And when I dragged my eleven eyes from the spectators, I saw blood raining from the sky as the two beasts gripped teeth into flesh and rocked back and forth in the air. Whenever he could, Cuzco breathed fire from his skull-holes and neck-holes upon his adversary, but the flames did not even sear the ebon hide of Djamrock. And Djamrock’s three heads relentlessly pecked and tore at Cuzco’s flesh.
One of Djamrock’s wings was severed by a bite from Cuzco and went tumbling to the ground. The black beast flapped free and spikes from its belly impaled Cuzco and Cuzco blazed fire again and the sky rocked with the horror of two monsters locked in an aerial death-embrace.
Then Cuzco lost a wing too and tumbled to the ground and crashed and Djamrock moved downwards with talons extended to sever his adversary’s remaining limbs, and thus secure victory.
Cuzco was dazed, and did not move. Djamrock was descending in a fast plunge. We all waited for the inevitable.
But Djamrock halted his dive. He hovered in mid-air above his near-unconscious foe, his great wings beating. And slowly Cuzco stirred. Then looked up. And saw his enemy poised above him, waiting.
A long and powerful funnel of flame from Cuzco’s skull enveloped Djamrock’s body, but Djamrock did not flee. He remained hovering, his wings beating out billows of flame, and after a time his black hide grew darker and the flesh below began to burn.
Djamrock screamed and screamed. For his body was aflame beneath the near-impregnable coating of his night-dark armour. His heads writhed from side to side. And Cuzco pulled himself on to his two legs and pounced, and his teeth caught Djamrock’s belly and ripped it. Then Cuzco took to the air again and flew above his opponent, stopped in a frozen hover, then plunged. And with a single powerful movement he landed on his prey and ripped Djamrock’s head off his body. And then he ate it. A silence descended, as we watched, stunned. Cuzco fed the head into his mouth and ate the skull, and ate the brains too. The slow steady crunching appalled us. Even the rejuvenating powers of the water of the well of life could not heal that; so now, one of Djamrock’s heads was completely dead.
Cuzco blew flame from his skull again, and we could smell and taste the aroma; it was the reek of the remnants of the burnt brain of Djamrock being expelled from Cuzco’s body.
Djamrock’s other two heads stared at the sight. He was in dire agony, but his dark hide was recovering its normal lustre. The fire in his body was being extinguished, his flesh was healing again. He was recovering. And even though he’d lost a head, he still had enough power to rip the crippled Cuzco into pieces.
But Djamrock did nothing.
Cuzco pounced again and ripped off a second head. And he ate that too. And he billowed steam from his neck to sluice his system of the last traces of alien skull and brain.
“No!” screamed a voice. “No!” screamed another voice.
But these were lone voices in the mob. I heard a drumming sound, as the crowd clapped and stamped their feet and chanted: “Kill him, kill him, kill him!”
Cuzco pounced one final time and ripped off Djamrock’s third head.
And ate it.
And shat out the remnants through his neck-holes.
And then Cuzco looked at me, with triumph and sorrow in his old eyes. And I knew then: this had been planned. This was a death pact between Cuzco and Djamrock.
And Djamrock had won. His victory in battle had entitled him to the ultimate reward: his irrevocable death.
Except that Djamrock was not truly dead. His sentience and his soul lingered on in his headless corpse. It endured in the particles of brain-ash that still floated in the air. Djamrock was thus doomed to an eternity of torment.
But he had died fighting; and that was enough for him.
The thought of what he had done, and what Cuzco had aided him in doing, appalled me.
I slithered away.
I was ashamed, so deeply ashamed, of Cuzco, of Djamrock, and of the rest of my fellow sentients. Could they not see that defeat was preferable by far to this kind of terrible victory?
That night, I crept out of my cabin and made my way through the pitch blackness of the interior planet’s artificial light, using memory to guide me, until I reached the lake.
And I there I sat, and listened to the waters lapping.
In the morning, as the sun rose. I watched the first fish leap from the water. I watched the aerials flock in the sky above, dancing patterns in air.
“Do you not see,” I argued, “that Cuzco must be banished? An example must be made.”
I was addressing the Guiding Council of the Sentients; twelve of us in all. Quipu, Biark, Sahashs, Loramas, Thugor, Amur, Kairi, Wapax, Fiymean, Krakkka, Raoild. And Sharrock, too, was there; for he had, unknown to me, been elected as a thirteenth Council Member and hence now had a responsibility for the government of this world.
The meeting was going badly. Quipu’s five heads were all laughing at me for my attempt to actually punish Cuzco for achieving a glorious victory.
Sharrock’s scorn too was evident in his every cold glare.
And the others-sentients I had known and regarded as friends for so many years!-treated me with a contempt that they barely bothered to disguise.
Thugor made a pacifying gesture. His words were silken, we felt them as much as we heard them. “You, my Sai-ias,” he said, “you, kind and gentle being, have always been a kisser of the arse of your enemy. Cuzco however is a hero. He showed us a way out. Through war and glory. You should celebrate him, not censure.”
“What he did was wrong,” I insisted.
“He enabled Djamrock to escape.”
“He cursed Djamrock! He will lead others to the way of death. That is not what we need,” I said, trying to keep calm, and to rein in my fury.
“Cuzco is a hero,” agreed Fiymean. “Sai-ias you are a dismal coward. You know nothing of war.”
“I know much about-”
“It’s pathetic,” said Kairi, in a shrill scornful voice, her feathers vibrating to make the sounds that the air translated. “All the things we do, and that you encourage us to do. The Days. The Temple. We demolish, we rebuild. We tell stories. The same stories. We talk about science, but we barely understand each other’s ideas, and have virtually no technology, and no way of acquiring fresh data. We talk about history, for all we have is history. There will be, for us, no more history. It is all futile. What Cuzco has done has shone a light on our world, and all we can see is shit and lies.”
“It is not futile,” I argued, in my gentlest of tones.
“Sai-ias, fuck yourself with a barbed weapon, and die in the process.”
“You turd-eating coward.”
“You pathetic fucker.”
“You’re not welcome here, you slimy sea fucking monster. Cuzco is our god.”
And so they continued; the taunting, sneering voices. I hated it so much, yet I endured the mockery patiently.
My task was all the harder because none of these creatures remembered the early years; the days of Carulha, and my two battles against him. For all the great beasts of that time had died, of Despair, or in some Ka’un battle or other. Only the Kindred remembered; and even they were starting to forget what I had truly done for this world. To this new generation, I was just a complacent fool; preaching peace and harmony to an angry lynch mob.
“Cuzco must be banished,” I insisted, “for the good of all.” And then I paused for effect, and said: “I so order it.”
But my words were like a light breeze in the midst of a hurricane; no one heeded them.
“Sai-ias,” said Quipu One, my favourite of the Quipus, and one of my oldest friends on the ship, “this is none of your affair.”
“It is my affair,” I said angrily. “You idiot Quipu, you know nothing-”
“Ah, fuck away,” said Quipu One contemptuously. “I have no more time for you.”