by D Des Anges
There was a great deal of wing-spreading and clicking. Many forelimbs were raised and snapped in the air, and many hisses exchanged, before the largest of the dull arthropods reared up, reached out its second feet – those behind the terrible weapons it bore – and grasped for their means of conveyance.
The net was lifted whole from the body of one and fastened to the dull leader instead. Hajar could see not how, and preferred instead to duck to the very bottom of the net and draw her shift about her, for the air was very cold.
Perhaps in thought for comfort, for cold, or only for storage for later trade, the pelts of several of the black-and-white bears, picked clean by hungry jaws, were dropped in with them. Hajar set about carpeting the net with their fur while Ferdinand clung to the topmost strands and claimed her mad.
* * *
When their captors crossed the mountains, Ferdinand and Hajar did naught but huddle among the furs in tight company, and shiver.
Ferdinand tried to cheer them both with a song he had learnt as a boy, but he could not recall all the words and Hajar could not manage a single tune from her own childhood. They fell instead to counting, as slow as schoolboys, the protrusions they could see of their captor’s belly.
In the high deserts they huddled amid the furs and watched the seeming endless expanse of nothing. They watched their captors hunt horse, some species of antler-less deer, and even the great hairy camels which took Hajar so very much by surprise that she laughed. The great runners thrust fragments of gnawed-off meat to them from each kill, which Hajar and Ferdinand took to eating with their eyes shut and noses pinched off against the taste.
They also saw their captors hunt, surround, and kill a scorpion the equal to El Alacrán, though Hajar buried her head within the furs and would not watch the fight to the end as Ferdinand did.
He said the scorpion had continued to snap and spin about, trying to face every arthropod at once, even as they plucked from it a leg at a time, like a schoolboy holding a May-fly to his cruel amusement.
Hajar screamed, “I don’t want to know! I don’t want to know!” until Ferdinand fell silent and drew himself away from her to watch, as if in some mesmerist’s clutches, the arthropods feeding on a fallen scorpion.
* * *
On the far side of the high deserts they came again to the land they had left at the hands of a hurricane, gripped now in the very belly of winter and thick with snow that drove all to silence. Hajar and Ferdinand both wished loud and often for the clothes and travelling cloaks they had left in the Hall of the sky-people, but wishes were no more protection from the cold than stories.
“Where do you suppose they mean to take us?” Ferdinand asked, as they ate handfuls of snow that the wires scraped up as their net passed above and sometimes through drifts.
“How should I know?” Hajar sighed. She examined her blue fingernails as she wondered would it really be so terrible to die. “Perhaps they mean to return us to the spiders.”
“Perhaps they mean to eat us,” said Ferdinand.
“We are of little consequence as a meal,” Hajar sighed. “Do you see the things they eat?”
“O talk not of eating,” Ferdinand grumbled, and he shook away the last of the snow from his great hands, unchewed.
* * *
The addition of a dead elk to their net, while temporary satisfying with meat and heat, was not an improvement to their grasp on sanity. Later, with the application of Ferdinand’s knife and a deal of patience of which Hajar had not known herself still to have the possession, when it satisfied with further furs and a firm wall of bones threaded through the strands against which to lean, it was perhaps to their detriment.
“I am going mad,” Hajar said, weaving bones through spun-steel-strong wires.
“Perhaps we are only becoming sane,” Ferdinand said.
The light of day grew shorter and shorter until the sun scarce gleamed through the trunks of the pine trees. Although the worst of the wind and snow was kept from them by the frozen canopy above, the perpetual darkness only served to lower their spirits still further.
All in all, Hajar was thankful and not without surprise when it took these days of hard travel at high speed, these many days for them both to at last fall very, very ill.
* * *
Hajar woke in darkness and warmth on something firm and furred, and when ungumming her eyes with her hands failed to reduce the darkness at all she reached the conclusion that her fever must have robbed her of her sight.
The aches in her body and the grooves in her skin which had not yet faded even now gave the truth to her journey: she felt the welts with her fingertips. But for the passage from snow-bound forest to current predicament she had only smudges and blurs of memory, and could make no clean recollection.
She said, “Ferdinand?” and cursed herself for the tremor in her voice.
He did not answer her. In the brief silence that came only the sound of her own breath and the slight reverberance of her voice convinced her that she was not dead but rather in some stone-clad room.
The silence that enveloped her was however not a long-lasting one, for as the faint echo of her voice died away she heard an unfamiliar but wholly human voice speak Albiontongue to her.
What it said was:
“O, you’re awake.”
Refusing for the moment to become the swooning heroine of a pfennic-drama sheet, Hajar bit down her enquiry of where she might find herself and instead asked, “Who speaks?”
“John Lancaster of Aberdeen; who answers?”
“O,” Hajar said, for the name at once struck her memory. “I am Hajar al Fihri of Durham and you I know of. Where is it we find ourselves?”
“You know of me?” the voice in the darkness asked, a little startled. “Then you must be the humans who travelled with El Alacrán. Where is he?”
“Where are we?” Hajar repeated, letting her impatience chase away for now a question she did not wish to answer, least of all to this man.
“Somewhere in the belly of the world far to the very north,” said John Lancaster.
He had a quiet voice, which Hajar strained to hear even in this most amplifying of chambers, and a strong accent of the kind that came from farther north than she. She wondered what he looked like, and for how long he had languished beneath the earth, and to what purpose. More immediate in her concerns was the wonder of whether there was water nearby, for her mouth was like a desert.
“In the realms of El Miriápodo –”
“O,” said Hajar again, “then we have come as we were meant after all. Is there water?”
“I cannot be certain,” said John Lancaster, “but if there is it will be laid at the side of the shelf you are upon. Reach down. There will be food also.”
Hajar fumbled in the darkness below her, reaching over a bed of furs thicker and less pungent than those in which she had weathered the mountains and the high deserts. She came at last upon a bowl of some kind containing room-temperature water, by putting her hand into it. She sniffed it with caution before drinking, lest it transpire this was a slops-bucket and drank altogether too much, too quick, rendering herself queasy.
“Where is El Alacrán?” John Lancaster asked, again. “Did he come with you? Is he here? I have heard nothing since your arrival, no one has come –”
“When was that?” Hajar muttered, between mouthfuls of what seemed to be dried fruit.
“Gooddaughter al-Fihri,” said John Lancaster with forbearance, “it is dark. I have no way of knowing if a tenmoment or a tenweek has passed. Please, came El Alacrán with you?”
“Some of the way,” said Hajar, pulling the thick fur back about herself as she lay back.
Her stomach thanked her for the feeding, but had been so long without that it required all her essence to digest, and she fell altogether drowsy soon after.
“Where is he now?” John Lancaster persisted, even as Hajar’s churning belly made sleep climb through her body like a wave.
“Not
with us,” Hajar murmured.
She squeezed her eyes shut in the darkness in the hope that this might eliminate the vision of the great scorpion’s last battle, of the parasitised arthropod’s huge snapping forearms slicing through El Alacrán’s huge armoured tail with the ease of a knife passing through paper. It did not lighten one single detail of the memory, and as Hajar passed back into the realm of sleep she felt most sickened and sorrowful.
* * *
When she woke – not knowing if a moment or a month had passed – Hajar heard Ferdinand’s voice. She was filled with such relief that she was fleeting ashamed of herself, and forgiving of the fact that the first thing she heard him speak were the words:
“That’s all very well, but where am I to piss?”
“There are channels and vents about the floor,” said John Lancaster’s voice, quiet alongside Ferdinand’s warm and sonorous (and at this moment, peevish) voice. “Only roll onto your side, do not try to stand or you will fall and hurt yourself in the dark.”
“Would it kill them to have a lamp,” Ferdinand grumbled. Hajar tried to stop up her ears against the sound of piss splashing on rock.
“These tunnels are close to the fires of the earth and filled with gases both tame and volatile,” said John Lancaster. “So I am told that it would indeed be a fatal light that lit these chambers.”
“We were to return to Albion,” Hajar said, as much to cover up the sound of Ferdinand’s pissing as to speak to the stranger who shared their darkened chamber, “with you given as our saviour. That was his plan.”
“The gossip of this place –” John Lancaster said, not remarking her wakefulness this time, “– for they cannot keep themselves from it – is that El Miriápodo will speak to you today. If you leave or not lies with him, and with no one else.” He said in a voice that cut Hajar most deep to the very quick of her, “They do not speak of El Alacrán, but this is no surprise.”
“Why not?” she asked, holding her tongue against what she might else say, and willing that Ferdinand might do likewise.
“The great contempt in which arthropods hold his kind prevents them from giving recognition to the individual,” John Lancaster said, as if he were acquainted in the first instance with the ways of the arthropods. “They will speak only of the group, and them as cowards.”
Hajar thought of El Alacrán’s last stand in spite of herself, and of the hunted scorpion of the high deserts, and wondered what distortion of truth must have led to this prejudice coming among the thoughts of the arthropods with such conviction. Had they ever met scorpionkind? How might they think so?
“I would scarce speak thus,” said Ferdinand, and Hajar held her breath, waiting for him to say aught else: but Ferdinand, peevish and tired and doubtless as weak as she after their journey and sickness, was ever more no fool. He spoke on further on it. “This El Miriápodo, how will he speak with us? We understand none of their speech.”
“Not true,” Hajar said, in a bleak attempt to make light. “I still count to eight in the language of the spider and know the words for spider, bottle, leech, and eggshell.”
“What a limited interrogation that shall give us,” Ferdinand scoffed. “We shall be done with and homebound in no time.”
John Lancaster did not seem to see humour in this, and it was only Ferdinand who guffawed at his own joke.
“Either he will Fold, or he will speak through me,” said John Lancaster. “I believe he will speak through me. Folding is hard on the arthropod body.”
Hajar thought of the hoarseness and weakness of El Alacrán’s voice as their travels progressed, and said, “We know.”
“He will know if I distort his meaning,” John Lancaster continued, “for he understands Albiontongue as well as you or I.”
Hajar understood from this that there would be no measure in trying to lie to El Miriápodo when the time came. She understood too that John Lancaster very much wished with all his liver and stomach and every other engine of his emotion besides that Hajar and Ferdinand might tell him where El Alacrán was, before El Miriápodo should learn of it.
But Hajar felt she might only recount the story once without the horror of it growing beyond her ability to tell of it, and that El Miriápodo had better have the telling of it himself.
She could not be sure if Ferdinand had grasped the second meaning of what John Lancaster said, but he did not offer an explanation either, and only said, “It is good to be inside.”
“I know your voice,” said John Lancaster, breaking the beginning of another silence. “You have spoke on the Wireless before.”
Hajar wracked her brain, and saw that John Lancaster must be right. Ferdinand’s soothing voice was familiar because she had heard it from the membranes of the Wireless receiver before, speaking the time or the name of the next broadcast she might hear.
“Yes,” Ferdinand said, seeming startled. “Often.”
“I knew as much,” said John Lancaster, with some satisfaction. “It is as if the Wireless sits in with us.” Rather shy, he added, “Did you ever meet Hugo Waldren?”
Though there was none to see her, Hajar put her face into her hands and groaned to herself.
Here they sat, caught between a rock and a hard place. They might as well be silent than speak, for in speech was the loss of one loved one or another, and in silence at least there was only the endless growling belch of the earth’s fires below and the echoing squeaks of arthropods unseen.
But Ferdinand said, “I knew him well, and with all my heart would know him again,” and in his voice there was no mistake to be made of his meaning.
Though little given to the giving of comfort, Hajar wished then that it were at least light enough for her to pat his shoulder, for the sorrow in him was so great that it might have drowned the room else. She gave thought to how great a sorrow might be unleashed from this John Lancaster when he came upon the truth of El Alacrán’s absence, and shivered to think of it. She gave no thought to how it pained her to see Benjon transfigured and emptied, for it could scarce be the same, and the memory of it still made her retch.
“El Miriápodo comes,” John Lancaster said, sudden as a train whistle. “They are whispering of it.”
Sure enough there hung a great excited chattering in the air, as of a hundred thousand arthropod jaws clicking their excited calls. So excited were they that Hajar jumped in spite of herself as the rustle of arthropod limbs came near to her.
A hiss from very close sent the other voices scattering, and John Lancaster said, “Hello again,” as if greeting a supervisor with some irony.
A click and a squeak and a click came to her, and she sat up straight, absurd though this was.
After further clicking, John Lancaster said, “El Miriápodo is pleased that you are well and wishes you to know that you have been here for two days. He says that you have not been brought here with the intent of harm.”
Ferdinand said, “Be that as it may, we near bloody died of that journey. Does no arthropod understand that humans must eat every day?”
“No,” said John Lancaster, plain speaking for himself. “As I can attest.”
There was a great rush of clicks and hisses, and Hajar found herself leaning away from their perceived source. Though in this echoing chamber it was scarce possible to determine, and for all the knowledge she had she might as well have leaned into the jaws of El Miriápodo.
“He says,” John Lancaster said, after a pause that led Hajar to believe some of this message might be held back, “that it is hard enough to persuade the Mantid Women – Mantii? Man-a-tees – I don’t know this word, I’m sorry – the women of this species to capture anything alive, let alone nurture it.” He added, once again plain speaking for himself, “Well why not send someone else—”
He was interrupted by a further click and a deal of hissing, which Hajar judged to be in ill-temper.
“Right. You are to be delivered to Albion-of-the-Britons direct with the apologies of the Northmost Faction and t
hat of the remnants of the Neutral for your – for your imprisonment, and the – firm request? Order? Requirement? – that you do not ever return into these lands which –yes – which you are reminded with some force are not your territory to enter.”
“When?” Ferdinand asked, but none answered.
“We must give warning –” Hajar began.
“No we mustn’t,” Ferdinand said, and Hajar longed for the light to throw something at him.
“We are to be delivered safe home, we exchange for this fair warning of what lies out there –” she snapped. “Trade like a respectable man, Ferdinand.”
“O and which particular ‘what lies out there’ shall we deliver?” Ferdinand muttered, seeming chastened.
There was another great rush of clicks, and both fell to silence as the arthropod in the darkness with them gave his meaning to John Lancaster.
“El Miriápodo, aside from wishing you would not quarrel,” said John Lancaster, most dry, “offers his gratitude for any news of use you may have but first wishes – as I wish – that you would tell of why the Man—mantid? The Mantid Women found you alone, and not with El Alacrán. He asks, do they deceive him, did they bring you only by slaying – by slaying – his agent?”
Hajar observed how his voice trembled at the word ‘slaying’.
“They do not deceive him in this,” Ferdinand said, before Hajar could speak. “Those… whatever they were… found us alone.”
“This is the warning we would give,” said Hajar, when it was plain Ferdinand would not take the burden himself. “We are alone, and only two, because –” she sighed, “– because that which slew our – my – friend then took the body of a, a, what did you call it – a mantis? – a Mantid woman, and with it… slew El Alacrán.”
There followed her proclamation an eerie silence broken only by the sound of echoed breath and the distant sounds of arthropods in the deep.
Hajar sat slumped upon her fur-covered shelf, weak still with the last of the sickness, and excused herself for the wetness upon her cheek. Benjon’s skin turned near inside-out and the sick, sinking horror that came with it, the treachery of the parasite, the skin-stealer’s bargain which it had struck in the full knowledge that they should never have back Benjon.
