The Wild Lands: Legend of the Wild Man (33 page)

Baucis returns to Kao's cage a few times. He
never stays long or watches Kao with the same intensity as their
first meeting. He always reeks of fear like a rabbit's or a rat's,
animals that do little more than eat and mate before they are
devoured by the stronger. But in spite of his pathetic stink, the
hunter knows the little man is old, very old. He has no hair to
betray his age with faded color but his eyes say it all. He has
seen much, but nothing like Kao.

Whenever Baucis visits he makes a few notes,
the hunter can see it in his eyes. He watches the way he moves.
Every time Kao reshuffles or paces, Baucis's eyes light up and Kao
feels vulnerable. He knows the man's intentions. They control the
animals with their stones, he plans the same for Kao. Why else
would he care about how he moves?

Kao learns to wait for Baucis to leave before
he tests his cage. He knows the little man is trying to get into
his head, but he does not want him to know any of what he will find
if he gets inside. The cage is strong, and try as he might Kao can
do nothing to harm it. He beats at and with all he has until his
prongs throw sparks and he feels their energy in his teeth and
fingernails. Nothing. It always relents and comes back to full
strength, as maddening an opponent as water. Though sometimes, it
flickers without his attacks, like another prisoner battles the
Totem and its evils. Though it cannot be the hermit or any of his
kin. Only the animals in the Garden have the essence to challenge
to Totem, but they are down on the earth, far below his cage in the
sky.

So Kao waits, and eats the fruits and
vegetables left for him. Always when he wakes, fruits and
vegetables are there. Plump and juicy, they fill his cage with
wonderful aromas. All of them spark and fuel his new strength. Kao
knows Baucis does not want him dead. He wants a new toy to scare
and intimidate other magnificent beasts into slavery (Kao's
expanding mind is still not keen enough to realize
he
invented that word).

The hunter paces his cage, not knowing what
fate is fair for the puny false god and his kin. He knows there are
more of them. He can smell their sour fatty musk drift into his
cage, through the shimmering blue wall. There are men and women,
though they all smell spineless and weak. He smells monkeys too,
dozens of them, though their scent never changes. They are slaves.
He knows this. He plans to free them all, by death if
necessary.

After a time, he gets a visitor.

He knows time not from the light, which
blazes unceasing, but from his heart. He mostly feels the dull
grind of whatever force creates the blue lightning, he can feel it
invigorate the prongs even when not testing the shimmering blue
wall. Underneath all that, his heart feels the moon's seductive
pull calling to him, telling him to wait a bit longer, wait for her
to be at her greatest strength, when she allies with the sun and
can pump his blood as fast as his veins will allow. Very soon the
moon will be full. When it is, he will escape. Until then, he will
entertain his visitor.

She is young, probably his own age, if not
younger, though it is hard to tell with the baby faced gods. She is
taller than the pudgy man, more than half Kao's impressive height.
She has sleek black hair, wears a silver flowing cloth and best of
all: she smells.

She smells of fear, real fear, animal fear,
the fear one should feel in the presence of a hunter, even a caged
one. She smells of the sullied tainted vegetables he has been
eating, he can smell the black moss that polluted their tender
flesh through her pores. She smells of sweat, of work. She smells
of curiosity too, reeks of it: it’s more than an aroma, it’s her
essence. He loves it, wallows in it, and pumps his own stink back
into the air. It does not matter if she
thinks
she notices
because part of her, the animal part, does.

It was her eyes behind the lion. The way she
plods silently towards him, the way she cocks her head to get a
better look, her perfect balance, her wild black hair all scream
lion
. Her eyes are a soft purple, like flowers in the dry
season, very different from the cat's orange slits, but the same
eyes. Not the same as when he first battled the cat, no, no, no.
Those eyes were hungry, betrayed and confused. These are the eyes
that shone through those eyes. The eyes that said stay down. The
eyes that spared his life.

She says nothing, thank the gods, but they
communicate. She pities him. He is angry for what she helped do.
She is sorry, but had to do it. She feels as caged as him. She
wants to help. She wants to help so bad. He can smell it, see it,
sense it. She screams it without words, like a maimed animal asks
for death.
Painless,
they plead or
quick.
He promises
her neither, but demands her help.

He makes a big circle in the air. She traces
it too. Then he holds his hands up high above. She scratches her
head. He sits on his haunches and pretends to howl. She nods
excitedly, either proud of herself or of him for playing the game
so well. She points at the ground.
The full moon is
tonight
?

The next part of the message is trickier. He
cradles his arms like he holds his sister. He pretends to brush
her. He coos to her and puts her to sleep. A fat tear roles down
the girl's cheek.
My sister is here
. He stoops his back and
shuffles his feet like the mad old hermit. She nods between more
tears.

Then footsteps echo down the hall. Baucis
returns with more tests. She is scared and turns to go but Kao
catches her eye and she hesitates.

He taps his chest, “Kao.”

She nods, bats back tears, points to herself
and says, “Urea,” with the saddest and most beautiful smile he will
ever see.

Nature is the goddess, the true manifestation of the
earth. Our ancestors turned their backs on her, and we forever pay
their debts. We can turn to no one but ourselves. Pray our Council
hears her.

“What shall we do Baucis?” Ntelo asked as she
paced the Council chamber restlessly. Her purple robes fluttered
behind her, a frock of irate moths. Rufus called a Council meeting.
She nor Baucis wanted to be here. There were more pressing
matters.

“We'll implant the new specimen tomorrow, I
just have to run a few more tests,” Baucis said tiredly. The veins
on his head pulsed. He was exhausted.

“You'll do it today. Or else those damn
biselk
are going to bring this place down” Orus Luca
said.

Baucis detested Luca, he was crass, rude and
boorish, but he empathized with the brute. The
biselk
had
been at it for hours. Every few minutes, one of them would ram the
Spire. The impact itself was inconsequential, even an enormous
biselk
could only dream of challenging the towering Spire,
but each time they struck the base of the tower, the lights
flickered, not enough to cause any damage, not yet, but enough to
notice, and with a regular infrequency that was maddening.

“Its better to wait,” Tennay said, then
shrugged to the hidden sky, “the full moon.”

“You're not superstitious?” Rufus Aurelius
asked, his voice incredulous.

Tennay shrugged. “The alignment of the moon
disturbs the magma tides that fuel the Spire.”

“There's no records of that phenomenon,”
Aurelius rebutted.

“There's a whole world not in your
databanks.” The lights flickered, an eerie emphasis to Tennay's
cold words. As they have done each time their precious energy
source was interrupted, the Council all glanced around the room, as
if they would be able to tell from the painted windows of ancient
skyscrapers if something in the Spire was amiss.

“Regardless,” the usually glib Aurelius
hesitated, waiting for the lights to dim again. They didn't, and he
continued, “Every moment that thing is free inside our city we
court disaster.”

“Why are we worried about the monkey when the
biselk
threaten the Spire?” Luca growled.

“The Naturalists think the
Wild Man
taught the
biselk
how to challenge the Spire.”

“There is no
Wild Man
!” Ntelo hissed,
convincing no one.

“A true believer,” Aurelius said dryly,
“despite your lack of conviction, their time with the brute has
left them enlightened.”

Tennay wrung his gnarled knuckles. Sometimes
the truth was too hard to tell, but had to be told anyway. He owed
it to the Spire, the Council, and the people inside. Tennay felt
fatherly to the place. He had no children (none he'd raised anyway)
but he had always felt a deep love for his kin trapped up in the
sky with him. Stupid, shortsighted mankind, it was a miracle they
could even see to the ground from up here. Still though, for all
their shortsightedness they'd done so much! Tennay was the only one
alive in the Spire who remembered the good old days, what
his
grandfather used to call
the future
with a wink
and a grin.

Tennay's grandfather had always marveled at
all the wonderful things the world had taken for granted, or so
he'd told his grandson as the boy had tried to stay awake past his
bedtime while grandpa prattled on. His grandfather knew how the sky
ships flew, how VRCs worked and everything there was to know about
Carbon, from diamonds to nanotubes to people, his grandpappy had
loved
carbon. He had odes to things called microchips and
processors, internal combustion engines (something so inefficient
it lost most of the energy used to power it to heat,
heat!
)
and touch screen computers.

“This was back before people had cracked the
optic link,” he'd say every single time. But best of all, Tennay's
grandfather loved to fix things with his hands. Tennay had watched
his grandfather's gnarled knuckles fix radios, VRCs, the family's
sky ship, the electromagnetic transformer in their house, even the
plumbing (The Spire should be especially thankful for that one, the
reclaimers would never have functioned without Tennay's fuzzy
memories of grandpa explaining suction).

His grandfather had lost his mind in his old
days. Alzheimer's, his mother called it. To a boy less than ten, it
looked nothing short of demonic possession. One day, grandpa seemed
fine, focused as a laser, the next day he came home from work and
couldn't remember his own grandson's name. Things went bad from
there. His grandfather stopped working, he couldn't drive, couldn't
talk, could hardly feed himself. For hours, his grandfather would
pronounce doom and gloom for a world that had forgot how to use its
hands, all while his own once talented fingers trembled and twisted
uncontrolled.

“The Future's catching us boy, just watch.
All this technology won't have a thing to say when Nature steps in.
Just watch.”Nature finally did catch up with his grandfather.

Tennay's life had been ruined. No one knew
more about the world than his grandpa. When he stopped being able
to access it, Tennay knew that he had to understand what powered
mankind, because
someone
had to do, and without his grandpa,
he couldn't trust anyone else but himself (his dad had proved that
to him long ago) and his mother, and she had enough to worry about.
So he signed up to work on Spire Casino, the latest and greatest
piece of future there was.

He had just finished his internship, was
finally beginning to really understand how it all worked, and was
even getting over the death of his grandfather when it happened.
The Apocalypse, the Flood, birth of the Scourge, no matter what
they called it, to a young engineer, it was proof that Nature had
finally caught up to the future. He had been half relived when it
had happened. Somehow he had survived, high in Spire Casino,
mankind's shining light of technological accomplishment. He knew
that eventually the place would wear down, but he knew enough to
keep it going for a long time.

Until this, until now. He had never prepared
for Nature to actually
attack
. He understood the weather as
a symbol of Nature, really more of a symbol of chance, chaos even,
but to see animals,
animals they had engineered
, attack the
Spire? It was too much. The Council had already given up, and they
didn't even know all the facts. Only Baucis seemed level headed.
Would he be?
Could
he be with all the information?

The silence had sat heavy in the room long
enough. The gaudy chandelier had flickered three times since anyone
had spoken. All were lost in their own dour thoughts.

Tennay cleared his throat. The Council
turned, dull glimmers of hope in their eyes. Tennay felt guilty
he'd have to snuff them all out. “I've been looking at our Voltage
output since the
biselk
have been ...” what? Striking?
Rebelling? Attacking? He let the sentence die. “More energy is lost
with each joust. Its like they're wicking it away. They're getting
stronger, while the Spire's...” he let another sentence die, then
held his breath while the Council looked at him, concern growing on
their faces. “Have you ever seen a candle melt?” he managed to
ask.

“A candle?” Luca asks. The weatherman
understood little beyond high and low pressure, obsolete
terrestrial technology was definitely not part of his knowledge
base.

“Its an ancient light source that inevitably
burned itself out. The system collapse will begin like that. We'll
slowly sink as the increased current from the
biselk's
attacks causes the Spire to heat the magma flows that...”

The Council gave him nothing but vapid
stares.

“But eventually... after as the charge builds
and a circuit inevitably melts and short circuits... do you know
dynamite?”

Blank faces warp into concern and fear. The
Council is much more familiar with that ancient tool, but no one
suggests any solutions, after all, the fuse is deep within the
crust of the earth, and is shortened every time one of the elks
collide with the Spire.