David Gunn - Death's head

But Sven is change.

He asks me about my tribe, then retreats and sulks for days at my answers. We fly, I tell him, among the stars and between the moons. A whole people are out there, their history written in those flickering lights that cross the sky each night.

Many Sven, he says.

I sigh.

He understands sighing now, along with tears and nods and shakes of the head. In turn I can identify seven separate smells and a handful of his gestures. The laser knife has stopped being a weapon and become the means by which I communicate. A strange Sven ritual, which involves touching light to the back of my hand until my words become clear enough for a ferox to hear.

We return to Fort Libidad before the onset of high summer. The youngster doesn’t bother to tell me why, but I know my presence is required. It is nearing the middle of the year and the winds have begun to rise; food is already scarce. Animals die when the heat comes, and the ferox refuse to eat carrion.

Next dawn, he says.

So next dawn sees us ready.

Even the chieftain makes the journey, his face wrapped against the wind and a hundred miles of sifting sand. We walk in single file, following in his steps. Mostly the wind blows our footprints away, but crossing the dried edge of an oasis I look back and see that we leave only one set of prints, albeit deep ones and made strange by the fact that I cannot always match the chieftain’s stride.

The fort is abandoned.

And the stench inside is vicious. Flesh has fallen from bones and rotted to matted spoor beneath half-visible skeletons. In time the heat will rot what remains completely, or desiccate it, but that time is not yet.

Door, says the youngster.

So I nod.

Walls, he adds. We speak almost effortlessly.

“What about the walls?”

Like doors? he asks.

“Are walls like doors?” The heat, the winds, and being near enough to the only one of my kind are beginning to get to me.

Door, he repeats, more intently. A dozen ferox stand around us in a circle, watching closely. That’s twice the number of beasts needed for the original attack, so this has to be important. Also, the chief is growing impatient, his head swinging slowly from side to side.

“Which door?” I ask.

It is the right question.

The youngster can only remember the armory door. Since nothing was able to stand in his way, nothing else counts. So we walk to the armory, followed by a silent procession of the others.

The pulse rifles are in place, broken down to lock, stock, and barrel and still chained through their trigger guards. Enough weapons to launch a revolution. A wall of cavalry sabers looks as gratuitous as it ever did.

We take, he says.

“What?”

Everything.

For a moment I feel panic. Unarmed, these beasts are deadly enough. The thought of a tribe of ferox armed with pulse weapons is beyond horrific. On the very edge of doing something stupid, I realize my mistake. To Youngster the broken-down rifles are simply clutter.

He wants the armory itself. At least, he wants its door and walls. It takes us three days to cut the building into cartable pieces. When I suggest that smaller pieces are easier to carry, the youngster just smiles. A quick baring of his fangs makes him look as if he might slip into laughter or outright savagery, had the first not been impossible for a ferox, and the second their default position on almost everything.

Work, he says.

I work.

And when the cutting is done we carry the pieces away among us. Well, I carry a door, which is lightest of the pieces into which the armory has been hacked. We carry our booty a hundred miles and it takes seven days, using up what little reserves of energy we all have left.

I sweat, drag my feet, and fail to follow in the leader’s footsteps. The ferox slow down, letting me grab ragged breath from the hot desert air. When I’ve finished vomiting a thin sour stream, which is all that fills my stomach, the youngster hauls me to my feet and the march begins again.

“Tell me why,” I say to one after another.

Their answers are strange, oblique.

I cut myself harder, and burn myself more sharply, but their words still hover on the edge of meaning.

Flamefire, says Youngster, but it means nothing to me.

Those pieces, which looked ragged when we ripped them from the walls of the armory, fit perfectly into the entrance of the main warren, across a turn of tunnel behind this, and into a gap where the walls narrow a hundred paces after that.

Not fit close enough to jam into place: They fit perfectly, every bulge in the wall matched by a curve in a slab of ceramic. No mortar is needed, because every tunnel narrows at exactly the point chosen. The ferox simply haul the ceramic slabs upright and use brute force and that natural narrowing to fix each slab into place.

Only seeing it prevents me from believing it impossible. And even then, while describing what is happening to Anna, I find myself wondering if what I’m saying is really true.

Done, says the youngster.

He seems happier than I’ve seen him in weeks.

Eat, sleep, get strong. Now we wait.

The youngster trundles away, and when I next see him he’s curled up on the edge of a rock pool, letting a thin trickle of water wash across his fur. He’s snoring, loudly.

A hot wind seeps into the cave system at dusk, finding its way through faults in the rock and up the slanting chimneys that climb toward the cliff tops above. For all its heat, the wind is a blessing. Our caves are beginning to stink of closeted ferox, dung, and too many beasts scrabbling a living in too small a space.

As the temperatures rise the males claim their own areas, only returning to the females for sex.

I find a small cave of my own. Since none of the adults disputes this, and most have become friendly since I first arrived at their camp dragging the skull of a long-dead chief, my landgrab is obviously acceptable. After all, I live in the warren and I eat what they eat, which some weeks is precious little…

There was a boy, they tell me, a man, and an older woman. All found wandering in the desert. Ferocious, almost as fierce as the ferox, Anna is what’s left. The others are gone, but no one seems willing to tell me where.

Anna=Human, they say. Human=Anna.

I think it’s a statement. After a while I realize it’s a question.

Looking into the girl’s eyes shows me nothing. I believe she is feral, a human like me, but run wild or maybe just wilder. Now I’m beginning to wonder if we’re even the same species. Strange things happened in the very early days of colonization, when people were still being changed to match planets, rather than planets being changed to match people.

Still, I feed scraps to the wild girl, who grows friendlier and begins to curl herself around me whenever I appear.

What happens next is inevitable.

One morning Anna arrives early, a dead lizard in her hand. She’s obviously really pleased with herself, understandably enough. She smiles when I say her name. It might be my tone of voice, although I pretend to myself that it isn’t. She looks up, and she smiles.

My own smile ignites a grin on her face.

We eat the lizard together, sucking it down to bones and mangled shreds of silver skin, and then I say, “Let’s clean you up.”

She keeps smiling and I keep talking, my voice low and soothing as I cut her hair with my laser blade, leaving her standing in a tangle of filthy curls. Her underarm hair goes the same way. A sweep of blade above her skin and an acrid smell of burning keratin and it’s done.

We are not ferox.

Only, some days, it seems we are.

In the deepest recesses of the cave system I show Anna a stream that slides down a gray wall and fills a pool that looks almost as old as this planet. I’ve been coming here for weeks, cooling myself against the wind and washing away the worst of the cave system’s stink.