The Wild Lands: Legend of the Wild Man

by Joe Darris

  His mind, finally comprehending but not wanting to, forces him awake and he groans mournfully to all those he lost.

  Home is gone. He is in a cage higher than the mountains. He should be rescuing his sister and the wisest man he has ever met but he has failed.

  The hunter is caged in a room white with harsh light, surrounded on all sides, above and below by some sort of stone. Its hard and cold and hums faintly like the prongs jutting from his arm. He beats the ground. Nothing. He punches the walls. Nothing. He feels for his knife. It is gone. Only one way is open. Dim light pours into the room, burning a silhouette into his unadjusted eyes.

  A man stands in the light, short enough to be a child, yet Kao knows the man is full grown. He is old, and bald. Wrinkles cover his face and veins like fat caterpillars run down his skull. His stomach is a fat paunch, his posture is heavy. He smells tired and weak, ready for the long rest, but he will never embrace it, not this one. He thinks himself wise but is really only scheming and dangerous. This is the man in the circle. The man who made the lightning, master of elk, lion, crow, monkey and...

  The Hidden.

  With a growl Kao is on his feet, snarling at the little pudgy man. The air shimmers a faint blue between the two, and Kao understands he is trapped. The little man is confident and smug, but the Hunter will show no fear, only rage, only the pain that burns inside him.

  The little man makes high pitched noises in the front of his mouth. It is gibberish to the Hunter, but he knows the little man speaks. One word stands out among the mess:

  “Baucis.” Kao understands this is the man's symbol, his name.

  “Kao!” the hunter roars and the little man recoils. This is good. Baucis catches himself and steps forward again. Neither wants to show fear. But Kao knows fear well, if the little man does not want to show it, he will.

  The hunter roars a war-cry. Not the sound to frighten elk but to intimidate a hungry lion. A roar that says you have taken too much, and will take no more. A roar that says one of us may die, but the other will remember. He sees fear in the little man's eyes and thinks he smells urine. Good signs.

  But Baucis does not retreat. Instead he sizes up the caged hunter. He is looks for weakness, fear, or false courage. He will find none of it.

  Kao beats his chest, the walls, the floor. He feels the stone around him tremble, but Baucis only bears stubby pointed teeth.

  The Hidden smile? He muses. The thought repulses him.

  Kao swings a fist at the little man, cage be damned, and his arm connects with an unseen force that knocks him backward and sets his bones buzzing. His fingers feel raw, like they've been burned by something hotter than fire. His knuckles release wisps of acrid hair flavored smoke into the air. Baucis laughs, but he should not have. He failed to notice two things.

  The first is obvious. The smoke drifts both towards Kao and Baucis. It passes through the barrier without so much as an extra whirl. A being as powerful as a god does not worry about something like air. But Kao knows the power of air. Its invisible, intangible, a carrier of secrets and messages older than symbols. He hides his grin. The Hidden will fall from a breeze.

  There is no way Baucis could have perceived the second detail, so the hunter will share it with him. Fear is a powerful tool, and if the little man does not want to show it, then it is more powerful still. When Kao's fist connected with the invisible barrier, the barrier flickered. It grew bright then dim, matched his strength then faded back, like the surface of water. Surely Baucis noticed this, but he did not perceive the hum that went up Kao's arm, through his shoulders and into his jutting prongs. The same as the power that filled his bones with lightning, only subtler, less explosive. The same power made the most fearsome beast he has ever battled flee with its tail between its legs. The pudgy little man is no match.

  Kao swings his left fist and feels his prongs glow when his knuckles connects with the shimmering blue barrier. Again and again he pummels the shimmering shield. Baucis smiles, proud of his shiny blue wall. After a few blows, Kao feels the first twinges of hot pain sear through his flesh. His prongs burn intensely inside his arm as the force spreads through his bones.

  It hurts more here. They are shielded by the blue energy from the pull of the round moon.

  After a few more blows, sparks rain from his prongs. The childish smirk falls from the Baucis's face and he looks weary and frightened. The veins that run along his pale bald head start to pulse. He knows fear. Kao beats and bangs the invisible wall, but the foolish little man does not flee.

  Lightning crackles and pops between the three jutting prongs. His arms are tired, his fists burn. The blue lightning takes as much power as it gives but Baucis does not know this. He is terrified. Entranced by the three prongs' waterfall of sparks, he is hypnotized, like a rat caught in the gaze of a snake. The blue lightning burns hotter than embers inside of Kao, but he does not relent. Instead he roars and throws all of his weight into the shimmering blue field. It pops loudly and throws him back against the far wall of his cage with all of the force he put into it.

  Then, another instant later, all goes black, and he wonders if the lightning blinded him. But no. His eyes adjust and he sees Baucis fumble in the darkness, his movements as clumsy from the dark as from fear.

  Kao lunges at Baucis, shocked that victory could come so easy, but the light clicks on and races back to full brightness. Kao collides with the blue barrier and is flung against the far wall. His head bangs against the wall, and his mind loses the battle against his exhausted body. The power is too much and he slips unconscious.

  Baucis sighs with relief. The hunter can smell his fear, it is thick in the air. His feeble body strains just to show it, and the effort exhausts him. The hunter passes out and lets the little man have his victory. The full moon still approaches, and Baucis learned nothing but terror.

  Baucis returns to Kao's cage a few times. He never stays long or watches Kao with the same intensity as their first meeting. He always reeks of fear like a rabbit's or a rat's, animals that do little more than eat and mate before they are devoured by the stronger. But in spite of his pathetic stink, the hunter knows the little man is old, very old. He has no hair to betray his age with faded color but his eyes say it all. He has seen much, but nothing like Kao.

  Whenever Baucis visits he makes a few notes, the hunter can see it in his eyes. He watches the way he moves. Every time Kao reshuffles or paces, Baucis's eyes light up and Kao feels vulnerable. He knows the man's intentions. They control the animals with their stones, he plans the same for Kao. Why else would he care about how he moves?

  Kao learns to wait for Baucis to leave before he tests his cage. He knows the little man is trying to get into his head, but he does not want him to know any of what he will find if he gets inside. The cage is strong, and try as he might Kao can do nothing to harm it. He beats at and with all he has until his prongs throw sparks and he feels their energy in his teeth and fingernails. Nothing. It always relents and comes back to full strength, as maddening an opponent as water. Though sometimes, it flickers without his attacks, like another prisoner battles the Totem and its evils. Though it cannot be the hermit or any of his kin. Only the animals in the Garden have the essence to challenge to Totem, but they are down on the earth, far below his cage in the sky.

  So Kao waits, and eats the fruits and vegetables left for him. Always when he wakes, fruits and vegetables are there. Plump and juicy, they fill his cage with wonderful aromas. All of them spark and fuel his new strength. Kao knows Baucis does not want him dead. He wants a new toy to scare and intimidate other magnificent beasts into slavery (Kao's expanding mind is still not keen enough to realize he invented that word).

  The hunter paces his cage, not knowing what fate is fair for the puny false god and his kin. He knows there are more of them. He can smell their sour fatty musk drift into his cage, through the shimmering blue wall. There are men and women, though they all smell spineless and weak. He smells monkeys too, dozens of them,
though their scent never changes. They are slaves. He knows this. He plans to free them all, by death if necessary.

  After a time, he gets a visitor.

  He knows time not from the light, which blazes unceasing, but from his heart. He mostly feels the dull grind of whatever force creates the blue lightning, he can feel it invigorate the prongs even when not testing the shimmering blue wall. Underneath all that, his heart feels the moon's seductive pull calling to him, telling him to wait a bit longer, wait for her to be at her greatest strength, when she allies with the sun and can pump his blood as fast as his veins will allow. Very soon the moon will be full. When it is, he will escape. Until then, he will entertain his visitor.

  She is young, probably his own age, if not younger, though it is hard to tell with the baby faced gods. She is taller than the pudgy man, more than half Kao's impressive height. She has sleek black hair, wears a silver flowing cloth and best of all: she smells.

  She smells of fear, real fear, animal fear, the fear one should feel in the presence of a hunter, even a caged one. She smells of the sullied tainted vegetables he has been eating, he can smell the black moss that polluted their tender flesh through her pores. She smells of sweat, of work. She smells of curiosity too, reeks of it: it’s more than an aroma, it’s her essence. He loves it, wallows in it, and pumps his own stink back into the air. It does not matter if she thinks she notices because part of her, the animal part, does.

  It was her eyes behind the lion. The way she plods silently towards him, the way she cocks her head to get a better look, her perfect balance, her wild black hair all scream lion. Her eyes are a soft purple, like flowers in the dry season, very different from the cat's orange slits, but the same eyes. Not the same as when he first battled the cat, no, no, no. Those eyes were hungry, betrayed and confused. These are the eyes that shone through those eyes. The eyes that said stay down. The eyes that spared his life.

  She says nothing, thank the gods, but they communicate. She pities him. He is angry for what she helped do. She is sorry, but had to do it. She feels as caged as him. She wants to help. She wants to help so bad. He can smell it, see it, sense it. She screams it without words, like a maimed animal asks for death. Painless, they plead or quick. He promises her neither, but demands her help.

  He makes a big circle in the air. She traces it too. Then he holds his hands up high above. She scratches her head. He sits on his haunches and pretends to howl. She nods excitedly, either proud of herself or of him for playing the game so well. She points at the ground. The full moon is tonight?

  The next part of the message is trickier. He cradles his arms like he holds his sister. He pretends to brush her. He coos to her and puts her to sleep. A fat tear roles down the girl's cheek. My sister is here. He stoops his back and shuffles his feet like the mad old hermit. She nods between more tears.

  Then footsteps echo down the hall. Baucis returns with more tests. She is scared and turns to go but Kao catches her eye and she hesitates.

  He taps his chest, “Kao.”

  She nods, bats back tears, points to herself and says, “Urea,” with the saddest and most beautiful smile he will ever see.

  Chapter 33

  Nature is the goddess, the true manifestation of the earth. Our ancestors turned their backs on her, and we forever pay their debts. We can turn to no one but ourselves. Pray our Council hears her.

  “What shall we do Baucis?” Ntelo asked as she paced the Council chamber restlessly. Her purple robes fluttered behind her, a frock of irate moths. Rufus called a Council meeting. She nor Baucis wanted to be here. There were more pressing matters.

  “We'll implant the new specimen tomorrow, I just have to run a few more tests,” Baucis said tiredly. The veins on his head pulsed. He was exhausted.

  “You'll do it today. Or else those damn biselk are going to bring this place down” Orus Luca said.

  Baucis detested Luca, he was crass, rude and boorish, but he empathized with the brute. The biselk had been at it for hours. Every few minutes, one of them would ram the Spire. The impact itself was inconsequential, even an enormous biselk could only dream of challenging the towering Spire, but each time they struck the base of the tower, the lights flickered, not enough to cause any damage, not yet, but enough to notice, and with a regular infrequency that was maddening.

  “Its better to wait,” Tennay said, then shrugged to the hidden sky, “the full moon.”

  “You're not superstitious?” Rufus Aurelius asked, his voice incredulous.

  Tennay shrugged. “The alignment of the moon disturbs the magma tides that fuel the Spire.”

  “There's no records of that phenomenon,” Aurelius rebutted.

  “There's a whole world not in your databanks.” The lights flickered, an eerie emphasis to Tennay's cold words. As they have done each time their precious energy source was interrupted, the Council all glanced around the room, as if they would be able to tell from the painted windows of ancient skyscrapers if something in the Spire was amiss.

  “Regardless,” the usually glib Aurelius hesitated, waiting for the lights to dim again. They didn't, and he continued, “Every moment that thing is free inside our city we court disaster.”

  “Why are we worried about the monkey when the biselk threaten the Spire?” Luca growled.

  “The Naturalists think the Wild Man taught the biselk how to challenge the Spire.”

  “There is no Wild Man!” Ntelo hissed, convincing no one.

  “A true believer,” Aurelius said dryly, “despite your lack of conviction, their time with the brute has left them enlightened.”

  Tennay wrung his gnarled knuckles. Sometimes the truth was too hard to tell, but had to be told anyway. He owed it to the Spire, the Council, and the people inside. Tennay felt fatherly to the place. He had no children (none he'd raised anyway) but he had always felt a deep love for his kin trapped up in the sky with him. Stupid, shortsighted mankind, it was a miracle they could even see to the ground from up here. Still though, for all their shortsightedness they'd done so much! Tennay was the only one alive in the Spire who remembered the good old days, what his grandfather used to call the future with a wink and a grin.

  Tennay's grandfather had always marveled at all the wonderful things the world had taken for granted, or so he'd told his grandson as the boy had tried to stay awake past his bedtime while grandpa prattled on. His grandfather knew how the sky ships flew, how VRCs worked and everything there was to know about Carbon, from diamonds to nanotubes to people, his grandpappy had loved carbon. He had odes to things called microchips and processors, internal combustion engines (something so inefficient it lost most of the energy used to power it to heat, heat!) and touch screen computers.

  “This was back before people had cracked the optic link,” he'd say every single time. But best of all, Tennay's grandfather loved to fix things with his hands. Tennay had watched his grandfather's gnarled knuckles fix radios, VRCs, the family's sky ship, the electromagnetic transformer in their house, even the plumbing (The Spire should be especially thankful for that one, the reclaimers would never have functioned without Tennay's fuzzy memories of grandpa explaining suction).

  His grandfather had lost his mind in his old days. Alzheimer's, his mother called it. To a boy less than ten, it looked nothing short of demonic possession. One day, grandpa seemed fine, focused as a laser, the next day he came home from work and couldn't remember his own grandson's name. Things went bad from there. His grandfather stopped working, he couldn't drive, couldn't talk, could hardly feed himself. For hours, his grandfather would pronounce doom and gloom for a world that had forgot how to use its hands, all while his own once talented fingers trembled and twisted uncontrolled.

  “The Future's catching us boy, just watch. All this technology won't have a thing to say when Nature steps in. Just watch.”Nature finally did catch up with his grandfather.

  Tennay's life had been ruined. No one knew more about the world than his grandpa. When he stopped bein
g able to access it, Tennay knew that he had to understand what powered mankind, because someone had to do, and without his grandpa, he couldn't trust anyone else but himself (his dad had proved that to him long ago) and his mother, and she had enough to worry about. So he signed up to work on Spire Casino, the latest and greatest piece of future there was.

  He had just finished his internship, was finally beginning to really understand how it all worked, and was even getting over the death of his grandfather when it happened. The Apocalypse, the Flood, birth of the Scourge, no matter what they called it, to a young engineer, it was proof that Nature had finally caught up to the future. He had been half relived when it had happened. Somehow he had survived, high in Spire Casino, mankind's shining light of technological accomplishment. He knew that eventually the place would wear down, but he knew enough to keep it going for a long time.

  Until this, until now. He had never prepared for Nature to actually attack. He understood the weather as a symbol of Nature, really more of a symbol of chance, chaos even, but to see animals, animals they had engineered, attack the Spire? It was too much. The Council had already given up, and they didn't even know all the facts. Only Baucis seemed level headed. Would he be? Could he be with all the information?

  The silence had sat heavy in the room long enough. The gaudy chandelier had flickered three times since anyone had spoken. All were lost in their own dour thoughts.

  Tennay cleared his throat. The Council turned, dull glimmers of hope in their eyes. Tennay felt guilty he'd have to snuff them all out. “I've been looking at our Voltage output since the biselk have been ...” what? Striking? Rebelling? Attacking? He let the sentence die. “More energy is lost with each joust. Its like they're wicking it away. They're getting stronger, while the Spire's...” he let another sentence die, then held his breath while the Council looked at him, concern growing on their faces. “Have you ever seen a candle melt?” he managed to ask.