CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
Lowanna lay on her back, feigning death. François had wanted to smear her with blood, and even drape a goat entrail artistically over her shoulder, as he had done to several of the villagers, but the mere thought had made her vomit. Instead, she had smeared dirt on her face and limbs conspicuously. Gunther lay at the bottom of the ridge, very visible against the grass-furred stone, with blood spattered all over his chest and face and a goat lung stuffed into his shirt pocket.
Lowanna lay still and tried listening to the hens.
She couldn’t quite shut out the sound of the goats, but the goats were more complex. They followed the movements of the humans of Ahuskay village, hoping the women would give them handfuls of seeds or melon rind, or the children might give them unwanted gruel. They monitored the movements of the men mostly to stay out of their way, to avoid being kicked. In the bleating of the goats, Lowanna heard warnings, threats, and the sharing of information.
Fat Head smells like melon.
I found sliced tubers in Wobble Bottom’s hut.
Stay away from the females!
This chopped vine is tasty.
It was distracting, it was too much. It drew her in, and the chaos of voices felt painfully like madness.
She tried instead to listen to the hens. They were simpler, stupider, more focused creatures.
Food, food, food, food, food, mine! Mine!
Food, mine! Food, food, food.
If Lowanna listened to the hens long enough, their words disappeared, and the animal sounds came very close to returning to being simple white noise.
Very close. But not quite.
Villagers—mostly women, a few older children, and all of the men—lay bloody and pretending to be dead. Three huts had been burned, and lay still smoldering; the others had been knocked down, the pieces scattered to look like vandalism rather than deliberate deconstruction.
The villagers had resisted the idea of burning all the huts, even after Marty explained the intent. But once the Tribespeaker became convinced, he had announced, “The Tribe has spoken,” and down the huts came.
Goats had wandered away with hides and poles in their mouths, and the villagers, following their Speakers’ instructions, lay still and let it happen.
Every adult of the tribe had a spear hidden in the underbrush, close at hand.
The few women missing from the scene, and the rest of the children, had crept away south toward a hiding place in the prairie, with food, water, and weapons, before François had activated the beacon.
The beacon shone now, a laser beam pointing up into the sky like a klieg light. It was tilted to shine to the south and east, where the Sethians lived. It shone out a narrow gully on the ridge’s flank, where the amulet lay on the chest of Surjan, cloaked and covered and made to resemble the Ametsu as much as possible.
Which was not very much. The head was the wrong shape, and for all his size, he was a little short. But maybe in the darkness it would be good enough.
Lowanna lay on the southern edge of the forest, farthest from the decoy. Marty and the Ahuskay warriors were closer to where they hoped to trap the Sethians, armed and waiting. François lay on his back a few feet from Lowanna.
That was by his own choice. And he was absolutely covered in goat entrails.
Probably, he was doing it to goad her. She was determined not to react.
“You know,” François said suddenly, “there are many thinkers who believe that Earth life is all a simulation, anyway.”
“What?” She wanted him to shut up, but focusing on his whispered voice was another way not to pay attention to the goats.
“Life as we know it. Life in twenty-first-century Earth. If life were a simulation, that could explain a lot of oddities. Cryptids, like the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot. UFO sightings. It could also help explain the Placebo Effect. Why do people’s brains apparently have the power to heal them? Well, because all we really are is a brain, in a simulated world, and the apparent healing is only perceptual anyway.”
“Is this the kind of thing you talked about while you were smoking pot at those private prep schools you went to?” she asked.
“Yes. And the Fermi Paradox. Given all that we know about the probability of intelligent life and the size of the universe, we should be seeing aliens all the time. We don’t. Why is that?”
“Because it’s really a simulation,” Lowanna said. “And the contradiction is just bad story design by the programmers.”
“Bad worldbuilding,” François said. “Yeah. And so I’m thinking—”
“Being in a simulation would also explain why we seem to be in the fourth millennium B.C.E.,” she said. “Marty’s vision. The voices I hear. The wrong stars. The blobs of light. The Ametsu and the cow-people.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“I’m going to try not to be an ass when I say this,” Lowanna said. “Shut up.”
He shut up.
Unfortunately, that brought back the sounds of the goats.
Maybe these big Two-Legs have food.
Ouch! That hurts!
Stay away from these big Two-Legs.
Lowanna stiffened. Had the Sethians arrived?
She heard the heavy crunch of footsteps. Her eyes were closed, but she couldn’t escape the panicked squeals of chickens as they flowed past her, seeking to flee from something that was enormously heavy, but walked like a man. She squinted through her eyelashes and saw only the dark outline of a head against the stars above her.
But it was a monster’s head, with a long snout and long, square ears.
She held her breath, and it passed.
She heard goats bleating to the south, on the grassland beyond the forest.
Is the big Two-Legs a predator?
Will it eat goats?
François whispered in a voice so soft it sounded as if he wasn’t moving his mouth at all, but exhaling words directly from his lungs. “It’s going toward Surjan.”
Lowanna said nothing.
Her role in the plan, with François and the women lying in the village and around the edge of the lake, was first of all to look dead. And second, when the warriors sprang their trap, she and the others were supposed to rise up with their weapons and stop the Sethians from running away through the village, trap them against the ridge.
But only one Sethian had come. Would they have to repeat this three more times?
Big Two-Legs are bad.
Big Two-Legs is hunting the children. Stay away!
Lowanna almost laughed, despite the tension. She was in some twisted intersection between George Orwell and Rudyard Kipling, being warned about the evil of Two-Legs by talking goats. Lying on her back, playing dead, on an African savannah.
Five thousand years before her own birth.
“Shhh,” François urged her.
Big Two-Legs is hunting the children.
Lowanna sharpened her ears to focus on the goats. They had gone back to nattering about melon rinds and stray seeds, but there were other voices.
Stay away from Big Two-Legs!
Run! Run!
They were the voices of prairie mice and snakes and ground birds. And they all came from the south.
“François,” she whispered. “There are other Sethians.”
“We know there are,” he whispered back. “Shh.”
“They’re going after the women and children.”
He raised himself up on one elbow and looked at her. “Animals are telling you this.”
She nodded.
He picked himself up off the ground, shook off the bloody guts, and grabbed his spear. They were at the edge of the forest and far from the ambush spot. Lowanna climbed to her feet and looked across the woods and the lake, seeing there a single Sethian, tall, beast-headed, spear-carrying, and walking into a trap.
And she saw all the men and women who were about to lose their children and didn’t know it.
She hadn’t taken a spear, because she hadn’t thought she’d need one. Rummaging through the knocked-apart skin and bones of a nearby hut, she grabbed the curved throwing stick. It was heavy, a hunter’s weapon. She knew from experience that it would kill even large animals with a single throw, if you hit them just right in the head.
And she knew how to throw it.
As she and François turned to creep from the forest, a woman lying on the ground reached up to grab Lowanna’s hand. “What?” the woman murmured. Lowanna recognized her as a young mother named Zegiga.
A young mother whose two young children were maybe now being stalked by the Sethians.
“There are Ametsu hunting the children,” Lowanna whispered. “Shh. Get a spear and come with us.”
She led, tiptoeing out across the grassland and looking back at the same time, making sure that the Sethian at the lake hadn’t noticed her movement. It would be a disaster if she tipped off the first Sethian, just as it would be a disaster if the Sethians killed the Ahuskay children.
François followed. Zegiga came after, with three other women whose names Lowanna didn’t know. They were all young. Were they all mothers? Had they chosen to lie at the edge of the forest to be near their children?
Were they all now panicking?
Goats loped toward Lowanna out of the darkness.
Melon rind is delicious.
I want water.
Lowanna stooped and grabbed the foremost goat by its horns. It was a big old billy with a wise face. “Big Two-Legs,” she whispered fiercely, staring it in the face. “Big Two-Legs with the beast face. Are they hunting the children?”
The billy bleated. One Big Two-Legs. It’s almost to the children.
Lowanna released the goat and ran.
François ran after her. “That was insane! I mean, bad word choice . . . but . . . were you just talking with a goat?”
The children and many of the women, especially the older women, had been sent to a small lake two miles away from Ahuskay. The lake wasn’t hidden and it wasn’t especially sheltered, just a depression beneath three large standing stones where a stream flowing from Ahuskay’s lake gathered into a large pond. The depression was deep enough that Marty and the Speakers had decreed that the children could have a fire there. The fire would cook food, drive away wild animals, and keep spirits up.
Had it also attracted the attention of the Sethians?
Or had they tracked the party of the children to their hiding place?
She ran faster. Her lungs pounded, but she knew to a dead certainty that she had never run this fast in her life. She was surprised that François managed to keep pace with her, and exulted to hear the footsteps of Zegiga and the others falling behind.
Which was perhaps a little foolish, since she raced to battle.
A low rise separated her from the depression containing the lake. She splashed across the stream that crossed from her right to her left side, flowing around the mound of earth. She didn’t see the Sethian yet, which meant it had to be down in the actual depression. She remembered his height and the muscle mass of the beast that had killed Abdullah, and the fierce primitive look of his fire-hardened spear.
François bent his course and ran around the right side of the depression. Lowanna raced straight as an arrow, up onto the low headland.
She skidded to a stop at the crest, heart pounding. Below her she saw the village’s old women huddled in a defiant knot. They held spears upright defensively, and they knew how to use them, but they were small. Before them, back turned to Lowanna, loomed a muscle-bound Sethian with its own spear. Its erect ears made it look eight feet tall, and its head made it look like a monster.
Its kind were monsters. Abdullah had died on a spear just like the one Lowanna was looking at now.
Behind the women, the children cringed and wept beside a large fire. There were maybe thirty of them—they were dirty, and wore ragged little tunics like shifts in some Dickensian orphanage. The oldest might have been ten or twelve years old, and they were all thin and tiny.
“Hey, ugly!” she yelled.
She threw her stick.
The Sethian turned at the sound of her voice, raising its muzzle to look for the source of the cry. Her throwing stick struck it in the side of the head. In the shadow, she thought she saw blood on its face and shoulder. Its right ear sagged and it staggered briefly to one knee.
The stick, of course, didn’t come back. Real throwing sticks didn’t return to you when you threw them. It skidded off the side of his face and disappeared into the darkness.
Lowanna had the initiative, and she wanted to keep it. She hurled herself down the hill, taking the slope in ten-foot bounds that risked breaking her neck or an ankle at each step.
The women behind the Sethian wasted no time. They stabbed the Sethian in the back with their spears. If they were penetrating its skin, Lowanna couldn’t tell.
It roared in pain and rage. Spinning around and rising to its feet in one motion, it knocked the weapons from their hands and sent them flying. It strode toward the children, legs covering five feet in a single step.
An old woman stepped into its path. She had lost her spear, but she stood before it with chin turned up and hands raised, yelling at it to stop.
It grabbed her by her hair and spun her in a single violent motion. Lowanna heard her neck snap.
As the other old women scrambled to recover their spears, the Sethian stooped. It took something from its belt and slashed at the dead woman’s body.
Lowanna kept running. François burst into view again at her right, still clutching his spear.
The Sethian spun around, hands raised. In one, it held a short, curved knife. In the other, it had a small bit of bloody meat.
The woman’s liver.
It sank his teeth into the liver, slurping it quickly into its gullet. Its teeth gleamed red with blood and it emitted a bellowing, bass laugh. The children shrieked and scattered away from the fire, toward the edges of the depression. The women wailed.
François broke out ahead of Lowanna and struck at the Sethian’s chest with his spear.
François moved fast, surprisingly fast for the boxy-looking banker he was.
But the Sethian smashed aside the spear with a flick of its wrist, and the weapon flew into the pond. As François charged forward, hands suddenly empty, the Sethian punched him in the face.
François fell to the ground.
The Sethian stepped forward over François’s body, blood on its teeth and blood on its knife and a predator’s grin on its lips. “Come here, little humans!” it roared to Lowanna and the old women. “Come to me now, all of you. I have belly enough to fit you all, and I have a hunger to end the world!”