Primordium, p.9
Primordium, page 9
Vinnevra actually smiled at this. I thought she was taking comfort in the possibility that it didn’t matter which way we walked, we were bound to meet up with something or other unpleasant and discouraging. But that was unfair. I was compensating for my growing attachment by casting aspersions.
How mature to see that.
“Oh, shut up,” I grumbled.
We could climb to the canopy, but it leaned out a considerable distance—several meters—and I doubted we could all clamber up and over.
I studied and stroked the thorns’ tough, thinly grooved surfaces, almost hard as stone—then pushed my finger in as far as I could between two of them. There was a bare minimum of flexure, of give—no more than a fingernail’s thickness. Perhaps the trees would present less of a barrier if we could bend and break the thorns with sturdy poles—wherever would we find those! Gamelpar’s stick was too flimsy.
But nothing we could do now would make much difference, and so we prepared through the slanting light of dusk to sleep out in the open yet again, with no idea where the next morning would take us.
* * *
From my uneven bed on the spiky dry grass, my eyes kept lifting above the tree-wall to the stars and the sky bridge. I drifted in and out of sleep, only half-caring that the dreams that moved behind a thin, translucent wall in my mind were not my own, nor mere fantasies, but ancient memories, with all the uneven detail of memories, made worse by being witnessed by an outsider.
Some, however, were remarkably vivid—lovemaking in a garden under a sky crisscrossed with Precursor architecture; the impassioned face of a female whose features differed from the women of this time, and especially from Vinnevra—so much variability in our kind!
But if these passing glimpses were at all indicative, humans had stayed remarkably true to their stock during our suppression and reevolution. We were all recognizably of the same kind, the same breed, and we did not grow up or get transformed into different physical castes like the Forerunners.
The dream-emotions conveyed by the Lord of Admirals felt sharp and raw, like the waft from a freshly slaughtered animal … strange juxtapositions of pain and pleasure, hidden fear and anticipation, a glowing spark of battle-rage kept from flaring—held in reserve.
For these dreams spoke of leave-taking and farewell, of the last night before a grand battle that would spread across a hundred thousand light-years to determine the fate of a thousand suns and twenty thousand worlds.
All dreams are young, my host, my friend. All dreams belong to youth, whether they be nightmares or idylls.
* * *
A snapping, clacking sound abruptly pulled me up out of this bizarre eavesdropping.
I started from my rustling pad of plucked grass and looked at the thorn-packed, forbidding wall of the forest. The thorns were withdrawing, pulling back into the trunks … opening wide, dark passages below the thick black canopy.
I crawled over to awaken Vinnevra, and she shook the old man’s shoulder. He slept lightly if at all, came awake more alert than either of us, but he did not rise up. Instead, his eyes moved back and forth under the silver-ivory reflected light of the sky bridge.
“Dawn’s a few hours off,” he said.
Vinnevra bit her lip. “We need to pass through the forest,” she said.
“Still the same direction?”
“If we are moving against … where I really want to go, yes.”
“That’s no guidance at all, really,” I offered.
The girl and the old man got up, brushed themselves down, and stood staring into the dense blackness between the trunks.
“If that way leads us to the Primordial,” the old man said, nodding back in the direction of the wall-hugging pillar, “then anything that leads us away…”
He was now using the same word for the Captive as my old spirit. He did not finish, and did not need to. We had already had a discussion about trying to walk back to the edge wall, around the forest, but that was a journey of at least two hundred kilometers, and possibly a thousand or more, depending on the convolutions … and there was no guarantee that the thorn-trunk trees, to either side, did not grow up flush against the wall, blocking passage everywhere.
On the other hand, if the thorns were everywhere dense within the forest, and we were caught between the trunks when they chose to thrust out again …
“We’ll have to move quickly,” I said, my breath coming up short. The combination of pitchy darkness, the threat of being pierced through, of basically being chewed to pieces by a strange forest …
Vinnevra and the old man seemed determined. But despite my complaints, I was no longer even thinking about separating from the only compass available to us on this wheel. No matter that it worked best in reverse.
I did not want to be alone out here. And these were my only friends, until we found Riser—if we ever found him.
“You’ll know a straight line through?” I asked the girl.
“I think so,” she said. “Yes. I still need to go back there.” She pointed away from the forest.
“All right,” I said. “You lead the way.”
Gamelpar picked up his walking stick. Before I could object, or gather up my sleep-addled wits, we plunged between the trunks and vision was no longer our guide.
The journey might have been awful, but once committed, I felt a strange calmness. Oddly, it was the old man who suffered the most, groaning and flinching as we brushed past the wide trunks, or collided with them. I had heard such sounds from young boys and men lining up to fight in the narrow alleys of Marontik, but the terror he felt in this dark puzzled me, until the old spirit within offered a plangent observation:
Strange fears echo through both old man and warriors. Those near death know it too well.
But Gamelpar did not slow down, and we kept moving. I had no idea whether we were keeping to any sort of straight line, but not once did Vinnevra hesitate.
Perhaps an hour later, some vague indication of daylight oozed and dripped down from the canopy, emphasizing rather than relieving the gloom below. Our dark-adjusted eyes were befuddled by this promise of coming brightness, and we lost our growing sense of knowing where a trunk might be.
Our collisions became more frequent.
Then—it seemed to happen all at once—I saw long shafts of day up ahead, echoing in golden, almost blinding silhouettes through a dozen great trunks. Vinnevra pulled us all along at a run. Gamelpar swung his stick against the trees, grinning and laughing, holding on to the girl’s other hand.…
We broke through. The dawn on the other side was just beginning, but after hours of struggling to see, we were like moles tugged up out of a burrow. I blinked, stumbled, let go of Vinnevra’s hand, tried to find Gamelpar. But they had moved away to stare across a beach of great rounded boulders and smaller rocks, tumbling down to a deep blue body of water that seemed to stretch on forever.
At the first direct ray of light over the far edge wall, the trunks gave a deep, booming groan and the thorns pushed out again, meshing tight—closing off retreat.
Gamelpar, closest to the trunks and thorns, reached back with his stick and tapped them again, then gave me a mischievous glance—followed by a deep sigh of relief.
“We’re stuck here,” I said.
Vinnevra paced back and forth along the rocks, using both hands to shield her eyes against the morning glare. “I know that!” she said. “I’m using all my willpower not to just turn around and wait for the thorns to open again … just to go back there and become part of … that. It’s getting stronger,” she said. “If I can’t stop myself … will you two tie me up and keep me with you, no matter what I say or do?”
I wondered what we could do if the impulse became so strong she decided to lie to us. For now, at least, it seemed clear that we had to cross the water, however we could. Walking along the inside perimeter of the forest, over these rocks, was no more a real option than walking around the outside.
I picked my steps carefully down to the lapping waves and looked out over the lake, deep blue, almost black. Kneeling, I dipped my hand into the cool wavelets and lifted it to my nose, smelled it—clean but different—then tasted it.
Instantly, I spat and wiped my mouth. “Salt!” I cried.
Vinnevra helped Gamelpar down to the shore and he also tasted the water, then agreed. Vinnevra tasted last and made a bitter face. None of us had ever tasted salt water before, it seemed. This provoked an observation from the old spirit.
You’ve never visited the great oceans, or seen a salt lake?
I admitted I had not. I knew of freshwater lakes like the one in Djamonkin Crater, and streams and rivers—sometimes freshets becoming floods—but all had been either fresh or filled with bitter minerals, never so salty.
Inland boy, the old spirit said.
“My best wife spoke of such water,” Gamelpar said. “She called it the sea. Her parents lived on the shore when she was a small girl and netted fish from out in the deeps. Before the Forerunners took them away.”
“Why salty?” I asked.
“The gods piss salt,” Gamelpar said. “Because of that, some animals live better in salt water.”
I did not want to ask him where freshwater came from.
“What about people … are we happier when we swim in salt water?” Vinnevra asked, balancing on a round boulder and stretching out her arms. Again, she looked like a carefree girl, as the worry and fear seemed to slip away from her face, replaced only by curiosity. So changeable!
So adaptable. Her People are survivors.
“Perhaps,” Gamelpar said, after giving her theory due consideration. “Are we going to swim?”
“I don’t know how,” Vinnevra admitted.
“I’m not going to try.” The Librarian was fond of strange and exotic beasts and plants. I thought of the irritable merse in Djamonkin Crater. What kind of creatures would she stock in a great, wide sea like this? How big, and how hungry?
“Look out there,” Vinnevra said, pointing to our left—inland. “There’s something hanging from those big towers.”
The light was at such an angle now that we saw dark strands stretched between a collection of stone pillars—bridges, I guessed, looking from this distance like hanging strings wrapped around posts. They might have been four or five kilometers inland and a kilometer or so out in the water. The longer I looked, the more it seemed there was quite a dark mass arranged between and on top of the pillars, whether made by People, or some sort of vegetation—an outgrowth of the thorny trees—I could not tell.
But I could just as easily imagine webs, traps, nasty things awaiting the curious.
“We should go there,” Gamelpar said.
I studied the rocky margin around the water with a skeptical look, but the old man raised his stick.
Litter from the great wall of trees had fallen on the rocks. Wind and waves had pushed the branches and bark up against the trunk wall, where they formed a thick mat. I investigated. The litter was several hand-spans deep, like a tough, woody crust. I stepped up on it. The path was irregular at best, but supported my weight—and I was the heaviest.
“Let’s go,” Gamelpar said. We helped him onto the path. He raised his stick high as if in salute to the trees, and started off.
Vinnevra shivered again, then leaned over and whispered to me, “It’s bad. It hurts. I need to…”
She took hold of my hand, raised it to her lips, then kissed my palm, eyes desperate, beseeching. “Kill me, if you have to,” she said. “Gamelpar won’t. He can’t. But I don’t want to go anywhere near the Palace of Pain.”
My heart sank and tears started up in my eyes. I could no more kill this girl than her grandfather could. I still remembered her smell when she first leaned over me, welcoming me back to the living. She was not my idea of beautiful, but I felt for her, and not just because of what we had already shared.
“Promise me!” she whispered, giving my hand a painful squeeze.
“It won’t happen,” I said. “I won’t let it happen. But I can’t make that sort of promise.”
She dropped my hand, spun about, and climbed up on the matted litter, then glanced back, face pinched, disappointed, even angry. I could not imagine what she was feeling.
Imagine. The old spirit again burned within me, his rage threatening to break through. Imagine the worst. It is all we can expect from Forerunners, all we can ever expect.
“But the Lifeshaper…”
Just another Forerunner.
“Without her, I’d be … free, but ignorant, empty of all but myself. And you’d be dead.”
The Lord of Admirals retreated, but not before his bitter miasma tainted my thoughts.
I kicked at the litter and performed another thrashing dance of frustration—well aware how stupid I looked, how desperately foolish and trapped.
How I wished I could talk to Riser and hear what he thought!
I followed after the girl and the old man.
THIRTEEN
THE SMELL REACHED us from some distance away, but Gamelpar gave a grunt and pushed on. The shore was littered with decaying bodies. We made out gray and green shapes slumped over the rocks … and then we were upon the first, and my worst fears were banished—but not by much.
These were Forerunners, not humans. By their size and build they had been Warrior-Servants, fully mature. One of them could be Bornstellar, I thought—larger after receiving the Didact’s imprint. But they were far too decayed to make out individual features.
Vinnevra hung back, holding her hand over her nose and mouth. “What happened here?” Gamelpar asked, his voice quavering.
“Another battle,” I said. “They’re not wearing armor.”
“Every Forerunner wears armor. Why would they take it off?”
Then I remembered and understood. My armor had stopped functioning, of course, but so had the armor of my Forerunner escorts—either jammed up by the metal fleas, or just stopped working. “Something killed all the armor,” I said.
“What, the Beast?”
“I don’t know. Part of the war, maybe.”
“And here they fought hand to hand?” Gamelpar asked.
The bodies were badly decomposed. Slash marks with puffy, swollen edges crossed what remained of their faces and torsos. A few puckered holes seeped inner decay.
I looked out at the rock pillars and the rope-bridge and platform-town—isolated from the shore, accessible only by water and so more defensible, but against what, I could not know. Forerunners of course could have flown out there, and would not have built such a primitive structure. Likely this was a human town.
On Erde-Tyrene, I had heard of villages built on lakes, usually out in the great north, but had never seen one. “There was a battle in the town,” I theorized, “and when they died, they fell into the water and drifted to shore. What does your old spirit think?”
Gamelpar made a face. “Sad, even for Forerunners. Is the whole wheel dying?”
We were too small, too trivial to know such things.
Vinnevra had walked up the shoreline to get away from the smell. “There’s a boat over there, behind the rocks,” she said. “I think it’s made from one of those trees. It has thorns on its sides.”
We walked along the matted path. She pointed behind a pair of boulders draped with wrack like thinning hair over gray heads. It was indeed a boat, and not a bad one, either.
How convenient. The gods piss salt water but leave us a boat.
Sometimes I found my old spirit to be a real prig.
Vinnevra stood between us, eyes fixed on mine. “We can use pieces of bark for oars, and row across the water,” she said. That seemed like an incomplete plan at best. “Gamelpar needs the rest, and we’ll do the rowing,” she added, eyes still piercing.
I shrugged. “Water is the only path,” I said, then set to inspecting the boat. It was about four meters long, blunt bow and stern, carved as she had suggested, no doubt, from one of the great trunks. The sides were indeed lined with formidable thorns. “Protection or ornament?” I wondered, feeling a sharp point with my thumb.
She tried to push the boat out into the water. It was jammed tight. Together, we pried up one end, then slid it out over the rocks, and with a grumbling, thumping scrape, pushed it into the water. Vinnevra held it while I helped the old man across the rocks and then lifted him up bodily, at which he snorted and made an unpleasant scowl.
I lowered him into the bow.
“Find some pieces of bark,” Vinnevra ordered, her face damp with sweat. She sounded excited and looked even happier. Perhaps we were passing out of range of the beacon signal.
Finding proper pieces of bark, fortunately, was not difficult. The trees shed in long, tough strips varying from a hand’s width to two or three. With a little vigorous bending and tearing, the strips made decent oars. I picked up several more and piled them into the boat.
Soon we were rowing across the water.
“We go to the town first,” Gamelpar insisted.
“Why?” Vinnevra said, her face clouding. “Let’s just row across and leave that be.”
“Looks quiet,” the old man said. “There might still be living People out there. Or food.”
“Or stinking bodies,” Vinnevra said.
I rowed, she rowed, and finally we rowed together so that the boat did not go in circles but toward the pillars, the drooping bridges, and at the center, the suspended village. It took us the better part of the day to row against a steady, lapping tide. Then, without reason, the tide reversed and rushed us in minutes toward the pillars, so that we had to back water vigorously to avoid being thrust between two adjacent pillars. We clumsily managed to make our way to a wide wooden dock in the crossing shadows of a network of bridges.
