The Irish cowboy’s name was Connor. He insisted that he, his friends, and the giant lizard things they rode on were all here to rescue us.
“You wouldn’t last long on your own now. Not out in the open like this!”
I call him a cowboy because that’s how he was dressed. He had the big hat and a buckskin jacket with some kind of rifle slung over his shoulder. He had a big machete at his belt and his shirt and pants looked like they were made from some kind of rough spun fabric. The metal of both gun and knife was black, almost like wrought iron. It looked fucking weird.
His friends were dressed similarly. Including Connor there were four of them, not the three we’d originally seen. Connor and the two who’d gone round us bore torches while a fourth had ridden lightless at the back. He was a younger looking man, a teenager really. I wondered if he was just along for the ride.
“There are seven of them!” the woman untying me called to Conner.
She was the one that lassoed me, but she called out the number seven as if that was something really weird, maybe even bad. She had a strong Indian accent. It disturbed me that I could place her and Connor but not the accent of me and Jan and the others I''d woken up with.
“Aye,” said Conner. “I see it. We’ll just let the Baru work that out.”
The woman let me up and stepped back to her mount, that hideous ox horned lizard thing. I stumbled toward the others in my group, a little bit dazed. When she’d touched me I’d sensed power in that woman, essence beneath her skin. It a lot. Far more than in the fish-lizard we’d eaten. When her knuckles brushed my skin it felt like she was a demon, the dense presence of power within her. But when she moved just a few inches I could not Sense anything. It made me wonder if my head was cracked, or if I’d just been dreaming.
“Who are you people?” Ryan was demanding. “Where are we? And what is going on?”
“Oh aye, well we are of the Kigali,” Connor answered, spreading his hands. “You are on the Island. You’ve all been spirited away my friends. My tribe rescues new Arrivals who appear along these beaches. Although you usually only appear in sets of six.”
“You mean this has happened before?” Vanessa asked.
Connor laughed. “Oh yes. It’s been happening quite a while. I was rescued some fifteen years ago myself. I remember it like it was yesterday, waking up on a beach on the east coast.”
He looked at the woman who’d lassoed me and she nodded.
“Twelve years," she said. "East coast as well.”
“Hugo?” Connor asked.
“Four,” the man on our other side answered. “Over there.”
He waved his torch toward the far headland. He was a fair haired man with a wind burned face and some kind of European accent, almost German from the sound of it.
Connor laughed again, “So recent! But our real baby boy was born on the Island. Hans! How long ago did your parents get here?”
“Too long!” the teenager called back. “Can we go back yet?”
I couldn’t make out Hans'' accent. It seemed like a really broad mix. He was dark haired and lean with very tan skin for someone with such a European name, although that was hard to judge by the light of the burning torches that the other cowboys held. Hans was the only one who remained mounted and he carried his rifle over his lap. He seemed nervous, eyes scanning along the foredune as if expecting monsters at any second.
“Oh well sure,” Connor grumbled. “Always in a rush.”
But he turned back to us. “You can see that we’re just ordinary people looking to rescue folk like you before you get lost in the woods. It’s eh... not really my tribe’s territory you see. There are Baliti in the jungle and you wouldn''t want to get caught by them.”
He leaned in closer. “They make slaves of all the men folk, or so they say. Come back to our camp. We’ll keep you safe.”
What could we do but agree? It wasn’t like we had much choice. Soon we were walking along the beach, back the way they’d came, with Connor next to us and the three other riders flanking.
He said the creatures they rode were called Raksasa and insisted that they were perfectly tame. Chloe’s leg gave out after a couple of hundred meters and Connor had her boosted up behind Sunita to ride the rest of the way. In the process of helping I brushed against both Connor and the creature and felt them with my strange new Sense. Both of them were horrifyingly dense with essence, way worse than Sunita, a truly monstrous internal strength.
For a while I walked with eyes lowered and as close to the middle of the group as I could. The other''s didn''t seem to notice anything. Connor continued talking just as friendly as before. He told us that the camp were were headed was called Leptis, that there were deserts in the Island''s west and mountains in the north. He described his home, the territory of the Kigali tribe, as a land of limestone hills where lotus blossomed in hidden waters and ginkgo groves grew on the slopes. He talked of towns, whole towns, called Avaris, Adulis, and Lothal. It sounded like his people held a country rather than part of an Island. I began to wonder how big it truly was.
Some of the others seemed to realise we weren’t ever going home. Jan straight out asked Connor how to get back to Earth.
“You don’t,” he sighed. “No one knows what causes Arrival, but there’s no way off the Island bar death and you don’t want that. Join our tribe! It’s not a bad life really, once you get past the initiation. Just don’t annoy any of the higher ups or you’ll end up exiled out to a distant southern camp to patrol the beach for newcomers.”
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He shot a knowing expression up at Sunita but she just shook her head and looked away. Hugo snorted.
“Some of us volunteered.”
“What’s this initiation you mentioned?” Ryan asked. It sounded like he was on the alert.
“Oh don’t worry about that,” said Connor, suddenly all blarney again. “You’ll see it soon enough. There’s nothing you can really do to prepare for it. Just don’t be stupid and do whatever the Baru says. You’ll be fine I’m sure.”
Vanessa asked what Baru meant and Conner told her it was the title of the man who ran the camp called Leptis.
“He’s kind of like a priest really. Pierre’s a little bit scary but he’s an alright sort. Just do what he says. You’ll be fine.”
Eric’s face scrunched up at the mention of religion but I didn’t really notice that. Connor had some kind of green mark around his wrist. I’d seen it a couple of times now when his sleeve rode up. It looked like a band of talons and fangs. At first I’d taken it for a tattoo but the green was so virulent that I didn’t think it could be ink.
Sunita had the same mark around her bicep, and Hugo round his neck. Hans bore his across his chest. I could just glimpse green in the vee of his open shirt. All the raksasa were marked as well. On them it looked more like a brand, a palm sized mark on their forequarters, small fangs in the middle and talons strung around it.
That green was unbelievable. It tickled my newborn Senses, even from a distance. Sometimes you just know magic when you see it and I looked and looked again, walking and glancing and listening and thinking. I fought a sinking feeling. Maybe Andy had been lying about those blue scales on my skin. Maybe he’d been hallucinating. Or maybe it had something to do with Devouring that mote, that glimmer which rose from the lizard-fish we killed.
Even now I could feel the small new void which had opened in my core, an unfathomable point of space right below the center of my chest. It lay where my diaphragm was, not in the real, behind it, as much a part of me now as any other organ. On instinct I Reached for it with my mind. It felt like groping for a hidden pocket and at first nothing seemed to happen, which made sense, my void was empty after all.
Then I glanced down and stumbled. A pattern of silvery blue scales glittered on the skin of my inner forearm. Like Andy had said it looked like a tattoo but to my eyes it felt like more, just like the green talons each of our ''rescuers'' wore.
‘Initiation’ might have nothing to do with the marks, but I wondered... Was there a tribe of the fish?
There was nothing I could do but hold my arm in against my shirt and keep on walking. It wasn''t like I could make a break for it. Connor and Sunita hemmed us in on either side, Hans from the back and Hugo from the front. Even if I got away I didn''t think I could make it alone, not if some of the monsters Connor talked about were real. When Andy asked about wild creatures he said that there were dinosaurs.
Chloe asked him about swimming, or about sailing across the water. Connor told her there were very aggressive sharks and...
“Prehistoric creatures the likes of which could swallow you in one bite!”
I decided to try and bluff it out and hope there was nothing to it. Maybe the scales would disappear again? Maybe it wouldn''t be a big deal?
It took us two or maybe three hours to walk around the bay. It must have been at least ten kilometers. The torches burned through their fuel and our captors lit new ones, but even in their ruddy flicker the sky seemed very dark without the pollution from street lights and highways and the buildings of the city. The stars were clear and bright. The moon rose higher behind us. It seemed full, and huge! Like some kind of primal version of the moon we''d left on Earth.
We got closer and closer to the distant glow of fire on the headland until it was no longer across the water but further up the shore. By now we could see that it was the reflected light of a bonfire behind walls, a palisade, Connor told us.
“Something to keep the beasts out.”
We came to a point where our escort led us up into the dunes onto a path. It was well beaten. The vegetation had been cut back wide enough for two raksasa to walk abreast and we passed up in that order. Connor and Sunita riding in front, us Arrivals next, then Hans and Hugo behind. Their lizard mounts scrabbled a bit more on the rocks and sometimes dragged their bodies but by torchlight we followed the path around the edge of the forest and up onto the headland proper.
The headland was very rocky, full of boulders and cracks, but the path got wider and rose higher as we headed toward the sea. The palisade loomed above us. The walls of Leptis silhouetted against the firelight behind them. They must have spanned eighty meters, enclosing a circular area right at the headland’s peak. The palisade itself was made from hardwood logs, each sharpened at the top. There was a catwalk and tribes folk walked along it, manning the battlements with rifles and torches. Around the base of the wall were row after row of sharpened stakes, all of them pointing outwards at an angle.
“A bit overkill isn’t it?” Ryan muttered, but Connor laughed from the front.
“Oh but you haven’t seen the creatures!” he called back. “You’ll be glad for all our protections then!”
He waved his torch in what looked like a signal pattern, three forward and three to the right. One of the people on the wall repeated it back. As we got closer chains clanked and an actual damn portcullis rose from the wall in front of us. Gates opened and light spilled out. The raksasa rushed forward and we with them, herded into the town while guards on the walls above us covered our entrance.
The portcullis crashed down behind us. The gates were shut. People actually cheered. There was a crowd of maybe fifty people around us, many of them with torches or candles, waiting for Connor and his squad, waiting for us, the new Arrivals, who’d they’d brought in to the fold.
It’s hard to describe my first impression of Leptis. It was a warcamp, built on a slope. There was only one road within it. It ran from the gate ahead of us to an open space in front of the Baru’s hut up at the far end of the settlement. That’s where the flames were burning, not one bonfire but two. On either side of the road there were row after row of timber longhouses. Barracks really. I think the Kigali had a hundred people in the camp back then but they could have easily have slept a hundred more.
Around the inside of the walls were pens and stables for their tame monsters. The raksasa of course, but probably some other ones as well. There were also hovels for their slaves, although I didn’t know about them then. In the open spaces were gardens. Painstaking cultivation of the rocky headland soil which I skipped over in my first glances. What hit me most was that everything was made from timber, timber and ironwork lit by flames. It felt like some kind of medieval recreation.
And the crowd! The crowd seemed huge, pushing in around us as if we were guests at a festival, as if we were the winners of some kind of prize. They wore leathers, woven wool, and rough spun linen. All kind of faces from all kinds of places. There was so much brown skin. Asians and Indians, Africans and Islanders, Americans, Middle Easterners, and even the occasional European.
It was probably just the shock of coming in from the open but it felt like we got cheered and catcalled in a hundred different languages. Even through the tumult though I glimpsed that green mark everywhere, on brow or cheek or wrist or shoulder, on throat or arm or shin, everyone in the crowd bore the Kigali claws. All of them seemed eager for us join.
Connor and his squad dismounted. People came to take the reins and lead their mounts away. A drum beat out at the top of the hill, a big drum, the kind that calls for the starting of a ceremony. The crowd split, opening along the road before us, and Connor straightened his jacket and hat. He walked to where we clustered together like a mob of huddled sheep.
“Come now,” he said. “It’s time for you to see a man about a priest.”