Forbidden Knowledge

A layer of mud caked on Tchakat’s skin, masking his scent and keeping the biting bugs from his back. Applied correctly it would cling as long as it did not dry, protecting him like armour. This second skin was a strategy of the Oranen—who though they had evolved a thick, waxy layer of flesh—were still plagued by flies that swarmed above the layer of oily water in which Oranen hunted. Jota swarms often worked together in search of succulent meat to feed their young, and unfortunate bodies in which to implant them. Usually, they were content to get the woody-fleshed bottom feeders, more plant than beast, but if they happened on one of Tchakat’s kind, the horrific scars and infestations left behind would as likely kill the poor host as render them pariahs to potential mates.

Tchakat had his fair share of scars, and one struck a stark shade across his chest, but he had been able to protect his face, which was important when trying to impress. When the season set upon his kind, the ridges and horns of maturity would rise and flare, rendering a young stag impressive and frightful to competitors, but striking to a leopardess in the proper state of mind. Unless, of course, chunks of the display were marred by missing horns or depressed ridges where some creature had torn a piece of face away.

At that very moment, it would be challenging to see any of Tchakat’s features, scarred or otherwise, hunkered as he was in the murk. Tall plants, thick as his waist, jutted up around him, tipped with fragrant, fleshy fruit that attracted sap feeders, and those hunters which preyed upon them. Their waste caked the bottom of the flats, feeding the plants, bloating their fruits bigger than his head, hosting larvae from the flies who managed to spawn before being eaten, continuing the cycle.

One of the creatures that fed on the unripe apples was stout and ugly, with a wide stance, six paws with long, dull claws, and a face which split four ways with a long and prehensile tongue to collect its food. The Barook was a stubborn forager, standing twice as tall as an Oranen, which made killing one a very impressive feat for a young stag. The one looming in the dim light near where Tchakat waited was a silverback, and would bring the young hunter much renown.

Beneath the water he gripped a sharpened spear he had crafted himself from a felled Koto tree. At least one of these ancient, hardy towers was felled each season, in one of the only parts of the mating rites that were not aggressively violent among the contenders. Stags from all parts of the valley, and even beyond, would be drawn to a mature tree by the lights that shone from its budding fruits, which would not fall unless the tree itself was forced to relinquish them to the mire below. The spear Tchakat had claimed was strong and straight, and it drifted with him as he stalked the Barook on the shoreline.

The lumbering beast ambled up to one of the bigger plants at the edge of the water, Tchakat began to move very carefully to meet it, waiting until the second set of paws were up off the ground and wrapped around the stalk before he began to move in, nearly undetectable in the darkness. Just as he was about to make his move, though, his hunt was recklessly interrupted.

Oranen were not, traditionally, pack hunters during the season, but there were occasions when one particularly strong stag might attract supplicants, who were not mature enough to succeed in their first season. These three were poorly coordinated, and very aggressive, and the dominant stag was smart, letting them surge ahead after leading the charge, to take the Barook’s attack for him.

And take it they did: The massive creature howled at its attackers, staggering their resolve enough that the first one to reach it was swatted nearly in half as dull but powerful digging claws tore through his midsection. The next clambered over his ruined body to climb up the Barook’s arm, swinging a stone-weighted Koto branch at the side of the creature’s face. It pulverized one of the creature’s small eyes, enraging but barely affecting it, and a wire-whip tongue lashed around his neck to pull him into the creature’s face, struggling until it bit down and stilled him with a final jerk.

Two dead, just like that: Tchakat ignored the urge to hunker down and flee. He watched, instead, as the third hunter charged in underneath, a sharp-edged stake in both powerful hands, swinging it like a blade at the partly exposed underbelly of the great forager. The tactic might have worked, had the Barook not lifted a mid-leg and caught the hapless Oranen around the waist, flinging him away into the swamp. By the time the battle was over the Barook was breathing hard, but when no others came for a long time, it turned to climb back up again to claim its dinner.

Steeling himself, Tchakat skated into place under the muck. He knew that the Barook would not fight without its feet on the ground and counted on that, so that when he saw it was thoroughly taken with its feeding, he lunged up out of the water with a cry of challenge, almost directly underneath the creature. He did not stab with his spear, but instead braced against the bottom of the swamp, squinting his eyes shut, and waited with hope and fear surging through his blood.

Enraged by yet another interruption, the Barook threw itself down atop Tchakat with all its considerable weight, intent on crushing this new challenger into the muck. The mostly-straight, mostly sharp end of the Koto spear caught beneath its ribs in the soft part of the belly, and as the beast’s own momentum plunged it down, lanced up through vital organs in an unerring and unimpeded surge. Black blood gushed from the utterly grisly wound, and all would have been well, save that the felled creature’s thick skull carried on downward, bashing against Tchakat’s own, knocking him out cold to drift in the swamp while it bled out it dying gasps.

When he finally woke, several things were clear to him: the first, that the earlier hunter had not been killed by the Barook, and when Tchakat had not risen to claim the kill, he had done so and was well into the process of pelting the creature and collecting its claws for himself. The second was that, despite the fact that the hunter was actively poaching his kill, he had not found Tchakat and killed him which the hunter took as good luck. The third was more shocking than the first two, and seized Tchakat’s guts in a mixture of awe, and cold fascination, as overhead in the direction of the Forbidden, a band of glowing light cracked across the horizon, marking a boundary with something he’d never seen before: a colour, green.

Tchakat’s kind had no language, any more than Barook had, or the Jota flies, all being beasts of the swamp. All the same, they all knew of the Forbidden, which was ingrained into their racial memory. One did not go to the Forbidden: if one climbed high enough to break through the ceiling of the sky they would be burned by the poisonous air and searing heat above it. Only the old who had become burdens to the warren went there, or the sick, or those mentally ill who could ‘see’ something in the Forbidden which no others did, and seemed possessed to follow its call. None of them ever returned, regardless of the case. And yet, here, Tchakat found himself looking into the emerald light in wonder. In his entire life, he had only known grey or dark, living in a world of shadow, and the newness of colour hooked his mind with new purpose: this would be his true hunt. Leaving his kill behind, he set off toward the horizon.

It took him days to traverse the valley, as he was relentless but not foolish: he still needed to avoid the predators, including his competitors, but the burning drives of his season had lessened since the light first appeared: it activated things in him that changed him, smoothing out his ridges and causing the horns to retreat back into their cavities in his skull as the muscles relaxed. It did not deafen him to the calls of the Oranen leopardess’ who crooned from the trees at the edges of the swamp where they lounged on branches of trees and awaited their suitors, but it did dull the need to answer their lure. Not, of course, that they would recognize him. The leopardesses were bigger than the stags, graceful and powerful, and one could easily have challenged his earlier Barook and won with the right tools. To them he would be little more than possibly food.

He had thought that the edge of the sky would be a tangible barrier. From afar, it moved and danced with what passed for daylight, but as he rose into the Forbidden it simply drifted apart and revealed more and more to him. He could feel the touch of light on his back, drying the caked mud into a flakey mess that fell away with his efforts to climb. He could feel the bulging sacks in his throat, which he used to breathe, spasm when the air he was used to thinned, and was surprised to gasp and find that his chest filled with pockets of air that tasted and felt sweeter than anything he’d ever experienced. It energized him, filled him with vigor, and he climbed higher still on these new reserves.

Finally, he reached up over the lip of the world. Unneeded skin sloughed from his body in pale sheets, and he labored for breath in his new lungs, but as he rolled over onto the dry ground, he could feel the blue grass caressing him, soothing as he looked up into the pink evening sky, watching the clouds roll by. He had lost sight of the green light from before, but found instead a gentle yellow shine as the sun began to dip below the horizon.

He did not know how long he lay there, and thought he might be dying as the sky darkened before bursting into a brilliant array of stars, clouds of nebulae and a corn-yellow moon looking down on him like gods. Exhaustion began to claim him when he was beset by voices belonging to silhouettes he could not make out, making noises he could not, with his newness, understand. He fell asleep as they swarmed over him, and dreamed of their words.

“A young male! It’s been so many seasons since we’ve had a new youth, I worried we’d need to go on a fishing expedition!” laughter, itself not a familiar sound.

Another voice: “Manners, Harok. You were once like he; you must remember your own climb. He’ll need care and education and time. And food! We shall need a feast, when he can speak.”

The first, again, more gently. “Of course, of course. It is just so exciting, Raoud. For all the races we’ve met among the stars, we are the only ones for whom sentience seems to be an optional mutation. The human embassy has been showing interest in our life cycle, this fine young specimen will give them plenty to write home about.”

“Later, my friend. He’s still molting, and will be hungry when he wakes. He’s kin, not an experiment. Let us welcome him in our way. He will have many nights to decide who he wants to be. Let us strive to make the first ones beautiful and comfortable.”

And then, sleep took him, and for the first time, dreams filled his unconscious mind with the colours of the stars.