As Simple As Hunger

by D Des Anges

  “We didn’t see any from the city,” Hajar persisted.

  “Get in the bloody boat,” Ferdinand sighed, and he made to seize her.

  El Alacrán, sensing a fight about to begin, thrust one claw between the quarrelling Moors, and snapped it twice to underscore his meaning. “Enough now.”

  The occupied Benjon had, in this dispute, clambered aboard the little vessel. “Remark their water stores,” he said, pointing. “We shan’t go thirsty.”

  “Why should it matter if you drown or die alone on the shore?” Ferdinand asked, stretching onto his toes to peer at Hajar over El Alacrán’s interceding claw. “We will die anyhurr. Let us at least die in the attempt of something, and not in the waiting for it.”

  El Alacrán considered this very mean comfort and dark humour indeed, of the sort to which he had grown used himself, but it seemed to have a logic to which Hajar could cleave. On the whole, he thought, his accidental captives were of a cynical set.

  “On landfall,” said the occupied Benjon with great satisfaction, as Ferdinand climbed down into the little boat, “we shall have a fresh vessel of arthropod kind, one way or another.”

  “Courage, Hajar,” El Alacrán said, offering a forelimb to steady her climb into the little craft. “It is at least too mean for seasickness.” He spoke with as much a mind to his own insides as to hers.

  At last he climbed, very soft and careful, onto the little vessel. It was high-sided, and in his estimation though it bore no covered place to keep the inhabitants from the baking sun of the day, it was more alike a tiny ship than a fishing boat. With an awning of some sort it would have been a suitable addition to some sea-borne caravan.

  Being of a practical mind, El Alacrán did not waste much thought on why such shack-dwelling poverty living in great fear of death from above, had come by this well-crafted craft and stocked it with water enough for a week’s careful rationing. Perhaps they, too, had intended to strike out for new lands at last.

  What gave him more pause was whose faction they might make landfall in, and how swift his death and those of his human companions might be should he by some accident of ignorance guide them to land in the wrong stretch of tropical shore.

  There was enough space to take him, if he laid his tail at a curve, and to seat the humans within.

  They might even lie to sleep, should they find themselves able. El Alacrán had not observed the occupied Benjon to sleep at all since his acquisition, and wondered if this, perhaps, was at the root of the terrible physical decline into which his exterior had fallen. His movement was quick and agile as ever, his eyes as fervent-bright.

  The boat was unmoored. Through some craft with ropes and sheaf of sail, the occupied and seeming seaman Benjon, fouled with mud and the blood of others, manoeuvred their shared vessel from the paved wall and the slap and slosh of sea against shore.

  The boat bobbed, and pitched, and rolled.

  For some short interval which seemed to last a few years El Alacrán thought he might have been mistaken in his assertion that the craft was too mean for seasickness, but its motion became that of a running beast. He gathered his wits within him.

  “You can determine north from the moon’s passage, if not the stars?” El Alacrán asked the occupied – and occupied – Benjon as the boat drew ever-farther from shore. The Moors sat within its centre looking small and sorry and resigned upon the great wide sea.

  “We can determine north from the stars,” the parasitised doctor replied, with no hint of doubt. “Our sailor was a regular of the Nubian trade and smuggling sort, and these are southern stars. This here,” the doctor pointed to a star El Alacrán perceived but dimly against the sky, for his vision of the skies was not at its best at night. No scorpion of his kind was meant for the night, “is north. Keep it above and directly before and we shall have our landfall. If there is land to the north as you claim.”

  Sooner or later, El Alacrán thought, but he did not like to speak it.

  The humans might not last the month or year it could take, and unlike his fellows he had never in his darkest thoughts seen that they might make a suitable meal. El Alacrán did not eat that which could think, even if what they thought did not agree with what he thought.

  The seas were calm, the breeze fair, and with each moment they came away from the strange island with its hungry land. They had never learned the name of it or its people.

  El Alacrán turned his attention north, and watched the waters.

  “Look,” said Hajar.

  As they peered all at where she pointed El Alacrán saw the water lit from beneath by countless tiny lights, like some underwater mockery of the stars that soared above. The lights moved with more speed than stars: they thrashed through the waters in strange patterns, vanishing and rekindling in an endless dance.

  “Why are they blue?” Ferdinand murmured. “These oceans must be full of mysteries,” Hajar whispered. “See there, an appendage has broke the waters, and still it glows.”

  “Tiny monsters,” Ferdinand said with approval, “the oceans should keep to these and the skies keep from haunting us with giants.”

  Hajar said, “Let us hope those birds are not sea-hunters by nature, else we have made ourselves a pretty target.”

  “Worry in the morning, when they wake,” Ferdinand said. “We can do nothing now.”

  Somehow, against this spectre of potential avian murder, those humans unafflicted by parasite grew weary, and laid down. They stretched out across the curved floor of the boat, untouching. While the sleepless doctor kept his hand upon the tiller and El Alacrán tried to air his cramped limbs without upsetting the craft or unsettling his companions, Hajar assumed the steady breaths of sleep.

  As Ferdinand lay out, his face turned from the rest of his companions, El Alacrán considered at last what he should do if he, like the Moor, were to lose everything.

  Until now, he had given space in his thoughts only to what could be done to prevent John’s death. Here in a vessel so fragile it might be an eggshell, full the other side of the world from all that he knew well and with his John captured by either forces unknown or betrayed by the only body El Alacrán might have deemed friend, he dwelt instead on what he should do, were he too late.

  Would he seek revenge? Or would he seek death? Or would he simply stand and ache within?

  The thoughts that accompanied El Alacrán that night were far from gentle. But then, he supposed as he listened to the now-familiar sound of Ferdinand’s fist-stifled sobbing, he was far from alone in this.

  * * *

  Dawn came earlier than the hour to which El Alacrán had been used, in his travels through the north through the winter.

  He watched the sky break from black to grey to pale grey as the sun climbed with none of its customary labour above the line of the ocean to their left. In so doing he saw that their mean vessel had done well through the night: the island from which they had sailed was only a smudge on the far horizon.

  The shadows shortened as the sun swept up, and yet clung to the hollows beneath the eyes of his human companions. El Alacrán found that he wondered, with naught else to occupy his mind that would not bring pain or fury, what John might make of them.

  John spoke little enough of his workers upon the rig: John spoke little enough of anything, which to El Alacrán’s mind made him invaluable. He kept few friends. His isolation had been El Alacrán’s safety, as much as John’s.

  El Alacrán wondered: would he take well to Hajar’s intense, deep-working intellect, or the sudden ease with which Ferdinand befriended whole groups at once? And what of Benjon? He knew nothing of the doctor’s nature, only that of the parasite that ruled him.

  He must have been, and must still be within, a very great man. El Alacrán thought he must be, for Ferdinand and Hajar to take such untold risk in the name of his well-being.

  But all the answer he had had from Hajar was He is my friend, with such ferocity that he knew not to ask again.

  “I feel l
ike something pissed in my mouth,” Ferdinand complained, kneeling to dip his arms in sea-water.

  “Leave us few enough water supplies and in a week that someone will be you,” Hajar muttered. She shaded her eyes to stare about the ocean. “We have come far.”

  “We have farther to go,” said the doctor’s parasite.

  El Alacrán watched Ferdinand stiffen from the shoulders as he washed his face in the cold sea water, but he did not, this time, instruct Benjon to shut up.

  Moving her hand to the side of her face to block the light that came unimpeded into her eyes, Hajar asked him, “Our plan, at landfall, remains the same? You still wish to take us to your General?”

  El Alacrán considered. “I want the return of John Lancaster,” he said, “more than anything else—”

  “You will find us a fresh vessel,” Benjon interrupted.

  “You will keep your tongue in your head unless you speak of sailing,” Ferdinand instructed, still splashing water to his face. He kept his back to the doctor, but it was with the wariness of a beast which knows the exact location of the hunter that follows it.

  “—And for you,” El Alacrán told her, ignoring the dispute, “the simplest way is to return from my faction to Albion, by boat or by passage over the Wall. My faction is that which abuts Albion’s territories, and through which I can promise safe passage. I cannot speak for the others.”

  Hajar did not appear to like this, but she took it without complaint.

  “You are a spy,” she said at last.

  It had been unspoken in the air between them for many days, indeed for all the weeks in which they had travelled, and now with no other cause to prevent it the truth came out.

  “You’re on a bloody fishing boat in the middle of nowhere, do we have to get into this?” Ferdinand rumbled.

  He seemed to be making a great ritual of washing every bit of his body that could be washed without tumbling from the boat, capsizing it, or displaying indecency toward his companions.

  “I am a collector of information,” El Alacrán agreed.

  “You mean to attack the dominions of Man?” Hajar asked, but she asked as if she might ask, ‘you like to eat fish?’.

  It did not seem so very important to her, nor even to him, out in this little prison-on-the-waves.

  “There is little profit in it,” El Alacrán assured her. “My faction fights the factions to the south and the east, as the human kingdoms more often fight each other than with us.”

  Though he had passed his night unFolded and felt the better for it at dawn, his breathing easier and his mind freer, the reFolding left him uncomfortable and chafed once more. Her question sat ill with him: he had no knowledge of what El Miriápodo might choose to do, given the power and opportunity. They had never discussed: it was not his place.

  “Then why collect information at all—” Hajar began, but El Alacrán had already his answer.

  “The better to borrow ingenuity,” El Alacrán said. “To fight our cousins. To fight each other. I am tired with wars, but the world has a thirst for them.”

  “You should probably look at this,” Ferdinand said, his voice low and urgent, awed and afraid.

  It came through the conversation like a blade through gossamer, and all, even the parasite-afflicted doctor, turned their attention to where he pointed.

  Down, down through the water, it was hard for El Alacrán to see. At first he thought Ferdinand saw unusual shallow waters, that the ocean floor had risen in some great ridge, and that they might follow it to where it broke to land once more.

  Then he thought his eyes had grown so weary that they invented, for the ocean floor moved.

  Then he thought of the great whales the Albionmen of Svalbard and Isǽland hunted. He thought that one had come astray through the by-ways and waters of the world, but this beast bore no tail, no fin, no mouth.

  Then at last El Alacrán saw what his human companions must see, and was so struck by the awe of it that he had no word to give in Albiontongue or arthropod lingua-franca, and fell upon a word of his own people. Folded as he was, it came from him not as the dust-dry purr that it should, but as a hollow whistle, and yet to the humans it seemed to convey everything that they saw, too.

  As his eyes, meant not for seeing at this angle and through such obstacle as seawater, grasped the enormity of what he saw, El Alacrán found himself gripped with a strange calm. Here, then, was a battle no faction could ever hope to win, or dare to fight.

  In the waters below their insignificant boat, some way down, lay a body as broad as the broadest and longest of whales, and below it, far below it, the continuing spiral of its flesh tendril.

  Here and there El Alacrán’s perception of what he saw in the waters adjusted itself, until shadows and ‘seaweed’ and ‘sand’ were confirmed otherwise. He saw at last the ocean filled in every visible direction by the tendrils. It was they that stretched far back to the island, far ahead to their guessed-at destination, and far down into the depths he yet could not see. It was them that were every shadow below the surface.

  He saw the great beast, bigger than islands, which hung peaceful as a sleeping pupae in the water. He saw the fraction that he could see of its vast, pale eye, and the ancient intelligence within.

  The voyage north seemed now a gamble not against the hand of starvation or thirst in the humans, or against the caprices of the sea, but rather against the casual stretching of a sea-creature whose scale was such that it would not even know it had drowned them.

  Chapter 24

  In the lands of men the balance of power was manifold and constantly-shifting: those who had the best alliances with trade-route countries, those with naval might, those with vast forests from which to draw wood, those who might easily withdraw diesel and those who might easily use it, those whose mastery of ornithopters or Wireless was superior, those who could predict best the changing weather, and those whose crops failed least often. Kingdoms and alliances formed and collapsed: sometimes stability was a greater advantage than resource.

  Across the Gated Continent the balance of power distorted around two points, about which all other balances tilted like planets about the sun. These were, since the neutrality of the orgone-workers was assured, only the possession of orgone stock from which to work iron ore and the sundry other uses to which it might be put, and the alliance of the Mantid Women.

  Unending wars of attrition and adventure sliced the Continent into geographical factions, all driven by the determination to control the extraction and part-processing of orgone before it could be traded to the spiders. The spiders might spin it, the spiders might mould it (though they were not the only ones), but if they had none to work their skills were worthless.

  Thus far no one faction had yet to discover the locations in which the beetles responsible kept their orgone mines, stuffed with grubs and riddled with death. If they had, the beetles had killed them. There was no consensus, even, at which factions might be closest the mines, for the grubs and their older sibling herders ranged for incalculable distances below the surface.

  Some secrets, they held, were worth this sacrifice, and for the time being the beetles (if not their larval form) were autonomous.

  If the balance of power had not yet been thrown into the permanent disarray that the control of the orgone mines was sure to bring, there was another weight which skewed the gravity of power for every faction but one: the Mantid Women.

  The Mantid Women, whose geographical faction was ‘everywhere they pleased’ and whose military prowess would have classed as ‘legendary’ had it not been seen by the eyes of any who fought against the Northmost faction.

  The feared Mantid Women, whose agreement to use the volcanic chambers of the Northmost as brood chambers had led to an alliance resented and feared by the rest of the Continent.

  The brutal Mantid Women, whose sacrificial males now toiled in the darkness, rearing their brothers and sisters, until the day came when they were to mate and die.


  The ruthless Mantid Women, who traded their neuters as slaves with the spiders, cementing the Northmost’s control of the secondary stage of orgone production.

  The nomadic Mantid Women, whose long-legged gallop covered with ease a hundred miles a day.

  The murderous, carnivorous, unstoppable Mantid Women, who might hunt what they wished, and feared nothing.

  It was alliance to the Mantid Women that brought El Miriápodo’s great Northmost their standing: no cave-dwelling arctic arthropods should have so great a say, and even with that leadership, no such formidable military. The alliance tipped the Gated Continent and caused resentment and ill-feeling where there was already plenty to be had.

  It was folly, to the mind of Dǝvǝdǝllǝyi, to send herself and her sisters in pursuit of some unfortunate and append to the request (for she’d not term it an ‘order’) with certain firmness, Bring him and his companions back alive.

  ‘Alive’ was not her forte. It was not the expertise of the Mantid Women or their particular desire to leave live anything that was not a Mantid Woman.

  It was why the spiders conducted their business from afar and the wretched centipede from deep in a tunnel her kind could not enter. It was why her entire culture had grown up to avoid the interaction of male and female, or any adult female and too-young-to-fight.

  ‘Alive’ was just not their way.

  El Alacrán, El Miriápodo had hissed from his burrow. He was days to the south of where he rightly should be, come all this way to speak with her. A scorpion. He is now missing one foreleg, second from the left, and by this and his human companions you shall know him.

  That, Dǝvǝdǝllǝyi acknowledged, was useful.

  All scorpions were scorpions alike to her sisters: sad, scurrying traitors scratching out a living in the high deserts, stabbing each other’s backs for the chance of a proper meal. They were acrid, and tasted bad, and they were aggravating hard to kill. Whatever force had made them cowards had seen fit to give them whip-tails and claws that might even match her smaller sisters’ own.