“No fucking speeches,” yelled Carulha, “die, you fucking cunt!” and the battle began.
And thus for the second time in my entire life, I fought.
And I slew them by the score, and ripped them limb, as Carulha had put it, from “fucking” limb. I smashed the aerials out of the sky with my tentacles and I ripped open the bodies of the giant sentients and tore the arboreals and bipeds and the many-limbed predators into pieces with my tentacle-claws that moved so fast that none could see their motion-thus my foes would abruptly and inexplicably split into many parts, gushing scarlet blood.
All this I did and more. And when it was all over, I threw Carulha’s dismembered body out of the hull-hatch, and the bodies of Marosh, Tarang, and nearly three hundred others. They would not die-I knew this for a fact, as I had known and understood so much from my very first moments on the Hell Ship. The same way that I had known that the waters of the well of life would heal me faster and more fully than allowing nature take its course.
No, they would not die; but their souls would live for eternity in the ripped remnants of their bodies, drifting through the emptiness of space.
And when the surviving slaves saw how I had vanquished Carulha, they swore their loyalty to me. They told me that I would be their new master!
But I refused their plea. For I would not be worshipped. I would not be obeyed.
I would, however, I insisted, be listened to.
And so they listened. And I used my newly acquired power to change our world. And this I have done; all the good that exists on my world, the clear blue waters of the lake, the comradeship, the use of cabins, the division of labours, the fertile plains, the Rhythm of Life itself-all this I caused to be.
Sharrock had no knowledge of all this; he arrogantly assumed I was merely a gullible and docile pawn of the Ka’un.
But in fact, I had defied the Ka’un, without them ever realising. I had turned their nightmare slave ship into a place where sentients of many species could live, and love, and share the joy of friendship.
So I have done; of this I am proud.
I found Cuzco on a crag, on Day the First, looking down at our world.
“The views,” he told me, “are wonderful up here.”
I looked at the views. They were indeed wonderful.
“Are you brooding?” I asked him.
“Fuck away,” Cuzco advised me.
“You are.”
“I am, indeed, you ignorant ugly monster, brooding,” he conceded.
I sat with him, in silence, for an hour.
“I’m still worried,” I said eventually, “about Sharrock.”
Cuzco snorted. “No need; he’s doomed. Forget the little cock-faced biped, for he’ll be marble soon enough. You worry too much, Sai-ias.”
“But I care about him. And it was a hard time for all of us, remember? The first few years. You must have-”
“You are so fucking pathetic!” Cuzco raged at me, cutting off my words. “You’re like a fucking mother to the new ones! You’d feed them the food from your mouth if you could. You sad ingratiating suck-arse! You can’t coddle creatures like this. Fly or die, that’s the way of the world.”
“I helped you. ”
“No one helped me.”
A lie, of course. Cuzco had also been an angry, bitter new one; I had spent many hours trying to teach him how to bank down his rage, and to find the moments of joy concealed in the bleakness of his life. Now, of course, he denied that he had ever needed me, or received any help from me; such was his pride.
“He reminds me a little of you, in fact,” I ventured.
“Go fuck a cloud!” said Cuzco. “He’s a biped. I’m a-a-” And he used a word that the air could not translate, but I knew it meant he had status. He was a giant among beasts, even on our interior world.
And, indeed, I often felt that Cuzco was a truly magnificent creature. He was a land giant with the power of flight; his armoured wings made him somehow lighter than air, and so he was able to effortlessly dance among the clouds, though he weighed more than Fray and myself put together. And his body was beautiful, in its own eerie fashion: he had two torsos, linked by bands of armoured flesh, and orange scales that glittered in the light. And claws on his haunches and torsos that could, when he so chose, be as delicate as hands. And no head; his face was on the breast of his left body, and he had features that were expressive and flexible and eyes that seemed to me to twinkle with delight when his mood was cheerful; though that was, in all honesty, not often.
“I fear Sharrock is harbouring a secret plan,” I admitted “He thinks he knows a way to defeat the Ka’un.”
“Perhaps he does.”
“You know he doesn’t. It’s folly.”
“I once,” said Cuzco, “had ideas like that.”
In his first year on the ship, Cuzco had, like me, attempted to attack the Tower. And to do so he had gathered a formidable army of aerials who had joined Cuzco in his attempt to breach the Tower’s invisible barrier from above. But storms had battered them and Cuzco’s six wings had been ripped off him so that he crashed like a rock in the lake, and the savage gusts of air had ripped the entire flock of aerials into shreds. Blood had rained upon us all that day; blood and beaks and feathers and scales and fragments of unrecognisable internal organs that pelted downwards and left our bodies soaked and stenched. Many of Cuzco’s followers were still mutilated after their mauling by the storm; and none of the aerials ever spoke to him now.
“Perhaps you could talk to him,” I said. “Counsel him to be-”
Cuzco stood up and his hackles rose, and terrifying spikes emerged from his body.
“I will tell him nothing of the sort! What do you take me for, you cowardly colon-full-of-shit? You do not comprehend,” said Cuzco, “what it is to be a warrior!”
“I comprehend it totally.”
“My kind were masters of all creation! We vanquished all the lesser breeds in our galaxy, and we were proud of it!”
“Your words bring you shame. You are nothing but a monster, Cuzco,” I told him, wearily.
Cuzco snarled; and then he stood; and leaped off the cliff top; and with grace and majesty he flew above the clouds, a patch of orange blurring the blue sky.
“Monster,” I said sadly, knowing it was true. If I’d met Cuzco in any other setting, he would have been my enemy, not my friend.
BOOK 5
Sharrock
I was tired of running; I had been running for days; yet still I ran.
I knew that in the trees they were faster than me; so I seized my moment and broke through into a clearing, and knew it was just a few more minutes to the lake But then I whirled and saw that the wretched monkeys had me surrounded. They had clubs and knives; there were a hundred or more of them. An army. They cackled and screamed with delight; and were clearly convinced I was not capable of causing them any further trouble, with the odds so heavily in their favour.
They did not, it seemed, know Sharrock!
I clutched the stone in my hand, relaxed my body, and calculated the distance between myself and Mangan and his regiment of tree-huggers. My eyes quietly scanned the mob. I identified the dominant beasts who needed to be slain first; and then I cleared my throat so I could deliver a battle-roar to confuse and paralyse the more timid ones.
I also considered how I could use the monkeys themselves as weapons; using the bodies of the dead ones to club the live ones, whilst using my teeth to bite and sever arteries. I recalled the time on Latafa when I was faced with a baying mob of two hundred highly trained four-armed centurions, and slew them all. All in all, I concluded, my task here was difficult, but by no means impossible. For as the historians of Maxolu all agree-with only those two irksome exceptions-I am indeed the greatest Northern Tribe warrior of all time!
The monkeys roared more rage, and started to slowly move towards me. I thought for a few moments more. Calculating all my options. Plotting my various potential battle moves.