“Why do I float like a feather on air?”
Samuille’s eyes said, “Do you not recognize your own predictions on planetary attraction now that you have become a heavenly body?”
Theory had not prepared Q’Enukki for experience. His decades of noting positions of fixed and wandering stars, first with inferior pictographs then in the joy of manipulating numbers, had accurately produced a working model of cosmic attraction and motion. Yet it all seemed trivial now.
“I was right. Celestial bodies have their own attracting power; a curve of the three dimensions stretched over the contours of the Fourth Heaven. The Chains of Pleiades—leash of the Planetary Wanderers—or for the simple; that force which makes things fall down instead of up.”
Samuille nodded. “It is given to you to know such secrets, which after the first World-end, shall be lost to the children of men until the approach of the second. Much greater things will you also be shown. For as you have been a messenger upon the face of this Earth, so you shall be on another—though it not be until you have traversed these binding forces to emerge again from their grip near the end of time.”
cockatrice [Middle English] cocatrix ichneumon [Middle Latin]: a legendary serpent that is hatched by a reptile from a cock’s egg and that has a deadly glance
— Webster’s 9th New Collegiate Dictionary
1
Cockatrice
T
he tracks showed two big dragons, spade-backed spike-tails, according to the harvesters. The workers made frantic hand signs against the evil spirits that haunted such monsters, and other kinds more bloodthirsty, all too near.
A’Nu-Ahki reined his mount, stroking the scaly rim of the unicorn’s bony collar-shield to soothe it after their charge at the ram’s horn alarm. The threshing floor around him was a trampled mud bog. Migrant workers began to knot about the mounted men, jabbering of ruined work and lost pay.
The broad five-toed prints showed a casual gait for the forest cover, southwest. A’Nu-Ahki knew that spikers grazed mostly in the western grasslands, beyond the jungle. That didn’t mean they couldn’t use the woods to good advantage. He pushed an irritating shock of black hair that had fallen over his eyes back into his bronze helmet, and signaled his scouts to fan out.
Not good country for mounted tracking, he thought, as he shot a wistful glance over his shoulder at the big river. The twist of his neck only freed the clump of hair to fall back into his eyes.
North, on the far bank, past the mashed-in wheat fields and palm tree rimmed waterfront, the city of Salaam-Surupag reclined like a queen by a garden fountain. A’Nu-Ahki could almost see her motion him home to the stepped pyramids that flickered in the sunlight. The red-gold domes mocked him with their call from a token attempt at a job for which he already knew he had no instinct. He turned to the jungle, and lowered his lance into its riding notch behind the semi-reptilian unicorn’s broad collar of scale-covered bone. Only then did he gouge his hair back under his head armor.
After a muttered invocation for the Hunt, he signaled his remaining men forward, line abreast, with mounts spaced at ten cubit intervals. They entered the forest on either side of the trampled undergrowth. Procedurally correct—as if that’ll make any difference when the time comes.
Greenish-gray shadows swallowed A’Nu-Ahki, as he led his hunting party past the last wurm-repellent smoke pot. He checked his flank guards on either side only to see them absorbed by the thickening jungle.
The size and weight of the spike-tails left clearly marked trails. These soon vanished to all but skilled eyes, as if the dragons had fled through some magic gateway hidden in the green. It still amazed A’Nu-Ahki how such huge seemingly slow-witted monsters could erase their passage. He knew it was not sorcery—at least none from the beasts themselves. Spikers habitually reared up and hopped diagonally over thorn patches or other obstacles to elude trackers and predators.
Consequently, A’Nu-Ahki never followed the main spoor, but assigned that to one of his trackers. “Somebody who actually knows what he’s doing out here,” he muttered to himself.
The jungle stifled sound in balmy mists heavy with mold and nearby swamp gas. The unicorns slowed wherever they had to either hop over or stuff their toothy beaks with thicker ground cover. Mostly they ate.
The urge to shout always came with the constricting green. A’Nu-Ahki resisted it. Even a tapping code could scare spiky into a rampage. He remembered getting sick the first time he had seen a man impaled on one of those stake-ended tails. Nor could he dismount to cut his way through. It had become far too dangerous since the strange migrations started about twenty years ago—not because of spikers, but for other lurkers in the green gloom with more demanding hungers.
A’Nu-Ahki’s mind began to wander. Other lurkers…
He shook himself. “Nu, a drifting mind is a good way to get killed out here,” his father had told him all too often.
Wood clinked against metal off to A’Nu-Ahki’s left, through the trees, followed by a violent rustle in the ferns. Swoosh-thud! Metal cracked, as unseen body armor caved against the bludgeon of a hidden spiked tail.
Nu’s dreams burned with the accusing eyes of wives and children from fallen subordinates. It was hard not to wonder just how many of them had originally requested duty in his band because they wanted to be led by the prophesied Comforter of heavenly A’Nu. Some comfort I am!
He tugged at his lance, only to tangle the tip in some hanging vines.
An invisible juggernaut smacked the small of his back, knocking away both his wind and his perch on the unicorn’s saddle. A’Nu-Ahki flew, rag-doll, into some ferns, where he lost his helmet and bashed his head on a giant tree root. Swimming eyes only half-saw the shadow-creatures mount his unicorn in bird-like hops, while the world faded in and out around him.
They moved from the trees in black-green blurs, elusive chameleon ghost-furies that became fully visible only for split seconds whenever they paused or changed direction. The cockatrice matriarch, perched atop the saddle of the thrashing unicorn, summoned more of her army from the undergrowth with a demonic screech.
Nu willed himself to scramble away, but his body could not budge against his frozen diaphragm. Panic distantly forced his fading mind to resign itself to death, until he blacked out.
Shallow gasps. He was gone only a few seconds. When light returned, he saw the phantom basilisks swarm over his mount, their throaty squawks like the mocking taunts of evil children. Darkness came and went several times through the sickening rips of hide and his unicorn’s dying squeal, as the cockatrici disemboweled it with scimitar toe claws.
Nu tried to prop himself onto his elbow to get more air, but the effort only made his world spin faster and the dark spells last longer.
The thorny jungle re-focused. One of the wurm-pack muckled its jaws onto the base of the unicorn’s whipping tail, only to be slapped by it through the dense foliage. The reckless cockatrice crumpled with a broken neck against a giant tree trunk, skin colors faded to gray in death. The remaining pack fell to their grisly feast as Nu blacked out again…
When the jungle reappeared, A’Nu-Ahki’s gorge rose. Fiery needles jabbed his spastic diaphragm. Shaken brambles and stringy red shreds flew upward from nearby. Croaking taunts from cruel children tortured the air; sounds which slowly clarified into the calls of the cockatrice matriarch.
The beast on the unicorn’s haunch paused from her lightning jabs. Blood and mangled flesh dripped from a needle-toothed grin that seemed to float free with enchanted bird-of-prey eyes against a greenish backdrop. She looked up and cocked her neck back and forth, as if to range in a new victim.
A’Nu-Ahki fought to focus until he could make out the matriarch’s size and shape—about that of a grown man crouched over. He knew it could not have missed him even in the ferns. If not by sight, terror scent alone gave him away. Yet the cockatrice must not have found him worth leaving her meaty perch to pursue. Instead, she jolted her head back to devour
the still-twitching unicorn.
No intelligence, no malice—only animal hunger, Nu realized.
Time slowed to a hyper-conscious mélange; the moment of clarity just before death.
He groped to pull the ferns over him, hardly able to squeak in the breath to keep from passing out again. A new thought assailed his airless panic. The wurm pack should have pounced on his helpless body! If these are servants of the Great Basilisk, they should leave the unicorn and attack me! I’m the prophesied Comforter from A’Nu!
The big doubt.
“The big lie!” he thought he heard some scuffling boys shout at him through the rattling bushes.
His neck lost strength until his head flopped back hard into the root. The blackness returned, full of noise, as flesh ripped and bones snapped amid the laughter of the jeering boys.
The diabolical children gaggled and screeched with the wurm pack, lashing out at him from the void. “They spare you because their master knows you will spread the seed of your own doubt to others!”
“You carry Basilisk seed!” barked their leader, who had eyes like the cockatrice matriarch. “You are not A’Nu’s Comfort! How can A’Nu—the vastness of E’Yahavah-in-the-heavens—comfort us through the likes of you? You are spared because you are dragon seed— wurm kin!”
In the turbulent darkness, old memories and evil rumors gushed out like hot blood from an open wound, disjointed, but all too familiar.
A putrid twilight grew in A’Nu-Ahki eyes, a faded shadow realm where the frenzied wurms and the brutal children all became one. The boy with the cockatrice eyes hovered over him, while the others barked and scraped around him in a devouring circle.
“You know what they say about your mother!” howled the vulture-eyed boy.
A’Nu-Ahki had somehow been here before. Soon it grew clearer. He had lunged at his tormentor and missed—long ago. During his moment of imbalance, the cockatrice-boy had swept in and tripped him up. Nu had landed with a humiliating thump on his back, the wind knocked out of him. The ring of boys laughed in wild guttural croaks at his clumsiness.
“Bhat-Aenusa, daughter of Bara’Ki’El, from Clan Aenusi—Princess of the Balimar apostates. Whore princess of the snake-eyed Watchers!”
The boy with the wurm matriarch’s eyes now had the leering face of Nu’s cousin, Uruk. The ferns had become the green belt-way around Salaam-Surupag Boy’s Academy.
“I bet she was Uzaaz’El’s personal favorite.”
A’Nu-Ahki’s respiration grew to a shallow pant. He tried again to push himself free of the paralysis.
“She couldn’t resist him, could she? He just took her over and she did things for him like a harem puppet. And she loved it, didn’t she?”
Gibber-laughter came from the academy boys, who all had needle-toothed mouths and fire-hungry eyes.
“Not much of a titan, are you, Nu?” Uruk laughed with the others. “The Nae-fillim are not all so big. Some are degenerate little things with two heads, or stupid ape-like beasts with one eye. They say that many even look normal and walk unknown among us.”
A’Nu-Ahki wanted to scream, to leap up from the ground and take Uruk by the throat and throttle the life out of him. But the airless panic would not release him.
Uruk kicked him in the side to prolong the effect. For a flashing instant Nu saw the talon of a cockatrice slashing by.
“The ‘normal’ ones always give themselves away, though. They can’t hide their true appetites forever. How long before yours pop out, eh Nu?” The tormentor knelt on A’Nu-Ahki’s chest and made obscene hand gestures over his face.
Uruk’s features melted into those of the wurm matriarch, smiling teeth splattered with fresh blood and unicorn entrails. A great curved gutting claw twitched expectantly against Nu’s chest as her bird-like foot pressed onto his stomach, which constricted his diaphragm yet again.
The snuffing cockatrice head lowered to where a quick peck would have torn out A’Nu-Ahki’s throat. Her neck muscles coiled to strike, but instead she became Uruk again—same eyes, same grin, only a human voice.
For Nu it was like being in two places at once, as if he watched everything from outside his body—panic and a place beyond panic.
“Your father almost divorced her when she wound up pregnant with you, old boy,” Uruk said. “All that stuff about Lumekki having a prophecy over his firstborn son was just to cover for your mother after you were born, and they saw you looked halfway normal. Of course, it’s only halfway…”
White light shimmered through the trees overhead. Other voices approached from beyond the circling pack-wurm-boys, as if carried down from above the rain-forest.
A flicker of uncertainty seemed to touch Uruk’s eyes. He barked something unintelligible to his minions, and rose from his victim’s chest. As if angry at the interruption, he kicked A’Nu-Ahki’s side again, just as breath seemed ready to return fully. Then he and the jabber-wurm school-boys scuffled off into the green twilight and left Nu huddled in fetal position, gasping, bloody, and marinated in tears of humiliation.
I couldn’t fight! I didn’t fight! I tried to fight, but I was too slow. I’m always too slow! Always too late…
The Light drew nearer until A’Nu-Ahki heard a man’s voice from its center. At first, it seemed like one of his hunters searching, but as it grew clearer, it began to sound more like his father.
“Yes, it is true I once doubted your mother,” Lumekki admitted to the Light, and to his son—long ago.
“How could you?” Nu heard the voice of his younger self shout with a boy’s indignation.
“I’m much ashamed of it now.”
“You should be!” A’Nu-Ahki still regretted the outburst two hundred and fifty-odd years later.
The Light dimmed to a saddened gray.
Lumekki’s voice carried through the trees. “Your Grandfather Bara’Ki’El sent her away to protect her from the sons of the gods. It probably got him killed. His was the last clan in Balimar that followed the Archon. Your mother must have conceived you on our wedding night. I went off to war at Zhri’Nikkor, and did not see her again for many months. When I returned and found her heavy with child, I dwelt on how her sister had played in Ardis Temple against Bara’Ki’El’s wishes. My suspicious nature got the best of me.”
Nu willed for his younger self to soften, to try to understand. Yet he was as helpless to change history as he was to make his arms and legs carry him away from the cockatrice pack.
“I had dreams,” his father’s voice said, “horrible nightmares.”
“What dreams?” demanded the shadow of Nu’s outraged youth. “Were they a seer’s vision? Did you know something?”
The Light darkened more. A’Nu-Ahki feared it would go out, leaving him alone; exposed to the cockatrice-boys, who could not be far.
“No,” his father said. “I would see your mother wake up in cold sweats, screaming. She would hold her belly in torment…”
“So she goes into labor—that’s supposed to hurt!”
“Not labor, son. In the dream she would shriek that it was clawing its way out from the inside!”
The Light continued to fade until A’Nu-Ahki saw Uruk with the cockatrice pack circling him hungrily amid the trees.
The voice of Lumekki withered with the Light, pleading to the boy A’Nu-Ahki still sometimes felt like he was. “The child was birthed in blood from the womb of a dead woman. Each time I had that nightmare I saw the infant emerge from her body, aglow with a sickly sheen, its moldy gray head, and black white-less eyes devoid of humanity.”
“Is that how you see me—diseased and unhuman?”
“No, son! It was Dragon-talk! I took my fears to my father, just as you have now taken yours to me. He dropped everything and made pilgrimage to Paru’Ainu, and found wisdom on my behalf. The Messenger of E’Yahavah appeared to him, and reassured him about you!”
“How can I know?” Nu wept with the boy he once was.
The Light lingered in his father’s oat
h. “On the day of your birth, I received the seer’s gift of our ancestors. I knew that you would grow up to be the Comforter from E’Yahavah A’Nu. I swear this to you by the Divine Name! Don’t be afraid!”
Yet A’Nu-Ahki was afraid—both the boy and the man.
The forest darkened somewhat as the searching voices moved off. The wurms began to poke their heads out again from the foliage. Some of the smaller ones pounced onto the unicorn carcass, fighting for scraps left by the feeding frenzy of the larger ones. Into their midst stepped the Matriarch, her demon-rooster head turned with a baleful eye straight at A’Nu-Ahki.
“Don’t desert me to them!” Nu pleaded toward the fading Light. “I have no seer’s gift, and no idea how to be this ‘Comforter’ they say I am!”
The cockatrice Matriarch croaked at him and narrowed her eyes while her toe hooks thumped the bloody ground with anticipation. Once more she transformed herself into Uruk—and Nu saw for the first time an effeminate insecurity hiding behind his older cousin’s witty smirk and charmed eyes. If Uruk were simply a thug, Nu could have dismissed him. There was something more. Uruk was not just bigger and stronger—he was smarter, more cunning, and a natural leader. Nu had never been able to compete with him in anything as a child.
Why then does he feel the need to tear me down? What do I have that he wants? The Prophecy? He flat out rejects it! Why would he want that? A father? His died before he was born…
Uruk stepped closer. Nu saw a cockatrice toe-claw click from his cousin’s sandal in the departing light.
“So what does my being A’Nu’s Comforter mean if it all ends for me here and now?” Nu demanded of the forest.
The Light halted its withdrawal.
Uruk again hesitated and lost the initiative.
Air flooded into A’Nu-Ahki’s lungs. A golden shaft of sunshine shot obliquely down into the glade.
The leader of the wurm pack stopped in mid-stride when the fiery beam touched the ground in front of Nu.
Dawn Apocalypse Rising (The Windows of Heaven Book 1) Page 2
