The Wild Lands: Legend of the Wild Man (13 page)

“With all due respect sir, you should have
seen that storm. A high pressure zone was moving in, and with just
a few bolts of lightning I started a tornado that ripped that
valley to shreds. There was enough rain to turn the top of the
mountain into a mudslide.” Zetis said as he perked up in his
chair.

Baucis turned on him, eyes aflame. “
With
all due respect
, young Zetis, you carried out unsanctioned
actions without your superior's knowledge. If I had one of that
ape's knives I'd carve out your VRC here and now.”

blade>

Zetis glanced at Skup who grinned maliciously
as he mimed stabbing slitting Zetis’s throat.

“Zetis is my apprentice, I'll discipline
him,” Orus Luca replied.

“Why does someone as incompetent as him have
any access weather control?” Baucis snarled.

Urea
chimed.

black hair, powers that be had no choice but to use me>

Skup flicked his own long hair back, much
longer than the aspirant programmer's. Zetis guffawed. Baucis was
not amused.

“Since you doubt your master’s discipline,
I’ll take it upon myself to punish you. I trust that’s
acceptable?”

Orus Luca opened his mouth to speak but
Baucis stopped him up with a wave of his hand. Luca nodded quickly
and wisely closed his moth and returned his plump hands to his
round belly.

Zetis’s grin
dropped.

“We always need help at the reclamation
level,” Tennay said. No one had seen the engineer slip into the
room. He stood in the doorway for a moment then silently sank into
a chair.

“That will suffice,” Baucis replied
icily.

sure to eat plenty from the Garden for you> Skup looked even
more arrogant, Urea hadn’t thought it possible. She had to
intervene.

“But Master Baucis, we couldn't contact you.
If we had waited until morning we could have lost their location.
We
had
to do something. You said you feared losing the
animal-”

“And where is the animal Urea? Can you
present me his body? Perhaps a small piece so I can be assured of
his death? None of you have any proof of anything. Shadows danced
in front of a fire so you took off the top of a mountain? I expect
this from these two imbeciles Urea, but from you I expect much
more.”

“You must think of the repercussions of your
actions,” Tennay said coolly.

“We were thinking of the repercussions of
inaction, sir,” Urea said to Tennay, then turned to Baucis, her
voice pleading, “you said you were afraid, you've never been afraid
of anything! What were we supposed to do?

“
My
fear of this beast compelled you
to do this? I am concerned,
perhaps
, but I do not fear
this...this ape-man
!”
he thundered.

“Well a lot of people do!” said Skup angrily.
His intensity silenced the room. “Ntelo's practically programmed
the whole city to be afraid of a
Wild Man
just like this
guy. The storm seemed like the only way to preserve our way of life
from that thing and his family! We had to do it! We've all heard
High
Priestess
Ntelo say thousands of times what
would happen if the elk run loose in the Garden. The elk! This
thing killed one without us even seeing him. We had to protect
ourselves.”

“You failed to mention your own pathetic
defeat.”

Skup turned beet red.

Zetis goaded.

Skup bit his tongue, but managed to remain
silent.

Baucis continued, “We know nothing of these
ape-men, why must we protect ourselves from them?”

“Isn't that why we have Hunters?” Urea asked.
Baucis stopped pacing, caught off guard by her dissension. “If not
the Wild Man, what are we protecting ourselves from?”

Baucis hesitated, “I find it interesting that
fear causes irrationality in humans as it does Evanimals. We need
fear nothing, dear. We're all-powerful.”

“We’re not even as powerful as our ancestors.
The Scourge proved that, and we're only living off their dregs,”
Tennay said.

Baucis scowled. He couldn’t silence the old
engineer as easily as he could the complacent Orus Luca.

“The ape-man will be interpreted as a
challenge to our power,” Ntelo added.

“That ape-man is only an animal. An animal we
could have used for my program, but can't since it is either dead
or gone. He and his kind would have been our greatest tool...”

“But the Garden works perfectly, why risk
unbalancing the natural order?”

stuff?> Zetis asked.

Skup replied. Urea kept
silent.

“Nature is imbalance, and the risks are
negligible, we need not fear him or anything else...” the Master
Ecologist trailed off into thought. He stared at a skyscraper. A
smattering of office lights shone out from the building. The idea
of people working late for something larger than their selves,
frozen in paint for eternity, appealed to Baucis.

“There are better things than fresh fruit and
meat.” Everyone turned to the soft-spoken engineer. Tennay's eyes
lit up as he looked around the room. “With the
Wild Man'
s
hands we could make machines instead of playing with the scraps of
our ancestors. We could return to the surface and rule as Nature
intended.”

The Hidden were as close to the earth's masters as
any ever were, but no one rules forever. Lord Chaos brought forth a
mighty storm, and The Hidden were no more... some survived, but as
a shadow of all that was.

“GO!” the hunter yells at the Hermit.

“Kao speaks!” the hermit replies. The old man
kept up with the hunter all morning, his frail form moved with
unseen speed, “and you are
still
going the wrong way.”

The hunter growls at this. He does not know
where to go. The storm left only the scent of rain. The clouds left
no trails, only death in the valley. He will never wrestle with his
blood brothers again. The crones—his grandmother among them—will
never share their wisdom with another soul. Lifetimes lost. He will
never flirt with the prettiest of the
troubles
again. Her
eyes, forever closed, will not challenge him to impress her as a
man. He will never know her as a woman. He will never sharpen
knives with the hunters, or swap stories by the fire. He will never
hear his mother sing, or hug her, or wonder if she worries about
him. He will never play with his sister again. He will never sneak
up on her on late afternoons while she gathers berries by the brook
and scoop her up and throw her into the creek despite her giggling
protests. She will never make him tea with his favorite herbs or
braid him another grass bracelet. Why did he never wear them? It
would have been so simple, and now he had nothing of her but
memories so sharp and bright they burned.

He cannot wallow in the dead memories of
everyone he knows. They're all gone, buried in mud, save him and
the mad hermit. He curses the hermit again with sounds older than
words.

“You could not have stopped this Kao. We're
blessed to be alive.” The old man says.

“Blessed?” he roars, “family dead! Home
ruined! Kao... alive.”

He collapses and weeps.

He tried to get to the tribe before the
storm, but he failed. All night he raced rivulets of mud down the
steep cliff face while powerful gusts tore at his fur. By the time
he had reached his home, all was buried: his sister, his mother,
the chief, the younger, the older, and the birds that kept a
careful watch over the village. Even the sky was hurt. The
mountains he knew so well and the sky they framed had changed, as
scarred by the storm as he.

The sun climbs into the sky and crests the
bald mountains too soon.

After too long he finds his tribe's tree. The
massive trunk lays horizontal in the earth. Its braided canopy is
half buried in mud. Knowing his family is entombed below forces hot
tears from his eyes and the hunter frantically digs at the earth.
He digs until he can't. Weak with exhaustion, he stops. The entire
valley is unrecognizable. Paths are washed away. Trees are
upturned. Rock and earth from the mountain covers everything. He
recognizes none of it save the tree. He doesn't know if it is where
it grew or if the storm tore its roots and threw it down the
valley.

His family, his tribe, and his life are
buried under earth and rock, never to be seen again. He envies the
few dead animals strewn about among the mud. At least they died on
the earth and not deep below it. Their bodies will be eaten by
others instead of being trapped for eternity. They will have peace,
he thinks. His heart aches with the weight of the mountain.

The thunderstorm was stronger than any he has
ever witnessed. His tribe lived in the valley because it protected
them from such powerful weather. It rained a little each day, sips
for the thirsty jungle. The valley was thick and lush with life
because of it. It rarely flooded. The giant trees drank much and
gave the rest to the creeks and streams that moved water out and
beyond the valley.

Now huge pools of water grow stagnant and
putrid as the great trees and all that called them home rots in the
sun. Streams feed them corpses. They bloat too quickly and rot too
fast even for maggots.

His sister and mother must have thought it
was just another shower, and perhaps huddled together for warmth in
the cold night. Maybe their bodies still clung to each other in an
embrace that would last until their bones turned to stone and were
pushed to the surface or sucked deep below. If only he could have
held them one last time, instead of climbing the cliff to drink
poison with the mad hermit in his cave.

“It's not your fault,” the hermit says, then
places a hand on the hunter's shoulder.

“Your fault!” he screams. His mind reels but
he
knows
it is the hermit's fault. Somehow, despite all of
this death, he can understand the words the hermit says better than
before and makes his own words without even thinking. Something
changed when he drunk the potion. Magick. He does not like it. His
mind is different. Thoughts connect in new ways. He sees patterns
in everything. Symbols race through his mind.

Symbols are what the hermit talks with.
Everything is symbols. The hunter knows this. Each sound is like a
line in the hermit's cave paintings. Together the sounds make
words: heard symbols shared through speech. Each sketch is in his
brain, for the hermit spent his life chattering away at the tribe,
filling their brains as he filled his cave. He taught them language
through his tales of the Hidden. The tribe only ever used the most
obvious of the old man's language in the most basic patterns, But
now the hunter is transformed. He is unique. He has a word just for
himself. It does not matter if the cursed hermit told him this or
not. It is true.

“The fault is with the Hidden,” the hermit
retaliates slowly and gently.

Kao stands and towers over the shriveled old
man, “Don't believe in gods!” he yells in the hermit's face.

“That word means something different,” the
hermit says meekly, then, trying to hide his excitement “someone
else tells stories?”

“Never again!” the Kao howls, then collapses
into the mud. He tucks his head between his legs, hugs his knees
and rolls over. He feels the cold squelch of the mud as it consumes
him. He wants to be underneath it, far below, with his family and
all he loves. He does not want to be trapped here with his mind and
the hermit babbling on and on and on.

His head hurts, every moment he understands
more than he did the last. His brain takes turns between blossoms
of new awareness and thorns of agony. Why did he drink that foul
potion? Part of him is exhilarated with new understanding, but none
of it can bring back his family. His mind swings back and forth,
faster and faster.

He understands the hermit, and his
environment opens up before his senses. He feels reborn, but he
still wishes the effects would wear off. Too much goes through his
head too quickly. He smells traces of loved ones and fruit trees
wafting up from the mud, never to be seen again. He hears the buzz
of insects, calling for their own kin, he feels their loss as great
as his, greater even, for more of them are dead. He squeezes his
eyes and ears tightly shut to block out the world.

“What am I?” he screams in stolen words.

“Awake.” The hermit tenderly pulls him out of
the mud, while the word permeates the young hunter's mind, “and I
am sorry...it is painful.”

“Why?” Kao chokes out.

“No one believed me save those that fought
the Hidden's beasts and saw the cursed stones with their own
eyes.”

“How you know?” Kao’s newborn voice
cracks.

“I told the stories for years, and you all
thought them nonsense, I almost believed that myself until I saw
that stone. I knew that it would bring them here.”

“My family...”

“Is gone,” the hermit finishes, “and I am
sorry, but if you did not share the vision with me last night then
you too would be gone. Chaos’s only champion would be an old man. I
doubt I can convince the Hidden of our tribe’s pain like you can,
Kao.”

These words work their way deep into his
self. His mind continues to bend and grow in new directions. From
each idea two more spring forth, and those lead to more and more
again.

His brain replays the battle with the
prongbuck. Its strange place in another buck's herd, the anarchic
spikes jutting from its spine, its odd behavior. Most of all he
thinks of the strange glowing stone stuck in its neck. His mind
offers him no other explanation for the thing's use. Why was it so
close to the animal's mind? Only now does he understand. The
hermit's words explain it: The Hidden.