by D Des Anges
“And how do you determine which think and which do not?” asked the dark female.
El Alacrán ignored the question. “You may address me as El Alacrán, if you wish,” he said. “How should I address you, Gooddaughter Albionwoman?”
“Hajar,” she said, “we are Hajar, Benjon—” here she indicated the parasitised fair male she had named the day before, “and Ferdinand, of Albion-of-the-Britons. We come—” and here she hesitated, exchanging a glance with this Ferdinand.
He raised his great shoulders in a shrug. He was, by El Alacrán’s memory, somewhat taller than his John.
“—We come in search of a cure to Benjon’s parasite, at the behest of his parasite,” said Hajar. She did not sound best-pleased with her own words.
How strange, that the parasite should seek its own cure.
“Hello,” said this Benjon, “I’m … Benjon’s parasite. I seek—”
“Shut up,” said Hajar.
“Indeed, save your breath for our walk,” agreed El Alacrán, who felt he could hardly breathe himself, “for it is a long one.”
Chapter 18
On the third day from the great silk citadel of the spiders, El Alacrán killed a bear.
It stuck in Hajar’s mind because she had never before seen a live bear, having missed the opportunity of visiting one at a travelling funfair. Her mother had been required to speak with some men in Wyccham and for reasons Hajar had been uncertain of at the time, she was also expected to attend.
The bear, on their first sighting of it, was drowsy and dazed, pulled (El Alacrán said later) from her winter sleep by some great disturbance. She was rumbling and grumbling at nothing, casting about the forest as the first snow of that dry winter began to tumble out of the air.
Hajar had thought they might slip by unnoticed: a moment after this thought the bear came up on her hindlegs and stared at them disapproving.
“Can’t out-run a bear,” Ferdinand said, which helped none. “Maybe if we had horse—”
“Well we don’t,” Hajar sighed.
Then the bear fell back to her forepaws and ran at them, her great shaggy body shaking as she charged through the falling snow.
El Alacrán came between them and the bear more quickly than Hajar could determine by looking: it seemed that in one instant he was behind them, and the next before, warding off the bear with his huge claws.
His whole shining-dark chitinous body tensed with the potential of a wound-up coil, and in the slow circling of the bear Hajar felt she saw the lightning-fast strikes that were to come.
They were indeed so fast that lightning seemed slow by comparison: El Alacrán’s curved tail lashed at the bear one, twice, three times, and to her eye it seemed to hardly touch the creature at all.
Yet the bear blossomed red with each strike: blood from the haunches, the shoulder, and finally her face. The scorpion toppled the creature as if she were no more than a fragile leaf against the wind.
“You might butcher,” El Alacrán said, as the shock of it still held Hajar firm in place. “Claws are not suited.”
Ferdinand and Hajar both, without consultation, turned to that which controlled the body of Benjon.
His skin had grown dirty, as had theirs, but he never seemed to so much as wipe his palms upon his legs. The creature that had the ownership of Benjon’s body – which to Hajar’s indignant eye did not seem to be treating it well – made a sound of assent and held Benjon’s hand out to Ferdinand.
“You have a knife in your boot, don’t you?”
Ferdinand looked annoyed. “And if I do?”
“We cannot butcher with his fingers,” said Benjon’s mouth, impatiently. “The hide of the bear is too thick and these fingernails are too blunt. We shall need a blade – or would you rather we used his teeth?”
“I want it back,” Ferdinand said, withdrawing the knife from his boot and passing it with a wary aspect to Benjon. He took a care not to touch Benjon’s skin. It was short and single-sided and folded away in two, the kind of knife used to cut wire, cord, and the other necessities of the engineer or horseman, not for fighting. “And in my boot, not buried in my breastbone.”
“Ferdinand,” Hajar hushed him.
They watched without speaking as Benjon’s occupied body slit and gutted, skinned and butchered the bear’s body with professional method and swiftness. Hajar wondered from which of the parasite’s previous possessions it had gleaned this knowledge, for Benjon’s dissections were slow and aimed to part and probe rather than to slice into tidy chunks.
This brought her to the question of how the parasite carried its knowledge: for Benjon had been firm on the matter of conscious thought residing in ‘some segment of the brain, perhaps the pineal’. Then there was the question of how it was transferred through the nerves and bones of each new host, and if they tired, or if their muscles learned what their brains had forgot …
Watching this parasitised Benjon make short work of the great bear, she found she missed his unadulterated state keenly, far more so than the familiar streets of Durham or the gentle presence of her mother and the frustrating progress of her experiments.
Benjon’s ravings about the foolishness of the Witegamot; Benjon’s waspish characterisation of his sole, unfortunate, and strange student; Benjon’s unintended humour in the heronish manner of his walk and the indescribable discontinuity of his run; all were missing.
To see him move with unnatural grace and speak of himself in the third was as dull an ache as a long-running toothache in the heart.
“There is a place we must call upon before I bring you to the boat,” El Alacrán told them, as Benjon’s hands piled up lumps of bleeding bear meat with mechanical efficacy, “your bear should feed you to their encampment, and you will be fed again there.”
“Did you have to kill her?” Hajar asked, still lost in regarding the bear’s great body as the snow fell ever-thicker on the beast’s hide. Steam rose in ever-diminishing clouds from the dead bear.
“No,” El Alacrán said, standing as still as a statue of himself on his remaining legs, “but all of us must eat, and a bear will take us farther than a rabbit.”
“What place must we call upon?” Ferdinand asked.
Benjon’s occupied body began shoving the bear meat into the hide he had already carried.
Ferdinand said: “You plan to exchange us for some favour.”
“I plan to deliver you back to Albion,” El Alacrán said. “But I have favours to collect and return to my General. We will walk to the place where the ground is hot, and I will speak with those who owe favours. It is best if you stick close to me, for fear of being taken captive again.”
“We are captive now,” Hajar pointed out. She had read of the times when the Romish lands brought up rivers of fire from beneath the earth, destroying cities and ultimately leading to their downfall, and wondered if this was what he meant by places where the ground was hot. It could scarce be a reference to the weather, for the snow swirled down in greater drifts and their road took them north still farther.
“You are free to leave,” El Alacrán said in his strange, echoing voice that hissed upon every sibilant. He gestured with one great claw to the falling snow, the featureless forest, the dead bear, and the darkening skies. “Go where you will. You are not my prisoners, but in the forests of bear, boar, leopard, and those moody eight-legged crazies with their cutting curiosity, perhaps it might be wise for you to stick by an escort who wishes only to see you gone from this land.”
Hajar said nothing. Benjon’s hands had completed their task, doling out the meat into the hides that were more often their blankets or coats now, and they would stink and the meat would be unpalatable. She tried not to think on it.
“I must trust,” El Alacrán continued, as Ferdinand lifted up his hide and held out his hand for his knife with a scowl, “that you will not betray me or mine when you are returned to your own kingdom. For now, will you trust that I mean to deliver you safe out of my lands
and into your own?”
“We’re not exactly blessed with a lot of choice,” Ferdinand grumbled, snatching his knife from Benjon’s hand with an ugly stare. “Are we?”
“Who is?” El Alacrán asked, taking Hajar by surprise.
* * *
Little after their first meal of it Hajar found that to her distress but no great surprise the bear meat bestowed upon her and upon Ferdinand – though somehow not upon Benjon’s body – what a most accurate and eloquent Ferdinand described as ‘arse-burning watery shits’.
Quite apart from the humiliation, pain, and stench of this development, the constant need to stop and race behind a tree trunk and expose their earsendu to the winter was a great inconvenience.
It slowed their progress such that El Alacrán grew snappish and impatient, and Hajar herself was in no fervent joy about the endless delay. Her mind thus occupied with the warning signs of further emissions from her suddenly-hostile guts, she had little thought to spare on why the parasite within Benjon, provided now with an arthropod vessel, did not possess it at once and let them leave. The same upheavals of her rear left her in no state to question why the parasite had not indeed singled out a spider when they had been so close.
Four days thence, El Alacrán’s talk of the hot ground proved to be as literal as his every other utterance.
Faint at first, but increasing as they went Hajar felt the rock below warm beneath the soles of her boots. As unnatural as it seemed in this wilderness, it came also as a comfort, and when they slept that night her misery was lessened.
Subtle and by little the landscape here was more green, more rich. The pine forest grew speckled with broadleaf (though the branches were bare) and taller scrub, and the black squirrels that had moved like swift shadows in the deep forest became more plentiful, and bolder, and sleeker. Snow did not settle, and soon the ground steamed as the cold flakes encountered hot rock.
The prior unchanged backbone of the land now bucked and dipped, slowing them again. It broke up into not so much mountains and ravines as hiccups and troughs, sharp stone belching from the forest as bare as the bones of the long-dead.
Here on this fourth day they came to a fissure in the bare rock ahead which was wider than El Alacrán was long, and longer than two El Alacráns laid tail-stretch to tail-stretch.
Its depths were obscured by the black smoke billowing from out of it like the effluent of a waste-fire, or the burning of spilled oil on the shoreline to which Hajar had once borne witness. This gash in the ground seemed then like the maw of some mythic beast from old tales, in which every third animal travellers encountered had apparently spewed fire with such regularity that Hajar had believed the tellers all drunk or mad.
“Two days from here, at this pace,” El Alacrán said, seeming unfazed by this most spectacular of geological occurrences. He added, “It’s active again,” as if it were an adequate explanation.
Hajar wished she had paid rather more mind to travellers’ tales.
Benjon’s occupied body regarded the fissure without curiosity or fear while Ferdinand stared at it much as Hajar was sure she was, with fixed eyes and a wary mouth. The split in the earth was to be circumnavigated if they were to continue north to this call which El Alacrán insisted he, and thus also they, must make.
It was not an easy diversion to take.
What soil there was here was thick and black and powdery, and the plants that anchored themselves in it had shallow roots, easily plucked when using them for support. The rocks were angular and bruised shins, knees, elbows, and every other part of Hajar that slipped against them.
Most of all the heat of the ground surpassed comfort and became worrisome as they crossed it with brisk, concerned steps. Hajar found that by dancing from foot to foot in an absurd dance she lessened the sensation that her feet were about to be boiled in their own sweat, but she found soon after that dancing like a fool upon the uneven ground made for an inevitable bruised behind.
She made a rude gesture at Ferdinand’s hastily-suppressed smile and, in the process of pulling herself up once more, stared up into the clouds, where falling flakes vanished in the black smoke.
At first she was sure she must be mistaken in what she saw, for it was beyond possibility and the billowing blackness obscured all certainty, but as she got to her knees and brushed ash from her behind with as much dignity as she still had, the shape came to her eyes again.
“What –” she exclaimed, watching the great whirring cross as it zipped through the hot smoke, trailing below it a vast sphere. “What is that—”
Ferdinand, too, threw back his head to stare.
The great floating cross passed through the smoke again and again, and each time Hajar squinted and glimpsed a little more of it. The vast sphere that hung below it was joined by another, and another, and on the next pass she perceived that these must be some sort of sac. They were either a part of the entity or separate from it, and it seemed that each bulged with the gas of the vent.
Again and again the flying cross zipped through the smoke, borne on what seemed to be a series of great wings, although this was only guesswork. Hajar could make out no number nor detail at the speed at which they moved. She could only assume they were wings at all.
The length of the cross was uneven, and at the shorter extension seemed the more excited with growths; it was from this, the front, that the sacs hung. As the cross passed again and another sac billowed out with smoke, Hajar saw it:
There were legs, below the body of the cross, and they gripped an increasing-long string of sacs. As another sac filled, the foremost and the head of the cross worked to fasten the sac’s aperture and transform it from hollow into sphere. It was a head strikingly similar to the green arthropods that had guarded them within the spiders’ webbed dome, but dark and somehow armoured.
“What the fuck is that?” Ferdinand called to El Alacrán, as they watched.
“I have as much idea as you do,” the scorpion said.
With a sudden shift of position, the flying cross-shaped creature released the smoke-skins, and like buoys marking the way at sea they drifted out, and up, joined by long ropes.
Up, up they floated, vanishing into the cloud and the smoke. Hajar counted maybe ten distinct spheres as they went, and the last rope grew taut, held between the flying-beast’s forelegs as the others now hung loose down below its body.
At some signal or some notion the flying-beast determined for itself somehow, it released the rope and the smoke-sacs disappeared above, into the smoke-dirtied clouds.
“What is that?” Hajar murmured, “What is it doing?”
“Did I not just say I don’t have a clue?” the scorpion grumbled.
“It looks like a fly-by-water,” said Benjon’s voice, distant. “A very large fly-by-water.”
“Impossible,” El Alacrán said, and Hajar saw from the corner of her eye the great scorpion turn his tail to follow the flying-beast.
“It’s right there,” Ferdinand said. “Either it’s a giant fly-by-water or we’re dying from smoke fumes and seeing the same phantom.”
The flying-beast, freed of the smoke-sacs, hovered above the travellers as if suspended there upon a string by some invisible hand. It was just the way, Hajar agreed, that fly-by-waters seemed to be suspended above the banks of slow-flowing streams and still ponds.
She could see on its head a helm or a mask which seemed leathery instead of chitinous, and some strange black pipe which ran from some unseen place to another, past the join of head and thorax –
There came a voice.
It was quite inhuman, more so than El Alacrán’s strange echoing rasp: it sounded as if some distorting machine was trying to speak. Not like a Wireless receiver set up wrong and amplifying wordless broadcast into a squealing rendition of speech, but as if the wind and a wheel axle and a child had come together to commune with the world through song.
“HELLO THERE!” it cried. “HELLO! WHAT ARE YOU DOING THERE? DON’T YOU KNOW THAT�
�S INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS? HOLD ON, I’LL FIND YOU A LADDER.”
And with this, the vast fly-by-water disappeared up into the clouds at a speed of which train drivers could only dream.
“What–?” Ferdinand cried, wide-eyed.
“Stop asking,” said El Alacrán, “I don’t know.”
“Perhaps some sort of mechanical apparatus –” Hajar began, but she was interrupted in her musings by a squeak and a booming noise from the clouds high above, not so much like thunder as a note from a bassoon.
The fly-by-water reappeared, coming straight down toward them at speed with something trailing out behind it like silk from the back of a spider. It came at them so fast that all were compelled to throw themselves to the ground in fear but El Alacrán: the great scorpion only flattened himself to the soil and raised his claws in threat.
The fly-by-water swooped past, swept up again, and came to a halt some fifteen feet above their heads, holding the air as if hanging in the waters of a mill pond.
Hanging now from seeming nowhere was an impossible rope ladder. It dangled from the dark clouds as if suspended there again by the same invisible hand that allowed this fly-by-water to hang without falling. The end of the ladder was about level with Hajar’s chest.
“GET ON THE LADDER,” the unnatural child-machine voice bawled, “QUICKLY, QUICKLY, YOU MAD PEOPLE, THIS IS NOT A PLACE FOR YOU TO WALK, GET UP THAT LADDER, HUP HUP HUP, COME ON, COME ON, YOU ARE MAD PEOPLE THIS GROUND IS NOT SAFE GET UP GET UP!”
Hajar hesitated, and looked at Ferdinand, who looked pained, and at El Alacrán, who was still tracking the hovering of the fly-by-water with the direction of his quivering tail, ready to whip at it.
While she observed them Benjon’s occupied form flung itself at the ladder and began to climb, that unnatural and uncharacteristic grace pulling him up with ease. She turned at the movement, but it was too late.
“If that takes him we’ll have no way to get him back,” Ferdinand told her, not moving.
“Benjon—” Hajar called, but the parasitised body of her friend kept to climbing. He did not so much as answer her.
