Then I quietly let the stone drop out of my hand.
“Do your worst,” I said calmly.
And they did.
Sai-ias
I laid Sharrock’s bloodied body down upon the grass, and I bathed him in water from the water-of-life well; oozing the healing moisture on him through the spiracles in my tentacle tips.
“Can you speak?”
He grunted, and opened his mouth; inside was a bloody void. As I’d suspected, his tongue had been ripped out. His torso was bruised and bloody, and I suspected there was severe internal damage. They’d also eaten one of his eyes.
He grunted as the water drizzled on to his naked body.
Just as I’d feared, Mangan and the arboreals had taken their revenge.
For twelve cycles I tended to Sharrock; nursing his wounds, talking to him; telling him stories. His wounds healed, and his tongue grew back quickly; but he was not communicative even when he did speak.
After six cycles he was able to walk.
After ten cycles he made a sword out of a tree branch; the wood was tough and the point was viciously sharp. He killed a non-sentient grazer and skinned it and fashioned himself a scabbard. He used the hooves to make knuckle guards, to help him with hand to hand combat. For days he collected stone remnants at the quarry and from then on always carried a bag of stones and a sling.
“Will you take revenge?” I asked him.
“You want me not to?” he said mockingly; for his tongue was now regrown.
“I want you to forgive them,” I said.
“You know I cannot do that,” Sharrock said sternly.
“Please, Sharrock. For me?”
“Never!” he snarled. “Those branch-fucking savages tricked me. Ambushed me! I was trying to do as you told me, live in peace. But they attacked me anyway.”
“And now,” I said sadly, “you will attack them?”
Sharrock looked at me; his pale blue eyes were calm. And he never, I noticed, felt the need to blink as many bipeds did.
“No,” he said, calmly. “These weapons are just for self defence. I gave a beating, I took a beating. Further violence would be folly, so now I’m done. From this point on, I embrace the way of peace.”
“You really mean that?”
“I really mean it,” Sharrock avowed.
I felt so proud.
Over the next twenty or so cycles, I got into the habit of spending the early mornings with Sharrock by the lake side.
He loved to fish; he had fashioned lines and nets and captured dozens of fish each day, all of which he released back into the water. And he was a gentler spirit now, after the mauling from the arboreals. A status quo had been achieved; indeed, Mangan and Shiiaa and the other arboreals occasionally invited Sharrock to share their cabin at night, and there they told each other tales. Sharrock had passed, and survived, his brutal initiation.
Sharrock talked often to me about his family-his love-partner Malisha and his daughter Sharil, and Malisha’s brothers Tharn and Jarro, and their love-partners Clavala and Blarwan, and their assorted children-with love and tenderness. And he told some delightful stories about the stupid things that young Sharil used to do, and the even stupider things he used to do to make her laugh.
And I told him that I had been merely a child when I was taken by the Ka’un. I had never had sex, or known adult love; my adolescence ended when I was captured by alien invaders and brutally beaten by the then occupants of the Hell Ship.
He was clearly shaken by that story; it affected him sorely for days.
I talked to him also about Cuzco and his warrior code, and I tried to get him to see how unutterably foolish it was.
“My people were not like that,” Sharrock protested. “Cuzco is just a savage; from all you say, no better than the Ka’un. But we were a cultured and a civilised people.”
“Truly?”
“Truly.”
“Then tell me; how many Maxoluns have you killed in single combat?” I asked him,
Sharrock was shaken by the question. “Hundreds,” he admitted.
“And in war?”
“Thousands.”
“And you feel no guilt?”
“None.”
“You should.”
“Perhaps I should,” Sharrock conceded.
He was silent for a while, made pensive by my words.
“How can that be?” I asked him. “How does a child become so ruthless a warrior?”
“When I was eleven,” he said, “I was sent into the desert, to spend three days and three nights alone. And,” he said, his eyes sparkling at the recollection, “it was hot. Fierce hot, with air that scorched the lungs. I drank water from roots. I hid from predators, including the great Sand-Baro. And I fought the Quila. These are four-legged creatures, the size of my hand, with vicious teeth, who live in the sand itself. And every dawn on our world the Quila would emerge from their sandy burrows and bask in the sun and feed on the flesh of unwary creatures who strayed their way. I killed six thousand of them before my father came to fetch me.”
“And what did that teach you?”
“Ha! That Quila will die, if you hit them hard enough with a club. And furthermore, if you judge it right, they will squirt blood from both ends.” He laughed bitterly. “It taught me nothing. No, not true, it taught me how to survive.”
“Yours is a brutal culture.”
“I’d never,” admitted Sharrock, “thought so, before I met you.”
“Imagine,” I told him, “a world where sentient species collaborated, and helped each other, and cared for each other. Where discovery mattered more than victory. Would that be so bad?”
“Not possible.”
“We achieved it. My people.”
“Then the Ka’un came and your people didn’t know how to fight,” Sharrock taunted me.
“At least we lost a civilisation,” I said. “You lost-what?-a barbarism?”
Sharrock’s features were pale with shock; my words had hit home.
“Perhaps,” he said, and I marvelled at his courage in accepting that his entire life might have been founded on moral error.
And so, buoyed with confidence at Sharrock’s new attitude, I decided he was finally ready to learn the real truth about our terrible world.
“It is time,” I told Sharrock, “for you to meet your own kind.”
Sharrock and I travelled up past the lake to the mountain ranges, and thence into the deep Valley where the smaller bipeds and the Kindred dwelled. The air was darker here, and clammy in the throat, and the high ground was just rock without any covering of soil. But the valley itself was rich and fertile, and twin rivers trickled and gurgled their way through it.
I had built these rivers with my own teeth and claws and the help of all the giant sentients. We created channels that were pumped with waters from the lake; and to our delight, the lake could refill itself by some unknown automatic means, so the rivers always flowed.
And further down the valley there were fields, fresh ploughed, and grazing animals on the grasslands. We proceeded on a pebbled path down a steep slope, as giants walked below us; I, slithering down on my segments, Sharrock running along beside me.
And at the gateway to the village of the Kindred, we were greeted by Gilgara, their chief warrior: a bearded colossus who was twice as tall as Sharrock, and who, like Sharrock, had upper arms as large as his head and strongly defined muscles upon his torso.
Sharrock bowed, clearly impressed by Gilgara’s military bearing and physique, and avariciously eyed the metal sword that the giant wore in a fine leather scabbard.
“You have weapons?” Sharrock said.
“Forged with fire; the metal comes from walls in cabins that we have pillaged,” said Gilgara.
“Impressive,” said Sharrock, respectfully.
Next to Gilgara was Mara; a glowering female warrior with one eye larger than the other. Mara peered at Sharrock, and a smile grew.
“Fresh meat,” Mara said, looking at Sharrock, and Sharrock’s own smile faded.