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.
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?”
