Black Halo

She had made it when she turned away.

She was shict, she told herself. Her loyalty was to her people. She owed him no excuses, would give him no reasons, would offer no apologies. And she had remained faithful to that vow when she came to him that morning, found him shrugging his shirt over a freshly stitched wound.

She had met his eyes, then, and was unable to say anything at all.

Perhaps that was why she unconsciously evaded Naxiaw’s probing instinct: a fear he might see what happened that morning, a dread he might know why they couldn’t connect, a gripping terror he might have a solution.

She looked to the Spokesman again.

She found herself surprised to see it there still and not, say, embedded in the skulls of one or more of the humans. Naxiaw had seen them, after all, when the two shicts had pulled themselves from the reaching ocean. He had paused, a mere fifty paces from them, and stared. The implications that had seized her with a cold dread then had surely dawned on him as well.

Despite his captivity, he was still fresh and energetic. Coming from a fight, the humans were not. He was still strong, limber and swift. The humans were weak, exhausted and burdened with each other. His Spokesman leapt to his hands like an eager puppy. The humans’ weapons hung from their hands like leaden weights.

He was shict.

They were not.

She had braced herself, then. For what, she wasn’t sure. The uncertainty paralysed her, rendered her incapable of doing more than staring dimly, unsure what more to do. A shict, she knew, would have rushed down with him against them. A companion, she told herself, would have stood between him and them.

But a companion would not have stared into her friend’s eyes and turned away when he screamed her name.

And a shict would not have felt wounded when he stared back into hers the following morning and turned away when she said nothing.

Kataria had done nothing that night. Kataria continued to do nothing. As much as she cursed herself for it, that did not surprise her.

What did, however, was the fact that Naxiaw had followed her example and let the humans be. Of all the qualities the s’na shict s’ha were legendary for, tolerance and patience were not among them.

Why he had vanished into the forest, continued to wait here, she did not know. Why he had met her with nothing more than an offer of cooked amphibians, she could not say. What he hoped to find in her as he stared at her so intently, she had no idea.

But she wished, desperately, that he would stop.

He might have picked up on that desire through the Howling. Or he might have seen her squirming upon her log seat with an intensity usually reserved for dogs inflicted with parasites. He looked away, regardless.

‘Cook the poison from the frog and there is no point to consuming them,’ he said, producing a pouch from his hip. ‘Venom, you see, has a number of advantages.’

‘My father said it’s how the greenshicts keep their blood toxic,’ she replied.

‘Your father knew more about the s’na shict s’ha,’ he paused, letting the word hang in the air, ‘than he knew about his own people.’

‘You knew him?’

‘Many of us did. He was a knowledgeable leader. He knew what he was. He knew what he had to do. He knew he was a good shict, and so did we. He also knew the value of consuming venom.’

He reached into his pouch and produced a frog, still alive, its red and blue body glistening as it croaked contentedly in his palm, unafraid.

‘It is a temporary pain and so snaps one from stupor,’ he said. ‘It sharpens the senses, makes one more aware of the weakness of lesser pains … improves the function of the bowels.’

He said this pointedly, looking at her. She furrowed her brow in retaliation.

‘And?’ she pressed.

‘And,’ he continued, ‘it is what cures disease.’

She stiffened at the word, gooseflesh rising on her back.

‘One would assume,’ she whispered hesitantly, ‘that poison would make one as ill as disease.’

‘Poison does not make one ill; it merely poisons. It is a temporary element introduced to a person’s body. It enters and, assuming the host is strong enough, it leaves. If the host survives, she is more tolerant to the pain.’

He watched the frog as it tentatively waddled across his palm, testing this newfound footing.

‘Illness is born of something deeper,’ he said. ‘It infects, festers within the host, not as a foreign element, but as a part of her body. And because of this, it does not leave on its own. Even if symptoms disappear, the disease lingers and births itself anew. Because of this, the host cannot wait for it leave. It must be treated.’

His fingers clenched into a fist. There was a faint snapping sound.

‘Cured.’

She fought to hide the shudder that coursed through her, more for the sudden ruthlessness of the action than for the fact that he subsequently popped the raw amphibian into his mouth and swallowed.

‘A cured illness is a purified body. It leaves the host stronger. But this is all assuming she recognises the illness to begin with.’

He fixed his penetrating stare upon her, sliding past her tender, exposed flesh, past her trembling bones, through sinew turning to jelly. He saw, then, what he had been searching for. She felt the knowledge of it in her heart.

‘To infect without being noticed,’ he whispered, ‘is the nature of disease.’

She could not bear his searching stare any longer. She turned away. His sigh was something harsh and alien, unused to his lips.

‘How long?’

She said nothing.

‘What am I to tell your father, Little Sister?’

She shook her head.

‘How am I to tell any of our kinsmen that you have been with humans?’

‘Tell them nothing,’ she said, biting her lip. ‘Tell them anything; tell them everything. Tell them you don’t know why and tell them that Kataria doesn’t know, either. Or tell them I’m dead. Either way, we can all stop wondering about it and talking about it and thinking about it and get on with whatever the hell else we were doing before everyone started asking if Riffid even gave a crap if a shict hung around round-ears.’

Her hands trembled, clenched the skewer so hard it snapped. She looked down at it through blurred vision; she couldn’t remember when she had started crying.

His stare was all the more unbearable for the sympathy flooding it. Sympathy, she noted, blended with a distinct lack of understanding that made his gaze a painful thing, two ocular knives twisting in her flesh with tears seeping into the wounds. And so she stared into the fire, biting back the agony.

‘It’s not what it seems,’ she whispered.

‘There are scant few ways for it to seem, Little Sister,’ Naxiaw replied. ‘They are not dead. You are not dead. Why, then, are you with them?’

She had been avoiding the question since the day she had walked out of the Silesrian alongside a silver-haired monkey. It had been easy to avoid, at first: just an idle wonder thrown from a clumsy and distracted mind. But Naxiaw’s mind was sharp, practised. The question struck her like a brick to the face, and she found that all the answers she had used to excuse away the question before felt weightless.

For the adventure? In the beginning, she had told herself it was for that – the thrill of exploration and the lust for treasure. But shicts had no use for treasure, and the use for exploration went only so far as scouting for the tribe. There was no word for ‘adventure’.

Friendship, then? As much as she knew she should loathe to admit it, she had become … attached to the humans. There was no denying it after a year, anymore. But there was no word for ‘friendship’ in the shictish tongue; there was ‘tribe’; there was ‘shict’. That was all a shict needed.

Perhaps, then, because she found she had needed more than tribe … more than a shict needed. But how could she tell him that? How could she tell herself that?

As the tears began to flow again, she realised she just had.

And she felt him: his gaze, his thoughts, his instincts. Naxiaw reached for her, with eyes, with frown, with thought, with ears, with everything but his long, green fingers. The scrutinising had not dissipated, but was mingled with an animal desire, an utter yearning to understand that made his gaze all the more painful, the wounds all the deeper.

He stared at her, trying to understand.

And he never would. There was no word for it.

If he didn’t know what she was feeling, he must have seen something in her tears, felt something in her heart, heard something in her head that made him know all the same that she was feeling something no true shict should. His face twitched, trembled, sorrow battling confusion battling fury. In the end, all that came of it was a shaking of his head and a long, tired sigh.

‘Little Sister,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘They’re kou’ru. Monkeys. Diseases.’

‘But I’ve been with them so long,’ she said. ‘My skin hasn’t flaked off; my heart hasn’t stopped beating; my blood hasn’t turned to mud. The stories aren’t true. They aren’t disease.’

‘They are,’ he snapped back, baring his canines. ‘A disease does not merely infect and kill, it weakens. It makes us vulnerable to other sicknesses, deeper illnesses, ones that cannot be burned out.’

‘Like what?’ She was absently surprised to find the growl in her voice, to feel her ears flattening against her head as she flashed her own teeth at him. ‘I’ve seen more in a year than most shicts will see in their lifetime. I’ve tasted alcohol, I’ve seen cities made of stone, I know what it means when a cock crows and what it means to drain the dragon.’

‘Symptoms of a weak and ignorant breed, and you’re infected with them.’

‘It can’t be ignorance to learn,’ she snarled. ‘A lot of what they know is useless, dangerous and stupid. But I’ve learned about farming, agriculture, digging wells. There must be a reason they became the dominant race. If shicts are to survive, then we have to—’

‘Reasons?’ He leapt to his full height, towering over her. ‘There is a reason, yes. They are dominant because when we first met them, we had a disease. Understanding, forgiveness, mercy,’ he spat. ‘These were the symptoms of an illness that claimed thousands of shicts.’

She found herself falling from her log in an attempt scramble away from him as he advanced, his long strides easily overtaking her. He leaned down, extended his fingers to her.

‘The disease rises now and again. I was there the last time it infected us. I was there when I saw the reason humans were dominant.’

Quick as asps, his hands shot out and seized her by the face. His eyes were massive, intense and brimming with tears as he drew his face towards her own wide-eyed and trembling visage. Then, he uttered the last words she remembered before he pressed his brow to hers.

‘You see, too.’

And then, there was fire.

It was everywhere, razing the forests in great orange sheets, writhing claws pulling down branches and leaves and blackening the sky. It roared, it laughed, it shrieked with delight: loud, too loud, deafening.

Not loud enough to drown out the screaming.

Children, men, women, elders, mothers, daughters, hunters, weavers, sitting, standing, drinking, breathing, screaming, screaming, screaming. She knew them all – their lives, their histories, their loves, their families – as each scream filled her ears, mingled within the Howling and became knowledge to her and all shicts. And she heard them all made silent: some instantly, some in groans that bubbled into nothingness, some in high-pitched wails that drifted into the sky.

She saw them: green faces, mouths open, ears flattened, weapons falling from long green hands. She saw the spears embedded in their chests, the boots crushing their bones, the thick pink hands that unbuckled belts, that dashed skulls against rocks, that thrust sword, stabbed spear, swung axe. She saw their eyes, wide with desire, vast with conviction. They looked upon the faces; they heard the screams. There was no language to let them understand what they did, and they did not try to understand.

The screams mingled as one wailing torrent, shrieking through her mind, bursting through her skull, flowing out of her ears on bright red brooks. She heard her own voice in there, her own sorrow, her own agony, her own tragedy.

Eventually, their voices stopped. Hers continued for a while.

She looked up, at last, and saw Naxiaw. His hands hung weakly at his side. He stared at her firmly. He did nothing more as she scrambled to her feet, staring at him with eyes bereft of anything but pure animal terror, and fled into the forest.

He stared, long after she had disappeared into the brush.

Then, he sat down, and sighed.

‘I should not have done that,’ he whispered.

‘She had to know,’ a voice deep inside his consciousness spoke: Inqalle, harsh and unforgiving.

‘You did as you must,’ another added: Avaij, strong and unyielding. ‘Anything to make her aware of the disease. So long as she knows, she can fight it.’

He said nothing in reply. Through the Howling, though, they heard everything.

‘You fear her weak,’ Inqalle said. ‘I thought her weak, too. She lacks the conviction to kill the humans. She has had days, opportunities beyond counting, and she has done nothing.’

‘If our plight, the suffering of our people, her people cannot move her,’ Avaij said, ‘then perhaps she is too infected. Perhaps she must be put down.’

‘I have seen too many shicts die at human hands,’ Naxiaw whispered harshly. ‘Too many families severed, children lost … I will not let it happen again, not to another shict, not to her.’

He sent these words through the Howling on thoughts of anger, of frustration. The words of his companions came back on sensations of possibility, anticipation.

‘Many Red Harvests approaches,’ Avaij said. ‘The idea here was to test it.’