So were these people around him really human? They were about Horza’s height, they seemed to have roughly the same bone structure, bilateral symmetry and respiratory system; and their faces — though each was different — all had eyes, mouth, nose and ears.
But they all looked thinner than they ought to have been, and their skin, regardless of hue or shade, looked somehow diseased.
Horza lay still. He felt very heavy again, but at least he was on dry land. On the other hand, it didn’t look as though there was much food on the island, judging by the state of the bodies around him. He assumed that was why they were so thin. He raised his head weakly and tried to see through the clumps of thin legs towards the shuttle craft he had seen earlier. He could just see the top of the machine, sticking up above one of the large canoes beached on the sands. Its rear doors were open.
A smell wafted under Horza’s nose and made him feel sick. He put his head down onto the sand again, exhausted.
The talking stopped and the people turned, their thin, tanned or anyway dark bodies shuffling round to face up the beach. A space opened in their ranks just above Horza’s head, and try as he might he couldn’t get up on one elbow or swivel his head to see what or who was coming. He lay and waited, then the people to his right all drew back and a line of eight men appeared on that side, holding a long pole together in their left hands, their other arms stuck out for balance. It was the litter he had seen being carried into the jungle the day before, when the shuttle had overflown the island. He watched to see what it held. Two lines of men turned the litter so that it faced Horza and set it down. Then all sixteen sat down, looking exhausted. Horza stared.
On the litter sat the most enormous, obscenely fat human Horza had ever seen.
He had mistaken the giant for a pyramid of golden sand the previous day, when he had seen the litter and its huge burden from the CAT’s shuttle. Now he could see that his first impression had been close in shape if not in substance. Whether the vast cone of human flesh belonged to a male or a female Horza couldn’t tell; great mammary-like folds of naked flesh spilled from the creature’s upper and middle chest, but they drooped over even more enormous waves of nude, hairless torso-fat, which lay partly cradled in the vast beefs of the giant’s akimboed legs and partly overflowing those to droop into the canvas surface of the litter. Horza could see no stitch of clothing on the monster, but no trace of genitals either; whatever they were, they were quite buried under rolls of golden-brown flesh.
Horza looked up to the head. Rising from a thick cone of neck, gazing out over concentric ramparts of chins, a bald dome of puffy flesh contained a limp and rambling length of pale lips, a small button nose, and slits where eyes must be. The head sat on its layers of neck, shoulder and chest fat like a great golden bell on top of a many-decked temple. The sweat-glistened giant suddenly moved its hands, rolling them round on the end of the bloated fat-bound balloons of its arms, until the merely chubby fingers met and clasped as tightly as their size would allow. As the mouth opened to speak, another one of the skinny humans, his rags slightly less tattered than those of the others, moved into Horza’s field of vision, just behind and to the side of the giant.
The bell of head moved a few centimetres to one side and swivelled round, saying something to the man behind that Horza couldn’t catch. Then the giant raised his or her arms with obvious effort and gazed round the skinny humans gathered around Horza. The voice sounded like congealing fat being poured into a jug; it was a drowning voice, Horza thought, like something from a nightmare. He listened, but couldn’t understand the language being used. He looked round to see what effect the giant’s words were having on the famished-looking crowd. His head spun for a moment, as though his brain had shifted while his skull stayed still; he was suddenly back in the hangar of the Clear Air Turbulence, when the Company had been looking at him, and he had felt as naked and vulnerable as he did now.
“Oh, not again,” he moaned in Marain.
“Oh-hoo!” said the golden rolls of flesh, the voice tumbling over the slopes of fat in a faltering series of tones. “Gracious! Our bounty from the sea speaks!” The hairless dome of head turned further round to the man standing by its side. “Mr First, isn’t this wonderful?” the giant burbled.
“Fate is kind to us, Prophet,” the man said gruffly.
“Fate favours the beloved, yes, Mr First. It sends our enemies away and brings us bounty — bounty from the sea! Fate be praised!” The great pyramid of flesh shook as the arms went higher, trailing folds of paler flesh as the turret-like head went back, the mouth opening to exposé a dark space where only a few small fangs glinted like steel. When the bubbling voice spoke again it was in the language Horza couldn’t make out, but it was the same phrase repeated over and over again. The giant was quickly joined by the rest of the crowd, who shook their hands in the air and chanted hoarsely. Horza closed his eyes, trying to wake from what he knew was not a dream.
When he opened his eyes the skinny humans were still chanting, but they were crowded around him again, blocking out his view of the golden-brown monster. Their faces eager, their teeth bared, their hands stretched out like claws, the crowd of starving, chanting humans fell on him.
They stripped off his shorts. He tried to struggle, but they held him down. In his exhaustion he was probably no stronger than anyone of them, and they had no difficulty pinning him; they rolled him over, pulled his hands behind him and tied them there. Then they tied his feet together and pulled his legs back until his feet were almost touching his hands, and bound them to his wrists by a short length of rope. Naked, trussed like an animal ready for the slaughter, Horza was dragged across the hot sand, past a weakly burning fire, then hauled upright and lowered over a short pole stuck into the beach, so that it ran up between his back and his tied limbs. His knees sank into the sand, taking most of his weight. The fire burned in front of him, sending acrid wood-smoke into his eyes, and the awful smell returned; it seemed to come from various pots and bowls spread around the fire. Other fires and collections of pans were littered across the beach.
The huge pile of flesh the man named Mr First had called “prophet” was set down near the fire. Mr First stood at the obese human’s side, staring at Horza through deep-set eyes contained within a pale and grubby face. The golden giant on the litter clapped chubby hands together and said, “Stranger, gift of the sea, welcome. I… am the great prophet Fwi-Song.”
The vast creature spoke a crude form of Marain. Horza opened his mouth to tell them his name, but Fwi-Song continued. “You have been sent to us in our time of testing, a morsel of human flesh on the tide of nothingness, a harvest-thing plucked from the tasteless wash of life, a sweetmeat to share and be shared in our victory over the poisonous bile of disbelief! You are a sign from Fate, for which we give thanks!” Fwi-Song’s huge arms lifted up; rolls of shoulder fat wobbled on either side of the turret-like head, nearly covering the ears. Fwi-Song shouted out in a language Horza didn’t know, and the crowd echoed the phrase, chanting it several times.