The sound of the creature ramming the flier was weirdly flat. It didn’t sound like the end of the world at all. If Lena had rapped on his faceplate, the noise would have been sharper, more alarming. And yet the machine folded, all those high-strength, hollow components just crumpling before the snail’s unstoppable momentum. People were running. People were fleeing in all directions. He heard shots. One thundered from close by as Lena sent a round into that shell, marking it with a jagged white scar.
The creature crouched in the ruin of their flier, their single transport, the only way they could get back to the ship. Its shell cocked and tilted, the rubbery legs beneath lifting it high as though it was exalting. It extruded a mass of prying fingers and began to tear into the ruined machine’s innards. He heard Lena scream at it in fear and frustration.
The ground shook again. He’d written it off as the structure of the base under assault, but he was out of the dome now. The ground was just the ground.
Lena was pulling at his arm, but he just turned back to see. No amount of warning could have prevented him.
The hill, the shielding boulder they’d built against, it was moving. Weed and mud at its base bulged and split as it levered itself up. He saw the vast limbs there, like the hand of a half-formed god.
I
AS WE MADE OUR way through the last of the trees towards Meravo, the children saw us. I think the adults sent them out that way, their scouts having had sight of us for a while. The little ones didn’t know what was going on, and we heard their shrieking as they spotted us between the bristling, feathery trunks. An odd sound; part terror, part excitement. Half of them were too young to remember us the last time we came this way, but they heard stories. Children are their own secret Order, with their own initiations, legends and rites. The thought made our business seem innocent by association.
“The Bandage-Men!” they cried, and fled ahead of us. “Don’t let them get you!” And I knew their parents must tell them: be good, do your share, or the Bandage-Men will claim you.
And it was true. We would.
We’d become a part of their world in just ten years, which before us had nothing new in it for many centuries, and that gives me hope. Things can change, which mean they can get better.
Those children saw us as dread figures, terrors to scare them into being good. We were the Bandage-Men and they told each other tales about what lay beneath our wrappings, what wounds, what decay and deformity. Were we even alive, or just corpses, skeletons, beasts pretending to human shape? They could never know that when we take someone away to become part of our bandaged brotherhood, it is a mercy. It is better than the alternative.
My name is Handry and I am many things.
To my home village of Aro, which I have not seen for many, many years, I was an outcast. Cut off from the rest of humanity after being daubed with the Severance, that mystical potion the doctor ghosts concoct, when someone has been so bad that the village can no longer support them. Severed, you become no longer one of us, no longer a part of the world. All men’s hands turned against you, all the fruits of the world poison in your mouth. And then, as it used to be, you die.
To Sharskin the priest, who found me after my Severance, who took me to the House of our Ancestors, I was a human of the Original Condition. He taught me that what had been Severed from me was not my birthright, but an addition, an adaptation. He said what I was now, despised, rejected, was nonetheless the native state of a human being. And, although he was wrong about so many things, in this he was correct.
And he has been dead for many, many years, too, but sometimes I hear his voice still. In my head, mostly, though occasionally the ancestors remember it and use it in their House to speak to me.
To the other Bandage-Men, I am their leader, the new priest of the new doctrine, who came after Sharskin. And to them, we are not the Bandage-Men of the children’s nightmares, but the Order of Cain. Simultaneously outcast and elevated, despised and necessary. We, who can do things no other human can, and all we paid for the privilege was everything we had and ever were.
To Melory, I am just Handry, her brother.
And what is Melory to me? Sister, yes. Doctor, ghost-bearer. But more than that. Since unthroning Sharskin, she has become something else. She is the sage who interprets the voices that throng the House. She commands the ancestors and curates the fragmentary knowledge they deliver. She is the bridge between the villages and the Order, because although she commands the ancestors who shelter and feed us, she is not one of us.
She is the one who never abandoned me.
As we made our final approach to Meravo, we started the music. A few of us had pipes to blow into, tuneless but piercing. I have lived with the music for years, and it still scrapes about the inside of my head. Some had rattles of stones and gourds and bones. The rest had bells, just tubes hung from a string that we struck with stones. The tubes were metal, though, and metal was something the people of Meravo had no experience of, not a part of their world. The high, ringing tones of our bells, echoing out between the trees, told them something unnatural was drawing near. The Bandage-Men were coming to take their due.
And they would be rushing about, making their own preparations. There was a compact, between the Order and those villages that accepted us. Which were more than the villages that didn’t, these days. It had been a long road: ten years, and I’m not the child I was when Sharskin found me starving in Orovo. And the villages would not have accepted that child, nor the man he grew into. But they would accept the Bandage-Men.
Back then, after I became the priest and Melory the sage; back then, when those of the Order who had not fled accepted the way things were . . . Back then we tried, Melory and I, to just go to the villages. To explain to them how it was, and that outcasts like me and the others were just people. And Melory was a ghost-bearer, an expert system as the ancestors named her. We thought they’d listen to her. But they looked on me, and they could not bridge that gap, even with Melory explaining. They were bound in the web of the villages that tied everything together: the people, the ghosts, the tree with its hive, the wasps, even the vermin that lived on their bodies and fed on their blood. It was a system devised by the ancestors so that their descendants could live. The Severance removed its victims from that system. It removed from us the changes the ancestors had designed, that let people eat the fruit and meat of the world, handle its materials, yes, and catch its diseases and be devoured by its beasts, for that blade has two edges. More than that, it let them look on each other and know That is one of us; that is human. And, never having known a human not part of that system, they looked on me and saw a thing to fear. For, unbound by their unspoken rules and codes, I might do anything.
Yet we did find a way. We went to Orovo, where we knew Iblis, their Architect, was a woman who thought unusual thoughts. Melory spoke to ghost-bearers of many villages. She spoke to the ancestors and learned words and phrases that would let her conjure the ghosts and request their aid in brokering arrangements. Sometimes it worked; sometimes the ghosts refused to recognise her, and she talked distractedly of versioning issues and failed backwards compatibility, the jumble of sounds the ancients lapse into, as you approach the heart of their mystery. Some villages still refused to have us near and drove us off with sticks and slings. But not so many; not these days.