Turin, radji Cradle ecologist
Date [standardised human time]: October 5th, 2117
(18 years, 11 months before the invasion of the radji Cradle).
Something had changed within Turin. At first, she did not understand it, her hunger, her restless nights. But one morning she woke and found could name the feeling instantly. A weight had taken hold in Turin’s womb. She had turned to Braq’s naked form beside her and watched him sleep. Gently she had brought his paw to her and placed it on her belly. He had woken then and smiled at the contact. Something quizzical passed through his gaze when he looked into her eyes. She did not need to tell him anything, a moment later he knew also. They showered one another with nuzzles and laughter.
That morning as they sat having breakfast, Turin looked out of the kitchen window. Sure enough, squinting with the distance, she could just make out Ki-yu sitting by the large platan tree. It’s low but great canopy, formed from wide fan-shaped leaves betrayed its foreign origin. Besides the fact that all three of them together would not have been able to encircle its immense trunk, Turin would have been loath to uproot it. Invasive or no, Ki-yu adored the wide, climbable branches, or at least she used to. Her focus on the tree had shifted from playground to hideaway, a fact that Turin found concerning. That was where they had buried the roht cub, at Ki-yu’s insistence, and most mornings she visited it.
Turin did not exactly blame her; that cub was yet another enigma in a long list that only seemed to be growing lately. Braq and Turin had poured over the literature on the roht fossil record, scant though it was, and found that none had ever been reported this far south. As yet, the camera trap had returned nothing of consequence; some fiirits, a stray brynn, a large shaggy mass too close to the camera to see clearly. But Ki-yu had become fascinated by it, all of it. She never really talked about it per se, but the discovery and subsequent burial had clearly disturbed her.
Bringing her bowl to the sink and opening the window, Turin called out at the top of her lungs. The sound travelled across the valley, and she saw Ki-yu look round before the echo bounced back off the mountains. With one last look up at the tree, she began loping back towards home. As she closed the window, Turin spared a glance at the predator pens. The shadow monitors were finally approaching a sizeable population, their first generation now nearing breeding age. Their plan of reintroduction was almost coming to a head, and it needed to quickly as the stiplets had reached a breaking point. They were now past the summer solstice, and the added strain their population would have on the ecosystem during the winter Turin could not imagine. Ki-yu, at least for the moment, did not have the disposition of a killer, which meant that all their eggs were firmly in the monitors’ basket.
“I’m worried about her,” Turin told Braq as he finished his breakfast. He was in a decidedly chipper mood this morning, and even that dark cloud did not seem to sullen him.
“Burying that cub was the most despondent I’ve seen her since… well, the fiirit,” he said.
“I’ve tried talking to her about it but…” Turin sighed. “Sometimes… I don’t think I’m as close to her as you are.” He stood and joined her at the window, before hugging her from behind.
“Nobody ever said raising a pyq was easy,” he rumbled over her shoulder. His paws ran over her belly as they looked out at the tree. “Maybe this’ll cheer her up?” he suggested.
“Maybe…” Turin said. “I guess this means we’ll have to dig another room.”
“We? You’ll be flat on your belly before long,” Braq teased. “I’ll head out for some supplies this morning.”
“Don’t you want to be here when I tell Ki-yu?” Turin asked, surprised. She turned in his arms to face him, and Braq tossed his head amicably.
“Of course, but I also think it’d be good for you both to spend some quality time together.” He mellowed a little. “But… if you’d prefer me there…”
“No,” Turin said with a sigh, “You’re right. And we’ll need to get those supplies before the market closes tomorrow. Promise we’ll spend some time together this afternoon, yes?” Braq nodded down at her, a light smile playing across his face.
“I love you, you know?” he said.
“I think you’ve mentioned it.”
Ki-yu padded into the kitchen as they nuzzled. The pyq rarely ate in the morning, but regardless was putting on weight fast. Ki-yu’s hide was darkening, of this they were now certain. Turin had grown fond of her speckled hide, and whilst she was yet to develop the harder scales and osteoderms of an adult pyq, it was a clear indicator that she was growing up fast. Ki-yu had also started learning to read. She was struggling with linking some of the symbols to the spoken sounds, but neither could deny her speaking ability was slowly improving.
“Morning Mama, morning Baba,” she said. She sat back on her haunches and looked up at them, considering their affectionate embrace. “Something wrong?” she asked.
“No sweetheart,” Turin said, separating from Braq. “C’mon, let’s do some reading.” Ki-yu groaned.
“But I don’t want reading… can’t we play?” Braq bent down in front of her.
“I promise we’ll all play when I come back, okay?” he said.
“Can’t I come with you? Why… never see…” She struggled to find the words, and Braq glanced at Turin, a sad look in his eyes. When he turned back to Ki-yu he was wearing a smile.
“Another time, sweetheart. Once you’re older,” he said. “Why don’t you start with the animal picture ones, you like them?” Braq suggested.
“Okay…” Ki-yu huffed.
“Hey,” Turin said. “Why don’t we do some reading whilst Baba’s away, and then we can all go visit the toolie later hmm?” That seemed to cheer her up a little, and she sauntered down to her backroom.
“Thank you,” Turin told Braq. He’s so much better with her than I am… Glancing at him she saw him reading her like a well-worn novel.
“Don’t be hard on yourself, beloved,” he said gently, shouldering his pack. “It’ll happen.”
Ki-yu padded back up the hall, her books in a basket between her jaws. With a subtle display of strength for one so young, she pushed herself off her forelimbs long enough to drop the basket on a chair. She darted over to Braq’s shins and whined up at him.
“Bye-bye Baba.”
“Bye-bye Ki-yu.” With a pat on her head and a loving look at them both, he left.
“Well. What’re we going to do today?” Turin said playfully. Ki-yu casually jumped up onto the table and began picking through her books with her mouth, her long tail flicking in the air. “C’mon darling, use you paws!” Turin chided, pulling out an animal picture book. “How about a game?” Ki-yu settled down onto a chair and panted happily at her.
“A game! What kind of game?” she asked. Turin reached up on the top shelf in the kitchen and pulled down the stash of sylphberries. Ki-yu eyed the yellow-orange fruit greedily. A few weeks ago, Turin had come into the kitchen to find Ki-yu, a supposed obligate carnivore, gorging herself on a packet of sylphberries that had been left on the counter. Sylphberries were a seasoning, a minor part of the radji palate. But despite that they had made her tremendously sick, she claimed they were delectable. As far as they could tell, they had no ill effect in small numbers, so they had become a little treat.
“Hmm…” Turin sat down opposite Ki-yu. “How about I pick an animal from this book, and if you give me three big words to describe it, you’ll get one berry. How does that sound?” Ki-yu shuffled excitedly and nodded in her seat. Turin flipped through the book and opened to a page depicting a brynn.
“Brynn!” Ki-yu said at once. “Hmm… fuzzy, uh… feary- no that’s not right… fearful… and, um… uh…”
“They live in groups…” Turin offered.
“Herding!”
“Very good!” Turin said, giving her a berry that vanished almost before it had left her paw. She skimmed through the book again, opening to a large, ape-like creature. “Do you know what this one is called darling?”
“Umm… no.”
“It’s called a darwi, sweetheart,” Turin told her. “They’re not found around here but try and give it a go.”
“Hmm… it says, eat lots of things… works together, so… clever?”
“Good, that’s one.”
“Aaand… they live in trees, so… climber?”
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“Sure, just one more.”
“Uh…” Ki-yu stalled, but Turin felt generous that she had given it a go.
“Here,” she said, offering her a berry. “I’ll give you that one since you worked so hard for it. Darwi are an omnivore, meaning they can eat most anything. You know how people tried to wipe out the roht?” Ki-yu nodded, her focus shifting from the berry to Turin. “They tried to do the same to the darwi, but like you said they are both clever and climbers, and so they have mostly escaped. Another good word would be survivor.” Ki-yu nodded as she swallowed the berry, and a thought occurred to her.
“Is there roht in this book?” Ki-yu asked. Turin looked down at the book that had been sanitised of any true predators for children.
“I don’t think they’re in here, darling.” The pyq looked quite upset at that. “But maybe…” Turin turned to the shelf and scanned their collection for something that might be vaguely child friendly. Well, Barudama’s “study” of predators better be moved higher up on the shelf, she thought. Actually, we should keep most of the anatomy books out of her reach for now… She selected Urut’s An Encyclopedia of The Cradle, Third Edition. It was old, incomplete, and biased by the Faith, but it had pretty pictures.
“Here,” Turin said placing it down in front of the girl and flipping to the index. “Rella… roayn, rocturn, aha! Roht.” The adult roht was a larger, even less friendly looking version of the baby, with a broad fleshy muzzle, and claws longer than Turin’s paws.
“Scary…” Ki-yu said, almost at once. “Different… Predator.”
Turin sat silently for a moment watching her daughter. She did not even look over for a berry, instead reading every word on the page. Her lips mouthed each sound as she went.
“Why did you want to see the roht?” Turin asked innocently.
“Must know what to look for. Roht baby must have Mama,” she told her. “All things have Mama.” Ah, best to change the topic.
“Well… speaking of mamas,” Turin said with a smile, “this Mama has something to tell you.” Ki-yu tore her eyes away from the book.
“I’m pregnant,” Turin told her giddily. The little reptile put her head to one side, as though thinking hard. She made a little gasping sound as she found the meaning.
“Oh! Like… new baby?” she asked, her eyes wide.
“Yes!” Turin laughed, unable to contain her joy. Ki-yu began laughing with her; giggling and jumping in her seat before leaping up onto and then over the table to embrace her. “Aha! You’ll have a brother or sister soon,” Turin said.
“What brother, what sister?” Ki yu asked, bouncing on her legs before sitting on the table.
“A sibling, a child born of the same parents,” Turin answered. The reptile’s dark eye patches screwed up in thought as she processed the concept.
“Children come from parents, yes?”
“Yes…”
“How?” Uh-oh.
“The mama and baba… work together to… make the baby.”
“How?” Uh-oh!
“Er…” This isn’t something I expected to be doing today. “Well… the details aren’t important but… the father puts a kind of seed in the mother, and the mother grows the baby inside of her.” Ki-yu blinked a few times and scratched the back of her head with a scaly forepaw.
“Like a tree?” she asked.
“Of a kind, I suppose.”
“So… Baba put a seed in you, that grew into me?”
“Er…” Well, I certainly didn’t sleep with any pyq… how the hell do I explain this? Surprisingly, Ki-yu read Turin’s silence perfectly.
“Baba didn’t put me in you?” she said, turning her head and looking at her side-eye.
“Not quite darling.” Damn, she’s catching on quickly.
“Then… not daughter?” she asked, less upset than merely confused. “Where come from?”
“You are my daughter, Ki-yu,” Turin told her, patting her paws. “Wait here.”
Going to their bedding room, Turin removed a loose panel in the floorboards hiding their most treasured possessions. Her secret copy of Bilte’s The Wild and Wondrous Deep, bought at great expense from a collector. A traditional animal leather and tooth talisman, a gift from Braq’s mother’s father when he was a boy, that his own had thrown into the fireplace in disgust. Braq had burned himself regaining it. Turin reached in and extracted a blue fabric bag. Returning, the radji placed the bag her daughter had come in so long ago down on the table. Ki-yu looked at her quizzically.
“Gently,” Turin told her, a smile on her lips.
Ki-yu carefully reached inside the bag and pulled out a fragment of her egg. Turin was pleased to see that it had still retained its lovely iridescence, even after all this time.
“Woah…” Ki-yu whispered. The child held her crib up to the light, watching the patterns of green and blue dance across its surface.
“What is it?” she asked.
“That, Ki-yu, is where you came from,” Turin said, pulling a second piece of eggshell from the bag. “Baba… has explained to you that you’re… different, right?” Ki-yu acknowledged this with a shrug, feeling the porous, stippled surface between her fingers.
“See different,” she said, “eat different… I’m predator. I’m a predator” She looked up, her dark eyes looking deep into Turin’s.
“Braq and I are herbivores, we are radji.” Turin placed down her eggshell with one paw and took her daughters hand in the other. “You are what is called a pyq. pyq lay eggs, like this one.”
“So… pyq made this egg… and…” she struggled with her words.
“And you hatched from it,” Turin said. “Braq bought it off a man named Dirk, but we have no idea where he is. We also didn’t know what it was… what you were. But we were curious. So, we hatched you.” Ki-yu turned the eggshell over in her hands, thinking hard.
“Then… I have other Mama?” she asked. She’s taking this rather well. Turin nodded affably.
“I suppose so, yes.” Ki-yu tilted her head to one side before shaking it with a snort.
“Not real Mama,” Ki-yu murmured, dejectedly but still carefully, placing the eggshell on the table. “Other Mama left…” Like the roht… she thinks she was abandoned, Turin realised. Wasn’t she? the darkness whispered.
“Who are pyq?” Ki-yu asked, not knowing the wave of dread and nausea that flowed from the question. Damn, where’s Braq when I need him. “Another hard question?” Ki-yu rolled her eyes.
“A hard truth,” Turin said, taking a deep breath. She deserves to know, Protector forgive me. “The pyq are… a dangerous people. We don’t understand why they’re that way.”
“Dangerous means… they hurt people?” Turin nodded. “Am… I dangerous?” Ki-yu asked. “Is that why can’t… leave home? Why have safety signal, for me?!” Her tone had crept away from curiosity and was now barrelling towards panic.
“No,” Turin said firmly, pulling Ki-yu across the table to her. “You are many things sweetheart, not least of all a predator. But I would never, ever say that you were dangerous.” The darkness within took a breath to speak some snide remark, but she struck it across the face. “I will admit, when you first hatched… we were scared.”
“Of me?” Oh, sweet child.
“But not anymore.”
“Shouldn’t you be?” Ki-yu asked, and a slight sob pressed against Turin’s throat. “Baba say I’m different, and that good. But… to hurt is bad… I am predator—a predator—and a predator must hurt. How am I not bad, not a monster?” I can’t let her destroy herself.
Turin took her daughters head in her paws and pressed their foreheads together.
“You are not a monster, never think that.” Turin pulled away and looked her in the eye. “You are a brilliant, clever, beautiful young girl. My daughter.” Ki-yu’s nostrils wobbled as she looked at Turin down her snout, her dark eyes damp beneath her scaly brow. “We have the signals, the hidden room, the cameras because the people outside wouldn’t understand you. That ignorance would make them scared. And that fear would make them dangerous, not you.”
“Then… can’t we talk to them? Show them I’m not… dangerous?” She said the last word slowly, it fit new and uncomfortable in the mouth. Turin sighed.
“Maybe… one day Ki-yu. But their fear of pyq, of all predators, makes that quite difficult.”
Ki-yu nodded sullenly, looking at the fragmented eggshell.
“The pyq,” she said, “how do they hurt people?” I can’t tell her that, not yet. It’ll break her. But I can’t lie to her either, that would also be a betrayal…
“The… things the pyq do are… bad. Monstrous, even. Some people will look at you and see only a pyq. But that doesn’t make you bad. And should you learn to hunt someday, as we think you must, that would not make you a monster.” Turin balled a fist and placed it firmly against Ki-yu’s breast. “It’s what’s in here that matters, your actions. That’s what Braq meant. Not who planted the tree, only who tends to it, and how it grows.” Ki-yu smiled gently behind her snout. “And… maybe,” Turin said, “you can teach your brother or sister that when they grow up, hmm?”
Ki-yu nodded, but still had one last question.
“If… pyq dangerous… scary…, why did you keep me? Why not leave me?” Ah.
“Like the roht?” Turin said, raising a brow. Her offspring wore a sheepish expression. “Braq and I… had wanted a family for as long as we could remember. We took solace from the fact that, even if we were isolated out here, even if we no longer saw our old families, we might build a new one. But… for many years we tried, and the tree wouldn’t take root. We don’t know why. Braq blames himself. I blame myself. If I’m honest… I don’t think either of us were at fault. We had long abandoned the idea by the time your egg went into that incubator. But when you hatched, and I looked into your eyes…” Turin closed her eyes at the memory of the three of them together by the raging river. A deep and lovely dark… “I saw you for what you were: a child. I like to think that, even if we’d already had a baby, we still would have raised you.” Turin realised she was crying, and Ki-yu reached up a scaly hand to brush away her tears. “But it’s also true that you may have landed in the paws of the two people on the entire Cradle who needed you most. The two best prepared to love you.” Turin took Ki-yu’s paw from her face and placed it on her belly. The infant was too early to feel much of anything, but it was the contact they both craved. “And now our family grows.” Ki-yu chirruped at her, a sound akin to a chuckle. She pressed her ear to Turin’s belly.
“How long?” she asked.
“A few months, four or five,” Turin replied as Ki-yu sat back up.
“Who will they be?” Ah, what a question!
“I have no idea. But I can tell you that one of the joys of being a parent is finding out who your child is.” Ki-yu smiled again, then giggled.
“Are you sure you won’t have egg?” she asked playfully. Turin scoffed, and then laughed.
“I’m fairly certain.” Ki-yu giggled at that.
“Shame,” her daughter said, picking up two pieces of eggshell from the table. “It is a pretty thing.” Experimentally and ever so gently, she tried to join the edges back together. Oh, isn’t that a lovely idea…
~*~
“Calm d-! Ow! Calm down!”
“I’m sorry Mama, I-”
“Just- Ow! Stay still!”
The front door swung open to admit Braq, who stopped dead in his tracks and tried to process what he was looking at. Mother and daughter, caught like they were both children up to no good, froze. Ki-yu was seemingly more glue than reptile now, her paws firmly stuck in Turin’s fur. Patches of that fur was missing, and Turin’s overalls had a big drying patch of glue on the front of them. In their struggle to free themselves, one of them had knocked over a pot of glue. The pyq had apparently rolled in it, flinging the adhesive around the living room. It was hard to say who looked the worst off: pyq, radji, or lodge.
Braq began laughing and dropped his shopping on the couch.
“I told you you’d get close!” he wheezed.
“Braq!” said Turin. “Stop that and help us!” Ki-yu the glue-gray began her barking laughter as well, the sight of which only made Braq wheeze even more. Before long the laughter of all three rang out across the valley. Sitting on the table was Ki-yu’s egg, as whole and perfect as the day they had first seen it.
---
“But for now, you’re just looking up at that tree, thinking about how it turned dirt and water and sunshine into wood and bark and leaves. How it turned nothing into a place where squirrels play. And you realise you are in the vast dark shade of this giant tree. And that’s the point.”
– The Anthropocene Reviewed: Air Conditioning and Sycamore Trees. John Green, 2019.