Skinner was stroking his chin, his gaze on the shadowed recesses of the jungle. ‘Thank you, Petal. Perhaps I was too hasty earlier.’ The big mage hunched his rounded shoulders, keenly embarrassed by the praise. ‘Now we just have to find that damned priest.’
‘I believe he travels with the labourers,’ Mara supplied.
Skinner gave a curt nod and a wave, indicating the end of the meeting. Everyone went their own way.
* * *
Many generations ago the fisherfolk of Tien learned not to fool with the field of towering dolmens that lay on this spit of land. It was not for them. Foreigners, however, appeared to never learn better. Every few years or so ships would come and these foreigners would unload their cargo of weapons and metal equipage. Then they would troop inland.
Mostly they returned much diminished in treasure and in blood. Sometimes they never returned. Often these visitations were accompanied by unnatural lights and sounds, or low clouds in which shadowy shapes moved. Sometimes even the earth itself shook. When this happened the fisherfolk hid in their huts, clutched their idols, and prayed to every god and demon in existence that they be passed over.
And so it was even stranger than usual that the low churning clouds should return so long after the latest batch of foreigners had fled. Flickering aurora-like flares cast their glow against the night sky and muted roars and cries terrorized everyone. The earth even shuddered now and then. The clustered households, hardly a village, gathered to decide what to do. Mostly they yelled and wept and struck one another but out of the free-for-all emerged the sound consensus that most societies reach: that the weakest and least important of them should go have a look.
So useless Gall, mostly just called Lackwit, was kicked from the hut and told to go or never be fed again. He cried and clutched the doorpost, but a well-placed bare foot to his face sent their brave scout on his way.
He blubbered and wiped the snot from his face as he staggered up the dunes into the storm of winds and dark roiling clouds. Fiercely blowing sands struck him, as would be the case in any normal windstorm. But this one raged only over the dolmens and not further up the spit in either direction. He tied a scrap of rag over his mouth and nose and leaned into the wind. It was dark now. Churned sand and dust mixed with the clouds to paint everything a dirty yellow. The inconsistent winds gusted fiercely only to suddenly die out to nothing. Gall was reduced to crawling on all fours.
He banged his head into a stone and lay with his arms wrapped around his throbbing skull. After a time he opened his eyes to see that he’d found a dolmen. He could make out other noises now over the booming winds: what sounded like great snarling roars of rage such as those from some enormous animal. Like a bear, was all that he could think of. Except much larger. Large enough to shake the earth.
Yet occasionally other sounds emerged from the dark. What sounded like a woman’s cries of pain and grunts of effort. Or dark cursing in words he could not understand. This confused him as he lay behind the cover of the dolmen, until he hit upon the image of a woman cornered by a bear. Another image briefly came to mind, of a bear and a woman mating, and even though the idea aroused him he set it aside because he wanted to be the one mating with the woman. This happy idea emboldened him to crawl closer.
Ahead, the storm of dust and thrown sand thickened to a near soup of darkness. Yet he could still make out something thrashing within: rearing, reaching, writhing. Unfortunately, it didn’t resemble either a bear or a woman. The only thing it reminded him of was either a monstrous bat — as he thought he’d glimpsed something like a webbed wing — or a snake, given all the flailing and twisting.
Then a limb emerged above the thickest roiling clouds of dust. It kept on rising, uncoiling, and at its end was an immense dagger-like head. All thoughts of bears and women and bats and snakes slid from Gall. It was something he’d heard told of and described in the stories he loved to listen to at night. A naga. A lizard-snake of the sort who served the Night-Queen, ruler of all the jungle. Caught here in the dolmens. Was that what this field of dolmens was? A huge trap for these creatures? Was this why they’d never seen one before?
The head and long neck thrashed, straining from side to side. Unseen wings pumped, churning up a massive billowing dirty yellow mass of sand and dust that stung his slit eyes. An unnerving groan of grinding stone rose then. A shearing sound, like rock in pain. A great tall silhouette in the darkness shifted. One of the dolmens fell inward, sliding into its separate piled sections. Something struck the ground nearby, in a meaty thump and shush of dry sliding sand and gravel, followed by silence.
The dark cloud slowly dispersed as the sands and dust came drifting down. The inner central ring of gravel appeared to have returned to its normal smooth calm. Heat radiated from it, though, like a stone taken from a fire. To Gall it felt as if he were pressing his face right up against a hearth.
A groan and a cough sounded from somewhere among the standing dolmens. He was encouraged once again, for it sounded like a woman. He searched among the forest of pillars. First he found the missing one. Or rather, where it had once stood at the very edge of the central ring. Now nothing of it remained. Gall wondered where it had gone. Had the naga flown off with it?
Then he found her. The woman. And she was naked! Despite his recent terror Gall’s member stirred to urgent life. Now they would mate. He would tell her he rescued her from the naga — just as in the old stories! He, Gall, naga-slayer!
The woman pushed herself upright and peered about. Gall’s member wilted as he saw how her eyes sizzled like the sun touching the horizon and how the sands smoked beneath her. Those eyes found him and their hooded gaze seemed to lacerate him like knives. He fell flat to his stomach, cringing and whimpering.
With his hands over his head he could only see the ground nearby. Here bare feet stopped and the goddess — perhaps the Night-Queen herself — spoke: ‘I would take your pitiful rags but I see that you’ve peed in them. And worse.’ The feet moved on.
After a time he worked up the courage to raise his head. She was gone. Perhaps the naga had come and taken her too. Or perhaps she rode it like a horse. There were stories of that too. But no, her footprints were clear. She was headed south. Of course! Back to Himatan! Where else would such a one go? Or come from, for that matter.
Gall headed back to the shore. He was frowning and distracted as he tried to work through what he’d seen. It was a labour he was unaccustomed to and it made his head hurt. At the hut the others confronted him.
‘What did you see?’
‘Were there foreigners there?’
‘We heard a yell in the winds — was that you crying for your mother?’
It was a strange sensation for Gall to suddenly discover that everyone was depending upon him. He realized that he didn’t want to let them down. And so he clenched his hands and brows and began, slowly, choosing his words with great care: ‘I believe a powerful spirit wandered out of Himatan and was trapped by the dolmens. It escaped and returned to the jungle.’
The others stared, stunned and amazed by the most eloquent and cogent speech they’d ever heard from him. Then as a group they fell upon him, beating his back and head with their fists and kicking him.
‘Fool!’
‘Liar!’
‘Expect us to believe that?’
‘You never even went, did you!’
Crouched beneath the flurry of blows, Gall wished then that he’d stayed with the whole naga-slaying and mating story instead.
CHAPTER IX
Of the semi-mythical lands some know as ‘Jacuruku’, accounts from returned shipwrecked sailors tell of great earthworks and large reservoirs within the boundless tracts of deadly jungle. Such claims, if true, lead one to wonder just who may have constructed such large edifices. Very probably they are the remnants of relatives of our own ancestors who themselves, according to legend, once migrated by ship across the waters in search of other lands. For who else could possess the intelligence, the drive and the determination to conquer such unmitigated wilds?