by John Daulton
She jerked her head out of the way and pulled her noose down over its head, yanking violently. The eyestalks were sinuous and slid right through and up again, but some of its legs snapped on one side as she mashed the noose down in a way that bent them against their joints.
She got the noose perhaps a third of the way down the creature’s length, like pulling a stocking over a frenzied, fighting foot. The combination of having several of its legs entangled and the pain of three or four broken limbs set it to hissing and thrashing. In its agony, it fell away from her and rolled up in a ball. The release of its groping feet and the push and pull of its weight sent her tumbling sideways, which in turn knocked the smaller insect off of her as well.
She scrambled to her feet and ran for the bashing rock where it lay upon the ground.
Unfortunately, the smaller insect was far quicker than she, and by the time she was but a step away from her rock, the bug was on her back again. It climbed up her body so fast she staggered and pitched forward, nearly colliding headlong into the tree to which her noose was bound. As it was, she struck it with her shoulder and was spun painfully around.
She landed hard on her back, with the insect, in that instant that she spun, clambering around her body to stand upon her chest. Once again there came a hollow, pointed mouth tube swatting for her eye.
She turned her face in time, and the little spike went through her cheek instead. It stuck all the way through and into her tongue as well, and for a moment she felt the force of the creature trying to suck it out. But the suction released an instant later, replaced by the taste of blood.
She mashed her fists at the creature and tried to roll away. It scrambled around her as she rolled, its feet astonishingly nimble, and it was on her back again when she stopped and got to her hands and knees.
She fought her way to her feet and then ran backward, slamming the creature up against the tree, pinning it against the bark. The strength of its legs was frightening. It pushed her away from the tree and quickly scrambled back around to her chest. She tried to stagger back to where her bashing rock was, but the creature was too long and its lower half was tangling her legs up all the way past her knees.
On instinct, she threw herself face forward into the dirt, intent on landing her weight upon it again. The creature, sensing it, scrambled around to her back before she struck. She got a face full of moss and dirt instead. She actually managed a smile as she reached forward and grabbed her rock, though. It was right there.
She faked rolling to her right and rolled left instead. The creature, though fast, was confused by the shift just long enough that she managed to get back onto her hands and knees. Once again she staggered to her feet.
Again the creature was at her chest. She dodged the slap of its mouth spike with her head as she struck the first blow with her pointed rock. She nearly dodged another slap, and took a long cut in her cheek, the same side with the hole in it, and this just under her eye. She dealt two more strikes with the sharp rock, one of which crackled on impact, like the crunch of dried twigs, and suddenly the bug was rolling away from her, it, like the other two, curled up into a ball.
Pernie ran to it as it rolled up against an exposed root and beat the sphere of it in with the rock. She pounded and pounded on it with the pointed end of her stone hammer, smashing through the creature’s armor casing as if it were the shell of some great pumpkin-sized egg. The bug was a heap of pale green-and-yellow goo by the time she was done whaling on it, with bits of ruined shell jutting from the mushy mound like wedges of broken dinnerware. She smiled down at its corpse and thought about picking through the wreckage to see what sorts of things might be in there. But she had more important things to do.
She saw that the big bug was still curled up around the noose, so she risked a glimpse under the ferns to see if there were others lurking menacingly down there. There were not. The first one she’d hit with a stone appeared to have run off, and the second one, the one that had rolled itself up, was now lying half-opened on its side, the balled-up defensive mechanism slightly agape, like the mouth of a dead man lying there.
She nodded. Good. This had gone better than planned.
She turned back to where the big one lay, still motionless on the ground like a large gray globe, its segmented armor gleaming dully in the wan morning light. She didn’t know what to say to it, but she was about to try.
Chapter 10
Pernie sat and watched the armored ball of her captive for a long time. For the first hour or so, she kept glancing nervously back toward the fern meadow, expecting more of the insects to come scuttling out and attack, but that didn’t seem to be the case. So, after a while, she worried less and started to wonder more.
She’d already figured out by her first day in the jungle that these creatures somehow communicated with one another. That much had been apparent by the way they chattered back and forth and by the way the two that had chased her had clearly been working in concert. The question was not if they communicated but how. Was it all vocal?
Master Altin’s dragon spoke to him all the time. Dragons, at least the one she knew semi-personally, communicated telepathically. She’d even heard that the little homing lizards that Prosperions sent flitting about with notes strapped to their backs had some kind of telepathic link to one another, even with other homing lizards that they had never met. So she knew it was possible for animals to do such things. What she didn’t know was if that sort of contact, contact that could cross over between species, was possible with bugs.
For a half hour she’d been trying just such a thing, and it was proving less than productive. At the wizard’s school in Leekant, Master Grimswoller had taught her how to use her magic telepathy. It was very simple really, once one understood how it worked. And it was with the practiced method that grumpy Master Grimswoller had taught her that she continued to reach out to the balled-up bug lying there, trying to connect to its bug mind.
She let her thoughts seep gently out across the intervening space, projected toward the insect in as friendly a manner as possible. “Hey,” she thought at it for perhaps the fortieth time, shaping her thoughts in the gentle way she would have shaped the words were she speaking to a skittish pony, goat, or calf. “Why won’t you talk to me?”
Still nothing. She knew that trained telepaths could block out others’ thoughts. Master Altin did it constantly. But depending on what type of block they had in place, she’d noticed that sometimes she could tell that there was a block. Meaning, she knew there was someone there. Not always, as Master Grimswoller had explained, but sometimes. But she wasn’t getting that with this silent bug.
She sat down on a rock near the tree and leaned back, making herself comfortable. She could stay at this all day if she had to. All week. All year. No stupid bug was going to outsmart her.
She wondered if its shell protected its mind somehow. Who knew what a weird bug like that could do? She wondered how long it was going to stay rolled up in a ball. It reminded her of the little pill bugs back home, the ones Kettle called roly-polies when Pernie was a very little girl. Thinking of those little bugs made this one seem less sinister somehow. She wondered if maybe they were related in a way. She thought it might be nice if they were family, like cousins who had gotten separated by the sea. Like she was separated from all her family. Or at least the only family she had ever known. She missed Kettle something fierce, and she was certainly sick of fish strips now. She was sure that she would never eat them again when she grew up. In fact, the best part of becoming a deadly assassin would be to beat the next person who tried to make her eat fish into a bloody pulp. She would mash them and throw all their stupid fish outside for the wild cats to eat.
Stupid fish.
She realized she had nearly fallen asleep when her head jerked up with a jolt. She blinked a few times and found herself face to face with the insect she had caught. It had crawled right up to her and raised itself up to stare at her.
She squealed and s
lid sideways off the rock she’d been sitting on, but she rolled quickly to her feet and darted out beyond the reach of the length of rope that tied the insect to the tree. But she need not have, for the creature once again rolled up into a ball.
Pernie frowned at it and wriggled her little lips in curiosity. She walked right up to it and prodded it with her toe. “You can come out, you know,” she said. “I’m not going to hurt you so long as you don’t try to bite.” She tilted her head, the long drapery of her blonde hair, rather dirty and unkempt these days, swaying with the motion and partly covering her face. “Or try to climb me like a tree,” she added, in case it thought to catch her on a technicality.
The creature did not respond, and it simply lay there looking like one of the big balls of pitch the siege engineers had stacked up beside the catapults the army had placed along Calico Castle’s walls.
She tried once more to push her thoughts outward to it, prodding gently, seeking its mind. This time she found it. She found it so suddenly that it startled her, causing her to lose the connection as quickly as she’d discovered she had one.
She giggled and clapped and jumped up and down. She’d known it would have a mind. She’d just known it would!
She tried again, feeling as she did that she now understood how Master Altin must have felt when he was first taming his dragon, Taot. Master Altin hadn’t been much older than she was now at all. This was certainly just like that, and she was very excited. Imagine how impressed he was going to be when he found out.
Of course, she still had to tame it properly.
She sent her mind in search of the creature’s again, her thoughts tapping softly across the space like one of the creature’s strong but supple limbs. She patted upon the surface of its mind like a kitten batting at a string. “Hey,” she thought at it. “Let me in. I’ve got work for you.”
She got back what could be simply translated as a “no.” Just that. Somehow she’d hoped for some kind of emotion and interesting intelligence. But it just said, “No.” Or at least, its thought made it perfectly clear. Just, no.
“Well,” she thought at it again, “I don’t care if you say no to me. I need a ride.” She walked right up to it and gave it a gentle kick. “Now get out of that little ball before you make me mad.” She put her hands on her hips, and her face wore the very stern frown that she’d seen Kettle use so many times before. “Get up,” she said aloud. “You’ve rolled about enough.”
This, of course, did nothing to unwind the creature from itself, so Pernie gave it yet another kick. Harder this time. “You listen here, Mr. Bug; you’ll do as I say or it’s going to go poorly for you, do you hear?” Now she sounded just like Kettle too. She sent that thought telepathically across the intervening space, and she made the mental threat of yet another kick to go along with it.
The bug sent back another “no.”
Pernie kicked it yet again. This time hard enough that it rolled down the gentle slope, bounced up into the air some when it hit a root, and then came to the end of the rope, which jerked it to a stop. “Now, unroll, you big mean bug, or I’ll have at you with my pointy rock. You can see how that went for your friend.” She sent that thought telepathically as well, and then glared down at the bug for quite some time, waiting for its reply.
“No,” it sent back. No anger. No fear. No sense of stubbornness. Just, no.
Pernie thought about kicking it again, but that last one had rather hurt her foot. The shell on those things was pretty hard, and this one was bigger than the one she’d bashed in with her rock.
She thought back to what she knew of Altin’s taming of Taot. She remembered him telling her the story once, out beside the well when she was very small. He said he’d had to scare the dragon into being nice to him. But how? How does a little girl scare a giant bug into being nice? Especially a bug that only knows how to say “no” to everything? She thought that if she should ever get this grouchy bug tamed, she might have to name it Kettle, since “no” was Kettle’s favorite word too.
She watched the bug lying there at the end of the rope, the taut bit of Pernie’s cord the only thing that kept it from rolling down the slope and into the little stream. And then it hit her. The water! Neither of the bugs that had chased her that first day had wanted to get their feet wet. Maybe that would be enough.
She sent that thought to the bug telepathically. “I’ll drag you right down to the water and sit on you until you be nice,” she told it.
“No,” came its reply.
“All right, that’s it, then,” she said aloud. “I’ve had enough of you.”
She went to the tree and untied her rope. She nervously unwound the last bit of knot and waited, half-expecting the creature to unroll itself and run.
It did not.
She wound the rope around her wrist securely so that the bug could not escape, then marched right back to the balled-up bug. “Last chance,” she sent to it. “Straighten up or it’s a bath for you.”
“No.”
Without another word or thought for the bug, she strode right down the slope to the creek, only needing to give the bug the least bit of a tug to set it rolling right along. It came down beside her, then bumped and bounced past her, winding the rope around itself as it went. As it rolled farther away, picking up speed, Pernie leaned back against the rope to stop it, but that only spun it around, allowing the rope to unwind as the bug continued on. Pernie ran after, though she didn’t have to for more than a few steps.
No sooner did the bug hit the muddy edges of the creek than it popped right out of its spherical form and braced itself, spreading flat, legs out wide and stopping short of the water.
Startled by the nearly instantaneous transformation, Pernie’s quick reflexes were the only thing that saved her from tripping over it and plunging into the stream. Instead, she seized the opportunity and hopped onto the creature’s back, turning herself sideways to its length and sliding to the middle of its trunk, where she stood balancing herself with slightly bent knees. The soft soles of her elven boots flexed gently over the arc of the creature’s back, and for nearly a full second she was perfectly perched up there.
Then, of course, the creature bolted back up the slope, tossing her off with its lightning-quick speed as if someone had just jerked a rug out from under her. She landed in a pile in the soft mud, and had enough time to look up before the insect hit the end of the rope again.
Had she not been dumped several inches deep into the mud, it might have dragged her off, at least for a bit, but the suction of the mud and Pernie’s determination not to let it get away were enough to flip the creature over onto its back as it reached the length of its tether so suddenly.
Its legs all went to spasms as it twisted and thrashed trying to right itself, at least all those legs that were not broken and hanging limply or jutting out askew. It did manage to get itself over, and it turned back at her, its eyestalks waggling furiously. For a moment she thought it was going to charge her, so she crawled back into the water and got to her knees. Her arm was extended to its fullest length to accommodate the length of rope she’d had to play out, and she leaned back against it and tried to haul the creature closer to the stream.
The creature flattened itself against the forest floor, spreading all its legs out until its body looked as if it were bread dough ready for the rolling pin. Pernie realized that if she pulled on the rope too hard now, it might slide down the bug’s length, break more legs, and then slip right off.
It seemed that they were at something of an impasse.
Which was fine. She didn’t need it to get wet anyway. She needed it to be afraid of getting wet.
She sent it another telepathic nudge. “I’m going to stand on you again,” she told it. “Do not move so quickly this time.”
She did not get a “no” from it, and instead, she felt its pain. Its legs hurt, the broken ones that she’d snapped trying to get the rope over its head, and the one that had broken when it hit the end
of the rope just now. It seemed its limbs were very strong for grabbing and running, but not so much so when bent the opposite way.
She hadn’t thought about that part, or of the pain that would have caused.
“I’m sorry,” she thought immediately, sending sympathy along the way. “But it is your own fault for fighting me.” She approached the bug then, hauling in the rope, hand over hand as she drew near, keeping it taut and causing the bug to remain spread out in its attempts to prevent itself being dragged into the water that it so clearly feared.
She got right up to it, only a handsbreadth from what she thought of as its face. Its eyestalks tilted back to watch her, curving like a pair of snakes about to strike.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said. “So long as you do what I say. Let me see if I can’t fix your legs.” She knelt down, keeping tension on the rope all the while, and with her free hand, she reached forward and touched the creature on its shell, an angular bit of armor shaped like a slice of pie between its eyes.
She closed her eyes and began to sing the song of the wilted daffodil. It was a healing song that she’d learned from Master Grimswoller back at school. A simple song, meant for healing flowers and nothing more. But she’d made it work on Altin one day when it really mattered, and she thought she could do it again now.
She reached out into the mana that seethed and roared silently all around. She still thought of it as a scary place where great pink waves and purple swells rose and fell with terrible violence. It was everywhere, and there was a ferocity to it that both frightened her and filled her with awe. She knew that someday she would tame it all and be just like Master Altin.
She knew better than to take up a lot of it, though. Master Grimswoller had taught her that much, most of all. So she plucked up a tiny little bit of it, like pinching spilled salt from a tabletop, and she dragged out a sticky strand of mana, which she pushed into the place where her hand touched the insect on its head.
