Meanwhile, the arboreals leaped down from the trees and hopped around, elated at the success of their great joke.
“I cannot,” I said.
“They tried to fucking kill me!”
“You must have provoked them,” I said sternly.
He looked at me, with horror and rage. “No I did not!”
“Did you tell them,” I asked, “that they are inferior to you, mere ignorant simians without any culture or grasp of sophisticated concepts?”
He hesitated; no doubt startled that I knew him so well. “Well perhaps,” he said. “But not in those exact words.”
“What were in fact your exact words?”
“I told Mangan,” said Sharrock recalling the moment with evident relish, “that he was nothing but a tree-fucking ape, and that on my planet we cook the brains of such ignorant branch-swinging hairy-arsed shit-hurling ignorant fucking savages!”
I sighed again, and in fairness he had the grace to look abashed at his own misguided eloquence.
“You insulted them,” I said. “And this is their way of asserting dominance over you.”
“Over me!?!” roared Sharrock. “On my planet, we feed hairy-cocked beasts like this to our fucking pets! You evil fucking whore-shit! You led me into a trap. You knew what would happen to me!”
“I knew it was possible. But you should not have not been so discourteously provocative,” I advised him.
“You should have warned me how vicious these evil fuckers are!”
“I sedated you,” I pointed out, “prior to leaving you in the forest. Surely that was warning enough?”
At that moment, Mangan strode towards us, his three legs moving in an odd rhythm, his silver fur matted, his big staring eyes blinking. Mangan’s four arms were huge, and he carried spiked clubs made out of tree branches in each hand.
“You fled, you hairless foul-tongued coward,” he sneered at Sharrock.
“I am no coward! However, I would like to try,” said Sharrock, in an unexpected attempt at diplomacy, “to be your friend.”
Daran threw another shit ball, rather sneakily; and I batted it away with one tentacle.
“This is wrong,” I told the arboreals. And they cackled and danced on the balls of their feet, entirely unrepentant.
“I regret my words,” said Sharrock. “I have insulted you, and for this I deserve all you have done to me. For Sharrock is,” and at this moment he literally hung his head in shame, “humbled, and defeated.”
The arboreals cackled again. Mangan was starting to look mollified. For one exhilarating moment, I began to think that Sharrock was capable of behaving like a sane and civilised sentient.
And then Sharrock screamed: “Ha! I jest! Sharrock? Defeated? Never!! ” And he pounced.
And then I realised that for all this time he’d been trying to get the four arboreals to descend to ground level. In the trees, they had the advantage; down here, he had a fighting chance.
And so he dived forward and rolled, like a bird in flight, and unbalanced Mangan with a foot swipe, and as he did so his elbow connected with the huge arboreal’s ribs. He broke two of Mangan’s arms in moments and then he had one of the clubs in his hand, and as the other three arboreals leaped at him he lashed out and in a series of swings so fast they defied the ability of eyes to see, he smashed their heads into pulp.
Mangan was back on his feet, and locked one hand around Sharrock’s neck but Sharrock had a knife made of serpent’s fangs concealed and he hacked Mangan’s arm off then buried the knife in his brain.
Shiiaa recovered from her battering, and got up, and lunged; her skull was caved in but her three knife arms were swinging. However, Sharrock leaped above Shiiaa’s head and landed behind her, then delivered two savage kicks to the arboreal’s twin spines, shattering both, and then broke her neck with a single savage twist.
But then Tara’s tail whipped up and caught Sharrock by the neck and lifted him in the air.
“Stop,” I said, but Tara ignored me so I spat at her; the spit congealed and wrapped her body in a tight web. Tara choked and fell to the ground, unable to move, snarled in white congealed spit that was stronger than metal. And Sharrock broke free of the tail and fell to the ground.
“Nice one, bitch,” he said, when he’d got his breath back.
“Climb on my back,” I told him.
I ran out of the forest with Sharrock clinging on to me, ramming through undergrowth and trees, hoping that I was not hurting any sentient plantlife in my clumsy progress. And then we emerged into the light, and I crashed down upon my lower segment on the purple grass of the savannah.
“I was defending myself,” Sharrock said, angrily.
“You picked a fight,” I informed him, accusingly.
“They were treating me like a slave.”
“You are a slave, and you should learn to be more polite.”
“You fucking betrayed me!” he roared, spittle rolling down his jaw again. “You put me with a bunch of fucking apes. Why didn’t you let me go and live with creatures who actually look like Maxoluns? The hairless bipeds. I know they exist. I saw them, the tree-huggers saw them too. They are creatures much like me!”
“The hairless bipeds,” I said, calmly, “have swords of metal. You would have fared far worse.”
Sharrock was silenced by my words.
“You mean, you knew,” he said, in calmer tones, “that I was going to get the fuckhood beaten out of me by those fucking apes?”
“Yes.”
“And you still let me go there?”
“For your own sake,” I explained to him, “For you have to learn to hold your tongue, and be more respectful of your fellow captives.”
“No fucking way, not ever! I’m a warrior!” he ranted.
“You’ve made four bitter enemies now. They will hate you for all eternity.”
“I killed at least two of them,” he bragged.
By this point I was tempted to give way to anger at his naivety. But I restrained myself. Sharrock was so new; he had so much to learn.
“No you didn’t,” I explained in my calmest tones.
“Don’t utter such fuckery! No one could-” he began to say, but I interrupted:
“Their injuries are survivable. Mangan will grow his arm back, and his brain cells will very likely heal after such a minor fang-stabbing, as will Shiiaa’s broken neck and snapped spines. And when they are all recovered, they will seek you out and batter you to a bloody pulp. But unless they entirely pulverise your brain, you too will heal, after months of agony. And then, consumed with rage, you will take your revenge upon them, and they will be beaten and bloody and in pain. Then they will heal, and-”
“I’m guessing you don’t approve of all this wretched backing-and-forthing,” he said quietly.
I sighed, from my tentacle tips, and noted with approval that Sharrock did finally seem a little embarrassed.
“These creatures are not your enemies,” I said. “We are all of us in this together.”
Sharrock made a sharp exclamation-it was his version of a laugh, I realised. But there was no humour in his tone.
“Fuck your anus!” Sharrock said viciously. “Those tree-fuckers bit my nose off! They broke my arm, my legs, then they tried to take my intestines out with a sharpened branch. Those shit-eaters deserve to die by choking on the barbed cock of a [untranslatable]!” Sharrock concluded, spitting with rage again by now.
“Make peace with them,” I said.
“Never!”
“You can’t,” I told him, “go on like this.”
He glared at me.
“Sai-ias, you mean well,” Sharrock said, icily, with what I felt was odious condescension. “You have a good soul. But the truth is,” and now Sharrock’s contempt for me shone through in every syllable, “you are nothing but a fucking coward.”
Sharrock’s scorn was hard to bear; but bear it I will and must.
For I have learned, over many aeons, to ignore the disdain of others, as warriors shrug off ghastly wounds without showing even a flicker of pain.
This is my tale; the tale how I shaped my world.