by Matthew Lang
“Go, go, go!” Adam hissed, and after a quick look behind, Duin guided Zoul up over the boulders, and only when they were far away did they urge Zoul to slow down, Adam reaching forward to soothe the trembling lizard.
“Can you see the others?” Adam asked.
“No,” Duin said after a moment. “And I can’t smell them either.”
“Did you see which way they went?”
Duin shook his head. “Sorry, I was too busy trying not to get us eaten.”
It took Adam a moment to realize his friend had made his last explanation without a trace of irony or sarcasm. “Given the circumstances, I’ll forgive you,” he said dryly. “It’s a pity about our food, but on balance, I’m just as happy being alive.”
“Let’s climb a tree or something,” Duin said, his eyes already searching the canopy above them. “Maybe we’ll have more luck spotting them from a height.”
“Sure,” Adam said. “Let’s just get the riding belt onto you.”
“We can swap if you prefer?” Duin said.
“No, that’s all right,” Adam said as he unbuckled the riding belt and slipped it around Duin’s waist. “I’m happy enough to stay where I am”—and possibly humping your ass, his brain added, and Adam would have laughed at the inappropriateness of it all had he not been so shaken.
ONCE THEY were properly strapped in, with Adam’s hands resting on the thick belt around Duin’s waist, they picked the tallest tree and urged Zoul into a slow walk. Even so, Adam found himself trembling as they rode up the tall gray trunk spotted with lichens and small epiphytic orchids. Adrenaline, he told himself, it’s just the adrenaline and the fight-or-flight response kicking in.
“Are you all right?” Duin asked over his shoulder.
“Yeah,” Adam said. “I’m fine—or I will be fine.”
“Good,” Duin said. “We just survived an attack without serious injury. Don’t fall apart on me now.”
“I won’t,” Adam promised. “How far up should we go?”
“Probably no more than this,” Duin said with a grin. “Look over there.”
Now at the level of the lower boughs, Adam peered through the maze of branches he had come to think of as the aerial highway. Off in the distance, in the direction Duin was pointing, was a small plume of woodsmoke.
“They made it,” Adam said, breathing out a sigh of relief.
Duin grinned at him. “Let’s catch up with them.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Adam said. “Let’s hope none of them were injured.”
“I’m sure they’re fine,” Duin said as he nudged Zoul across the boughs and back down to ground level.
They rode comfortably for several minutes, and it was perhaps because of their relief at being safe that they failed to notice the warning signs and blundered out of the undergrowth at the edge of the clearing into… the village in the clearing. It was made of longhouses, each raised high above the ground on tall wooden stilts. A few goats—the first mammals larger than the six-legged striped rabbits he had seen disappearing from their path over the past few sleeps—cropped at the short grasses. The most impressive of the longhouses stood in the center of the village, ringing a large open space. They were ornately carved, and the walls painted in pictorial art that reminded Adam of Aztec carvings he had seen in old back issues of National Geographic at his dentist’s. The other houses lined a dirt track that wound its way to the edge of the clearing closest to the distant river.
Small four-armed children, naked or wearing scraps of leather and rag cloth, darted between the house stilts, throwing balls of woven grass or chasing after flitterfish and other small creatures—some of which were then clubbed to death. Others helped the women of the village weave baskets and prepare food. The women were dressed in skirts of grass and wore strings of beads around their necks, torsos largely bare to the sun. The men wore even less than the women, most standing tall, muscular, and naked other than a large gourd secured over their genitals with leather cord. A few wore scraps of Aergonite armor or leather wrappings, but they were more decorative than anything, the rainforest climate not being conducive to heavy clothing. Clothing would also have obscured the swirling tattoos that covered their bodies, many with regular raised patterning that didn’t seem like natural skin. Their hair was a uniform black, worn in intricate braids or dreadlocks, and their four arms grasped a large variety of tools and assorted weaponry.
“Kanak…,” Duin breathed.
The kanak at the edge of the village had stopped their activities and were staring at the mounted pair as if they couldn’t believe their eyes. One of the warriors was the first to react and brandished a spear at them, bellowing a challenge.
“Run?” Adam suggested, but Duin had already turned Zoul and urged him into the reptilian equivalent of a gallop along the edge of the village. Unfortunately the kanak had missile weapons. The children threw whatever they could get their hands on—fruit, pebbles, and in some cases, goat dung. Dodging the smaller missiles was bad enough, but Adam was worried about the flurry of actual weaponry that was bound to come. Zoul’s path took him to a cliff rising up on the far edge, and Duin guided the lizard straight for the rocky surface.
“Try following us now!” Duin crowed.
A spear hit the cliff beside them, the force of the throw driving it several inches into the crumbling rock surface, causing Adam to start. More spears followed, and then the air was filled with tiny darts that clattered all over the cliff face and bounced off Adam’s armor. Except one. Wincing, Adam reached up and plucked the small feathered dart out of his neck. The top was splattered with blood—his blood—and a strange black smear. Absently he noted the feathers on the dart meant the kanak must have brought down a number of the slasherclaws. Then his vision began to blur.
“Oh shi—” he said as he blacked out, and his fingers slipped from Duin’s waist.
Thankfully, he was unconscious before he hit the ground.
Chapter 9
ADAM AWOKE to pain. He was in a sunken wooden pen, hands bound behind his back and a thick rope tethering his left leg to a large protruding root. He was on his front, his face mashed into the dirt. As he raised his head, his gaze focused on a large black ant that reared backward, antennae waving as it considered whether or not to crawl up his nose. Despite the pain, Adam pushed himself into a sitting position away from the ant and its fellows, trying to put as much distance between his flesh and the insects’ overly large mandibles. Closing his eyes against the spinning of the world, he tasted blood in his mouth and wished—for the first time, truly wished—to be sitting on his couch back home. Spitting onto the earthen floor, Adam huddled in the corner and looked around his prison.
The pen was made of thick bamboo and shaded by a tree with foliage so blue it was nearly black. Aside from the ants, and a hairy spider he hoped wasn’t poisonous, Adam was the only inhabitant of the small cell. Experimentally he started to rise, only to fall back down as his left leg protested vociferously. Gingerly testing his calf, he concluded nothing was broken, but given his lack of firm medical training, it was more of a hope than an actual diagnosis. Taking further stock of his situation, Adam found he had been stripped of his armor, although he still retained the leather leggings Darius had insisted he wear, along with his hiking boots, and he immediately wished he had continued to keep a knife in his boot.
Wincing, Adam knee-walked over to the wall of the pen, which stood, palisade-like, in the ground. At one point, a mixture of mud and grass—at least, he hoped it was mud and grass—had been used to fill the gaps between the poles, but the twice-daily rainstorms had washed most of that away, allowing Adam to peer out into the village proper. It was much as he remembered outside, but the goats were huddled under the longhouses, and there were no villagers in sight. Frantically he searched for something sharp—a blade, arrowhead, stone, anything, but he came up empty and resorted to twisting his wrists to loosen the rope that bound his hands. Or he tried to. The air was hot and muggy, and soo
n sweat dripped down off his brow into his eyes, causing him to blink and curse, eventually closing his eyes entirely. It wasn’t as though he could see what he was doing even with them open.
In the distance, thunder rolled and sounded again, much closer. Then the heavens opened and the rain descended as he had become used to… only this time he was not in the safety of a well-crafted shelter. Now he was out in the middle of it, and although the rain was warmer than that he might have experienced at home, it still leeched the warmth from his body after a while, reducing him to huddling by the tree for what little protection the leaves gave him. Hours later, when the rain finally eased, he was numb with cold and barely looked up as sounds of activity filtered through the fence.
Leaning against the wall, he nonetheless caught bleary, unfocused glimpses of the village outside, and he got his first lengthy look at the kanak. The one he saw carrying a baby clutched to her breast was obviously female and wore the grass skirt he had seen earlier and a string of brown, red, and ivory beads. After a moment, Adam was surprised to notice that the kanak females only had one pair of breasts on their upper pair of pectorals, the lower pair having nipples but no mammaries. The baby was clutching at her with three of its four hands, the last holding the long necklace of beads she wore around her neck. The children resumed their games, and a few of them scrambled up the side of the wall and stared down at Adam with their wide yellow-green eyes, whispering and giggling among themselves, some of them ducking back behind the fence if Adam met their gaze. A few of the more daring ones threw pieces of twig and small pebbles at him, and he wasn’t able to stop himself from flinching, causing the children to squeal with excitement. Then one of the larger kanak warriors came to the fence and stared down into the pen, grinning when he saw Adam looking back at him. Turning away, he bellowed something in the guttural kanak tongue, and activity around the camp stilled, and then started again in a frenzy of noise and bustle.
Sometime later a gate at the far end of the pen opened and four males entered, two of them armed with long ceremonial-looking spears. Staring at the large, muscular warriors, the fight drained out of Adam. Logically, he knew his chances of not going with them were next to nothing. His left leg protested again when he was hauled to his feet, and again when large hands grabbed his neck and limbs, holding him near immobile. The rope around his foot was removed with a swift cut by an extremely sharp saber—looted no doubt from some unfortunate Aergonite scout—and Adam was hauled out of the pen with quite a bit of ceremony.
The path from the animal pen to the center of the village was lined with kanak of all shapes and ages, and a heavy drumbeat rang through the air as he was pushed along. With his limited vision, Adam was unable to see much, but could make out that the path between the longhouses led toward the central gathering spot he had seen earlier, with a large fire pit piled high with deadwood awaiting the touch of flame. Seated on a throne of wood and bone was a large kanak male wearing a richly woven loincloth and a gorget of bone and turquoise, as well as a headdress of red-and-brown slasherclaw feathers—and infuriatingly, Adam’s battered watch glinting from a leather thong around his neck. Standing to his right was an older female leaning on a gnarled staff, the goat skull and beads of bone and turquoise indicating her rank as a shaman or medicine woman of some sort. She wore a red silk wrap over her shoulders and around her waist, and an ornate grass skirt that almost reached her feet. Her expression was proud and serene as she watched Adam’s approach. Behind them was a carved totem, rising tall above the longhouses, carved and painted with horns, claws, teeth, and scales of yellow, and what looked like the suggestion of bat-like wings and fire breath. Before them was a low table, or rather, two table halves, which looked like they fitted together, barring a small circular hole in the middle. He stared at it for a good twenty seconds before he realized what he was looking at and started to struggle.
ONE YEAR, Adam had taken a bludge subject typically reserved for international students, which had included a camping trip to Uluru in the middle of the vast Australian desert. Basically a glorified tourist outing. Adam had ended up sharing a tent with a hunky American exchange student named Rusty—who had made it very clear he was interested in what Adam had hidden in his pants, and the feeling was definitely mutual. Rusty’s father had, prior to retirement, been a businessman with some big multinational company, although exactly which one was escaping Adam’s memory just now. They’d just been treated to an outback barbecue, with kangaroo and emu both on the menu, and then the tour guide had broken out the witchety grubs—long, roundish moth larvae that were a squidgy white and yellow, looking for all the world like someone had squished balls of chewed gum together and covered it with a thin, semitranslucent membrane.
Toasted over the fire they tasted a lot like peanuts, or at least, so it was said. However, the thought of eating grubs had almost proved too much for “processed hot dog and sliced cheese” Rusty.
“I can’t believe you made me eat that,” Rusty had said, turning over to face Adam when they crawled into their tents after a few beers.
“It’s good for you,” Adam said as he pulled on the clean T-shirt he was planning on sleeping in. “Besides, aren’t strange foods like that meant to make you more virile?”
“Virile? You and your dictionary words. What’s that one mean?”
“Extra horny,” Adam said, grinning.
“Now, I don’t need help with that. And the moment I don’t want to barf thinking about what I just ate, I’ll prove it to you.”
“Is that so?” Adam said, lying down next to his friend.
“Well, I’ve heard it gets cold in the desert at night.”
“I’ve heard that too.”
“Don’t you think the best way to keep warm is sharing body heat?” Rusty suggested. “Not with a T-shirt that reads ‘Mister Clever’?”
Adam laughed, ripped off his shirt, and joined his friend, quite literally, in the sack.
Later, when they were drowsing off in their now zipped-together sleeping bags, Rusty snuggled up against Adam’s back. “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten?” he asked suddenly.
“Raw snail. Dare in year ten,” Adam said promptly. “You?”
“Witchety grub. Tonight.”
“Oh come on, you don’t have any stories?”
“Not personally, no,” Rusty said. “My dad was fed monkey brains, though.”
“What?”
“Monkey brains. Fresh from the monkey, apparently.”
“Explain, please?”
“He was in… I think it was Egypt? Or somewhere in Africa, anyway, and he was served monkey. He said they had a table with a hole in the middle—they put the monkey’s head through the hole and use a knife and….”
ADAM HAD wondered if Rusty, or possibly Rusty’s father, made up that story, but now, staring at a table of two halves with a hole in the center, he was beginning to think he might be experiencing something similar firsthand—and from the wrong end.
A great roaring cheer rose as Adam struggled uselessly against his captors, only to be forced to his knees as the wooden table snapped around his neck, the rough wood pricking into his skin. From his new vantage point, he could see old bloodstains and knife marks on the table’s surface, and he bucked his shoulders and tried to rise to his knees, struggling to dislodge at least one half of the table, even after heavy wooden pegs dropped through two sets of matching holes that lined up, one over the other, to lock the tables together.
“Fire! Fire!” Adam yelled, on the basis that someone was more likely to respond to a call of “fire” than a call for help. He got his feet under him and heaved up, but found the table was far too heavy for him to budge.
He didn’t know how long he struggled, shouting and yelling as the sunlight steamed down in its unwavering blood red. But then the shaman began a chant, which slowly crescendoed with the boom of drums and the stamping of many kanak feet. A wicked-looking stone knife was placed on the table in front of him, and
his eyes nearly crossed as it lay before his sweating face, the point facing directly toward him.
I’m going to die, his brain said quietly. I’m going to die a horrible, painful death in some fucked-up jungle, and no one at home is going to know where I’ve gone. Fuck my life. Heck, fuck my death.
Adrenaline had long worn off. He had been jerking to get free for so long, slamming his neck around the wood of the table so much that he was certain he had rubbed his flesh raw by now. As the chanting reached a fever pitch, the chief picked up the stone knife, then raised it above his head. The blade glinted dully in the sunlight, and Adam saw flecks of dried blood on the blade. With a desperate heave, Adam threw himself backward, and the table rocked, teetering slightly before settling back, trapping him firmly beneath it. With a toothy grin and what sounded very much like a chuckle, the chieftain brought the knife down hard.
Adam screamed.
The crowd laughed as the stone bit into the wood barely a centimeter from Adam’s face. Grinning, the chief wrenched the knife out of the wood and raised it above his head again. Adam looked up in defeat. Maybe it wasn’t this stroke. Maybe it wasn’t the next, but eventually one of them would connect, cracking his skull open and hopefully ending his life before the kanak brought out their spoons, or whatever implements they ate with.
He didn’t even register the bellow and the rush of footsteps as anything unusual until the chieftain toppled over, borne to the ground by some great furry snarling thing. The kanak fell heavily against the table, knocking it over and knocking out one of the pegs. Adam’s neck twinged as he was thrown forward and to the side, his nose stopping mere inches from the ground. With a final push of desperation, Adam shouldered the table halves apart and pushed himself out through the resultant gap. Gritting his teeth against the pain of his sprained ankle and more than one complaining rib, he ran forward, dodging around the shaman, who tried to block his way. The drums had stopped, and a babble of panicked voices rose to fill the air in its absence.