by D Des Anges
They came upon the damp sand and with a few final pulls left the boat in the driest, most powdery whiteness to which they could heft it. It was far from the reach of any tide that had left yet debris on the shore. Ferdinand dipped the remaining water to quench them both, and Hajar said she would fetch more fruits if he would stake out the sail as a canopy to make shelter from the sun.
Ferdinand climbed back into the boat and busied himself with this, but when he broke to straighten his back he saw that Benjon stood still upon the beach. He remained under the glaring eye of the sun, not so much as fanning himself from the heat as Hajar did.
The doctor with his parasite stared deep into the shadows of the forest as a mustelid stared into the holes into which it could not fit, in frustration at the pursuit of mouse. His stillness and unfeeling ignorance of the heat and the no-doubt terrible hunger of his twig-thin body gave Ferdinand pause.
The hollow feeling in his belly once more returned.
He staked out the sail as shelter from sun, any seaward breeze that might come, and some lighter rain, should that fall, and sat himself beneath it with the remainder of the ropes. They were in disarray, and so he coiled them as he had seen sailors do. His hands were better occupied than idle.
Hajar came with arms laden, tipped fruits at his feet across the floor of the boat. Without pause she turned to trudge back across the beach for more, her water-logged boots slapping against her calves like handclaps over the sound of the sea.
“We only mean to fill our bellies, not start a jam-making business –” Ferdinand called after her, at least part in jest.
“Shut up,” Hajar shouted back, and as she went he picked up and bit into another of the dark berries. They were lightest below the taut skin, and grew darker about the pit, their flesh a hue of which he had never seen in fruit or fowl or fish. Their taste, though, was not so very different to the greengage of the southern farms, and the flesh’s feel almost the exact double. They were sure to be cousins, although many a harmless thing had deadlier cousins.
So far they seemed not to have any great adverse effect upon him, though Ferdinand was mindful that he had thought the same of eating raw bear meat and had then spent several days in scitten. Hugo had the poetry of even such mortifying afflictions and always called the curse ‘the bloody runs’ when it befell him.
Torn back to Albion with this sudden memory, Ferdinand grew morose once more, and spat the fruit’s pit over the side of the beached boat, and into the sand.
For some hours he and Hajar sat beneath the sail while the sun beat upon the white sand and near-blinded them both. For some hours Benjon stood unmoving in the whiteness with his eyes fixed into the forest shadows, awaiting El Alacrán and the ‘vessel’ he was promised.
For some hours Ferdinand ate foreign fruits and speculated aloud on how delicious a pie, a pastry, a cordial, a wine, they might be called upon to make. In truth by the time his stomach was no longer bawdy with aching protest at its own emptiness, he was so sick of the taste and texture that he would have been happy never to see them again.
The sun swung from right to left, but always stark straight overhead –
“We must be at the girdle of the world’s middle,” Hajar said, “there have been many calculations on the angle of its light. The girdle runs through the Nubian Kingdoms; they say the sun, too, is always overhead there.”
– And as it sank lower in the sky to their left, coming to kiss the headland with its lower curve, Ferdinand thought they must herein pass the night without guard.
The tide had turned once more, and with its turning came closer and closer to the boat. The air grew cool, and with the coolness Hajar climbed from the boat without her boots and went to stand in the shallows of the sea with her skirts hoisted up.
“What might come from that forest at night which is not El Alacrán,” Ferdinand warned her, when she returned.
“What would come that might stop that which occupies Benjon from holding sentinel at the forest’s edge,” Hajar sighed, and she said with unusual wit, “Perhaps we might eat it.”
“So long as it is not another bear,” Ferdinand said.
As night fell, lights washed up on the shore: the dead bodies of the tiny squid they had seen from the boat. It disconcerted Ferdinand, and left a strange blue undulating line across the beach by which light he observed, at least, that crabs tugged and nipped the dead squid. Their fading lights also showed him that against the white beach Benjon’s crane-like figure still stood.
The trees stirred in the passing of a breeze, and disgorged at last visitors to the beach.
At first Ferdinand startled to see them come, for he had been so ready for an attack that this absence of it made him all the more nervous.
In Edinburgh it was possible to pay to see the display of a skeleton of one, else to visit the travelling collection in the summer, when the weather might allow their live form to be presented without risk to the tropical beast. Busy as he had ever been, he had only ever seen them depicted before upon posters declaring the coming of such a collection.
Tiny furry tail-bearing men came trotting from the trees to the edge of the ocean, and joined the crabs in the feast upon blue lights. They held their tails in coils over their backs, and walked upon feet that were hands both fore and aft, and they chattered to each other like children.
The monkeys picked and quarrelled at the feast by the shore. One, however, stopped in its procession to the water and, with an expression of curiosity clear on its little homunculoid face even under the light of a failing moon, picked up a fruit pit and sniffed it.
The monkey placed the pit in its mouth and tested the hardness against its teeth, and on finding it impenetrable flung the pit aside. It reached for another.
“Bugger off,” Ferdinand said to the monkey, which froze and stared at him as a caught rabbit might. “I said bugger off,” Ferdinand repeated, breaking the spell.
The monkey scampered from the boat to the water where its fellows feasted.
“Suppose we ate some of those squid,” Hajar suggested, though she sounded as if nothing could be further from her taste.
“Suppose we did not,” Ferdinand said.
With the turning of the night, the monkeys began to drift back across the beach to the treeline once more, and Ferdinand lay him down to sleep again. His thoughts were still unsettled and his nerve not calmed.
* * *
The morning brought no sight of El Alacrán, and no respite from Benjon’s ceaseless standing and staring. It brought with it also a feeling of considerable reluctance when faced with the prospect of further berries to break Ferdinand’s fast, and he could not but agree when Hajar said she wished they had braved the feast of squid after all.
They both walked down to the tide line, but the resultant mess was not appetising. The crabs which still frenziedly plucked at the gelatinous bodies were too fast to be caught, to speak not for the sea birds which came for both crab and squid.
It was already too hot to take many moments outside of the sail’s shelter, and Ferdinand judged it mid-morning when a great rustling set up in the hot-forest. As one body he, Hajar, and even the statue-still Benjon broke to a run to investigate this sudden breach in routine.
The cracks and creaks of bending and breaking branches drew them into the hot-forest as a dinner-bell might, stumbling on roots and slipping with tangled footsteps through the undergrowth. As before, Benjon’s fraying body outstripped them, and so it was the parasitised doctor came first to the scene.
El Alacrán had returned. He was engaged now in the subduing of something which struggled and twitched against bonds of what looked not too unlike the same spidersilk that had bound Ferdinand to the back of a galloping arachnid.
Though bound about its feet and limbs, the captive arthropod thrashed with such violence that the trees shook and El Alacrán was compelled again and again to dance away from it.
He gave as good as he got, whipping the side – but never the wicked barb – of his
tail into the beast’s head, snapping at its tangled limbs. He dodged and struck with speed that must surely have outstripped a diving hawk.
In the confusion it was hard for Ferdinand to determine the nature of the beast: it was slender and green and arthropod, and in some intangible way recalled to him the shapes of the little slaves of the spiders, writ large and terrifying.
It was not until the green, restrained arthropod spread – hard and fast as a slap – a fan of fibres in colours so bright and unexpected as to be an assault themselves, that Ferdinand had the memory of the little slaves’ chewed-off wing nubs. He knew them, then, to be cousins.
But what cousins: the creature that flapped and fought so fierce even bound at every limb was as much the equal to the cowering slave-creatures of the spiders as a cowering wildcat was to a lion.
There was a terrible hiss, and a thump, and El Alacrán perched atop the creature. The scorpion pinioned it to the forest floor with his every limb.
The arthropod still thrashed, but her kicks and struggles could not unseat the scorpion.
In the relative stillness that followed this manoeuvre, Ferdinand could hear the hiss and screech of arthropod threats, but no answer from El Alacrán, in any tongue whether Albion or arthropod, until an impossibly long minute had passed.
“Here is your vessel,” El Alacrán’s hoarse, rattling voice breathed, as plain exhausted as if he had been lying panting upon his side.
Ferdinand jumped back as Benjon rushed forward, his ecstasy of avarice disturbing to see. He made to push Hajar back too, but she had already removed herself.
As the infected doctor came to the struggling arthropod, the green and slender creature ceased its struggles and lay still, as an injured horse when treated and about to die.
The comparison, though not intended, did not please Ferdinand at all.
“You may release her now,” Benjon said, patting with unusual tenderness what Ferdinand recognised, now that it was laid still, to be the eye of the creature.
El Alacrán did not quibble but, as Ferdinand had, backed away from the fallen arthropod and the parasitised doctor. He stood by with claws still raised in case of further attack.
Ferdinand was unsure of what the doctor did next. He knew only that at one moment the doctor patted the stomach-plates of the arthropod’s abdomen, as if admiring the workmanship of some particularly smooth carving, and that in the next moment the doctor was upon his knees and tugging the plate back as if furling a stiff sail.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING–?” El Alacrán cried, plain horrified.
Ferdinand had not seen before how much expression there was to be gained from watching the limbs of the arachnid in his motion, but here the great scorpion had all but curled in upon his own stomach-plates as the spiders had. He tucked his every leg beneath him and curved his tail with quivering alertness all ready to strike.
Ferdinand thought this must be arachnid horror: the same as a gaping mouth and hands placed dumb to it.
He found himself engaged in that very same gesture soon thereafter, as Benjon thrust his head to the gaping wound whence alien offal spilled out upon the leaf-litter amid a deal of clear fluid.
He made the gesture further and with fervour as Benjon’s mouth touched the gash and split, opening too wide for any human mouth’s gape. It split not only along the corners but across the length of his face—
“NO—!” Hajar shouted, and Ferdinand flung himself to hold her as she lunged for the unnatural scene.
He caught her by the arm, and overbalanced, throwing them both to the muddy ground. Upon their sudden bed of rotten leaves and rustling things, Ferdinand gripped her arms both, and watched with a pained and twisted neck the process by which the parasite bled from host to host.
The split had ripped through the length of Benjon’s body now.
Though Hajar squirmed and roared she could not rise with his weight upon her. Ferdinand did not like to consider what might happen to her should she join the fray.
The edges of the split adhered almost exact to the wound which Benjon’s hands had somehow inflicted, but at one fold where the skin did not quite fit to the lip at first.
A cloud of reddish-orange dust like the spores of a kicked puffball poured out. The skin twitched and closed until it had a complete seal.
Ferdinand tried very hard to keep foremost in his mind only the horror of what he witnessed, but there was ever a treacherous fragment of his thoughts which whispered to him of how the thing had lied to him. This must have killed Hugo, this, not any lingering sickness in his body, this, this impossible passage. Not even the exhaustion of overuse had killed Hugo; Hugo had been dead by the time Ferdinand knew aught was amiss.
The skin that had been Benjon Silverstein’s sagged and shrank.
“NO,” Hajar cried again, scratching Ferdinand’s face.
“What do you think you will do in undoing this?” Ferdinand hissed, trying to jerk his head away and watch all at once. “And how do you mean to do it by bleeding me?”
The skin that had been Benjon’s collapsed in on itself, crumpling and falling like a discarded coat.
It looked pitiful small, robbed of any supportive means, and very bare and mean of hair. The every scrape and scratch that had never healed, the every empty inch of it lay useless and dead on the forest floor. What had once been Gooddoctor Silverstein was now a fragile rag clad in dirty ones.
In the head of his body, still dangling from the belly of the beast, the only weight seemed to remain. It was some ball of some massy matter hanging at the top. The weight distorted the lie of this otherwise cloth-like skin sack, and reminded Ferdinand of a scrotum in a manner that was most unpleasant.
He felt his stomach begin to turn.
“NO WHAT IS IT – YOU LIAR!” Hajar shouted, making a considered effort to head butt Ferdinand in the face.
The creature shuffled its limbs, and gave an experimental flutter of its wings: they were sure too small for flight. With this shuffle it shook the skin from its stomach: there was no gape, now, only flush plates of chitin and some small red residue to show where Benjon’s body had been sealed to it.
The arthropod new-inhabited clicked as the spiders had.
“WHAT?” Hajar shouted, near-deafening Ferdinand as he strained to hold her.
“She says,” El Alacrán said, his hollow rasp elided of any inflection that Ferdinand could even imagine to place upon it, “this is much better. There are no bones to be eaten.”
He was very still, and Ferdinand wondered if this thought had left the scorpion as queasy as it had him.
“YOU LIED,” Hajar cried, squirming beneath Ferdinand with such determination that he had half a mind to free her and be done with it. Behind his shoulder he glimpsed the arthropod shook free of her bonds, and struggling to her impossible-long legs. “YOU SAID YOU’D GIVE HIM BACK.”
The green arthropod paused, its huge serrated arms raised. They were so much longer and larger than El Alacrán’s that the enormity of his feat in bringing her was again impressed upon Ferdinand’s mind. The beast chirruped.
“She says,” El Alacrán wheezed, “she has given him back. You have the skin and the brain, these are the only parts which matter.”
“ARE YOU MAD?” Hajar roared, and Ferdinand struggled to keep her to the forest floor as he had once struggled to keep seated on the most troublesome of ungelded horses. “HOW DID YOU THINK HE WOULD LIVE?”
The green arthropod tested her legs, and seesawed about like a new-born foal. She chirruped again.
“She says,” El Alacrán’s hoarse and weary, echoing voice translated, “that he was rotting in soup beneath your feet while you debated at first meeting, and that it should have been quite obvious.”
“FUCK YOU,” Hajar suggested.
With this Ferdinand found himself no longer holding down a furious struggling woman of larger than usual height, and that he was instead lying on his back in the leaf litter while the woman in question roared like a lioness and
attacked, empty-handed, a creature that El Alacrán had barely been able to tame.
For a moment, as Ferdinand struggled to find his feet, it was uncertain.
The parasite was new to the arthropod’s movements, and when Hajar came to seize one of the great green legs it only backed away. It trailed through the mess of what had once been its innards, and had once been Benjon’s hide.
But the arthropod towered over Hajar like a building given claws, and Ferdinand scrambled to haul her back.
Shaking with fury, her body as tense and hard as an arthropod’s herself, he found wrestling Hajar back from the thing so hard that he wished El Alacrán might be enlisted. But the scorpion was clear not given to such delicacies, and had other matters on his mind.
El Alacrán had assumed a stance the double of that in which he had fought the great birds, and backed and backed until his hindmost legs were half-way up the trunk of a tree.
“HAJAR,” Ferdinand bawled, as he tried to shove her back from the great green parasitised arthropod, “Hajar stop, stop –”
The arthropod clicked in what Ferdinand considered to be a contentious-cheerful manner, and Hajar once more tried to lunge, stopped only by Ferdinand’s increasing bruised torso.
“WHAT DID SHE SAY?” Hajar shouted, trying with little success to walk through Ferdinand.
“She says she will be leaving now,” El Alacrán said in a distracted echo, still positioning himself against the tree. “Which I… fear … cannot… allow – had I known – Benjon was lost – would have destroyed this before –”
His speech was broken as he angled himself, his tail tensed and claws raised high. Ferdinand found his stomach knotting itself in anxious shapes as El Alacrán raised himself higher.
“—Too dangerous … might not like them but they are our allies …”
“Back,” said Ferdinand in Hajar’s unlistening ear, pushing her as he might push a recalcitrant door or heavy cabinet. “Back, I said, do you want to die now? Get back.”
He had little to go on if she heard him or no, but he kept pushing until she dug her fingers into his shoulder and made a sound of sadness that gave him pause. Ferdinand let her go, and Hajar only stood with her arms limp at her sides, her face screwed into a ball of discontent and anguish.
