Veracity

by Mark Lavorato

  I had gone to sleep forming a plan of how to carry the crow, or raven - or whatever kind of bird it was. (Eventually, I settled on calling it a raven; but only because I had to pick one of them, and, out of the two possibilities, I liked the sound of this one a little better.) This plan of mine was largely based on the appealing image of the raven perched on my shoulder, patiently balancing itself as I walked. It was also, as I would find out, completely unrealistic. After preparing to leave, I untied the rope from the rock and walked up to the bird, which was watching me nervously, as if well aware of the ordeal that was about to take place. When it tried to fly away, I grabbed hold of the rope, quickly looped it around my arm, and yanked down on the tether so that the bird would be drawn up to my shoulder while it was still flailing around. At which point, the back of my skull was beaten with the thudding of its wings, and I tried to lean away from it; but I wasn't far enough, because it managed to jab the side of my head with its beak. I swore, flinging both the rope and the bird up into the air, proving, if nothing else, that it really was unable to fly. Despite flapping as hard as it could, it crashed into the grass, and then began hopping away with the greatest of urgency.

  I touched the side of my head, sucking air between my teeth, inspecting the blood on my fingers. "I'm trying to save you! Do you get that?" As if in reply to this, the bird plunged behind a thick bunch of grass and continued to flee through the meadow, apparently not caring to 'get' anything - it just wanted to escape. I wasn't worried about losing it, knowing how weak it was; I imagined it would stop as soon as it thought it was out of sight.

  I went into one of the buildings to get cloth of some kind, hoping that if I covered its eyes, or beak, or maybe its entire body, it would make the journey more bearable for both of us. While I was inside the cluster of buildings, I also decided to cut off a large section of the rope that I found the raven tangled in. It would be useful, as I only had frayed cord that I was constantly braiding into longer pieces back at the hut. I uncoiled the spool until I came to a spot where it wasn't as damaged by the sun, and cut a long piece from there.

  When I returned, I found the raven not very far from where it had disappeared, squatting in the grass, trying to lay hidden, a ragged black shape against the green-yellow strands. "Okay. Let's try this again," I said, holding out the piece of cloth that I'd taken from one of the houses. The bird, seeming to understand that there was going to be another attempt at picking it up, turned and began scurrying away through the meadow again. "Look," I shouted after it, "you can come with me and be fed, grow your feathers back, and be released when you're strong enough; or you can stay here, starve to death and get eaten. The choice is yours." But it wasn't really, and I walked up behind it, tossed the cloth over the whole of its body, and wrapped it into a kind of bundle.

  We travelled the entire day, stopping to rest and eat some fruit now and then. I found that as long as the bird was completely covered, with only its beak sticking out of the cloth in order to breathe, it wouldn't try to flap or escape, or even worse, gouge my skin. Unfortunately, it took me a while to learn that I couldn't let my guard down for a second when it came to its opportunistic pecking, and my arms looked like a map of welts; red islands splaying across a skin ocean.

  When we arrived at the hut, just after the sun had gone down, I tried to bring the bird inside for the night to keep it safe from predators. But it didn't think much of that idea, stubbornly flapping and squawking until I brought it back outside. In the end, I decided to take the boughs and leaves that were padding my bed and move them outside, having to sleep a second time under the open sky for the raven's sake.

  The next day I built a cage out of sticks and some of the tattered strands of rope from the hut, which worked quite well. While I tended the terrace during the day, I would keep the bird tied to a rock, where it would flap and exercise its wings, pluck beetles and other insects that happened to wander its way along the ground, and eat fruit that I cubed and placed in front of it every few hours; then, overnight, I would put it inside the cage to keep it safe from other animals. But one day I spotted a long and thin scavenger ambling along the rim of bushes, which looked similar to a cunning little mustelid that we had on the island. I hadn't been taking an animal like this - which could easily fit between the bars and kill the raven anytime it wanted to - into consideration when I'd built the cage, or when I'd been placing it on the ground outside my door overnight. As a solution, I decided to hang it in my open doorway, thinking that if my smell wasn't enough to keep the tiny predator at bay, then the raven making noise as it approached would be; as I would wake and probably scare it away before it did any damage.

  It had only been dangling in the doorway for five nights before that very thing happened, the raven flapping wildly and clawing at the sticks of the cage until I roused from sleep. Only, it didn't turn out to be the tiny scavenger that woke me.

  * * *

  36

  I rolled over, suddenly awake, my eyes darting around the darkness of the hut. There was a deep, sickening feeling in my chest that something was wrong, but that I'd become aware of it too late; as if I'd been thrown into a race without having any idea which direction to run. The raven was restless, rattling the wooden cage, wishing that it could break out and fly away, vanish into a jagged silhouette in the night sky where it could watch things unfold from the safety of the air. The fact that it wasn't making any vocal sounds only added to the urgency, as if it somehow understood that in this kind of situation - whatever this kind of situation was - silence was a far better tool than alarm; that the time for giving signals of warning had long since passed. It clacked its beak together when it noticed I was up, seeming to chide me for taking so long to wake.

  "Shit," I whispered, rubbing my eyes, "What is it?"

  The bird crouched down and jerked its head to look out into the night.

  I crept out of bed and ducked under the cage, stepping into the cool air outside. I stood in front of the door and listened for what must have been a few minutes, until I heard a sound above the rush of the stream; just one, coming from behind the hut, far into the terrace.

  Believing that there were only animals left on the mainland, and knowing that animals would run as I approached, it didn't cross my mind to bring a knife; I just rounded the building and walked toward the fruit trees, stepping as noisily as I could to give fair warning that a human was on its way. A gentle breeze drew up the long slope to the terrace, pressing my clothes against my skin, and I could hear some of the leaves in the fruit trees rustling, one of them tapping a distracted rhythm against a branch. There was no moon in the sky, yet there was enough starlight that I could make out specific trees, and I kept walking until I was roughly in the centre of them all. Which is where I stood, looking around, listening, wondering why I hadn't heard anything scurry away as I'd approached.

  I must have been there for a few minutes before a disturbing thought crossed my mind: the small scavenging animal, which I was so intent on protecting the raven from, would have had ample opportunity to climb the doorframe and crawl into the cage in the minutes I'd been away from the hut. While I was investigating what was probably only a piece of fruit falling to the ground, I might have been giving the sly predator a golden opportunity. In fact, I thought to myself, it might even have been the mustelid skulking closer to the building that had agitated the bird in the first place. I turned to walk back, shaking my head, feeling stupid, careless.

  But then I stalled, and was suddenly standing stiff, holding my breath. There was something in the stillness, something hidden beneath the lazy flutter of leaves. And the more I concentrated on it, the more I was sure it was there. It wasn't anything specific, or, for that matter, even audible; it was more like a tenseness that didn't belong to me, the weight of another's anticipation. And it seemed to be in every direction, as if I was surrounded, as if my movements were being watched from all sides with fanatical concentration.

  I don't know why I chose to speak, but
, for some reason, this is what made sense to do. My voice was hesitant, doubtful. "Hello?" I called out.

  At the exact moment the word left my mouth, the trees and vegetation around me came to life. There was motion everywhere. From right behind me, to far below the terrace, near the rim of the bushes, close to the hut, high in the trees, immediately to my left, directly in front of me. Everywhere. I didn't look around to try and see what was happening, or stand firm in a defensive stance, nor even try to run; instead, my knees weakened, and then buckled, and I crumpled to the ground, covering my head, waiting for a spear to pierce my skin, or plunge through my rib cage, pin one of my limbs to the ground.

  Between the spaces of my arms, and against the backdrop of a star spotted sky, I saw a figure run in front of me. I would have described it as looking like a man, but its silhouette was smaller, more petite, its waist crouched low, the legs gawky and awkward, the knees having to bend with acute angles. However, almost contradictory to these gangly limbs, it ran with an incisive posture, a grace, an extraordinary speed. I could hear the thudding of their feet on the soil, could feel the thumping reverberations on the ground as a few of them jumped out of the trees. While the frantic scattering whirled around me, one of them must have stepped quite close, because a bit of dirt bounced onto the skin of my hand, making me cower even more. And with my head buried deep into my arms I couldn't see anything anymore; I could only hear hectic sounds that could have signified any number of things: their fleeing, regrouping, encircling me, or maybe preparing for something unknown, an attack - anything was possible. I could predict nothing. I had no idea how this was going to end.

  After a few seconds, the sounds began to recede. They were running over the lip of the terrace and down the hill, and I listened to the pounding of their footsteps until they faded into the whisper of rustling branches and the hiss of the river. And just as suddenly as it had begun, it was over.

  I didn't take my head from my arms for quite a while; and when I finally did, I only ogled around at the dark, still afraid to move. It had crossed my mind that some of them might be lingering in the trees - perhaps a few scouts that would be watching for what I was going to do next, and who would then slip away to inform the others so that they could react accordingly; maybe readying themselves for a battle, which, as was plain to see, they would effortlessly win.

  Before I'd even gotten to my feet, I heard a set of long, haunting calls coming from the slope below. I recognized them as the same sounds I'd heard when I slept on the doorstep after finding my knife; the same three melancholic notes repeated over and over again. Only this time, I also heard what must have been a kind of answering call, echoing in the distance. And after that, I could have sworn I heard another, even further off. But while I listened to them, I realized that it hadn't only sounded like a flute that I'd heard that second night on the mainland, but that it really was one. Which, I think, was the most intimidating realization I could have come to.

  Because it meant that, not only were they advanced enough to communicate with other groups of the same species, but that they had the intelligence to make musical instruments (or at least warning horns with variable notes). And as all of these haunting calls had sounded exactly the same, it also meant they could construct flutes that were in a consistent key from one to the next, which would require their cutting tools to be incredibly precise. And if they were producing and using cutting tools of that calibre, one could only guess at the type of weapons they were capable of making.

  Which made me wonder what this group of Creatures was so urgently communicating to the other groups, after having seen me. (I'd already made the link that these animals were the Creatures, which, as I would find out when there was enough light to look at the bite marks in some of the fruit they left behind, was an assumption I was right to make.) Were these flute calls only a warning, something urging every Creature to be extremely careful because a human had been spotted? Was it perhaps a signal to take flight? Or was it a command to gather for an assault, to come together and protect their territory as a united group?

  I knew the Elders would have told me about an intelligent hominid living on the mainland if they'd known about it, which obviously meant that they didn't. No, this had to be a new animal, probably one of the strange mutations Dana had warned me about, a product of the horrible weapons we'd used at one point in our history. This was something that no one, anywhere, knew anything about. I was blind. I didn't even know enough to begin helping myself. All I really understood was that if they decided to come in large numbers with weapons, there was no way I could defend myself against them. I understood that if I wanted to survive, I had to think of another strategy. And soon.

  I got to my feet, brushing the dirt from my clothes, shaking soil out of my hair, constantly looking over my shoulder as I did so, still half doubting I was really alone. I went back to the hut, ducking under the cage in the doorway, and sat on the edge of my bed for quite a while, as if trying to find the right words to break all of this news to the raven. "So - uh... I think we're in a bit of trouble," I finally said. The bird opened its wings, flapped once, and then tucked them back in, the sound of settling feathers scratching at the quiet.

  I didn't sleep for the rest of the night, worrying about the Creatures returning, and with what I was going to do in preparation for it. But by the time the sky began to blanch with the light of morning, I had at least formulated some kind of plan; and though I understood it would take a lot of work, and more than a few days to complete, I imagined it would be a fairly effective one. I couldn't wait to get started, and I was out of bed at the earliest hour possible.

  But before I could begin, I had to satisfy my curiosity, and walked out into the terrace to study the tracks that the Creatures had left behind. I realized that I'd seen them once before, in the mud along the river while I was looking for the hut. They resembled a human hand in many ways, though the fingers looked shorter and contorted. I carefully picked through the peels and fruit that they'd eaten as well, trying to learn something new about their habits, but didn't really come up with anything further.

  Then I returned, hung the raven's cage from the ceiling in the middle of the hut, left it some fruit, and closed the door as best I could. I picked up the length of rope that I'd taken from the cluster of houses, and the sharpest cutting tool I had, and set out to complete the first part of my plan.

  Because it was clear that between running and fighting, running was my only option, I didn't bother wasting time carving spears or trying to make bows and arrows. Though, I did go for a few minutes to carefully inspect the wire cage of boulders that was reinforcing the bank before the entrance to the canyon. It had occurred to me, when I first looked at it, that this cage would break open once the rusted wire had corroded enough, sending the heavy rocks tumbling down the slope to the river. Which meant that if I weakened the wire at strategic points, and could invent a kind of release mechanism, I could let the boulders loose as a trap, or at the very least, as an imposing display. (It was doubtful I could kill more than one or two of them with a barrage of slow moving rocks, but I could probably inspire some caution, making them reluctant to pursue very close at my heels; which was enough.) That's where the second part of my plan came in.

  Thinking about how the Creatures had run away the night before, I realized that they had completely avoided the shrubs, despite the fact that they could have crawled into them and disappeared by slithering only a body length inside. This only made me assume that they were as unfit to travel through them as I was, and sparked an idea to use the bushes to my advantage. I thought that, if I could fight my way through the shrubs for a day, and find a spot to drop a rope into the canyon, I could then use it as an escape route. If they came, I could run up the canyon from the hut, climb the rope, and pull it up after me, thus having already gained an entire day on them, as they would have to struggle through a day's worth of bushes before they could get to the place I'd tied the rope.

 
That first day was spent with this aim, battling my way along the top of the canyon. I thought I would weave through the shrubs where they were thinnest, following the lip of the gorge as closely as I could. But the branches hung over the canyon's rim like mud oozing over an edge, and if I wanted ground under my feet, I had to pass through vegetation that was just as dense as everywhere else. I also discovered that the shrubs weren't only dense, but were also littered with thorns and spines that relentlessly scored your skin. But I still wrestled my way through them, lifting the heavy limbs and crawling beneath; at some points, I had to climb up and traverse small sections by squirming through the prickly forks of higher boughs, and then scuffle back down to the ground again, my skin grated and raw. I avoided cutting as much as possible, especially at the point where I first began making my way through. I didn't want to leave any clues that it was possible to pass through there, which meant when I had to cut branches, I did it strategically, scarring the wood in places that wouldn't easily be seen.

  At the very end of the day, with blisters of blood lining some of the deeper scratches on my arms and legs, I made my way to the steep edge of the canyon, and looked down into the river from some of the overhanging limbs. I tied the rope to one of the trees at a point where it would be easy to climb my way to safety, and then lowered down, a little nervous that the rope might not be strong enough to hold my weight; but, thankfully, it turned out to be fine.

  This was great. Now that the rope was in place, I could use the cutting tools from the hut to construct a trail, which would begin from the point where the rope was tied. This trail would hopefully circumvent the impassable section of the gorge, following the edge of the canyon, and would access the river further upstream, where I could then travel along its banks and continue my escape, deep into the plateau.