were ferocious weapons, as, of a more manipulable kind, was the arm that corresponded to the giftwing. fanwings were immobile. They peered through the dark with eyes attuned to motion. They were social hunters. They worked in concert to corral the dog-sized prey-animals of the plain.
We were too large for them to come for us, but they still watched. Flying things skittered at our torches: burrowing eaters of phosphorescent rot, used to honing in on glowing ground, emerged and gnawed confused at the pooled light.
We didn’t take the leash off our prisoner—we didn’t trust it or know how to decide if it became trustable. But we’d been treating it with less fear for days, and did so with even less now. The new ex-Host liars regarded it, and whispered to each other in words they’d used countless times, that now did very different things. By early morning something was changing. The Ariekei were circling the captive. It wasn’t gasping or lunging at them, or at me, or Bren or YlSib: it was watching us, and watching the other Ariekei.
28
SPANISH DANCER and our captive circled. The others ringed them. Every few seconds one of the two would shove out its giftwing like a knife-fighter looking for an opening. It would sketch out some outline in the air: there would be a pause and the other would follow suit. Spanish’s fanwing frilled open and shut. The Languageless’s stub trembled.
The gesticulations were information, motion telegrams. Talking. They didn’t understand each other but they knew there was something to understand. And that was liberation. When they did make communication—something ridiculous, Spanish throwing a pulpy bud then pointing into the muttering wildlife where it lay, and the Absurd picking it up—their euphoria, even alien, was palpable.
Signifying Spanish could speak through gesture now. For our captive that no longer had a name, perhaps the strangeness was greater. It had thought that without words, it had no language. Its comrades communicated with each other, never knowing they did, not across the chasm with untorn Ariekei; and mostly what they expressed to each other was the very hopelessness that made them believe they were incommunicado.
But in the panic of the attack and our escape, it had understood shove-and-point instructions to flee. It had watched Bren, YlSib and me speak and listen to each other with gestures for stress and clarity. The rest of the Absurd army never had to reflect on these behaviours. Spanish had learnt it could speak without speaking: the Absurd had learnt that it could speak, and listen, at all.
“They were yanking it around,” Bren said. “It was impossible for it not to know what they meant: they were shoving it and pointing the same way. They madeit obey them. Maybe you need violence for language to take.”
“Bren,” I said. “That’s crap. We were all running the same way. We were all trying to get out. We had the same intentions. That’s how it knew what we were doing.”
He shook his head. Formally, he said, “Language is the continuation of coercion by other means.”
“Bullshit. It’s cooperation.” Both theories explained what had happened plausibly. I resisted, because it felt trite, saying that they weren’t as contradictory as they sounded.
“Look,” I said. Pointed above the horizon. There was smoke, stains in the sky.
“IT CAN’T BE,” Bren said, as if to himself, as we moved as fast as we could. “They were going to wait.” He said it more than once. When specks appeared far off on the lichened downs, we pretended that there were many things they might be, until we came too close to deny that they were bodies.
We looked down an incline to the aftermath of war. Thousands of metres of remains. I was breathing very hard, through my aeoli, in horror. At this distance the specificities of carnage were hard to gauge. I was trying to estimate Terre versus Absurd, but the death was too tangled. In any case, many of the Ariekene corpses I saw must be EzCal’s forces, like the humans with which they lay.
We led our not-quite-captive. It was in its collar but we hadn’t shocked it for kilometres. Spanish Dancer drummed its hoofs. It looked at me and opened its mouths. It pointed at the ruination. It opened and closed its mouths and said to me: “
”
“Yes.”
“.”
“Yes. Too late.” We had not taught it that.
“.”
STRUNG OUT, artificially, druggedly alert, there was an unpleasant drag to my senses, as if things I saw or heard left residue when I turned from them. My aeoli mask in a rare reminder of its biorigged life shifted, uncomfortable at the smell of the dead. Everywhere were men and women burst open. There were Ariekei dead with fanwings and without, strewn together. Innards evolved on opposite ends of space alloyed in compound decay. There were corpse-fires and rubbish.
Wrecks. The aftermath was scored by lines of char culminated in craters, where fliers had come down. Bren sifted through junk, hands wrapped in rags. I copied him. It wasn’t quite so hard as I’d expected.
This had all happened perhaps two days before. These scenes made me careful and cold. I didn’t look too close at the faces of the scores of Embassytowner dead. I was too certain I’d see one I knew. Picking through remnants between those smoke pillars I tried to learn the history of the fight. There were many more Embassytown-and-city dead than Absurd. Fighters lay mid-action, in mouldering stasis, hands and giftwings and weapons still on each other. We read these corpse dioramas for the stories of their creation.
“They have corvids,” I said. Strategising without speech, the Absurd were driving biorigged weapons. “Jesus,” I said. “Jesus it’s an army, I mean it’s an army.”
Shockingly few combatants were left alive. A few mortally wounded Ariekei cycled their legs in the air, craning eyes. One cried out in Language, telling us that it was wounded. Spanish Dancer touched its giftwing. The Absurd moribund were dying with too much focus to notice us. On some I saw the bleed from fanwings newly excised—there were new recruits to that force even among the dying.
Pinioned under Ariekene dead was a woman still just alive, her broken aeoli wheezing oxygen into her. She looked at Bren and me as we tried to calm her and ask her, “What happened here?” But she only stared, terrified or air-starved out of speech. At last we laid her back down and gave her water. We couldn’t move her; her aeoli was dying. We found two others alive: one man couldn’t be woken; the other was conscious only of his impending death. All we got from him was that the Absurd had come.
Bren indicated ripped uniforms. “These are specialists.” He pointed at runnels out of the battlefield. “This wasn’t... These were outriders, this was a guard group, around something, that came in first.”
“The negotiators,” I said. He nodded slowly at me.
“Of course, yes. The negotiators. This was supposed to be a bloody parley. They gave it a try. My God.” He looked at the remnants around us. “The Languageless didn’t even slow.”
“And now they’re heading for the rest.” For the main mass of the Terre-Ariekei army.
WE HAD TO double back. We took an abandoned vehicle, cleaned the mess of war out of it. We sped along the cut through the marks of thousands of hooves. I was pressed against the Ariekei. Spanish and Baptist were crowding around the Absurd. They were sketching marks in the air, and the captive, if I could still describe it so, was doing the same.