D'Arc

by Robert Repino

  More movement. This time, the strands of silk came to life, making the entire hammock vibrate. The arachnid emerged from the bull’s-eye of the web, camouflaged with the same milky color. Its segmented legs lifted its body and propelled it across the structure, mocking the prey who could barely move. The spider had no face, only a mouth that cleaved open. The monster’s fangs clamped shut on the beaver. Then its hind legs curled under its abdomen and spun the beaver round and round, wrapping it in fresh silk that reflected the last drops of sunlight.

  Castor began to hum, the deep sound warbling in his throat. Booker sang a prayer of mourning, as was their way.

  We commend you to the earth,

  To the lodges that rise to the sky.

  May you find the warmth of your clan,

  Where our song can never die.

  They wouldn’t shut up. Falkirk lowered the binoculars and gazed away from the town, away from Castor and Booker. Oh, God, why do you send these monsters? When will you forgive us for what we did?

  Falkirk’s empty stomach twisted inside of him. Castor said something about the spider, but Falkirk couldn’t hear. Lodge City had blurred into an image of his old house on the day of the quarantine. The day the Alphas ransacked it, making no distinction between inanimate objects and living things. Falkirk watched it all from the safety of a hilltop, having returned from a patrol in the woods. The giant insects scuttled across the roof, in one window and out the other, through the front door. Falkirk wanted to believe that his mate Sierra had taken the children to a safe place, into a closet or under the floorboards. But the house had no safe spaces. And when the ants climbed out of the windows, their jaws glistened with blood, like clown masks. Or like war paint to mock a defeated enemy. Falkirk wanted to keep walking toward them, to let the ants devour him. He turned and ran instead. God was not through punishing him for that.

  “Are you listening, Mr. Falkirk?” Castor said.

  “He’s gonna pass out,” Booker said. “Like Ryder did when he saw it.”

  “Where did it come from?” Falkirk asked.

  “The river,” Castor said. “See how the web dips into the ponds we built? Gulaga needs to keep her gills wet so she can breathe. And she has those two claws in front. She’s more like a crab than a spider if you ask me.”

  Castor gave him the short version of what happened. Gulaga appeared somewhere downstream, building a small nest but staying out of sight. But then, one night, the spider snatched several people and locked them in a cocoon of silk. This, however, was merely a trap. The web covered a wide perimeter, and any attempt to infiltrate the area sent alarm signals all the way to her lair. When rescuers arrived, Gulaga seized them as well, and then tried to barricade the entire city. Twice more, Castor and the others tried to attack. Twice, Gulaga ate one of the hostages on the spot. “Maybe we were doing them a favor,” he said.

  “Is she intelligent?” Falkirk asked.

  “She’s not dumb.”

  “But has she tried to communicate with you?”

  Castor chuckled. “This is how she speaks.”

  Falkirk kept staring at the city until it fully replaced the image of his old house. He was not the best at his job—that was why Tranquility dumped him in the wilderness—but focusing on the task at hand had been his salvation for years now. It kept away the awful silence of the quarantine.

  “We’ll need help,” Falkirk said.

  “It won’t arrive in time,” Castor said. “Besides, you’re here to take notes, aren’t you? Observe and report. You’re not here to help. The water flows, and you’ll just sit and listen.”

  The beaver was right. “Take me back to the camp,” Falkirk said.

  They walked in silence. Along the way, Booker held his zeppelin aloft, pretending it could fly, sometimes whispering orders from the ship’s imaginary captain. “Set a course for Lodge City!” he said. “Aye, captain!”

  They returned long after nightfall. The camp bustled with people cooking, sitting in small groups and talking, children running around the lodges. Castor led Falkirk to a hovel made of branches and leaves where he would spend the night. As a courtesy, an oil lamp flickered in the corner, and a tarp covered the muddy floor. A pot of bean-and-insect stew waited for him. As he sat cross-legged, eating with a hand-carved spoon, another song broke out, an even sadder one this time. The beavers couldn’t help themselves. Falkirk covered his ears, but it made no difference. The low bass sounded like a set of bagpipes, stirring the dirt into a minor earthquake.

  We watch you disappear downstream

  We await your return with the wind.

  The beavers repeated it, with different families taking turns. Falkirk imagined how his mother would have reacted to a song in her honor. A one-eyed husky named Durga, she would have asked, in her stilted way of speaking, “You learn talking, and you sing this noisy shit?”

  Falkirk imagined Durga tangled in the web, growling, her one blue eye bulging as she tried to bite her way through a cord of silk. If the spider got close, Durga would die with her fangs wrapped around one of the monster’s legs. From then on, Gulaga would live with a set of teeth marks etched in her armor, a reminder of the most stubborn husky who ever lived.

  Durga was raised in a shelter that doubled as a dogsledding tourist trap. Though Falkirk never knew his father, his mother kept him and his brothers safe, mostly by currying favor with the masters, a married couple named Paul and Judy Weyrich. They called him Arjuna in those days. Both humans were tall and strong, though Judy eventually needed a wheelchair to get around. She did the paperwork for the shelter, while Paul took vacationers out on sledding trips, often with Durga leading the way. That is, until she lost her eye protecting the pack from a mountain cat. A mountain cat! From then on, Durga would wait at home for Falkirk and his brothers to return. The family would reunite under the soft lamps of the pen, and eventually fall asleep in a pile of fur and tails.

  The Change crept into the shelter slowly. Falkirk’s youngest brother Koda transformed in his sleep one night. The other dogs barked at him until Paul arrived with a shotgun. Terrified, standing on both legs, Koda leapt out the rear door to escape. The snow swirled where he once stood. The dogs shouted into the void, ignoring Paul when he told them to be quiet. Falkirk believed that his brother disappeared into the night and somehow became the snow.

  The next night, more of them changed. Falkirk hid in a corner as the dogs doddered about on two legs. He whimpered despite his mother’s growls to keep quiet. On the day he finally stood upright, Falkirk saw something he wished he would never see: Durga, trembling in a corner, terrified of her own son. His mother—the ruler of this pack—shivered on the ground, a mere animal afraid of a predator. When she transformed later that evening, her first words to him were, “Find food.” She thought she could still boss him around, along with everyone else. But the damage had been done.

  The elders discussed what to do. They possessed that power now. They could negotiate and compromise, without repetitive barks or pointless wrestling matches. Once the snowstorm passed, they considered searching for Koda. Durga instead talked them into checking on Paul and Judy. A few grumbled at this, having chafed at the work Paul forced them to do. One of them, a dog from another kennel named Pandu, said that he hailed from a shelter where his brothers and sisters had been culled. Falkirk asked him what that meant. Pandu said that some kennels slit the throats of excess dogs and then burned them so their ash became part of the clouds—that was where the snow came from. Durga did not believe him. And besides, the Weyriches saved Pandu by adopting him. When Pandu asked how they could be sure that Paul and Judy wouldn’t try the same thing, Durga cut him off.

  “Watch,” she said. “Watch in every direction, all directions. All white. White and nothing else. Food here. Out there, nothing. The humans give, the white takes.”

  Falkirk would never hear Durga master the language. But in t
hose early days, she spoke well enough to convince the others to stay.

  They stopped arguing when the smell of roasted meat entered the room, still raw enough to release the fragrance of blood. It came from the house. There, Paul stood on his porch, raising a white flag cut from a bedsheet. The dogs gathered and watched the sweet smoke rise from the chimney, saliva drooling from their lips.

  That night, the canines sat around Paul and Judy’s dining room table. Judy carried platters of seared steak on the armrests of her wheelchair. None of the dogs had been inside the house before. Animal and human ate together, chatting about the extraordinary events of the last few days. Paul said that the animals had changed all over the world. He told each of them their names, and promised they were welcome to stay. There was no reason to be enemies.

  “Why would we be enemies?” Durga asked.

  Falkirk’s mother took special pride in knowing she had been right to remain at the shelter. Until one morning, three days later, when an Alpha on patrol wandered onto the property. Durga rounded up the dogs, told them that they needed to defend Paul and Judy. They retrieved tools from the shed and surrounded the beast. It took them two hours of hacking at the insect to bring it down. By the time the monster finally collapsed, the dogs were so exhausted they could hardly stand.

  From then on, Durga ordered them to form a perimeter to defend the house. And she wanted a special bark if any intruders arrived, along with guards in the humans’ quarters. And she wanted to chop down the nearby trees and make pikes. She became unhinged. Her one eye, oscillating in its socket, became like the lens of a periscope peering from the depths of her mind. When Falkirk suggested moving somewhere else, Durga refused. “This home is home,” she said.

  The next day, Falkirk’s brother returned with more dogs. They demanded to know where the humans were hiding. Addressing him by the name Koda, Durga asked what they meant.

  “I’m Wendigo,” he said. “I don’t have a slave name.”

  Wendigo asked if they knew what was happening beyond the white hills. When no one answered, he told them to turn on the television. They didn’t know what a television was, so he told them to let him inside so he could show them. For once, Durga was outvoted. With Paul and Judy hiding upstairs, the dogs gathered around a panel that hung from the wall. Wendigo touched a button on the side. Two-dimensional images moved across the screen, showing buildings burning, with more of the giant ants crawling over the rubble. Whenever Wendigo tapped another button, the image would change. One channel showed men in green uniforms and helmets, standing over a pit with hundreds of dead dogs in it. Another channel showed a troop of wolves carrying rifles, walking in formation with the giant ants.

  “Do you see what the humans have been hiding from you?” Wendigo said. “The ants are coming to purge the land. We have to leave.”

  “No,” Durga said. “We stop them.”

  “Stop them from what?”

  “From attacking the house!”

  In the tense quiet that followed, Wendigo eyed each of them. “She didn’t tell you, did she?” he asked. “You might as well still be animals. This gift is wasted on you.”

  “I decide what we do,” Durga said.

  “These humans have been using us. They cast us aside when we’re too old or weak.”

  “Shut your mouth.”

  “Tell them what the humans did to our father.”

  She slapped him. He let her do it. He didn’t even bare his teeth.

  “We don’t have to be slaves,” Wendigo said. “The Queen has set us free.”

  Durga told them it was a lie, that Wendigo had betrayed them. Despite her protests, the dogs from the other kennel walked over to Wendigo’s side. It left Durga and her three remaining sons. She spat and said she didn’t need cowards to defend the house.

  “Does he speak true about father?” Falkirk asked.

  All she had to do was tell him the truth. But she merely repeated the same lines: “Food here. Nothing out there.”

  And so he joined with Wendigo. And even then, he knew he would spend the rest of his life trying to explain why. As he walked out, the answer was already changing in his mind. First anger made him do it. Then fear. Then shame. He hated himself, he hated her, he hated this place, he hated the way these new words could mean whatever the speaker wanted them to mean. The rebel faction left Durga standing on the porch screaming at them. “The white takes you! The white takes you now!” Even after climbing a hill, he could still hear her voice.

  Sitting on the floor of the beaver lodge, Falkirk felt the same wave of nausea from that cold night. He tried to swallow another spoonful of the stew, but his gag reflex wouldn’t allow it. He spit it out into the bucket they’d left for his waste.

  Though Falkirk did not need company, he didn’t mind it when Booker and three of his friends paid him a visit. They asked questions, often giggling or covering their eyes in embarrassment. They wanted to know what Falkirk saw in the web. One of them cowered when Falkirk described the arachnid, prompting his friends to make fun of him for being scared. These children, he realized, were about the same age as his own son and daughter, had they lived.

  They asked him about the humans in Hosanna. Were they mean? Did they still eat baby animals? No, Falkirk said, the humans weren’t like that. The Department of Tranquility was the most diverse organization in the world, with representatives from every species. Old animals spread rumors about the humans to frighten the children.

  Booker raised his hand. “Is it true that when humans fart, they think no one can hear it or smell it?” His friends broke out in hysterical laughter that only grew louder when Falkirk answered yes.

  An adult beaver arrived to shoo the children away, telling them that their visitor needed time alone. After finishing his meal, Falkirk considered his next move. The bird patrols would not pass through here for a few more days, meaning that he would not be able to send word to Hosanna until then. It would take at least three days to reach the nearest transmitting station. And what would happen when his message finally made it? His superiors would most likely tell him to abandon the town, leave it for the scientists to study later. Besides, the prospect of human soldiers infiltrating Lodge City—no matter what the reason—would provoke the wolves, which would then anger the remote villages still considering joining the Union.

  While recording the day’s activities in his logbook, Falkirk sensed someone near the entrance. There, he saw Castor, with his mother Nikaya leaning on him for support.

  “My mother wishes to speak with you,” Castor said.

  “Take my hand, pup,” she said. She shambled closer to him and sniffed his neck. “You are a husky.”

  “Mother!”

  “Go on, I’m fine,” she said. “The dog will watch after me.”

  “I’ll walk her back,” Falkirk said. “It’s okay.”

  With great pain, the old rodent took a seat on the tarp, shifting her sagging rump into a more comfortable position. Falkirk sat before her, still holding her hand.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said.

  “Please don’t. You’ve probably heard by now that I’m just an observer.”

  “And yet the Three Goddesses led you here anyway.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Ah, but our Goddesses are real,” she said. “The river, the earth, and the trees are right in front of you. You need to keep what’s real alongside what you hope for. It makes you honest.”

  Falkirk agreed.

  “Will you say nice things about us to your friends in the city?” she asked.

  “I will.”

  “Good. Because I know what you’ve heard about us. I know we’re not perfect, that we’ve bent the rules here and there. I’ve stood in front of that shrine and asked forgiveness for the mistakes I’ve made.”

  Falkirk knew what she meant. Lodge City had been more
inclusive once, allowing in other species from the forest, including a cloud of bats who made their home in the rafters of a gymnasium. “I’m not here to investigate what happened with the bats,” he said.

  “They betrayed us,” Nikaya said. “Personally, I think they’re behind all this.”

  Unlikely, Falkirk thought. But the bats certainly had a motive. In one of her last acts as leader, Nikaya ordered the gymnasium demolished, the bats exiled for heresy and intrigue. Despite her grandmotherly demeanor, she had orchestrated a power grab like some medieval human courtier. As a result, her bloodline would continue to run the city, for better or worse.

  “No one tried to help those poor creatures more than I did,” she added. “But they were going to sabotage everything we built. I couldn’t let that happen.”

  In the awkward pause that followed, Falkirk scratched an itch behind his ear.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Nikaya said, “but I came up with the idea for Lodge City before the Change.”

  Falkirk grinned.

  “I know, I know,” she said. “Everybody claims they were really smart before they changed. But I’m serious. I dreamt about the city. A place where everyone would be safe, where no one would starve, no one would kill.”

  She gripped his hand tighter, so he could feel the thin bones pressing into his palm.

  “The water flows, Mr. Falkirk. There might be a way to fix all of this, but I can’t ask it of the others. Not even my own son.”

  “What is it?”

  “It involves breaking a promise. I know someone who can help. Two people, actually. A dog and a cat.”

  “From Hosanna?”

  “No. They’re out on their own. I promised not to tell anyone about them. But people will die if I don’t.”

  “Who are they?”

  “A couple of ant farmers. Veterans of the war.”

  “Ant farmers,” Falkirk said. “Did they give you the ants for my stew?”

  She laughed so loud that one of the beavers rushed over to the cave to see what was going on. “They’re Alpha ranchers. They’ve been raising soldier ants for years now.”