The Wild Lands: Legend of the Wild Man (16 page)

Kao sleeps little. Mostly he watches the
unnatural bone-white totem. He has never seen anything as tall. It
reaches higher than the mountain. It stabs the clouds. They bleed
lightning.

Kao can believe that those who built it could
destroy his village, control the animals, the storms, even the
land. Something more went into making the white tower, a great
power, not of the earth. He will take their power from them, for
they abuse it.

He gently shakes the hermit awake. The old
man raises heavy eye lids and stretches his stiff muscles before
unceremoniously climbing onto the wild man's back.

“Onward,” he mumbles.

The hunter descends. Forward, downward,
towards the white tower from the top of Father Mountain. The way is
slippery, and Kao has to rely on his rope. He ties it to branches
and lowers the elder and then himself. Time is wasted flipping the
rope loose.

The hermit snorts and sniffs. Kao can feel
his hot breath on the back of his neck. He tastes the air.

“I smell kingcrows.”

Kao smells them too: bile and rotten meat.
There must be a nest nearby. The monsters slumber in the shadow of
the bone-white totem. Kao is not surprised.

“We must find a different path.”

“You were hunter?” Kao asks. Words are always
making more sense. They no longer cause his mind to race
frightfully, but he still prefers not to speak.

“I was never a hunter. Always a thinker,” the
hermit says.

“Hunters brave.”

“Thinkers must be wise... and I think it
foolish to get any closer to a kingcrow nest.”

Sleeping, night.”

“Kao, we can't take stupid risks. Chaos needs
your help,” the hermit pleads, “I am no hunter, yet Chaos has made
the Hidden my prey. I need your strength.”

“Your god, your prey. My sister.”

The hermit only sighs.

They descend in silence down the mighty
mountain. Its foothills reach all the way to the river that borders
the strange fields that surround the totem. The fields grow no
closer. In the half moon's light, the field looks to be lines
straighter than spears that stab the shadow of the mountain the
tribesmen hide behind. Kao knows nothing so massive or perfectly
ordered. Maybe the Hidden do worship a different god. His eyes hurt
if he looks at the lands too long. They are too different from his
jungled home, where living disorder rules. There was an order of
sorts in Kao's lands; paths lead from orchards to swimming holes as
they wind through the jungle like gnarled tree roots. The Hidden's
lands look different. Nature is tamed. The plants fit a design.

“We are near,” the hermit says.

Kao smells them too. Their acrid stench burns
his nostrils. He crouches down on the ledge and inhales deeply to
learn more of crows. The mixture of chemicals in the air wash over
the follicles in his two large nostrils. He smells the birds'
feces, their vomit, the telltale scent of decay that their feathers
always reek of. One nostril smells them more, they lie in that
direction. He inhales again and knows they still sleep, but he
smells something more, berries, herbs, and clay from the stream.
His sister!

His nose guides him towards the ledge. He
sees the nest, off and away. There are more than two hands of
birds. All sleep. Each one's bald head is tucked beneath its wing
as they slumber. Kao never knew there were so many. He is sure the
Hidden aren't in all of them. If they were, then more would have
attacked him in their last encounter.

“Smell her?” Kao whispers to the hermit. The
old man is petrified.

Only altitude and a narrow ridge of rock
separate them from the center of the fearsome birds' nesting
grounds. The kingcrows are barely down the mountainside, above the
tree line and nestled in a barren section of boulders and rocky
crags. Kao knows he must climb down, find his sister and take her
to the jungle below before the birds wake. If they are discovered
the flock will take flight and pick them from the cliff face like
fruit from a tree. There is no place to hide. The jungle is too far
below.

Kao stands upon a sheet of stone that cracked
off the mountain as it was pushed skyward millions of years ago.
Dozens of sheets fell off. They lay below the two tribesmen, a maze
of connected paths that even the hermit can traverse if he can find
the path.

“I see a way,” the hermit says and points a
zigzag pattern down the stone steps. The frail old man tightens his
grip on Kao's back, ready to be carried swiftly. Kao shakes his
head 'no,' and points at the nest.

“I smell her.”

“She's not there.”

“I smell her.”

“Fine, you stubborn brute. Go! The sunrise
waits for no one.”

The hermit pulls the elk skin tighter around
his shoulders and hurries down the path he drew in the air.

Kao hurries and is among the flock in no
time. Each bird sleeps in a messy nest made of brambles and bones.
The ground is bleached white. The smell is overwhelming, but now
and then he smells the berries, herbs and clay from the stream. He
is close. Then one of the kingcrows is awake.

Kao hears the difference in its breathing.
His round eyes catch starlight that reflects off of the bird’s
feathers. It is an arm’s length away. It turns toward the flock and
Kao drops to the ground and freezes. Kingcrows never come out in
the dark. He hopes bad night vision is why.

Kao waits an eternity. He is worried about
the hermit. He cannot risk moving to see if he is safe. The hunter
hopes his hairy back is close enough to the color of the cliffs in
the early morning. It seems to be, for the bird pumps its wings a
few times, then leaps from the cliff. Headfirst it dives into the
abyss below.

Kao sniffs the air and resumes his search. He
prowls around the cliff. The birds sleep, but when the sun rises,
they will awaken, hungry. He is close. He can smell berries, clay.
He must find her!

His nose leads him. He scuttles towards
another kingcrow, this one a female. He smells mud and berries and
knows this one took her. Then his sharp eyes see it. A single braid
of grass lies outside the nest, in a caked pool of mud. He scoops
it up and smells it deeply, tastes it.
Herbs, berries, clay from
the stream
. This was on his sister. He sniffs and searches but
sees nothing else. She is either dead or gone, but Kao smells no
blood. She is still alive.

He waves the little grass braid.

The hermit hisses back, “Hurry!” and points
down the mountainside.

The kingcrow pumps its wings far below. As it
spirals upwards Kao sees light glint off of one of its eyes, only
one. He curses and climbs after the old man. As he nears, he points
towards the rising black form.

“Hidden.”

The hermit nods. He did not need to be told.
The two climb faster, and hope the forest is closer than it
looks.

We tell these stories for when the Hidden awaken...
and they will, sure as the sun rises.

Skup climbed the stairs that that connect the
lower residence quarters to fifth floor, home of the Amplification
Chambers and the Evanimal program. He loaded news reports on the
Virtual Reality Chip embedded in his brain as he tromped up the
steps.

Nothing major in the news. Someone had
discovered yeast in the air and thought they could make bread. Skup
had never had the stuff. The reporter said it would be a good use
of grain. Melons were on sale. Still nothing about the storm or the
Wild Man
, but that was to be expected. They'd hold onto that
one as long as possible, and Ntelo would announce it, not the news.
Skup shut down the program as he walked onto the fifth floor. Time
to work.

He loved the fifth floor this early. Spire
City slumbered until sunshine burst through the clouds. Even the
pilots rose after dawn. The Evanimals' priority in the morning was
always eating, something they did not need a human consciousness to
assist them with. Most pilots synchronized once their Evanimal had
eaten and was ready to start working in the Garden. Skup never
afforded himself such a luxury. He needed to have fluid control of
his
vultus
before the flock awoke. Otherwise there would be
early morning claims for dominance.

Since the Wild Man half-blinded his
vultus
, the other birds had been more ornery than usual. On
top of that, the flock was jealous that they didn't get to share in
Elia's catch. A young
vultus
like hers was supposed to
surrender its food. They would remind her of that today.

Skup stepped into his Amplification Chamber.
It smelled of cold metal. The electricity in the air made his few
arm hairs stand on end. This early, there was no sweat from other
Shepherds wafting in from the dozens of other chambers, none of the
familiar sounds of people coming and going, none of the crowds
watching the Shepherds guide the Evanimals and tend the gardens. It
was just him and the machine that took his mind to earth.

Skup stepped into the middle of the hexagonal
metal room, sat down and took a deep breath. He felt the
electromagnetic field that powered everything ignite his senses
with a slight metallic taste.

“Synchronize,” the walls of the hexagonal
room pulsed dully. Poor quality visuals. Skup closed his eyes and
listened. He heard the
vultus's
slow breaths, its heartbeat
in the quiet of the early morning. He slowed his breath to match
the bird's. In and out, in and out, until they breathed as one. It
wasn't necessary to do this, but Skup swore by it. He and his
sister believed the Evanimals responded to subtler controls than
most people used. He liked to imagine that the bird thought of Skup
as part of its own mind, some sort of powerful intuition that
guided it. Some days he opened the connection and only observed,
hoping that the
vultus
understood the mind inside its own
was there to help, not control it blindly for ends different than
its own. Today though, he didn't afford the bird the luxury of its
own awakening. Skup wanted to explore the edges of the jungle,
where Elia had discovered the furry little girl. He knew there were
more of them. He wanted to find them, dead or alive.

Skup moved his arms and heard the rustle of
feathers and the familiar tinkle of the armament of prongs and
bones he kept stashed inside the bird's wings. He opened the bird's
one eye slowly. The stars were still out, but the kingcrow could
pick out little more than the glowing clouds the Spire hid inside.
The Garden was drenched in darkness. The
vultus's
poor night
vision made it look like blackness superimposed on still blacker
depths. He could see rough outlines of the tops of trees when
electricity discharged from the Spire.

To think, he was looking at the city that
held and protected his own body through the eyes of a creature that
could not only survive the toxic planetary surface, but would
gleefully kill anyone from the Spire. He wondered if the
vultus
had any idea that the cloud bank its eye was trained
upon was the source of the consciousness that shared its body.
Probably not, he decided but it was an amusing thought.

Skup shook his own body a bit which ruffled
the bird's feathers, then slowly stood up as the bird did the same.
He extended his arm and stretched his own muscles. He stretched his
fingers and marveled as the bird's feathers did the same thing. The
magnificence of sharing actions with any animal, let alone an
animal as powerful as a
vultus
was a source of constant
amazement for Skup. He moved his arms back and forth and saw the
bird's wings do the same, but their increased length and bevy of
feathers pushed dirt and sand off the ledge in front of him.

He approached the edge of the cliff, ready to
take flight. Flying could be risky this early in the morning,
before the sun illuminated the earth and its obstacles, but Skup
knew the area well, and liked to push the limits of his
synchronization with his
vultus
whenever he could. He looked
right towards the sleeping flock, left towards the sheer cliff
face, then back towards the cliff he'd plunge from, but the
vultus
hesitated.

It was resisting him. The bird was fascinated
with the cliffs. It could see nothing but blackness. Skup had heard
nothing, so knew that the bird must be using a sense the VRC could
not broadcast.
Elia would know what it sensed,
Skup though
bitterly
.
Smell? Touch
?
Intuition?
Skup wasn't
sure. He only knew the bird sensed something.

Probably just a goat.
Something large
enough to be worth catching for food. But whatever it was would
have to wait. It was still invisible in the predawn blackness and
Skup had no way to catch it. He put it out of his mind and forced
the bird to look forward. Skup made it ruffle its feathers once
more, then leapt from the cliff.

The
vultus
hung suspended, motionless,
eternal. The Lord of the roost floated in inky blackness. Only the
sound of wind ruffling the bird's obsidian black feathers betrayed
the speed of the plunge. Neither Skup nor the
vultus
could
see the ground coming up at them. Skup heard the bird's pulse
quicken as it accelerated. It was a steady drumbeat in his head,
quieter than the wind that whistled in the birds ears, but more
persistent, driving. Skup could use the bird's VRC to judge
distance automatically. He knew exactly when he'd need to spread
his wings to save himself, but did the
vultus
?

He dropped his arms to his sides, made his
body limp. The
vultus
could do as it pleased. He gave it
freedom for the sake of curiosity. How would the
vultus
handle the fall? Skup did the jump nearly every day, so the bird
should remember what to do, but it was early, normally they could
see the ground rush up at them. Would the plummet in darkness
overwhelm its sense of self preservation?