile. She knew they were going to be friends, just as she and Hunagu had become friends. Maybe he would teach her how to speak like a big person. Wouldn’t it help her to escape from the zoo? At least, she might learn how to properly insult the big people who came and wiped the snot-trails of their noses against her windows.
The following day, Balthion returned with another chunk of bread. He gave her half through the bars and saved the rest for after their lesson. They played the naming game. He wrote a great deal in his scroll. Balthion came daily, after that. He had questions, and pictures to name, and wanted to know every click and trill that Pygmies used in their words. Pip tried to help him understand that she wanted to learn to speak, too. Balthion, however, seemed to have only one jungle trail in his mind. Pip kept speaking to him because he brought bread, but she found herself growing angrier and angrier with each day that passed. She pounded through her warrior exercises and wrestled Hunagu furiously until he grunted:
“Pipsqueak cross. Bad thing in heart. Hunagu bad thing?”
“No, not Hunagu,” Pip realised. “Balthion.”
“Pipsqueak make Balthion understand. He not bad big person, but he not know Pygmy girl.”
Pip hugged her friend, trying to put her arms right around his neck, even though she knew she couldn’t. Would Hunagu ever stop growing in height and in wisdom? Balthion might be clever, but Hunagu could read the secret trails of a person’s heart.
When Balthion offered his next piece of bread, Pip shook her head. “Pip doesn’t want bread.”
Balthion tugged on his beard. “Right. Let’s talk Pygmy. What’s this, Pip?”
Snatching the bread
from his hand, Pip flung it across the cage. Five vervet monkeys pounced on the morsel at once, screeching and fighting each other.
He said, in his careful Pygmy, “What wrong in Pip?”
“Nothing’s wrong with me,” she shouted, turning her back on him. “It’s you.”
“What wrong with me?”
Pip ground her teeth in frustration. How could she make him understand? In his tongue, she said, “Big person speak. Pip learn big person speak.”
“Balthion learn Pygmy,” he said, in her language. “Give Pip bread. Good-good?”
“I want to learn what you know,” she replied, taut with despair. “I want to learn how to speak like a big person, Balthion, and how to make markings on scrolls. There’s so much I don’t know.”
He clearly did not understand enough Pygmy, yet.
“Pip teach Pygmy-speak,” said Balthion, in his poor accent. He had made good progress into the hot season and learned many words, but he still spoke like a baby. Pip knew she spoke worse than that in his language.
She just did not have the words to say what she wanted to say. She tore at her hair in frustration. In the end, what was boiling inside of her simply exploded out as, “Pip no monkey!”
Flinging tears of rage left and right, Pip marched off across the cage.
* * * *
That evening, a storm swept in from the north, bringing a sharp snow shower that carpeted their cage within half an hour. Pip sat beneath their shelter and caught the fat yet fragile snowflakes in her hand. So beautiful, and gone so quickly. Perhaps her parents saw her life like that. Had they mourned her death?
Abruptly, Hunagu stood beside her, his great chest heaving and his breath steaming in the cold night air. He stared urgently at the sky. “Bad thing,” he said.
“Bad … oof!”
Pip gasped as Hunagu dived on top of her. His hand was so huge, he only needed one finger to cover her mouth while the rest of his palm enveloped her upper body. He rolled beneath the shelter, taking Pip with him, but he cradled her carefully to avoid crushing her.
She was about to yell at him when she saw, past the leaf-fringed edge of their roof, a vast shadow winging from the north, as if borne on the wings of the storm. She saw clouds through it. Yet it was not a shadow, for it rippled like black, oily water–and as it passed, there was a sense of overwhelming, visceral terror such as she had never experienced before. The flying vervet monkeys dropped from their perches in a dead faint. Several cages further away, the painted dogs of the Northern Isles set up such a chorus of yipping and howling that it made her skin creep. Beneath her, Hunagu’s heart boomed against her back. He made a sound like a whimper.
The creature seemed to have wings, although it was hard for Pip to tell in the gloom. She was grateful for Hunagu’s hand muffling her mouth, for a scream finally managed to find its way up from the frozen, silent cavern of her chest, only to die against his hand.
It hungered. It hunted.
And then it was gone. Pip and Hunagu held each other until their shaking subsided. When she slept, it was to dream of the shadow-creature stalking her endlessly through a dream-jungle. Pip did not sleep the rest of that night.
Chapter 6: Lessons with Balthion
Balthion Did not return for several days. But when he did, he brought with him a table and two chairs. He placed them behind the first gate, inside the stone room, and bade the zookeeper unlock the gate into the enclosure. He seated himself with the care of a Pygmy elder. To Pip’s surprise, the zookeeper left, locking the inner gate behind him.
Pip stared at Balthion.
Bowing his head, he indicated the chairs. He said, “Pip is not a monkey.”
For the first time, there were no bars between them.
Her smile felt as though it had been masked by a cloud, perhaps for years. He understood.
Pip made to enter the stone room behind the gate, but her feet froze with a second shock. Balthion had brought a girl. She was not bad-looking for a big person. She was beautiful. She wore fine clothes, and had long, straight hair which fell down her back like a waterfall of dark jungle honey. Her eyes were the same green as her father’s, lively and friendly, and her face a slimmer, prettier version of his.
“I’m Arosia,” she smiled. “You must be Pip.”
Pip stared unabashedly at the tall girl, thinking that the twin suns had walked into the stone room, until Balthion took her hand in his–another shock–and showed her how to clasp wrists with Arosia. “Women greet like this. Men, like this.” Taking his daughter’s hand, Balthion bowed from the waist. He blew once upon her knuckles, made an odd gesture in front of his face twice, and then kissed the palm of Arosia’s hand three times.
“Arosia is twelve summers ancient, Pip,” said Balthion. “Your age.”
“No, not ‘ancient’. Say, ‘old’,” Pip trilled.
Arosia laughed. “That’s Pygmy speech, Dad? Amazing! By the Islands, Pip, we’re going to be friends. I will tutor you in Island Standard. You will learn to read and write. I will come here as often as I can after my lessons, as long as you help Dad with his research.”
Happiness spread like molten suns-shine through her veins. She wrinkled her nose at the girl. Chuckling merrily, Arosia wrinkled her nose, too.
And so the remainder of the warm season passed in a joyful blur for Pip–except for recurrent nightmares about the oily Shadow Dragon, but even those faded with time–and right on into the golden leaf-blowing of autumn. Each day, Arosia taught her five runes or five letters. Whole worlds unfolded before her. Those squiggles meant something! There were one hundred and eleven letters, and four hundred and sixty-nine basic runic symbols, which often combined with each other in bewildering ways. “Just keep practising,” she insisted, gently. “You can do it, Pip.” Pip wrote with bamboo sticks in the soil. She sketched imaginary runes on the walls. She traced words in the air with her sword as she danced through her exercise routines.
Hunagu told her she had worms in her head. Pip taught him how to say greetings in Island Standard. “Pip silly spider-monkey,” he chuckled. “Pip dance like crazy bat.”
Pip showed Balthion the name-tattoo on her calf. “Pip’úrth’l-iòlall-Yò’oótha,” she said, spelling the runes she knew with her finger. Some were different to those she had learned. She thought Balthion would swoon, he was so overcome.
“Ancient Southern runes,” he crowed. “Do you know what this means for my research? Can I copy them, Pip?”
“You won’t steal them?”
“What, chop off your leg? Islands’ sakes, girl, you do prattle on like a parakeet.”
With reading came knowledge; and with knowledge, a growing awareness of how little she knew about anything. Learning arithmetic, science, trade and the history and geography of the Island-World opened up new vistas of imagination for her. Pip eagerly traced the Crescent Islands on a map with her fingertip. That was her home. Now she could place it in her head. She learned about the three great races in the world, the Humans, Dragons, and those who could be both–Shapeshifters.
Yet she lived in a cage with monkeys and her friend Hunagu. Everyone else was free to come and go as they pleased.
Nor were big people truly free, she learned later. Big people had jobs. Some of them made war on other Islands and Island-Kingdoms. At that time, the Island of Sylakia–where the zoo was located–was at war with another Island called Tyrodia. Big people soldiers made weapons and killed each other in these wars, which sounded much like the fights her tribe used to have with neighbouring Pygmy tribes, only both Islands were making alliances with the Dragons and their Dragon Riders, who were trying to keep the peace.
Big person children had to go to school, Arosia told her. Soon, she would start attending a new school in Sylakia Town, in preparation for going to a magical-sounding place called the Academy.
“School sounds wonderful,” said Pip. “So many friends to enjoy, so much to learn …”
“So many teachers telling you exactl
y what to do and how to behave,” said Arosia. “You have Hunagu, Pip. And you’ve learned so much already. Did you know, I’ve been teaching you for two years, today? And, Dad has a special surprise for you.”
“Ooh, tell me, tell me, tell me.” Pip bounced on her toes.
“I shouldn’t.”
Pip stuck out her tongue. “Then today’s the day you have to meet Hunagu.”
“I–Pipsqueak, you are joking, aren’t you?” Arosia did not look at all comfortable with the idea.
“Come on. Two years, and you’ve never touched him. You’re behaving like one of your ralti sheep. Which I have never seen, might I remind you?”
“No,” said Arosia. A shadow seemed to flit across her expression.
“Hunagu. Come here.”
Hunagu, who had been lolling in the sun, turned to regard her with his saucer-sized black eyes. “Pip friend dare touch mighty Hunagu?”
“Behave, or Pip wrestle Hunagu into mud.”
Arosia’s eyes widened as the gigantic Oraial approached them, his knuckles sinking into the soft earth with the weight of his massively muscled upper body. Pip slipped out of the narrow gap in the gate, which the zookeeper had taken to locking in place so that it could be opened no further, and ran to meet Hunagu. She wondered how tall he was, and how many tons he weighed. Could a Dragonship even bear his weight?
“Look, Arosia. He’s so gentle.”
Hunagu scooped her up in his paw. His thumb alone was thicker than her thigh.
To her credit, Arosia came right up to the gate. She called, “Don’t leave me alone, Pip. Uh–Dad will kill me if I go into the cage.”
Pip dragged Hunagu’s hand over. Her friend was shy! Or scared. She wanted to tease the Oraial, but he had been a little touchy about teasing, recently. Male Apes, she thought. They were always acting grouchy about something. Hunagu had taken to climbing their new frame right to the top, and staring about him with what he thought was majesty. She wanted to laugh every time he puffed out his chest or admired his reflection in one of the crysglass windows. Now he would not touch Arosia?