“Gone?” Jun frowned and adjusted his shell armor yet again. Damn, but it had become too small too fast, clamping around his back and shoulders. “Gone where?”
Sunia glanced up, a weary look on her face. “Look, I wouldn’t have asked you if I could go myself and fetch Aima. But what about them?” She gestured at the four smaller children, mock-fighting on the floor of the cave, the colorful armors they wore clanking against each other. “You are the oldest of the Stray Clan, Jun.”
“Hey, I didn’t ask for it.” To be the oldest, responsible for the younger ones.
Then again Sunia had always been like a mother to him. He’d do anything for her.
He avoided her bright gaze and stared at the cracked bowls stacked on a rock shelf. “Where is she?”
“I wish I knew. At the pond, perhaps. She might be in danger, she’s so small. Will you go, Jun?”
The pond. At dusk. Like most of the dangers of the dunes, water lizards were more likely to appear as day began or ended to hunt. The bird attacks intensified then too, though birds seemed to follow their own schedule.
Aima was a good soul and shouldn’t be left to perish, to join Queen Elvereth’s army of the dead.
He nodded.
Sunia reached out and surprised him with a hug. Her body trembled, her voice quavered. ‘Thanks.’ Her relief was palpable.
“It’s all right.” He pulled back, feeling heat climb up his neck. Hugs were for children, and he was practically a man. He hoped nobody had seen it. “You said it. I’m the oldest.”
He turned quickly and stepped outside the rock shelter. He stole a look at the sky and swallowed a groan. Almost dusk. Damn Aima and her stupid escapades. Yet she had never stayed out so late before.
Jun adjusted his armor again, wincing as it chafed against the welts it had caused on his upper arms and his back. He had glued a patch on his left shoulder where the armor had split. It still held.
He shook his head to clear it, and his dark hair whipped his face. Right. No two ways about it. Got to find Aima.
He strode down the well-worn, winding path toward the pond.
The dunes crawled with Shell People returning to their dens in the shelters that formed black mouths in the vertical rock surface. The tide of clickety-click sounds washed over Jun along with the rustling of the rushes in the timid breeze.
They passed him by, men, women and children in black, white, grey, blue shell armors, dashes of green, spirals on the shoulders and helms with sharp projections on their elbows and swirls of yellow on the tailbones.
A light grey young man, his armor dusted with brilliant green rays, waved at him. Bless Ras, properly called Stone Grey; he was not as arrogant as his clan warranted. Trust him to ignore the social rules and greet a member of the Stray Clan as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
He waved back and trudged in the opposite direction, toward the pond, heart already thumping.
Jun ducked underneath a low branch and jumped over a hole in the ground. He rounded a bend of the trail and halted, fell a step back, peeking between the blades of a grass plant.
A fight.
Jun’s hooks rose on his backbone, grasping his armor tighter with excitement. The Shell people had found an empty armor, and just his size from the looks of it. Remnants of an old battle, the shell armors had been used to near depletion, but from time to time another one turned up, pushed up to the surface of the earth by worms and moles.
The welts from the friction of the armor on his arms, shoulders and back all but drove Jun crazy. The idea of having one that actually fit pulled him forward. Aima would be fine for a while longer, had to be. This was a chance not likely to come up again soon.
A great one, a Spiked One, stood at the side, and Jun paused and eyed him warily, but he seemed to be keeping out of the fight.
Jun ran headlong into the broil, smashing into others, blows and curses falling on him. He returned them with equal fierceness, pushing into the eye of the fight. He let out an ululating cry and dove into the melee, raining punches and kicks.
A blow landed on his shoulder and he heard a crack. Cursing he felt for the patch there. Gone. Second hand armor, crappy patch. Lizardshit.
All the more reason to win this new armor. He had to take it now, before anyone hooked it on.
With a cry of rage he pushed and dragged a black-and-white one off a green and took his place, then reached with both hands and pulled himself beside the empty armor. He punched a blue in the face, crushing its nose. Blood spurted across Jun's chest. A grey launched herself at him. He cartwheeled to the side and successfully avoided her. He landed behind the empty armor, grunted as he fell on one knee, straightened painfully and fought his way around.
Damn. They were all younger than he was, their faces still bearing the dots of childhood, though just as tall and wide as he was. Living in the Stray Clan was not easy, no protectors, no providers of food. He was too small for his age.
Growling, he tripped up an oncoming dark blue and elbowed hard another coming from behind. Between the tangle of limbs and the spurting blood, the empty Shell armor loomed magnificent, sky-blue with streaks of grass green and marigold yellow.
Beautiful.
The hooks on his backbone clenched again in anticipation. He fought the urge to throw his armor off him and fight unrestrained for the new one.
Bad idea.
He turned and bent, taking the brunt of a tall white on the right forearm, and replied with a kick that knocked her off her feet.
Lightning pain streaked through his left shoulder. He stumbled and fell to his knees. Something sharp had pierced his flesh.
Impossible. The armor protects me. He shook his head, tried to unclench his jaw, and remembered the broken patch. His armor was useless.
Grinding his teeth, he pitched forward onto his belly, freeing himself with a cry. Blood trickled down his back and chest. He rose unsteadily and turned to see the Spiked One looking down at him, the great spikes on his elbow dripping with Jun’s blood. The Spiked One smirked.
“This isn’t your fight!” Jun yelled. “The armor doesn’t fit you. You can’t fight on behalf of another!”
The fight ceased for a moment. Seeing his chance, Jun lunged at the empty armor, taking hold of it. For a moment, it was his.
The Spiked One grabbed and pulled him off, throwing him to the ground. Jun sprawled in the dust, his breath knocked out of him. Through blurry eyes he saw the Spiked One drag a youngling forward, an immaculate white with dark dots on his helm. From the Spiked One’s clan for sure, Jun thought grimacing as he tried to pull himself upright. Damn him.
Now he watched as the youngling shed his white armor and hooks flexed like fingers from the vertebrae on his pale back. No scars, no ribs sticking out. A protected one.
Jun stood hunched over, panting, feeling light-headed.
The Spiked One raised the sky-blue armor and placed it over the young one’s head, fitting it over the shoulders and back, and the hooks clicked as they slid into place and attached themselves.
The crowd, bloodied and covered in dust, began to disperse.
Jun straightened, pain stabbing through his shoulder.
“You,” said the Spiked One in a grating voice, turning to him. Jun watched transfixed the Spiked One’s helm bristling with white shafts, the enormous spiked shoulder pads, the stern face. “You, nameless, should know better than to challenge worthy ones for an armor.”
Oh, for Elvereth’s sake! “I’m not nameless. I have a name, it’s Jun!”
“That’s not a name for a Shell,” said the Spiked One, “and you know it.”
Jun glared at him, remembering the Shell's name: Noon Sky White.
“And this thing you are wearing in the stead of an armor,” continued Noon Sky White, “is an embarrassment to us all.”
Jun instinctively drew back, but the Spiked One towered over him and, grabbing Jun’s half-torn armor, pulled it apart. With a sickening crunch, it tore more
, exposing his injured shoulder.
Noon Sky White snorted. “As I said, a disgrace. You are a disgrace. I’ve never seen you dune-side at this time before. Seems your cowardice finally gave way to a death wish. Good decision.”
Jun pulled at the pieces of his armor, mind running through ideas of how to put it back together. Without it he was as good as dead.
“Greet the birds for me,” Noon Sky White tossed over his shoulder as he turned to go shelter-side.
Jun clenched his fists. “Lizards’ innards!” He started as his shell armor ripped further, cracks going all the way down to his tailbone. His hooks were already disconnecting, withdrawing, giving up. He stared at the pieces blindly for a moment, then threw them down in disgust and stomped on them.
He bent over, hands braced on his knees, and breathed deeply.
He was done for.
When he looked up again, he saw evening had turned a deep blue and a full moon silvered the dunes.
Jun slapped his forehead. “Aima!”
He took off toward the pond, parting the shoulder-high grass as he passed. Long streaks of fiery pain radiated from his left shoulder down his arm and back, slowing him down.
Running at dusk without a carapace. How stupid that is? Vulnerable and exposed, like a new-born, he ran beneath the watchful sky.
Serves you right, he scolded himself. You shouldn’t have stopped, shouldn’t have become involved in that fight when you saw the Spiked One and his friends. You know they are trouble.
He bit his lip.
The ground crunched beneath his light steps and wavelets whispered on the sandy shore. Drawing sharp intakes of breath that hurt his chest, he stood on top of a dune and peered around. His eyes flitted over the glassy surface of the water to the dark shapes of bushes and gnarled trees that grew nearby. The moon framed everything in silver.
No sign of Aima.
“Shades and shinks.” He jogged down to the shore, eyes darting, checking every hollow and every shadow that could be hiding Aima.
Nothing.
A thin scream rang. Jun froze. A moment later he gathered his wits and climbed the next dune. A small bay. He dashed down, spraying sand all around.
A water lizard stretched there in all its terrible beauty, metallic brown with stripes of bright yellow and red.
The lizard had someone in its mouth.
Please let it not be Aima.
Jun rushed toward the lizard. It paid him no heed as he came on yelling, brandishing a rock he had gathered on his way. It didn’t even move when he threw the stone and struck the beast right over the eye.
The lizard ground its jaws. Its victim screamed, then fell quiet.
Jun forgot how to breathe. The lizard blinked its huge yellow eyes, then spun around, blinding Jun with a torrent of wet sand, and dove back into the pond.
Jun wiped at his eyes and cursed at fading ripples that told where the lizard and his victim had gone. Moisture kept leaking from his eyes.
Had it been Aima? Was she now gone forever? My fault. I took too long.
He pressed his lips together and turned to go, a weight on his chest making each breath a struggle.
A blue glimmer on the sand caught his gaze. He stared in disbelief. It was the sky-blue armor he had fought for and lost. The lizard had eaten the young one, but spat out the armor.
Not Aima. It hadn’t been Aima.
Joy filled him, stronger than a fever, and his whole body shook.
On wobbly legs he walked to the armor and picked it up, turned it this way and that. Its spiral patterns of green and yellow shone in the moonlight, the tiny spikes on the shoulders gleamed like blades.
Long scratches ran down one side, but it was otherwise intact.
He had known it was too large for the youngling. His hooks had surely been too small to connect properly.
He pulled it on. He had known it would fit perfectly, but he could not contain the sigh of pleasure that escaped him as the armor hugged his body. It fell flawlessly around him, like a second skin over his body’s contours, like a caress. His back hooks grappled and secured it into place.
He threw back his head and released a cry of pure joy. His hands smoothed over the arm sheathes, the relief of lines on the helm. All his. His arms and legs were already taking on the colors and patterns, turning blue.
A whimper drew his attention away from himself. He walked over to the next dune and stood gaping.
A great one, a white Spiked One, cowered there. Jun would know those armor patterns anywhere.
“Noon Sky White?” Jun’s voice squeaked and he coughed to clear it. “What are you doing—”
“Is it gone? Is the lizard gone?” Noon Sky White uncurled a little, his arms unlocking from around his knees, allowing a glimpse of his pale face. “You should run, fast, blue one. A lizard attacked our party.”
Jun’s eyes narrowed. “It’s gone now. What are you doing here so late?”
Noon Sky White hung his head. “They dared me to walk along the shore. It’s their fault.”
“You let the young one die.”
Noon Sky White said nothing, and Jun strode away, anger humming in his chest. Noon Sky White was rumored to have fought a bird and saved a young of his clan once. Now Jun wondered about the truth of it.
His steps echoed on a stretch of white rock gleaming in the moonlight, and he heard plonking sounds from the surrounding dunes. He turned to see more Shell people rolling down, heads tucked in, armored arms folded tight over knees.
Cowards. So many of them, and they had abandoned the youngling to his death.
Jun shook his head in disgust and walked on. Jun ran his hands over his new shell armor. He loved the way it flowed around his every movement, barely touching his flesh.
To his right stretched the Good Dunes, where bulbs and fat mice provided sustenance for the shelters. To his left spread the pond where fish were caught. Beyond stretched the Bad Dunes, where snakes lurked.
And Aima? Where was she?
He heard the screeching call of the bird before he heard Aima’s cry. Cold fear gripped his chest and his heart pumped faster. He took off running toward the two sounds that now defined his world.
He nearly fell over when he saw her. Aima stood on the shore dressed in her black-and-white armor. Jun came crashing down the dune, rolling into a ball, falling all the way to Aima’s feet.
The bird flapped off a ways, hovering there, not nearly as scared by this stunt as Jun had hoped.
“Aima, are you well?”
The black and white Shell turned toward him. The pallid boy’s face was unknown to him. His heart just about stopped. “You are not Aima! Where is she? Why are you wearing—”
The Shell pushed him off and ran as the bird came down again. The boy rolling into a ball and falling into the crevice between two dunes. The bird tried ineffectively to grab the armored ball, then pushed at it with its claw, rocking it, trying to open it.
“Jun?”
He whirled around and squinted. Aima’s slender form stepped from behind a rock. The black and white markings on her arms and legs had vanished along with her armor.
Aima, Aima! His heart pounded with joy at seeing her alive. “Aima, did that boy hurt you?”
She came trembling to him and he gathered her in his arms, felt her small heart beating wildly against his chest. He rocked her lightly.
The bird stopped pecking at the rolled-up boy down the dune and turned a beady eye on them.
Jun’s mind whirled.
As if in a dream he forced his hooks to unclench and retract, heard the light click they made as they pulled back slightly into his spine. The armor weighed down on his head and shoulders. “Aima. Put this on.”
He shrugged the armor off and pulled it over Aima’s head. “It’s too big, I know. Get in as many hooks as you can, then roll. Yes?”
Aima watched his face, his lips, then nodded slowly. He gave her a strained smile. “Good girl. Try it.”
The bird flexed its wings about to take flight toward them.
“Now Aima!”
Aima’s hooks clinked as they entered the armor openings and fastened themselves. She gave Jun a teary smile that gave him more courage than he thought he could muster.
He could not fail her. He was the oldest.
Aima folded into a ball and rolled down to the roots of a bush. She stayed there, still rocking, looking like a smooth blue pebble.
The bird’s shadow fell over Jun, cutting the moon. Without an armor, his body was so light he felt he might fly. He raced away from Aima waving at the bird. For a moment, the bird seemed to take interest in Aima’s curled form with the blue and green and yellow designs — they were meant to hide her in the grass, not on the sand — but Jun’s gesticulating, shouting figure appeared to draw it back.
Jun bent as he ran to avoid a giant claw and then a flapping wing, ducked underneath a branch overhanging a drop, rolled down and found his feet once more, spitting sand.
Plonking sounds greeted his passing: the Shells from Noon Sky White’s party were rolling down the dunes again, all curled up. Noon Sky White’s armor gleamed in their midst.
“Help me! Distract the bird!” Jun shouted as he passed by them, but as he raced on, rolling and rising to avoid the questing claws and beak of the bird, he heard nothing more from their direction.
He stopped beneath a rock to catch his breath and saw them from afar lying there — gleaming, colorful balls of cowardice.
The bird screeched and made a vicious grab for him.
No time or breath left to run.
On a flash of inspiration, he launched himself at the hovering claw and swung himself onto it. He grabbed hold of the bird’s horned leg and hung there like a pendant, swinging, too stunned at his own act to remember how to breathe.
The bird screeched again, tried to peck at Jun, but the position made it impossible. With a great flap of its wings, it flew off, carrying its living burden.
Jun clung onto the bird’s leg for dear life. The land fell away beneath him, landmarks he knew well becoming smaller, the moon becoming larger.
I can’t believe this, can’t believe this. He closed his eyes not to see the heights to which the bird was rising.
His arms started to cramp, but shifting them seemed too risky. Cold made his teeth chatter. He dared glance down and saw blue water. A pond. He thought to jump but by the time he got his stiff fingers to unlock they were flying over land with trees and streams. Jun held on. A fall from high without armor would surely kill him.
He prayed Aima would reach the shelters in one piece.
He prayed the bird would perch close to the ground so that he could slide away.
A hill came into view and something glittered on top. The bird swooped toward it. Piles of broken armor littered the hill, and three tall poles crowned it.
Jun’s sweaty hands were slipping. He scrambled to keep his grip, but the bird shook its legs and Jun fell.
He hit the ground, rolling instinctively, grunting as his injured shoulder slammed into the dirt. He straightened, gasping, and looked up.
A small Shell child was climbing on one of the poles, white with streaks that glinted like water, and a crest of black and red on the helm. As Jun’s feet crunched on the fragments of armor, the Shell turned slightly. A boy. The face was fine-boned and the eyes large, fixed on Jun.
“Who are you?” shouted the boy.
Jun shook his head and examined his surroundings. He found himself gaping at the shiny armor hanging empty from the third pole, a black grey one with spikes like wings on the shoulders and arms, and a great yellow crest on the helm. Sleek and elegant like a jewel.
The bird screeched and flapped its wings.
Oh Elvereth. The boy hung on the pole like bait. Looked like the bird was getting its meal after all.
Jun dashed to the pole where the empty armor hung and climbed it with the speed of desperation, grabbed it and pulled it over his head in a single movement. His hooks clicked into place as he let himself curl and fall down. He uncurled instantly and took off running toward the boy.
The bird rose on the air. Jun climbed the pole reaching for the boy. He grabbed the boy’s legs, then his shoulders to push himself higher. The boy kept quiet, perhaps sensing he was trying to help.
Jun reached the top of the pole as the bird bore down on them. He launched himself at the bird, curling in the air, one arm held high, and thrust his spikes into the bird’s eye.
He barely heard the bird’s screech as he tucked his arm in and fell to the ground. He hit it with a thump, the breath driven out of him.
He lay there, curled, dazed, sure the bird would come after him.
Nothing happened.
Cautiously he uncurled, groaning. He rose and staggered toward the boy.
The bird was gone.
The boy was looking at him wide-eyed. Slowly he climbed down the pole.
“What were you thinking?” Jun opened his arms and gathered the child. “That was dangerous. The bird would have got you.”
A female voice rang from behind his back. “No, it wouldn’t.”
He whirled around.
The young woman had long dark hair and the clearest blue eyes Jun had ever seen. She wore no carapace. Instead, she wore a long green garment that pooled around her.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I am Queen Elvereth of The Green Nether Realms.” She smiled. “And you are brave.”
Around them uncurled and rose colorful carapaces, blood red, moon yellow, foliage green and sky blue. He turned in a circle, eyes drunk on their colors, his heart somersaulting.
“What happened? Why am I here?”
She reached out her hand. “Your hold on the bird slipped. You fell.” Her eyes deepened like pools of mossy water. “You are dead, Jun.”
He took her hand, fingered her fine bones, and looked into her laughing eyes. A weight lifted off his shoulders. The anger, the sadness, the despair he had expected never came. The place, her grasp, all felt familiar, as if he had been there before.
“Has Aima made it?”
“That she has.”
He nodded, satisfied. “Then I’m home.”
THE WOLF GAME
First published in Lorelei Signal Magazine, October issue 2010
Dreamwater Page 2
