The Flight

by Travis Perry -

“It is the wrath of Lallah. We must flee it!” exclaimed Shoo. Back in the nomad camp, all the men had formed a circle around a small fire of lavabrush and bug bristle. Ross had been included this time without question…and now Shoo had just pushed her way into the circle.

“Grandmother,” said the young man standing just to her left, eyes lowered in embarrassment. “Please, this is the council of men…” his voice trailed off into a gurgle.

Shoo looked around with bright eyes, “Yes, I suppose that would be why there are none but men here!”

“Grandmother, please,” said the young man on her right—this one really was her grandson.

“This is a simple thing, dear men. Hear me out and I shall quickly leave you in peace.” The sweet old hag grinned toothlessly.

Markas looked across to the oldest man in the council, meeting his eyes…who happened to be Shoo’s husband. The grizzled elder simply shook his head with a cough that nearly formed a laugh.

An expression crossed Markas’ face that might have been a wave of annoyance, but it soon disappeared as he faced her, his eyes blazing. “You may speak, woman, but then you will return to your place.”

“Good you hear me, young man. Good you hear. For it is recorded in the tales of the old women that if the mountain will not come to the prophet, the prophet must go to the mountain. And in times of trouble, ‘Flee, flee, always to higher ground.’”

“So we are to run then? That is your advice?” Markas spoke the last word with a sneer.

“What will you do instead? Fight? The righteous shall be saved from the wrath of the Holy One, but only if they heed the word of Lallah, given to the community of the righteous, to both the men and yes, the women!”

“The old women’s stories,” replied Markas in faux-deference.

“Stories I was teaching when you were still sucking at your mother’s milk,” answered Shoo in firm determination, her hands on her hips.

“Very well, old woman,” said one of the elders. “We hear you. Please leave now.” Soon others echoed this plea. Moments later, the chorus of voices rising, Shoo stepped out of the circle of men as abruptly as she’d entered it.

Ross found it interesting to note that after hours of deliberation, even though none of the men repeated anything Shoo had said—not in the way she’d said it, anyway—the council agreed the tribe needed to flee…up into the mountains of the volcanoes of the Five Rims…until such time as the wrath of God had passed them by.

The Cause

by Travis Perry

Markas stood over his aspbug. Three of its legs had been torn from its body before Markas had killed the flailing mount himself.  Ross stood beside him with the other two nomads, surveying the damage. One aspbug and all five buzzies dead, but the humans were still alive.

Ross could see in their eyes that nomads respected him more for having fought for himself. But he’d only been trying to stay alive. He tried not to flinch in pain as Markas bound his wound with a cloth, stopping the bleeding. He did his best to keep his hands from shaking—he thanked God he’d peed not long before the attack, or else he probably would have wet himself.

Standing next to Markas, Ross shifted his feet back and forth to hide the shaking of his legs from the tribesmen, none of whom seemed shaken at all. He watched Markas use his knife to open the body of one of the beasts who had attacked.

The inside of its carapace was crawling with white little moving shapes, like carrion fly larvae, but with legs like spiders. “See, stranger?” The nomad’s voice rasped in a hard whisper. “These are the cause, the reason the buzbugs ran yesterday, the reason they attacked just now.”

“I see them. What are they?”

“They are a sign of the wrath of Lallah. They come to execute His judgment on all that lives.”

“How do they do that?”

Before Markas could answer, one of the small white bugs leapt of out of the body of the dead buzbug onto the nomad’s right hand, the one holding his knife. Immediately the small creature began burrowing into the skin of his hand. With surreal calmness, Markas switched his knife to his left hand and held up the back of his right in front of his face. For a moment he watched the bug dig itself under his skin. And then with the knife in his left, he slashed at the bug, removing it and half the skin from the back of his hand.

The Fight

by Travis Perry

Ross yanked his knife from his belt and stabbed hard at the buzbug that had fixed itself to his leg. His stabs counterattacked in an unaimed frenzy while he screamed at the top of his lungs. His pierced leg kicked hard, almost of its own will, and after eternal seconds the mandibles which had sunk into his leg broke off, the bug falling to the ground.

His fellow nomads had yanked their own black powder pistols from their belts, each responding with a directed fury as if they’d been killing rabid buzbugs their whole lives, firing their single-shot weapons, each one impacting a bug carapace. Then in a flash each dismounted and pulled their knives, launching themselves into frenzied buzbugs with fast hard stabs of the steel knives Ross had traded to them years before.

Ross shouted again, more an enraged roar now, and followed them by jumping off Markas’ mount, which had become the target of most of the buzbug attacks. On the ground he eyed the screaming buzzie with broken mandibles and hurled himself into it, knocking it down, one arm around it as it clawed at him with its hard legs, his other arm stabbing at the side of its hard abdomen, some of his blows glancing off. He finally dispatched the beast which had bitten him, it struggling far longer than it had any right to do.

He looked down and saw blood gushing from his wounded leg…

The Attack

by Travis Perry

Ross rode behind Markas on his aspbug mount. As much as the nomad did not seem to like him, the man clearly expected Ross to hang onto to his body. The discomfort most Eclectia men felt about touching one another was clearly not something nomad men experienced. Ross found himself more comfortable reaching under his own thighs to grasp the rough saddle strapped across the bug, even though this made staying put in his seat awkward.

The three bugs rode hard to the west, their riders chasing the buzbugs that had charged off in a frenzy toward the setting sun. The wind whipped hard and the ash blocked out the stars. Ross had no idea how the men knew where they were going.

A cold winter morning revealed a bleak rocky horizon, the distance scattered with a few pygmy lavabushes. Markas glanced back at him without slowing the aspbug’s trotting pace. “You see them, stranger? There, by the hill on the left.”

At first he saw nothing…but then his eyes caught sight of five or six buzbugs charging east in the direction of the rising sun with the same ardor with which they had run last evening, but no longer bleating. He wondered what happened to the rest of them, the other dozen or so bugs…

Markas and the other two riders angled off to the left. The long legged aspbugs soon brought the men to in line with the charging buzzies.

Normally a buzbug would come to a stop near an aspbug, or at least change direction out of fear of the much larger beast. But these buzbugs, each one an herbivore, charged straight at the much larger mounted animals.

Markas, leading the riders, brought his mount to a quick halt, too late to respond to the charging buzbugs, who now voiced a sound Ross had never heard before. A sharp hiss. They leapt at the aspbugs, their mandibles chopping, attacking the Markas’ aspbug. One leapt high and pain lanced through Ross’s right calf as the mouth of the frenzied herd animal pierced his flesh…

The Council

by Travis Perry

Markas’ hard eyes shifted away from Ross toward the western horizon, toward the buzbugs still charging that direction. “A day’s ride and I can bring them back. I’ll need two other men with me. Useful men who can ride.” After addressing the tribe, his angry glare returned to Ross, who found himself flushing red.

“Oh, no, child,” interjected Shoo. “You must not go! They are harem.” Ross would have thought from his knowledge of the tribe that an old woman would not be allowed to publicly speak to an unrelated adult male as she just had done. But apparently Shoo played by her own rules…the word she used, “harem,” Ross of course knew, but she had used it in a foreign way, totally unlike the meaning he was familiar with. He wondered what she had meant…

His chain of thought ended when a young man shouted, “Keep yourself quiet, grandmother! Your open mouth shames us!” Shoo’s face set in anger and the shocked reactions of both men and women told him that her grandson had just violated a rule weightier than a woman addressing a man.

“Calmness and peace,” snapped Markas as his aspbug mount shifted and grunted. “We need to meet in conference over this matter—strangers not included.” The last phrase he uttered while staring directly at Ross.

#

Ross sat at the edge of camp during the conference, on an outcropping of flat rock. Next to him sat Shoo’s grandson, unspeaking, his elbows on his knees and his chin resting in the palms of his upward-reaching hands. They did not speak to one another.

At one point, one of the herd boys passed Ross, his face still pale and sweaty, like the time several months ago when the same boy had thought he’d seen a ghost. “What happened to the herd?” he asked, guessing this to be the cause of the boy’s anxiety.

“Bugs just started running, the same ones who are still running I think. They scared the rest of the herd before we could do anything. Bugs jump sometimes, but a dozen, all at once? I’ve never seen that. There was nothing I could do.”

“I’m sure you did your best,” said Ross. “The tribe won’t blame you.” These words brought a small smile of relief to the boy’s face.

After a bit more conversation, the herder returned to his beasts. Not long afterward, Markas approached Ross. “All is well with Shoo, I trust?”

Markas paused before answering. “She was never in any danger of reprimand—but you have charmed her, it seems. For she defended you and gave her reasons as to what happened to the herd. She says it is not your fault.”

“Praise Lallah. I’m glad to hear that.”

“I would not praise yet. You are to come with me and we shall see if her words are true. If they are not, you will not be returning to the tribe.” As he spoke, perhaps unconsciously, Markas moved his right hand to rest on the pommel of the dagger in his belt.

The Rider

by Travis Perry -

The charging bugs hurling forward, Ross didn’t know where to run. He dodged left as a buzbug bolted past him and then right, too slow, as another plowed into him. The beast massed less than half his weight but it sprinted as it bleated in terror and hit him low and off-balance. Ross plunged to the ground, rolling, catching glimpses of the nomads responding. None yet knocked down like him—all dodging more successfully than he, even the old ones—in spite of his terror of being trampled to death, some part of him registered chagrin at that.

He pulled himself to all fours, the herd bugs of the nomads still rumbling around, over, and into him. Markas, a robust man of about thirty, jumped up and seized the elongated neck of his aspbug as it galloped, all sixes clawing rocks and gritty dirt backward. He swung upward into the saddle and in moments had his mount under control. He thundered the beast forward and reached a calloused hand out for the bridle of another frenzied mount.

Ross watched in fascination, again amazed at the resourcefulness of this nomad people. But several herd bugs hit him in the side at that same moment, knocking the wind out of him and rolling him onto his back, reminding him he was still in the midst of a struggle to survive.

Covering his face with his hands and balling himself up to make a smaller target, belly down, his ears recorded not only the bellowing bugs and the staccato thunder of their hard chitin feet impacting on rocky ground, but also the nomads calling out to their beasts and one another. In minutes—no, probably seconds drawn out long in the heightened awareness of fear—the rumbling of most of the herd had ceased.

Ross uncovered his head and quickly stood to his feet, ashamed to be the only man on the ground. He spotted Shoo, the old woman who always favored him, also hunched down like he had been. He walked over to her and without thinking offered his hand to help her up. The move was unthinking because in the tribe men only touched women if they were close relatives or married to them. So the fear of having committed a grave social error rushed into him, too late to take back the hand hanging down. But the old woman took the hand and pulled herself up, grinning toothlessly at him.

After that he afforded himself the luxury of looking around. His eyes confirmed what his ears already knew. The nomads, led by the first aspbug rider, had gotten the herd back in control…most of it anyway. Some dozen bugs still rushed westward.

Ross met the eyes of Markas, the rider, who glared back at him in anger. As if the stampede had somehow been his fault.

Rumbles In the Wilderness

by Travis Perry -

The nomads knelt down when they prayed and then arched their backs to the rear, catching themselves with hands stretched to the rocky ground behind them, their faces swinging upward toward Eclectia’s ash-tormented dome of a sky. Their faces sought the sky, but their eyes remained closed as their lips mumbled their supplications to the Divine.

Ross Smit had worked many years to earn his place among the nomads. Most people in fact, did not even know that the nomads existed—he’d learned of them as a teenager from a friendly and overly-talkative-when-drinking miner.

He’d begun his efforts by first pursuing Human Studies at Zirconia University (though he’d grown up in an underwater colony mysteriously named “Enterprise”), not realizing for many years how much all he learned fell short of what his choice of study had been in the Golden Age of Social Sciences back on near-legendary Earth. He then had studied every fragmented bit he could learn about the dialect of the northern nomads—during The Voyage, nearly all languages of the past had been forgotten, leaving what had been called “English” as the dominant tongue. But that one language had since begun to split and fracture—and the nomads must have been different from the beginning. Even then, with all the knowledge of their language and culture he could attain, it had taken four years of him posing as a friendly trader before they’d accepted him into the tribe.

He dressed like them, ate like them, rode their giant insect mounts wherever they rode to follow their “buzbug” herd (the prefix “buz” did not refer to any sound the canine-sized insects made—Ross suspected the word tied back to some now-lost human language), and followed their customs in every way he knew how. Still, he was not fully accepted as one of them—he once asked them to teach him to pray, but they’d treated the very request as a near-blasphemy. So he’d learned to content himself with watching as they rose upright on their knees and fell backward, over and over, performing the evening prayer as the Whale set into barren hills far to the west.

He’d asked once why they did this and at first no one had answered. But finally, as the awkward silence stretched long, an answer came from one of the old women, the one who from time to time toothlessly grinned at him and seized his cheek in her iron grip as she served him supper, hurting him, but meaning only to show affection, laughing at what a good son he would have made…if only he’d been born human. She’d said, “To face Immakah, dear child.”

Through his studies he suspected the word referred to an ancient holy city on Earth. So instead of bowing down in humility to the ground as many praying cultures had done, of course they prayed upward to face their holy city. The sky somewhere contained the city, somewhere on Planet Earth—which they called “Ard,” though without real knowledge of what “Ard” was—so of course they faced the sky in prayer. That moment of discovery, that rapture of understanding—that was why he’d chosen Human Studies (what he’d once heard anciently had been called “Anthropology”). It was better than Wizardry—better to know his fellow man, and thus, himself, than to know the angels and whatever powers knowing them might offer.

But this day the prayers did not end with the setting of the sun. “Buzy! Buzy!” yelled one of the boys left out with the herd during prayer time. On ancient Earth it would have been like shouting, “The sheep! The sheep!”

At that same moment the bugs began sounding, their voices repeating in a, “AhAhAhAhAh AhAhAhAhAh.” Several of the praying nomads snapped upright and turned their heads. Most continued to pour petitions upward.

But in an instant the voiced “ahs” came much faster and in a much higher pitch. And much louder, as the entire herd emitted piercing near-screams. Now all the nomads, even the old ones, sprang to their feet, their eyes looking behind him wide with shock and terror. Ross whipped his head back eastward, the direction all the nomads were looking. He saw what all of them had seen, what his ears also began register as rumbling thunder. The entire herd, hundreds of bugs, were charging full speed at the dismounted humans. As were the “aspbugs,” their mounts. All of them in a frenzied charge all at the same moment, straight at the humans, all of them together, and screaming, screaming, stampeding westward, as if trying run headlong into the blazing circle of the setting sun…

Rumbles In the Wilderness

by Travis Perry -

The nomads knelt down when they prayed and then arched their backs to the rear, catching themselves with hands stretched to the rocky ground behind them, their faces swinging upward toward Eclectia’s ash-tormented dome of a sky. Their faces sought the sky, but their eyes remained closed as their lips mumbled their supplications to the Divine.

Ross Smit had worked many years to earn his place among the nomads. Most people in fact, did not even know that the nomads existed—he’d learned of them as a teen-ager from a friendly and overly-talkative-when-drinking miner.

He’d begun his efforts by first pursuing Human Studies at Zirconia University (though he’d grown up in an underwater colony mysteriously named “Enterprise”), not realizing for many years how much all he learned fell short of what his choice of study had been in the Golden Age of Social Sciences back on near-legendary Earth. He then had studied every fragmented bit he could learn about the dialect of the northern nomads—during The Voyage, nearly all languages of the past had been forgotten, leaving what had been called “English” as the dominant tongue. But that one language had since begun to split and fracture—and the nomads must have been different from the beginning. Even then, with all the knowledge of their language and culture he could attain, it had taken four years of him posing as a friendly trader before they’d accepted him into the tribe.

He dressed like them, ate like them, rode their giant insect mounts wherever they rode to follow their “buzbug” herd (the prefix “buz” did not refer to any sound the canine-sized insects made—Ross suspected the word tied back to some now-lost human language), and followed their customs in every way he knew how. Still, he was not fully accepted as one of them—he once asked them to teach him to pray, but they’d treated the very request as a near-blasphemy. So he’d learned to content himself with watching as they rose upright on their knees and fell backward, over and over, performing the evening prayer as the Whale set into barren hills far to the west.

He’d asked once why they did this and at first no one had answered. But finally, as the awkward silence stretched long, an answer came from one of the old women, the one who from time to time toothlessly grinned at him and seized his cheek in her iron grip as she served him supper, hurting him, but meaning only to show affection, laughing at what a good son he would have made…if only he’d been born human. She’d said, “To face Immakah, dear child.”

Through his studies he suspected the word referred to an ancient holy city on Earth. So instead of bowing down in humility to the ground as many praying cultures had done, of course they prayed upward to face their holy city. The sky somewhere contained the city, somewhere on Planet Earth—which they called “Ard,” though without real knowledge of what “Ard” was—so of course they faced the sky in prayer. That moment of discovery, that rapture of understanding—that was why he’d chosen Human Studies (what he’d once heard anciently had been called “Anthropology”). It was better than Wizardry—better to know his fellow man, and thus, himself, than to know the angels and whatever powers knowing them might offer.

But this day the prayers did not end with the setting of the sun. “Buzy! Buzy!” yelled one of the boys left out with the herd during prayer time. On ancient Earth it would have been like shouting, “The sheep! The sheep!”

At that same moment the bugs began sounding, their voices repeating in a, “AhAhAhAhAh AhAhAhAhAh.” Several of the praying nomads snapped upright and turned their heads. Most continued to pour petitions upward.

But in an instant the voiced “ahs” came much faster and in a much higher pitch. And much louder, as the entire herd emitted piercing near-screams. Now all the nomads, even the old ones, sprung to their feet, their eyes looking behind him wide with shock and terror. Ross whipped his head back eastward, the direction all the nomads were looking. He saw what all of them had seen, what his ears also began register as rumbling thunder. The entire herd, hundreds of bugs, were charging at full speed at the dismounted humans. As were the “aspbugs,” their mounts. All of them in a frenzied charge all at the same moment, straight at the humans, all of them together, and screaming, screaming, stampeding westward, as if trying run headlong into the blazing circle of the setting sun…