* * * *
“It’s a Westlander—a female without horns. So small, almost the size of a child.”
“I never thought that little tale was true. She’s such an interesting color.”
“Indeed,” Eela’s eyes flickered and she was faced by two silhouettes backlit by the setting suns. She lifted her head and tried to focus on their faces. They were like her! At least she thought so. As her head cleared and the light of the suns was filtered by a branch of the tree, she realized she was looking at Idru like her. She stood gingerly, squinting against the glare, and moving around so she could see them clearer. They simply watched her, and waited.
They were almost like her; except the female had four spiraled horns sprouting the back of her head, much the same as Oureth’s had been, horns that were impressive for a male in her herd. But they were small next to those of the male in the stranger’s company, his were nearly as long as his body, and they curved upwards at the tips. They were counterbalanced by a smaller horn that branched from each large one, pointing frontwards over his heavy brow. He was huge. Almost twice as wide and long as Oureth, and the female was as big as Eela’s mate. Eela looked tiny next to them. They were Idru; however; no doubt; the shape of the body, the thick chest and graceful neck, the large eyes, the memory-language. They observed her, eyes wandering down to the four parallel slashes on her shoulder, on which tiny maggots now squirmed, consuming the dead flesh and cleaning the wound.
“You are out of your element,” the male said to her, his voice was deep and filled with certainty.
"I had no choice,” Eela whispered.
“You are injured as well. It looks like the work of a Retnath; a very large Retnath.”
“We don’t see your kind often, that’s for sure,” the female interjected. She sniffed the air, and then shook her head, tossing her wispy white mane. These animals were almost black, much like the Retnath, not the soft grayish brown of her own herd. They each had a mane and the male a beard falling from his lower lip.
“She carries little ones,” the female concluded. Her eyes grew tender. The male shook his own head, but it was an expression of disbelief. He emitted a sigh.
“You cannot stay here, come along. You’re small, alone and injured. You could become hunted.” They moved around her, and she hesitated, choosing to follow when the female paused with one hoof poised, and looked back. “Come along.”
They left the oasis, and moved under the setting suns along the serpentine valleys between the dunes, following what Eela realized, was a well-worn path. The two strangers spoke, one of them surprised that she’d made it to the oasis; she spoke of the dreegu possibly being somewhere else, or sleeping. Eela did not know what they meant, but she surmised there had been some predator that was so great that it frightened even the Retnath, and had somehow missed her during her long walk across the dunes.
Great mountains appeared on the horizon. The scent of greenery and water grew stronger. The sand began to taper as they approached the slopes, and became green prairies, laced with thin vermiculate rivers that wound out into the desert, converging into a lake. There, she saw the dark silhouettes of other Idru. Hundreds of them and they all looked up at the sight of the pair that arrived, trailing a diminutive version of themselves with them. The great herd gathered and they looked upon Eela with curiosity. All the females had horns. Even the little female babies showed nubs of horns-to-be.
In the distance, the distinctive roar of a Retnath echoed against the mountain slopes. Not a single Idru flinched; Eela however, did. She froze and her muscles tensed and twitched, her fear was palpable and the Idru looked at one another in bewilderment. They began to speak out of turn.
“From the size of her wounds, I think that there is probably a reason for her to fear that sound.”
“Well, I imagine with a regular source of food, they’d grow rather large.”
“Yes. They would.”
“Strange, how tiny she is.”
“I’m not tiny,” Eela argued, “…not in comparison to those in my herd.”
“No horns, small size… no match at all,” Eela was distracted by the sounds of the Retnath. It approached them, and nobody seemed to care. The Retnath roared again, and Eela finally spotted it. It was by the river, hovering at the edge of the great herd. It was only a juvenile, no bigger than Oureth. It roared at them again and tried to approach a curious fawn, whose mother reacted without hesitation; instead of running away, she charged it, and lowered her head, butting the animal in the torso with her head and horns. The Retnath went flying to the ground, and scrabbled to its feet, trotting off on its two legs in embarrassment. It went chasing after a rat-like rhashri instead, which was less of a formidable match.
“Stupid things,” someone muttered. The herd then lost interest in her, and returned to their grazing.
“If there’s a little one, there’s bound to be at least two parents nearby, why are you not alerting the herd?” Eela asked incredulously. The male who’d found her cocked his head and then laughed. He looked knowingly at the female who nodded.
“I suppose you need it explained to you. That is an adult Retnath. The ones you know, they are not natural. You are not natural.” Eela’s forehead wrinkled in puzzlement.
“You are food. The dreegu came south after the time of the black sky, and claimed the red sands as theirs. It was once a connected place, the prairies once grew all the way across, but the dreegu ate everything. They do not care for water, and so they stay there between the range and the western forests. They cut your smaller herdlands off from our great expanse and your people have been trapped there since. The Retnath knew that they had to be careful… that the herds would not be replenished by the herds from the expanse any longer because of the dreegu. So they farmed you instead. They control your numbers and your growth. You are food.”
“We are all food, in the end,” the female added, nosing towards the maggots that seethed in Eela’s wound.
“How do you know this if you are cut off?”
“The meklos have told us. We believed them to be wild tales, exaggerations… we thought the stories of towering Retnath to be ridiculous… however now we know this is the truth.”
“Meklos? What is that?”
“The large flyers that take the sky; they are our brothers. They are Idru of the sky. They fly to cooler lands during summer.” Eela’s eyes filled with tears. Her entire people, not just her herd, her entire people were being contained for food for Retnath who’d grown huge on the glut. Why had the birds not come down to tell them, to encourage them to cross the land of the dreegu? She made it across, perhaps it was a risk, but what was worse? The male seemed to see her turmoil and came to her, nosing her neck affectionately.
“Never fear. You are safe now. Our herd is large, our range wide. Your little ones will grow up with little danger as long as we are here to protect them.
“Can we not tell the Meklos to warn my people? To instruct them to cross the desert?
“The Meklos cannot take ground there. They are no match for the Retnath there. Besides, you alone crossed in safety because you are small, and fleet. You did not disturb the sands too much or make much noise. Many Idru, no matter how small each one is, would certainly cause the Dreegu to rise up from the sands and they would be eaten, bones and all.” Eela was shocked. She thought of Oureth, who was unknowingly leading the herd to certain doom. At least she survived, and the babies too. At least some Idru were allowed to live and breed in the Adredu; even if it meant a possible culling, and the loss of herd members. She knew these wild Idru here were not invulnerable; but they were certainly more equally matched against their predators. With a final look back at the dunes behind her, she sighed and followed her greater cousins into the thick of the herd.
Her
Her darkness attracted me at first. I felt like I belonged to it, and I envied her for possessing such pallid beauty without trying. Me, I had to paint my fingernails black, and to wear black
clothes; I dyed my hair pitch coal, and lined my eyes densely with darkness. I brooded; I felt detached, all my life. I didn’t feel connected to the sunnier people; to the giggling and forced nasal speech peppered with the world ‘like’. The shining, well-coiffed hair, and fashionable clothes… The overachievers and the jocks, they might as well be from another planet. I was always aware of the whispers and sneers as I passed them by, a guy wearing eyeliner, reeking of wet cigarette. There's a lot to laugh about there.
I never quite related to any of those people, nor did I seek to. So I made sure they knew I wasn’t interested in their world by making myself appear as separate from them as I could. They lived in their own world and I made my own. My world included two more souls who thought themselves unique, but were exactly like me. Our universe consisted of a notch in the back wall of the racquetball court building that was shielded by the wind by a row of massive poplars. It was the perfect place to hide. The ground was peppered with butts, and smoothened by the soles of our Converse All-Stars. We were all about wristbands with studded leather and a joint made of hash and tobacco that took us a week to finish.
We hardly spoke to one another. Occasionally we would allude to our misery; our troubles, our trials and our shared curse of being chronically misunderstood. There was Kurt, who was gay and angry and Rebecca, who had no idea who she was. Kurt was at least one step ahead of us in our hunt for identity. It was likely on any given day, between classes and at lunch, you would find us there behind the racquetball courts, smoking cigarettes or something less legal, sometimes eating something, other times just standing against the wall, one foot flat on the bricks, knee bent watching the poplar leaves dance in the wind. If it was cold, we would huddle in a circle. We’d share a joint, and I would stare at Rebecca’s striped socks that went up to her thighs and her frayed black denim miniskirt, but mostly at the smooth, pale length of exposed skin of her thighs. She was a nice looking girl, underneath her black lipstick. She had her hair cut in an asymmetrical bob, longer on her left side than the right, and dyed a wine-red. She had a silver stud, a tiny little sphere in her nose. She liked to wear a necklace of little skull-head beads. A string of grimaces. Above them, her pale face. I watched her pupils expand wide, gobbling up the brilliant golden-hazel irises like a lunar eclipse.
But next to her, Rebecca was a shade. A shadow. I don’t really remember where I met her exactly. Things are hazy from when I was around her in the beginning. It could have been at the Tower, but maybe not. I know she likes the place. She’s sort of fascinated by it. The Tower of London is neither a tower, nor is it in London. It’s a storefront in a rather defunct part of town wedged between a cheap furniture store and a used book shop facing a secondary, dead-end street nobody drives down. You can’t see inside because the windows are blacked out, and the door is solid wood. All there is to indicate it’s a business is a sign, a really nice sign for what it is, made of painted wood with the letters routed into it, leafed in a darkened, weathered and patinated coppery gold. They used some fancy scripty-looking text; the T and the L elaborate and curly.
Inside the door, it’s a cross between a cowboy era bordello and something ripped out of the Georgian period. The walls are draped in deep blood-colored velvet swags, some edged in gold fringes and tassels. The furniture is equally as ornate and cheesy; upholstered in jewel-toned purple, deep gold, red, royal blue and emerald green velvets and brocades. Hanging on the walls, over the folds and swags of velvet are gold-framed portraits. They’re all ghoulish and dark, some random figure, sallow, dressed in ruffled shirts and cuffs, or a period gown and bodice, dark hair, glaring eyes that follow you. The floor is carpeted in red with gold acanthus leaves woven into it. It’s really just a hangout. It costs five dollars to just walk in the door for the night. Somehow it manages to stay un-dingy, despite the regular Goth traffic that comes churning through here. There are little black-enameled and gold-leafed tables everywhere. A tacky gold-painted sideboard offers tea and coffee from ugly over-decorated urns. Splenda and teabags are hidden in rows of enameled black and gold boxes. There is a sort of bar on the right as you come in, facing the large parlor. You can get non-alcoholic drinks served to you in cut glass stemmed goblets so you can feel sophisticated. And some nights, if you’re lucky, you can get some wine or something spiked, if the owner is feeling naughty. She sometimes serves snacks, but she prefers to keep things simple. There are booth-like alcoves holding large loveseats along the wall facing the bar, and a large one in the back. Behind the swags the speakers usually play Trance to the Sun or some other faded and obscure Goth Rock group.
Well, expectedly, the patrons of this place are what one would imagine. Kids like me; acting out the melodrama of our lives, baleful gazes and eyeliner; dyed hair, piercings and sorrow. I would go there with Rebecca, we’d choose one of the many cozy alcoves along the wall, sit in the plush loveseat and make out. I’d tell her that she was beautiful. She’d tell me she liked my docs. It suited us.