As Simple As Hunger

by D Des Anges

  She made her way, almost still asleep, to the bay which had by means of no real selection somehow become ‘her’ horse. Hajar found it skittish and uncooperative, shying away not only from her but from every shadow and murmur in the forest equally, spooked enough to put back his ears and stamp.

  “Whuzz,” said Hajar, who very much was not awake enough yet to give the horse the benefit of an entire intelligible word.

  Ferdinand had sat up and was making some attempt at dismantling the poles across which their travelling-cloak was stretched. Benjon sat motionless upon the ground a few feet away, staring fixedly into the trees.

  Hajar turned back to the horses. There was something unusual about the little herd besides their pawing and whinnying. It took her sleep-addled mind a moment to discern that, in place of the four adult horses and one foal she had seen when the light of their small fire had finally dimmed, there were now three adult horses and one foal and all of them were in distress.

  She peered about into the grey gloom of the morning forest: it was early, for it was always early when she woke, the ground affording no comfort for late sleepers. The colours of the woods, such as they were, ran together in a kind of mist.

  Here was her bay, here Ferdinand’s ghostlike white, here the chestnut and the foal, and there was missing the second chestnut with the white foot and black-streaked mane.

  Hajar frowned, trying to catch her bay. He pulled away and made a sound of distress, stamping and dipping his head.

  The trees hereabouts were man-thick and deep red. They ranked as uniform as soldiers, tall columns stretching two or three man-heights up until they at last put out tentative spars. There were one or two which were instead thin and brown-black, maybe a leg-width, and they curved as they rose up. Here dangled like a vast fruit a ghostly-white sack that struggled feebly –

  With great care, Hajar did not scream.

  Her heart pounded with the pace of a speeding train and her arms and legs quivered and she felt cold down to the very cores of every single one of her bones, but she only said to Benjon, “Here are your bloody arthropods.”

  They were not so tall as the trees, but taller than Ferdinand standing on his own shoulders. They were huge in the way that trains or carts were huge, and there were four of them. They stood as still as mountains in the early-morning forest with their many eyes glistening and their many legs poised like perfect, coil-sprung machines.

  Ferdinand jerked his head sharply to look at them, and left the tent poles to do as they wished.

  They looked so much like their tiny cousins that Hajar grew near dizzy, wondering if she looked so very threatening to the smallspiders who stalked their prey through the corners of kitchens.

  It seemed impossible at that moment. The thing that had Benjon could no more ensnare a spider than it could eat a train, or birth a foal.

  “I hope you have a very good plan,” said Ferdinand to the thing occupying Benjon.

  Hajar looked at the weakly-swaying sack that dangled from the body of the nearest spider, and at the other horses, who seemed too confused to startle and flee. The white mare shied violently as one of the spiders lifted a long, delicate leg – Hajar felt she would have shied, too, had she been able to induce herself to move at all – and so fast that Hajar was not sure she had seen anything at all, the spider lunged.

  She was sure she did not see the movement, only the intent and the aftermath. The mare screamed – a horrifying sound – and fell, bleeding from the flank from two great puncture wounds.

  The remaining horses tried to flee, but found their way blocked by the ponderous, seeming unmoving legs of the other spiders. They rose up, whinnying and crying out, turning inward toward each other, trying to shield the foal from the great fangs of the huge spiders.

  There was a terrible moment in which the white horse tried to stand again, her legs already useless, and she flung her head about at the end of her neck. She was panicked so that her eyes were near as white as her coat. Her mouth was red as an open wound, and as she tossed her head in terror, the mare smeared thick blood from her bitten tongue across her own shoulder.

  The spider which had bitten Ferdinand’s mare seemed to examine Hajar with its many black, glittering eyes. It raised a foreleg.

  Hajar stumbled backward in an ecstasy of movement as her muscles released their paralysis of fear. She did not have time to turn, much less flee, before she saw the spider raise its second foreleg, and thrust both toward her at a speed she could not calculate.

  She fell, or maybe she flew: the spider’s legs hit her chest with such force that the ground no longer clutched her. Hajar’s last recollection that day was the immense shock and subsequent pain of something making contact with the back of her skull, and then there was nothing at all.

  Chapter 14

  When John Lancaster first set foot upon the forbidden territory of the Gated Continent, he stumbled, fell, and hit his knee hard enough to draw blood on the unforgiving rocks.

  He was hardly to be blamed for it: after five days cramped within the confines of the tiny boat, without food and only the very tiniest quantity of water, his legs were weak and unaccustomed to movement. The rocks, too, were slippery and smooth, turned to ovals by the action of the sea and clothed in ice.

  The wind near plucked him from the stones as he struggled upright, unsteady as a new foal, and blasted his ears red and stinging in a breath’s-time.

  Keep to snow, hissed El Miriápodo, his great long body forming a barrier against the wind, and his clicks only just audible above it. Holds a footfall better. Even unFolded his manner was curt.

  John had barely the strength of limb to obey and lean against the brown chitin of his captor as they crept across the frozen beach. He had not therefore the strength to observe that this kindness seemed out of keeping with the callousness that had left him so weak.

  In the boat he had been starved, and indeed could scarce keep himself upright. In the boat he had pissed on himself, for there was nowhere else. In the boat the fumes of the orgone engine had kept him in a state of near-delirium for the journey, his lungs a-struggle and his head a-spin.

  El Miriápodo had not remarked upon this or indeed spoken.

  Now they made foot step after foot step after foot step (El Miriápodo’s many feet holding him tighter to the stones than John’s two) away from the black boat. John wished himself back inside that wretched prison, with his aching legs at least warmed by the heat of engines and of the vast centipede coiled into the same shell with him.

  John kept his head down. Once, when a gust of wind swept him onto his knee again and he twisted to regain his feet, he saw behind him the black blot of the undersea boat. It was hemmed in by rocks and bobbing like a leaf on a crashing sea. The ice did not touch the shore, and John was briefly moved to wonder how this was, and how there came to be channels like veins through the thick white floes, dark as ink against paper. He thought he could see steam rising from the waters, but the air before him fogged so with his own breath and the wind hit him so hard he could not be sure.

  He had little time or will to consider this for long, for it was soon after this that his boots touched the frosted grass that fringed the beach. It was also the moment the wind that had buffeted and shoved him to his hands and knees so many times opened the thick banks of cloud which came down to touch the seemingly endless horizon, and poured flurries of snowflakes over him.

  John bent his head until his chin touched his collar. Entrusting his direction entirely to the thought that El Miriápodo would as like catch him from straying as much as from intended escape, he clapped his hands to his burning ears and crunched across the plain alongside his captor.

  The snow in haste built into a second coat over his canvas suit. It was too thin by far, now, its woollen under-layer as feeble a protection as the canvas. Under this curiously insulating jerkin of fresh snow, John trudged, and trudged, and trudged.

  He had no way of telling at first for how long he froze and sol
diered beside the centipede. Every minute felt like an eternity, and he had most of his mind occupied with trying not to fall, or to let his fingers become frostbitten, or his nose, or his ears.

  John knew when it grew dark, and colder, and when what little light there had been shrank and fled. He knew when he was sure he would die from walking that he kept walking, a hand upon the flank of the centipede in a darkness as near-complete as of the boat. The wind ripped tears from his eyes, and numbed him down to the bone, but he stumbled, each footfall sure to be his last.

  And there, through a long and murderous night, John Lancaster put one foot in front of the other until the sky became not the blackness of the inside of a cave, but the thick grey of slate. He put one foot in front of the other until the slate grey of predawn became the middling-grey of dawn, and somewhere among the terrible clouds the weak and distant sun rose.

  All he knew of the journey was the change in it: the seemingly endless horizon of the day before was a shallow slope. Somehow he reached the crest of this hill, barrelled off his feet twice by the freezing wind, his eyes shut entirely.

  In this, he thought he heard, for though the cold convinced him of the reality of his predicament, there was much lassitude within the experience for departure from his sanity, the sound of running water. He thought he heard a rumbling which might have been the earth itself speaking.

  John pressed onward in the wake of El Miriápodo.

  The bitter wind and unending snow was as effective a prison as the tiny boat had been, for he already felt he was beginning to die, and could not dream of fleeing. John had ever preferred cold winds to the stifling heat of summer, but this bleak torment was beyond what any man could be asked to endure, much less enjoy.

  The downward slope was no doubt no greater than that which he had climbed with such labour, but more abrupt. The wind that rocked him at the peak died away as he descended, and John opened his eyes, scrubbing away a layer of snow with fingers he could no longer feel. He feared his eyelashes frozen together, but at a fierce enough rub they parted company from each other or from his eyelids.

  The great centipede took care to angle himself a little in front of John, that he might not fall too far down the loose scree, but John scarce noticed.

  The valley was some landscape ‘scaped from a nightmare: the snow did not settle, though this oddity was far from the most alien and unreal cast of it. The ground, as John descended, grew warm beneath his feet. As he stared through the valley he could see the stream which wound through it and sent up steam into the freezing air.

  At the base of the slope he staggered down, his side turned to the direction of his descent, the strange river plunged into a fissure in the rocks, gurgling.

  The valley itself seemed less a valley than a gouge taken out of the landscape: it was a terrible wound in the rock which clothed itself, all busyness, in dead grass and the winter-grey slumbering carcasses of low plants. Almost opposite the hole into which the river ran, across the floor of the great stone gouge, ran a long low burst in the sheer bluff.

  There being no sign of any habitation in the valley, John shrewdly guessed that this mean, low crack to be their destination.

  Some other day, perhaps, he might have balked at the necessity of wriggling into what might be an unendingly low cave as an activity which hailed almost without a single change from his night-terrors. After his struggle through the snowy slope, his ears and nose still unthawed and his fingers burning as the blood returned, John would have climbed into a coffin with a corpse had it been certain to bring warmth and life back to his weary body.

  At the belly of the valley there was almost no wind at all, and John’s skin stung at the unaccustomed kindness.

  The river that steamed in the centre of the valley, which appeared to issue forth from another fissure at the far end of the gorge, was of the width that John might ordinarily have leapt. He was now weak of six or seven days of starvation, five certainly of confinement, and a frozen trek on this strange shore. His legs quailed at the challenge.

  “Will this burn me?” he croaked, pointing to the river. It seemed almost not to matter. He had endured the other extreme of bathing in the hospice, lying in water drawn from under lake-ice for hours at a time.

  He could not recall the last time he had spoke, and this, too, was so terrible a reminiscence, so like the hospice, that John could not sure he was not still there.

  The centipede examined John. He turned then his attention to the river, his antennae almost touching the steaming water. Both jerked away at once, and El Miriápodo raised himself from the bank.

  Yes, he clicked, This would burn you. Do not swim.

  “I can’t jump. I’m too tired.” John felt he sounded pathetic, but it could not be helped. His honesty was supported by the knee he had hit on the beach, which chose this moment to give and tip him onto his hands and knees.

  From this position he stared across the river, through the steam, and started as he saw antennae waving in the darkness of the low cave beyond. There were many pairs, he realised, as his eyes came accustomed to their fine shapes rising from the black. They were delineated by the stripes they created against the stones that lay in light.

  Another image of another night-terror.

  John rubbed his knee clumsily with a hand he was only just beginning to feel again.

  There were maybe a hundred of them, waiting in the cave mouth. Not all had antennae, but as he peered he made out the places that the dim light of the failing day hit upon their chitin, outlining them. A grey-armoured thing that looked like a far larger cousin to the little rolled-ball beasts John had found under his sink when he moved into the oilman’s flat in Aberdeen came out from the cave and waved its antennae at El Miriápodo.

  The woodlouse was plainly calling to John’s captor, but John’s ears, so sore abused by the howling cold wind above, could not make out the import of the clicks and squeaks. He heard only El Miriápodo’s response:

  Get back inside. Who told you to come out? Enough fuss. Get away, find some food. The mammal is weary. Go away.

  John contemplated this message little, for as the woodlouse obeyed, he found himself enveloped tightly in several jointed, strong brown-black legs, and crushed close to the belly of the great centipede.

  Another man might have struggled or strained, but John Lancaster was John Lancaster, and not another man. He was too exhausted to be afraid, too accustomed to the scent and sound of the centipede to be discomforted, and too used to the embrace of arthropod limbs to find them strange.

  He lay limp as a sack of grain and closed his eyes.

  There was a momentary discharge of steam across his back, and when he opened his eyes again El Miriápodo was already engaged in laying him to the ground once more. He laid John down as a labourer might lay down his tools after a long day’s work, or a tired mother lay down her child.

  You will rest within, El Miriápodo informed him. And be fed.

  John said nothing, and got to the one of his feet that joined with a leg willing to walk. He hopped, limped, and shuffled across the few remaining yards of open air with his knee throbbing and his ears once more aflame with reactionary blood. He did not know if he was supposed to thank the centipede for kindness, after his design had brought John here in the first place, or if it would be better on him not to speak.

  As ever, John elected not to speak.

  He had misjudged the cave: there was a hand’s breadth between the top of his head and the rock that hung above it. Though the floor seemed treacherous uneven and like to pitch him on his face as soon as he had not the light to see by, it was warm and dry and there was the promise of rest ahead.

  The cave-mouth was not empty, though El Miriápodo hissed into the darkness an easily-translated and quite profane instruction regarding the movements of his people. John could not see who clicked, who squeaked, who hissed, but there was a murmur so consistent that he picked out its meaning despite the cacophony of many voices:

&nbs
p; The General has returned, the General has returned, everyone, the General has returned.

  The overall timbre was ecstatic.

  When the last of the little light that entered the cave was fled from his eyes, John closed them again, for there seemed little point in straining to keep them open with nothing to see. He then allowed himself to be guided by nudges of feet.

  Most were El Miriápodo, but he felt some others, too small or too high or too light, and when one almost unfooted him the centipede hissed another obscenity at the culprit. In the dark, John heard myriad feet scurry away over bare rock in the wake of this sharp instruction.

  The unnatural warmth of the cave perturbed him, but as from behind a thick wall his tiredness and hunger pent up his curiosity and despair like water pent up beyond a dam. When they came to a place at which El Miriápodo halted and clicked, Lie down now almost gently, John did so without hesitation or query.

  There will be food, El Miriápodo proclaimed, and John felt the centipede’s many legs pass in the darkness, leaving him stretched on his back on what felt like fur. His body ached and his mind reeled as he lay alone in a cave at the end of the earth.

  Or not alone, which might have been worse: there must surely be a guard to keep track of him, for John knew he was, however well-treated, still a prisoner. To which end he was held he could not have begun to discern, even were he not near-faint with hunger.

  Chapter 15

  Jolting woke Hajar from a dreamless, grey hinterland in which her mind was preoccupied entirely with a sense of urgency that seemed to have no source.

  She tried to sit up, but found herself held snug in place by what seemed at first to be a thick, white silken blanket of the kind no train-runner could hope to afford. Testing its bonds determined that the blanket was in fact a great mass of cords, not thick enough to be ropes but too thick to qualify in her hazy categorisation of such matters as ‘string’.