It was done.
The matriarch eyeballed the assassins with rage, burning their faces to her interminable memory. With a summoning call, she and her daughters backed away, faced with the definitive loss of their charge. With resounding roars of fury, they backed along the river brandishing tusks in sweeping warning, then turned and ran into the forest.
The hunters gathered around the slain bull. There were bruises and gashes, scrapes and exhaustion but miraculously all had survived the stegodons’ wrath. Filhia fell into the arms of her older sister, overcome with relief. Rinap patted her quietly, wanting to reassure her without seeming a child herself. Kari’s face was almost as relieved at seeing Rinap unscathed. Apparently he had swept her away from the deadly tusks many times, to which she had responded with even more determination to prove her skills. Ivy couldn’t help but be proud of the girl’s audacity. Leihna had been knocked to the ground early on and now sat concussed and silent in the grass. Ivy comforted her in place of Shahn, who had stayed at the cave, too heavily pregnant to travel.
There was no celebration, nor fanfare. This victory was only a victory of strength, not justice nor worth. The adolescent bull had stood his ground, protected his family and fought bravely. As much a child of nature as the hunters themselves, the hunters took no gratification in his death, but instead offered humility and thanks to him for the gift of his life. He would feed their family now and deserved to be honoured.
Krue stood at the animal’s head and closed his hands over its glassy eyes. Through Leihna, Ivy heard his practiced words.
“We honour you, brother probech, for your courage and sacrifice. We thank your family for the gift of your life. They will mourn and remember you, so we offer them this; we will bring your life back to the forest through our own bodies and you will walk again through our steps. We are now a part of each other.”
Quiet at first, their voices rose from scorching grass. A single note, held long and low like thunder on the horizon, then another to match its strength, and another rich in timbre. Beside her, Leihna raised her ashen face to the sky and offered her song in a young woman’s clear, sweet voice. The Dusk Song. Forty voices rose and fell together, vibrant but soft in their release. From the slain bull’s side, the long grass swept the harmonic offering across the river valley and into the burning sky, forming that strange bridge between heaven and earth that almost seems real enough to cross.
There was no religion or God designed to receive this offering. Regardless, the reverence they held for their prey was sacred and palpable.
The voices broke together and the midday valley fell silent. With a single move, Krue’s hand was high in the air; blade poised, and then plunged deep within the animal’s throat. Warm blood hit his face in streaks of scarlet.
An angry shout shattered the ritual of Krue’s blade.
Ivy’s pupils narrowed, straining to find the source above the grass veil. The hunters leapt to their feet.
Ivy’s blood ran cold.
Belting towards them from across the river were men. Furious, indomitable, massive men.
The karathah.
It was past midnight and Orrin sat alone in his small office. Food wrappers and empty coffee cups cluttered his desk and worry lines felt permanently etched in his forehead. Ivy’s cello recording played softly on repeat through his speakers. Orrin wasn’t really listening anymore; he already had every note and run committed to memory.
It had been two days since Dimi had called.
I can’t guarantee that I know you anymore Orrin. I’ve warned you. You’re on your own now.
Dimi wasn’t the sort to over-react. His cool head had countered Orrin’s quick temper on more than one occasion in younger days. But now he’d abandoned their friendship in an instant. Orrin’s gut twisted and he buried his face in his hands.
Once more, he picked up his phone and dialled Dimi’s number. Once more, it rang out.
Shite. He tossed the phone onto the table. The dull thud as it hit the desk broke the silence of the building and Orrin shivered despite himself. His palms were sweaty and he suddenly felt desperate to speed up time, to get Ivy back before another obstacle presented itself. If only he knew how. He wondered what the Director had threatened Dimi with, to make him react so severely?
I got him into this mess. The guilt of that thought was buried a hundred fold by the creeping doubt he had been trying to ignore. Could he trust Dimi not to betray his secret? Dimi knew everything - the laboratory experiments, the energy surge, the transformation of the earth into a new ugly one where hobbits were facing experimentation and torture and environmental genocide and solar storms increasingly threatened human life. And at the heart of it all somehow, were Orrin and Ivy.
Most devastatingly, he’d told Dimi about Ivy. How he’d lost her. How he was responsible for getting her back. How, perhaps, he might be in love with her. And still, his supposed best friend had deserted him.
He opened his desk drawer and picked up the amulet. The surface was smooth now. It’s layers of dirt had been rubbed away during the many times he had sat holding it over the past few days, feeling its strange warmth and imploring it to give up the answer to this infuriating puzzle. Orrin traced his fingertips across the surface.
He turned it over. The five circular indentations still marked the back. What do they mean? He wondered. Who put them there? Orrin held it up to the light.
Well I’ll be damned. The five points of the Southern Cross, just like the cave painting. How on earth did I miss that?
Orrin leapt from his chair, grabbing his jacket, and rushed out of the empty building. He skirted the paths and security cameras, hugging the dark places. Orrin hid as a lone security guard doing his rounds passed by with a torch then slipped into the leafy garden surrounding the biology building. The manicured gardens gave way to native bush, thick and deliberately unkempt. Thin leafy branches whipped his face as he negotiated his way through, unsure of where exactly he would end up. Orrin reached high and began to hoist his body up the tall wire fence he found in his way.
“Ouch!” He jerked his hand back. Blood dripped down the inside of his wrist and he smudged it away on his jeans. He hadn’t expected the barbed wire. Pulling off his jacket to use for protection, Orrin gripped the barbs securely with both hands. He drew breath through gritted teeth and scrambled over the top. His shirt and jeans caught and ripped as he fell heavily on the other side, covered in scratches.
A loud hiss from the dark caught the hairs on the back of his neck.
Orrin turned, finding himself against another wire wall. This one however, was the perimeter of a giant cage. A dim globe hung from the wire roof, which was open to the elements. Further back, a covered awning connected the cage to an inbuilt observation room. Two meters from Orrin on the inside of the cage, four pairs of dark eyes watched his every move.
“I don’t want to hurt you. Just talk, do you understand?” Orrin pulled his hands back in what he hoped was a gesture of surrender. “I won’t hurt you.”
Orrin noticed the cage was now entirely empty but for the hobbit woman, her baby and two children, perhaps three or four years old. They were pitiful in their fear of him and hid behind their mother. The hatred in the hobbits’ eyes had gone and now there was only true fear, grief and desperation.
“Where are the others?” Orrin whispered.
The woman hugged her baby tighter. It was clear she’d lost the battle to save her family many times now. A purple bruise ballooned her left cheekbone and cuts and grazes laced her skin. She frowned at Orrin then turned and pushed her baby into the arms of the eldest remaining child, who seemed little more than a baby herself.
The hobbit woman stepped forward on shaking legs. She staggered but righted herself, clearly determined to see the threat gone. Her breathing was laboured and a wheezing hiss coated her breath. Bones projected unnaturally from her tiny frame. Her matted black hair hung miserably over her thin shoulders.
“Ash gitraahn shiwah!
” she hissed, clutching the wire wall between them. The malice had returned, but there was no strength to her threat.
“No, I’m not leaving yet,” Orrin said. “But I promise I won’t hurt you.”
Orrin sank to his knees. Less than a meter of dirt separated him from the animal. No - human. This is a human, he realised, unexpectedly. He suddenly felt compelled to reach out and touch her.
Orrin pushed aside the thought and instead pulled the amulet from his pocket and held it up to the light.
“I need help, love. There are markings on this. See, here - stars.” Orrin pointed to the amulet and up to the night sky. “Stars. Five stars. What do they mean?” He frowned. “What do they mean, these stars?”
The woman squinted at the stone in Orrin’s hand, trying to make it out in the dim light. Her eyes grew wide. She looked panicked, flicking between the stone and his face.
He lowered his voice. “Please. The stars. There are markings on this stone. The Southern Cross, look!” Fumbling in the dark, he found five jagged rocks, each the size of a fist. He shoved them one by one into the lattice of wire, creating a vertical rocky constellation between them.
“Hiranah,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Hiranah.”
“Hiranah?” Orrin repeated. “Is that was this is called? These stars?”
The woman closed her eyes, deliberating. With slow careful movements, she pointed back to the rocky constellation and then found its counterpart in the sky, barely visible through the clouds. She gestured back to the amulet. “Hiranah.”
The woman crouched down. She swept the dirt floor with her fingers collecting a twig and poked it through the wire lattice. Her bony wrist and arm easily followed. She began to draw a shape in the dirt at Orrin’s knees. Five points coming together. Connecting the dots.
An ivy leaf.
“Hiranah.” She whispered again. Her arm swept once more from the constellation, to the amulet and down to her dirt symbol. “Hiranah.”
She smiled sadly, then turned and limped back to her children.
“She’s some kind of Goddess,” Orrin declared.
“Who is?”
“Ivy.”
“Yeah right man, you wish.”
“No listen Phil, I’m serious. I’ve been looking into this ‘Hiranah’ symbol that the hobbit woman showed me. It was an Ivy leaf, clear as day. I think they’re all interconnected; the symbol, the constellation and the amulet. I think, they are all Ivy.”
“Okay, I’m game.” Phil leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms with a derisive look. “Humour me.”
Orrin ignored the sarcasm. “I’ve been doing some research on the Homo floresiensis species. There isn’t much to go by, well, there’s actually a lot of anatomy and subsistence research available. But not much culturally.”
“That’s probably because they have no culture, dude.” Phil rolled his eyes.
“Actually they do, you smart article. It’s just not widely recognised. Listen to this,” Orrin adjusted his glasses and read from the computer screen.
“Early behavioural research on the Homo floresiensis species was undertaken by Chantelle Miruve, a PhD from Oxford University during the years 1967-1978. Dr Miruve was the fourth and final researcher sent into the field under the umbrella of famous palaeoanthropologist Louis Leakey to study primates in their natural environments. This research stemmed from his attempts to determine the potential similarities between non-human primates and early human behaviour.
‘Leakey’s Angels’, as they became known, consisted of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Birute Galdikas and Chantelle Miruve. These women respectively studied the chimpanzees of Tanzania, mountain gorillas in Rwanda, orangutans of Borneo and the Homo floresiensis ‘hobbit’ species in Flores, Indonesia.
Initially, Miruve made minimal headway with the species; however, she was eventually able to gain their trust enough to begin ethnographic research as well as behavioural observation. Her work suggests the hobbits have a complex oral history. The species is primarily a nature-worship society incorporating a deity (taken to be a goddess-like figure) called Hiranah. The name is a reference to the sunset and is symbolised by a crude five pointed shape, believed to be a star. This symbol has since been found represented at numerous limestone caves in Flores by archaeologists.
Dr Miruve’s sympathies for the species against deforestation concerns and hunting of the hominid for the bush-meat trade, led to frequent conflict with local hunters. Dr Miruve was found murdered in her camp in 1987. No charges were ever laid.”
Phil let out a soft whistle. “Murdered?”
“That’s what it says” said Orrin, “It seems the debate over hobbit rights began a long time ago, but apparently Dr Miruve’s voice was silenced pretty swiftly.” Orrin adjusted his glasses as he considered the prisoners, for that is clearly what they were, in the Behavioural Research lab. “At least now there seems to be some backlash to their treatment. It’s a shame it has taken this long.”
“I don’t think life’s going to improve for them in a hurry, poor little buggers,” Phil said.
Orrin raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t think you gave a shite what happened to them.”
“Maybe I don’t. Dunno.” Phil shuffled uncomfortably. “I heard a black-market haul was uncovered yesterday though. It was bad news. Exotic animals, hundreds of them. Mainly young ones being sent as pets from South East Asia to the Middle East. They’re considered a status symbol you know, there’s big money involved.”
“What happened?”
If Phil looked uncomfortable before, now he looked downright disturbed. He took a deep breath and let his eyes wander around the room as he spoke.
“The shipping containers were pulled off route and confiscated but almost all the animals were already dead. Clouded leopards, heaps of exotic birds, monkeys and hobbits. Lots of them. They didn’t have enough food or water to make the distance. Or enough air. Some suffocated, most starved.”
The blood drained from Orrin’s face. “They did that to the young ones? All those animals? To children?”
Phil finally met Orrin’s eyes. His distaste was clear in the set of his mouth. “It’s pretty standard apparently. Babies make the best pets.”
Orrin screwed his eyes shut at the memory of the injured hobbit mother fighting for her children against the tranquiliser darts. How soon would she lose her last battle? Were her last three children destined to become pets on the black market? Consumer novelties for the rich? The thought was sickening.
“It’s been happening for years O,” Phil sighed. “There’s nothing you can do about it.” He looked thoughtful. “So you’re saying this ‘Hiranah’ deity that Miruve uncovered is actually Ivy?”
“I’m saying it has got to be Ivy,” said Orrin. “Look at the ethnographic evidence. The word Hiranah actually means sunset – a pretty distinctive shade of red and also the exact colour of Ivy’s hair.”
Phil grinned. “You like gingers, hey?” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively.
“Shut your gob and focus Phil,” rebuffed Orrin, without malice. “So, the symbol representing this deity is a five pointed shape, I bet it’s not a star - it’s an ivy leaf.” He strode over to the pin board and pulled Jayne’s cave painting down. “What is this, if not a clear indication of Ivy living with these people? Red hair, white skin, even Kyah is documented in prehistory.”
“But why consider her a deity, even if she was there?” said Phil. “She’s human, not a god. She has no special powers.” Although Phil countered Orrin’s argument, his face showed no disrespect.
Orrin considered for a moment. “Well, I’m sure this Dr Miruve recorded it as objectively as she could. But there are language barriers, obviously, and she didn’t have all of the information, did she? How could she have known Ivy wasn’t a deity, but was actually just a normal woman – in the wrong place and the wrong time? There is no precedent for something like this. Her observations were correct, but her interpret
ation was wrong.”
“Fair enough.” Phil conceded. “As far as the logic goes, I suppose I can accept that. Assuming it all happened of course. And we’ll have confirmation of that little stretch of insanity in just under a week.”
“Yes, we will.” Orrin sighed, sitting back at his desk.
Phil sat forward, pulling a newspaper out from under his half-eaten cafeteria lunch. He folded it back onto itself and expertly ran his fingers down the page.
“Crap,” he said, scowling.
“What now?” Orrin didn’t look up.
“Stock prices have dropped again. MMR, and consequently most of my inheritance, is going down the tubes.”
“MMR? Never heard of it,” said Orrin. Although, in light of the fact he didn’t belong to this version of reality, Orrin wasn’t really surprised.
“A mining conglomerate,” Phil said. “Most of the rare earth metals being pulled out of South East Asia are mined by MMR Holdings. Including Flores, actually. That’s where they started, just a local Chinese operation back then until geologists recognized the link between the hobbits’ brains and what was underground. They moved the operation into Indonesia and it’s been nothing but champaigne and caviar since then.” At Orrin’s bewildered expression, Phil added, “Family connections - my grandparents were ground-floor investors.”
“And here I was thinking you aspired to the noble mediocrity of an academic salary,” Orrin said.
“Hell no, I’m planning to live off my charm and good looks,” Phil shot back. “But I did hope my trust fund would still be around when they wear out.”
“My heart is bleeding for you. So why did the shares drop?” asked Orrin.
Phil looked disgruntled. “Now it’s clear you’ve been AWOL from reality or you wouldn’t be asking. The shares are nearly worthless because we’re running out of deposits to mine. There’s been a shit-fight over the last tracts of land and MMR lost the job to someone else. Basically, what minimal rare earth deposits are left are worth billions and the rest of the land is worthless. It’s been strip mined to buggery and replanted with Palm Oil plantations. Hence, the share prices and my future livelihood, as it were, are going rapidly down the toilet.”
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