As Simple As Hunger

by D Des Anges

  Qingting, smaller than the birds, had been much harder to escape.

  “How do we get back onto that, that, the city?” Ferdinand wheezed. He pointed without real direction above his head, to where the branches of great ancient trees laced together like the fingers of cupped hands.

  “We do not,” El Alacrán said. His echoing voice had become an echoing rasp, and insofar as Hajar could tell, he did not breathe well.

  “We can hardly remain here for the rest of our lives –” she cried, in some alarm.

  “We require a vessel,” Benjon’s voice said.

  “Shut up,” Ferdinand sighed.

  “You promised us a vessel and in return we will quit your friend,” Benjon’s mouth said, ignoring him. “There is nothing suitable upon this island. We demand a mantis.”

  “Shut up,” Ferdinand scowled.

  “Listen, you,” El Alacrán croaked, “when she gets back up there we’re finished. They will roll up their ladders. Do you understand?”

  “Yes I understand,” Ferdinand huffed, near-collapsed over the fallen branch of one of the trees that tangled through. “But we can’t set down … roots … and live in a hot-forest forever.”

  He cast about with his hands as if reaching for some unseen object.

  “Don’t you have someone to rescue?” Ferdinand said at last.

  “Shh,” Hajar said, for El Alacrán’s tail twitched among the tree branches.

  “We must go north,” said El Alacrán, at last.

  “There’s that ocean in the way,” said Ferdinand.

  “We will cross it,” El Alacrán, as if he meant fording a stream. “These are a fishing people, by the sea. They will have a boat.”

  “This is a very bad idea,” Hajar cautioned, thinking with horror of all the deaths that waited in the sea for three humans and an arthropod in a tiny fishing vessel.

  She reluctantly retied her headscarf below her chin: it chafed on the terrible sweat. She fanned herself with the flat of her hand.

  Another thought struck her. “And they look to be refugees, not fishermen. Their city fell into the earth –”

  “We think,” Ferdinand interrupted.

  “O and what do you suppose they drew for us, then?” she snapped, exasperated with heat and humidity.

  “With that draughtsmanship it could have been anything – a myth, a story –”

  “How long do you think they have been living thus?”

  “Enough squabbling,” El Alacrán groaned, and in the hoarse echo of his voice there was pain. Whether affected or genuine Hajar could not tell. “We go to the shore. Trade for a ship.”

  “Trade what?” Ferdinand asked, still quarrelsome. “We have nothing.”

  “Then we will steal a ship.”

  “That’s not very—” Hajar began, but the great scorpion twitched his tail toward her, and she ducked without meaning. She had meant that it was unkind, not that it was impossible. She could see well enough that with El Alacrán it would not be impossible to at least steal the boat.

  “Do you want to die on this island or do you want to go home?” El Alacrán asked, so weary that his voice might have been the very voice of tiredness itself.

  They left the dense thicket with caution in their every step. All eyes turned upward, and only fleeting glances given to the uneven and changeable ground.

  The hot-forest must have contained a multitude of undescribed animals and plants, libraries of knowledge for those who knew how to read them, but Hajar could think of nothing but the foolishness of setting out on their uncharted return, and which aerial horror was to assault them next.

  She embraced these thoughts, keen to evade those that waited behind them: the immediate memory of the piecemeal final descent of Ærndís’s mortal remains.

  El Alacrán, who claimed to have the taste of the sea pinpoint, led their way, breaking a path through the most tangled of vines and branches with his great claws. Whatever it was that ailed him, it took no toll on his strength, only his voice.

  Hajar wondered, did the business of … what had he called it … ‘internal origami’ … wear at him?

  The angle of light that filtered through the tree trunks had changed by the time they came to the end of the hot-forest, and Hajar was dry in the mouth from sweating.

  “I can smell the sea,” Ferdinand proclaimed.

  A moment later they came from the trees and onto the paved road as it ran alongside the shore.

  They had stumbled from the hot-forest some way to the other side of the village from where the road plunged into the trees. This was if it could be called a ‘village’ and not a streak of shacks strapped together with rope.

  Closer to, now, Hajar could see that they had been making do, as men and women after a terrible flood or fire might salvage in the absence of any salvation from outside. Though the buildings were meagre constructs of rough-hewn wood worn down by the sea wind on one side, the inhabitants had taken pains to paint the seaward side of their shacks in a fantastical spiralling pattern that seemed to move and shape itself like the sea. There was not the fierce constriction of works with which Hajar was familiar.

  They had hung out lines across the fronts of their shacks. From these lines hung cloths dotted with such an intricate repeating and reshaping pattern that Hajar was sure it must be some kind of writing.

  Her certainty was not diminished, though her compassion a little dampened, when two painted women emerged from one of the shacks and began throwing rocks at her. They were also naked to the waist, their breasts hanging low like rotten fruit, lined and stretched.

  “Not welcome here,” Hajar muttered, running to get out of their range.

  “You don’t say,” Ferdinand said, outpacing her.

  The women had not only good aim but also considerable strength. Hajar’s back was sore as if she had been beaten, but she thought at least they must not have been trying for her head. Long after she thought herself out of their range a rock would bounce weakly from her calf and send her hurrying further along the road.

  “Not welcome there at all,” Hajar sighed, when the women at last returned to their shacks, leaving them unassailed by airborne stones.

  “Look,” Ferdinand said, and before Hajar had a moment to so much as perceive the direction in which he pointed, he had seized her by the arm and near dragged her off the feet, running again for the trees.

  As Hajar found again her feet, and stumbled after Ferdinand she cast a glance upward and was confirmed in her suspicions at once. This was why they had been driven out, then: for there above their heads in the evening light, the huge birds were circling again, and meant to make a meal of them.

  They fell upon the treeline like desert travellers on a well, and stood back from the light that forced its way amid the branches. Hajar peered back through the tangled twigs and watched huge birds swoop over the shacks. Their dives bore no fruit for them: it was evident then that the women and their families were long-familiar with the ways of these great predators.

  “Now what?” Ferdinand asked. When Hajar looked back from the bright reflections of the sun on the paving stones, she could scarce see him at all against the trees, and El Alacrán might have been a tree himself. Even Benjon’s parasitised form, pale at the extremities and under the filth of his garments, was all but invisible to her unshaded eyes.

  “A decoy,” the parasite inhabiting Benjon suggested. “You should run out and draw the birds away.”

  “When I need strategic advice from a parasite and a murderer,” Ferdinand said in a low and rough voice, “I will ask for it by screaming that I have lost my mind. Until then, do not speak to me.”

  “There is more than one bird,” El Alacrán said. “And they have the tactics of thinking beasts. A decoy would be of little use.”

  “Perhaps,” said Hajar, “we should return into the hot-forest, and examine the circle we saw from the city.”

  In the cloying heat of the hot-forest, which carried more water than Hajar thought
possible for air to carry without resorting to rain, her companions stared at her. Or rather, Ferdinand and Benjon’s body stared at her: she had no notion of what might hold El Alacrán’s attention.

  “What good’s that going to do?” Ferdinand asked, when he had stared at her for so long that Hajar felt herself beginning to grow angry with him. “You don’t seriously believe—”

  “I would like to know,” Hajar said, as the skies over the paved strip outside became so quiet that they roused suspicions in her. “What else are we doing?”

  No one had an answer for her, and after a silence filled with the whirs and chirps of the living forest, El Alacrán began to lead the way further into the oppressive darkness and spots of fading light.

  At first she was unsure if she would even know the place she had seen, or if El Alacrán could know which direction they must take, but the scorpion moved with such certainty that after a while it no longer occurred to her to doubt him. She thought that perhaps he could smell the younger trees as he’d tasted the sea on the air.

  Before any other sign there was the dimming of light, as the sun struggled through thicker, younger trees pressed closer together than the venerable trees through which they walked, but the change from untouched hot-forest to fresher, greener growth was abrupt as if a knife had cut through the old wood. Here and there among the tall, reddish-brown trunks an opening had formed to the old side of the line, and the remains of roots broken off still rose through the leaf litter like the tops of buildings after a flood. Although thick, fast growth had obscured the gaps, there was little of substance.

  “Landslide,” Ferdinand said.

  “The land is the same height,” said the parasite with Benjon’s voice. Ferdinand ignored this.

  “A landslide which replaced all the land as it was,” El Alacrán said, and though there was no way to infer that he chastised, Ferdinand sighed at volume and pushed on through the dim hot-forest and onto the seeming plateau. The ground remained firm beneath his feet, and in the gathering dark Hajar watched without amusement as he leapt up and down upon it.

  “They built a city here,” Hajar said, “and it vanished into the earth.”

  “They claim it did,” Ferdinand corrected her, but he stopped his infuriating jumping.

  “You think they claimed it did,” Benjon’s parasite said, and in his bland needling Hajar couldn’t help but hear an echo of his unafflicted self and his habitual, unthinking pedantry. “You interpreted that meaning from some scratches.”

  “And what—” Ferdinand began, but he bit away the question and turned to Hajar to implore: “Are you satisfied? There isn’t light to see by now.”

  “We should return to the shore and—” Benjon’s voice began.

  “No one asked you,” Ferdinand muttered, but he made no further complaint, and only crossed back over the outskirts of the circle of fresher foliage.

  “The light fades,” El Alacrán observed. “I can move in the darkness, but you will end in broken limbs trying to climb through these tangles. We can return in the morning.”

  “The birds will be there in the morning,” Hajar said, and in her mind’s eye she saw again the limp rag doll of Ærndís falling back to earth in a hail of body parts. The thought occupied her so that she only half-heard the impatient reply: all around them the hot-forest fell finally into darkness, and the leaf-litter about her feet swarmed with the tiny cousins of El Alacrán and his kind.

  * * *

  The night’s sleep they passed within the hot-forest, subjected to its screeching sounds and crawling life, was one of the least pleasant of Hajar’s life. She thought as she tried to shake out what appeared to be ants from her hair in the low light of dawn that this measure included even the sleep she had snatched on her petrifying ride upon the back of a giant spider. Hajar declined to share this thought with her companions.

  They breakfasted on the same green-red fruits that Ærndís had been stockpiling, reasoning that she must have known they were edible. None of them, at least, felt queasy afterward. El Alacrán led them through the hot-forest in near-silent single file: while Hajar and Ferdinand stopped every few paces to remove yet more ants from their respective clothing, and Hajar to shake out some unidentified crawling thing which had slipped into her boots in the night, the body of Benjon walked on unharried by the flies that bit him.

  At the tree-line before the paved road which skirted the shore, El Alacrán bade them stop and scuttled – there was no other word for it – out onto the flat stones. He went as swift as a cantering horse, and was soon shrunk by distance. Nothing came, only the consistent song of the hot-forest about their ears.

  Hajar strained her eyes peering among the interlaced branches at the early morning sky. There were low clouds and the gentle suck and slap of the sea against a solid wall, but no piercing cries of birds, and no angry shouts of people, either.

  “He hasn’t called for us,” Ferdinand snapped, and Hajar turned to the sound of churning leaf litter and cracking twigs as the parasitised form of Benjon stepped from under the tree-line out onto the paved road.

  After a long moment or two Hajar realised her fingers hurt from bracing herself against the tree-trunk, waiting for some terrible bird to swoop down and bear him off. She straightened her back and followed the occupied body out into the dawn light.

  He had gone some way along the road after the arthropod, taking long, too-graceful strides. El Alacrán stood some way further off, poised by the edge of the road on the seaward side.

  “The birds will be back,” Ferdinand grumbled, catching up with them.

  “Who cares,” said Benjon’s voice. “Look.”

  And one of Benjon’s long and bony fingers pointed farther yet down the road, to where a boat bobbed in the water beside the great stone road. It was this that held El Alacrán’s attention, and this that they hurried toward.

  The drop from the edge of the great road to the water was as abrupt as the harbour from which she had first sailed. Hajar thought this must have been deliberate on the part of the first builders of the road. Perhaps the whole had once housed many, many more boats.

  Hajar gave the boat the benefit of what little knowledge she bore of sailing. It certainly had a mast. It might conceivably bear a sail, if one were there to be borne.

  It was, in all, very little longer than El Alacrán, and very little wider than two El Alacráns. He made, she acknowledged, a handy unit of measurement in a world without yard rules.

  There was no roof, no shelter of any kind, and it seemed it would be a miserable conveyance for the circumnavigation of a small bay, let alone the crossing of uncharted seas with no better direction than mere ‘north’ to guide their course.

  The sun was still low on the horizon, the shadows long, but they had only broken the shade of the trees for a handful of minutes when smaller, dot-like shadows in the form of crosses fell on the paved road, and all three humans broke into a run.

  Coming together as a flock, the vast birds did not spare energy on wasteful swoops, only dropping lower in the sky as if waiting for them to come out again, then veering off into the upper skies.

  “We’ll wait until night, then,” said the parasite within Benjon, unperturbed.

  Chapter 22

  For so long John lay in darkness that he came to regard his life before as a dream, a dream which he tried to return to by sleeping as often as his body would allow.

  But his sleep was treacherous, and brought with it the indomitable night terrors, and through the avoidance of these towering fears he found himself, often as not, waking to the sounds of concerned arthropod chatter.

  Were it not for the inability of his own tongue to mimic these sounds, he would have thought his memory of Albiontongue but part of the same dream that contained birds, bad origami, the grind of rig machinery, and, pouring from out of the Wireless receiver’s membranes, the soothing sound of Hugo Waldren’s rich voice softly mocking the foolishness of the Franks on a wet afternoon.

&n
bsp; Having no means of marking time, and being quite detached from the passage of it by now, John did not know for how long he had slept and woken, slept and woken in the cave when he began to feel less fatigued, less disoriented, and a good deal more hungry.

  He did mark that it was only one sleep after this discovery that he was met with the delicate tapping of arthropod antennae upon his now-bearded face. It was joined with a chirruped instruction put direct to him instead of to those beside him.

  Follow me, please, human-Lancaster, follow me.

  Unable to mimic the clicks and squeaks of arthropod lingua-franca, John had no means of telling the speaker that he although understood, he could no more follow an echo than he could swallow a shadow. In the darkness all directions were the same, and if he moved much from his chamber he was sure to become lost.

  I am told you understand us, the chirrup went on, and he was aware then of a delicate foot pressing the back of his knees. I regret, I have never learned human speech. I am told it is very different from our own. This conversation will then, be of less use to me than to you, which is hardly how the interrogation of a prisoner is supposed to unfold; our General will come to interpret you, later.

  John followed the pressure on the backs of his knees, stumbling over the uneven rocks as a drunk might, trying to keep to a steady path. The knee he recalled beating against the frozen beach, as in another life, was stiff, but no longer swollen.

  The first glimmerings of natural light came with an incalculable cold, and his eyes could stand neither. They screwed to slits against even the bare grey of illumination on rock, and he had no say in it. To a man of the daylight, perhaps this faint gleam would be too poor to read street signs by, but to John’s light-starved eyes it was as if the sun was shone direct into his face.

  He stumbled again.

  The pressure on the back of his knees, faint as it was, was removed.

  He stood blinking and giddy in the very rear of the fissure through which he had first entered the caves – or one very like it – and saw only a white swirling chaos at the far end.