Scourged

by Kevin Hearne

  “Wukong, none of my assumptions about this guy are comfortable right now. Does that make you happy?”

  “Let’s talk afterward if you beat him,” the Monkey King says, and Wuguan roars, leaping into the air with his sword held high.

  i’ve heard of the Amazon, o’ course, but it’s not something I can really comprehend, a vast river spanning a continent that’s the breadth of nine fecking Irelands or something like that. We have lots of bonny water on the Emerald Isle but not concentrated in a river that bloody wide or long. And it doesn’t hide alligators and piranhas and the like either, or huge great snakes that have somehow become euphemisms for a man’s mickey. I’ll tell ye what, lads: The day I see a mickey that can wrap itself around a full-grown man and squeeze him to death is the day I stop even trying to have sex.

  The tree I use to shift in is right by the bank of the Amazon, near a city in Peru called Iquitos. I don’t realize it when I get there, but later I find out that ye can’t get to this city by car. Ye have to either fly in or float in on the river. Or shift in, like me, using a tethered tree. They have local transport in the city, roads and such, but the roads don’t cut through the forest otherwise. Still, it’s not a wee town. It’s half a million people, and it smells like they’ve been here for a while.

  Siodhachan told me that most of this continent got colonized by the Spanish and Portuguese. Those were a couple of the big colonial powers, along with the British, French, and Dutch, who used gunpowder and disease to make the world such a European bollocks.

  “The Irish,” he says to me during that history lesson, “were among the first to be colonized.”

  I shan’t lie to ye, that sticks in me arse like a toothpick shoved in sideways. Can’t blame anyone who’s resentful of those colonial powers or the destructive swath they cut through the world. Whole peoples have been erased by them, others enslaved by them. But it goes further than the human cost, as far as the earth’s concerned. Gaia herself has paid a huge price for such arrogance.

  Here in Peru, for example, the Incas had four hundred different kinds of potatoes, and the Spanish wiped almost all of them out. They brought a few kinds back to Europe, and that became a huge staple food for the Irish, which is why Siodhachan bothered to tell me about it, but the diversity was gone. There used to be a whole bunch of bananas too, if ye will pardon me pun, but now ye have just a few kinds left and some plantains. Siodhachan says he regrets not saving some of those in a seed bank or something like that, but he didn’t realize it was happening, because potatoes and bananas don’t have death screams. Extinctions are sad, lonesome exits by the last few specimens, often silent and always tragic. And they’re still happening.

  Something around Iquitos is fed up with that. It’s decided humans are the problem, and much like Bavaria told me to take out the problematic kobolds, it’s taking out humans in this isolated city surrounded by the jungle.

  Except it’s no single thing doing the damage. That’s the true problem here.

  A swarm of wasps swoops down on an auto-rickshaw—a noisy three-wheeled open-air machine—and proceeds to sting everyone inside to a screaming death. Clouds of mosquitoes settle on others like a bloodsucking horror show. Monkeys have come out of the trees to throw rocks and anything they can find at people’s heads from the rooftops. Birds of all kinds dive and peck at eyes, but the harpy eagles are especially deadly. There’s a jaguar chasing people down and tearing out throats. The best thing for everyone right now would be to get indoors and stay there, but I would not be surprised to learn that people are getting attacked by their own pets. I greet the Amazon elemental and hope she might be able to help me figure this out.

  //Query: What is source of this attack?//

  //Nature goddess//

  That part was at least partially expected—the disturbance here could hardly be organized by anything else—but it sure does pluck the string labeled wrong on me personal harp. It doesn’t make sense that a nature deity would join Loki under any circumstances, if he could even communicate with one. I mean, as soon as a nature deity heard Loki say, “First we’re going to burn everything,” it should have kicked his gibbering arse for opening his gob. So I think this must be a reaction to the chaos erupting elsewhere. Nature’s having a rough go of it thanks to Loki’s shenanigans, and the deity here is thinking globally but acting locally, blaming humans for the mess.

  //Query: Where do I find her?//

  //Unknown//

  Bollocks.

  //Query: Name of deity?//

  //Unknown//

  Hairy bollocks, damn it. Sweaty ones that smell like dodgy cottage cheese. I need to know more if I’m going to figure out how to deal with this.

  A red-furred monkey scampers above me head and I reach out to him, binding me mind to his, and ask who sent him. I get a mental shrug, a shriek, and a rock thrown at me head in reply.

  I duck into a place that looks like a restaurant, advertising something called tacacho. “Who speaks English?” I ask the room, and a few hands go up, including the lad behind the register. I approach him and tell him thanks. “Do ye have a nature goddess people pray to around here?”

  My question is heard by several people, and they all respond the same way: “Pachamama,” they say. They exchange glances and trade tiny smiles and nods, recognizing fellow worshippers.

  “Ah, good. What does she look like?”

  That gets me some confusion. “You look for art?” the lad behind the register says. He’s young, probably not old enough to drink yet.

  “No, no. I don’t want art. I’m not a tourist. I want to know what you think she looks like.”

  Because if this deity has manifested anywhere near here, she’s going to look something like what her worshippers envision in their minds.

  “Big?” The register lad throws his hands wide, like he’s describing the fish he caught yesterday.

  “No, no,” one of the patrons says, his mouth full of whatever tacacho is. A bit of it spits out as he tries to talk around it. “Long hair. Many colors. Healthy size, not big or small. Made of plants and animals.”

  “What? No, she looks human and has normal brown skin!” someone else says.

  “She is mother of all,” the eating fellow says. “Not just humans. She is not confined to human form.”

  I can see why Amazon had difficulty identifying where she might be. Judging by these varying descriptions, she could manifest as nearly anything.

  “What is she like? Does she have a temper?”

  “No, no, she is gentle and loving,” the boy at the register says, and the others agree.

  That doesn’t fit with the wrath going on outside, and the patrons here seem largely unaware that it’s happening. That changes when an auto-rickshaw crashes through the huge front windowpane and a fecking plague of something flying comes with it. I’ve never seen people fill their pants with shite so fast.

  When the first thing stings me I understand why, because it bloody hurts. I realize I’m a target as is, but there’s a simple solution: Cease being human. I shape-shift to a red kite and let me clothes fall off, emerging through the neck of me shirt and flying right out the window past all the stinging insects, which only want to sting humans. I spiral higher and higher and then circle the borders of the city, looking for something that might qualify as a nature goddess stomping around. Off to the east, near what I later find out is the Belén district, I think I see something worth investigating. Treetops not quite treelike, moving against the prevailing wind.

  I ride up on a thermal, gaining more altitude, and see that there’s a river there—the Itaya, in fact, a tributary to the Amazon. The housing, especially on the other side, is the most basic shelter, built on stilts to allow for seasonal flooding; the people there are living crowded together in awful conditions. And I worry they may already be dead, for what I see peeking over the treetops across
the river is a creature of wrath, and the swarms are flowing from that direction to the city.

  I don’t want to try to fly against that, so I angle around to land on the bank to the south, flanking it, and once on the ground I shift into a bear. If a jaguar wants to take me on, I figure I’ll give it a proper fight that way; I doubt these jungles have any bigger predators than that, apart from the swarms of this ant or that hornet.

  There’s no time to be cautious after that. People are dying and I need to figure out how to stop it. I rumble north along the eastern bank of the Itaya until I arrive at what is unmistakably a manifestation of Pachamama. Once I get a good look I understand why the Amazon elemental couldn’t figure out where she was, for she is not any one thing distinct unto herself. She is a collection—no, there’s a fancy-arsed word for it—an amalgamation of plants and animals, all forming the shape of a human woman twenty feet tall or so. She’s made of vines and monkeys and saplings and beeswax and every fecking thing in the jungle. She is both terrifying and beautiful. I don’t know half of what I’m looking at, since I’m not from around here and lots of these species are new to me. I have two apprentices, though, Luiz and Ozcar, who come from different ends of the Amazon. Ozcar is from Peru, but Luiz, from Brazil, is undoubtedly the biggest animal lover of me whole grove; either one of them could probably tell me what I’m looking at in great detail. All I can tell is that it’s a seething mass of mammals and birds and insects around a skeleton of wood and vines, and it’s powerful mad and a right glory all at once, staring at the human city across the river with churning eyeballs made of fiery-red army ants and bending all her will to destroying everyone living there. Should Gaia ever choose to manifest herself, I imagine she might look something like this, but on the scale of mountains.

  Figuring out how to talk to her is going to be the problem. She’s manifested from local belief and they speak Spanish around here, which means that’s probably what she speaks. That’s not one I’ve picked up yet, apart from a few words.

  I can’t even tackle that, however, until I figure out where she’s keeping her consciousness for this manifestation. She has so many critters hanging out in her skull that I can’t find hers. It’s a frustrating search in the magical spectrum—I even look around the chest cavity for something special, thinking perhaps she’d be keeping herself where the heart should be, but all I can pick up is an overall glow suffusing her constructed body, which does have hair of many colors, the strands made up of vines covered in various furred and feathered animals.

  I grunt a bear’s equivalent of “Oh, shite!” when the answer is precisely that overall glow—Pachamama is a manifestation of nature, so her identity is not separate from that body but rather shared among everything in it. She is the sum of those many parts—which is why Amazon could not locate her specifically. She is a distributed consciousness. Or maybe the proper word would be diffused? I still fecking hate English.

  But it gives me an idea. If I bind with any animal that’s part of her, that should be a way in. I choose a somewhat goofy-looking creature hanging on to a knotted bole around her ankle. It has a smile on its face, very long arms, and three enormous claws on each hand. A three-toed sloth, I learn later. Luiz would love it.

  I’ve had frequent practice with the binding of minds thanks to Siodhachan’s hounds, and it’s a quick process now. Not sure how quick the speaking bit will go, but fortunately once the binding’s made a whole lot can be communicated through emotion, imagery, and intent rather than spoken words. Rendering it into mere sentences later is like hitting a dartboard’s outer rings instead of the bullseye, but at least it counts toward some kind of understanding.

  I says,

  The creature slowly looks around at the animals teeming around it on the ankle and foot of the giant goddess. Her mental voice is affable and kind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  That’s not something I can really communicate with just images and emotions. It’s a name couched in language, and she has a spot of trouble with it.

 

 

 

 

 

  I don’t mind her messing up me name like that. I kind of like it, really. Maybe I can convince the elementals to call me Oaken Druid someday. There has to be some way to get them to change that.

  It’s almost a full minute before I get a response, but when I do, fecking hells, it nearly liquefies me brains.

  The mental voice would be a pleasant alto if it weren’t like a jackhammer in me skull. I can tell the sloth feels it too, because she closes her eyes, whimpers, and nearly falls off the branches she’s clutching. Poor lass won’t have a good day if that keeps up.

 

  The seething mass of creatures shifts its attention from the city across the river to me—all these eyes, compound and binocular, looking at me. I definitely have Pachamama’s attention. Her answer is modulated to the loudish range of normal when she replies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  she booms, and when both me and the sloth wince, she quiets, but the anger in her tone is unmistakable.

 

 

  It’s impossible for me to argue with that. Ever since Siodhachan brought me forward in time, me gob has been more than smacked, it’s been practically obliterated by the ruin humans have wrought upon the world. It’s not just coastlines that are going to disappear under the waves with these rising temperatures. Plenty of critters will vanish too, and they already are. Like the great extinctions of earlier epochs—except one, all of them were caused by warming global temperatures like this—the die-offs are going to accelerate and cascade without a massive correction to carbon emissions. If we survive this day of reckoning, we still
have many more days ahead to reckon with. I plan to make sure the Druids are ready.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  I have no idea if that’s true or not, but it sounds good.

 

  Ah, bollocks. I’ve gone and bent meself over for one of those Amazon snakes, haven’t I? Siodhachan surpassed me in slinging shite long ago, but it’s not like I never gave him any lessons in the fine art of prevarication. He just had some natural talent to add to me own legendary instruction.

 

 

  and even I can hear how lame that sounds. So much for me legendary skills.

  The problem with this is that I’m arguing with a force of nature. Humans have few redeeming qualities from nature’s point of view. I can’t appeal to Pachamama’s appreciation of art or music or theatre when she’s honestly not a fan of any of that. But perhaps I can appeal to her sense of self.