One early morning he was awakened by something in the tunnel. Since his mother left with the pack to go hunting he guessed that she was now returning to feed him. It was natural to assume that, for he had little else to think about but food. Yet when he woke from his dreams thoughts of hunting filled his head. He had not forgotten what it was like to be a hunter. The memory of it moved through him as though it was something he experienced right now. The spear was in his hand, the herd of fallow deer grazing in the deep grass before his rigid and silent form. Of course that was when he still lived among his own people, lived and hunted like them, with crude sharpened sticks. What must it be like to hunt as these Egris hunted?
With his eyes half closed he was suddenly alerted to something crawling right outside his burrow, only to now realize that this was no hunter. Deprived of even a simple stone implement to protect himself with, Ilon could only squirm in his hole like some helpless animal waiting to be killed and eaten.
“Help!” he screamed. “Help me!”
Something large was climbing inside; he knew that it was something dangerous. Though his eyes were well accustomed to the darkness he saw little of the black thing—long stick-like appendages, a vague outline, that was all. A damp sucker pressed against his cheek, another touched his foot. Ilon shivered. To die this soon made his short life seem all the more pointless.
Suddenly he heard the scraping of toenails in the corridor, running footsteps coming closer. Gaping jaws reached inside and closed around the creature, its hard shell cracking easily under a hunter’s powerful dentition. The feral beast emitted a shrill shriek before dying to silence.
Gangahar stood at the opening, Katakana behind him. “That was too close.”
“What is it?” she queried him.
“A despicable creature of disgust. Look.”
He dropped its dead mass at her feet and spat out the remains from his mouth. Katakana shook with revulsion. A tree turlin. A blood sucking parasite, it had only one goal: to firmly attach itself and suck the life from its host. Had Gangahar not killed it immediately, Ilon surely would have been lost, for one as small as he would have been quickly drained.
“Ilon, are you safe in there?”
His frightened face appeared in the burrow’s opening. “Is it dead?”
As if to prove to him that it was, Gangahar’s clawed finger speared through it as he held it up to show him. “At least you were not its last meal.”
To finally see it caused Ilon to shiver. What other horrors were hiding out there that he might not have the luxury of calling the hunters for help?
Ordinarily turlins were ambush stalkers, preferring to hide in the trees and fling themselves onto unsuspecting prey. How it had slipped into their burrow unnoticed was a moot point. Under Gangahar’s direction they soon discovered that it had in fact crawled through an adjoining tunnel, one thought to have been sealed up. After a thorough search of the entire sand burrow they determined there was no further danger.
Ilon was waiting for them in the central chamber where he had built up a fire, perhaps in the belief that this would keep away the predators, though as he was finding out in this strange and hostile world, he really was a baby, or at least he was as helpless as one.
“It will not happen again,” Gangahar promised.
“Until you grow larger, here is where you must stay,” Katakana agreed.
“From what I remember of my other life, this is as large as I will grow.”
“Then I hope you are wrong because you will fit very nicely into a bigger animal’s stomach.”
Gangahar asked him curiously, “Were the animals not dangerous where you hunted?”
“Some were very dangerous,” he admitted. “And what animals do you fear?”
“None except the Iranha.”
“You have said little about these creatures.”
“I promise you will hear more,” Katakana replied uneasily. But before he could ask her she changed the subject back to tonight’s incident. “Since only Gangahar and I possess this knowledge of the tree turlin no one else need ever know—especially your mother.”
“I won’t tell her,” he agreed, otherwise she might never let him out of the burrow.
At dawn the hunters returned, jaws bloodied, stomach’s full; everyone was happy to be home. When questioned by Horhon of the evening’s events there was much yawning and complaints of boredom. Fortunately for Gangahar she believed his small lie, though he felt a stab of guilt when she asked about Ilon. Yet he knew the mere mention of trouble would generate unnecessary anger, endless enquiries and precautions that he had already taken great pains to correct. And so it was never spoken of.
Ilon lost track of the days. Boredom seemed to be his only distraction; this sitting around and doing nothing was taking a toll on him. His requests to leave the confines of the burrow grew louder. It became a tug of war between him and his mother. He wanted to go out, while Horhon wanted him to stay put. She realized that eventually one of them was going to have to give in to the other.
“The time has come for you to go outside,” she said one afternoon. “I have told you of the forest and plains and all the animals that fill it. For any hunter these are things that must be seen.”
“Are we going hunting?” he asked excitedly.
“For goud.”
She was easily double his height, and the goud she had described to him were much bigger than her. They sounded even larger than the mammoths he remembered hunting on the plains, but he suspected even the biggest mammoth wouldn’t have a chance of escaping one of these hunters.
“I have thought about how best you might travel with us, so that you can be safe, and I do not have to worry about where you are. This is for you,” she grinned with satisfaction. Between her thumbs was a mottled green skin that she held out to him. “I made it myself.” And Horhon was immensely proud of it too, for she had carefully scraped off the wet meat and stretched the thin remains onto a frame to dry in the hot sun. This particular one was still warm.
To Ilon it looked like a pouch with carrying straps, having openings for his legs and arms. But mostly what she showed him revealed little of its true purpose. At least, not until she lifted him up and fitted him in. With the straps now tied securely around her neck and waist it looked as much as something the Taal women might have used to carry their babies about—perhaps this was where she had gotten the idea.
When it happened the first time Ilon thought he was flying. He watched the ground fall away beneath him, then return with the same force that had propelled him off. The other hunters beside him were leaping high, jumping together in long graceful bounds, legs pumping, tails snapping rhythmically behind them. They continued at the same pace for a while, yet it was not until the pack halted and the dust cloud settled that he had his first real glimpse of the world.
What he saw was unlike the world as he remembered it, unlike anything he had ever seen. Huge scaled trunks plunged skyward together, so tall that they seemed to vanish into the blackness. Were those branches above him? Dark creatures were flying underneath that he was sure were not birds. Now he was beginning to regret ever leaving the burrow. What was this forbidding place? Krugjon called it the Pok forest. A forest? Then these huge things were trees? It seemed impossible to believe that a tree could grow so tall. And what of the distant plains? Sparsely planted grass and brush. Beyond that, sand, dunes of sand, hills of sand, a field of sand. Just an empty endless desert. This might have been the plains someone else remembered, but not him. Even the sun seemed brighter. And it was hot, far, far too hot.
Something was moving into the forest, creatures of immense size, stiff tails dragging behind them, huge beaked jaws, tearing mouth-sized bites out of the tree trunks and chewing contentedly. From their great size and the color of their skin he guessed they were goud, a giant herd of them.
The dissimilitude of this place frightened him. He wanted to go back inside, to close his eyes on what could only be a bad dream. If t
his ever was once his own world then it was no more, a world lost and gone forever. What remained was too different, too menacing. Obviously he did not belong here, he could see that now, and he wished to be dead again.
He should have been dead.
Why was he here, still the same creature living among a world of monsters? If there was a reason or a purpose for his existence then why did he have no knowledge of it now? His head hurt from trying to think of a logical explanation, yet there were many more questions and too few answers.
It was near dusk when the sun appeared through thinning cloud before it set. The first stars were brightening in the eastern sky; a plenary moon was lifting over the field. Yet there was something different about this night sky too—particularly that moon, larger, brighter than he recalled. But when he saw the second moon rising Ilon knew then that he was far, far from his home.
Back in their burrow his mother had talked of a world that was immensely bigger than this vast forest and plain. What he had once thought was the whole universe was in fact only a tiny speck in a vast sea of other lights. Now he knew those flickering points for what they were in the sky. Seeing those two moons was confirmation for him that he was somewhere else, so out there among those same stars must be his own world. What would it be like now? Ilon wondered. With the Taal gone and the Uta crawling all over it, he had a very bad feeling about its future.
“There are more goud coming in off the plain,” Amink had just come back to tell them. “Plenty enough to fill your stomachs. Are you ready hunters?”
All were in complete agreement; now was the time to hunt.
“Hold on tight,” Horhon warned Ilon as she pumped her legs and leapt away with the others, straight towards the herd.
The size of these creatures was unbelievable. Had Ilon seen one of these back in his other life he would have been the one to have run away. Not these hunters. They were fearless and ferocious. No need to cull the weakest, slowest animal, just pick whatever one suited them and attack. Within moments a giant goud was lying on its side, being efficaciously ripped apart. The Egris were rudimentary eaters. It turned Ilon’s stomach to watch them devour the animal, yet this was their world, and they were the masters of it.
“We will search for some wood and build a fire to cook your meat,” Horhon said.
Other than himself, she was the only Egris who knew about fire. This puzzled him because she also knew things about him that only he could know, as if somehow her mind was connected to his and they were seeing and remembering the exact same things. This was a very strange second life he was living.
The sky was darkening as the second moon set, but by the time the pack reached the forest there was a blur of gray light growing above the horizon. Gangahar and Krugjon were waiting for them at the burrow. Yet when Horhon counted for the three who had left that evening, only two returned.
“What happened to Ilistruk?” she asked them.
In a slow trembling voice, Krugjon said, “My daughter is lost. Dead.”
There were shocked gasps, even young Yahu understood some of it and trembled hearing the name of his sister. What Krugjon had said was death, but death how everyone was wondering.
“We were after nentenens,” he continued. “We killed a big one near the river gorge and were feeding well on its meat when—”
“You left her body there for the scavengers to eat?” Katakana interrupted amid everyone’s cries of protest. “We should go and retrieve it at once.”
“No!” Gangahar shouted so strongly that she would have fallen backwards had her tail not supported her shifting weight. “Return, and we die the same death.”
No need for Horhon to raise her hand for silence. With those few words everyone was subdued, so she merely motioned for Krugjon to continue.
“As I said, we were feeding when we heard a noise coming out of the forest, so we went closer to investigate. What we found were the Iranha.” With his mouth gaping open, he told them all, “They are pulling down the trees! There is an ugly scar where they now cut through the forest. At first I did not know what to think, for they do many strange things, but as I watched them I began to understand. They are building something to cross the river. And that will bring them and their world even closer to ours!”
He tried to continue, could not, for he could no longer repress the true emotions that possessed him, so Gangahar now spoke in his place. “Ilistruk’s only mistake was that she hid behind the wrong tree. There was a terrible noise, a lot of bright light and smoke, a deep crater where the tree once was, and Ilistruk dead. We returned at once to tell you of this.”
“Dead for nothing,” Horhon growled bitterly. “If the Iranha are tearing down our forest to build this thing then we must leave at once before they get any closer.”
Everyone agreed. Except Ilon.
“No. Fleeing will only give them more of what they are taking away from us. What we must do is find a way to stop them, for their presence here can only mean there will soon be Iranha everywhere.”
“But we have no real weapons to use against them,” Gangahar argued, lest anyone was thinking about staying.
“You have your teeth and claws.”
“And what good are these against their death sticks? They point them, and we die.”
“Did Yahu not kill one of these things on the plain?” Since Krugjon had told everyone Ilon knew he couldn’t disagree. “If a youngster can kill an Iranha, so can you.”
Although each hunter had an opinion no one seemed able to provide the solution. While they despaired of an answer, Ilon walked over to the fire and removed one of the burning branches, waving it in the air to bring him the attention he wanted.
“Perhaps this is the weapon that we seek.”
“Fire?” Saskakel said doubtfully. “What is that against creatures like the Iranha?”
“Are these trees they bring down not made of the same wood—wood that will burn?”
When the full extent of his words sank in Horhon quickly said, “Why then this thing that they build to cross the river will burn just as these sticks, be consumed—and destroyed! Yes!” she roared aloud. “You are right. A weapon.” And she knew how to make fire. Closing her fingers around the burning stick she held it aloft. “Wait until dark, then we strike. Burn it into the river and let the wreckage be floated away.”
The plan was quickly made and everybody agreed that it was the right thing to do, for now their very survival depended on fighting back. All shared the same desire for revenge, all wanting to see the Iranha’s creation destroyed. The pleasure of attacking the Iranha, instead of running away, thrilled them.
As Ilon watched them go to their burrows to sleep he knew that they too were fighting to destroy an enemy that could not be beaten. Taal and Egris, two cultures, two peoples, and he, here to bring these two worlds together at last. Suddenly the future and his place in it were now very clear.
Chapter Twelve
“Something terrible has happened.”
Nalanusat was the only passenger to emerge from the open hatchway. Even as he waddled off the landing platform and onto the deserted field he rehearsed the same unhappy words over and over out loud to himself.
“Something terrible has happened.”
Not since first arriving by air transport had he seen anyone else on the runway. Nor were there any posted guards in front of the main terminal. A vehicle was supposed to have been sent to escort him back to the city, but there was no sign of that either. With news this important he could not wait here any longer, and so he started off by himself, moving forward with slug-like speed.
It was near dawn when he arrived at the walls of city Soligcetis; the sun was an undulating yellow swell just above the dunes. When he reached the main gates armed guards were waiting to stop him.
“Let me pass,” Nalanusat puffed, though gesturing more than talking. Finally, after he pushed several more breaths of air though the pores of his skin, he was able to make clear what he wanted and said
, “I have come all the way from Betelgesel bearing an important message that only Poxiciti can hear. He must be awakened from his sleep at once.”
As the huge metal gates swung slowly open he pushed his bulk inside and hurried on; a guard was calling out directions behind him as he plodded away. Dim yellow lights guided his way down a deserted street, past the city’s administration building, finally ending at the dormitory. More warders were stationed outside of the building.
After repeating the same urgent message the guards pressed Nalanusat to answer more of their questions before deciding to let him through. The door briefly hummed then hissed open to a dark corridor beyond. One of the Epiphilinian soldiers, a heavily armed female with a dreg’s rank on her blue neck band, escorted him the rest of the way inside.
“Let him through,” she barked at a second locked door. Eventually she led him to an elevator, then up to a expansive waiting room from which Poxiciti was summoned.
While Nalanusat waited he took out his bottle of tesano and applied a fresh coat of makeup. The nozzle hissed as the bright green paint coated his face, a color that was said to attract even the most unresponsive females. After checking himself in the window he then focused his thoughts back to Betelgesel and wondered how he would bring this dark event into the light of day.
The Battle for Tomorrow (Ilon the Hunter) Page 10
