As Simple As Hunger

by D Des Anges

  “HATCH,” shouted the whiskered sky-man, and two men pulled it open.

  Ferdinand at once took so many steps back that he bumped Qingting, then El Alacrán, in his haste to retreat.

  “Peace,” El Alacrán said, and Hajar saw him close his great claw most gentle about the bones of Ferdinand’s wrist, “You will not fall.”

  The other party came first to the open hatch: they dragged down their contraption, and with careful hand passed it down to arms that stretched up from below, on the platform. Hajar wondered had they climbed to the platform through some smaller hatch, or swarmed the lines like sailors. For the sky-men and women seemed untroubled by the very great distance below, and rather revelled in it.

  Once the contraption was gone, the fly-by-waters and the few men in their leather clothes strapped tight to their bodies pulled their masks across their faces. They crawled then down onto the platform below.

  Hajar turned to the window nearest, and watched as the fly-by-waters came out, hovered and hung in the air with too-fast-to-see wings. She watched with still more interest as the great contraption appeared beside them, its levers in operation, each inch of taut cloth directed by lines and the men dangling in harness below.

  “You long for it,” Ærndís murmured, from beside her. “I can see it in your eyes.”

  Hajar said nothing.

  “I used to,” Ærndís said, seeming uninsulted by her silence. “I flew, too.”

  “What happened?” Hajar asked: because she knew she was meant to, not because she cared to know.

  At the hatch, Qingting crawled through.

  “A loose rope, a high wind, no more arm,” Ærndís held up her stump for Hajar’s queasy inspection, “and no more husband, either.”

  She patted Hajar on the shoulder with her good hand.

  “It was long ago,” she said. “These things happen, in the sky.”

  El Alacrán hung now over the hatch edge, his great legs clasping the aperture in a variety of poses as he struggled to balance himself correctly for the descent. It seemed hard on him, this manoeuvring.

  She was not therefore altogether surprised (although still alarmed) when he withdraw all his legs at once and jumped with a thump that they heard in the Hall.

  Benjon’s occupied form and Ærndís went willing enough, and as Ferdinand and Hajar came to the ladder, Hajar said, “It is a wide enough platform.”

  “Shut up,” Ferdinand said, gripping the rope ladder down with his hands a-tremble.

  “You will not fall,” Hajar said, standing behind him.

  “Easy for you to say,” Ferdinand grumbled, but he took down the ladder at a pace which was not torpid. For all his hesitance, Hajar was able to follow him soon enough.

  Down on the platform the winds blew and the stifling heat of the sun was diminished.

  Hajar pulled her headscarf tight about her hair and, for want of any pin, knotted it secure under her chin. The men at the corners of the great platform untied this and loosed that, and the whole deck began to descend.

  “Fuck,” Ferdinand said under his breath, for the deck swayed hard.

  Qingting took to the air as soon as there was space, and with a cry and her wings whirring was gone from beneath the Hall. Beneath the grime of volcanic soot, it seemed, her chitin was rose-pink and many-hued. Hajar scarce had the chance to notice before the fly-by-water was gone, and scarce the chance to remark this before she was back, and gone again.

  Their descent stilled with a jolt, and one of the deck-men cried, “Scorpion, you must be our weight for the ladder, for you’ll not climb. Take this –” and here El Alacrán was presented with the end of a rope ladder, “– and hold tight, eh?”

  The operation of lowering the rope ladder with El Alacrán lashed and clinging to its tail was a complex one; a pulley was brought in to ensure the smooth lowering, and still the ladder swung in huge circles, and Hajar thought it must be a miserable descent for the arachnid upon the end. He must have swung like the weight at the tip of a pendulum.

  “For us,” Ærndís said, her voice wistful, as one recalling a grand adventure, “we only tie rope to the harness, and leap off.”

  “Then I am very glad,” said Ferdinand, who had heard her, “that I am not one of you.”

  “How shall you climb?” Hajar asked her, meaning her hand. It was hard enough to navigate a swaying rope ladder with two.

  “As I said,” Ærndís cried, much more invigorated, “for us, we tie a rope through the harness –” here she patted the leather bridle that spanned her chest and stomach, as criss-crossed with straps as the harness of a horse. “– And leap off.”

  “Madness,” Ferdinand said, and Hajar could not help but agree.

  Qingting reappeared by the edge of the deck, roared, “WELL HURRY UP HEY,” and vanished below again.

  The men of the deck took great care with the rope on Ærndís’s harness.

  Hajar felt sure it would snap at its fullest extension, and surely without means of slowing the free-fall the force of its halt would prove too much? But they seemed unconcerned by this, and ushered her to the edge of the platform.

  “No,” Ferdinand groaned, covered his face with his hands, and so he did not see – as Hajar saw – the look of delight that suffused Ærndís’s face even about her obscuring mask. She dropped.

  “LADDER,” called one of the deck-men, pointing to it in case Ferdinand, Benjon, or Hajar were in any doubt as to what he meant. “ONE OF YOU, ANY OF YOU.”

  Benjon’s unnaturally graceful form slipped past Hajar and took to the rope ladder with all the speed and assurance of the great spiders. He vanished swift from sight, and when Hajar came to the head of the ladder she found the rope taut and stiff as wood, as if some great force was exerted upon it.

  “El Alacrán,” she said, and then, “Ferdinand, go first.”

  “No.”

  “Go first, get it over with.”

  “You go first, woman.”

  “It is taut,” Hajar said, “like a real ladder.”

  “It is half a mile up in the fucking sky,” Ferdinand said, “that is not the location of a real ladder.”

  “Stop being a child,” Hajar snapped. She coughed soon after, for the fume of the great ship’s engine had worked itself into her as she argued, and they had been offered no mask. “Get away from this foul air.”

  With a look of near-rage, Ferdinand seized the top of the ladder and lowered himself stiff-limbed onto the rungs. Hajar watched him go with eyes that streamed and stung, and itched. The change in wind, she thought, must be at fault for the sudden introduction of the foulness into her face, though the Hall remained steady in the sky.

  As soon as he had gone six feet, she took to the rungs herself.

  It was a slow descent, as slow as their climb had been, from the known to the unknown.

  The deck rocked hard, shaking the ladder as a hand might, and below her Ferdinand shouted, “NO NO NO,” and wrapped his limbs about the ladder for dear life –

  They froze to the ladder, but no further jolts came: this, then, must have been the fullest extension of Ærndís’s rope.

  With some coaxing and some harsh words, Ferdinand began to descend again, and Hajar followed.

  It seemed that Benjon’s occupied form had none of their compunction or care, and toiled downward far below Ferdinand as he had toiled far above Hajar on the climb.

  Qingting hurtled upward from the depths and bellowed, “HURRY UP HURRY UP WE WILL ALL DIE OF OLD AGE BY THE TIME YOU GET DOWN HEEEERE,” as she looped through the sky, returned, and hovered beside them.

  “Fuck off,” Hajar shouted back.

  “Hajar,” said Ferdinand from below. He sounded impressed.

  “Shut up,” she said, and as Qingting flitted away she heard Ferdinand laugh.

  It was not the laugh of a man at ease, but it was neither the laugh of a man in the grips of terrified hysteria, and for now this was enough.

  At last she came to firm ground again. As she j
umped the last few feet and El Alacrán released the ladder, Hajar found herself with an appreciation for the unsinkable nature of land which she had never before considered.

  “We will head toward the shore,” El Alacrán said, when they were all assembled.

  “Who died and made you chamberlain of decision-taking?” Qingting asked in her strange, eerie, child-machine voice. She zipped past El Alacrán’s head, flying in low, and he assumed the same defensive posture Hajar had seen him use with the bear.

  He snapped his claws at Qingting with menacing affect and turned to follow her with his tail, but of course she flew too high.

  “Let us head for the shore,” Ærndís said. “Together. Yes?”

  Their course took them along the great paved road, away from the unexplained circle of young trees and toward the shore.

  Hajar thought they must look the strangest of processions: two Moors in ill-fitting and unsuited garb; an Albionman whose aspect lay somewhere between a man-without-home (for he had neglected to change his befouled garb) and that of a murderer (he had also neglected to soak the blood from his arms after performing surgeries) and whom Hajar was certain would terrify any locals they encountered in that respect; a cripple wearing still a mask which devoured the lower half of her face and rendered her quite inhuman, and two vast arthropods, one flying and one equipped with a curved blade at the end of an armoured whip.

  Scarce could they have seemed more alien and threatening had they come painted blue, spangled with feathers, and banging a war drum.

  The paved road was broad as any city thoroughfare and worn flat and smooth. Any city thoroughfare in the more monied side of the town, Hajar corrected herself, thinking of the narrow-veined streets of the port they had sailed from. It seemed an absurd long time ago now.

  Though the stones had plainly seen much use, they were in good repair, and some seemed newer than others, as if care had been taken to replace them. Some still bore chisel-marks about their connecting edges.

  And yet the trees overhung them, and from between the cracks grew weed, and from the edges of the road the hot-forest was creeping in unrepulsed by whatever keepers the road had once boasted.

  “Something has gone awry here,” she repeated. The maintenance of such a broad thoroughfare would be the work of several, and the shanty-town they had glimpsed from above was not in need of such splendour, or capable of rising to such a challenge. Should they be the creators of a road like this, why, then, did they dwell in such mean houses and not construct themselves better dwelling?

  A wooden shack was no protection from the heat. Though Hajar herself had never seen them, she knew much of the great stone labyrinths Fihriana had once boasted, plumbing well-water, to cool those who talked within even in the burning middle of the desert day. Her childhood had been well-papered with artist’s renditions of them.

  “We’re on the ground,” Qingting cried, “that is as awry as awry can go—”

  “You aren’t on the ground,” El Alacrán said. “Shut up and fly away.”

  “Shh,” said Ferdinand, and he pointed into the hot-forest.

  There among the unknown leaves which shielded the shadows from the dappled expanse of the paved road was a painted child, watching them with huge unblinking eyes. It was young, no more than ten, with long and tangled hair. He – or she, Hajar could not tell – had smeared his face with stripes of clay or paint; but underneath the earthen hues was as dark as Ferdinand.

  “Hello?” Ærndís called to the child.

  The child startled, turned on his heel, and ran.

  Hajar caught only a flash of some pale garment about his midriff before he was gone into the shadows like a shadow himself, the smears of mud hiding him as certain as the stripes of a wildcat. Even the rustlings of branches that might have accompanied his flight were lost in the thickness of the forest.

  “Well,” Ærndís began, but Ferdinand cut her off with a sigh.

  “Take off your mask,” he said, “we’re away from the fumes, you just scared the child out of its wits.”

  “Oh!” Ærndís said, and she hooked her good hand about the leather and pulled it down about her neck again. “Forgot about that, eh.”

  Hajar thought rather it might be the sudden attentions of a strange circus of intruders which had startled the child so, but she kept the opinion to herself. She only re-joined the bizarre procession in their trudge toward the sea and the seaside shanty-town.

  “Do all ground-dwellers live in such squalor?” Ærndís asked. “Our newcomers are usually … dirty, then.”

  No one answered her, but Ferdinand gave her such an ugly look that Hajar almost laughed at his indignation.

  When they broke from the trees at last they were met at the forest’s end by three men, naked to the waist, and streaked with the same quantity of mud or paint as the child.

  They hung back, beneath the trees, their greying garments tied about their waists, and watched unsmiling but not visibly armed as Ferdinand raised both arms in greeting.

  It was a clever greeting, Hajar saw, for the first it did was show that he carried no weapon, and the next it did was show that he did not mean to protect himself for he believed they would be hospitable.

  The part of Hajar that had received such careful schooling from her mother approved of his choice. The rest of her watched the worry on the faces of the men and pressed again with the fear that something was gone awry. They had no hatred or anger about them, only grave concern and the ache of what seemed like grief.

  “Hello,” Ærndís tried again, also raising both her hands in unarmed greeting. “We would like to talk to you.”

  One of the painted men looked to his fellows, whispered something, and gestured to the intruders to squat. It was, Hajar saw, to be a dumbshow. Their tongue sounded nothing like any she had heard spoken, and she knew there could be no question of their understanding Albiontongue.

  She wondered quite how they were to ask any question at all, but Ærndís was prepared, and took from her garb a parcel wrapped in cloth.

  The painted men shuffled away from it, as Hajar thought was sensible when some stranger appears from the forest with an unknown object in her hands. Ærndís began to unwrap the thing, and they leaned back in to see it, as did Hajar.

  It was only a slate, hemmed in a wooden frame, the staple of any school-room: of course, Hajar recalled, Ærndís took lessons for the young of the Hall like some travelling-tutor. And, as she removed the last of the wrapping, there was also a nub of chalk.

  Hajar watched with interest: it seemed this barrier to commune was a common affliction for those who sought to reach down to the earth. Then again, she doubted it was as great a barrier as the vast sun-blocking cloud of the airborne city itself.

  Ærndís drew a circle upon the slate, hemmed it with stick-trees, and showed it to the curious painted men with her eyebrows raised in question.

  For a moment they only stared at the slate, and Hajar was sure this method was unsupported. Then they began to nod, frowning, and held their hands out for the slate and chalk. They were not snatching, only asking.

  Ærndís relinquished them both, and the painted men drew within the circle shapes Hajar recognised, at once, as the many crags and squares of a great city. There were roads, and she saw the tiny figures of men. Their means of depicting mankind was different from an Albionchild’s, but there was a uniformity to it that struck her. Men far from Albion or even the Tealands or the Nubian Kingdoms drew men as their cousins did, more or less.

  They had understood, and answered.

  The painted men showed the slate to Ærndís, to Benjon’s occupied form, to Ferdinand, and to Hajar, in turn. When the slate was shown and they had all nodded their understanding, the painted men wiped at the dark surface with their pale palms, and began to draw again.

  Across the streaks and smears of chalk they scraped and scratched with fervour, passing the nub between them to better draw upon the knowledge or skill of all three. Hajar leaned for
ward to see more, and cracked heads with Ferdinand, who had attempted the same.

  When the painted men turned the board to show them again, Hajar was puzzled, but Ærndís electrified. Hajar stared at the picture: it was a blurred and heavy-handed representation of the earth, with teeth much apparent in its maw, gulping down a city as a snake swallows a rat. Tiny stick-people fell in the chaos, some heavily-lined.

  Ærndís sprang upright and shouted to Qingting, “Ghar was right! It has happened here!”

  Hajar examined the chalked scrawl of land eating city, and at the ten straight lines which followed after, in a pile. She thought perhaps this was a tally of the dead – ten hundred, ten thousand – or perhaps the time since this had passed.

  A tenmonth would have brought no such great reclaim by the hot-forest, but ten years should do so. Perhaps, though, they worked to some other measure of time, for did not the calendar of Albion and the calendar of what was Fihriana contain a divergence of days?

  Ærndís, meanwhile, waved her arm and half-arm to Qingting in great excitement, crying, “THEY HAVE SEEN IT. THEY HAVE SEEN THE HUNGRY LAND SWALLOW UP THEIR CITY. GET UP AND TELL THEM AT ONCE. IT HAS BEEN SEEN.”

  “Retrieve your slate and I will bear you –” Qingting began.

  “No, you get up there and tell them,” Ærndís commanded, “we have yet to find provision, eh? Go tell them, they will need to know.”

  “But—”

  “Fuss like an old woman later, go now, eh? Go, then!” And Ærndís flapped her hands at Qingting as if scaring birds from a window-garden. “IT HAS BEEN SEEN, TELL THEM! IT HAS BEEN SEEN TO HAPPEN HERE!”

  With great reluctance the rose-pink fly-by-water flitted away up, up into the cloudless blue sky, and back the way they had come. She no doubt chased the airborne-Hall, seeming soon black in contrast against the brilliant sky.

  Hajar turned her attention once again to the painted men, who had wiped the slate clean and were once more scribbling upon it in a frenzy of chalk.

  When they presented the slate this time, amid the murk and mist of half-wiped chalk there were three stick men, and across a short divide, two stick-women, two stick men, and, plain in its intent to represent if not plain in accuracy, a stick-scorpion.