As Simple As Hunger

by D Des Anges

He will not be in the high deserts, El Miriápodo had corrected her. That much is certain.

  Dǝvǝdǝllǝyi cared little for the affairs of scorpions, but even she was impressed. It took a very great transgression indeed for the scorpions to care so much that they would chase out one of their own.

  He vanished between the home of La Araña and the home of Ämblik, El Miriápodo had hissed, for if centipedes were nothing else they were thorough.

  Thorough tiresome and thorough mean-dealing little males, thorough cowards to hide in their holes and issue ‘orders’, but thorough in all circumstance and situation.

  The day before the great storm, he vanished, he had clicked. It might be good sense to begin with the spiders.

  And I suppose you’d like them left alive too, Dǝvǝdǝllǝyi complained. She knew though that the thinkers, at least, must be kept from too great harm else she would have to return to eating her own neuters instead of selling them.

  The practice of neuter-eating, now since dead, had made mad many of her foremothers, and some said it drove down fertility. Of course, others said it meant fewer males were ‘unexplained’ neuter at maturity instead of doing their duty.

  Some of them at least must continue, El Miriápodo had agreed, but if examples must be made of a few I will be blind.

  How many humans? Dǝvǝdǝllǝyi had asked, for there was sure to be some room for manoeuvre here.

  He left with three, El Miriápodo had hissed, firm as the rocks in which he hid. If he has three with him when you find him, I want three back. If he has two, I want two back. If one, bring that one. Do not eat his humans.

  It would not be worth the effort, Dǝvǝdǝllǝyi had said. They are small and full of poisons.

  Bring them all back alive, El Miriápodo had decreed, as if his slender many-foot body were somehow the equal to hers. As if, should he venture from his hole, he would be able to survive her.

  And so Dǝvǝdǝllǝyi had returned to her sisters with the news: the tedium of aimless patrol was over, and they were to seek out and not kill a seven-limbed scorpion in the company of some errant humans, whom they were also to not kill.

  She told her sisters that if El Miriápodo said he had seven legs, the scorpion had bloody well better have seven legs when he reached the centipede once more. She told her sisters that centipedes knew one scorpion from another and that the capture of another scorpion and removal of her leg would not do.

  It must be the right scorpion.

  Some of her siblings she sent east through the snow: they were the sisters she had most quarrel with, for the further east they came the worse the weather grew, and the more chance had they of failure. The factions that lay to the east were as hostile to her kind as to scorpions, and here lay the flying-beetles who might rise just far enough from the ground that they outreached the grasp of her sisters’ claws. These beetles had been known to rain down fire from cliff-tops.

  Some of her siblings she sent back to the spiders: they were the sisters who had most recent mated, most recent egg-laid, and they would see the neuters in their speechless labours and know what pettiness befell those without gonad. They were also the most hungry, and Dǝvǝdǝllǝyi thought: If someone is going to eat spiderflesh it might as well be them.

  Some of her siblings she sent straight south, to dally in the high plains and the borders with the human kingdoms. There was some chance, she supposed, that a scorpion might be drawn to high plains for being like the high deserts, and if he was with humans perhaps he might be drawn to their kind, by the sticks and scrapes that made a pretence of a wall in the places where no human dwelled. These siblings were her youngest sisters, in need of practice and of hunting: for the high plains were full of the fastest and most nervous prey, and they would learn or starve there.

  Dǝvǝdǝllǝyi herself and her brood-sisters went south-east, for Dǝvǝdǝllǝyi had never seen the hot-forests and wide rivers from which she was told her kind had come. The factions of the south-east were languid where they were not timid, and timid where they were not languid, and all were divided against each other without truce. There was no obstacle to a Mantid Woman and no obstacle at all in those luscious places.

  Before the hot-forests came many plains, and after the many plains came many mountains. It would not be an easy journey. Dǝvǝdǝllǝyi welcomed the descent from the cold at the top of the world, but the winds and snow did not abate from one day to another.

  She led her sisters through the forests that girdled the Continent, and they met neither scorpion nor any other arthropod for day upon day. The winter swallowed up the life and living of almost anything with a mind to think with, and sunk it into deep torpor. Most of the prey-species slept or hid, and the hunting was hard going.

  They were at first reduced to hunting deer, which were small and weak and posed no challenge. Each sister stood as a tree for maybe an hour or more until the hoofed beasts came to chew bark from their legs, and with a snap and a slap the deer were broken and the herd was scattered, and there was food for their southward rush once more.

  Then they came to high plains, where the trees did not grow. Here there was hunting to be had which taxed them: the horses which fled at speed, and took a great gallop to catch up to; the saiga which might out-wait them in frozen aspect, confounding the precision of her sisters’ blows with their stillness.

  As they came to the high-deserts they must cross, there were the camels, which could snap a Mantid’s leg should they kick her.

  The high desert was cold as the snows to the north, but dry. With no snow to struggle through they were impeded only by the wind, and ran at a crouch to ‘scape it. This charge scattered camels and their sad-scurrying predator scorpions as they came, but they encountered nothing more.

  They came to the great mountains, and were slowed. It was one matter to race across plains and another to clamber up, and down, and up, and down, through valleys as deep as plains were wide, and ever more tiring. The nature of the air changed from cold to hot, from dry to warm, and back, and back again. In the higher reaches the hunting was sparse, and were they not on a race they might have lasted longer between meals. As things stood, Dǝvǝdǝllǝyi and her sisters decimated the goats, and were still hungry.

  At the great mountains, Dǝvǝdǝllǝyi and her brood-sisters declined to continue their search.

  They sent for their half-sisters, quarter-sisters, eighth-sisters, and sang to them on the winds that wended their way from mountain to hot-forest by way of the great rivers:

  Find the seven-legged scorpion and his three humans and bring them north, alive.

  They sang them with their display-wings outstretched and rustling the emphasis for the miles it must travel: alive, alive, alive; echoing down the valleys and spiralling through the places where the strange water-dipper arthropods fished. It scattered them to pass on the message lest the Mantid Women come in their wrath at being disappointed:

  Find the seven-legged scorpion and his three humans and bring them, alive, north, alive, north, alive, the seven-legged scorpion and his humans, north, alive.

  * * *

  John Lancaster woke in darkness, as he had woken each time since his arrival. There was a change in the air of the room that he could not at first put his finger on: some difference in the pressure or the sounds of the place. After sleep had cleared from his head he knew it was the sound of breathing, human-sounding breath among the silent inhalations of the arthropods.

  He believed himself still dreaming at first, but in slow steps he came to consider that it was most like his captor, folded once more, waited for him to wake.

  “Who’s there?” he asked. El Alacrán had said, and he had himself found, that it was to his advantage to appear more ignorant than he was. Thus far there had been few opportunities to display much more; he couldn’t have been much more in the dark.

  “I have sent to search for him,” said El Miriápodo in the curious flat voice he spoke with. The echoes of the cave made it impossible to find him in the black,
and he made no sound of movement. “The head magister will speak to you again now.”

  “Do I need to be there?” John asked, keeping his voice almost as flat as the centipede’s. “You gave little enough of my answers.”

  “I gave what the magister needed to know,” said El Miriápodo. Beyond his unnatural, human-sounding voice John could hear the sentries on his cave click and whisper to each other. He wondered if they, so unused to human voices, could tell apart El Miriápodo’s from his own, or if they thought he spoke to himself.

  But John did not ask, and so the centipede could not answer. Instead he stumbled among the uneven rocks of the cave floor, guided not by the soft touches of antennae on the backs of his knees, but by the wet, false double of man’s hands upon his shoulders. There came a time when they fell from him, and he drew to a halt. El Miriápodo did not harry him, but remained a stone in the dark for so long that John began to believe that the centipede had left him there, carried away on silent feet through the shadows.

  Only when antennae tapped the backs of his knees again did he understand what had passed.

  The centipede led him through the maze of stone and into the once-more blinding grey light of the cold cave that connected the underground to the frozen outside world. The small, strange minister waited for them, and in the low light it was almost impossible for John to distinguish between its dusty carapace and the rocks among which it sat.

  Our allies have been dispatched to retrieve the spy El Alacrán, the magister squeaked, getting down to business from the off. He asked nothing of John to begin, only waved his antennae in a manner John thought might be impatient. When we retrieve him we will have answers as to his loyalty and intentions in fraternising with you.

  “His bloody loyalty was never in question,” John sighed, too tired to be angered by these constant barbs against El Alacrán’s better qualities. He noted the great centipede did not deign to translate this, and only squatted silent in a brown river amid the stones, waiting.

  The question of why we have this beast, said the magister, and for a moment John found himself swamped in confusion, until he understood that the weevil addressed himself not to John, but to El Miriápodo, has been bandied about these tunnels more than is necessary or advisable. I want a stop put to it. The faction is aware we have not interrogated him fully.

  John knew then these talks were held in his earshot in order to intimidate him.

  The centipede acknowledged this in a sole, gnomic utterance that gave John little guidance or hope. They are also aware we have dispatched the Mantids.

  You have dispatched them. The minister raised his foremost set of legs in some aggressive gesture John had not the knowledge to interpret. And now I must find some reason why I gave this order, or I shall be required to make a show of punishment for you, and this will go badly for us both.

  “You acted out of concern for your own,” John said to the great centipede, and the words tasted ashen on his tongue, for nothing, he thought, could have been further from the truth. But El Miriápodo conveyed this to the magister, and the weevil lowered his forelegs and made a great show of cleaning his antennae the way Super Rachelsson might clear his throat after an uncontested correction. The magister shuffled about amid the rocks and at last addressed himself again to John.

  Your presence must be explained.

  “You’re going to exchange me for aethropede hostages held by men,” John suggested, but he had not even the strength to wish this were true. No hostage the Governance of any of Albion’s dominions held was of little enough value to be exchanged for an unskilled madman, and no hostage of Albion’s who bore an exoskeleton survived long enough to be held for exchange.

  We should imply that he is to be traded, El Miriápodo murmured, the phrase a soft sigh of air from his breathing holes.

  Plausible, the magister decreed. Weak, but plausible.

  In the freezing air of the fissure, John’s body began a series of tremors intended to keep the chill from his bones. They started in his chest or his belly, but soon his whole skeleton shook with them. Neither arthropod marked this, or if they did, they did not remark upon it.

  * * *

  At the volcanic chambers of the neutral faction’s great orgone refineries, Ämblik and her kind heard the forebears of Mantid approaches, and barricaded their holes until only spiders might pass them.

  The engineers laced rubble to rubble and orgone plating to orgone plating, with silk and with orgone seal, and wove their doors shut against the onslaught. They laid in wait, and kept their vigil. There stores were few, and should a true siege begin they had even less to live upon than the mantids outside.

  But the winter prevailed, and the Mantid Women ran south, to La Araña, La Sangijuela, and the thinkers in their great channelled web.

  In the web dome there was no such rubble, no such orgone plating to lace.

  Leeches followed their channels to the heart of the dome, and there waited under planks. The stagnant waters rippled with urgent waves as their fat ribbon bodies made haste for the only place they might hide.

  Spiders ascended to the peak of their wind-raked construction, dangled, and curled, and there waited. They might have fled to the woods, but none knew the forest byways well enough to remain hidden.

  Their purchased neuters stood at the entrances with their heads bowed and the stubs of their display-wings raised, and there waited to die.

  Give us the scorpion, cried the Mantid Women, outside the web.

  He is gone, the spiders hissed, curled in their silken attic.

  He is gone, the leeches whistled, huddling in their channels beneath the planks.

  He is gone, the neuters signed, their hind-legs raised and their faces concealed.

  Give us the humans, cried the Mantid Women, outside the web.

  They are left with the scorpion, the spiders hissed, huddled together like sleeping bats.

  They are left with the scorpion, the leeches whistled, trapped in their pools.

  They are gone with the saviour, the neuters signed, their hind-legs raised and their faces silenced by mutilation. As we might have been, as we might have been.

  The razing of the web-dome was the work of a day.

  The Mantid Women were not centipedes, and not thorough.

  They did not make the effort of chewing through the silks, but ducked and waded through the stagnant channels, and speared many leech-doctors with their claws. None of the Mantid Women stopped to feed on the leech-flesh but left their muscular bodies lying scattered about to rot.

  They did not attempt to climb to the pinnacle of the web-dome, but rather shook its foundations until enough spiders fell to their clutches, as if shaking a tree for ripe fruit. Few could withstand the force of their rocking, most of all not when the guide lines were chewed through.

  The Mantid Women left alive some (they left alive many) but in the wake of their passage they left the shrivelled, empty husks of their neuters. They left the shrivelled, empty husks of the thinkers and calculators, and in the end, when their hunger was at last sated, they left no trace at all of the leech-doctors they pulled from the waters.

  The Mantid Women came to the neutral faction’s great webbed dome, and when they left, they left it in tatters.

  * * *

  In the hot-forests of the south-east, the cousins of the Mantid Women were green and slender, and spent much of their day in stillness, although what contemplation they gave was only that of hunting.

  In the hot-forests of the south-east, the cousins of the Mantid Women stood tall and proud as their brown northern kin, and required no volcanic caverns to weather their brood in; the northern mantids might say this was weakness, the south-eastern that it was sense.

  In the hot-forests of the south-east things were as they had been since mantid-kind had first come to their minds: neuters were eaten, males sacrificed, and leaf-nymphs were persecuted for being near but not near enough the right shape. Food was plentiful if wary, breeding frequ
ent, and other arthropods wise enough to keep the Mantid-Women from their political manoeuvres.

  In the hot-forests of the south east, the whisper came like a scent on the winds:

  Find the seven-legged scorpion. Bring the humans north. Alive.

  Chapter 25

  Ferdinand slept and woke, slept and woke.

  On his third day at sea he abandoned what had at first seemed the sensible practice of washing himself in seawater, for it began to chap and split his skin as it dried in the sun.

  The murdering parasite which resided now within Hajar’s friend took good care of the skin it dwelt in, now, Ferdinand noted.

  It had yet to wash from itself the blood it bore, which was brown and fouled with sand and grime, but it took pains to keep from nicking its hide, its borrowed hide. It did not scrub with sea water but rather dabbed carefully with spittle enough to keep supple.

  Ferdinand regarded it with suspicion, but shared none of his half-formed thoughts. There was after all no place in which he could whisper them freely, and the boat had grown silent ever since they saw the beast.

  Every hour, maybe more, he looked over the gunwale and into the clear blue waters beneath the tiny, high-sided craft. Every hour, maybe more, the endless tendrils studded with barnacles and the bodies of sea creatures, surrounded by a retinue of fishes large and small, remained in sight.

  He grew to regard the beast not as a creature but as some sort of undersea forest, through which fish moved like deer, and sharks like wolves.

  Now and then he glimpsed the great beast’s unwinking yellow eye, fathoms-deep, or watched over the gunwale for long enough that he perceived the terrible slowness of its movements. Had he not watched for so many hours from the absence of aught else to do, he might never have known that there were movements it made to be seen. Ferdinand tried not to consider what such a creature might eat; it seemed too big even for an Isǽland whale to be of any use.

  The parasite kept Hajar’s Benjon without a second’s rest for their whole voyage, and Ferdinand wondered if it allowed him to sleep at all. The occupying force had given Hugo no rest either, and it gnawed at him that this, as much as any ‘canker’, could have finished him.