He wondered if Oswyn was still waiting for him at the village. Her thick, rough Racroft skin was there, as well as her condescending voice and bitter contempt for Thurl. They had been chosen to mate when they were children, but they never liked each other much. Thurl wondered if Oswyn even missed him. The rest of the hunting party must have returned to the village after the storm and the narvai-ub attack, and the entire village had likely mourned the loss of Sohjos and Djinzon and Hedule and Xatencio and Romd. They were all dead – killed by the narvai-ub. They followed the fate of hundreds of hunters before them, killed by predators in the wild.
Maybe the village mourned the loss of Thurl, but his loss was likely just a family matter. He was not part of the hunt team; not the real hunt team. Nobody would assume Sohjos and Thurl had survived the attack. Nobody had ever a narvai-ub survived before. Oswyn would have been free to choose a new mate … and if she had done so, Thurl was free to do the same.
“I choose Iassa,” he said aloud, just to hear her name on the wind; just to claim his desire out loud.
“Choose me for what?” Iassa whispered.
Suddenly, Thurl’s heart began pounding so fast he thought she could hear it. He put his hand on his chest, trying to calm it, or muffle the sound.
“Um…” he started, searching his mind for some reasonable explanation, while a chilled sweat raced down his spine and shook him with inexplicable fear.
Any words he may have attempted were stopped when Iassa put her finger on his lips and traced them, drawing his mouth open slightly, then pressing her lips to his, leaving him breathless and dizzy and sweating and scared.
She didn’t say anything else. When she pulled her lips away, she pressed her head into his chest. She wrapped her arms tighter around his chest and went back to sleep. Thurl wasn’t even sure he was awake himself.
He lay there, unable to think, until the wind changed and blew directly into the cave, forcing them to get up and resume their quest to get Sohjos back to his village and tribe.
CHAPTER twenty-eight
Thurl could smell the tide of the sea. It was time to move again. Iassa was up quickly, wrapping herself in chunacat cloaks and chewing a deilla stalk. In the avalanche, she had lost her weapon. Thurl gave her a spear from the stock in the cave.
Sohjos was getting stronger, but his erratic speech was babble and nonsense. He wasn’t in a position to walk yet. His wounds from the narvai-ub needed attention, and he had suffered more damage in the avalanche.
Thurl knew the final push to the village was possible, even with Sohjos in tow and Iassa unused to walking through thick snow.
Iassa affixed her pack to her back and filled it with supplies. Thurl’s shield, which he’d been using as a sled for Sohjos, was badly beaten, and had broken in several places. He moved his father to a fresh shield and attached stronger vines to it from the stock in the cave. He strapped them around his shoulders, and as the wind shifted again to whistle through the mountain pass, they left the cave behind.
The weather was temperate, almost calm; as if the avalanche had tamed the skies.
“I just can’t believe all the fires up there,” Iassa kept saying. “There have to be millions of them. What do you think they are?”
Thurl didn’t know. He couldn’t feel any warmth from them, so as far as he knew, she was just telling tales.
It wasn’t long before they found the tranik vine and followed it toward home. They paused and rested in the grotto where Thurl had first encountered the chantimer. He didn’t tell Iassa the story, even though she found one of the cracked egg shells. The chantimer chicks had all hatched. Thurl wondered if they stayed close to their nest, or if they had already learned to fly, of if they’d died without their mother when she was eaten by the narvai-ub.
As they neared the bristlewind fields, the smell of the narvai-ub attack became stronger. The bristlewind fields had been altered by the violence of the ice-storm and vortexes. Thurl found his way across by unusual landmarks: the smell of the enormous cavern in the ground where the narvai-ub broken the crust and swallowed Xatencio and Romd whole; the blood on the ground where Djinzon had died; where the beast had taken Sohjos below and where Thurl had begun his adventure. He discovered the bones of Hedule, picked clean by scavenging rodents and birds. The hunt team had never returned to claim the warriors remains.
They rested again, this time in the cave beyond the bristlewind fields where Meisx had convinced the tribe to abandon their leader, Sohjos, and leave Hedule’s carcass behind.
“The last time I was here,” Thurl told Iassa, as she huddled against the comforting interior walls of the cave, “was the last time I saw any of my people. It seems like eons ago; another lifetime in another world.”
He told her about Meisx and the storm and the narvai-ub attack. It was exhausting to recount the horrors. He tried to hide the emotion in his words, but his faltering breath betrayed him. Iassa sat behind him, her arms wrapped around his broad chest. She whispered to him things he needed to hear - the horrors were over, he was almost home, his father was alive, she would stay with him – as he bravely wept, trying hard to stop. Finally, he fell asleep in Iassa’s arms, and she slept with her head on his shoulder.
CHAPTER twenty-nine
“Thurl!” Sohjos was shouting. “THURL, RUN!”
Thurl awoke and leaped to his feet, clicking and grunting in rapid echoes, hunting for the danger.
There was none. Sohjos was lying on the shield-sled in the cave, delirious and sweating and babbling. The lingering scents of the narvai-ub and the blood on the snow were playing with his damaged mind. If they got him home to the healers, he might live, but Thurl was beginning to wonder if he could ever be Leader of the Hunt again. If he lost his position as Leader of the Hunt, the entire Racroft Tribe would have to choose a new chief. Perhaps, they already had.
“It’s okay, Father,” Thurl reassured Sohjos. “The narvai-ub is gone. We’ve beaten it.”
“My son. Save my son. Save Thurl,” Sohjos said. “He’s my youngest; he’s my legacy. Please, you have to save my son. I cannot live if he is lost. I will not live without him.”
Thurl was thunderstruck. Sohjos was delirious; babbling and mentally unhinged, but his fear was sincere; his affection was genuine.
Suddenly, Thurl could feel new resolve pressing against his muscles. He was ready to run, to race back to the village and get his father the help only the Healers could provide.
“Iassa, we have to go,” Thurl said, trying to wake her gently, but bursting to deliver his father back to the village and prove himself the survivor of a narvai-ub attack, the savior of the Leader of the Hunt, and the son of the great and mighty Sohjos of Racroft.
“Why are you coming home with me?” Thurl asked Iassa as they neared the mountain where his village cavern was.
“Why wouldn’t I?” She replied.
“I mean, don’t you miss your home; your family? You could have stayed below, where your world was familiar. I would never have left the surface if my father hadn’t been in danger. You left simply to follow me. Why?”
Iassa didn’t answer for a long time. He could hear her feet pressing into the snow beside him; could hear the crackle of the crystals as they pressed new tracks.
“I don’t know,” she finally answered. “At first, I liked the adventure. Then I liked the danger. Once we got to the surface I liked the fires in the sky and feel of the snow. And then there was the avalanche and home just seems so far away now.”
“But, I told you how I got to the narvai-ub nest through the tunnel in the bristlewind fields,” Thurl pressed. “You could have gone back then.”
“I didn’t want to.” Iassa stumbled in the snow and fell into Thurl. She grabbed his arm and when she regained her footing, she didn’t let go. Soon, her hand found his and they locked fingers. Thurl didn’t ask any more questions. The nerves in his stomach wouldn’t let him breathe enough to talk.
Soon, he could feel familiar wind-streams as the
breeze wound through the opening to the Racroft cavern and back along the mountainside; could feel it guiding him home like the gentle hand of a loving parent. He could smell the warming river and the sweat of the Racroft and the unique scent of the huts and the warming rocks and the moss that grew along the walls of the cavern.
Finally, against all sensible odds, Thurl was nearly home.
Sohjos could sense it, as well. He kept raising his arms over his head to feel the familiar wind streams and he stuck out his tongue to taste the Racroft air.
There was a hillock to cross before they reached the entrance to the cavern, just tall and wide enough for them to hide behind. Thurl stopped behind it, and removed the vines from his shoulders.
He could hear the sounds of mid-day inside the cavern: the bustle of the mid-day meals being prepared; the sounds of the Racroft gathering around their warming dais’s in the center of their little communes.
Thurl helped Sohjos to his feet. He wanted his father to walk back into the village as a triumphant warrior; a returning hero; the Leader of the Hunt. He put a spear in Sohjos’s hand, and wrapped his father’s arm around his own shoulder to help him walk. Sohjos was only barely aware of what was happening. He knew he was home, but he was still weak and infirm.
“Leave the shield,” Thurl told Iassa. “I want him to walk the rest of the way if he can.”
Thurl and Sohjos rounded the hillock and as they got closer to the cavern, Sohjos found his feet beneath him; found strength and resolve, and took as many steps as he could without Thurl needing to drag him forward.
There were some Racroft children playing near the edge of the cavern, where their mothers were collecting berries off the panawick shrubs.
“Tell my Mother that her husband is home!” Thurl shouted to the children.
The women clicked and grunted and smelled the air. Then, recognizing Sohjos, they dropped their berries and grabbed their children and sent them back home, quickly. Two of the women ran to help Thurl and greet the Leader of the Hunt. Three more ran back into the village to spread the news: Sohjos had returned.
“He’s injured,” said one of the women.
“Yes,” Thurl answered. “We need Healers.”
“Run and fetch the Healers, Naclan,” the woman said to her friend, and Naclan ran into the village to get the Healers.
It didn’t take long before the news had reached all of Racroft, and the villagers were gathering at the cavern mouth. There were cheers and gasps and Sohjos gathered enough energy to walk on his own, and raise his spear over his head and growl into the wind.
“My son,” Sohjos shouted, then repeated more loudly, “MY SON! My son has defeated the narvai-ub and brought me home to you!”
Murmurs rolled through the crowd like waves.
Sohjos took several long, slow, painful breaths, then continued:
“My son, Thurl, has defeated the narvai-ub,” he shouted once more, louder than before; loud enough for all of Racroft to hear him. “My son has brought me home!”
Then he collapsed onto the snow.
CHAPTER thirty
Thurl was invited to the Grand Hall – a vast cave set back from the main cavern where a warm geyser from the planet core had eroded through the mountain rocks and fed the waterfall that created their stream. In this cave, the Racroft had built a waterfall warming dais, where all the village’s biggest events took place. Thurl was invited to speak in the Grand Hall; to tell his tale and address the entire Racroft village. Thurl declined the offer. He just wanted to go home; to take his father home.
He sat on the ground near the warming dais of the Healers huts. His brothers and sisters were inside with the Healers and frail Sohjos, bravely clinging to life.
There was a crowd around the warming dais; dozens of Racroft gathered in the small circle; a hundred more clung to the roofs of the huts and hung from the walls; all of them eager to hear the story of Thurl and Sohjos; all of them curious about the companion Thurl had brought back with him; the companion who was inconceivably not Racroft.
Iassa was not with Thurl and not among the crowd. She had been quickly escorted to a council of the Elders at their request; to be questioned and interrogated; to be awed and amazed over; but also to be protected from the curiosity and prejudice and sheer terror of the Racroft who had always, for generations, been isolated in the universe – suddenly confronted with evidence that they were not alone, and perhaps not as advanced, or civilized, or safe as they believed.
Thurl was too exhausted, too weary and too traumatized to recount the narvai-ub attack on Sohjos, so he began his story with his descent into the tunnels.
“I did what any Racroft would have done,” he began, and there was laughter, loud and hearty, rolling through the crowd. “I couldn’t let the beast take our Leader of the Hunt,” he continued. “So I tracked him underground, into the world that he inhabited, ready to kill or be killed for the honor of my Father.”
All day, a stream of important and high ranking Racroft had filed in and out of the Healers hut, hoping to meet or talk with Sohjos, or checking on his condition, or curious to know if the rumors were true: that Sohjos had truly survived a narvai-ub attack and returned home to his village. The Elders who could walk, each in his turn, visited and whispered words of comfort or strength or condolence. There were delegates and directors of important village functions: the berry gatherers, the rock warmers, the kanateed seed farmers, the horvill sow ranchers. Thurl’s brothers and sisters moved in and out of the hut, bringing new warming rocks, leaving with empty bowls, bringing fresh water, leaving with soiled cloaks and pelts.
Finally, survivors of Sohjos’s final hunt team arrived to greet their leader. Thurl could smell them as they approached: Aivira, Sreht, Lavis, Yadreet. They had lost four hunt team members in the narvai-ub attack. Thurl expected the other three other members of that team, Ciashi, Gabal and Darawa, but they never approached.
Finally, Meisx shoved his way to the front and entered before the others. He had a stronger smell than Thurl remembered; something arrogant and powerful, pretentious and smug, but also angry and ashamed and frightened.
Thurl was certain Meisx had come home to brag how he had beaten the vortex storm and saved the ‘little runt’, only to have them attacked by the narvai-ub. Meisx had always told lies to aggrandize himself. With few survivors to contradict him, he must have writ his heroics large when the hunt team returned without the Leader of the Hunt.
The hunt team went into the Healer’s tents, and Thurl continued with his story. He narrated his adventures in the narvai-ub tunnels; how the fegion tried to attack and were devoured by the narvai-ub; how he found his brave father alive in the hatched shell of a larvae. He told of the strange warriors who came into the lair and hunted the larvae with projectile weapons and a warming liquid called ‘fire’ which clung to vines and roots and would eat at your flesh if you tried to touch it. He talked about chasing these warriors and his confrontation with them in a cavern filled with intense warming liquid. He recounted the horror of the serpentine thing trying to implant her babies inside Thurl’s stomach. He explained how he turned his shield into a sled to transport his father, and how he met Iassa, and how they fought off an attack by millions of barrasc – vicious, hard-shelled creatures like enormous, fanged grull beetles.
He was just beginning to tell the crowd about Iassa and the other tribes – tribes their Elders had talked about, but everyone assumed were fables – when the hunt team members came out of the hut: Aivira and Sreht and Lavis and Yadreet. They didn’t acknowledge Thurl, as he expected them to do. They all three went separate ways, ignoring the crowds and Thurl until they had disappeared into the village.
Then, the Healers began to file out of the huts. One by one, they pushed through the flap, and skirted the edge of the crowd. None of them said a word. They clicked softly, finding their way to their own homes, ignoring everyone in their path.
All his brothers and sisters were in the village running errands.
Only Meisx and Thurl’s mother remained inside the hut.
Thurl stopped talking. The crowd was silent. After a moment, they could hear the sobs. Thurl’s mother was crying. The Healers had done all they could, but Sohjos was dead.
CHAPTER thirty-one
Drums echoed throughout the cavern. For four days, Thurl, with the help of his brothers and sisters, prepared Sohjos’s body. They worked in silence, forbidden from speaking by custom and respect. They removed their father’s organs and carefully minced them, then mixed them with stream water and soft soil from the Northern-most enclaves of the cavern. In a solemn ceremony, the deceased internal organs were mixed with the compost that would fertilize the patches of seeds and berries and leaves growing in small plots throughout the village. Sohjos’s bones were ground and sprinkled into the stream. The empty husk of the Leader of the Hunt was plucked and washed and split open and laid flat and dried on their largest warming rocks. When it was dry and leathern, the village artists etched it with sharpened stones and the pointed edges of grull beetle shells and small bones of the woteni fish they took from the seas. They carved and engraved the story of his life into the flesh, working day and night, until the flesh was a three dimensional topographical canvas that told the full story of the Racroft who had once worn it. Upon the lips, they inscribed the last known words Sohjos had spoken: “My son has brought me home”.
When Thurl ran his hands over the parchment of his father, and the echoes from his choked grunts narrated the inscriptions on the flesh and on the lips, he broke down into tears and wept openly before of his sisters and brothers.
Orphan Tribe, Orphan Planet Page 16
