Three days and a hundred miles later I meet the first woman I’ve seen in five years. I’d like to think I’d be impressed even if she wasn’t naked, although it’s hard to put an age to her to begin with, because she’s smeared with dirt and her hair is so long it falls around her shoulders and hides her upper body.
And I’m not being disingenuous. When I first see her, it’s dark and I’m tired and she’s running across a cave floor on all fours, her breasts hanging low like the teats on a sand wolf.
Human? The young ferox is intrigued by my interest.
I nod.
We’ve been thrown into each other’s company during the desert crossing. I’ve come to learn the meaning of at least five basic smells, while the youngster now realizes that the way I articulate my head carries the meaning of two of these.
He points at me. Not human.
I’m not inclined to argue, since the youngster’s certainty that I’m something other than her seems to be one of the things keeping me alive.
“Sven,” I agree.
Pointing to the girl, who has frozen under his gaze, the ferox tells me she’s mine, but first I have to meet the elders. This is inevitable, I suppose. Everything about the ferox is tribal, and tradition for them seems to be interchangeable with law. In fact, both concepts come from the youngster as a single thought.
The very idea of elders suggests a solemn gathering, probably around a fire. Well, that’s what it suggests to me. The reality is simpler and much more boring. The youngster drags me through a huge warren of tunnels and caves, stopping only to tell every male he meets, Not human.
Not, they agree.
And then one of the pups, so young that his armor is still soft, brings me the girl. Human, he says, and I begin to understand the problem.
The girl is fifteen, maybe a few years older. From the way old whip scars cross her ribs it looks as if she’s moved on all fours her entire life. She can stand and climb and fit sideways through cracks in the rock that would stop me at the shoulder, but she can’t talk and when I lift dark hair from her face, there is nothing in her eyes but wariness and the sullen anger one expects from any caged animal.
I ask her name.
I ask her age.
I ask how she ended up living with ferox deep in the desert.
After a while, in disappointment and tiredness, I begin to demand answers to the impossible. Why is our beloved leader such a prick? What keeps the stars apart? Is God hardwired into our minds? If so, who did the hardwiring? The stuff that passes for serious thought in legion bars across the empire.
In a sweating tunnel hacked into a cliff face by a long-dead river, a hundred miles farther into the desert than any human is meant to have gone, I lose myself for a week in questions and thoughts of death.
She sits, she watches, after a while she brings me water.
“Thank you,” I say.
Nothing in her face suggests she distinguishes these words from the noises I make as I rage and weep and mourn for a hundred children whose names I’ve never bothered to learn.
In my defense I offer their slaughter, a desert hike that has reduced my feet to bloody pulp, and the fact that the first woman I meet in five years-and quite possibly the last person I will ever see-is little more than a ghost of what I believe humans to be.
Questions about her tribe, her mother and brothers bring no answers. A legionnaire quickly learns patois; how can we not? We take the sweepings of a fifth of the spiral arm and provide immunity from all crimes that have gone before, except treason, in return for certain death, the time and place to be the legion’s choosing.
Common tongue, city tongue, outlying worlds…
I even toss the girl words from traveler speech and machine cult but she recognizes none of them, and I am a man who can order a whore or a drink in fifteen different languages.
I began to agree with the ferox. If she is human then I am not.
Nor were the boys now dead at the fort, though the ferox have no way of knowing this. Nor were the women I knew in Karbonne. Nor my sister, who holds a family together in my memory, relying on sheer determination and guts when the money goes and an entire planet falls into poverty and chaos.
However, the girl is beautiful beneath her dirt. So I give her a name, though I’m uncertain she understands that Anna refers to her. Still, she quickly comes to recognize the tone. Anna shares my food, follows me like a shadow, and no longer flinches when I come within striking distance.
It’s not much, but it’s enough.
Things will improve, I tell myself. She’ll learn to speak. And in the meantime, if I want proper conversation I seek out the youngster and talk to him about the tribe and the desert and what went before. The tribe is old, a thousand chiefs if the youngster is to be believed; old, venerable, and very certain of their right to this land. They have only ever lived in caves, and their laws state-quite clearly-that nothing must change.
But Sven is change.
He asks me about my tribe, then retreats and sulks for days at my answers. We fly, I tell him, among the stars and between the moons. A whole people are out there, their history written in those flickering lights that cross the sky each night.
Many Sven, he says.
I sigh.
He understands sighing now, along with tears and nods and shakes of the head. In turn I can identify seven separate smells and a handful of his gestures. The laser knife has stopped being a weapon and become the means by which I communicate. A strange Sven ritual, which involves touching light to the back of my hand until my words become clear enough for a ferox to hear.
We return to Fort Libidad before the onset of high summer. The youngster doesn’t bother to tell me why, but I know my presence is required. It is nearing the middle of the year and the winds have begun to rise; food is already scarce. Animals die when the heat comes, and the ferox refuse to eat carrion.
Next dawn, he says.
So next dawn sees us ready.
Even the chieftain makes the journey, his face wrapped against the wind and a hundred miles of sifting sand. We walk in single file, following in his steps. Mostly the wind blows our footprints away, but crossing the dried edge of an oasis I look back and see that we leave only one set of prints, albeit deep ones and made strange by the fact that I cannot always match the chieftain’s stride.
The fort is abandoned.
And the stench inside is vicious. Flesh has fallen from bones and rotted to matted spoor beneath half-visible skeletons. In time the heat will rot what remains completely, or desiccate it, but that time is not yet.
Door, says the youngster.
So I nod.
Walls, he adds. We speak almost effortlessly.
“What about the walls?”
Like doors? he asks.
“Are walls like doors?” The heat, the winds, and being near enough to the only one of my kind are beginning to get to me.
Door, he repeats, more intently. A dozen ferox stand around us in a circle, watching closely. That’s twice the number of beasts needed for the original attack, so this has to be important. Also, the chief is growing impatient, his head swinging slowly from side to side.
“Which door?” I ask.
It is the right question.
The youngster can only remember the armory door. Since nothing was able to stand in his way, nothing else counts. So we walk to the armory, followed by a silent procession of the others.
The pulse rifles are in place, broken down to lock, stock, and barrel and still chained through their trigger guards. Enough weapons to launch a revolution. A wall of cavalry sabers looks as gratuitous as it ever did.
We take, he says.
“What?”
Everything.
For a moment I feel panic. Unarmed, these beasts are deadly enough. The thought of a tribe of ferox armed with pulse weapons is beyond horrific. On the very edge of doing something stupid, I realize my mistake. To Youngster the broken-down rifles are simply clutter.
He wants the armory itself. At least, he wants its door and walls. It takes us three days to cut the building into cartable pieces. When I suggest that smaller pieces are easier to carry, the youngster just smiles. A quick baring of his fangs makes him look as if he might slip into laughter or outright savagery, had the first not been impossible for a ferox, and the second their default position on almost everything.
Work, he says.
I work.
And when the cutting is done we carry the pieces away among us. Well, I carry a door, which is lightest of the pieces into which the armory has been hacked. We carry our booty a hundred miles and it takes seven days, using up what little reserves of energy we all have left.
I sweat, drag my feet, and fail to follow in the leader’s footsteps. The ferox slow down, letting me grab ragged breath from the hot desert air. When I’ve finished vomiting a thin sour stream, which is all that fills my stomach, the youngster hauls me to my feet and the march begins again.
“Tell me why,” I say to one after another.
Their answers are strange, oblique.
I cut myself harder, and burn myself more sharply, but their words still hover on the edge of meaning.
Flamefire, says Youngster, but it means nothing to me.
Those pieces, which looked ragged when we ripped them from the walls of the armory, fit perfectly into the entrance of the main warren, across a turn of tunnel behind this, and into a gap where the walls narrow a hundred paces after that.
Not fit close enough to jam into place: They fit perfectly, every bulge in the wall matched by a curve in a slab of ceramic. No mortar is needed, because every tunnel narrows at exactly the point chosen. The ferox simply haul the ceramic slabs upright and use brute force and that natural narrowing to fix each slab into place.
Only seeing it prevents me from believing it impossible. And even then, while describing what is happening to Anna, I find myself wondering if what I’m saying is really true.
Done, says the youngster.
He seems happier than I’ve seen him in weeks.
Eat, sleep, get strong. Now we wait.
The youngster trundles away, and when I next see him he’s curled up on the edge of a rock pool, letting a thin trickle of water wash across his fur. He’s snoring, loudly.