Lil. Or the other girl.
Sis rushed towards the crumpled body, her hair reaching out far before her. Hair that picked up and cradled the girl tenderly.
The body was limp, lifeless; just about every bone shattered
It wasn’t Lil.
Sis sighed with relief.
*
Sis sensed the presence of the two women before she heard the rattling of disturbed stones.
She should have killed them, as she used to do before she’d met Lil.
Not that they would be any problem for her: it was just an inconvenience.
Carefully, she placed the girl’s crumpled body on the floor.
The two women hung back: they weren’t stupid after all. They knew they would lose any fight.
‘This is what we feared,’ Frenda explained, indicating the body with a slight tilting of her head. ‘She hadn’t been properly secured to the post.’
‘You were going to sacrifice her anyway,’ Sis pointed out.
Frenda nodded in agreement.
‘Yes; yet this way, she dies for no reason. For no advantage to anyone.’
‘Aah, I see – your fear is that your offering is incomplete?’
Frenda gave another nod of her head, this time a little ashamedly.
‘I need to know where my friend has been taken,’ Sis demanded.
‘The gods will come to us,’ the other women announced worriedly. ‘They’ll want to know why our offering wasn’t adequate; to punish us.’
‘Then I’ll wait,’ Sis said. ‘And prove to you that these are not gods!’
*
There wasn’t long to wait.
In that short time, there had been many arguments amongst the people once Frenda had explained to them what had happened.
‘We could flee.’
‘They would find us; chase us down.’
‘Surely they’ll understand when we explain what happened; that this strange girl was at fault.’
Frenda hadn’t revealed Sis’s true nature to the assembled crowd.
She had put the deaths of the other warriors down to an implied attack by Sis in the darkness, using arrows and blowpipes.
‘What have you brought down upon us?’ some had furiously demanded of Sis.
‘Nothing: there will be no harm to you if I stay,’ Sis had replied.
‘Hah, only if we offer you as their new prize!’
‘Yet she wasn’t the chosen: even that won’t appease the gods!’
‘Do we fight? Do we defend ourselves?’ someone had asked fearfully.
‘Against the gods? There is no defence against them!’ Frenda spat back sourly.
‘Wise, very wise.’
This was the gruff voice of a man, a man who appeared from between the rocks as if he had been a part of them.
He moved as stealthily, as precisely, as an animal.
Which was no surprise.
For the man was also half lion.
*
Chapter 18
‘Frenda, you know the price for refusal of a request for an offering.’
The man spoke politely and, ostensibly, reasonably. He glanced suspiciously at Sis, as if recognising that she was new here.
‘It wasn’t a refusal on our part, Droken,’ Frenda replied, a slight tremor in her voice. ‘The girl was offered, as requested; she slipped from the post.’
‘Slipped?’ Droken grinned maliciously. ‘Then ceremonial procedures were not followed: a crime against the rule of the gods in its own right.’
‘We will arrange another offering, or more, if you deem it necessary to make amends.’
‘And yet – these extra offerings would not be our originally chosen, would they?’
There was an undoubted menace in his tone, even a sense of joy that he could torture Frenda and her people in this way.
As he spoke, more hybrid men appeared from the surrounding rocks. Men who were also part lion – albeit in different ways, with a difference in limbs, even in the make up of their heads – but also men (there were no women) who were part bear, bull, or eagle.
‘The offering was made,’ Frenda persisted nervously, utilising a slight crooking of fingers to indicate to a handful of her warriors that they should surround Sis and bring her forward. ‘It cannot be laid on us that–’
‘The girl you took, the one you have,’ Sis interrupted, staring imperiously at Droken, letting the warriors push her closer towards him, ‘she must be returned.’
Droken stared back, first in amazement then amusement. He turned to glare at Frenda once more.
‘Do you wish to bring the wrath of the gods down upon your pitiful community? To have it lain completely to waste?’
‘No, no,’ Frenda pleaded, ‘she’s not with us! We can–’
‘Do you know where I might find Lil?’ Sis coolly asked the man.
*
Some of Frenda’s people chose to fight on the side of the gods.
Others chose to resist them.
Either way, they died easily, and in their droves.
They were no match for the servants of the gods, the humans’ relatively feeble strength and agility useless against the combination of human guile and animal instinct.
However, the animalistic cunning and swift response of the hybrids presented little difficulty for Sis.
Her rapidly extending strands of hair tore through them, ripping off limbs with a sharp tug, severing others with whiplashing cuts. Swords, spears and knives were wrenched from hands, or grasped in mid air as they were cast towards Sis, becoming part of her own armoury.
Arrows were similarly stopped in mid-flight; but even if they had somehow managed to pass through the whirlwind of hair, they would have bounced harmlessly of the exoskeleton of armour that had slipped into place everywhere about Sis’s body.
Shining with the emerald brightness of beetles, the sapphire of butterflies, the armour was a part of her, causing no restriction to her ease of movement. She could have easily leapt amongst the warring peoples, or somersaulted athletically if she had thought it necessary: yet she hardly moved, letting the serpentine maliciousness of her hair keep everyone at a safe distance.
With a deft swipe of a razor sharp thread of hair, Sis sliced the throat of a looming bear-man who had been on the point of finishing off Frenda, who had chosen after all to challenge the servants of the gods. Other writhing strands, swiftly enwrapping themselves around Frenda’s waist and torso, dragged her back across the floor towards Sis, just as the corpse of a bull-man was similarly if less carefully pulled back towards the centre of the battle.
‘I can prove these “servants of the gods” are nothing but men,’ Sis announced, recalling the time she had cut deeply into the dead eagle-man, revealing the clear delineation of differently textured flesh and muscles – all indications of an unnatural process of grafting.
This time, she didn’t bend down to make her incisions: she allowed the threads of her hair to precisely slice, to pull flesh, muscle and veins aside.
But this was a post mortem that didn’t go the way Sis had expected.
For there was no difference at all in the constitution of the flesh and muscles.
It was all of exactly the same quality, the same type.
This was no man grafted with animal elements.
This was a perfectly natural mix of man and bull.
*
Sis frowned, puzzled: and she had never, ever been quite so puzzled.
Her hair continued to cut away at the flesh, fruitlessly seeking any sign of grafting.
There were no such signs: the flesh was all of the same make-up, the same constituency.
This is how the flesh had grown.
Naturally. Despite its obviously unnatural results.
‘So, you were wrong,’ Frenda stated flatly, betraying no sense of satisfaction as she observed Sis’s confusion. ‘You’re not as infallible as you believed.’
There was an abrupt loud crack, the sound assoc
iated with a tree snapping, shattering.
But Sis felt a brutally hard blow to her chest, one that knocked her back, leaving her briefly unsteady on her feet.
Once again, she frowned in puzzlement. She warily glanced down at the indented armour, the hole that progressed deep into her body.
She brought her inner fibres under her control, forcing them to obey her, to push free the obstacle so painfully lodged deep within her.
To the sickening sound of slurping mud, she caught her dark blood in the palm of her hand as it ran from the hole. She looked in wonder at the small metallic object that had caused her so much agony, cylindrical and pointed like the most basic arrow tip.
She looked up, wondering where it could have come from, trying to work out why her protective veil of swirling hair hadn’t stopped it.
Far off, far out of the reach of her snaking hair, she saw a lion-man pointing an oddly shaped stick at her.
The stick momentarily blazed, loudly cracked.
Sis’s head was violently jerked back, a spout of darkest blood spouting from her forehead.
This time, she was dazed; she stumbled.
She fell back, landing face up on the ground. Her eyes glassy, dead.
Like the waves of a hurriedly ebbing sea, the extended threads of her hair rapidly shrank back towards her.
And the lion-man, the king of the hybrids, ululated triumphantly.
Nothing could vanquish the servants of the gods!
*
Chapter 19
High above the ground, the air had been cold.
Cold enough to put to sleep any normal girl.
Lil, however, had been wide awake.
It was a strange kind of dragon, she’d thought.
One of metal, not flesh.
The retracted arm that had let go of the other post once the poor girl had fallen was made of struts. The wings, too, were not animal like, but whirled like gigantic, impossibly fast wheels.
What had at first appeared to be a reptilian head formed the best part of the ‘beast’s’ entire body, a square-snouted monstrosity, with eyes of glass.
And through those glassy eyes, Lil caught a glimpse of what could have been the creature’s mind.
A man who was part bear.
*
As the metallic beast dropped towards the ground once more, everything below them suffered yet again from that punishing downdraft of air.
Lil was lowered first, into the hands and claws of a large group of waiting bestial men and women, all of whom worked quickly in unfastening the restraining coils of rope that bound her to the post. Then the beast itself swooped off to one side, landing a few yards away where the whirling wings wouldn’t cause anyone any harm.
The men and women surrounding Lil were primarily a mix of mules and buffalo, working under the commands of a woman who was part eagle. They were neither particularly unkind nor tender in the way they cut through her bonds and began to direct her off towards a large door leading into what could only be an uncovered Golden Age building.
But then, as the eagle woman ordered the final severing of the knots binding Lil’s wrists, she stopped what she was doing, her eyes wide with awe as she spotted the ruffled pages of the book remnant wedged into a dress pocket. She reached for and pulled the book free, staring with an even greater sense of awe at the title page had become the book’s cover.
‘Stop, stop,’ she cried out excitedly, raising a hand to bring Lil’s removal to a halt, even urgently grabbing the arm of a buffalo-man to ensure they all came to a stop.
The woman turned the book around so that the other bestial men and women there could also see the title page, indicating one of the bolder words with an aggressively tapping finger.
‘Milton,’ she sighed almost with relief. ‘Milton!’
*
The woman was no longer interested in helping haul Lil off towards the doorway.
She turned, glancing about the busy yard. Everywhere, bestial humans were toiling laboriously on any number of tasks, but mainly stacking up horse drawn carts with all manner of materials recovered from the Golden Age.
At last the woman appeared to spot what she had been looking for. She sprinted off towards a bull-man who was overseeing a group of people cannibalising what might once have been a large machine.
Lil was bewildered by the eagle-woman’s reaction to the discovery of the book.
Why had she shown such a weird interest in Milton?
Could she read?
How else would she have recognised the word?
The woman was eagerly showing the book to the bull-man. He appeared every bit as startled as she had been when she had first spotted the word.
Leaving the group he had been overseeing to continue with their task of breaking the machine down into usable parts, he purposely strode over towards Lil, now carrying the book that the woman had handed to him.
‘You brought this?’ he demanded of Lil even before he was completely looming over her. ‘Where did you get it from?’
‘It was given to me by a friend,’ Lil answered honestly.
She wanted to tell them as little as she could about the book until she knew why they were showing such a bizarre interest in it. But stating truthfully that she had been given the book was hardly revealing any important information.
‘Where did she get it?’
‘She never said.’
The bull-man was fighting to control his frustration. He tried another tack.
‘Do you know what it is?’
‘A treasure from the Golden Age,’ Lil replied innocently.
‘Do you know what it says?’
‘Says?’
The bull-man held the book before, pointing out the words.
‘The symbols; do your recognise any of them?’
Lil shook head, as if confused by his question.
Realising he wasn’t about to garner any new information about the book from Lil, the bull-man began to quickly scan through a few of the other pages.
He frowned, more puzzled than ever.
‘Milton is a man? Not a place?’
*
Chapter 20
The buffalo- and mule-men were curtly dismissed by the eagle-woman. They were given orders to present themselves back at the mine entrance and take fresh instructions there, as they were now relived of their duties here.
A mine, Lil thought; that would explain the vast amount of recovered materials she had seen being carted away. It wasn’t unknown, of course, for people to dig deeply into the earth to uncover artefacts from the Golden Age, implements that were both usable and highly tradable. But she had never heard of, let alone seen, an operation on this scale.
She was partially lifted off the floor as the eagle-woman and bull-man each took her by an arm. Rather than heading towards the doorway, however, they spun Lil around a little and headed off in a different direction, one taking them towards a much smaller door, but one guarded by two lion-men.
The inside of the building belied the fact that it must – like all the other recovered Golden Age items – have lain hidden underground for a long time. It either hadn’t suffered any damage through whatever catastrophe had hit it or it had somehow been expertly repaired, even though that would require skills supposedly lost long ago. The way the tales of the devastation had it, even buildings that had survived the first waves of earthquakes, floods or storms had suffered badly once they had been steadily covered with soil and rampant vegetation.
The building’s interior was spotlessly clean, itself remarkable as mud would have at some time leaked into the rooms, overlaying and staining everything. There were chairs, tables, all from the Golden Age, all of it promising undreamt of luxury.
It really did seem like the abode of the gods.
Yet it seemed that even the servants of the gods had their own hierarchy, affording them their own servile minions.
The mix of bestial men here was nowhere near as varied as that Lil had
witnessed outside in the yard.
There were men and women who were partially lion, eagle, bear, or bull-like; yet that seemed to be it, apart from a small number of feline females who were constantly serving them drinks or generally waiting upon them.
Everyone there, however, stopped to stare curiously at Lil as she was led through the rooms. Obviously, it was unusual for one of the ‘chosen’ to be escorted through this part of the complex.
Her captors unceremoniously dragged her towards a set of swing doors, bringing them all out onto the landing of a bare set of stairs. Descending a couple of flights, they came out into even barer, colder corridors.
It was the domain of a lower level of beast, men in grimy overalls with the heads of dogs or badgers. A maintenance class.
Then again, Lil realised, as she watched the men going forlornly about their chores, how much better must this life be than being forced to engage in the laborious task of digging underground? Even if any equipment recovered as a result of that digging was reemployed to make the excavations easier, the going would still be unimaginably difficult, ridiculously dangerous: especially on the scale of the operation being undertaken here, going by the rich haul of salvaged goods Lil had seen being cleansed and broken down into usable parts.
Using only the crude tools that were available, excavating the Golden Age levels on that scale would require a vast workforce.
Perhaps even people forced to be slaves.
Of course!
That was the reasoning behind the apparently preposterous games and ceremonies to determine the ‘chosen’. The reason why ‘offerings’ of young men and women had to be made to the ‘servants of the gods’.
They were simply being ‘offered’ up to be ‘chosen’ as slaves for the mines.
*
Lil still wasn’t sure what these bestial people were intending to do with her.
Whatever they had in mind for her, thankfully it wasn’t a place in the mines: at least, not for the moment anyway.
The discovery of the book, the recognition of that word ‘Milton’, appeared to have caused them to change their original plans regarding her fate.