Red Sun Also Rises, A (6 page)

Her shredded corpse dropped to the ground and lay twitching.

There was a momentary pause, then drums suddenly boomed from beyond the trees, adding their din to the clamouring storm, which was now directly above the clearing and appeared to be descending toward it.

The witch doctor smeared foul-smelling grease over my skin then rubbed a gritty glasslike powder into it, covering my entire body. A prickling sensation needled into every inch of me, as if I’d become filled with a strong static charge.

“It is ground crystal,” he said. “It will ensure that the gods take you.”

He applied his blade to his own palms, threw the weapon aside, held his hands poised above my face, and began to sing.

His blood dripped into my eyes and onto my lips. Each time I opened my mouth to scream, some of it dropped onto my tongue and oozed to the back of my throat.

God! Please! I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!

My church, and the last remnants of my faith, burned.

The air above turned into a writhing ball of energy. It flashed and shimmered, boiled, flattened into a disk, and opened in the middle. Warm air, tangy with the scent of lemons, gusted against my face, then suddenly reversed direction and howled as it was sucked upward. I felt a tremendous force pulling at me.

Clarissa Stark tottered to her feet and screamed my name. She staggered over with her eyes clamped shut and tears streaming from them, and threw herself on top of me.

Iriputiz bellowed, “No! Not you, woman!”

I felt myself rising, carrying Clarissa with me.

My senses left me.

°

3. Yatsill
and
Yarkeen

I look back upon the man I was prior to that ritual on Koluwai and I see a pathetic individual. I see a man who professed faith when he felt secure but who had none when he felt threatened.

True faith is steadfast. When mine was tested, it failed instantly and completely.

The Tanner family, the women of Whitechapel, the abominable crimes of Jack the Ripper, and the ghastly ordeal I suffered on the island, these things convinced me that God is a figment of the human imagination, for surely if He existed, He would not allow such iniquities to be visited upon one of His advocates.

So I was born again, a non-believer.

I was born again, under the palest of yellow skies and with a citrus fragrance in my nostrils.

I was born again, and I was lying on my back on the ground.

A voice said, in Koluwaian, “By the Saviour! Look at this one!”

Panicking, petrified, I turned over and scrambled away on my hands and knees. Then I stopped and sucked desperately at the air, my eyes fixed on the grass between my hands. It possessed a peculiar bluish-green hue and its blades were tubular with minuscule white flowers at their tips. I began to tremble all over. A mewl of mortal terror escaped me as my body was consumed by the unendurable agony of the witch doctor’s torture, except—

Except it wasn’t.

The pain was but a memory.

A second voice exclaimed, “Suns! What is it? Look at its colour!”

The first voice: “An aberration?”

“By virtue of there only being two of them, yes, of course. When before have so few been delivered to us?”

“Is the other awake?”

“It is moving.”

I fell onto my side, drew my knees up to my chest, and hugged them. In a quavering whisper, I recited, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy—be thy—”

I swallowed and felt my lips drawing back against my teeth.

The words had emerged as empty sounds. Meaningless. There was no comfort in them. They didn’t alter the fact that it was no longer a stifling tropical night but a bright and fresh day, or that the air smelled not of the jungle but of lemons, or that when I turned my head and blinkingly looked upward, I saw, directly above me through the branches of a pink tree, four small moons in a cloudless cadmium sky—three of dusty red and the fourth, the smallest of the spheres, purple with a dark blemish in its centre.

Four moons.

I broke into hysterical laughter, uncurled, clambered to my feet, and looked around. Pastel colours slid past my eyes. Nonsensical shapes. A bizarre forest. Long shadows.

Plum-coloured fruits, shaped like pears but the size of a man, hung from gargantuan trees. The nearest to me emitted an incomprehensible mumble.

I flinched away from it, turned, and saw Koluwaians standing around me. Koluwaians and . . .
other things
. One of the latter was bending over the prone form of Clarissa Stark. It said, “This one appears to be damaged.”

My laughter rose in pitch and became a long, despairing wail. I toppled to one side and hit the ground in a dead faint.

° °

I was aboard a ship, on a voyage to the other side of the world. I was on a stretcher being carried up into the jungled hills of Koluwai. I was being shaken back to consciousness by a hand on my shoulder. I yelled and pushed myself away from it, bumped into warm bodies, and lashed out with my fists and feet.

“Aiden, is that you?”

Clarissa Stark.
Clarissa Stark!

I opened my eyes and looked down at myself. I was naked. The grease Iriputiz had smeared over me was dry and breaking off in large glittering flakes.

Then I looked up and saw figures. There were the—the
things
I had seen earlier, there were Koluwaians, and there was Clarissa.

She was still wearing the clothes I’d last seen her in—the trousers hanging over misshapen legs, the shirt pushed up by a humped and twisted spine. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut, with tears streaming from them.

“Clarissa, where are we? Where are we?”

“I don’t have my goggles, Aiden. I’m blind. Were we rescued?”

“I don’t—I don’t think so.”

Though I tried desperately to avoid looking at anything but her, I couldn’t help myself, and glance by fearful glance I took in the immediate environment. We were sitting among a group of Koluwaians, five plump men and three fat women, in a forest clearing. The trees were the same as I’d glimpsed before—of phenomenal size, raised up on mangrove-like roots and heavy with enormous purple fruits from which faint sounds issued. The air was filled with the muted whispering and mumbling, which reminded me of the noise one hears in a theatre during the brief seconds between the lights going down and the curtain going up.

Six creatures were busy around the edges of the glade. They were pushing sharp hollow sticks, similar to bamboo, into the fruits and collecting, in what appeared to be skin containers, the juice that ran out through them.

One of the things noticed that I’d regained my wits, stepped away from the trees, and approached us. It looked down at me. It was so dreadful in aspect that it was all I could do to suppress a scream.

In terms of species, it resembled an amalgam of mollusc and crustacean, with a carapace of slate grey. Its body was reminiscent of a mussel shell, standing on end with the seam at the front. From the base of this, four crab-like legs extended, while the top of the torso curled outward in a frilled and complex manner to form wide armoured shoulders. The arms—which like the legs reminded me of the limbs of a crab or lobster—had two elbows and ended in three extremely long fingers and a thumb, all of which moved without cease. A fluted shell—shaped like a hood—protected the head. A revolting “face” bulged out of it. This was the only visibly soft and fleshy part of the creature. It had the appearance of a snail or a slug, in that the skin was grey and wet-looking, with no bones beneath it to give a defined shape. It was, in fact, almost entirely mouth—the long opening dividing it vertically—with outer lips fringed with small red feelers, like a sea anemone, and a further set of flexible inner lips which slid over a hard beak, just visible at the back of the orifice. There were four eyes, two to either side of the mouth, the upper pair being the largest. They were like black beads, circular and carrying no expression. A small bump was located above each upper eye, like nascent horns.

The creature was about seven feet tall and wore nothing but a leather harness, which held five long wooden barbed spears against its back.

“I am Yazziz Yozkulu,” it said, in Koluwaian. “You have been delivered, as these others once were—” It wiggled its fingers at the islanders. “This place is the Forest of Indistinct Murmurings. Your appearance is very curious. Are you damaged?”

I couldn’t answer. With each word that emerged from the creature’s horrible maw, I seemed to recede from the world, until I felt that, rather than participating in it, I was merely looking on as a spectator.

“We are not injured,” Clarissa said. “Forest, you say? Where is it located?”

“It is where it is. Where else could it be?”

Another of the loathsome things scuttled over. It bore a jagged gouge running down the left side of its body—an old wound.

Yazziz Yozkulu turned to it. “Have we gathered enough Dar’sayn, Tsillanda Ma’ara?”

“We have. I will be glad to depart. I find the forest repellent.”

“As do I. I always feel a sense of trespass when we come here. However, the Saviour demands it, and the Ptoollan trees have served us well, so I suppose the diversion was worth the effort. Look at these misshapen things, though!” The creature gestured at Clarissa and me. “I don’t know what to make of them!”

“I think we have encountered a potential dissonance, my Yazziz.”

“Perhaps so. You have greater sensitivity to such matters than I. Should we withdraw from the Ritual of Immersion?”

“If you will it.”

“Do you advise it?”

“No. I recommend we proceed as normal. These new ones are curious but the dissonance I sense is fledgling. Let us take them with us. When we return to Yatsillat, we can present them to our fellow Wise Ones.”

“Very well. Saviour’s Eyes, but they are peculiarities, though!”

The Yazziz—it appeared to be a title rather than a name—lifted the hollow rod it held and very gently prodded Clarissa with the blunt end. “The other ones will feed you if you require it.”

“The other ones?” my friend asked.

One of the Koluwaian women leaned forward and touched my companion’s shoulder. “Us. Do not be concerned. We are children of the Saviour, and the gods are kind.”

“That is true,” Yazziz Yozkulu said, then addressed the woman. “Take your people back to the Ptall’kor. We will join you presently.” The beast scurried away with the one called Tsillanda Ma’ara following behind.

A shrill giggle escaped me, and I heard a sharp edge of madness in it.

Clarissa reached out, groped for my hand, and held it tightly. “Aiden, what’s wrong? I don’t know where we are, but at least we’re not with Iriputiz, and the people seem well disposed toward us.”

“People!” I screeched. “They’re not people, Clarissa! They are—they are—
monsters
! And this place—it’s a nightmare! A nightmare!”

The islander who’d spoken before said, “My name is Kata. This is Ptallaya. Those with us are the Wise Ones. Come. I will lead you to the Ptall’kor.”

She stood, as did the other islanders. I helped Clarissa to her feet and we followed the group through the trees.

“How far are we from Koluwai?” Clarissa asked.

“As far as can be,” Kata responded. “Ptallaya is where the gods dwell.”

A few moments later we came to the edge of the forest, and here I was confronted by yet another paralysing sight. It was a living thing, floating in the air, but whether animal or vegetable I couldn’t say. In shape, it was similar to a mermaid’s purse—the egg case of a shark or skate, dried examples of which I’d seen in bric-a-brac shops—but a powdery brown, and massive, at least a hundred feet long and thirty wide. Seaweed-like ribbons rose high into the sky from its corners, buoyed up by gas-filled sacs, and from the thing’s underside a great many tendrils dangled to the ground, about twenty feet below. Each of these had finger-like appendages at its end, which gripped the grass, appearing to hold the thing down.

“It is a Ptall’kor,” Kata explained. She emitted a trilling whistle and the thing responded by sinking down. There were Koluwaians and more of the mollusc creatures sitting on its back.

Following the islanders, I guided Clarissa up onto it and we settled on its chitinous hide. My companion let go of my hand and pressed her palms against her eyes. “It won’t do. It won’t do at all. I need my goggles. You must detail everything, Aiden. I must know our circumstance. Tell me! What is around us?”

Feeling drunk and remote, I started to speak mechanically, my emotions disengaged. I described the weird forest and its mumbling fruits, the Ptall’kor, and the landscape beyond the trees.

“The sky is pale yellow, Clarissa. There are four moons overhead and two small suns close together and very low, just above the horizon, which, incidentally, is too far away.”

“Atmospheric illusions?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What else?”

I looked down at my limbs and, at last, emotions registered—embarrassment and humiliation! I was naked! Completely naked! But my exposure also revealed that my body was covered from head to toe in small, thin white scars—Iriputiz and his knife, but healed already? How could that be possible?

“Reverend Fleischer!” my companion barked.

“I—I can’t. It’s too—too—”

She gripped my arm, almost viciously. “Be my eyes!”

Her voice was sharp and assertive, but I suddenly became aware that she was trembling, too.

I gave a deep, shuddering sigh. “The forest is at the mouth of a valley, which opens onto a wide savannah. I see a narrow river winding through it. There are mountains on one side of the valley and low hills on the other. All the colours are of a soft hue. There are exotic plants and giant trees, and herds of—of—I don’t know what they are.”

“Antelope, like in Africa?”

“No—similar, but not antelope. And a lot of flying things. They don’t look like birds. More like sea life, but floating in the air with—um—buoyancy sacs, I suppose. Here come the—the—” My voice failed me as the “Wise Ones” scuttled into view and clambered aboard the Ptall’kor. They placed bulging and sloshing skins into a pile and the one called Yazziz Yozkulu announced, “Only two new ones delivered to us—and strange ones at that—but at least we have plenty of Dar’sayn and can now leave this accursed place. On with our journey, and Saviour protect us!”

Our “vehicle” rose into the air and pulled itself past one of the colossal trees. At my companion’s request, I described it in greater detail: the raised roots, so tall a man could easily walk among them; the trunk, silvery grey, at least thirty feet wide but proportionately short; and the feathery fern-like leaves that arched outward from its top. They were of a soft pinkish hue and comprised of ever-thinning filaments that became so slight as to be almost invisible, causing the edges of the fronds to melt into the air. This was common to much of the flora that I subsequently observed—the thinning of foliage to the point where it became a nimbus around its parent plant. Together with the dominant pastel shades, it gave the landscape such a lack of definition that it might have been a dream.