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“Less said about the tree, the better,” Quarterchief Michael said. “Suffice to say, after that Richard and I took over. We moved everyone to the water temple for a time. Buried everyone from the revenge killings in the glen. Left Murph to rot in his hollow. Corpse is probably still there.”
Outside the barrier, night had fallen. Cool mist off the spring kept the temperatures down off their noon highs while also forming a curtain that both shielded them and prevented them from viewing the Jean’in out past the headwaters.
“So, this outlander, this Clarissa of Clan Flores. She’s not my mother?” Maat asked.
“And when does our mom come into play?” Lloyd asked. “You’ve talked about nothing but outlanders so far.”
Sara jabbed him in the ribs. “Read the shrine.”
“Clarissa? She is definitely not your mother, no,” Michael began. “We broke up from being a proper couple maybe a year after for irreconcilable differences. After a few more years she went off to the bird herders for some sort of clan exchange. Should still be somewhere off to the east, away from most of the fighting. Last I heard she had like five kids, all half-clan of course. Your actual mother? Well, you see, that’s…”
Was she elvan? Another outlander? A human from another isle?
“Well, that’s certainly a pertinent question,” Aminia grinned softly at the water’s edge. “It may be best to simply finish the story.”
Michael grumbled. “Alright. Give me a bit to compose myself.”
Beyond the shrine, the besieging enemy had taken to beating deep, bellowing drums out in the mist. As a tool of psychological warfare, it may have proven unnerving. But it also showcased just how they were wholly unable to get in here and kill them. Might prevent them from sleeping, but Maat wasn’t going to sleep, not when he still had to listen to his father’s testament.
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All the bodies from the first month and a half were buried in the field, with the buses. The three elvan were still tied to the trees. Some warning that proved to be.
Everyone still with us decamped for the river shrine. There were a few defections from what was left of the offensive line, but everyone still living and in good standing with the group moved to our more defensible ruins.
Fish weren’t hoping onto our skewers with quite the enthusiasm as they were that first week. Even our diminished group was still over fifty strong and needed a fish or two per person per day to keep everyone off starvation rations.
The tides were flowing out into the river, though we did not yet have the ability to determine why or how, and the water did not correspond to the erratic movements of the two visible moons.
“Their bodies are still nailed to those trees,” I said to myself one night, looking out over the tidal pool.
Nobody wanted to dare leave the safety of the barely standing walls or nearby wide-open fields. The whole mess had started with their murder. While those who orchestrated their murders were dead or lost to the rainforest, there was no way of explaining this when their cousins came running out of the woods, ready to perform another decimation.
“Commend them to the Torrent.”
A disembodied and high-pitched, vaguely masculine voice reverberated out of the very stone. There were others, awake near their bunks, on the floor just below me and patrolling outside just beyond the wall. But this voice was perfectly tailored to be heard by I and I alone.
“Commend the bodies to the river,” said the voice. “They believe it ferries them to the afterlife. Mostly it will keep their clan-kin off your back.”
I raised an eyebrow, looking through the long shadows of the twilight shrine for our mysterious benefactor.
“The Torrent? Is that the name of the river?”
“Yes.”
“Rolls right of the tongue,” I said. “Just, surprising is all.”
“It has different names in the nine-dozen individual language families that exist in the river basin alone. Well, nine-dozen and two, now. These new languages are like none I’ve ever heard.”
“You… can tell we’re speaking English and Spanish?”
“Espanol, your friends call it. Don’t know anything about it, but neither it nor English here have ever been spoken along the banks of the Torrent. You’re a pioneer, Mister Martinez.”
“Mister Martinez is my father. I’m Michael. And how do you know that name?”
“I know everything that occurs along the banks of the Torrent,” the voice said. “Besides, it was on the back of that vest.”
My jersey was basically ribbons after months of continuous, rigorous use. It maintained its maroon coloring, though the white text had frayed into nothing.
“You appeared before me, once.”
“My powers along the river’s lower reaches are waning. Still, I summoned what I could to meet the new neighbors. You did, and do, need my help. And it just so happens… the river may need your help, as well.”
I exhaled sharply out of my nose. Then pinched the thin skin opposite my elbow. Dreams, stress-based hallucinations. If I started taking orders from a suave, sly voice in my head, I’d end up gibbering like Coach within another month.
“Commend their bodies to the Torrent,” the voice repeated.
“Okay,” I said for lack of alternatives.
“Sorry for putting all this on you while you’re still grieving. It’s hardly fair, but you seem… different than the others. I am no oracle and cannot see the future. But as sure as the water flows, this act will set you right with your neighbors, and put you on a channel that flows towards a win-win for us both.”
“Then what?” I asked.
“There are berries along the shore south of here that turn purple when ripe. It should be possible for your frail constitutions to stomach them without dying. Once the bodies are commended, wait another three days. They’ll come to you.”
Extremely ominous, I thought to myself, but did not say. If the strange guardian angel could sense my thoughts, it gave no indication.
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“Oh, if you ever want to commend your dear friend or the others to the Torrent, let me know. I’ll make proper arrangements…”
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The lanky strangers with the elongated ears – didn’t know they were called stormlanders at the time – they weren’t us, and the closest thing to a local guide wanted to give them a water burial. Everyone left who could carry a sharpened stick followed me out to collect the bodies Coach had strung up. Nobody challenged us, though an astute pair of eyes noticed a group of five in bark armor standing on a branch far in the distance.
“Now we have to worry about people dropping out of the damn trees, man,” Hector said. “Like friggin’ ‘Nam. Grand-uncle Luiz warned me about this!”
The three bodies had been out there decaying in the heat for days. No maggots or bugs still; this world just doesn’t seem to have any. Plenty of small varmints – mammals and birds - played the role of scavengers. The bodies were still bloated from gas and gnawed, eyes and weak points gone.
Nevertheless, we carried the bodies from a distant hill overland towards the water shrine. The smell was unlike anything we’d suffered through before or since. Once at the shrine we didn’t exactly know what to do.
Water in the central pool had receded to the point where it was down to our ankles. Too shallow for fish.
I ordered the corpses put into the central pool. Everyone, Hector included, thought I was insane.
“It’ll spoil our water supply,” Hector said.
Everyone, that is, save for Richard. He was studying the walls for the umpteenth time.
“Perhaps this place had some kind of ritual funerary purpose,” Rick said. “Leave the bodies there.”
The three bloated corpses were left atop a sunken altar. Stunk up the place. But over the course of several hours, the water crept back in through shallow channels, flooded the lowest reaches of the temple, and rose steadily, enough to sweep the three bundled-up corpses and whisk them off into the dark, deep central currents of the Torrent.
“Thank you.”
The voice, clear as day, echoed through the temple grounds. Only I heard it.
That very night a booming, clicking cry came from the tree line. There were torches up on the high branches.
The survivors scrambled. We thought they were going to finish the job, rush in and hack us all to death with knives, machetes, whatever weapons the people of this world used.
It would be years before we found this out, but they were commending us for our proper dedication to funeral rights. They understood there’d been a change in leadership and that the rebellious members of our “clan” would not warrant retaliatory strikes upon the main band any longer.
Still, didn’t get much sleep that night.
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After a time, we’d managed to set up some triangular pens in the nearby fields, by which we could trap, corral, and dispatch centurion birds at our leisure. They taste like chicken, though for you kids I suppose chicken will taste like centurion bird. With the river drying up they became our new staple food, a fact that has continued to this day.
Three months out, and the river had retreated fifty feet from the temple. The no-man’s land between was muddy and filled with decaying river plants and the odd shoulder-deep pool of standing water. Got a few fish out of those, but only the sour-tasting bottom dwellers.
This happened to correspond with a relative dry spell in the near-constant tropical rains that sweep through the island ten months out of the year. Prevailing theory was that there was a dry season and a rainy season, though the only way to calculate how long each truly lasted would be to live through them.
“It doesn’t make sense to build a water temple if the watering hole is a desert half the year,” Richard said.
As the expert in religious studies, such as it was, we deferred to him on these matters.
Centurion birds typically stuck around the inland springs in their flocks. The springs hadn’t gone anywhere. That’s what led me to think there was something affecting the river itself, further upstream. But without the manpower to fell these massive whitewoods for a raft, the source of the river might as well have been back in Texas, for how easy it was for us to reach it.
It was in this environment of drying water, a significantly less-defensible temple complex, and a guardian angel that hadn’t spoken since we commended the dead to the Torrent, that we had our first proper meeting with the locals.
The ferns were turning an autumnal red and began to wilt – evidence of an oncoming drought. Stormlanders found us first one early morning – a massive, unarmed group of lanky locals emerged from the trees and waited patiently at the edge of the temple.
We saw them coming, rallied the ‘troops’ such that we could. Still armed with some sharp sticks and a tire iron.
Things went smoothly despite absolutely zero basis to even begin trying to translate each other’s languages. Turns out the body language for “we’re starving, please share food” is similar enough for all human subspecies.
Most we could figure was that the gaggle of strangers wouldn’t hurt anyone on temple grounds. Richard was off working alone on one of his various side projects, so there was nobody who could speculate in depth.
We shared as much preserved centurion bird meat (we called them turkey legs at the time) as we could spare. We managed to sus out the visitor’s word for bird, though could not pronounce the specific combination of clicks and syllables required. Food, that was easy enough. Cook possessed different connotations among the locals, more ritual than a simple meal preparation tool.
There wasn’t a vocabulary left to explain that this was all we had left. Fearing additional crowds and a repeat of the initial bloodbath, we tried and failed to describe our predicament to the locals.
I went seeking Richard down near the northern bend, where a few enterprising backbenchers had answered his call to help create a proper lookout station high up a particularly sturdy whitewood.
“Hey, Rick. Where’s Rick?” I asked the volunteers.
They shrugged, then pointed up. A series of steps painstakingly had been wedged into a series of carved-out divots in the side of the tree. This hand-carved staircase wound its way up dozens of feet, having been constructed over the course of several weeks. The fourth step visibly swayed with the wind. Not OSHA-complaint, but we had to make do.
“Hey, Rick. There are some more locals here.”
Plan was to have Rick try to negotiate out some half-way workable language we could use to communicate. He seemed smarter than the average denizen of Edna High. Kept using big words like pidgin and name-dropping guys called Hegel.
“How many?” came a distant, echoing voice from above.
“Few dozen. Can you come translate?”
“Think they can help carry stuff?”
“Probably? How come.”
No response. Instead, Richard ran down the stairs at a precarious clip given the lack of guardrails.
“It’s amazing what a little height and the receding waters do for visibility.” Richard said before he was even halfway down. “The supply bus is maybe half a mile north of here, sticking out of a silt bank. Guess it teleported, or whatever, directly into the river.”
“What does that have to do with the situation at hand?” I answered.
“Oh, and there’s a massive mountain range further north.” Rick took the last hop down to ground level.
That made sense. Any idiot could tell you water flowed downhill.
“C’mon. Let’s go convince the locals to help us raid the bus.”
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Bribing the gaggle of stormlanders to help us walk into the newly unveiled riverbed and strip the last remaining bus of whatever was still viable after months underwater took some negotiation.
This final bus was the supply bus, so most of the items aboard were surplus sporting goods. Being underwater didn’t do most of it any favors. But a nylon tarp was a highly interesting conversation piece at worst to a gaggle of starving low-caste subalterns from a society that hand-wove all their fabrics. And the usefulness of a good tarp, net, or baseball bat was readily apparent to our guests just as soon as they laid eyes on the curios.
Found bits of the bus driver here and there. Likely found himself underwater, then was beset upon by one of the Torrent’s many apex predators.
We found:
Three big boxes of jerky, preserved in a waterproof container, sat in the back of the bus. We traded one box with the locals for their trouble and kept the other two for rations.
Five baseball bats. Not even our sport, but we had spare ones from the gymnasium. These are the ancestral war clubs, of which only Maat’s here is still with us. Even that one looks a little worse for wear.
Numerous spare footballs. Useless in the current environment, but the material could come in handy.
A half-dozen tarps and ball nets. Water didn’t damage these so much, certainly not once they’re dried.
And lastly, spare football uniforms. Water did a number to these, but there were elements we could salvage to repair our current threadbare rags.
The visitors wanted to borrow our mascot – a big, water-ruined falcon costume. What’s a mascot? Good question. You know how the Laval claim to be descended from a condor that decided to walk around on the ground one day? And how the bird herders claim kinship with centurion birds? It’s somewhat like that – our band of warriors claimed kinship with eagles, which are a large bird of prey that’s unthreatening to humans. Few of these creatures actually lived near our home, but we knew of them because it was the mascot of our country as well. What’s a country? Well, something like a super-clan. God, should’ve taught you guys to read a history book at least. If we hadn’t given up on going home, we would’ve told you more about your birthright for sure.
Bus is still out there in the river. Rusted beyond recognition. Can hit it with the bottom of your raft or canoe at low tide.
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