by Marc Secchia
In a word, yes.
“I’m sure that if I left and never returned, sheer loneliness would kill me. So I ask you, nay I beg you, to consider my words. I shall return at noon in three days’ time. Prepare yourself.”
She essayed no word.
Asturbar was just about to depart, when he turned on his heel. “Would it be an awful sin if I pinched just one bread roll? Just a teensy bite?”
Light flickered within the entrance; he caught a sharp whiff of ozone, and then he heard the sound of a body falling.
“Girl? Girl?”
No answer. After a short while, Asturbar left. He was not so crass as to help himself to any of her food, but he did replace the broken flowers in the vase with fresh ones. He had a hunch she was the type of girl who would notice.
* * * *
Having laboriously hauled the chair together with his less-than-svelte person up one of the ravines which seemed less populated and more navigable than most of the others, Asturbar returned to his hut that afternoon. How quiet it seemed now. How basic and lacking in homely touches. His Three Scamps had become seven, and they had raided both his fruit bowl and his vegetable patch for treats.
“Rascals! Go hunt for yourselves!”
He pottered haphazardly about the place, his thoughts consumed by the presence of a girl who hid in caves, whose magic struck him as powerful and fey. Could he imagine that there had been some kind of connection between them? He thought about Rezhine, wondering if he betrayed her memory by the gush of his feelings for a girl whom he had barely met; indeed, whom he knew not at all. Watering his vegetables and succouring what could be saved of the dragonets’ destruction, he remembered her voice. Collecting fruit and checking his snares, he pictured her petite footprint. Carving a new leg for her chair, he replayed her playful tones as she took him to task for calling her ‘ma’am.’ What could he call her? One banished so young could not have been married. Without a trusted third party they could not be introduced; without introduction, he could not ask personal details of her – although he already knew her age, he realised. Twenty-two. That was an intimate detail.
Asturbar finished his repairs by that evening, and before suns-down scoured his woodpile for pieces suitable for being split for shutter slats. Shutters were a sweet touch, but he just did not understand why they might be necessary in this never-changing, wind-still climate.
To his inner soldier’s disgust he spent the following two days moping over the girl and the impressive catalogue of hapless blunders he had already committed with regard to her, but come the following morning, he bounded off his pallet with a zesty crow of delight. Yes! Maybe he would even see her this time. He actually skipped out of the door. Skipped! Cracking his bounding head on the lintel, however, had the salutary effect of curing him of his Moons-madness. Asturbar growled a soldierly curse, felt the worse for his crass and newly bitten tongue, and gathered his effects. No. Calm down. Plenty of time.
Exercise first, then breakfast. Asturbar peered suspiciously past the Islands fringing the natural amphitheatre, wondering at the strangely dusky quality of the light. He could not see anything untoward, but the day seemed unusually quiet. Where were his dragonet friends? Most peculiar. He had not been subjected to the usual early morning song-making. By the time he had bathed in the central pool, Asturbar was convinced there was something distinctly odd afoot. The hairs crawled on the nape of his neck. The air felt sticky and oppressive. The birds were not singing. Even the insects had failed to stir with the dawn. As he watched, a pair of hand-sized – his hands, that was – bombardier beetles disappeared beneath the front porch he had built last week.
Something was wrong, perhaps a storm front incoming, although not a single cloud marred the sky – standard for this place, in his experience. Did the Doldrums even have weather? Maybe he should find shelter. The issue was, all of the decent caves were down below. That would bring him closer to the girl, happily – and might she offer him shelter if there was a blow in the offing? Warming to a pleasing mental image of taking shelter from a fierce storm, of holding the girl in his arms and comforting her, Asturbar trotted off on his mission with understandable zeal. His new rope was braided from a fibrous succulent plant, prepared the hard way with hours of painstaking labour – pulping the leaves, extracting the fibres, cleaning them and finally braiding them finely, strand by strand, until they reached a thickness that could be called rope. Strong stuff, too. How the boys had scoffed at being taught rope-making during their basic infantry training!
He rappelled down the cliff with the ease of long practice. Everything was so quiet. His danger sense was birthing baby dragonets. Asturbar moved faster, but not half as fast as the weird half-light occluding the suns. He began to hear a low, sibilant hissing sound that was unlike any storm he had ever heard before. The whole Island around him was buttoned down. Bated breath. Bloodsucking bantalizards, where was … everything? No butterfly dragonets. No insects. Every leaf upon every bush stood utterly motionless, as if paralysed – like the alarm searing the portals of his heart, now. Go!
Gripping her chair in his left elbow, he put both hands to the rope and slid the remaining fifty feet in a controlled fall. Thump. Boots to ground. An eerie, wind-like wailing sound rose over the bulk of the Isle above. The darkness deepened ominously. Tossing the chair into a handy clump of bushes, he sprinted for the hut. Front door thumped closed. He banged on the panels. No answer. Of course, she was not home. Smart. She knew what this storm was and had taken shelter in her cave.
Boots skidding on the soft sward, Asturbar rounded the hut faster than he would have believed possible. That was no storm. The sound made the hackles stand erect on the back of his neck. It was like a thousand Dragons on the move, a mighty rushing of wings, but this sound hearkened to hard, chitinous appendages rather than the predatory thunder of attacking Dragons. They were coming fast.
A smaller man would have made far easier going of the narrow cleft that led to her cave. Approaching, Asturbar shouted, “Open the wards! Let me in!” His sideways steps scraped his stomach, his muscular chest, his elbows and knees. He had no need to simulate alarm. “Open the sakkix-sucking wards!”
“I can’t! Oh, please …”
Something landed beside him. It was almost transparent, an insectoid beast out of a nightmare. Six razor-tipped legs. Wings that looked sharper than daggers, and a mean, undershot jaw stuffed with tiny fangs, above which he saw the only hint of colour about the beast – orange eyes, blazing with infernal hatred. Asturbar stove its head in with his axe, but in the blink of an eye, ten of its friends wedged their bodies into the gap and oriented upon the alarmed soldier with rapacious interest. Above the narrow chasm, hundreds of bodies whizzed past with that terrible, sibilant sound he had heard earlier, the rapid rubbing of wings against insectoid thoraxes. Each was a foot to two feet in length. Thousands. A swarm!
“Open it!”
“Can’t – the magic’s keyed –”
“Curse it, girl, I’m naked out here! Gaah, close enough …”
“I’m sorry. So sorry.”
Asturbar struck, and struck out again. His huge weapon was a liability in this tiny space. Thrust. Parry. Kick! They did not die easily; those multi-thorax bodies were as tough as old leather. Ants with wings was the closest his experience could place them. He shook one off his boot, ripped another off his shoulder with his free hand, and ran it through with the spiked tip of his axe.
He roared, “Tell me what to do!”
Stay outside, he’d get eaten alive. At least two creatures slapped against his bent upper back; Asturbar surged backward to crush them against stone, but there were five more right behind, biting rabidly at any and every body part they could reach. He ditched the axe in another body and struck out with his huge fists. Wham-a-blam! He had been gifted for this. Fists like literal hammers given his metal-reinforced bones. Their skulls were strong but breakable. Jab! Jab-and-smash! Crouching to present less of a target, Asturbar struck ou
t blindly amidst the thickening flurry. They were crawling down the sides of the ravine in huge numbers now, probably attracted to the scent of his blood.
“Sunlocusts! Hut – trapdoor!” Her cry barely reached his hearing. “Under the bed!”
The hut? Of course. It had shutters. A door. Any protection was better than nothing out here, but the swarm was so dense now that it clogged the narrow entryway and turned daylight to darkness, despite the colourless bodies of these creatures. Sunlocusts. The fabled billion-fold swarms said to strip Islands bare within minutes. This was why the Doldrums were so barren. He had no need to ask what they ate. Meat was on the menu. Tough, unwilling Human meat.
His hand fell again upon the haft of his axe. That foolish girl had forgotten to add ward elements for any kind of emergency. Perhaps she had never imagined sheltering a soldier in her cave. Perhaps she could not, or did not know how. He had bigger problems to deal with. Twenty of the creatures mobbed his person now. Teeth gnawed at his fingers, gnashed at his ears, scrabbled around his lips, tore at his shirt; crimson streaked his arms.
He’d chop his way free. With a mighty roar, Asturbar heaved to his feet, using the close rock walls to scrape off and crush his foes. He still could barely move, but what space he had created would be a winnowing ground for his battle-axe. He’d make it count in bodies.
Just then, an irresistible force slammed into the small of his back.
Chapter 7: Sunlocust Plague
SHOUTING. ROARING. HOWLING. Shocked to the core of his being, the infantryman found himself tossed like a windswept leaf through some intersection between a torrent of bodies and a jarring cessation of actual reality. His limbs morphed and shrank and bobbled about him along a dozen impossible vectors all at once, while it seemed a fell, desiccating wind shrieked in his ears. He saw unshod feet pass through his arm and his pulsating heart sat on his nose. If he were allowed to anthropomorphise an organ, his heart looked far more terrified than he felt was manly – but it was justified.
The sunlocusts whispered by; those he struck imploded sharply in blinding bursts of ashen-lavender light. At some point he was convinced his legs had wrapped about his head and one thigh protruded from his grossly enlarged nostril, incongruously placed squarely upon the cheek of his backside – the right – and then he performed another ten limb-bending contortionists’ tricks on his way through an impassable press of bodies. The doorway bulged as he whizzed by, before the power which had just kidnapped his sanity folded him into a Samakoonian pretzel, stuffed him through an eight-inch space beneath a bed – this before bothering to heft the entire bedframe out of the way – and then dropped a heavy wooden trapdoor upon his stupefied cranium for good measure. His head rebounded through a part of him he did not care to mention before hurtling back to assume its proper place atop his shoulders. He hoped.
“Stay here,” hissed a voice.
In another flare of light, his glowing rescuer lifted the trapdoor an inch and shot out so fast that his eyeballs spun independently in their sockets. Darkness slammed upon him.
When his brains had stopped their gyrating dance inside his skull, Asturbar checked his person with rather more care than he had ever imagined he would need to, save if he had been splattered by a draconic fireball, for instance. Mostly, he was intact. He shivered. He had more cuts than he could count and he was not convinced a few organs weren’t still catching up after that incredible ride. His heart pounded in his throat. Terrifying sounds reached his ears, the whistling, unending roar of millions of bodies scraping against each other as they besieged the Island, but in his bolt-hole, he was safe. He felt around him. Empty shelving. He could hear talons scratching the floorboards above his head, but the sunlocusts seemed unable to reach him.
Asturbar mopped his forehead. If that had been the girl …
Was he trapped in the Doldrums with a monster? Surely not. It had been a rush of magic, the power of the beast that dwelled in her cave. She must be enslaved to it somehow.
He hated not knowing.
He loathed the terror now receding, leaving a nauseous aftertaste in the back of his throat. This incident had been outside of his experience. Way outside. Frustrated and furious with himself, he gritted his teeth and gave his surroundings a fierce growl of his own. Save the girl? Safeguard her? Excellent work, Asturbar!
Still, mysteries had a way of staying mysteries. Some might suffer themselves to be revealed in good time, others clung jealously to their enigmatic status for all the days Man or Dragon might claim beneath the suns.
It was sweet to be alive. Asturbar listened for a long while, but the mayhem out there gave no sign of abating. He imagined a carnivorous feeding frenzy, and hoped his sassy septet of dragonets – and the girl-creature – had the good sense to have buried themselves far, far out of sight or reach. What to do? Well, as any professional soldier would opine, ‘always’ was the best time for a nap. Curling up at the bottom of the storeroom, Asturbar nodded off within seconds.
* * * *
The stillness alerted him. Having slept with half an ear open, Asturbar was on his feet before his brain caught up. Environmental check. Did he hear the faintest of sounds, perhaps dragonet song? Yes, and nearer at hand, he detected the scraping of a smaller insect’s carapace against the floorboards. The silence was oppressive.
Was the swarm over? Departed?
Carefully, he ascended two rungs of the ladder and pressed against the trapdoor. Lifted it. His weight snapped the rung and Asturbar fell to the ground. Gaah! Again, more charily. The Island-World lay so still. A deathly chill prickled his neck. He peeked out from beneath the bed. Several twisted and burned sunlocust bodies lay in her bedchamber; a larger pile had apparently been cremated in her living room and kitchen. Asturbar reached through the gap to lever the bed up onto its side, opened the trapdoor fully, and found he had to make a much longer and more painful series of contortions to wriggle out. How had he entered in the first place? That magical distortion was a real, physical phenomenon? Eventually, in lieu of lopping off an arm or skinning his own hide, he resorted to tearing up two floorboards to create enough space to fit through. Suffering tunnel rats! Ripping her house to pieces, he was.
Her light yellow dress lay discarded next to the table. Hmm. Different colour to the one in her drawer, and even shorter. Holy smoking … phew!
Stumbling to the doorway, Asturbar found an Island stripped of greenery. It looked so unclothed that he reddened in a visceral response, before he growled furiously. Mind gushing like a bursting sewer! Every green and living thing had been consumed, from the least leaf of the Island-binders to the flowers in the girl’s window boxes. He surveyed the carnage with a queasy sense of outrage and violation. Here and there amongst the fallen sunlocusts he saw the bones of dragonets, probably eaten alive, but he suspected the majority had hidden themselves in time – unlike a certain fatuous Human and his misplaced amorous follies.
His eyes flicked back to the garment. Clearly, she had fled sans coverings. Fate had just ushered in an ingot-shiny opportunity for a brave soul to perform a noble service … he chuckled to himself. Ah yes. Every motive a pure one, eh, soldier?
Checking on the girl was his first priority, however, for it did seem that she had saved his life by unleashing the beast. Plucking up the garment, he made himself useful.
“Girl? Girl, are you alright in there?” He ground one last sunlocust skull beneath his heel. “Do me a favour and stay dead, filth.”
“Fine, Samiska be praised. And you? Survived?”
“Cut and bruised, but none the worse for wear,” he said cheerfully. “That was some ride. I owe you a debt of gratitude for saving my life, although quite what you did to my limbs on the way is a Dragon-sized question. No mind. I brought you your dress, thinking you might have forgotten it.”
“I did. Thank you.”
“Shall I –”
“Drop it where you stand, please, and leave.”
She was not half the prickly thorn bush, Astu
rbar thought, amused. He called, “No need, I’ll just toss it inside. Here, catch!”
“No!”
Skiss! A blinding flash of light and a small explosion later, Asturbar found himself wearing the carbonised remains of what had once been a dress.
“Gaah, sorry about that,” he groaned, coughing a sooty and very unhappy cough. “I think I just ate half of your garment. Guess the wards work properly after all.”
A tiny giggle lightened his despair. “Oh, the infamous appetite of the Azingloriax strikes again …”
“Yes! No dress is safe around me!” Asturbar boomed, playing along.
“Is that so, soldier?”
Her coy tone gave him pause. Oh no. Much pause. Asturbar clapped his hand to his mouth, but his irrepressible snort of laughter beat that gesture into futility. The girl chuckled uncertainly, perhaps regretting the ribald overtones of her comment. There was a long, long pause, before his belly clenched and a perfect roar of mirth erupted. He could not help it. The situation was beyond hilarious. As his laughter gathered force he clearly felt the six Jewels jiggling about inside his belly, and that only made it worse. Asturbar guffawed so hard he began to hiccough; tears sprang to his eyes. He had to hold the ravine wall to support himself, and when her answering laughter gushed from the darkness, wild and breathless and unchained, that was the end of rationality as far as he was concerned.
He had forgotten how freeing it was to truly laugh with another soul.
After a while, though, her laughter ended and he halted to the tune of a strangled splutter. Asturbar wished with all his heart they could laugh together again, but any second she would order him to leave, and that would be that.
He said lightly, “I can’t just keep calling you ‘girl,’ can I? That sounds so silly. Nor can I ask …”
“Are your traditions the same as mine?” she whispered.
“I assume so. Even if we are seven hundred leagues from anyone who would know, we would know.” Asturbar swallowed awkwardly. “Someone who saved my life ought to have a name. I just could not ask it of her.”
