As Simple As Hunger

by D Des Anges

  The chalked forms of their group all bore what looked like arrows without bows: spears, perhaps, or pike, and the picture bristled with aggression.

  Hajar shook her head firm, and nudged Ferdinand to do likewise; she knew Benjon’s parasite would mimic as unnerving exact as a mirror. She spread her arms as Ferdinand had spread his, to show the absence of weapon, but the painted men only sagged in some terrible disappointment.

  “They seek protection,” Ærndís said. “They seek our aid. This is no good; we need theirs, eh.”

  One of the painted men glanced up, froze, and called a single word to his fellows.

  While Hajar stared at their sudden change in demeanour, they right away without pause discarded the slate, and sprang to their feet. The painted men sprang into a run without hesitation and fled among the trees with the speed of startled rabbits, their feet flashing pale in the darkness.

  “What on –” Hajar began.

  Ferdinand seized her by the arm.

  “Look!”

  Chapter 21

  Somewhere high above wheeled great black blots, like outstretched hands in pairs, increasing in number. Hajar could not determine their distance: by their size they ought be on top of her already.

  They were carrion birds of a sort, no doubt; birds which stripped bones had a similar cast regardless of which bones they picked. They rode in spirals, as buzzards did, their wings hardly moving. A native by rearing if not by breeding to Albion, she knew her birds. These were no type known to her, but they followed in pattern, a form for a function.

  Hajar looked up at the birds, expecting perhaps to see one of the contraptions the sky-men had departed in engaged in some terrible battle, but there was nothing of the kind. She saw only the stirring feathers of the carrion-birds.

  “Birds,” said Benjon’s voice without interest. “Are you an ornithomancer now, Ferdinand?”

  He sounded for a moment so much like his true, mocking self that Hajar entertained again the brief hope that the parasite had somehow been cast from him.

  “Shut up,” Ferdinand said, stiff in voice. “You do not speak to me. You never speak to me.”

  “They’re big,” Ærndís observed, shading her eyes from the insistent sun as they stood, staring up. “Spooked by birds, eh? What now?”

  “Birds of bad omen,” El Alacrán said, and then, as Hajar stared at him, “No, not omen. But they don’t look friendly.”

  He assumed a defensive stance, his tail tipped back and ready to strike upward.

  “When are birds ever friendly?” Ærndís scoffed. “Should we away to the shore to speak more with these nervous land-men, or into the forest to seek out provision?”

  “The forest,” said El Alacrán, before anyone else could speak. His echoing voice was hoarse and worn, as if the throat from which it issued was torn and scraped by some terrible claw. “I don’t like the look of those birds.”

  “I doubt they like the look of you either,” Ærndís said, “what must they think, seeing a great arthropod like you out here, hey?”

  “Dinner, I suspect,” El Alacrán said, morose.

  He led them into the trees. He had to herd Benjon’s occupied body with his great claws, for it stood still staring at the sky.

  “He doesn’t like the birds, I don’t like the trees,” Ferdinand confided, as they pushed through the unfamiliar foliage and Ærndís brought up the rear like some grinning vanguard. “Anything could be waiting for us in here. Anything. You saw those birds – what else lives here?”

  “It will have to try hard to be more threatening than El Alacrán,” Hajar pointed out, stepping over high roots.

  What might have been a lizard or might have been some other bright-green beast scuttled away from her passage with sudden swiftness, and made her startle. The hot-forest was thick with flying bodies: the dancing fly-by-day midges that plagued Albion’s summers, or something very like them, and more unfamiliar beasts. Some were huge beating vivid-hued fly-by-days who bore faces and barbarous patterns upon their great flapping wings; others she could put no name to and looked like foliage that had ideas above its station.

  “Think of the stories you will have to tell,” Ferdinand said.

  They came about to a tree root so vast that it required him to grasp its top with outstretched arms and vault over it.

  “Ooof. Ow,” he lamented. “O I am not young.”

  “You have the art of story-telling better than I,” Hajar pointed out.

  She looked up at the brace whence he had vaulted without much hope for her own passage.

  “Ugh, it is no use, I can’t. I can’t. We must look to another route.”

  “I must vault this twice?” Ferdinand complained, but he cried, “El Alacrán, Benjon, turn. We cannot all climb this root.”

  “Pass along, it will end,” El Alacrán’s hoarse and echoing cry returned.

  “O how I wish you’d suggested that before we were so divided,” Hajar muttered, but she turned, and passed along, and as she turned, the thought came to her. “We have not marked our path from the road, how shall we find it again?”

  “Scent,” El Alacrán’s hoarse croak came.

  “We have not all your nose, scorpion,” Ferdinand said, peevish. “Let us begin again by the paving stones and mark ourselves a route that we might divide, mm? Else one of us will be lost before we know it.”

  “Turn, Benjon,” El Alacrán croaked, “turn, I said, or I shall turn you myself and you will hop the remainder of your days.”

  “HARM HIM AND I SHALL PULL YOUR REMAINING LEGS FROM YOU,” Hajar shouted, without pause for thought or reason. “Turn the man gentle, you –”

  “Hajar, hush,” Ferdinand said. “Back away, woman, or I’ll land on your head.”

  The oof he uttered on landing this second time was more pronounced, and Hajar saw his legs slip as he came to his feet again. The leaves beneath them were wet and thick, taking each step by sinking deep, though not so deep as the pine needle carpet of the northern forest had.

  Then came Benjon’s occupied form with an ease Hajar knew his unadulterated body would never have allowed. He himself moved with absent-mindedness and dislocation from the world, not with this fine-tuned abandon. The real Benjon would have been sure to smash his elbow, or remained peevish and stuck on the other side, rather than pivot over the great walled root thus.

  She missed that, and missed him. She missed the cantankerous coffee-guzzling rage and intense scrambling at corpses and the unmannerly lectures and hectoring of invisible audience and his sudden shyness, taken for arrogance, when faced with words of kindness.

  He seemed here out of place and out of person. The latter was the worst of all, like a painting taken from its habitual hanging and repainted in glaring hue before being slung upon a nail in some foreign home.

  Hajar thought she, too, must seem out of her place, but there was no one here who would know it. That, too, stung.

  El Alacrán’s great body came up the side of the root, legs levering his bulk seeming none the worse for missing one of their number, and he descended head-down as swift as a spider.

  Hajar watched with some of her old curiosity at the angles and distributions of his great weight. Such an operation it was, to heave him over the barrier, and yet it was performed without rope or pulley or engine of conveyance and only with the natural push of his legs.

  To imitate the bodies of arthropods would be the greatest feat of engineering man could aspire to, Hajar thought. Her mind created with idle fascination the first joints or armour that might allow them to move like the chitin plates of El Alacrán moved.

  “Why have we turned back?” cried Ærndís, coming upon them with her arm laden down. “I found – these, these then, we have eaten before, further north, I think.” She did not test this by biting into any of what she carried. “They have crossed the water. Why have we turned back, eh?”

  “Mark our route,” El Alacrán croaked, his echoing voice more harsh than before.

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nbsp; “We will elsewise lose ourselves in this wood and never return to the road,” Ferdinand elaborated.

  El Alacrán froze against the forest floor and made a sound not unlike a man with the chest-consumption rattling his phlegm.

  “We shall require the use of your chalk again,” Ferdinand concluded, ignoring this.

  “Hah, I had forgot,” Ærndís said, looking up at the great canopy of branches blotting away the light from above. “There are no such obstacles in the sky.”

  “And one cannot fall off the land so easily,” Ferdinand countered with a grimace.

  They followed El Alacrán back through the path they had taken.

  Hajar thought she recognised some of the same oddities of growth in the smooth-barked trees and their shining leaves, the same pattern of species in reverse, but she knew that she could not be sure. Without El Alacrán’s scenting to guide them, they would have been buried within the hot-forest for a month without coming again upon that paved road, and yet within the same hour they came back to its edge.

  “Pile up your cargo here,” Ferdinand suggested, resting his weight upon the trunk of a tree and blotting at his brow with his shirtsleeves. It was not only hot, but damper than the inside of a lake within the hot-forest, and Hajar followed his suit. She loosened her headscarf and dabbed beneath it in disgust at how greatly she sweated.

  Ærndís deposited the round, green-red fruits into a rough pyramid that used as its base one of the joints between slabs upon the great paved road. Each fruit was the size of a child’s head.

  Like Ferdinand and Hajar she swiped at her head to flick away the worst of her sweat.

  “What if rats should take them?” Hajar asked, for the depositing of unguarded food in Albion was an invitation to lose it to vermin, as Ferdinand must well know.

  “Have you seen any rats?” said he.

  “One never needs to see a rat to know it is always within earshot,” Benjon’s voice said. He sounded pensive, and familiar-from-some-other-source.

  “You will not quote Hugo to me,” Ferdinand cried with terrible savagery. “If you must speak at all – which you bloody do not need to – you will not speak of or in the words of the man you let die, do you hear? Do you hear?”

  “Ferdinand,” Hajar said softly, “Ferdinand, hush.”

  “And there is our pile, eh,” Ærndís called from the paved road, with some satisfaction.

  She was red-faced from the business of arranging fruit in the sun, and her short-shorn fair hair lay at comical angles from sweat and motion. Hajar had not observed how she had carried or stacked the fruits, distracted with her own thoughts. Now she thought how skilful Ærndís had become with her stump, how her humour had returned to her, if she had ever lost it.

  “They will be pleased for the variance,” Ærndís said. “Salt meat is boring after many months, eh?”

  And then she was gone.

  “WHAT?” Hajar shouted, unable to contain her surprise or express it better.

  Where Ærndís had stood came nothing.

  There was no sign, no fragment, only the diminishing shadow of something vast upon the bright-lit stones.

  As Hajar gaped, El Alacrán cried, “GET BACK,” and in an instant the huge arachnid had passed her, running out onto the road as if fear had never inhabited him.

  She watched his posture: his claws lifted toward the sky, his tail tipped back the better to strike upward. For a foolish moment she thought perhaps Qingting’s panic had the better of her, and that she had dived down to ‘rescue’ Ærndís from the terrible hunger of the land.

  But it was only a moment, for as she shielded her eyes and squinted up through the few over-reaching branches of the trees that bent over the road, she saw, and understood what had occurred.

  There above the trees, only a few feet above them, circled the birds.

  They were far vaster than she had known, far more huge than her best guess. They called out in the voices of wolves, and their claws were visible even from the forest floor. They screamed in the voices of eagles, and tussled with each other on the wing for the ownership of what seemed a doll in the grip of a buzzard.

  Hajar let her hand fall across her eyes to shut out, for the moment, the great birds as they rent and ripped Ærndís this way and that.

  “GET BACK!” El Alacrán shouted again.

  When Hajar did not, she found two hands – one broad, one long and thin – shoving her shoulder and belly to push her away from the road. She pulled her own hand from her eyes to see for herself what terrible end was to occur.

  One, two, three great birds swooped from above, their talons extended, to grab at El Alacrán as some tame hawk might seize upon a rabbit. They came in formation, in pack, like hunting dogs. They came in line, like soldiers, and they sought to overwhelm him in their number.

  Hajar pressed her hand now not to her eyes but to her mouth, as El Alacrán snapped and slashed at the great birds.

  It was only beside him, this scorpion of such size, that she could appreciate the measure of these beasts. Each of their spread talons was the width of half his body, each of their cruel, rending beaks the size of his head.

  Small wonder Ærndís had looked like a doll in their grip. Hajar shuddered at the thought of the thick claws tearing through her.

  Still they came at El Alacrán, and still he stabbed and whipped with his tail, still he snapped and grabbed with his great claws. They wheeled, regrouped, and returned to their attack. She saw the red blossom of blood upon their legs, and feet.

  At first she could not say what it might be, for arthropod ichor was nothing like red blood, but then she saw it. Their claws were not meant to break the chitin of arthropod, but El Alacrán’s vicious weapons had breached their defences.

  And still they came.

  Snapped-out feathers as long as Hajar’s arm fell onto the stones, fluttering down with a gentleness that belied their size.

  A bird’s scream rent the air like a knife through skin, and one of the great black birds flapped frantic away, feet dangling limp as it retreated –

  “He took its eye,” Ferdinand murmured, stood between awe and horror.

  But still the remaining birds came: El Alacrán slashed and snapped, the birds dived and screamed.

  At first Hajar did not recognise the next shape to enter the fray.

  It came from above, and at first she swore into her hand in horror, sure it was another of the terrible birds. But it was pink, and it was long in the body, and it was screaming in the high mechanical voice of distortion tubes.

  And so she knew it to be Qingting come too late, much too late.

  The birds pulled back as if from flames, flapping away in haste with their great feathered legs dangling below: but Qingting came too late, too late.

  Among the screaming of the fly-by-water, the shrieks of the birds, and El Alacrán’s hoarse cry of, “STAY BACK,” Hajar heard a wet thump, as of some heavy bowl of pudding meeting with the flags of the university.

  There, not five feet from where they stood, lay a foot, in a boot, and half the leg it came from.

  It seemed forlorn in a fashion Benjon’s dissections had never been. For it was still clothed so, and about it upon the pavement there were red speckles the size of eyes, the size of hands.

  “No,” Ferdinand muttered, putting his hands across his mouth.

  There came another wet and sickening thump, and Hajar’s stomach leapt to her mouth as she looked for the body part that had brought it. Here, further from them, lay a length of leg.

  With heart-stopping suddenness one of the vast birds plummeted toward them. It landed, and flew away once more, with its huge wings beating air and Ærndís’s thigh clutched in one massive foot.

  “O this is hateful,” Hajar whispered.

  “YOU,” Qingting’s child-voice screamed.

  “We would not wish to be one of those birds,” Benjon’s voice proclaimed, to the interest of no one.

  “YOU,” Qingting repeated. To Hajar�
��s great surprise the pink fly-by-water swooped from the sky, as the birds had swooped, and dived at El Alacrán’s head. “YOU. YOU LET THIS HAPPEN. YOU.”

  “HE DID NOT –” Hajar shouted, running out onto the pavement before Ferdinand was wise to her intent. “HE DID NOT! THEY –”

  But before she had even the chance to finish her defence, the fly-by-water flew for her head. Hajar could only fling herself on her face and cover her head with her hands as best she could.

  The fly-by-water’s jaws were sharp against her back, and Hajar felt them break her skin through the shift twice. They raked her headscarf and, she was sure, severed much of her hair before Qingting took to the air once more in such a flurry that Hajar knew El Alacrán must have slashed his great claws at her.

  “Back into the wood,” El Alacrán wheezed, shoving at her with his forelegs. He almost unbalanced himself in the task. “Back, back into the wood. Go, I will follow.”

  She ran, shielding her head from further attack with her arms.

  Though she near stumbled on something heavy and round, she kept running, sure that at any moment the beating wings of Qingting would fill her ears and those furious jaws clasp her neck. Her only other certainty was that the birds would return and, so distracted, the arthropods would be unable to save them.

  Hajar fell from the paved road and into the hot-forest without breaking her pace, and dragged Ferdinand with her in one hand, Benjon in the other, running, running.

  She turned only once – to ensure El Alacrán ran with them – and saw the great scorpion scurrying backward, then forward. He turned about in circles with his claws and tail raised as he made his way from the paved road to the hot-forest.

  Qingting still dived at him, screaming a wordless howl of bitter, misplaced rage, but the birds, it seemed, were more occupied with their… meal.

  * * *

  “And now what?” Ferdinand demanded.

  They stood – once again, a mere four – deep in the mid-day dark of the hot-forest, where light fell only in dots upon them. Hajar stood caked to the eyelids in sweat, her heart pounding still in the absence of her feet’s flight. She panted.