Erues
The place she had fallen into was a dark one. Dim spots of light flickered on and off in the distance. Her feet flailed around searching for ground as an immense force kept pushing down on her. She felt the velvet touch of the mass surrounding her body, a soothing, shapeless thing matching her movement with movement of its own. When she tried to breathe, there came no air pouring into her lungs, only the cold. Slowly, she watched the distant lights go out one by one like candles in the wind. All that remained was darkness.
Reality then wrapped its arms around Pen with a terrible suddenness. She felt pressure, but a different, subtle kind. The air was seething, and her bones were nailed to a bed of earth. Doubts grew inside her. She had been fooled by her dreams before, slipping from one into the next thinking she’d woken. If this was a dream, it was an unpleasant one. Just to be safe, Pen kept her eyes closed waiting for the sensation to pass.
Scattered noises reached her ears. There were tekans, the hollowed-out squashes that Gekiko musicians used to mimic the cicadas’ ratchet sound. She heard the houm whistles blown by Koeiji’s bird keepers to keep their flocks in check. In the distance, children’s shouts followed the turns of some fast-paced game.
And within a fraction of a breath, she realized that none of these were what she thought, and ripped open her eyes in terror.
There were no instruments, no children. Around her stood the thickness of unpruned plants, the mingle of trees, vines, ferns, bushes, mosses, weeds, shot through with sounds that came before her peoples’ imitations of them, before the people themselves. This place was a hostile one, and it did not care for her.
Pen shot up only to become dizzy and stagger backwards against a tree. She sunk down sending panicked glances at the mesh of leaves surrounding her. Every breath, she expected them to part and reveal some ravaged monster that would open its jaws and—
Monster. She remembered. They had been attacked, her and Rannek and Glane and Ibiko and Wellan and… No. That wasn’t right. Wellan wasn’t with them, he was… dead. Wellan had been killed, murdered by the beast spewed out by the mountain’s mouth. But where were the others? Had they, too, been…
It couldn’t be. Pen pressed her fingers against the underside of her jaw and breathed slowly, evenly, just as Glane had once taught her. For a long time, her pulse kept beating fast, and it was only when she forced herself to close her eyes that it calmed down somewhat. Steady as a psalm, little miss.
She wanted to cry, but couldn’t. Besides, the jungle wouldn’t care. When she took another look around, the leaves looked less dangerous than indifferent. There seemed to be no predator waiting to pounce at her, only bugs. She noticed her sarif had been torn in multiple places. A dash of dark red still ran across the fabric covering her stomach. Rebels’ blood. Glane. She recalled him lying on the ground, reaching for her, pleading for her to… what? Her memory was hazy, and what it suggested didn’t make sense. Nobody could hurt Glane. He was a Cursed. She shook her head as if to shake out the nonsense, and rose to check her surroundings for clues to what might have really happened.
Three scratches and four bug bites later, she had not grown much wiser. The plants were thick and treacherous. She had found herself an ell-long branch to use as a stick, yet still had to fight the jungle every other step she took. Not far from where she had woken up, the ground fell off at a perilous angle. The other direction brought her to a crag that rose up so harshly she could neither climb it nor spot any mountain peaks beyond. Even the sun was of no help, hanging behind the foliage at the peak of its ark. Thus, she decided to walk along the rock in the direction most likely to lead west. West was Koeiji.Sooner or later, it would lead her back home. It had to.
Her memory proved more confusing the harder she tried to focus, assaulting her with images of leaving the ground, flying, soaring above the trees. There was no sense to be made of it, yet she tried, for that at least gifted her some distraction, and made her wonder in the way only a loneliness as deep as that of the jungle made one wonder. She kept arriving at the same ridiculous question.
Was she a Cursed?
The odd jump between her heavy steps seemed to suggest that no, she was still a mere human shackled by gravity. The voices of past teachers sounded all too clearly in her ears still. There are no Tahori Cursed. Not anymore. Not after the cleansing of the Second War, and most certainly not in the Republic.
Yet there was one. She had seen it, the beast, alive and strong and frightening to the bone. And perhaps it had been the heightened sense of danger that had let her soar. Didn’t the legends say so, too? According to them, Curses were rarely activated by will alone; their carriers required urgency, necessity, a dire need to see their powers blossom.
She remembered Rannek hinting at something similar when she had asked him about the Empire’s Cursed—Gifted, as the Gralinn called them—and their training by the Four Orders. People told stories about the grueling tests they were submitted to, tests that broke many a man and woman to see only a fraction of them succeed. She had asked Glane about it, too. He had changed the subject, yet for a breath, his eyes had become unrestful.
As she put down her foot on a patch of moss, it suddenly broke through. Pen lost her balance, and reached out just in time to grab a tree and hold on to it for dear life. After pushing herself back in shock, it took her a few breaths before she dared to crawl up to the edge again.
The ravine was a good twenty ells broad and about as deep, though its bottom was hidden by a false floor of treetops. It extended far down the mountainside, so far she lost all hope of crossing it anytime soon; even then the edge on the other side bristled with thickets and trees as unwelcoming as the ones around her. She only had two options. She could either turn around or walk down until she found another way west.
As those options were still being weighed in her mind, her eyes ventured further down the mountain to where it sloped off and escaped her sight. Something wasn’t right. The plains and woods had not looked this small before, and they seemed to extend further, too. It took her a breath to realize why that was.
Cursed or not, her flight had carried her along the mountains, further than she had ever dreamed. Before her lay not the surroundings of Bitaab, but the northern lowlands of Tahor with all their jungles and corn fields and shimmering rice paddies. She spotted the Mother Foen and realized that the river, too, betrayed her expectations, running out from the mountains to her right, not her left, into lake Bo and out, to cut through the land in a soft east-bound curve. She had crossed it. This was far from home. This isn’t even Koeiji prefecture anymore.
Pen stared until her stomach growled, and only then left her lookout to start the descent.
The edge of the ravine was not straight, but serpentine, cutting into her path multiple times before she decided to move not down directly, but diagonally, in the direction she now knew led east. It was a bit easier, yet still hard, and ambushed her every few steps with burrows and roots trying to rob her of her balance. She moved on, stumbling, falling, for what felt like days on end, only to look up in between and find the sun barely moved—those few times she found it at all beyond the thick tree crowns.
No matter how much ground she covered, there came no fruit, nothing to still her hunger. When she relieved herself in the cover of an ebony, the color that came out scared her. Then, she remembered the marimoss.
On top, it also made for poor sustenance. Or was her hunger the result of a sleep longer than what she assumed? Had she been out one day, or two? Three? Pen wasn’t so sure of anything anymore. She either could fly, or her memory was tricking her. She would either die of thirst and hunger, or from eating the wrong thing.
As her strength waned and the pain in her bowels grew, she thought of all the books she had read that could help her in this dilemma, encyclopedias, picture books, and the more realistic of adventurers—not Bramu, but Leef the Botanist and curious Kuone, educational stories pushed by teachers on an unwilling student body—yet while her body was all too willing to recall information about her surroundings, she was forced to face a harsh truth: reading did not mean remembering. Gone were the hours penned up in her room consuming all the information she so direly needed, information that had trickled away to make space for the most useless of trivia.
The capitol of the Allayn island of Enesham is Kuthrid.
Bramu’s cat is named Umarb—a gag she grasped for the first time right as another bug drove its stinger into her arm.
The people of Kaam don’t like to be complimented on their shoes.
When another root tripped her and flung her head only a finger’s width past the spike of a broken ebony branch, Pen decided to take a break, and sat down beside the spike in the hopes it would remind her to be more careful. A frag passed, then two, and gradually, her mind reached a state of calm. The hunger, the thirst, the pain from her wounds remained, but began to fade into the background of her consciousness as she took in the sensations of the jungle without haste for a change.
The more still Pen became, the more movement she saw. On leaves, bark, moss and soil lay a carpet of nervousness, a constant up-and-down-and-back-and-forth of tiny specks with tiny legs. Within five frags of sitting down, her legs had been conquered by three spiders, two worms, seven mosshoppers, and one tingly bicentipede, all of whom scared her, yet turned out to be wholly uninterested in her presence. Her thighs were only a pair of logs to them, a minor obstruction. Still, at the hundredth pair of legs, Pen felt a shiver go down her neck. It occurred too late to her to actually check the skin back there before a bug big into it and was gone before she could swat it.
With calm, she also grew alert. Surrounded by a million leaves whose green and yellow colors intertwined to form eye-like shapes, Pen couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. Wishful thinking, she supposed in her loneliness, yet the feeling stayed, settling in her stomach and telling her to stay watchful.
She had not been wrong to liken the cicadas’ buzzing to tekans. There was a rhythm to each of their mating calls, even though she failed to find even one matching pair. Some went on for frags and frags in evenly spaced staccato bursts. One not too far from her seemed caught in an endless loop of a dance-like rhythm, a dri-dri-driiik she could easily imagine an umum-player joining in with. Others seemed to almost speak, or sing, voicing themselves with patterns and swells that the closer she listened, the more they sounded like actual—albeit shrill—voices.
As she sat in this ocean of sound, Pen soon started spotting some of the singers, brown, hand-long insects that sat just as still as her on branches, trunks, and the dried teak leaves that covered the ground. Unlike the plants, she remembered, they were nutritious. Yafa was famous for its roasted cicadas. However, there came a sourness creeping up her throat at the thought of sinking her teeth into one of them; a calming sign, she reckoned, as it clearly meant her hunger had not yet turned critical.
Then, she heard a thump. A crackle. Suddenly, from beneath a shinoi bush, a pair of tiny gray-brown hands parted the vegetation bringing to light two big, yellow eyes dotted with black. This jungle-dweller she recalled having read about. An erue. A young one, from the looks of it. It bared its fangs at her.
“Heeey”, she said, as soothingly as possible.
Ak, said the erue, still showing its fangs, but hesitantly, like it wasn’t quite sure what to make of her. It couldn’t have been more than half her size.
“You and me both”, said Pen.
Ah-uh, said the erue. It then sheathed its teeth behind lips framed by tiny wrinkles, and cocked its head.
“Is that your name?” she asked. “ Yahu? Mine’s Pen.”
Eeh, said Yahu.
“Close enough. Was it you watching me? Good thing you didn’t just burst out.” She tapped her stick against the ground. “I could’ve hurt you.”
Yahu looked at the stick, at her, and began fumbling around the bushes with motions as jumpy as a bird’s. She arched her neck to spy its purpose, but refrained from sitting up, lest the little thing got scared and ran off. She couldn’t let that happen. There’s no such thing as a single erue. This much she did remember reading. Where there was one, there must be others, and where there were others, there must be food. The Gralinn insisted that humans had once been monkeys, or apes, one of the two. Either or, Yahu’s frantic search looked human enough to give her hope that at the end of this budding friendship laid a meal. What’s good for Yahu should be good enough for Pen.
Yahu spun around and pointed at her with a short stick. It was thinner than hers and carried three half-rotten leaves at the top that shook with each movement of the monkey’s hand, who looked quite proud of his find. Iiah, said Yahu.
Pen smiled, and softly, carefully, butted the tip of her stick against his. “Stick buddies.” She watched Yahu slam a fist onto the leafy ground, once, twice, three times. It seemed a happy gesture. “You don’t by any chance know where to find food, do you?”
Ooh, said Yahu, giving her quizzical eyes.
“Food. Fruit, preferably. Do berries grow this high up? You know berries, right?” There came no response. “Berries. This small. You pick them, then stuff them in your mouth, like this.”
She was sure to have spotted a glint of understanding in his eyes. Ia-ak, said Yahu, spinning around. She nodded. He nodded. Then, Yahu the erue took his stick in both hands, and bit into it.
“No, Yahu.” Pen palmed her face. “Not the stick. I meant—“
AAAH, it came from not far off, scaring her to her feet. Yahu leapt back a couple of steps, as well, his head shooting back and forth between her and somewhere high up in the jungle. She tried to follow his stare, but there was nothing there but trees, and lianas, and a ceiling of green.
AAAH, it came again, and suddenly she saw. A body a darker shade of brown than Yahu’s separated from a teak, jumped onto another, and another, moving fast down the mountain until it was out of sight. Pen looked down to find Yahu’s stick lying on the ground, the young erue nowhere to be seen. For a breath, she froze.
Then, Pen picked up her stick and raced after them.
The jungle, still, did not care for her. It bit, scratched, and stung as she pushed onward, following the AAAHs coming from further and further away. She managed to avoid tripping only at the cost of chafing her hands on bark. The stick lost its use going at high speed, yet she didn’t let go, fearing that at any corner, a leopard or a boar could jump out at her; how exactly a measly stick would help, she couldn’t bother to figure out.
The erue’s calls turned quieter until they merged with the jungle’s background noise, losing all location. Pen sped up her step, bursting through bushes, desperate to find them. Yahu had looked well-nourished. They would lead her to food. They would save her. The trues were her only chance. A noise to her back made her turn, yet slow down she wouldn’t, couldn’t, not until she found them.
It was thus blindly that the ravine took her. A foot stepped into nothingness. A hand reached back to grab hold of a tree, and came off clutching a piece of bark. And then she fell. Up and down and up her head went merging green with brown with blue with green, until her shoulder crashed into the slope. She cried out in pain as she rolled, tumbled, hit her head. Fly. Why couldn’t I just fly?
The ground evened out, but it took a sprawling shrub to end her fall, biting into her side with a dozen thorns. Panting, whimpering, Pen pushed herself away from it and crawled back up the slope. She looked up. Breaths passed before her sight lost its blurriness.
A massive trunk hovered in the air not far from her, hairy figures moving across its slanted mass. Erues. Far above, she saw the tree’s base reaching out over the edge she’d missed, its winding, thick roots clutching balls of earth that had been ripped out by some great blow. It was a bridge down into the ravine. A bridge I could’ve used. Pen sat up and started picking broken thorns from her arm looking at the slope that had caught her fall, a half parabola of dirt dropped by the tree’s collapse. There was luck in her survival, yet she failed to appreciate it.
That was, until she heard the noise. Behind the thorny shrub, there were ah’s and uh’s and oh’s going back and forth from a hundred monkey mouths. She stood up under a good deal of pain and stretched, making her legs and hip crack in more places than she cared for. After limping along the shrubbery a bit, she found a hole she could slip through.
The first thing she saw was a tangle of erues the size of Yahu jumping about, climbing each other’s backs, grabbing each other’s tails. They stopped for a breath upon spotting her, but soon continued. An adult monkey half her size was keeping watch over them, and now kept watch over her, too, following Pen with alert eyes as she circled around the rough-and-tumble. On the watcher’s back, she spotted a growth. The growth moved. It was a baby, hardly bigger than her own palm, looking at her with eyes big and glowing and full of wonder.
The second thing she saw were more monkeys than she could count, erues of all ages, sizes, running here and there through the bushes and up and down the trees. For the first time since she had woken, Pen could barely hear the cicadas. What sounded like a dozen brawls looked playful upon closer inspection; there were games of chase, hide-and-seek, and pull-the-tail going on all around her. Further down, she spotted a bunch of them frolicking along a narrow creek splashing water at each other. Water.There was a burning demand by her body at the sight of it. And when she listened, Pen knew she had no other choice.
She stepped forward slowly, making sure to keep her stick down at her side, muttering, “Hello”, and “Don’t worry”, and “Just passing through” as she made her way toward the stream. A small cluster of erues followed her, children mostly, some reaching for her stick when she wasn’t looking. An over-the-shoulder glance was enough to scatter them. With soft steps, she arrived by the creek, and forced herself to crouch down in the wet leaves just as softly, pretending to only want a light refreshment.
The pretense ended as soon as the water touched her lips. It was icy-cold. It was muddy. It was delicious. Handful after handful she scooped to her mouth, thinking of the last time water had tasted this good to her. The fountain in the cave. Rannek had been there first, slurping, gulping, kneeling beside her.She wondered what had become of him, of Ibiko and Glane, and felt guilty that even those grave thoughts could not lessen her joy.
When she turned, she feared the erues might have ganged up on her, but instead, they had dispersed. Perhaps to them, her sitting down turned her from a giant into just a rather hairless monkey. As she stood, something orange above her made Pen look up.
The third thing she saw was her salvation. These were neither teaks nor ebonies, but abi trees, she realized, bearers of the abi fruit, the sweet, carafe-shaped delicacy so sought after in the big cities. And it was the season. Up there, Pen spotted even more of the monkeys rushing through the wide-spread branches, sleeping on its limbs with their legs and feet hanging down, picking at fruit, eating, sleeping, delousing each other. Her hunger returned with a vengeance. She felt her mouth watering.
She noticed a commotion coming from inside a circle of brown-haired backs further down the creek. A shouting match. Let them shout and be distracted, she reckoned. It took their attention from her stretching and jumping under the abi tree.
Fortunately, the fruit hung low, and her stick proved long enough to separate one of them from its branch without damaging the neck. Only bitter earns the fist / ‘cuz sweetness claims a knowing twist. This one she remembered. Breaking its upper half, squishing it, even just making a cut would ruin the sweet pulp, pump it so full of bitterness that it would become near poisonous. Yet what Tahori could not open the abi? She didn’t need a book, hells, even the monkeys could do it. Pen grabbed the neck firmly with both hands, tucked the bulbous bottom between her thighs,grabbed the neck firmly with both hands… and twisted it off. After throwing away the seed-infested parts, she took a small bite of the pulp. It was good. Better than good.
Six frags later, with a face full of fire-colored pulp, Pen let out a content belch and sunk against a tree. A few of the younger erues clung to her stick, yet they seemed to take her for some sort of entertainment; soon as she ceased moving, they started chasing each other around again. Looking at them, she wondered which one might be Yahu. It was impossible to tell.
Sitting amidst the monkey tribe, Pen was reminded of the time a pack of erues had gotten inside the municipal building. That same day, she had been brought into Rannek’s office to be scolded for tricking Glane and leaving the house for an unguarded stroll, yet from one breath to the next, there was screeching and shouting in the hallways. Rannek’s face after sticking his head out the door was priceless. As he locked his office once, twice, and even called in Wellan with reinforcements, she couldn’t but make fun of him. His response were full of facts about the cunning of the city packs, about the surprising strength of a monkey arm, but his voice and eyes were full of fear. She wished he could be there to see how wrong the books had been. How caring they were. How they groomed, cleaned, watched one another, in ways eerily similar to the families of Koeiji.
The commotion down the creek stirred up further. She turned her head to see the cluster of monkeys burst apart suddenly and with many a loud AH and UH. They moved among the trees hitting the ground with their fists, eyes bent on a squabbling duo of older erues. Their fur was dark and coated with a hue of silver, she saw as they came closer, whirling around each other trying to pry something out of the other’s hands. A dispute about who owned what. Not unseen in Koeiji. Just to be safe, she stood up, and kept a close eye on them.
Then, it happened. A ripping noise sounded, and the two erues fell off each other as the object of their squabble took flight. It rose. It fell. It landed not four ells away from her, sliding through the dried leaves. She stared and stared, and only after a breath came to realize what it was.
A satchel. My satchel.
The sight set her mind to racing, trying to make sense of it. I must have had it when I took flight. I must have lost it. It fell, and they found it. But it wasn’t opened. Only the strap had been torn apart. They must have been trying to figure out how to open it. But why? What was their motive? Why were these two fighting over a plain leather bag?
When she took a breath to set these questions aside, Pen realized too late what she had done. She had stepped forward. Reached down. And picked it up.
A hundred, two hundred black-dotted spheres of yellow suddenly pointed at her, from the ground, the trees, from before and behind and beside her. All erues had seized their playing, their eating and drinking, to just sit and stare at her. She felt the hair on her neck stand up, and waited in vain for a sting. Fear seized her body.
“H-hey you”, she said, swallowing. “I didn’t mean to… interrupt you. Here, you can have it back.“ She offered the satchel up to one of the elders who had fought for it. He jumped back and bared his fangs. Please, gods, no no no no no. “Please, take it back. I don’t want any—“
She felt a sting on her shoulder. It wasn’t a bug. Something fell down to the ground, something small. She picked it up. It was an abi seed.
A second sting came, and a third, and then the monkeys suddenly started screaming. She looked around in panic to see them picking up seeds and pebbles from the ground and flinging them at her with full force, hitting her, hurting her. She turned and ran. Everywhere she went, there were more erues waiting to pelt her with tiny projectiles. She raised the satchel to cover her face, but soon, her hands and forearms were burning with pain.
Pen burst through a tangle of thorns, earning only a breath of respite before the monkeys came after her. She ran on. Ran up. About halfway up the slope, she tripped and fell. As she slid down the ramp of dirt and looked up, she saw she was trapped. A half circle of erues stood before her, shrieking, blocking off the shrubs, sitting on the tree bridge. The nuts and pebbles made way for small rocks, debris from the collapse of the trunk. One hit her forehead. Another her ribs. She closed her eyes.
“Please”, Pen cried.
The impact was so deafening, she thought they had finally knocked her out. It was only when the pelting stopped that she dared glance up again. Dust was settling slowly on her surroundings. Through it, she saw the monkeys jumping around, shrieking, looking up the wall of the ravine to her back. There were fewer than before. There also was a swathe, a strange opening in the shrubs where a ditch went through the ground away from her, leading up to a tree. A massive shape lay there, gray and unmoving and huge.
The second boulder came down not far from her, ripping down more of the shrubs and crashing through two abi trees with earth-shaking force before coming to a halt. Little brown-haired bodies flew about and landed motionless in the boulder’s wake, drenched in red. Pen began to shiver. She tried turning around to look up the wall, but something kept her neck stiff. She did not want to look.
Off to her right, a thud sounded. The monkeys had gone, disappeared down the creek and into the jungle. Their home was a wasteland. Pen turned her head slowly, pushing herself up the slope away from the hunched figure slowly stepping out of the dust.
The beast. Its hand did not cover the eyes anymore, but shaded them. Wild hair waived around as it scanned the ground, the trees. Something about its skin was off, even more so than before; it hung in strips off its arms, its chest, its legs, making it look like a snake mid-shedding. Pen was afraid to look, and yet couldn’t do anything but look, stare at Wellan’s killer as it picked up something from the ground.
From the beast’s hand dangled a body brown and red, twitching softly. It may have been any of them, but in that moment, Pen was convinced she was looking at Yahu, her stick-buddy, the tiny erue that had led her to water, led her to food. It twitched once more.
Then, the beast opened its mouth and bit into the monkey’s head with a crunch. Pen gagged as it took another bite, and another, before flinging the body aside. It then looked at her. Came closer.
“N-n-no”, she said, pushing herself away, up the slope. “No. P-please, no!”
Hm, growled the beast before grabbing her by the waist and tugging her over its shoulder. It jumped, the impact making her gag once more. It jumped again. Before she knew, she became incredibly dizzy, and looked down.
She was soaring. Flying. Darkness closed in on her, but Pen fought on, long enough to realize the beast was not flying, but jumping from tree to tree and rock to rock with savage strength, making its way further up the mountain. The impacts of each jump hit her hard in the stomach, robbing her of all air. Pen felt her senses waning. Her eyes rolling back. The dark place was close, she could almost feel it, the mass, the lights, the—
With a last impact that shook and hurt her every bone, they landed. Pen was dropped to the ground. She tried to raise herself up, but fell. Everything was spinning. She breathed, slowly, put her fingers to her jaw. Counted the pulses. Then, she threw up chunks of abi, and rolled to her back wheezing.
When the spinning stopped, she sat up with a heavy head. The ground was even and overgrown with yellow weeds. The few trees in sight were far apart, dismal growths compared to the jungle. Her satchel lay not far from her, and on the other side lay an edge, with a floor of foliage beyond it, and the flatlands, the horizon beyond, more distant than before. Though the sun was warm, the air had cooled down a bit. They had gone even higher up the mountain, to where the jungle’s dominion ended.
Pen turned to find dark green eyes gazing at her from under a shielding hand. There the beast sat on a rock, its back to the gray mountain rising ever higher into the sky. Blood was dripping from its beard onto the stone. It did not move, and neither did she. Her pulse was a rapid firing that would not slow.
And suddenly, as she stared and the beast stared back, a series of words came back to her with startling clarity, a passage from ‘The Myths & Tales of Tahor’. It was an account of a sage born before the invasion, an orator who had witnessed the Tahori warlords die one by one in the two Great Wars. It was short. It was truer than any other words she had ever known.
‘Always remember the dual origin of the Curseds’ name; for it is easy to cite the cruel ways death makes for them, easier yet to forget what curse lies in the utter fear of man facing god in man’s clothing.’
Martin Surga 