by Wayne Hill
“Sit, drink. Rest,” Talon says.
Tommy takes a long pull from the flask and offers it back to Talon.
“No, keep it. I insist. Your flask was too small and awkward to carry, anyway. That there is a superior drinking vessel. Please, keep it. You’ve earned it for humouring me with your ridiculousness,” Talon says still smiling that bizarre, slightly insane smile.
Tommy smiles back nervously.
“Thanks ... I guess. I’ve never been called ridiculous before. Oh well, I suppose there’s a first time for everything.” Tommy takes large gulps of the ice-cold water, thinking. He really doesn’t see anything wrong with his own flask. But, as a guest — and a guest in significant debt to his hosts — he feels like he is in no position to disagree. Never insult a smiling blade-wielding devil. It seems a good rule to live by. Live being the operative word.
“The forest gives us life, little one. The shadows have flown from your eyes because the forest has healed you. It has absolved you of your destructive behaviour and, in its benevolence, restored you to full health.” Talon says this in a mild and gentle manner. He points his long index blade at Tommy and inclines his head towards the haul of dead forest creatures.
Tommy just stares.
“I couldn’t let you destroy any more of our hunting ground, young Tommy. Although, that is but one reason. There are many others.”
Tommy wonders if Talon feels guilty. This thought makes Tommy uncomfortable, so he changes the topic. “From my perspective, you have an odd system of life. It seems valid. A direct and rewarding way to live. I would love to find out more about how this whole thing works.” Tommy rubs his eyes, tired. Lights, sounds and conversation were now becoming a strain on his still quite fragile, healing body.
“Valid? Odd? These are words of a stupid person. We might have to change that,” says Talon. He relaxes back into his chair and stretches his long arms above him, they creak like taut ship ropes.
“But I do feel that your clan's way of life is strange. I’m not stupid. I don’t think I am, anyway.” Tommy shuffled away from the cold draught at the cave-face towards where Talon sat, and the heat of the fire.
“I existed long before the Drumcroon facility sent innocent people to their deaths,” Talon continues. “I have memories I can never really describe in words. Words are fragile, limited things. Ephemeral. They describe feelings, objects — things of immediacy. Things that exist in the now. They express a commonality, a shared frame of reference. When consciousness shifts so does the frame of reference, and words lose all meaning. They belong to a different realm of perspective. I originated in a place which is unexplainable in human terms. I have memories, if you can call them memories; and I remember where that place is, and how it feels to be there. Now I’m here talking to you, in this cave, and, yes, I’m calling you stupid. You have no idea where you are or what’s happening. You are too intimidated to live but petrified to die. You are in a limbo state of constant fear. At night, in the woods, you would fear this little fellow.” Talons flashes a serrated smile and holds out one of the large black squirrels. “A boogada boogada boo!” Talon says, launching the squirrel at Tommy. Without shifting his stare from Talon, Tommy plucks the dead creature out of the air. He throws the squirrel towards Talon's head and, this time, Talon catches it. The two stare at one another, Talon’s plate-bone grin making soft grinding noises.
“How old are you, Talon? You look young,” says Tommy, with a surprising lack of sarcasm.
“Your benevolence knows no bounds, kind soul,” Talon sighs. He reaches for a dead forest bird. Grabbing clumps of its feathers, he starts quickly plucking the fowl.
“Can I help?”
“Set the fire, if you feel you have enough energy. That is, if you’re not too scared of what’s back there, in the dark.”
Concern flashes on Tommy’s face as he notices for the first time his bare right arm. How could he not have noticed it before?
“Where are my joining tools?”
“The fever made them detach from you.”
“I want them back.”
“They’re safe.”
“I need them, Talon. They’re all I have now. They are everything to me.”
Talon sighs. “I would prefer you to stay like this for a while. As you are my guest, in my home, you have become my responsibility.”
Tommy struggles to his feet, then falls. Talon catches him before he hits the ground.
“You’re still weak,” Talon says, as he lowers him. “Youth betrays you, makes you believe the power you wield is everything, and eternal. You’re too unstable to understand the truth. What you possess is useless without control. You can’t have control without knowing who, or what, you are. You must suffer for wisdom. True gnosis and pain are intricately woven, like the strongest of sea ropes.” Talon puts Tommy to bed, like a naughty child, and returns to his favourite seat. Tommy, although unsettled, tries to find comfort by pulling one of the fur blankets, ubiquitous in the cave, about his sore shoulders.
One of Talon’s fingers rips through the plucked bird’s ribcage and he swiftly moves his index blade the full length of the dead bird, opening its chest cavity. The insides he removes by using the sides of two sharp fingers. Talon dumps the innards into one of the hand-carved wooden bowls without spilling a drop onto the cave’s ancient floor. The foul stink of the internal organs hits Tommy. It makes his nose sting with the bird’s hidden rot. The smell crawls down to his throat, making his gore rise. Tommy clamps a hand over his mouth and nose — to stop his stomach contents rising to meet the stench — but he cannot stop himself from watching the butchery skills with a nauseated curiosity. Seeing Talon working hard to feed him, Tommy feels the need to say some words of thanks. Perhaps kind words would also be medicine for his broken and vulnerable condition. He wants to thank Talon for his kindness, but a certain paranoid fear inside him wonders if, one day, Talon’s butchery skills may yet be used on him.
“You saved my life. I understand that the joining tools bother you and, as long as they are safe, I’m happy to obey your rules. I find myself indebted to you and your family for saving my life.”
“Remember the day; remember the deed,” says Talon. “You have a great future if you can keep this attitude. We share similar traits, me and you. I believe that your soul will not fall into the abyss. You could possess what it takes to survive, given time. You will learn, or you will lose your head”.
Talon uses two of his fingers in a scissor action to remove the head and legs of the plump wood pigeon, then he moves on to the next bird.
The finger blades Talon possesses fascinate Tommy. And, not for the first time, Tommy thinks: He’s terrifying. Horrific. He cannot get any scarier.
Until this moment Tommy had lived a rather sheltered existence. A clean, mostly blood-free existence. Tommy's family and the Guardians had shielded him from the truth of this harsh world, concealing him like the internal stink of intestines. Tommy searches his mind for experiences, for reference points — anything to process these smells, these sights, these sounds. His senses expand, invisible tendrils snaking out and demanding reference markers from his tired brain; but nothing is there. The sights, sounds and smells are new, real — and shockingly alien. He tries and fails to rationalise the scene as ‘merely a horned demon mutilating a squirrel,’ but his brain just does not accept the description. He realises that it is not Talon that is making him uneasy, it is the realness — the rawness — of this experience. The NTB learning pods at the Drumcroon facility are not programmed to simulate this level of reality, thinks Tommy.
“The fires not going to build itself, young Tommy,” Talon says, interrupting Tommy’s musing.
“Oh. Right. Okay, yeah ... Er ...I — I don’t know how to do it without my tools.”
Talon stops plucking the second wood pigeon and smiles at Tommy. Tommy once more takes in the detail of Talon’s upper and lower masses of serrated bone, that lie below his spike of a nose. The lethality of his
smile is obvious. Tommy finds himself wondering how many throats it has torn out, how many defending hands it has bitten in half. Talon’s smile radiates the same menace heard in the sound of an ancient warrior determinedly drawing his sword from its scabbard.
What kind of hellish place spawns a creature such as this? thinks Tommy.
“I suppose there are many things we can learn from one another,” says Talon.
Tommy returns the fearsome smile with one less lethal, less interesting.
Talon moves to the back of the cave, climbs up the wall, and returns with a brown hessian sack. He pulls dried leaves from the bag and piles them up inside the fire’s circle of stones.
Talon strikes the edge of two of his finger blades together, scraping off a shower of sparks which start to smoke and smoulder in the nest of kindling. Crouching low, Talon blows on the embers until flames take hold. Tommy feels that he should show some initiative, and shuffles to the woodpile, hauling out a thick branch.
“No, No,” Talon corrects, “the delicate twigs.”
“Like this?” Tommy says, snapping off delicate branches.
“Good, good, the thin ones,” Talon says. “Once they catch, slowly build up to thicker ones.” Talon leaves the fire to Tommy and returns to dressing the game.
Tommy blows and blows under the leaves, mimicking Talon, and the flames curl around the small twigs, they crackle and spit. A question bursts from Tommy and, no sooner as he says it, he instantly feels stupid.
“How old are you, Talon?”
Talon pauses in his plucking, smirking. Tommy is painfully aware of the intrusiveness of his blunt question as the silence grows — then relief, as Talon replies.
“How old would you think me, young Tommy?”
“I — I’m sorry, Talon, I couldn’t say.”
“The fire is going out. Keep blowing on the sticks and add some bigger ones.”
“Okay.”
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“What?” Tommy says.
“You think that it’s hard to tell how old I am because of my strange appearance, yes?”
“I, well, I was thinking...”
“It's fine, Tommy. I have an appearance considered by many to be ... Odd, perhaps? I, however, see it as a gift. And sometimes —” Talon stops plucking and stares out of the entrance of the cave. He studies the moving clouds in the darkening sky, then he looks thoughtfully at his bladed hands — “Sometimes, a curse. Yes, it is a curse, to some extent.”
Then, his reflection period over, Talon’s lethal fingers deftly snips off the head and feet of a bird — the extremities landing neatly in separate bowls.
“I’ve seen more seasons pass by than I care to remember.”
“So — are you much older than my father? He’s fifty-six and —”
“Don’t you dare speak of your father to me, boy!” Talon thunders. His deep-set, horn-rimmed eyes of dark coal somehow seem to burn with ancient flames.
Tommy startles and has no time to mask his shock.
“Let’s change the subject,” Talon says, snatching up a black squirrel and taking a deep steadying breath. “We were talking of my age, yes?”
“Sorry, Talon, yes, we were,” Tommy says, glad of the conversational change as the tension in the air drops markedly.
“We will start with Daria. It’s easier to explain things this way.”
Talon stares into the dead squirrel’s face a moment and gently strokes the soft black fur on its head, with a thoughtful smile now returning to his fiendlike face.
“You know her to be three, right? And she is, to me, anyway. To you, though, she would be three times seven years of age.”
“Twenty-one,” Tommy calculates with no thought. Talon meets his confused stare and nods.
“Twenty-one?” Tommy repeats with mounting disbelief.
“In what you class as a year, she has seen twenty-one of those,” Talon says, holding Tommy’s shocked stare as Tommy gently touches his still-healing facial wounds.
“She’s clever,” Tommy blurts out, rather randomly, smiling and shaking his head.
“She is,” Talon says.
“Twenty-one,” Tommy says to himself, backing away from the growing heat of the fire. He throws larger pieces into the centre of the stone circle and then sits on a comfortable fur blanket.
“Yes, twenty-one. But to me, she is three.”
“And you, Talon?” Tommy’s curiosity, in harmony with the progress of the fire, builds to a blaze.
“As you reckon it, I would be more like one hundred and sixty-eight times seven years,” Talon says.
Tommy’s mouth falls open. “You’re one thousand, one hundred and seventy-six years old?”
Talon nods, still smiling. He guts the big black squirrel and then peels off its skin, like peeling a bloody banana.
“Approximately, yes. Although, I prefer to be considered one hundred and sixty-eight. That is in my years.”
“How is that possible?” asks Tommy.
“As I said, young Tommy, we have a lot to learn from one another.”
Bewildered, the only thing that comes into Tommy’s mind to say to the horned demon in a cave who is preparing a meal for him is, “You look remarkably young for your age.” The words come out in a voice that is weak and croaky. His mouth and throat feel dehydrated from blowing the flames, so he finds the multi-coloured, leather flask Talon gave him and drinks deeply from it.
Talon goes behind his seat and pulls out yet another wooden bowl. This one is three times the size of the other vessels, which are filled with feathers and offal.
“Fill it from the alcove and wash your hands and face,” Talon recommends as he passes over the bowl, followed by a sea sponge and a rough fabric drying cloth. He drags a few pieces of metal over to the fire and slots the two birds and squirrel through some spits. He throws several logs onto the fire and says that, when this wood is burnt down, the spits will be put up. Feverish and sticky nights had made Tommy’s eyelids gummy and heavy. The water is cold and refreshing. After Tommy finishes his ablutions, he notices Talon at the cave mouth, his arms outstretched.
“Talon?” Tommy asks in quiet confusion.
“I should also wash before eating,” says Talon, over his left shoulder, before diving out of sight.
Tommy scrambles over to where Talon was, only seconds earlier. Shaking his head, Tommy sees, three hundred feet below, Talon swimming in the sea. Laughter erupts from multiple cavern entrances all along the cliff face.
Tommy laughs, too, as Talon gives him a wave from among the many bobbing boats.
“That’s nothing,” says a booming voice near Tommy. A mountain of a man emerges from nowhere. The cave gives birth to his bulk, and he jumps — plummeting with no grace, but massive force, into the water. There is an explosion as he hits the sea followed by the hysterical laughter of children, as the small boats they are in rock violently, and a tidal wave of water soaks them.
Talon leaps on the giant man’s back. The whale-like man circles around the giggling children’s boats, underwater, as Talon stands on his back. The children poke at the large man, who seems not to need air, with oars and other items and shout, “Thankwell! Thankwell!”
To the assembled children’s joy, Thankwell surfaces to blow a spray of water into their faces. Thrusting forth an imaginary harpoon, Talon shouts out, “I am Ahab. I am Ahab. I have caught the great, white whale!”
Despite not knowing who or what an ‘Ahab’ is, Tommy finds the rising laughter infectious. He shouts down, “Get him, Ahab! Get him!”
IT TAKES TOMMY THREE months to completely heal from his many injuries. During this time, his strange new friends initiate him into their clan. Tommy is a part of a new community of people: he is a part of the northern coast cliff clan. In the clan, everyone calls him Astilla. When he asks what it means, Daria says nothing, but the others say: “Astilla is your clan-name.”
Tommy is accepted by Talon, who is the founder and leader of
the clan. Daria gives Tommy his clan-name. Pandeminia, the name-giver of the clan, is nearing the end of her life, and Daria, her long-time apprentice, is her natural successor. Tutored by Pandeminia, Daria nurtures the gift of finding the other inside of people. Talon explains this to Tommy in elementary terms:
“There is the name a person is born with — the name which holds no substance to who they are, the adult they evolve into — and then there is, hidden inside, the person’s other name. This other name is an amalgamation of who you are and the path you are on. The other name defines what you truly are — who you will become. It is important to the clan folk that they have a name which reflects their true nature.”
Tommy has many talks with Talon. Talon admits his original plan was to live amongst the prisoners because he wanted a new life away from the endless regulations of the Drumcroon facility. Talon’s advice is instrumental in Tommy's decision to leave this wonderful place: “You should continue with your plans. It's your path. Everybody needs to stick to their own trail.” Tommy rarely takes advice from anyone, but, looking at Talon, he could tell this strange man has a wisdom that was deep and far-reaching.
Tommy’s time in the cavern on the northern coast of the island, surrounded by prison planet Earth’s oldest community is his first true learning curve. Tommy learns the basics of sailing from Thankwell. When he is misunderstood, Thankwell’s temper is volcanic; and Tommy constantly misunderstands Thankwell. The cause of Tommy’s continued confusion is Thankwell’s limited vocabulary, especially when technical sailing matters are discussed. In the beginning of Thankwell’s essential teachings, the big man is silent. He uses small hand signals and grunts and, when these hand signals and grunts are inevitably not understood, Thankwell grabs Tommy by an arm and leg, and launches him into the water, skimming him across the ocean. It is in these moments — when Tommy finds himself skipping across the surface of the sea like an oddly-shaped, screaming pebble — that the inspiration to learn fast, and try harder, finally manifests itself. Thankwell often heads back to the caves alone, leaving Tommy to drown or make the journey back to land successfully. It was this kind of ‘tough love’ training which made Tommy’s body strong, his mind quick, and his mouth, more-often-than-not firmly shut.