Chapter 3: Chapter Three: Horrors of the Meat World
Like sagging sails on a stagnant lake, the vast, unfurled wings flickered tremulously as they hurtled through the Abyss. The black ribbons hung preternaturally still as the Baugn streamed over the oases, and as it picked up speed, the cool Abyssal air did not blast back but stayed at a murmuring lull, as if they slipped between its current.
As Leitara had no memories of Baugn, she neither feared nor understood them, and newborn wonder drummed in her questioning mind. The Baugn seemed less animal than puzzle; less meat than idea; less material than ideal. As if they were only the projection of a colossal entity which could not extrude its whole being into reality, and satisfied itself with this bestial representation, this vestige of its vast meaning; just as she was only the representation of a mute Tree-Mother whose voice was only ever imagined or remembered and whose wishes were now the ashes of death whispers.
As the day dragged on, they dwindled from thirst and hunger until the Baugn alighted on an oasis no larger than the deck of a sailing ship. When they picked clean its single berry bush, its astringent fruit puckered their mouths and tightened their stomachs well past the point of killing their appetite, until their insides were so painfully drawn that they were less comfortable in fulness than they were in hunger.
While Kuruk complained only of stomachache, the berries blurred Leitara's vision, so that after a miserable interlude of many agonizing hours, in which both only opened their mouths to moan, Leitara observed that the oases had thinned out. Soon after, they were alone in the Abyss, pale ghosts hurtling through an unending chasm. For hours, it seemed like they simply hung adrift in nothingness, until the vermilion Abyss-light touched a dark outline, and the Human World seemed to ripple into existence. Other than the slash of light behind them that marked the center of the Abyss, there was nothing else—not only were the other worlds too distant, but the oases had passed the point of visibility.
Hravak was a smaller world than Ielnarona, and its dark surface crowded by clouds joined by tendrils of lightning.
"That's an enormous storm."
"What is that?" Lord Kuruk pointed at a dark shadow scudding over the Human World.
"It's your world. You tell me."
"That's no cloud." The flashing gloom unveiled glimpses of the strange dark material—a large satellite streaked by green copses and glimmering pools.
"I thought Hravak had no moons."
"That's no moon. It's an abyssal oasis."
"Whatever it was, it's a moon or a meteor now, and you'd better hope it's not the latter."
"It wasn't there when we departed. How did it get there?"
"The right question is 'where are we going?'"
"Kuruk!"
Startled, Leitara turned her head. The other Inamu lords had caught up at last, gesticulating wildly from Baugn-back as spear shafts hurtled past and a half dozen Baugn flew in their wake. While it could not be said that Baugn pursued or played the part of pursuers, the dryads they carried took advantage of their steeds' migration to bring them in range of Leitara and her allies.
When the next javelin threaded through both Baugn and Lord Hauca, the tip pierced his chest, then continued through his chin to emerge from his mouth, and blood spouted straighter than the javelin. As his nerveless hand let go of the strip of skin, it unfurled, spilling Klyr's head into the Abyss.
"Hauca!" cried Kuruk.
"Keep your head down, old king."
"We must draw nearer," whispered Kuruk. "Do you hear me, world-beast? They must pay in blood." He sat up on the Baugn's back, drew his sword and brandished it at the dryads.
Something in the old man had snapped; this was no cavalry battle, but a migration. Kuruk should know from his many Abyssal journeys that the Baugn would take them where it willed. Leitara put one arm around his shoulders and yanked him against the furred flanks. Though Kuruk shook with rage and grief, he could not worm free of her viny arm.
The dryads did not bother to return Kuruk's threatening gesture, as they had spears for their comeback. They soon ran out, having also pinned Drunga to the dying Baugn, which drew its last breath, freezing in the crystallizing moment while the other Baugn hurtled by. Their last shaft skimmed the underbelly of Leitara and Kuruk's Baugn.
Every instant the Human World expanded further and further, centered on a craggy mountain bulging towards crackling clouds.
"No," moaned Kuruk. "This is all wrong."
"I'm sorry your friends are dead, but we're arriving any second."
"Not friends," said Kuruk. "Hauca was my youngest boy."
"Forgive me," said Leitara, mustering empathy she did not feel, "I don't mean to be glib, but save your strength for climbing."
"Not here! Not the Juntawni. We picked a rogue Baugn."
Crisp memories of past selves reading recalled that Juntawni was one of nine Hravakian mountains where Baugn roosted.
"What's wrong with the Juntawni?"
Kuruk's answer was cut off by their steep and rapid descent, which seemed like the Baugn punched an echo in the cold, upper reaches. As they passed sparking clouds, Leitara's hair stood straight up in green streamers, and she felt the caressing weight of blossoms on her cheek and crowding her hair.
Kuruk's eyes roved wildly over her flowering figure, head to chest and back again, and when his next words were drowned in the downward gale, he shouted, "Are you the Spider-God, to weave so quickly?"
Leitara did not answer this bizarre quesion because she was coming to grips with its bizarre answer. Her knees were tangled, her arms were wrapped in a viny snarl, and blossoms fluttered on her breasts. Having traveled naked through the Abyss until now, she was at a loss to comprehend how she had spun a garish blue and green garment of effluvial threads with a glistening sheen that caught the flicker of the lightning. Despite the gusting turbulence, the creeping weave knitted together so rapidly that she could watch the crawling strands. This was an ability reserved for dryad queens, and while Leitara was proud of the pedigree of her past selves, she was barely noble.
When the Baugn's frictionless flight snapped to a halt mere yards above Mount Juntawni, there was no recoil, only a gentle flap as its backswept wings furled in planting its talons in the jutting precipice. Upon squatting, it fell into a torpor, and by the time Leitara had dismounted, and assisted Lord Kuruk in finding his footing, it was fast asleep.
Though the old man's eyes were wet, his knees swayed, and his sword clattered on the promontory, when the other Baugn fluttered to a lower outcrop, Lord Kuruk pried free a stone to hurl, but only struck mountainside. The dryads on its back had only dour glares to let fly. As their baleful eyes were embedded in the face of Inglefras, Leitara thought of unearthing projectiles herself, but decided not to encourage Lord Kuruk.
"I see them." Lord Kuruk's cheeks were damp from leaking his grief, which he rubbed away with his balled, shaking fists.
"Can you climb...my lord?" Leitara picked up Kuruk's sword.
"You will see how swiftly I descend. Give that to me." Kuruk's glare burned as his hand flashed to the sword's hilt.
Reluctantly, Leitara released the weapon. "Lord Kuruk, I only want to help you as you helped me. While I am not fond of flesh creatures, your plight kindles in me a sentimental affinity. When death claimed your son and my Tree-Mother, life became not a continuum but a chasm into which we peer, searching not for meaning but an ending."
"I will have my revenge, and an end to my grief."
"I will help you, so long as you do not mean to fall on them from above."
At the old man's shamefaced frown, Leitara knew that was exactly what he had intended. By leaping into the abyss below, he meant to join Hauca, who drifted in the Abyss above.
"We descend the slow, surefooted way." Lord Kuruk's pained voice sounded drawn over gravel. "Though not native to these lands, I have climbed Juntawni once before. This short path leads to a long climb. Not that a Tree-Woman would fear climbing or the soil of any world."
"While not a day old, I have lived so many lives that it is truer not to say that I fear than that I have feared, and remember those fears when moved to fright. The centuries bury me in fears from which I struggle to emerge. Even now I see not with new eyes, but am embedded in experience."
Leitara followed Kuruk along a winding ledge. Sometimes it widened so two might walk abreast, but in narrow spots, they put their backs to the mountain and shimmied along the rock face, advancing by cautious sidesteps.
"This is only resentment, Tree-Woman. You must only learn to live honestly."
"Though I am not bitter, I remember what it felt like. If I have a bitter face, I have long held this pose. So many memories were poured into my mold that there is no question of my being the model, only the statue, a stone preconceived and tapped free."
When they came to where they must climb in earnest, conversation died as they hunkered to the task. Though they climbed side by side, Leitara would come to retain no memories of this journey, as her focus was bent to their descent, and Kuruk was too shortwinded to speak. While Kuruk had the confident instincts of a strong climber, he had the body of an old man, and whenever Leitara had to grasp his slipping hand, Kuruk averted his eyes and pretended to look down the slope.
At the midpoint, they nearly stumbled over a craggy wire giant, for although its leaden complexion camouflaged it in the gray stones, when its crackling snore sounded like the mountainside was giving way, they jumped back and glimpsed it all at once, in an instantaneous reflex, less than a yard from its big toe. The behemoth was squatting like a gargoyle, its bushy head nodding over its clasped knees. Perhaps while looking for prey or sport, it had drifted into its rough slumber. They tiptoed under its thighs and creeped down the slope.
As they neared the foothills, the slopes became gentler, and when Lord Kuruk broke into a plunging sprint, they leaped over the larger snags in their headlong run.
At the base of the mountain, Leitara panted, "what was that?"
"Are you not excited by a world under your feet?"
"While I am curious to see this world's cannibal life cycle of meat eating meat, I cannot say the prospect of being here excites me."
"Come with me if you want purpose, or a plot worthy of Tree-Woman roots."
The setting Abyss-light crowned the rocky horizon with light and streamers of smoke.
"That way lies Cuvarnei," said Lord Kuruk, "not a warm welcome."
"Everything feels cold," said Leitara, "and nothing smells good."
"I hate Cuvarnei, but I'd like a bed."
"Rest here. Better to be uncomfortable than anxious of your hosts."
"Do dryads sleep?"
"Do humans breed?"
"I did not mean to be rude."
"I did," said Leitara. "And I apologize. Exhaustion takes its toll, and dull knives make rude cuts."
"You could say anything, and I would not care. You are not like my wild children."
"Yes, dryads sleep. Tree-Mothers do nothing but sleep, though they are always conscious, and Tree-Women sleep now and then. As we have a great capacity for tedium, we only seek sleep when we crave relief."
Since there was no sign of their pursuers-turned-prey in their mountain descent, they began their land journey under the bale light. When the golden rays of the distant city melted under the rising Abyss, Leitara's tunic became a robe of glossy blue-green fibers, so that she went from being clad in water to clad in sky. Though it was illusory garb, and the breeze still cleaved to her nakedness, the sheen of her effluvial garment was like sateen.
Short shaggy trees studded the foothills, while tall firs clumped along the rise. Their wavy path rippled up and down as often as it swerved left and right, and when Kuruk tottered,
she knew they must find rest.
Why was Hravak called the Human World, she wondered. Creeping things were its dominant life. Not only slithering snakes, but crawling, buzzing, and chittering bugs, including a black, pill-shaped insect that hopped leaf to leaf by way of a sharp popping. Hravak not only teemed with vermin, it swarmed with so many monsters that it might rival Nymerea's claim to the title Monster World, with not only fanged, one-horned goats leering over long beards and tails the bright yellow of daffodils and dandelions, but dragons, unicorns, hippogriffs, griffins, centaurs, and other hybrids that fused animals into brazen ideas, topped by equally profane heads. Not only were Ielnaronan fauna headless, but dryads believed the evils of other worlds stemmed from meaty passions, while mind and intelligence stemmed from vegetal impulses.
If Hravak wasn't the Pest World, it was the Weed World, for unchecked and unmastered plants of little worth swarmed and choked majesties, from dandelions squeezing out tulips and rose bushes to profuse oaks and maples crowding birch and ash.
When they passed a wagon, its cowled Cuverneians passengers sneaked a peak at the dryad, but none glanced at the old Inamu. It was as if he didn't exist.
"This is no place for your grove, Tree-Woman," Kuruk scowled.
"Is anywhere free of vermin on your world?"
"No, and especially not here. This is the path to Drydana."
"Is there another route?"
"This way is faster."
"Until now, I have humored you, as I have no pressing obligations, nothing better to do, and a passing interest in yourself. Do not think you can test me."
"You'll turn my head with such strong flattery."
"You are too magnificent for a landless Tree-Woman."
"Do not think me unlearned or untraveled. I have sat at the feet of a great goblin lord,
studied in the Alfyrian citadel of learning, and know a dryad queen when I smell one."
"I am no queen, but an exile."
"What we once were is true no longer, or I could still call myself king."
"Call yourself a philosopher, then. That would be true."
Kuruk's laugh was bitter and tight. "I suppose I am."
The grassy smell of corn, wheat, rye, and rice wafted from Cuvaernian farms,
where dark brown brick farmhouses squatted far from the road. Sleek, muscular horses trotted in the corrals, while the cows were staggeringly obese, with fat rolls hanging over their hooves, and fat clumped to their faces and tails.
While Cuvaerni had no outer wall, the residences were so flush to each other that the only mode of ingress was a road so dry and cracked that clods were chipped free by boots and hooves, and Leitara had to steer the swaying Kuruk not only around the larger holes, and the flinty piles of dirt, but away from the horse piss puddled along the edge. The Tree-Woman did not doubt that Cuvaernei was so hot and dry that the urine would evaporate before it could soak into the soil, for she already felt a few ounces vaporize from her vegetal form, accenting her flowering garment with a delicate fragility.
As the Cuvaernians were exhibitionists that delighted in display, their porches were a venal gallery of feral life, and Leitara's head swiveled from the whipping of half-naked children to barbecued racks of ribs, rutting on lawn chairs, loud declamations from chaplets of violent, ribald verse, and then the market square, where four butchers had skinned, bled hams and beef hung in their windows, and attached abattoirs with troughs of bloody refuse where stray dogs and cats fed with wild eyes, eyes more alive than the glassy orbs of the Cuvaernians funneling into an agora of crowded stone seats descending to a stage where two humans, frothing at the mouth, fornicated with screams, tears, and scratching caresses that shaved bloody rivulets from their limbs and faces.
"Do not judge me by these human flies, Dryad Queen."
Leitara was quiet until they had passed the obscene playhouse. "While I reserve the right to judge as I please, I have nothing to say."
"I condemn them myself. It is a cruel mode of execution."
"Execution?"
"Since the drug lingers for days, kreug-krava is a death sentence, and for the Cuvaernians, their favorite recreation."
"What did you call it?"
"Kreug-krava." Kuruk winced. "Don't ask what it means."
"Why? I'm hardly innocent. I recollect all manner of mischief in my past lives."
Kuruk sighed. "It means 'cannibal congress.' While we would say that the poisoned orifices are stimulated or never sated, in the simple language of Cuvaernei, they are simply never full, which to them means one--often a female, but not always--is eager to be fed--which is to say, penetrated--and the other is eager to be consumed. So they mate, then mate some more, then go on mating, until they mate to the death."
"As dueling and feuding are legal on Ielnarona, and the lives of Tree-Women are treated as capital by the Tree-Mothers, I am scarcely fit to judge your world; that said, at least our practices leave someone alive. What crime did they commit?"
"Who knows? Kreug-krava was once reserved for adulterers, but now all capital offenses are punished in this fashion. And as kreug-krava executes in pairs, the deceived are condemned with the deceiver, the accusers are condemned with the offenders, and the innocent are condemned with the guilty; it is true guilt by association. As you might imagine, this policy leaves the city guard plenty of free time."
When they left the market, they entered a crowded, affluent residential district, where the washerwomen wore livery embroidered with a roaring beast fringed with brown and gold, and the children were clad in clean tunics and sandals. No less feral than the poorer children, these richly dressed boys and girls trailed Leitara and Kuruk through town, giggling, whistling, throwing pebbles at their backs, then hollering, in unison, a sing-song rhyme.
"What's that they sing?"
"Don't ask."
"And leave things to my imagination?"
"It could not be worse than the song."
"They hate dryads that much?"
"They hate all offworlders, and reserve a special loathing for Inamu."
"How did your tribe earn this enmity?"
"We learned."
"What did you learn?"
"Among other things, not to talk to Cuvaernians."
"Is human language that sloppy?"
"What do you mean?"
"Facts are or are not learned, people are or are not trusted. Learning and trusting are not the same; trusting is neither taught, nor learned, though it can be understood. We learn nothing about personalities, only what they teach us."
"Dryads have a strange catecumen," said the old Inamu. "Beware the ganess.
"What's a ganess?" said Leitara. "A kind of taboo?"
When a piercing squeal aired in the street, the Cuvaernians hustled onto their decks and closed their porch gates, and Leitara backpedaled from a drooling, scampering beast that waved a bobbing, tusked head. Blood streamed from its eye sockets, black dots daubed its scrawny musculature, and it zigged and zagged in a staggering path that furrowed the dry soil.
Not only did the disgusting, eyeless ganess evoke the headless beasts of the Dryad World, and seem a piece of home to Leitara, but the sightless beast and the cruelty of its keepers—whose custom appeared to be blinding a beast before its butchery—constituted such a canned horror that her old head laughed by reflex, until its tusk wormed into her thigh.
When the ganess shook its head, Leitara screamed, the wound worried and widened with slopping blood, and Kuruk seized the beast's other horn, and the scruff of its neck, and with a curious twist, produced a gruesome snap. The ganess slid to the dirt road, its horn trailing a flowing green ribbon from the gaping wound. Leitara also slipped to the ground, only to scrabble back to her feet when a dozen men dashed from a storehouse. When Kuruk took to his heels in a red-hot hurry much faster than his years suggested, and passed from sight trailing pursuers, the remaining three circled her languidly.
"Codura jipeti dul." Surely handsome by this world's standards, he would have been thought an unsightly and asymmetric aberration on Ielnarona. One eye was nearly a half-inch higher than the other, and as it was cocked in a sardonic taunt, it seemed nearly a full inch loftier. His beard grew in uneven tufts blotched by a white hairless scar on his upper lip. When the others snorted ugly laughs, he nodded and said, "codura," emphatically.
While her hand was still wet with green blood, the fluttering pain fluttered away and cleared the fog of her wooziness. A feathery tuft had grown between the fingers pressed to the wound, and her thigh was clean, whole, and dry.
Though the wound no longer nagged at her, the scornful words did. Surely he had not called her a great beauty or an admirable person to produce such contemptuous laughter.
Their moseying circle stopped, and when the one to her left feinted, she sidestepped into the one on the right, who seized her forearm, which bent with a flower's elasticity to snatch his own wrist, and with a double-jointed, vegetal lash, snapped his limb, producing not only the wet, protruding bone, but cringing bellows from all three men.
While dryads are stronger than they look, and their bodies bend differently, the two unbroken Cuvaerneians closed in, wary of her treacherous flexibility, and held her fast by the cunning expedient of pulling her arms taut between them. While her viny strength might have extricated herself from their sweaty, meat man entanglement, they were joined by the others, who returned without the Inamu.
They dragged her toward the storehouse—a shoddy structure made of saplings joined with mud and dry grass—where a white-bearded man with bloodshot brown eyes pulled a hood over her face.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone