Serpent Catch: Book Two of the Serpent Catch Series Page 3
“Wait!” Phylomon shouted in an attempt to slow the others. “They’re afraid of us. They have been at war with the Craal for eight hundred years. They don’t like us any better than others of our ilk. Just because we want them to loan us a mammoth, doesn’t mean they will. Let me speak to them.”
The party stopped, and Phylomon waved his left hand in the air as a sign that he wanted to speak. The big female that led the group motioned him forward. They stood for nearly half an hour. Phylomon spoke in finger talk, and the big female answered him in kind, occasionally grunting or barking for emphasis. Phylomon finally returned.
“They’ve agreed to barter over dinner. The Hukm don’t use fire, so we won’t be able to cook. Don’t make any aggressive moves. Leave your weapons. And don’t smile or show your teeth. They’ll see it as a ‘baring of fangs.’ Don’t speak, even among yourselves. They might worry that you’re plotting against them. So keep silent. I’ll do the talking.”
The Hukm grabbed two logs and pulled them side by side. The four Hukm sat on one log, Tirilee and the humans and Pwi sat on the other.
The great female, who stood ten feet tall and measured four feet at the shoulders, walked forward and sniffed each member of the group. Her hair had been cut in the front, to keep it from falling in her eyes, and she wore only a dark red bandoleer of cedar bark. When she moved in close to smell him, Tull could see that the bandoleer was a pouch filled with small cured leaves.
Tull looked into her dark brown eyes, and inhaled. She smelled of open grasslands and mammoth hide, like something wild. She reached forward and touched his chest, very gently, with one finger. When she passed on to Wisteria, she lifted one of Wisteria’s breasts, then pointed at her own relatively small breast, as if to say, “I am a woman, too.” There was a look of respect in the Hukm’s eye. Only when she studied Wisteria, did she look at an equal.
The Hukm moved on. When she checked Tirilee, she failed to notice the Dryad’s budding breasts. She gestured to Phylomon, pointed out Wisteria, let her hand fall and her fingers waggle.
“She will barter for use of a mammoth only with you,” Phylomon said. “Since you are a woman, you will understand how she loves her mammoth children. She wants me to translate for you.”
“But,” Wisteria protested, “I don’t know what to say to these animals.”
“Try to see them as more than animals,” Phylomon answered. “The only thing we have that they would want are Scandal’s spices. We’ll use those to barter.”
“All right,” Wisteria said.
Scandal went to the wagon and brought out the spices. Compared to the size of a mammoth, the packets of black tea, vanilla beans, cinnamon, ginger, sage, cardamom, anise, and dried orange peel were tiny.
Yet when arrayed on the ground, the Hukm went wild. They fingered the tiny wooden boxes, recognizing their great worth, and the two young Hukm actually drooled. The Hukm quickly made an offer. They’d obligingly take the spices in return for a mammoth, provided that the two young Hukm escort the party the length and breadth of the entire journey.
Wisteria and Phylomon discussed the offer for a long time. Hukm were dangerous, and did not understand the ways of humans. Yet they would not let the mammoth go without an escort. Under his breath, Scandal whispered, “God! Not all of them! These spices are worth a fortune in steel eagles!”
Many of the spices had traveled two thousand miles by sea and could be bought only at great cost.
Wisteria countered the offer—one-quarter of the spices in return for a mammoth, and the haggling was on.
The Hukm came forward to sniff each spice, each of the teas. They savored the exotic aromas—rejected some and sorted others into piles. As the day wore on, hunger forced the Hukm to dip into their pouches for dried fruit.
Scandal went to the wagon and brought out dried apples, pears, and pickles to feed the party. After several hours, the dealing wore down. The party would pay nearly three-quarters of the spices for the mammoth, but Scandal was relieved to find that the Hukm rejected some of his most expensive herbs.
When the bartering was done, Tull stretched himself and crossed his legs. He sat for a moment, then looked over at one young Hukm. The boy was breathing heavily, and seemed to be glaring at Tull. Tull watched the youngster for a moment, then glanced at Wisteria and the others beside him. The young Hukm was obviously glaring at him. Tull uncrossed his legs. The Hukm stood and roared.
Tull smiled at the creature, and it charged. Tull remembered that he was not supposed to smile.
Tull jumped up, and the Hukm swung. Tull threw himself backward. The blow caught him in the chest and sent him flying twenty feet. When he hit ground, Tull was still trying to figure out if he could move as the Hukm jumped on him—six hundred pounds crashing onto his chest and belly. Tull heard ribs snap, saw the young Hukm’s mother struggle to pull him off. After all of the care I’ve taken to keep from injuring my feet, he wondered, how will I push the wagon with broken ribs? Although the mother smacked her lips together to make the sound Chup, Chup, the whole scene seemed strangely quiet.
Tull woke to creaking wagon wheels. The wagon bumped with a jounce; the motion knocked the air from his lungs. He looked up and could tell immediately that he was bedded in the great oak barrel where the women had convalesced. Tirilee sat beside him, holding his hand, and Wisteria slept at his side. He jerked his hand away from the Dryad, but she just watched him, as if mesmerized.
“Water,” he said.
“Tull is awake,” Tirilee shouted to the others, scrambling from the barrel. “I’ll get you some water,” she called over her back. The wagon kept moving, and Wisteria stirred, sat up on one elbow. “Are you all right, my love?”
“My chest feels tight,” Tull said.
“Phylomon wrapped it. You’ve got at least six broken ribs. You’ll have to stay down.”
Tirilee returned with a flask, said “Here,” and poured some water in his mouth.
“What happened?” Tull asked.
“You pointed the sole of your foot at a Hukm.” Tirilee said. “It’s one of about a thousand things you never do to a Hukm!”
“Phylomon’s very sorry,” Wisteria said. “He’s apologized a dozen times. He said he should have warned us before we met for the parley. The Hukm can’t speak much, so they waggle their tails, move their fingers, use gestures. Pointing your foot at a Hukm roughly means ‘you smell like dung.’ It didn’t help when you smiled at him afterward.”
Tull smelled the stink of woolly mammoth, heard the steady plod of its feet. The Hukm had obviously struck a bargain. He said, “I’ll try to remember that.”
Tirilee said in her high, chiming voice, “Phylomon has warned the Hukm not to get upset by our nasty habits. But still, you must remember to always go downwind from camp to relieve yourself, and make sure you go at least two hundred yards. They don’t like the smell. And don’t pee on bushes, since they might want to eat the leaves. Most of the things that offend them are so strange you’d never do them anyway. For instance, never bark like a fox behind their backs. But some things you might do by accident. For example, never point your little finger at the Hukm, don’t yell at their mammoths, and don’t wiggle your butt from side to side when you are standing still. And don’t wear anything red, since that is the color of war, and don’t kill any birds—since those are the messengers of heaven.”
“And don’t clench your fist and hold it over your head,” Wisteria said, “That’s another bad one, because they think you are trying to throw a curse.”
“And don’t spit in their direction,” Tirilee added.
“Or if you want to be nice to them,” Wisteria continued, “throw a handful of leaves to the wind at sunset to feed the spirits of their dead.”
“Or you can hold your hand open at sunset,” Tirilee said, “if you don’t have leaves to throw.” The girls looked at each other. “We’d better get Phylomon to go over the list again. I know there are a hundred more things he told us.”
“At least a hundred,” Wisteria said. “Still, Scandal thanks you. You saved some of his spices. The Hukm were embarrassed by the incident, so they settled for a better price.”
“We got our mammoth,” Tull said more in satisfaction than as a question. He did not need to worry so much about carrying his share of the load.
“We’ve got two,” Tirilee answered. “Short Tail—the Hukm who tried to kill you—he’s driving the wagon now. His brother, Born-in-Snow, has a mammoth up ahead clearing a trail. We’re going very fast. We’ll be in Sanctum tomorrow.”
Tull leaned his head back and smiled. Sanctum. It sounded like a good place to be.
***
Chapter 4: Sanctum
Phylomon felt nothing for Sanctum anymore but the vaguest sense of nostalgia. Although the starbase had been his childhood home, and he remembered it perfectly from those days, it had been vacant for so many centuries that it was but a pale shadow of what it once had been. Seen from across the plain, it glimmered like a handful of gems, even at twenty miles. When the group was half a day’s journey from the city, they began to come on herds of mammoths, great shaggy beasts that stood with dark shoulders high above the plains, painted tusks curling up and back toward their trunks. A band here, a band there.
Sometimes only a few with painted tusks, sometimes a hundred. Always the Hukm stood nearby in the shade of sprawling oaks, fingering massive clubs as they watched the strange party of humans, Pwi, the Dryad, and Hukm.
The group reached Sanctum at sunset. Only the skeleton of the city remained—eleven towers of Benbow glass forming countless beams. Two miles above the plain, the towers flared into wide platforms, each at distinct levels. The ruins of Sanctum sat on those platforms. The walls and floors had burned or rotted away, leaving only frames of incredibly thin and graceful towers, with arches hundreds of feet tall that often spilled off the platform. One could see where entire households had stood suspended above the plain.
Phylomon recalled the sense of security the city had given him as a child of six. He remembered watching from the windows as a gray storm swept over the plains below. During a tremendous lightning display, a pack of dire wolves separated a baby mammoth from its herd, and then hamstrung it. That was back when shuttles still flew between Anee and Falhalloran, their orbital space station; Phylomon had felt secure and powerful to be a Starfarer. He’d tried to imagine what it was like to be young mammoth, living on the dirty ground in a wild storm. Now he smiled at the memory. After so many hundred years living in the wild, he could not help but laugh at the naïve child he’d been.
The Hukm had gathered at Sanctum by the tens of thousands to begin their annual migration south, and upon the ruined crossbeams of the tower, young Hukm climbed and capered, hanging strips of colored cloth as pennants, hanging streamers of clam shells and painted wood chips. Many young Hukm carried small trumpets made of ox horn, and when they saw that the wagon drew close, they all sounded their horns in warning.
As the wagon came in, the Hukm gathered to sniff and bark at the humans and Neanderthals. Many Hukm had turned white, gaining their winter coats, and some swung war clubs threateningly overhead, but none dared touch Phylomon, for he was well known here. As the Hukm saw Tirilee they scurried away, for they feared the young Dryad. The cart pressed through the crowd, past stalls where Hukm traded oats and sugarcane, prunes and dried apples, rope and pumpkins. They were ushered to the tribal matriarch, Ironwood Woman, who wore a great necklace of thousands of intricately carved oak beads.
Phylomon was glad that she was willing to speak to him, for only by gaining the matriarch’s protection could his band remain safe among the wild Hukm.
She barked orders for her workers to lavish food on the party and to make up beds of leaves, instantly making Phylomon wary. He’d met Ironwood Woman several times, and she’d merely tolerated him—never had she been warm. She wanted something.
Phylomon passed through the evening as if in a dream, for he would look on the skeletons of the towers and see the shuttle port hanging in the sky as it had in his youth, see the city with its piercing lights shining silver above the plains.
When the group was fed and their beds laid, Ironwood Woman crawled to them, her wooden necklace clacking on the ground, bringing gifts of hazelnuts.
She bowed low to Phylomon, so that her snout touched the ground, then rose up and spoke in finger language.
Ironwood Woman warned him of Blade Kin outposts in the White Mountains, of the numbers of raiders patrolling each pass. She told him that there were more Blade Kin in the mountains than there had ever been before. “Sixteen thousand of us Fruit People died this summer,” Ironwood Woman told him gazing at the ground in reverence for the dead. “The traders from the south take tubes of glass from Benbow and sell them to Blade Kin. The Blade Kin make sticks of death, and kill us Fruit People.”
Phylomon shook his head at the loss. The Hukm were losing their long war. He promised, “I will go to Benbow this winter and hunt down the men who are selling rifle barrels to the Crawlies.”
Ironwood Woman warned him in finger language, “They kill us Fruit People from a long way off, but they do not see at night, so we kill them in the dark. Killing the men who sell glass is good. But we hope for more. Our legends tell of the times when you raided the strongholds of the Slave Lords.”
“That was many winters ago,” Phylomon said. “I have not raided their villages since before your grandmother was born. There are too many of them now.”
“If you lead our army, we will send fifty thousand warriors with you this winter. When ice freezes the ocean, we will cross to the islands of Bashevgo and kill the Pirate Lords in their sleep.”
Phylomon was stunned by the immensity of what she was asking. “That would be a great battle, and many slavers would die, but I fear that all your warriors would die in such an attack, too. In Bashevgo, they would all die.”
“I swear upon the bones of my foremothers,” Ironwood Woman said, “that if we do not destroy Bashevgo now, all the Fruit People will die, cowering in fear. We would rather die as hunters.”
Phylomon had seen the Hukm’s fighting tactics. They fought as they lived, wandering back and forth across the continent in caravans. They had no strongholds. They lacked military discipline. “Even if we destroy Bashevgo tomorrow,” Phylomon countered, “the lords of Craal have millions of people in the west. They would come back and fill it with men more evil than the ones we kill.”
“Bashevgo is on this side of the White Mountains,” Ironwood Woman said. “If we take Bashevgo, we will keep the east free for the Hukm and Pwi. We will capture their fire cannons. The lords of Craal could send their men to take Bashevgo, but if the free people of the Rough are there, we will destroy the armies of Craal.”
Phylomon felt astonished. Never had the Hukm fought beside humans and Pwi. Their hatred for other races was so old, so well known, that he doubted they could join such an army. Yet Ironwood Woman had made the offer. He remembered his history books from long ago. War and greed were the two legs that the industrial and technological revolutions had been founded on. For centuries he’d been trying to initiate a technological era, and here the opportunity presented itself. In Craal, technology was produced out of greed; in the Rough it grew because of the necessity of war.
“If you take the island of Bashevgo,” Phylomon said, “and you leave your Hukm to defend it, you will need food to last the winters. Also, you will need to learn to use the tools of the Slave Lords. You will need to learn how to run their generators that take power from the sea and sun. You will need to learn to maintain the fire cannons that protect their coast. You will need to learn to sail their ships. Are the Hukm ready to do this?”
“The Fruit People do not like to float on water,” Iron-wood Woman said. “We will bring food to our people when the ice freezes the ocean.”
“The ice does not freeze the ocean every year. You must learn to sail ships, just as the Pwi and the humans sail ships.”
“We do not like the water,” Ironwood Woman said.
“I won’t lead your army, unless your people learn to use the ships,” Phylomon countered, calculating how long it would take to prepare an attack. It was too late this year. Next winter at the earliest—two winters was better. Before he realized it, he was trapped. The very notion that he’d lead a raid on Bashevgo after four centuries was incredible. What had Chaa said? “If you go on this journey, you will not live three more years.” If Phylomon accepted this position, he’d set himself up to fulfill the prophecy in grand style. But it was worth it.
“We will learn to sail the ships,” Ironwood Woman said. She bent and slapped both hands on the ground, offering a Hukm oath, and the negotiations were done.
That night, Phylomon sat up with the Hukm and watched the sky. The Hukm seldom used fire, and so the night was clear. It was the season for the Festival of the Dragon—a yearly celebration of the start of winter. The hills were thick with dragons. Every night they flew high into the air, obeying a genetic impulse planted by the Starfarers long ago.
In ages past, the struggle of the upward climb killed the oldest dragons as they succumbed to weak hearts. But since the Eridani had sent their orbiting war-ships, the red drones, things had changed.
The red drones attacked the rising dragons, as if they were spaceships climbing into the sky. The drones shot the dragons down so that they dropped flaming from the sky. Ironwood Woman lay back and watched the sky, and Phylomon did too. This was sufficient cause for celebrating the Festival of the Dragon—to watch the dragons die.
One of the two warships reached its zenith at sundown and shone like a brilliant red comet. Several great-horned dragons flashed their leather wings as they soared in the moonlight. For hours the dragons climbed. Phylomon calculated that the red drones did not allow flight above fifteen thousand feet. As a dragon climbing under the cold autumn moon reached this ceiling, a finger of white light would shoot from the drone. Touched by flame, dragons fell like burning stars.