I had come out into the forest with the hunters sometimes, mostly to help them bring back a big catch. Never at night, though. Never beneath that starless expanse, the dark sky swallowed up by the darker canopy. I found a hollow between roots and tried to tuck myself into it, arms and legs drawn in to stop me inadvertently feeling some unseen moving body out there in the blackness. As well as the familiar jibbit jibbit jibbit, I heard a dozen other sounds I could not identify, and each in my mind was a nocturnal killer hungry for human flesh. Once, something crashed between the trees, surely no more than twenty feet away, sounding larger than anything and bending the tree trunks back with its progress. I knew I would never sleep. I thought I wouldn’t even live to see the morning.
And of course I slept. I was exhausted. I had run and stumbled a long way, and my heart was broken. When a little time had taken the edge off my terror I wept wretchedly, unable to stop myself sniveling like a little kid. It was too much for me. Everything I ever knew was lost, and worst of all it was still there, just a short walk in a direction I could no longer travel. I felt as though I had died in every way but the actual. Any predator making a meal of me would just be setting right an unaccountable error in the tally of the world.
And at some point I can’t remember, that grizzling wore me down into sleep. What I do remember is the waking up, because there was an Arraclid standing over me.
They were a big problem for Aro. Every year there was a new nest near the community somehow, and they never learned not to go after people, mostly because they were big and strong and fast enough that they often got away with it. Other places I’ve been, you barely saw Arraclids from one year to the next, or people had never even heard of them, and there was some other local monster that Aro had never had to find a name for.
Arraclids, then. Like most big animals, they have six legs, each with more joints than yours or mine. Their broad, flattened body is kind of slung between them, and with a big one—like the one I was staring at right then—it hangs at around head height, with the legs arching up almost half again as high. Big enough to carry off a choice animal from the herds, then, or a herdsman for that matter, and yet they can squeeze down and force themselves through narrow gaps if they have to, and they’re strong enough to break down a barred door. They have four main eyes, like most beasts—above and below, and either side. The eyes go forwards, though, rather than just staring outwards or weaving around on stalks, so when they turn your way it’s as though they’re really looking, like a person looks. Worst of all are their mouths, which are like an eight-fingered hand, big enough to grab you about the waist and make off with you easily. And in the palm of that hand they have a couple of curved fangs to hold you still while their other barbed parts tear strips away to get at what’s inside.
I had a good look at that mouth from where I lay. It was crouched right over my hollow, canted at an angle, and the lower eye, a fist-sized black lens like still deep water, was staring right at me. The jointed fingers of its mouth flexed slightly, as though it were a man cracking his knuckles before getting down to work. Below them, I saw its teeth move. I watched in fearful fascination, seeing that each one was ridged like a flint knife and positioned on its own stubby little knuckle so that, when it finally got to apply them to my body, it would be grating away with them, grinding inexorably through my flesh and guts and slurping up all the tiny shreds it would turn me into. I lay there and wondered, with a calm born of helplessness, just how long it would take before I actually died from it.
It moved, just a little. When Arraclids attack they come in very fast and sure, a flurry of limbs and reaching fingers that’s the nightmare of anyone who’s seen them. Before that, though, they have an odd swaying motion to them, as if they could just be branches hunting the sun, not a threat at all. It’s easy to miss them in the wild, as they let themselves drift close enough to go for you. Perhaps this one had painstakingly spent the night inching closer and closer, not realising that I had been dead to the world.
Its lower eye shifted slightly—it was on a little knuckle-finger of its own, I saw, a stumpy version of the stalks Jibbits and some other animals had. No lids, of course. Only humans have eyelids.
I stared back at it. What else could I do? As though surprised by my effrontery, it said, Kak kak kak, that deep knocking noise they make. I felt as though I had disappointed it.
It shifted again, and I realised it was carefully bringing its mouthparts towards me so that it could murder me with a minimum of effort. I tensed, knowing that I should be kicking out, shouting, yelling. Except who would I be yelling to, now? Who would come at my call? Instead I was just very still, waiting for the end.
I had ripped my leggings in my mad flight, torn them open on a branch and bloodied my leg as well. Now the Arraclid extended its fingers and touched me there. I felt the rough calloused pads like sand on my skin, and then the softer, rubbery hide around them. That one eye continued to pin me with its contemplative gaze. Kak, it said again and pushed and pried at my skin, sending a shock of pain through me as it reopened the wound. It dabbled its rough fingertips in my blood as though about to draw something in it.
Then, just as terror had me wound so tight that I might have done anything, it was moving off, those deceptively slow and swaying strides more than compensated for by the long reach of its legs, at first on the ground, then climbing, reaching from trunk to trunk and ascending into the canopy. I lost sight of it after it had put three trees between us.
The Arraclids weren’t the threat that would kill me. They would approach me several times in the few days when I wavered, close to Aro. The third and last time, when the biggest of the monsters I ever saw squeezed its flexible body between two trunks to stare at me with all four eyes, I just stood there and stared right back, finding that I didn’t care whether it killed me or not. The fingers of its mouth flexed, half reaching for me and then drawing away. At last it backed off, and a shudder rippled across its grey-blue hide, as though it was disgusted by what it had found.
What looked certain to kill me was hunger, and I wondered if, when I finally dropped in my tracks, my body would just lie there forever, untouched even by agents of decay. I was not Sethr, to be poisoned and bloated to bursting by what I ate, but everything sickened me. I felt as though my stomach was a tight-clenched fist inside me, shrivelled until there was barely room for a seed or a grub in it. And yet I ate. I found berries that were bitter as acid on my tongue and that gave me fierce cramps. I winkled trackworms from beneath the scales of tree bark and crunched their writhing bodies between my teeth, fighting not to retch. I killed a Jibbit, beating its frantically undulating body with a branch until it burst open, and then I ate its grey, chewy flesh raw because I was no hunter and didn’t know how to start a fire. And I threw up some of it, but then I kept eating the rest because I was so, so very hungry. I found that I could keep myself just one step ahead of starvation if I varied my diet daily, but that a second or a third meal of anything would be too much, toxins building up inside me to gift me with a night of hurling and convulsions, aching joints and violent bowels and a throat burned raw with vomit. And yet I wouldn’t die.
Then there was the cold: no fire, no walls, nobody to share body heat with. Once I found a herd of Raikers huddled up together, each of them bigger and heavier than me, plated and bristling. I tried to hunker down amongst them; surely I was too trivial for them to worry about. And yet I smelled wrong or I moved wrong, and the whole herd just upped onto their many legs and lumbered off, hooting at each other through the vents in their sides, and taking their warmth with them. The best I could do was tear down branches and cover myself with a blanket of foliage that the wind would tear away half the time, while the other half I’d wake with a rash across my skin that matched the radiating veins of the leaves. And so I froze each night, and some days, too, because the cold season was coming on, but that didn’t kill me, either. It was as if even death found me repellant.