The seemingly bottomless crater-pit that marked their northern border came into view, and Jaxinta kept quiet. She said nothing when they finally caught sight of the yawning mouth of the cave system that was their destination. She did smile widely, though; it had been a long time and she had missed it every day.
“Nearly there,” Melaarny said softly.
Jaxinta looked at her. “Little sis, are you okay?”
Melaarny’s nervous smile was answer enough.
“Fair enough,” seemed the most appropriate reply.
They stopped at the mouth of the cave system – a sharply twisting tunnel barely two people wide. It was shadowy and dark inside; no fires burnt in the lanterns affixed to the walls.
“Coo-ee!” Jaxinta yelled.
Melaarny laughed, surprising herself. Jaxinta laughed with her before calling again. No reply. Jaxinta raised her hand to call a third time, and two shapes carrying flaming torches suddenly melted from the darkness.
“Damn,” Jaxinta and Melaarny said at almost exactly the same time.
A pair of adult warriors stood before them. The sisters were both instantly and utterly intimidated: Melaarny had never met these particular warriors before, only seen them in passing as they guarded the priest, while Jaxinta had only met them the once, when her own time had come. The warriors were gnarled, weathered, leathered and lined. Their names had been stripped; their lives were devoted solely to their duty, as was the priest’s. They were old, the gap between them and Jaxinta at least the same as that between Jaxinta and her brothers, and they were strong.
Jaxinta and Melaarny weren’t really sure how they knew that. They just did. They both felt the urge to curse again. They resisted; in the presence of these warriors was no place for frivolity.
“Melaarny, it is time,” the warrior-man said.
The warrior-woman rolled her eyes at her partner’s solemnity, something that surprised the sister. “Jaxinta, you may go,” she said. “I’m sure your parents can’t wait to see you.”
Jaxinta smiled to herself; she was just as eager to get home as she imagined they were. She thought back to when she had been called. There had been no goodbyes – an adult had fetched her, escorted her to the cave then left her all alone. Her childhood had ended at that moment and a new life had begun and there had been no family to share it with. Now, she understood why. Back then, she had been a mess. The world of spirits and gods held little sway over her, but she still muttered a ‘thank you’ for the chance to see her little sister take her first steps on the path.
Hugging Melaarny tight and almost squeezing the breath out of her brought tears to Jaxinta’s eyes.
“Stay safe. Remember that we love you. Be strong.”
“Jax, please, don’t…”
Jaxinta let her little sister go and turned her back before she did or said something that she would regret. Melaarny was left to just stand wordless, forced to watch her big sister walk away. For a moment, Melaarny was exactly the same as any child on the verge of adulthood – alone and overwhelmed, all too aware that what she knew was but a pale shadow of everything that was, consumed by both fear and excitement at the thought of what she was about to see and learn.
The warrior-woman crouched until her shattered, scarred face was level with Melaarny’s own. She looked Melaarny in the eye. She winked and smiled a crooked smile, the only kind she could muster.
“We were once like you,” she said, gesturing back at her partner. “We stood here, frightened and excited in equal measure.”
The warrior-man stared into the distance. He might have been smiling, Melaarny couldn’t really tell – most of his face was lost behind his bird-nest beard.
“Look at us now…”
Melaarny had a hard time believing that either of the warriors had ever been children. It was a ridiculous idea; she knew that they had been born and raised like everyone else, that they weren’t ghosts or spirits who had simply come into being and joined the tribe. But there was no sign of childlike delight or wonder in them now. They were hard, like approximations of people carved from rock. Try as she might, Melaarny couldn’t imagine them any other way.
“You’ve a long road ahead, child,” the warrior-man said. “But if you pay attention and do as you’re told, you’ll be fine.”
Melaarny nodded. She didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how she should address them. All in all, she didn’t know what to do, full-stop. The warrior-woman reached out and ruffled her hair. Melaarny squirmed at this, a faint smile on her face. The warrior-woman stood back up, ignoring Melaarny’s embarrassment.
“Come along, and don’t dawdle.”
***
They entered the shadowy tunnel beyond the cave-mouth, the steel gates that kept their tribe safe soon disappearing behind them. The warriors walked side-by-side, purposeful yet seemingly unhurried; Melaarny trailed after them, barely managing to keep up. She breathed deeply of the wet-earth smell that came from deep below, the smell of home. The tunnel walls caught the light of the warriors’ torches and reflected back every colour imaginable, a rainbow-shimmer of metals and plastics and alloys fused into a solid mass filled with streaks and whorls. As she did every time she walked through it, Melaarny couldn’t help marvelling at it.
But this time she didn’t stop to drink it in.
They hurried on past various chambers and caverns, down numerous tunnels and passages, some of rock and some of wood and some of steel. Melaarny recognised a number of these chambers and tunnels, and others she had only seen in glimpses. She wondered where they were going, and felt a delicious sliver of excitement at the thrill of the unknown. She felt a pang of sadness as they passed the honeycomb-cells she and the other children slept in. She felt slightly bored as they entered a dead-straight tunnel of dull steel that seemed to stretch on forever. She felt another sliver of excitement as they turned into a side-tunnel she had never seen before. And then she felt the excitement turn to sudden dread, as the warriors extinguished their torches without warning and plunged the side-tunnel into darkness.
Melaarny swore aloud and then ran into the woman-warrior, who had unexpectedly stopped in front of her.
“Do not worry, child, you have nothing to fear,” the warrior-man said. “This is simply a precautionary measure – very few of us know this path, and the priest and the elders would prefer to keep it that way.”
Dripping with panic-sweat and mightily afraid, Melaarny said nothing. To make it worse, she barely understood half of what the warrior-man had said – his age was made plain by the words he chose to use. The warrior-woman ruffled Melaarny’s hair a second time before slipping something over her eyes. Melaarny twitched and started at this, caught by surprise.
“Please, Melaarny, be still,” the warrior-woman said.
Melaarny submitted and dutifully relaxed, and a moment later the blindfold was tied snugly over her eyes. She heard the sound of the warriors relighting their torch and felt the warmth of a nearby fire on her bare skin. Not even a faint glow bled through the blindfold.
“I’ll be right behind you, making sure you don’t trip,” the warrior-woman said. “The ground is mostly flat and the way ahead is safe.”
Melaarny didn’t move. She couldn’t move, as fixed as rock thanks to her fear.
“All you have to do is walk,” the warrior-man said.
The warriors waited, patient and understanding. Trapped behind her blindfold, Melaarny willed herself to move. Nothing happened. The warriors kept waiting. Melaarny tried again. Still, nothing happened. Still the warriors kept waiting. Finally – finally – Melaarny took a single step and then another and another, and began to realise that everything would be okay.
“Very good,” the warrior-man said. “Be sure to listen for my voice.”
The warrior-woman abstained from such patronising condescension, reassuring Melaarny with a simple squeeze of the shoulder. They set off, a strange caravan – the old and weathered leading the young and blind. The warrior-man sp
oke up occasionally, calling out directions. Sealed in darkness somewhere deep within the earth, Melaarny let her imagination run wild. She pictured verdant plains filled with the beasts of childhood stories, endless skies filled with Fixed Birds in flight, lands of wonder and marvel and mystery. And although she felt slightly afraid of what she might find, still she felt ready for it. Her world of uncertainty and un-belonging had drawn-on; she had straddled the threshold of childhood and adulthood too long; it was her turn as much as it was her time.
As the feeling of readiness grew, she picked up her pace.
The warrior-man in front obliged her. The warrior-woman behind laughed. They kept on. The tunnels they walked snaked and wormed; blinded, Melaarny had no sense of direction, no idea which of the four points of a compass they were headed towards. Sometimes she heard dripping water, sometimes faint birdsong, sometimes a low moan, the tunnels and caves and the very world itself shifting and settling, shifting and settling. The ground underfoot was mostly flat, as had been promised. From slick and dry to rough and rocky, from cold and hard to sharp and brittle, she could feel its odd textures through the soles of her shoes, and could feel these textures change without warning. The wet-earth smell lingered, joined every-so-often by the flat tang of still water and the vile sweetness of carrion and rot.
They walked for what felt like hours. Melaarny steadily grew thirsty. Her feet started to ache.
“Child, you may stop,” the warrior-man finally said.
Melaarny muttered a ‘thank you’ under her breath. The warrior-woman reached forward, removing Melaarny’s blindfold. Blinking hard, she staggered a little. The warrior-woman righted her before unclipping a skin of water from her belt and encouraging her to drink. Melaarny drank and drank and drank. The spots in front of her eyes soon faded, and she passed the skin back.
“Thank you,” she said, always one to mind her manners.
Both warriors laughed.
“You’re welcome,” the warrior-man said.
Melaarny looked about the chamber she found herself in. It was cramped, with barely enough room for the three of them; a hole in the low ceiling let a perfectly round pool of light brighten the grey earthen floor; to Melaarny’s right, a tunnel bored into the rock and disappeared into the darkness.
The warrior-woman extinguished her torch, the warrior-man did the same, and they waved Melaarny towards the pool of light. Standing right over it, Melaarny craned her neck and looked up into the hole.
“Bugger…”
The warriors ignored her curse; it was a somewhat extraordinary sight. High above them was the burning disc of the sun – so small that it could fit in the palm of your hand – with a sliver of blue sky below it. Running up one wall of the shaft were two parallel steel poles, rungs fixed onto them every metre or so. The light was so bright that Melaarny took an involuntary step back.
“It’s called a ladder,” the warrior-man said.
Melaarny rolled this new word around in her mouth. She knew that it was just the first of many, but she wanted to savour it nonetheless.
“And it works like this…” The warrior-man jumped, caught hold of the lowest rung, and hauled himself up until he had disappeared from view.
Dust fell in his wake, but not too much, not enough to cause worry or concern. Speechless, Melaarny looked over at the warrior-woman, who smiled and nodded before bending down and cupping her hands. Somehow, Melaarny instinctively knew what to do – with grace and ease, the warrior-woman boosted her up until she too caught a rung. She strained and fought, and eventually started climbing after the warrior-man, the warrior-woman following them both.
“Not long now,” the warrior-woman called, laughter in her voice.
Melaarny didn’t know what to feel. She put her mind to the hard work of the climb, letting effort and grind drive every other thought away. Looking up, all she saw were the rough soles of the warrior-man’s boots. Looking down, it was the smiling face of the warrior-woman. Melaarny looked straight ahead and concentrated on climbing. The grey concrete walls of the shaft never changed. Once or twice, Melaarny caught a rung in the crook of her elbow and wiped the sweat from her palms. Her blood pounded in her ears; her breath was ragged.
They climbed for a long time, up and up and up and up. And then just like that there were no more rungs, and a reaching hand took hold of Melaarny’s and pulled her free.
***
Melaarny found herself standing on a concrete platform in the middle of an enormous white cave. She lacked the words to call it anything else – in size it resembled the vast spaces that made up the caves she called home, but apart from that it was unlike anything she had seen before. Impossibly distant walls curved into a high domed ceiling marred by a gaping hole almost directly above her; it let the sun in, flooding her in bright light but leaving the rest of the cave in shadow. Innumerable cracks ran from it, spreading across the ceiling and down the walls, growing steadily thinner the further they ran. The floor was a mess of wreckage and rubble, broken wood and steel, brick and cement, rock-like chunks a white substance that bore no small resemblance to the walls themselves.
Melaarny spotted a group of elders, almost hidden in the shadows.
Dumbstruck and increasingly nervous, she looked away lest she get caught staring. Straight ahead, the far-end of the cave ended in something that was almost a gate and almost a wall: long spikes ran from the floor to the ceiling and from the ceiling to the floor, a jigsaw-portcullis, the perfection of the interlocking rows only broken by an occasional gap. Melaarny could see that at some point the domed ceiling and the distant walls began tapering towards the gate-wall, and it was only a quarter as wide and as high as its depths.
Melaarny spun on the spot, running directly into the two warriors who had led the way.
“Sorry,” she said breathlessly.
Behind the warriors, the domed ceiling and distant walls tapered again, narrowly this time, seeming to disappear into the earth itself. Some part of Melaarny wanted to know where they went. She ached to know, a real feeling, physical and raw. She looked up at the two warriors. Although they both shook their heads ‘no’ they smiled wide and bright nonetheless, amused by Melaarny’s eagerness. She turned away and looked down at the group of elders she had spotted earlier. The old woman who led them lit a torch, illuminating her face.
“Welcome, child,” the priest called.
Overexcited and forgetting her place, Melaarny leapt off the platform to join her. Not a second thought was spared. For all Melaarny knew, the floor of the cavern – almost two metres below – could have been unstable or unsafe, riddled with snags and pitfalls. The half-second between Melaarny launching into the air and landing on the ground seemed to stretch on and on. Caught in it, Melaarny realised just how much of a child she still was.
She landed heavily, teetered back and forth, almost fell. “I’m sorry,” she said before she had even looked up.
The priest reached out, cupped Melaarny’s chin and raised her head. Melaarny avoided her gaze, tried not to swear and did a good enough job of it.
“This one time, you are forgiven.”
The priest’s voice was a reed-thin scratch. She smiled at Melaarny and the innumerable wrinkles covering her face wormed and flowed. With a surprising show of strength, she took Melaarny’s hand and pulled her to her feet.
“It is your time. Your time to learn about the world, to leave childhood behind and to become an adult.” She looked Melaarny in the eye and her smile faded. “And it is your time to choose.”
At that, she strode off for the gate-wall. The two warriors smiled at each other before following her, accustomed to her ways. Melaarny let herself get caught in their wake; the elders that had accompanied the priest didn’t know what to do. They dithered for a moment before a grizzled old man gathered them together and led them on to the gate-wall. Melaarny recognised him as Mykul, their one time leader. He had always been a calm man, sure of himself and at peace, and it came as no surprise to Melaarny
that he was the one to steer the other elders through the torrent of abruptness and pigheadedness that flowed from the priest.
Melaarny lagged slightly and shot Mykul a quick smile of encouragement borne of excitement. He returned her smile, a little bemused, and then Melaarny hurried along to catch up with the priest – she had stopped at a hole in the gate-wall and was blocking the way ahead, her back to those that trailed after her. Melaarny realised that the spikes making up the gate-wall’s ‘teeth’ were longer and bigger than she had first thought. There were hundreds of them, each taller than an adult, descending from the now-low ceiling and, surprisingly, rising from the floor. Each one tapered along its length, an exact fit with those surrounding it.
“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” the priest said, more to herself than anyone else.
She laughed, as if she had told an exceptionally funny joke. Once again, the other elders just looked confused, apart from the two adult warriors and Mykul. They knew the priest of old, knew her foibles and strange habits well.
“Here goes nothing.”
She laughed again and walked through the hole she had been standing before. It was as if her whole being demanded that everyone else follow, an unsaid command they couldn’t ignore. And so they stumbled after her. Playing her part well, she had stepped to the side the moment she cleared the gap, in order to avoid being bowled over. Melaarny wasn’t so lucky; in their haste to get through, the elders behind her knocked her off her feet. Apologies and pardons rang in the air as she caught herself on her palms. She ignored them, not out of discourtesy or displeasure but in eagerness to see what was coming next. The priest and the elders encircled her, blocking the way ahead. Mykul shadowed the priest, watching Melaarny the whole time.
“Take my hand, child,” the priest said.
We Call It Monster Page 24
