by Louise Wise
‘This is your family?’ Molver asked after a while. ‘They don’t look very pleased to see you.’
Fly was still staring at the cave where the natives disappeared into the gloom. ‘Wait here,’ he told him again. He ducked back into the cave, and ignoring the dead forms of the female and her baby, followed the cave to the back.
The alpha male and the females had seemingly vanished, and Fly guessed the caves were full of hidden crevices and tunnels leading to warren-like caves. But the next cave was empty. And so was the next.
‘Jenny!’ He listened to his echo, and then waited for an answering shout. Nothing. Half stooping, half crawling because of the low ceiling Fly made his way back to the main cave and almost knocked heads with Molver.
Fly’s curse echoed as Molver scurried backwards.
‘I don’t like to be alone,’ Molver said when they were both back in the larger cave. ‘What were you doing in there? Who are you looking for?’
‘Shut up!’ Fly stood up the best he could and glared at him. ‘I don’t even know why you’re still with me! Go! Just go and be grateful you’re free.’
Molver took a step backwards, and Fly turned away, uncaring of the nervous look on the boy’s face. He heard him give a sharp intake of breath and then there was a sound as if he’d fallen. Fly spun round to see him struggling to free his leg from a crevice in the floor close to the cave’s wall. There was a sudden howl and native chatter from below.
Fly roughly dragged the boy up and peered down into the narrow crevice. He followed the crack in the floor and it led to a wider fissure. Yellow eyes stared up at him from below the ground and then a sharp spear thrust up and only missed his face because he jumped back in time.
‘It’s Ji-ji,’ he said, looking back down at the yellow, peering eyes. ‘Ji-ji, remember?’
The natives chuffed at him, but didn’t lower their spears.
‘They don’t like you, do they?’ said the boy. He was rubbing his grazed knees where Fly had shoved him. ‘Can’t say I blame them.’
Fly ignored him. ‘Jenny!’ he shouted down the hole. ‘Chi-Chi,’ he said to the unblinking yellow eyes. ‘Bargi, bargi,’ he added.
A spear thrust through the crack towards him again.
‘Where’s Jenny? Chi-Chi?’ He could kill them. Spit a hole into their faces and let the venom fill their bodies, but even though he felt desperate for Jenny, his conscience prevented him. He looked at Molver. ‘Come here,’ he said.
The boy came over looking wary.
‘I want you to make as if you’re going down that other crevice—’
‘Are you crazy! Have you seen the size of those spears?’
‘Make as if, I said, and it’ll give me time to poke my head down and look for Jenny.’
‘Who’s Jenny?’
‘Just do it.’ As the boy moved towards the other fissure, Fly peered down into the yellow eyes. He attempted a teeth-together grin, but got no response. The faces swivelled in the other direction as Molver shuffled somewhere above them, but the honnards didn’t move.
Molver screeched, and came scooting over. ‘Get yourself another decoy,’ he said.
‘It doesn’t matter. They’ve lined themselves up all along the opening.’ As Fly spoke, there was new chatter below and the sound of something that he remembered. It was the sound of the elderly honnard shaking her pain relief instrument; Jenny had called it “hocus-pocus”.
‘Where is Chi-Chi?’ he said again, looking down into the hole.
There was a scuffle down inside the hole and then Fly saw the old honnard peering up at him. She took the stick effigy of Jenny from around her neck, and thrust it up towards the opening. She chuffed at him, and shook the maracas, putting the carving back around her neck.
‘Ji-ji,’ she said.
Fly grinned, native style, in encouragement when she spoke his name.
‘Chi-Chi tri-uff, tri-uff.’
Fly sat back on his heels.
‘What does it all mean?’ asked Molver. ‘What are they saying?’
‘Tri-uff means “hunt”. She’s gone hunting?’ Fly spoke to himself.
‘Who has?’
‘Jenny. Jenny’s gone hunting.’
‘If I wasn’t already on another planet, I’d think I’d just arrived on one!’ Molver stood up huffily, forgetting about the low ceiling and banging his head. He “ouched” and sank back to his knees clutching his head. ‘Can we go now please? You said you’d help me find my friends.’
‘I said no such thing.’ Fly looked at the maraca-shaking native. ‘Chi-Chi’s, er, fari?’
‘Fari!’ She spat on the ground. ‘Ji-ji nardi!’
Fly frowned.
‘What’s it saying?’ asked Molver.
‘“Fari” means baby,’ Fly said. ‘I’m not sure about “nardi”, but she spat. Could she be mimicking a Jelvia?’ He was thinking aloud and didn’t expect an answer. Molver answered anyway,
‘Jelvias have their baby? Why would they take a baby? They want able-bodied slaves not helpless infants.’
‘Let’s go. We’re upsetting the natives.’
Molver was scrambling out before Fly had finished the sentence. In his hurry, he kicked off the blanket covering the dead mother and baby. He turned his shocked expression on Fly questioningly.
‘That’s not the baby the honnards meant,’ Fly said, but he wasn’t sure if that was the unasked question in Molver’s eyes. The boy turned a shoulder and then hurried out of the cave.
‘Please, can we go now?’ he asked when Fly joined him in the open air.
After a slight hesitation, Fly placed a hand on his skinny shoulder.
‘I’ve seen them kill men and the prims, but never anyone so young. Never a baby,’ Molver said. He still wasn’t looking at Fly and Fly suspected he was trying not to cry. ‘It was just a baby!’ he continued. ‘Why kill a baby? Sometimes, I’m ashamed to be called a Jelvia!’
Fly watched him stomp away, and after a final look at the cave, he followed him back into the dark jungle.
***
Fly fell on the buggy in delight.
‘The prims have a motor vehicle?’ asked Molver.
‘You really are stupid, aren’t you,’ Fly said. ‘This is mine. I left it here.’
‘So how come you were surprised when you saw it?’
Fly said nothing. He threw his possessions into the rear and climbed in. He closed the door and Molver rushed round to sit in the seat next to him. Fly sat holding the steering wheel thinking hard: The old honnard’s words ‘fari’, which meant ‘baby’, and ‘nardi’, which, Fly thought, meant Jelvia, or maybe, ‘bird’, all led to one thing—he had to go back to the Jelvian valley—if only to kill as many Jelvias as possible for ruining his life.
‘Why didn’t the prims try to kill you?’ asked Molver.
Fly looked at him.
‘I’ve seen them in action and they are ferocious!’ Molver said. ‘Ripped a Jelvia’s arm off once with their teeth!’
‘What do the Jelvias use them for?’
‘Tasks that are too dangerous for us. I think the wardens realised that if they worked us to death there’d be no one left to do their work.’
Fly started the engine and began to reverse the buggy out of its hiding place.
‘I think there’s writing on the window,’ Molver said, stopping him. He sat forward, cocked his head, and tried to read. He sat back. ‘Maybe not. It’s just the tree branches marking it.’
But Fly was out of the car and circling it. On the windscreen, Jenny had written: I’m coming in English.
Chapter Thirty Three
It had been a long and arduous walk; the land was rising upward, not gentle, and sometimes hands, as well as feet, were needed. The natives loped up easily, their weapons carried on their backs or in their mouths.
The land animals had changed drastically too. There were horse-like creatures with overly long bodies and spindly legs and ones she recognised as the Jelvias riding. There were
flat creatures, the colour of sand, which clung to rocks, mimicking the surface, and then rippled away. There were two-legged, stripy beasts that hopped; they had no upper limbs and had a face that appeared to be inside a halo of tentacles.
Small sponge-like animals that rolled themselves into a ball and let themselves fall many hundreds of metres only to unfold once they’d landed and scuttle away, and then there were the birds. Troublesome and an enemy of anything and everything.
Jenny could tell the honnards felt out of their comfort zone; the lowlands and marshy bogs were their familiarity not the crevices and valleys of the highlands. Their number had dwindled a little, and she suspected a few had returned to the camp. Zack and Bo were still part of their makeshift army though.
The land levelled slightly and made the going easier. She shifted the improvised backpack on her back; the weight of it cut into her shoulders. She thought of Diana but immediately pulled her thoughts away from her baby. She had to keep emotionally strong. Her life probably depended on it.
Head down, one foot in front of the other.
She came to a sudden stop as the honnards halted. In front, the drop below was dizzyingly far away. One of the honnards chuffed warnings to the rest of the group.
The backdrop was lush grassland, grazing animals and a winding river that disappeared into the distance. There were strange brown circles seemingly cut into the grass, and before she figured them out, geysers burst from them in billowing steam before falling back down.
With a start she realised she’d climbed part of the mountain range that she could see from the place where the Jelvian spaceship had crashed. The snow-capped peaks towered into the sky, breaking through the cloud, like mountains portrayed in children’s cartoons. She peered back over the edge of the cliff. It was craggy and littered with animal droppings, vines and fungus.
‘Chuff-Chi-Chi,’ said Bo behind her.
She turned to see the caveman watching her, probably wondering what she was thinking. The others had come to a stop; flinging themselves to the ground with sounds of exhaustion.
With relief, Jenny took off the backpack and sat alongside it. She looked up at Bo looking down at her, and then over at his fallen army.
‘Let us rest,’ she said.
‘Chuff-narda, Chi-Chi,’ he said. You’ve five minutes. That’s all.
‘Thank you.’
He walked away, and Jenny stared up at the sky. It was clouding over, and looked like rain. She rolled on her side wondering how she could be thinking mundane things when her family had been forced to separate. Each of them in different parts of the world.
A honnard howled. Jenny looked around; not being able to see the culprit straight away. Another howl, and Jenny looked back in the direction they had travelled and saw Zack in the distance, facing the setting sun; his body a silhouette.
Bo joined him, and howled alongside him. A collective howl.
Jenny sat up. She looked at the others as they all rose and ambled over to Zack and Bo. One by one, they turned to look back at her.
We’ve arrived. There’s Fly!
Her heart boomed in her chest, and she jumped up and rushed over. The honnards parted to let her through, and then she was standing beside Bo and Zack. But all she could see was barren, rocky ground. Her heart dropped, and her throat became scratchy.
She looked at Bo and shook her head. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
‘Chuff-Ji,’ he said, and shook his spear at the horizon.
Then she saw what they saw—a valley that lay sunken between mountains. Its land was grass, and hugging the cliff face was a grey sparkle of water.
Distant figures moved around in the valley—Jelvias.
Zack chuffed. ‘Ji-ji,’ he said.
Did he think those Jelvias were all Flys?
She looked into Zack’s yellow eyes and tried to seek his intelligence.
Zack took his effigy from around his neck, muttered a few words, and then raised it overhead and howled.
Chapter Thirty Four
Molver had been chatting about his friends and living a simple life farming animals and growing crops in the lowlands. He’d obviously seen what he and Jenny had and liked the idea. Fly was under no illusion that these other ‘friends’ could exist, but no way could they co-exist in the harmony that Molver described. Fly had no intention of helping Molver find them, not now anyway. They’d kill him as soon as they saw him. They’d probably forgotten about the boy already. Nobody cared about anybody on Itor—just like he hadn’t cared who he killed when he placed the explosives around the spaceship.
‘How old are you really?’ Fly asked him, as he drove.
His foot had been flat on the accelerator but the engine began to emit a high-pitched whine, so he held back and drove at a more sedate pace. The buggy took the bumps well despite the many repairs he’d made to its tracks over the years. The rubber had long been replaced with hardened animal sinew. His mind drifted to Jenny as he remembered a two-day trip in the buggy that she’d sent him on, searching for trees that secreted rubber milk. They had them on Earth, apparently, but he’d never found any such tree. He came back instead with a new fruit that Jenny dubbed ‘banaberry’ because she had said they looked like an earth fruit called strawberries but tasted like bananas.
Fly looked at Molver. ‘Well?’
‘I told you,’ Molver said.
‘You’ve told me nothing but lies. You’re not the age you say you are.’
Molver picked at a loose thread on his well-made trousers.
‘Nice clothes.’
‘I made them,’ he said. ‘I’m the clothes maker.’
‘How many are there of you in this tribe?’
Molver looked at his fingers and seemed to be counting off them.
‘Can’t you count?’ asked Fly.
‘I can count!’
Fly fell silent. He manoeuvred the buggy over the rocky terrain, causing it to lurch sideways. Molver grabbed the rim of the door as the car bounced back down.
‘What about you?’ Molver said, turning in his seat to glare at Fly.
‘What about me?’
‘You’re not telling me who you’re looking for or where we’re going. The prims didn’t try to kill you, and you knew where to find them and were sad to see they’d been massacred. Now, that’s strange in itself. What’s the fascination with them?’
Fly gave him a look that caused Molver to look away saying, ‘You don’t have to tell me.’
They chugged on. Back over the rocky plain, and upwards to the high grounds and the mountainous terrain. After a while Molver said, ‘I’m not a prisoner, OK? I’m a runaway.’
‘I know.’
‘You know?’
‘You’re too young to be a prisoner. You must have been a child of a runaway; a lucky child.’ Fly remembered, many months into the journey to Eden, when group after group of runaways were discovered. They stood no chance, and if they weren’t killed straight away they’d wished they had been.
‘Gorjum told me never to speak of it.’
‘Gorjum?’
Molver glanced at him as if detecting a spark of interest in his voice. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He’s our leader.’
Fly concentrated on driving the buggy. Prisoners knew their fate: sentenced as an experiment to an unknown planet, and while some prisoners spoke of a ‘new life’, others believed the new planet would mean a slow and agonising death, and if they were to die then the wardens would too. Fly was one of those men, and he thought Gorjum was as well.
He thought Gorjum was helping him hide his explosives in the air vents of the spaceship as planned, but later discovered the man had been relaying his plans back to the wardens and removing the bombs as he planted them.
He learned this too late when he was in the lower deck of the spaceship to receive his punishment. The plan was to be taken down there and away from harm when the bombs detonated. Gorjum was supposed to have been taken down as well, but of course, turning inf
ormer he wasn’t included. But luck was on Fly’s side that day. Gorjum had missed a few bombs.
Molver was still talking: ‘Gorjum and Saneg wanted revenge on the wardens and to kill them—that’s what our tribe started out to be, you know, a base to plot. But we began to farm animals, build our homes and started to feel free and unafraid. And Lyden talked the others out of it. He said living a good and happy life was a type of revenge on the wardens.’
Fly knew all the names Molver was mentioning. ‘How many in your tribe?’
‘Let’s see…’ Molver looked at his fingers again. ‘There’s Gorjum, Saneg and Lyden. Then there’s Kyip, Dol—’
‘Roughly!’ he interrupted before Molver listed everyone.
‘I haven’t enough fingers,’ the boy said. ‘I need another hand. Maybe two more hands.’
‘Do you know where your tribe is?’
Molver lowered his hands to his lap. ‘The wardens captured me, Myten and Dolcam. We escaped from the valley but they came after us. Myten created a diversion so we could get away. The wardens killed him. I’— he swallowed as if he had something unsavoury in his mouth—‘I couldn’t do anything. I wanted to help him, but I didn’t. Then Dolcam told me to wait and he went somewhere. I waited near that cave where I saw you, but he never came back. I waited for three nights.’
‘So how old are you?’
‘Gorjum says I’m eighteen.’
‘That means you were three or four at the time the spaceship left Itor. No wonder you’re so—’ he broke off, staring at him. Molver looked away as if uncomfortable under his scrutiny. ‘I presume your family were killed?’
The boy didn’t answer straight away, and Fly had the impression that his answer would be carefully chosen. There were many families smuggled on the ship, mainly kinfolks of men who were caught as runaways. They believed they could begin again on the new planet.
‘Saneg found me,’ Molver continued. ‘He and Gorjum hid me but the wardens found me and punished us real bad.’
Fly remembered that Saneg had disappeared for a long time, and when he returned he seemed a cowed man. He was, or was then, a young man. One of the youngest on the spaceship and there were taunts that he was the ship’s ‘bum buddy’. Fly hadn’t given him much thought at the time.
