Orphan Tribe, Orphan Planet

by Jonathan Vick

  As they ate, Iassa tried to explain all the words he didn’t understand: fire, smoke, burn. When she came to the word ‘light’, she didn’t know how to make him understand.

  “How do I describe sight to a blind man?” Iassa groaned. “If you can’t see light, I don’t know how to tell you what it is.”

  “What is ‘see’?” Thurl asked.

  Iassa sighed.

  “I thought we were the same,” Thurl told her, sensing her frustration. “I thought we were both Racroft in some way, but I don’t know anymore. You don’t have enough follicles and whiskers to feel the air. You use eyes for communicating with the world. It’s like we came from the same animal, a long time ago, but turned into very different creatures along the way.”

  “I know,” said Iassa. “We have more similarities than differences, though. Once we get your father home, you’ll have to come back with me to my village. Or, maybe it would be easier for me to explain my world to you, if I knew more about your world. If you can’t see, how do you know where you are? How do you hunt and fight and walk around without bumping into things?”

  He wanted to explain things: how the Racroft used the reverberation of air currents and sonic resonance to navigate the world. But he was anxious to get Sohjos back home where he would be safe.

  “I can explain it all when we get to my village,” he told her. “But I have to get my father home.”

  She put her hand on his arm again. This time, he didn’t pull away.

  “Help me put out the fire and we can go,” she said.

  She taught him how to make the warming liquid disappear, then packed up her things and helped him get the ropes of the shield over his shoulders.

  CHAPTER twenty

  They were running through wet, hot, muddy tunnels again. Sohjos was laying in the shield, still packed in slowly melting snow. Thurl dragged him through the muddiest paths, where the make-shift sled put up the least resistance.

  Iassa was ahead of them. She had a stick with fire on it. She said it helped her ‘see’ where she was going. Thurl didn’t understand why she didn’t just click and grunt, like he did, but she was able to move much faster than him, so he guessed there must be some advantage to ‘see’.

  They ran for hours, until Thurl was exhausted again. Thurl rounded a bend and could smell the chill in the air; could smell the snow and cold. Soon, they reached the chasm where the barrasc had led Iassa.

  The chamber wasn’t very large. It was only slightly wider than the tunnel, but far taller. The entire crag was open to the void above. There was a pile of snow lined up against one wall of the chamber, quickly melting in the subterrain. The other wall was a solid sheet of ice where all the moist mud had frozen in the cold chill from above.

  Thurl tossed the root rope off his shoulders and dove into the snow, rubbing it on his skin, cooling his whiskers and follicles so they stood out from his flesh again. He pulled the sled into the snow bank and re-packed Sohjos with the frost.

  Iassa stood to the side, waiting for him. When he was done, he clicked and grunted to get a full impression of their challenge.

  “How do we get up there?” He asked Iassa.

  The opening was closer than the last one had been, but it was still a long way up.

  “We could climb these walls,” said Iassa. “The mud comes off easily and the rock beneath is solid.”

  “How do we get my Father up there?”

  “I don’t know,” Iassa sighed. “I don’t think we can. We could keep walking and hope this tunnel comes out on the surface. I can’t promise it will, though.”

  Thurl didn’t speak. He grunted slowly, running his fingers over the muddy rocks of the crag wall.

  “You could climb out and go to your village for help,” Iassa offered.

  “I can’t leave my Father behind,” said Thurl.

  “I’ll stay with him.”

  Thurl stopped. He took a deep breath of the frigid air coming from above; the air he desperately wanted to surround him. He felt like he had been holding his breath for days without end, and was suddenly given breath again.

  “I can’t,” he said, quietly. “I can’t leave him here. I have to get him home myself. I have to show him that I am a warrior. I have to prove to myself that I…”

  Iassa clasped her hand over his mouth. She whispered a soft hush in his ear.

  Thurl grunted quietly. There wasn’t anything in the chamber with them. He grunted again, searching for changes.

  There! He detected a shift in the mud pattern further down the tunnel; the musk of some strange creature. There was something down there, following them, staying just out of range.

  Iassa pulled the short spears from her pack and placed them on her stringed staff. She pulled back on the rope and the spear flew in the direction of the tunnel.

  Thurl could hear it stick into the muddy wall.

  “Is it a narvai-ub?” He whispered to her.

  “Too small,” she said.

  “The larvae?”

  “There are thousands of creatures that live in these tunnels,” said Iassa. “But I don’t think this is one of them.”

  She stalked toward the tunnel opening. Thurl listened for the sound of breathing, or movement from the creature. He heard nothing. If Iassa didn’t think it was an animal of some kind, then he didn’t know what she suspected. She had talked of ‘seven known tribes’ like the Racroft. He never thought to ask if they were all friends.

  Iassa crept forward. She rounded the corner of the tunnel, then stopped and turned her head toward Thurl. Thurl stood in the coldest part of the chasm, in the driest air he could find, hoping to stimulate his follicles so he could feel air movement again. He felt crippled without his primary sense. He grunted for perspective.

  Then, suddenly, there was noise.

  A high-pitched screech, like splitting air, reverberated in front of Thurl, followed by the twang of some wooden root striking frozen rock and falling to the ground.

  Thurl clicked and discovered the spear that had barely missed him. To his right, in the unexplored tunnel, there was the ghost of a figure, just escaping around a bend.

  Something was in the tunnels with them; some other Racroft or Muson. And it was attacking!

  Iassa screamed. Without thinking, Thurl grabbed the spear and chased after her, grunting like a warrior: the low, sonorous thrumming of battle.

  Iassa was against the tunnel wall. The smell of blood came from her leg, where she had been cut. She was clutching a spear, trying to fit its notched end onto the thin rope of her staff. Further down the tunnel crouched an oddly shaped man, smaller than any Racroft. His head was small and thin. His ears were too low. His skin was slick and hairless. He held a curved dagger in his left hand and some bizarre gourd in his right.

  Despite the draft from the fissure above the chamber pushing Thurl’s scent down the tunnel, the creature didn’t seem to smell him. Thurl clicked and the creature turned his head, but didn’t seem to have any knowledge of Thurl in the tunnel.

  Taking advantage of his stealth, Thurl slowly and silently cocked his arm back, placing his fingertips on the very end of his spear, and with a low grunt for accuracy, launched the spear directly at the figure.

  It struck the poor creature in the center of its face. Thurl could hear the stone tip of the spear drive through the meat and crack the bone beneath.

  The figure fell backward, and crumpled into the mud.

  “Who’s there?” Iassa asked, panicked.

  “It’s just me,” said Thurl. “I put a spear through its skull. I think it’s dead.”

  “He cut my leg,” Iassa said. “I can’t see it, though. My torch went out.”

  “What do you need?” Thurl asked.

  “Fire,” said Iassa. “Bring my pack. I have flint and dried roots.”

  Thurl ran back into the chamber. He checked on Sohjos, who was breathing slowly and calmly. There didn’t seem to be any other noise or signs of another attacker. Thurl grabbed his own
spear, still leaned against the icy wall near his father, and took Iassa’s pack to her.

  As she fumbled through it, Thurl slowly approached the figure, still motionless in the muddy tunnel.

  It smelled rank; like death and bowels. It was a strange little creature, more like Iassa than Thurl, but different from either of them. It had a tail: a flat flap of muscular flesh that was flopped in the mud just above its legs. It had very short, very powerful legs, and long arms that Thurl imagined probably touched the ground when it walked. The eyes on it were enormous; larger than its own fists, and protruded from the face.

  Thurl reached down and touched the figure, holding it by the neck in case it was alive and tried to rise up against him. There was no threat. The blood that poured from its face had stopped pumping. That meant the heart had stopped, which meant the creature was dead. Thurl knew this from his hunt team training.

  Behind him there was a whooshing sound, and he could feel the warmth coming from Iassa’s fire.

  “Is he dead?” She asked.

  “Dead enough,” Thurl answered, then turned back toward her.

  She was sitting in the mud, holding her fire-stick in one hand, trying to examine her wound with the other.

  “Need help?” Thurl asked.

  “I just need to wrap it,” said Iassa. “It’s not as bad as I thought. I couldn’t see it in the dark and I was afraid it was much deeper.”

  “What is that thing?” Thurl asked.

  “Looked like one of the Fogha tribe,” Iassa said, handing the torch to Thurl and pulling a gaul wrap out of her pack to bind her wound. “I can’t be sure, though. I’ve never seen one of them. They live deeper than we do, and their main villages are supposed to be hundreds of miles to the North. Maybe he got lost.”

  “Are there more of them?” Asked Thurl.

  “There aren’t supposed to be any,” Iassa said. “They don’t come this far South, or this close to the surface. The Fogha tribe is the one tribe we know the least about. Except the Racroft, of course.”

  “How many are there? How big is their village?”

  “Nobody knows,” said Iassa. “No one in the other known tribes has been there.”

  Iassa finished binding her leg and stood on it, tentatively. She walked a little, putting pressure on it slowly.

  Thurl went back into the chamber and sat in the snow bank next to Sohjos. He clicked slowly, moving the sound all over the wall of ice, searching for grips and hand-holds to climb up. He was certain he could climb high enough to get through the fissure and back onto the surface. Sohjos was still too injured, though. Even if he regained consciousness, he wouldn’t be strong enough to manage the climb. And he was too heavy for Thurl to carry while climbing.

  When Iassa came back into the chamber Thurl sighed and lowered his head.

  “We have to keep going,” he said. “I can’t find any way to get my Father up through the crag. We’ll have to continue looking for a tunnel out.”

  Iassa sat on the snow next to Thurl. He could feel her soft arm brushing against his.

  She said, “Do you want to keep going forward, or do you want to go back to the narvai-ub lair and try a different tunnel?”

  “If there are enemies in this tunnel, we are better off going back,” he said. “But if there is an opening this close to the surface, this tunnel may lead us out.”

  “So, what do you want to do?” Iassa asked.

  Thurl shook his head. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest. He could feel a lump in his throat. He was exhausted, and tired of being wet and muddy and hot and alone.

  “I want to go home,” he told her, and as he said the words, the emotions poured out of him. He could feel the wetness from his eyes dripping down his cheeks.

  Iassa pushed closer to him. She put her arm around his wide, thick shoulders, and buried her head against his neck. Without saying a word, without judging him as weak, she let him cry, and held him while he did it so he wouldn’t feel alone.

  CHAPTER twenty-one

  They dragged the body of the dead Fogha into the chamber and propped his body, face-down, in the snow bank. They arranged it to look like he had slipped in the ice and fell onto his own spear. This was Iassa’s idea.

  “If there are any more of them, or if anyone comes looking for him, we don’t want them to know anyone else was here. If we make it look like an accident they might not come after us.”

  They pushed mud and snow over their tracks and tried to obscure any trace they had been there. Then, they moved forward, down the unexplored tunnel. Thurl walked in front, pulling his father in the sled, while Iassa followed, slowly covering the sled tracks and their footprints with mud.

  They moved more slowly this time, listening for narvai-ub; for barrasc; for Fogha. Thurl was happy he didn’t have to keep up with Iassa. In some ways, he envied her sight. It allowed her to move more quickly; to receive information about the world faster than he could grunt and click. She told him that light comes from fire and is like the sound reverberations he uses, but much, much faster and often more accurate. She told him that, at one time, even the Racroft may have used sight to navigate the world.

  The Racroft tribe still had eyes, but not even the Elders were certain what they were for. Many of the Healers said they were important thermal exhausts used to help release heat in battle, but soft to keep the orifice closed from the frost.

  The Elders liked to spin wilder tales; tales of ancient Racroft who used their eyes to communicate with the world; stories of the world still trapped by the pull of a warming planet, when eyes were used to locate objects without the guttural sonar or echo-location; without scent and the sense of air current movements. Thurl didn’t completely understand, but he thought it must have been a horrible time. He couldn’t imagine his view of the world being dominated by a single sense. In some ways, he felt sorry for Iassa. If this was really the way she discovered the world, he thought it must have seemed very disconnected and lonely to her.

  He turned a sharp bend in the tunnel and could smell the cold. There was frost on the walls, and the mud was turning into a thick slush. Thurl’s heart began to race. He clicked and grunted, trying to examine the tunnel ahead; trying to find an opening to the surface.

  When Iassa followed around the corner, she gasped.

  “Is that the way out?” She asked.

  “I don’t find it,” said Thurl. “Are you certain it isn’t another fissure in the ceiling?

  “I can see the end of the tunnel,” she answered. “I can see little lights; like a billion tiny fires. What is that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Thurl. “But I can smell the permafrost.”

  Thurl grunted and picked up his pace. When the sled-shield hit the thin ice layer covering the mud on the ground it began to slide more easily. Soon, Thurl was running. He could feel the cold wind between his follicles. His whiskers were standing out, crisp and alive.

  A blast of wind and ice hit him when he burst out of the tunnel. Snowflakes fell onto the fine downy hairs on his face and melted in his eyes. He felt the tears collect and run between his follicles before freezing to his chin. He laughed, and took long, deep breaths. He tossed the rope off his shoulders and dove, face first, into the snow. He rubbed it on his chest and arms. He roared, like an adrenaline fueled conqueror after a battle with a much larger and stronger foe.

  Still asleep in the overturned shield, Sohjos breathed deeply. His arms twitched in the frigid air.

  Iassa stayed in the tunnel. She wrapped her pelt closer around her shoulders and huddled against the wall, trying to stay out of the wind.

  Thurl clicked and grunted, trying to find landmarks to orient himself; to help him find the direction of home.

  He was in a wide valley, between two steep crags. Above them were mountains, but from the echoes Thurl couldn’t tell which mountains. In one direction, the valley narrowed and seemed to devolve into a crumbled avalanche. In the other direction, the crags got lower on either side unti
l, Thurl imagined, they finally met the ground. He couldn’t detect any tracks in the snow, or signs of any wild animals nearby. Also, he couldn’t smell the thick brine of the sea.

  “Any idea where we are?” Iassa asked from inside the tunnel, holding the warming torch close to her face.

  “Not yet,” said Thurl. “I need to get out of this valley; smell which direction the sea churns. Why are you cowering in the tunnel?”

  “The wind,” said Iassa. “It’ll blow out my fire.”

  “Fire is vulnerable to the wind?” Thurl asked.

  “Everything is vulnerable to something,” Iassa answered.

  “We don’t need fire,” Thurl said. “I’ve lived my whole life here on the surface, and I’ve never had fire.”

  “Your hide is thicker than mine,” said Iassa.

  Thurl had been miserable underground in the tunnels. He’d never considered that Iassa would be as miserable out of them. She had spent her entire life without wind or cold, with fire and heat all around her.

  He took off his chunacat pelt and wrapped it around her over the small pelt she wore.

  “If the fire goes out, I’ll keep you warm,” he told her.

  “Maybe I should just go back home,” she said.

  Thurl felt his heart stop.

  Slowly, he put his arms out; wanted to put them around her; to hold her; to protect her in his world. He didn’t. He wasn’t old enough. It wasn’t mating season. He was mated with Oswyn.

  Iassa stepped forward, just one step. She put her head just past the threshold of the tunnel, and face upward toward the void.

  “What are you doing?” Thurl asked. “Do you hear something?”