Human (59 page)

“Xiou is ready. Filhia’s waiting for you.”

With a sinking feeling, Ivy made her way to the trees. It was no longer her own safety she was concerned about. The stegodon family were devoted to one another and about to lose a member. The matriarch would defend an attack. Ivy suppressed her instinct to protect the animals’ lives and forced the faces of the hunters into her mind instead. Xiou, Kora, Guntah, Setian, Krue, Leihna, Rinap, Kari - this was their livelihood. It was necessary and to be fair, the size and strength of the stegodon far surpassed the hunters. It could easily be her own family that lost and suffered today.

On the sloped forest edge, Filhia found her. Of the forty that came, eight stayed in the trees. They were there to assist, to butcher, to carry. Some, like Filhia, were too young or unskilled to hunt and others were experts only in butchering or had injuries from the fire that rendered them less agile but still strong. Ivy watched as the black spaces below wove through the grass in a wide arc. Beside her, Filhia’s eyes were straining to follow her sister’s shadow. With both parents taken by the Swift Death, the girls were inseparable.

Ivy watched as the arc closed in precisely, like a shower of arrows. In the centre, the young bull startled from his cud, sensing danger. The vibration of thirty pairs of tiny feet came to him through the soles of his own, as a myriad of nerve receptors shot the low frequency message to his brain.

Rearing back on two legs, his low groan escalated to a bellow, splitting the tranquillity as the jigsaw of hunters suddenly materialised around him. Instantly, the air was rent with trumpeting, bellowing and a stampede of massive feet. With a rush of air, he crashed to earth and charged forward, scattering the hunters crouched before him like so many mice. The matriarch screamed in fury and stamped her feet sending vibrations far into the hard earth. She rushed in from her outpost.

The stegodon herd thrashed though the water. Confusion reigned as they sought an escape through the minefield of spears upon them. The calves were swept up in a rush of trunks and thundering feet. With weak newborn eyes, the little one fell, lost in the long grass. Within an instant she was surrounded by a barrage of trunks rolling and lifting her to unsteady feet. With a roar like thunder the mother stegodon reached her, eyes rolling with rage. She led her baby in the direction of the retreating herd. The calves were pushed back from danger by young adults, while the matriarch and her eldest daughters fanned out, fiercely protecting their precious ones.

Still separated, the young bull roared and fought, holding the hunters at bay. Spears slashed from all sides to weaken and tire him. The females rushed to his defence crushing the long grass and its hidden attackers beneath them. Tusks ripped at the hunters who returned lightning jabs of razor-sharp stone.

The stegodon threw bodies in their wake. The hunters ducked and weaved underneath, caught in a dangerous game of dare beneath feet bigger than their own skull. But it was the bull they sought; they had no interest in killing the others and only defended themselves to achieve their end.

Ivy’s heart pounded at the sight of bodies being thrown. She had lost sight of Rinap and Leihna in the chaos surrounding the bull.
Are they hurt?
The prospect of such fragile girls being thrown or skewered by a tusk ran her blood cold.

Filhia’s face beside her was frozen in fright. Her little lips were pinched and her brow was so deeply furrowed it looked cut into ridges. Sweat pricked her face, collecting on her top lip and her fist was clenched almost white around Ivy’s fingers. Ivy squeezed her hand, realizing it was cold and clammy, despite the heat.

Quickly, intuitively, the hunters realigned themselves. With a half dozen keeping each of the tyrannical females at bay, the strongest men gathered at the head of the young bull, now foaming at the mouth with anger and exhaustion. In one swift move, Ivy saw Krue, Setian and Xiou leap into his path. Xiou’s spear broke clean through the centre of his forehead directly below his treacle eyes. Simultaneously, Krue thrust his spear into the soft knobbed bone of his temple and Setian sprung high clinging to its back piercing the tender flesh under his shoulder blade with enough force to pierce his heart. With a final bellow, the bull crashed to the ground, dead.

It was done.

The matriarch eyeballed the assassins with rage, burning their faces to her interminable memory. With a summoning call, she and her daughters backed away, faced with the definitive loss of their charge. With resounding roars of fury, they backed along the river brandishing tusks in sweeping warning, then turned and ran into the forest.

The hunters gathered around the slain bull. There were bruises and gashes, scrapes and exhaustion but miraculously all had survived the stegodons’ wrath. Filhia fell into the arms of her older sister, overcome with relief. Rinap patted her quietly, wanting to reassure her without seeming a child herself. Kari’s face was almost as relieved at seeing Rinap unscathed. Apparently he had swept her away from the deadly tusks many times, to which she had responded with even more determination to prove her skills. Ivy couldn’t help but be proud of the girl’s audacity. Leihna had been knocked to the ground early on and now sat concussed and silent in the grass. Ivy comforted her in place of Shahn, who had stayed at the cave, too heavily pregnant to travel.

There was no celebration, nor fanfare. This victory was only a victory of strength, not justice nor worth. The adolescent bull had stood his ground, protected his family and fought bravely. As much a child of nature as the hunters themselves, the hunters took no gratification in his death, but instead offered humility and thanks to him for the gift of his life. He would feed their family now and deserved to be honoured.

Krue stood at the animal’s head and closed his hands over its glassy eyes. Through Leihna, Ivy heard his practiced words.

“We honour you, brother probech, for your courage and sacrifice. We thank your family for the gift of your life. They will mourn and remember you, so we offer them this; we will bring your life back to the forest through our own bodies and you will walk again through our steps. We are now a part of each other.”

Quiet at first, their voices rose from scorching grass. A single note, held long and low like thunder on the horizon, then another to match its strength, and another rich in timbre. Beside her, Leihna raised her ashen face to the sky and offered her song in a young woman’s clear, sweet voice.
The Dusk Song.
Forty voices rose and fell together, vibrant but soft in their release. From the slain bull’s side, the long grass swept the harmonic offering across the river valley and into the burning sky, forming that strange bridge between heaven and earth that almost seems real enough to cross.

There was no religion or God designed to receive this offering. Regardless, the reverence they held for their prey was sacred and palpable.

The voices broke together and the midday valley fell silent. With a single move, Krue’s hand was high in the air; blade poised, and then plunged deep within the animal’s throat. Warm blood hit his face in streaks of scarlet.

An angry shout shattered the ritual of Krue’s blade.

Ivy’s pupils narrowed, straining to find the source above the grass veil. The hunters leapt to their feet.

Ivy’s blood ran cold.

Belting towards them from across the river were men. Furious, indomitable, massive men.

The karathah.

It was past midnight and Orrin sat alone in his small office. Food wrappers and empty coffee cups cluttered his desk and worry lines felt permanently etched in his forehead. Ivy’s cello recording played softly on repeat through his speakers. Orrin wasn’t really listening anymore; he already had every note and run committed to memory.

It had been two days since Dimi had called.

I can’t guarantee that I know you anymore Orrin. I’ve warned you. You’re on your own now.

Dimi wasn’t the sort to over-react. His cool head had countered Orrin’s quick temper on more than one occasion in younger days. But now he’d abandoned their friendship in an instant. Orrin’s gut twisted and he buried his face in his hands.

Once more, he picked up his phone and dialled Dimi’s number. Once more, it rang out.

Shite.
He tossed the phone onto the table. The dull thud as it hit the desk broke the silence of the building and Orrin shivered despite himself. His palms were sweaty and he suddenly felt desperate to speed up time, to get Ivy back before another obstacle presented itself. If only he knew how. He wondered what the Director had threatened Dimi with, to make him react so severely?

I got him into this mess.
The guilt of that thought was buried a hundred fold by the creeping doubt he had been trying to ignore. Could he trust Dimi not to betray his secret? Dimi knew everything - the laboratory experiments, the energy surge, the transformation of the earth into a new ugly one where hobbits were facing experimentation and torture and environmental genocide and solar storms increasingly threatened human life. And at the heart of it all somehow, were Orrin and Ivy.

Most devastatingly, he’d told Dimi about Ivy. How he’d lost her. How he was responsible for getting her back. How, perhaps, he might be
in love
with her. And still, his supposed best friend had deserted him.

He opened his desk drawer and picked up the amulet. The surface was smooth now. It’s layers of dirt had been rubbed away during the many times he had sat holding it over the past few days, feeling its strange warmth and imploring it to give up the answer to this infuriating puzzle. Orrin traced his fingertips across the surface.

He turned it over. The five circular indentations still marked the back.
What do they mean?
He wondered.
Who put them there?
Orrin held it up to the light.

Well I’ll be damned. The five points of the Southern Cross, just like the cave painting. How on earth did I miss that?

Orrin leapt from his chair, grabbing his jacket, and rushed out of the empty building. He skirted the paths and security cameras, hugging the dark places. Orrin hid as a lone security guard doing his rounds passed by with a torch then slipped into the leafy garden surrounding the biology building. The manicured gardens gave way to native bush, thick and deliberately unkempt. Thin leafy branches whipped his face as he negotiated his way through, unsure of where exactly he would end up. Orrin reached high and began to hoist his body up the tall wire fence he found in his way.

“Ouch!” He jerked his hand back. Blood dripped down the inside of his wrist and he smudged it away on his jeans. He hadn’t expected the barbed wire. Pulling off his jacket to use for protection, Orrin gripped the barbs securely with both hands. He drew breath through gritted teeth and scrambled over the top. His shirt and jeans caught and ripped as he fell heavily on the other side, covered in scratches.

A loud hiss from the dark caught the hairs on the back of his neck.

Orrin turned, finding himself against another wire wall. This one however, was the perimeter of a giant cage. A dim globe hung from the wire roof, which was open to the elements. Further back, a covered awning connected the cage to an inbuilt observation room. Two meters from Orrin on the inside of the cage, four pairs of dark eyes watched his every move.

“I don’t want to hurt you. Just talk, do you understand?” Orrin pulled his hands back in what he hoped was a gesture of surrender. “I won’t hurt you.”

Orrin noticed the cage was now entirely empty but for the hobbit woman, her baby and two children, perhaps three or four years old. They were pitiful in their fear of him and hid behind their mother. The hatred in the hobbits’ eyes had gone and now there was only true fear, grief and desperation.

“Where are the others?” Orrin whispered.

The woman hugged her baby tighter. It was clear she’d lost the battle to save her family many times now. A purple bruise ballooned her left cheekbone and cuts and grazes laced her skin. She frowned at Orrin then turned and pushed her baby into the arms of the eldest remaining child, who seemed little more than a baby herself.

The hobbit woman stepped forward on shaking legs. She staggered but righted herself, clearly determined to see the threat gone. Her breathing was laboured and a wheezing hiss coated her breath. Bones projected unnaturally from her tiny frame. Her matted black hair hung miserably over her thin shoulders.

“Ash gitraahn shiwah!” she hissed, clutching the wire wall between them. The malice had returned, but there was no strength to her threat.

“No, I’m not leaving yet,” Orrin said. “But I promise I won’t hurt you.”

Orrin sank to his knees. Less than a meter of dirt separated him from the animal.
No - human. This is a human,
he realised, unexpectedly. He suddenly felt compelled to reach out and touch her.

Orrin pushed aside the thought and instead pulled the amulet from his pocket and held it up to the light.

“I need help, love. There are markings on this. See, here - stars.” Orrin pointed to the amulet and up to the night sky. “Stars. Five stars. What do they mean?” He frowned. “What do they mean, these stars?”