Words
The first time sleep caught up with Pen was at sunrise. She only had herself to blame. The retreat of darkness had calmed her senses enough to not pinch herself the moment her eyelids became heavy. When she woke up, the brightness of day had settled on the small plateau, and a light breeze rustled the bushes.
The beast still sat there, unmoving, shielding its eyes.
It kept looking at her, longer than anyone had ever looked at her. As neither of them moved, its stare did not change, but what it meant to her did. At first, she thought herself prey; a meal, the main course after an erue appetizer. She thought to spot a predator’s glint darting her way from the shadow of the beast’s hand. She even once caught it licking its lips.
Yet time passed, and there came no final pounce. Her own stomach growled, but she dared not move from her spot in the middle of the plateau lest she provoke some action on the beast’s part. Having already pleaded with it twice, she dared not even speak anymore. Whatever went on inside its mind, mercy had no place there. A fear less life-threatening and more twisted presently seized her mind, and soon, she clutched her ripped sarif trying to cover the exposed skin of her thighs.
A different sort of prey. Though she only had Yuri’s playful comments on her looks to go by, her age made her more of a woman than a child. Of the company that had left the caves, she had been one of only two females; and though that rebel girl certainly was more grown, she reckoned it could be argued that she was prettier.
Suddenly, it was not hunger glinting in the beast’s eyes, but lust. The way it had grabbed her and carried her up the mountain proved it possessed little respect for her person to begin with. To it, she was an object like the rocks it threw, the limp bodies it nourished from. She began to wonder which was the worse thing to be: food or flesh. The answer eluded her, yet she kept searching, all the while not noticing that her eyes had long ago fallen shut.
The next time sleep caught up with Pen, she woke sweating and shaking from dreams too twisted to recall. The sun had risen and gone down, and only a pink glow at the horizon lighted the plains of central Tahor. Her skin burned, bitten and scratched in a hundred places, but nothing hurt as badly as the yearning in her stomach.
The beast still sat there, unmoving, not shielding its eyes.
Though black in the fading light, they were eyes of green like those of her kin, eyes you would meet anywhere on the streets of Koeiji. Unreadable, however. She feared giving it too much unhidden attention—yet what else was she to look at? The bushes, trees, and weeds had nothing left to show her, and the plains forced her to lose sight of the beast. Thus, as darkness crept upon the plateau, Pen for the first time risked a full look.
The beast was not as big as she had thought. One-and-a-half, maybe two heads taller than her standing, but that went for most grown-ups. It certainly wasn’t on eye-level with Glane, far from it. And yet it had bested him, all but killed him. Deadened skin still hung from its every limb in scraps, but one by one, it continued to rip them off, revealing new skin beneath that had an odd hue to it. Dead flakes caught in the hair sprouting from its head, chin, armpits, and chest, dark hair, matted by negligence. Only its brows were tame. A nose not particularly ugly was rendered asymmetrical by an unseemly crook. Its lips were full, and a bit wide.
’A god in man’s clothing’, she remembered. If she tried hard to ignore the god in there, the clothing struck her as… insignificant, almost.
Hm, said the beast, as if it had read her mind.
She caught only one last glance after that, a shameful one brought about by fear. Although she had never been the type to obsess about the drawings in her biology textbooks, Pen looked at the nexus of its thighs and the thing sitting there within another growth of hair. It did look somewhat like what she expected.
Yet something was missing.
As night began anew, she heard distant Ah’s and Uh’s coming up the mountain. Erues reclaiming their home, most likely.She wondered if they felt about their dead like she had when Wellan was killed. Could monkeys swear revenge? They must. Everything they had done had seemed so human. The playing, the caring, even the fierce attack on her reminded Pen of her earliest days in school. She remembered two boys on the schoolyard once, fighting over a pair of shoes. Were they so far from those older erues who had spun around her satchel?
The satchel. Pen almost slapped herself. She had hidden behind it, yet in all her fear not even once thought to check its contents. Slowly, she loosened the clasps, the buttons, and reached inside careful to not make too much noise. Her hand went through it, scanning every shape. Her notepad. Books, one, two, three. Pens and pencils. Her fan. Her wallet. A newspaper taken from the rebel’s stash. An empty thermos. Every single useless item was still there, and somehow, that made her feel better.
She closed the satchel and put it under head head as a pillow, stretching out on the weeds. When she took a cautious glance, she noticed the beast was not looking at her anymore. Neck pointing upward, it gazed at the myriad stars of their ancestors twinkling, looking down. Pen laid on her back and did the same, feeling her hunger, her weakness, and the weight of her eyelids. She wondered if this would be the last thing she saw.
“What do you want from me?” Pen asked, drifting out of consciousness.
Hm, said the beast.
The third time sleep caught up with her, it felt like only a breath passed before she woke again. The sun had barely risen above the mountains. The jungle was loud. She was weak, and had to gather her strength before sitting up and looking at the rock.
The beast sat there no more.
She shot to her feet in an instant and took a hesitant step. Took a second. No Hm. No nothing. She started walking up and down the plateau on shaky legs hoping cautiously that it may actually be gone. That it may have lost interest in her. No beast. Her joy was silent, for part of her feared that the smallest noise might break the spell.
Slowly losing fear, she took stock of her surroundings. The edges of the plateau fell off into smooth vertical rock, unclimbable even if she had all her strength. The closest tree crown lay too far below her to hope for a safe jump, and the roots and vines growing down from the trees on the plateau turned out to rip apart when charged with her full weight.
Pen’s stomach chimed in, reminding her of the urgency of a swift escape. She started to rip every vine she could reach off the trees, collecting them next to each other. One wouldn’t hold her, but more might do the trick. With clumsy hands, she tried to combine the longest three into one thick mega-vine, but found that it slipped and dissolved when she pulled at it. She had to make them stick together. She needed to braid them. Most girls her age would find it easy, she knew, but those girls also had mothers to teach them. Father had never been the type for decorations.
An idea came to her. The books she’d brought—one of them may be able to help. ‘Northern Rites’ she had brought to prevent regional misunderstandings between the people of Bitaab and Penroe of Koeiji, but perhaps, just perhaps, there would be instructions about knots and weaves. Those were rites of sorts, weren’t they?
Not according to the book. As she flung it back into her satchel, Pen spotted another one inside that stumped her. ‘Plants’ by E.B. Luen. It was the gift she’d send father for his next birthday. She could not remembered packing it. She picked it up carefully, noting the cut-off fibers at the edge, and opened it, careful not to rub the dirt on her fingers onto the pages.
There was much and more she hadn’t spotted before. None of it helped her at the moment, unfortunately, though she regretted not having read it earlier upon learning that rotten pagalia petals made for a trusted bug repellant when rubbed on one’s skin. The short explanations proved knowledgable about plant-based coordination, finding water, additional food sources, and—
Wreaths. There the information was, in different context, but clearly illustrated: the weaving of different flower stalks into ‘the pretty summer wreaths gifted to guests of a village’. She even found instructions: ‘Stalk C cross B, A cr C, B cr A…’ She stared at them and the ink depicting their application, burning both into her memory. Then, she closed the book.
If the jungle came with instructions, Pen would have long ago mastered it. Only a few frags and some failed attempts later, she held eleven ells of woven perfection in her hands, nine when tied around the teak closest to the edge, six hanging down from the edge. Enough to allow her to climb down, push herself off the rock, and jump across into the nearest tree crown. She didn’t know whether she was still strong enough to hold on, but that was a risk she would have to take. Bramu wouldn’t hesitate. Pen closed her satchel and tied a knot into the ripped strap to put it around her shoulder. She walked up to the edge. Looked down. Suppressed the urge to jump back. And took a long, long breath.
Pen grabbed the woven vines as tightly as she could and stepped over the edge into the vertical world. Every instinct in her begged to climb back up. She carefully placed her sandals against ledges and cracks where they could get traction. After careful inspection of the rock, she took the second step, then the third. So far, so good. She turned her head shortly checking for the tree to her back. It was still below her, but a bit closer.
There was no path set out in the rock, forcing her to dare a jump to move on. So far, the braided vines held her weight. They even let her slide her fingers in for a better grip. Soon, she descended smoothly for ells at a time, clearing the rope’s half-way mark. The tree was now as much below her as it was behind her.
As she lifted her left foot to take the fourth step, something loosened in the rock. She heard a crack and ceased to move hanging with one foot suspended in air. The noise had come from where the other one sat wedged in a gap. Perhaps, if she moved carefully enough…
The face of rock broke off suddenly, without a sound almost. Her right sandal fell with it, and in a breath, Pen was dangling. She held on for dear life as the rubble crashed into the underbrush far below. Panic seized her. Wrapping both legs around the vines, she dangled in the air trying to calm down, waiting until the swinging stopped.
When it did, Pen knew she was trapped. There was no rock to put her feet against anymore; what remained was a wall receding from the edge over which her rope went, too far from her to reach. Her legs and feet hardly took any weight off her hands, tiny, weak things that were already protesting the force pulling at them. Climbing up was an impossibility. Climbing down led to certain death. Her mind raced. Then, she heard the thump.
It came from above. The tree. It was starting to give in to her weight. She had hoped to pull off the jump before it ever came to this, but with no rock, there was nothing to jump off of. Pen tried to pull herself up by her hands, straining her shoulders. She let out a scream of desperation.
When she looked up again, there was something new protruding over the edge. Hair. Messy, black, curly, matted hair centered on a pair of deep green eyes that looked at her with—
“For the gods, pull me up already!” Pen yelled.
Hm, said the beast. It continued looking down at her, just as before. Yet she saw neither hunger nor lust in its eyes.
She felt herself being pulled even further from the rock. The vines went no longer across the edge, but through the beast’s hand, holding it and her aloft like a piece of string over the jungle. Suddenly, with a burst, she was pulled up two ells, then two more. Her hands were in excruciating pain, yet she held on, burst for burst, until a tight grip closed in around both her wrists and she looked ahead to find the beast holding them, staring at her from up close.
It smelled of earth and blood.
The beast flung her back onto the plateau, where she remained on the ground catching her breath. It wasn’t the first time she had escaped death, nor was it the closest. Still, she couldn’t but feel the same as when the Krissin had went down, or when the beast had first attacked them. Powerless. Frustrated. Angry. She was so, so angry.
Thus, when she looked up to find the beast standing no three steps away from her, unmoving, shielding its eyes, she did not cower. Pen stood up, walked up to it, and wagged her finger in its face screaming her lungs out. “What in the six hells is WRONG with you? I’ve been sitting here for days thinking you’ll kill me, but you won’t, will you? Do you think you’re the first person to ever save my life? That doesn’t mean a thing to me. You killed Wellan. You killed my friend. And if it wasn’t for you, I’d be back in Koeiji, I’d be home, I’d be safe, I’d never have to go back into this godsforsaken wilderness ever again! Why did you take me here? What am I to you?” She stopped, panting. “ANSWER ME!”
The beast only looked at her finger shivering before its eyes. In the shadow of its hand, she thought to have spotted twitch of its face. But it only huffed, and turned away from her with an indifferent Hm.
“How dare you?” After a second of bewilderment, Pen walked after it refusing to put down her finger. “Look at me! I demand you tell me what you want.” No response. “I won’t give it to you, whatever it is, but that’s the least you can do. Or better yet: who are you? And don’t you dare say ‘a Cursed’, I know that already, everyone does. If any of my friends survived, they’ll send others hunting for you, be sure of it. Think Glane was a challenge? He’s gonna be the least of your problems.” The beast arrived by the rock it had sat on the past days. She spotted a dark mass of hair and limbs placed there, red trickles running down the rough stone. “Oh, got yourself a snack, haven’t you? What about me? All your heroics won’t be worth a damn thing if I starve to death. Either let me go, or give me some food. Look at me! Answer me, gods—“
The beast turned around to drop something into her arms, and she caught it, too surprised to question the gift. It was warm. It was wet.
It was a freshly killed erue.
A shriek escaped her as she dropped it to the ground and jumped back. “What… I can’t eat that! That’s disgusting! What have they ever done to you?”
Hm, said the beast. It sat down and began gnawing away at a larger specimen, dripping blood all around it.
“There’s other things to eat down there.”
Mhm, said the beast, mouth full. This time, Pen’s stomach responded before she could. As it growled, she looked at the mangled gift from the beast and almost had to gag.
“I… can’t, okay? It’s a start, but if you want me to live, you’re gonna have to do better than that!”
This time, the beast made no reply except for the crunching of bone in its mouth.
“You’d be wise to be nice to me—I’ll be the only one who can convince them not to kill you. Because that’s what they’re gonna do. They’re gonna kill you. You’re a Cursed, and you’re Tahori. You’re not supposed to exist.”
The beast’s stare stayed the same. Pen began wondering if anything she’d said had made an impact, and suddenly, her anger made way for confusion. “Are you telling me you don’t understandme at all?”
No response.
“Nothing. Not a word. Not even this?” She took a deep breath before jabbing upward with her middle and index finger extended. “Fuck you.”
No response.
“You’re a dense, halfwit, half-dick murderer. Die in a fire.”
Hm, said the beast. It seemed more amused than hostile.
“Unbelievable.” Pen sunk down to the ground. This was worse than anything she could have anticipated. No matter what base instinct drove the beast, she could have at least tried to manipulate it, trick it. Yet how did one trick something without being able to communicate properly? Yahu was of more help than him. It, she reminded herself. This inarticulate beast had killed Wellan. It may have just as likely killed Glane—fast, strong, near invisible Glane. Such power in the hands of one utterly incapable of reason…
God in man’s clothing. It wasn’t as true as she had once thought; as far as she knew, the old gods had been quite capable of speech. According to the sages, they barely did anything but talk, apart from squabbling and destroying the odd crop here and there. So what had gone wrong with this one?
Again, her stomach growled. Again, her eyes went to the erue. The weeds around it had drunk up the blood eagerly, as had the dry earth. It was a bit taller than Yahu. It was missing an arm. An uncomfortable fact occurred to her. It’s already dead. That was not what the tenets of right and wrong were about, though. She had seen the beast kill without mercy. She couldn’t but feel like benefitting from its brutality would reward it. Even if the erues had been less than kind to her, that was because of their lack of understanding. They were simpler creatures. None of them had the same education as her. Then again, neither did he. It, she reminded herself. Her stomach growled.
Pen wiped her arms on her sarif to get rid of the blood, opened her satchel, and pulled out her books. If there was no other option, she might as well know. This time, the ‘Northern Rites’ held the information she was looking for.
Chapter 8, ‘Trial by Fire’: ‘Firestones like flint are identified by their dark color and their shape, often resembling glass shards with sharp, rounded edges. They are usually found in the vicinity of present or past bodies of waters, like lakes or rivers, or their respective beds.’ She needed not look for those up here, Pen knew.
‘Creating a fire via the rubbing / spinning of wood against wood is a harsh endeavor requiring patience, precision, and strong hands.’ Pen took only one look at her chafed hands to know that this, too, was out of the question. Then, she noticed something—or rather the absence of it. The crunching of bones had stopped.
The beast was staring at her once again, only its eyes were pointing somewhere specific. Her hands, no, the book in them. Pen closed it. “You don’t speak, you don’t understand; you’ve never seen a book, either?”
No response.
“Lo and behold: it’s nothing but words.” She turned the pages to it. “Not that interesting to you, is—“ She silenced. Not all of her books consisted only of words. Fidgeting, she took out ‘Plants’ and browsed through the pages searching for a painting she knew would be there. It had to. Every Tahori knew the—
“Ever seen this?” Pen asked, showing the beast the rendering of an abi tree and its fruit, pointing at it. “That’s an abi. A-bi. Say it.”
Hm, said the beast. Its eyes seemed spellbound by the painting on the small page. It stood up. Walked toward her. Reached out.
“Hey, hold on!” Pen clutched the book to her chest. “You can’t have that, it’s mine. I need it.”
The beast looked at her for a little while longer before turning away, and going back to eating erues and gnawing on their bones; though before it turned, there was a motion in its face, one surprisingly human for all the savagery she had seen it display. A petty motion.
“… Did you just roll your eyes at me?”
Hm, said the beast.
Pen felt conflicted. The book was her gift to father, but what use was a gift if the giver starved to death before giving it? She would have to trust it. The killer. The monster. Slowly, she extended her hand, and offered up the book opened to the page of the abi. “If you don’t bring it back, I won’t forgive you.” An empty threat to one who already deserved her eternal hatred; but if it didn’t understand words, it wouldn’t spot a lie, either.
The beast took the book in its hands, turned it. Fingers smeared with blood went all across the page, almost prompting her to try and intervene. No use. At least, she told herself, it seemed to take a close look. Too late did she realize its intent. A tear sounded. The book dropped to the ground.
“What—why did you do that?”
Holding the crumpled paper in its hand, the beast crouched down in utter ignorance of her. She opened her mouth again, but too late. With a thump that shook the plateau, it took to the sky in a long arc and dropped into the jungle. Pen was left in shock. After nothing happened for a while, she picked up the book and checked the damage. Only the page with the abi was gone.
She once again inspected the plateau, the trees, and the still intact rope of woven vines. There was another tree down below that she could try to jump to, one whose adjoining face of rock hadn’t broken off. But it was no use, she found when she tried to put her weight onto her hands. The traction burned in her palms, and she could already see herself dangling in the air again; this time, she wasn’t even sure whether she could keep herself from screaming for help knowing that the beast might come. Curse the Cursed, she thought, and left the rope and the plateau’s edge behind.
The heap of dead erues still irked her, but looking at it didn’t frighten her as much anymore: they were dead. She had seen dead things before. Monkeys. Hounds on the roadside. People. She’d seen two men die before her very eyes, the students who had tried to take her, years back, cut down by Glane’s blade faster than she could process the sight. All there was was blood, and the look in their eyes, and the solemn, pained smile on his face as he sheathed his weapon and apologized. Something about him in that moment suddenly struck her, something she’d tried to forget. That moment, he hadn’t looked quite like a man to her. He had looked more like a beast.
Foolish thoughts, product of her hunger. Glane could speak. Glane could feel regret, and admit mistakes. She left the erues be, and soon found herself circling the plateau looking for nothing in particular, trying to get her mind in order.
On her umpteenth circling, she took a closer look at the small pilings of sediment and rubble at the foot of the crag rising from the plateau. On the umpteenth-and-first, she slowed her step ever so shortly. Another circling later, she stopped. It didn’t make sense, but she couldn’t deny what she was seeing buried amongst the rocks. Shards. Dark, oddly shaped shards.
How had the ocean ever come up here, Pen wondered.
It was about noon when the beast returned to the plateau. It dropped from the sky carrying on its shoulder not an abi, but an abi tree, whose roots rained down earth upon impact. In its crown hung a host of fruits, as well as an erue scared out of its mind. The monkey sped away as soon as the beast dropped the tree, and disappeared over the plateau’s edge with the reckless abandon of a skilled climber. As her captor stepped up to Pen, it took on a look of confusion.
Hm, said the beast. Yet it sounded more like a question, aimed both at her and the puny fire crackling in front of her.
Pen snapped out of her state of shock, dropped the stake to which she had tied the one-armed monkey corpse, and wiped the grease off her lips with hasty motions. Eating alone had proven shameful enough, but the eyes of another made her wish to crawl into a hole and die. Even the beast’s. Especially the beast’s.
It kept staring out of the shadow of its hand.
“How was I to know you actually understood that?” She packed the pieces of flint and the scratched thermos into her satchel before crossing her arms.“Besides, a whole tree? That’s kind of dense, even for… Don’t you know what fruit is?”
No response.
Pen stood up and walked over to the tree. With both hands, she picked one of the fruits and held it up to him. “You must have seen it before. You’re Tahori. Every Tahori knows this.” She lodged the body between her thighs, twisted the stalk, and yanked it out before taking a bite of the sweet, untainted pulp, and slurping up its juice. “Right?”
Without a breath of hesitation, the beast took a fruit and bit into it without twisting anything. It did not even bite into the pulp, but the stalk. Pen watched in horror as it chewed and chewed. Finally, it stopped.
Hm, said the beast, before spitting out and throwing away the abi in disgust. An evil eye went her way, scaring her for a second. But the beast only went back to its altar of bled-out erues, and resumed cleaning the flesh off their remains.
Pen stood and stared, unmoving, as a truth came upon her with disarming clarity. This was a beast through and through. It did not know words, but that was hardly the beginning. It did not know this world. Daylight blinded its eyes. The sun’s heat caused its skin to peel. The caves had not just held it, but birthed it, sheltered it from the outside.
She suddenly saw it look up at the spot beside the smoldering fire, the spot where she had sat so long, squirming under its stare. And she saw that it was neither looking at the spot nor the embers, nor anything on the plateau. As the bones crunched between its teeth, the beast gazed out over the wide lands of Tahor, the forests, rivers, the hills and the horizon, and the sky.
This was the first thing it may have seen besides darkness in its entire life, it occurred to her. And from some place within her she did not know, a deep sadness overcame Pen. Wrong. The first thing he saw had been Wellan shooting at him.
It, she reminded herself.
Martin Surga 