jungle for this elite caste and then, when the stores are exhausted, they round the elite up and take them back to the caverns to look after them. We stumbled upon that foodstore and the Gargoyles somehow took us for members of their elite caste and took us back to their settlement.”
“What about the corpses?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they weed out the ones with diseases or some kind of flaw. They took our menstrual bleeding as a sign of disease and cast us out, just as they cast out any of their own with comparable signs of weakness.”
~
They headed north again, sticking to their reasoning that survival would be more feasible in the temperate zone. Corrie waited until that night before telling the others that she was carrying a few scraps of dopefruit.
Gathered in the root-hollow at the base of a large, broken-limbed tree, they shared out the pieces of fruit she had managed to scavenge. The first bite sent digestive juices scorching painfully up her gullet in anticipation. The second sent a sense of mellow well-being seeping through her body.
Soon the food was gone and for the first time in days Corrie felt sated. Tanya and Sue were curled up in each other’s arms, asleep already. Corrie turned to Rachel, brushed her lips across her friend’s cheek and slumped against her, asleep before either of them hit the ground.
Nine days later, they found the third set of standing stones.
There were fewer this time, nineteen of them, and they were smaller. Corrie wondered if the Denebian tribes had some kind of class structure, with the tribes ranked according to the size and number of their standing stones. Perhaps, but xenthropology wasn’t her field. That made her think of Imran, and for the first time in days she wondered what was happening to the men they had left behind.
The pits here were empty, as they had anticipated. In unspoken consensus, the four women followed the trail that led roughly northwards away from the standing stones. Corrie consulted her map and saw that a small river crossed their path about seven kays due north. If this followed the pattern of the first two finds, that would mark the location of a Gargoyle settlement.
They camped out in the jungle about a kilometre short of the river.
Corrie took first watch, as the other three slept. In the dark confines of the jungle, ‘watch’ was really an inappropriate term: she listened instead. By now she was familiar with the night-time sounds of the jungle, the occasional rustles and calls of nocturnal creatures, the usually distant whoops and hollers of the agile lizard-like creatures that inhabited the high canopy of the forest.
She drank from the flask, filled from a nearby dew-pond formed in the hollowed-out horizontal limb of a tree. It was cooler at night now, and the air moister, which meant that thirst, at least, was not the problem it had been further south.
And then she heard the scream.
It sounded like a baby... a baby in intense pain. The kind of agonised wail that cuts right through to any human with the merest scrap of empathy.
She shook herself. The sound had only lasted for an instant, and now she wondered if she had somehow imagined it, some kind of aural hallucination. Something in the water, perhaps.
She was just beginning to relax when she heard it again, lasting a full two seconds.
“What is it?” Tanya was at her side.
“I don’t know,” said Corrie. “But it’s coming from where I think the settlement will be. And it’s bad – I know that much, for sure.”
They approached the settlement in the grey twilight hours before dawn. The screams had lasted well into the previous night and, even when they had subsided, none of the women could settle again.
They knew they were nearing the settlement when they heard the steady sobbing drifting towards them from up ahead.
The women exchanged glances as they edged cautiously through the undergrowth towards the growing lightness of the forest fringe.
They came to
“What about the corpses?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they weed out the ones with diseases or some kind of flaw. They took our menstrual bleeding as a sign of disease and cast us out, just as they cast out any of their own with comparable signs of weakness.”
~
They headed north again, sticking to their reasoning that survival would be more feasible in the temperate zone. Corrie waited until that night before telling the others that she was carrying a few scraps of dopefruit.
Gathered in the root-hollow at the base of a large, broken-limbed tree, they shared out the pieces of fruit she had managed to scavenge. The first bite sent digestive juices scorching painfully up her gullet in anticipation. The second sent a sense of mellow well-being seeping through her body.
Soon the food was gone and for the first time in days Corrie felt sated. Tanya and Sue were curled up in each other’s arms, asleep already. Corrie turned to Rachel, brushed her lips across her friend’s cheek and slumped against her, asleep before either of them hit the ground.
Nine days later, they found the third set of standing stones.
There were fewer this time, nineteen of them, and they were smaller. Corrie wondered if the Denebian tribes had some kind of class structure, with the tribes ranked according to the size and number of their standing stones. Perhaps, but xenthropology wasn’t her field. That made her think of Imran, and for the first time in days she wondered what was happening to the men they had left behind.
The pits here were empty, as they had anticipated. In unspoken consensus, the four women followed the trail that led roughly northwards away from the standing stones. Corrie consulted her map and saw that a small river crossed their path about seven kays due north. If this followed the pattern of the first two finds, that would mark the location of a Gargoyle settlement.
They camped out in the jungle about a kilometre short of the river.
Corrie took first watch, as the other three slept. In the dark confines of the jungle, ‘watch’ was really an inappropriate term: she listened instead. By now she was familiar with the night-time sounds of the jungle, the occasional rustles and calls of nocturnal creatures, the usually distant whoops and hollers of the agile lizard-like creatures that inhabited the high canopy of the forest.
She drank from the flask, filled from a nearby dew-pond formed in the hollowed-out horizontal limb of a tree. It was cooler at night now, and the air moister, which meant that thirst, at least, was not the problem it had been further south.
And then she heard the scream.
It sounded like a baby... a baby in intense pain. The kind of agonised wail that cuts right through to any human with the merest scrap of empathy.
She shook herself. The sound had only lasted for an instant, and now she wondered if she had somehow imagined it, some kind of aural hallucination. Something in the water, perhaps.
She was just beginning to relax when she heard it again, lasting a full two seconds.
“What is it?” Tanya was at her side.
“I don’t know,” said Corrie. “But it’s coming from where I think the settlement will be. And it’s bad – I know that much, for sure.”
They approached the settlement in the grey twilight hours before dawn. The screams had lasted well into the previous night and, even when they had subsided, none of the women could settle again.
They knew they were nearing the settlement when they heard the steady sobbing drifting towards them from up ahead.
The women exchanged glances as they edged cautiously through the undergrowth towards the growing lightness of the forest fringe.
They came to
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