Adulthood Rites (9 page)

U
PRIVER.

The Humans had a long, smooth, narrow canoe, light and easy to row. Two pairs of men took turns at the oars, and the boat cut quickly through the water. The current was not strong. Working in relay as they were, the men never slowed to rest.

Akin had screamed as loudly as he could as long as there had been any chance of his being heard. But no one had come. He was quiet now, exhausted and miserable. The man who had caught him still held him, had once dangled him by his feet and threatened to dunk him in the river if he did not be quiet. Only the intervention of the other men had stopped him from doing this. Akin was terrified of him. The man honestly did not seem to understand why murder and abduction should disturb Akin or stop him from following orders.

Akin stared at the man’s broad, bearded, red face, breathed his sour breath. His was a bitter, angry face whose owner might hurt him for acting like a baby, yet might kill him for acting like anything else. The man held him as disgustedly as he had once seen another man hold a snake. Was he as alien as a snake to these people?

The bitter man looked down, caught Akin staring. “What the hell are you looking at?” he demanded.

Akin ceased to watch the man with his eyes, but kept him in view with other light-sensitive parts of his body. The man stank of sweat and of something else. Something was wrong with his body—some illness. He needed an ooloi. And he would never go near one.

Akin lay very still in his arms and, somehow, eventually, fell asleep.

He awoke to find himself lying between two pairs of feet on a piece of soggy cloth at the bottom of the boat. Water sloshing on him had awakened him.

He sat up cautiously, knowing before he moved that the current was stronger here and that it was raining. Raining hard. The man who had been holding Akin began to bail water from the boat with a large gourd. If the rain continued or got worse, surely they would stop.

Akin looked around at the land and saw that the banks were high and badly eroded—cliffs with vegetation spilling over the edges. He had never seen such things. He was farther from home than he had ever been, and still traveling. Where would they take him? … into the hills? … into the mountains?

The men gave up their effort and rowed for the bank. The water was gray-brown and rough, and the rain was coming down harder. They did not quite make it to shore before the canoe sank. The men cursed and jumped out to pull the boat onto a broad mud flat, while Akin stayed where he was, all but swimming. They dumped the boat, tipping both him and the water over one side, laughing when he slid along the mud.

One of them grabbed him by a leg and tried to hand him to the man who had captured him.

His captor would not take him. “You babysit for a while,” the man said. “Let him piss on you.”

Akin was barely able to stop himself from speaking out in indignation. He had not urinated on anyone for months—not since his family had been able to make him understand that he should not, that he should warn them when he needed to urinate or move his bowels. He would not have urinated even on these men.

“No thanks,” said the man holding Akin by the foot. “I just rowed the damn boat god knows how many miles while you sat there and watched the scenery. Now you can watch the kid.” He put Akin down on the mud flat and turned to help carry the boat to a place where they might be able to make their way up the bank. The mud flat was exactly that—a sliver of soft, wet, bare silt collected only just above the water. It was neither safe nor comfortable in the downpour. And night was coming. Time to find a place to camp.

Akin’s babysitter stared at Akin with cold dislike. He rubbed his stomach, and, for a moment, pain seemed to replace his general displeasure. Perhaps his stomach hurt him. How stupid to be sick and know where there was healing and decide to stay sick.

Abruptly, the man grabbed Akin, lifted him by one arm, thrust him under one of the man’s own long, thick arms, and followed the others up the steep, muddy trail.

Akin shut his eyes during the climb. His captor was not surefooted. He kept falling but somehow never fell on Akin or dropped him. He did, however, hold him so tightly that Akin could hardly breathe, so tightly the man’s fingers hurt and bruised him. He whimpered and sometimes cried out, but most of the time he tried to keep quiet. He feared this man as he had never before feared anyone. This man who had been eager to dunk him in water that might contain predators, who had gripped him and shaken him and threatened to punch him because he was crying, this man who was apparently willing to endure pain rather than go to someone who would heal him and ask nothing of him—this man might kill him before anyone could act to stop him.

At the top of the bluff, Akin’s captor threw him down. “You can walk,” the man muttered.

Akin sat still where he had landed, wondering whether Human babies had been thrown about this way—and if so, how they had survived? Then he followed the men as quickly as he could. If he were mature, he would run away. He would go back to the river and let it take him home. If he were mature he could breathe underwater and fend off predators with a simple chemical repellant—the equivalent of a bad smell.

But then, if he were mature, the resisters would not want him. They wanted a helpless infant—and they had very nearly gotten one. He could think, but his body was so small and weak that he could not act. He would not starve in the forest, but he might be poisoned by something that bit or stung him unexpectedly. Near the river, he might be eaten by an anaconda or a caiman.

Also, he had never been alone in the forest before.

As the men drew away from him, he grew more and more frightened. He fell several times but refused to cry again. Finally, exhausted, he stopped. If the men meant to leave him, he could not prevent them. Did they carry off construct children to abandon in the forest?

He urinated on the ground, then found a bush with edible, nutritious leaves. He was too small to reach the best possible food sources—sources the men could have reached but probably could not recognize. Tino had known a great deal, but he did not know much about the forest plants. He ate only obvious things—bananas, figs, nuts, palm fruit—wild versions of things his people grew in Phoenix. If a thing did not look or taste familiar to him, he would not eat it. Akin would eat anything that would not poison him and that would help to keep him alive. He was eating an especially nutritious gray fungus when he heard one of the men coming back for him.

He swallowed quickly, muddied one hand deliberately, and wiped it over his face. If he were simply dirty, the men would pay no attention. But if only his mouth were dirty, they might decide to try to make him throw up.

The man spotted him, cursed him, snatched him up, and carried him under one arm to where the others were building a shelter.

They had found a relatively dry place, well protected by the forest canopy, and they had swept it clean of leaf litter. They had stretched latex-sealed cloth from a pair of small trees to the ground. This cloth had apparently been in the boat, out of Akin’s sight. Now they were cutting small branches and sapling trees for flooring. At least they did not plan to sleep in the mud.

They built no fire. They ate dry food—nuts, seeds, and dry fruit mixed together, and they drank something that was not water. They gave Akin a little of the drink and were amused to see that once he had tasted it, he would not take it again.

“It didn’t seem to bother him, though,” one of them said. “And that stuff is strong. Give him some food. Maybe he can handle it. He’s got teeth, right?”

“Yeah.”

He had been born with teeth. They gave him some of their food, and he ate slowly, one small fragment at a time.

“So that Phoenix we killed was lying,” Akin’s captor said. “I thought he might be.”

“I wonder if it was really his kid.”

“Probably. It looks like him.”

“Jesus. I wonder what he had to do to get it. I mean, he didn’t just fuck a woman.”

“You know what he did. If you didn’t know, you would have died of old age or disease by now.”

Silence.

“So what do you think we can get for the kid?” a new voice asked.

“Whatever we want. A boy, almost perfect? Whatever they’ve got. He’s so valuable I wonder if we shouldn’t keep him.”

“Metal tools, glass, good cloth, a woman or two … And this kid might not even live to grow up. Or he might grow up and grow tentacles all over. So what if he looks good now. Doesn’t mean a thing.”

“And I’ll tell you something else,” Akin’s captor put in. “Our chances, any man’s chances of seeing that kid grow up are rat shit. The worms are going to find him sooner or later, dead or alive. And the village they find him in is fucked.”

Someone else agreed. “The only way is to get rid of him fast and get out of the area. Let someone else worry about how to hold him and how not to wind up dead or worse.”

Akin went out of the shelter, found a place to relieve himself and another place—a clearing where one of the larger trees had recently fallen—where the rain fell heavily enough for him to wash himself and to catch enough water to satisfy his thirst.

The men did not stop him, but one of them watched him. When he reentered the shelter, wet and glistening, carrying broad, flat wild banana leaves to sleep on, the men all stared at him.

“Whatever it is,” one of them said, “it isn’t as Human as we thought. Who knows what it can do? I’ll be glad to get rid of it.”

“It’s just what we knew it was,” Akin’s captor said. “A mongrel baby. I’ll bet it can do a lot more that we haven’t seen.”

“I’ll bet if we walked off and left it here it would survive and get home,” the man who had killed Tino said. “And I’ll bet if we poisoned it, it wouldn’t die.”

An argument broke out over this as the men passed around their alcoholic drink and listened to the rain, which stopped then began again.

Akin grew more afraid of them, but even his fear could not keep him awake after a while. He had been relieved to know that they would trade him away to some other people—to Phoenix, perhaps. He could find Tino’s parents. Perhaps they would imagine that he looked like Tino, too. Perhaps they would let him live with them. He wanted to be among people who did not grab him painfully by a leg or an arm and carry him as though he had no more feeling than a piece of dead wood. He wanted to be among people who spoke to him and cared for him instead of people who either ignored him or drew away from him as though he were a poisonous insect or laughed at him. These men not only frightened him, they made him agonizingly lonely.

Sometime after dark, Akin awoke to find someone holding him and someone else trying to put something in his mouth.

He knew at once that the men had all had too much of their alcoholic drink. They stank of it. And their speech was thicker, harder to understand.

They had begun a small fire somehow, and in the light of it Akin could see two of them sprawled on the floor, asleep. The other three were busy with him, trying to feed him some beans they had mashed up.

He knew without his tongue touching the mashed beans that they were deadly. They were not to be eaten at all. Mashed as they were, they might incapacitate him before he could get rid of them. Then they would surely kill him.

He struggled and cried out as best he could without opening his mouth. His only hope, he thought, was to awaken the sleeping men and let them see how their trade goods were being destroyed.

But the sleeping men slept on. The men who were trying to feed him the beans only laughed. One of them held his nose and pried his mouth open.

In desperation, Akin vomited over the intruding hand.

The man jumped back cursing. He fell over one of the sleeping men and was thrown off into the fire.

There was a terrifying confusion of shouting and cursing and the shelter stank of vomit and sweat and drink. Men struggled with one another, not knowing what they were doing. Akin escaped outside just before they brought the shelter down.

Frightened, confused, lonely almost to sickness, Akin fled into the forest. Better to try to get home. Better to chance hungry animals and poisonous insects than to stay with these men who might do anything, any irrational thing. Better to be completely alone than lonely among dangerous creatures that he did not understand.

But it was aloneness that really frightened him. The caimans and the anacondas could probably be avoided. Most stinging or biting insects were not deadly.

But to be alone in the forest …

He longed for Lilith, for her to hold him and give him her sweet milk.

T
HE MEN REALIZED QUICKLY
that he was gone.

Perhaps the pain of the fire and the wild blows, the collapse of the shelter, and the sudden wash of rain brought them to their senses. They scattered to search for him.

Akin was a small, frightened animal, unable to move quickly or coordinate his movements well. He could hear and occasionally see them, but he could not get away from them quickly enough. Nor could he be as quiet as he wished. Fortunately, the rain hid his clumsiness.

He moved inland—deeper into the forest, into the darkness where he could see and the Humans could not. They glowed with body heat that they could not see. Akin glowed with it as well and used it and the heat-light from the vegetables to guide him. For the first time in his life, he was glad Humans did not have this ability.

They found him without it.

He fled as quickly as he could. The rain ceased, and there were only insect and frog noises to conceal his mistakes. Apparently these were not enough. One of the men heard him. He saw the man jerk around to look. He froze, hoping he would not be seen, half-covered as he was by the leaves of several small plants.

“Here he is!” the man shouted. “I’ve found him!”

Akin scrambled away past a large tree, hoping the man would trip in the dangling lianas or run into a buttress. But beyond the tree was another man blundering toward the sound of the shout. He almost certainly did not see Akin. He did not seem even to see the tree. He tripped over Akin, fell against the tree, then twisted around, both arms extended, and swept them before him almost in swimming motions. Akin was not quick enough to escape the groping hands.