The fourth? phase of Yirith: Age of Low Adventure
Sessions 18-
Session 18, “Bugging Out at Quiet Lake”
Two wayward souls tromped along the unnamed river on the largest island of the Golden Archipelago, once the domain of the Monkey Empire, when simians ruled tropical Yirith. Dungan pushed aside the reeds with his staff, wary as always, wondering if the odd sorceries he carried in his head would be of use. Salome perhaps should have known better than to wear her usual flowing garments for this journey, her sweat had washed her war ochres into the material, and she was already concocting fictions to explain her messy appearance. These two odd friends carried spices, cardamom and black peppercorns, and dreamed of facilitating an exchange one day with profits that would allow them to settle down and retire. That wasn’t going to happen in the village that they were slogging to. It wasn’t even large enough to have a name, was just known as the village by the Quiet Lake.
It was curious that these travelers’ transit was on foot: both had been born aship, though each had lost their original home long ago. Dungan’s clan had been a seafaring people, their trade gradually reduced by the Hundred Taikuns, the merchant league of the Inner Sea. His birthplace no longer sailed the Indaskian Sea, a casualty of market efficiencies and massed coin. Salome had been birthed in stranger circumstances: she had breathed her first aboard a prahu in the Fleet of the Dead as it plied the Darkened Sea. She had disembarked in the Black Archipelago, but that is a story for another time.
“I heard the Gleaming Fins’ village upstream sells camphor with the souls of birds. Even the Taikuns send their ships there, Dung-uhn.”
“Yes, I know, and five days beyond, by water buffalo, is the Spider Mountain Temple. It’s ‘Doon-Yan’.”
All they had in front of them was a small landing with six canoes and an oppressive forest that threatened to swallow everything, except maybe for the great, curving cliff that loomed behind the settlement. The bleating of goats broke through the cacophony of monkeys, birds, and insects in the trees.
“Ooh, I want to see the goats!” Salome said, striding right past the odd boat with a papered interior.
An open, thatched barn sat at one end of a corral, the gate and hut at the other. The tradeswoman held out some of her own rations as Dungan followed, gazing back at the few villagers staring at him. When the big billy-goat got close, Salome could see that something had bitten its neck, the wound just scabbed over.
A cantankerous, frail old man came shuffling out of his home. His words shook when he challenged the strangers. Salome told him of the bite on his livestock, and he informed her that a kid had been stolen from his herd. He showed them a barb that had been stuck in the gate, scratching himself as he did so. The hook looked and felt like it belonged to an insect, but was alarmingly large. Dungan asked if any other animals had been taken from the village and the man scoffed; there were nothing but chickens in the other homes. The newcomers looked around, finding a bit of blood splashed on a leaf, odd footprints, and drag marks almost certainly belonging to the missing kid, leading to a trail into the forest. They began to negotiate their services and goods with the man–he was probably the richest in the village–and they ended up with a skin of goatsmilk.
Dungan asked Ghikri, for that was the man’s name, if he knew the history of the area. The goatherder launched into a story, its rhythms suggesting that he’d told it many times before, perhaps to his children, or even his goats:
Long ago, before the monkeys built their empire, a runt demon was born, deep in the earth. His brothers bullied him, plucked all the hair from his body. Shamed, he slunk away through holes in the earth that his sisters could not squeeze through.
When the demon emerged from the earth, he saw stars in the sky, and one fell toward him. A maiden suddenly stood before him, and spoke her name, “Elalela.” She kissed his wounds and taught him the stories of the world. He fell in love, but when he was healed she stopped teaching, and told him he needed her no longer, and flew away into the sky.
The demon began crying. His body changed: his skin turned into a shell; his belly bloated with pus; his limbs shrivelled into spiny hooks. He cursed the world. His tears filled a lake. And that is how the Quiet Lake nearby was formed. The demon lives in the earth again, now, living an endless night.
A tea house stood in the middle of the village. Sojourners were welcome there. The smell of warming wine drifted outward, and the proprietor, Jinta, sat cutting red nuts, wrapping them into leaves. A burly woman with a thin mustache, Iba, sat on a bench and sipped tea quietly. The pair of adventurers were refreshed (paying for their meal with Ghikri’s milk), and learned where the home of the local charm-crafter, Musun, could be found, as well as their right to sleep under the roof here come nightfall. They heard the story of a dark form swooping low over the village, shrieking in a high-pitched voice.
When the sun was high in the sky, Salome and Dungan left for the beadswoman’s hut, and they saw Iba depart the tea house shortly after. The home was covered in charms, baubles and bangles hanging across every window and door. A form busied itself inside, a loud woman who shouted each answer to the questions posed by those outside. The interview produced the following information. The jangal was full of horrors: snakes and cats, insects and leeches. One needed protection to venture there.
“But leeches are good for you …” Salome argued.
“Bah! They will steal your memories and limbs!” Musun blared.
“These are not like leeches I know,” Salome responded, quietly.
“If we need to take memories …” Dungan trailed off.
Musun admitted that a man-bat had been rooting through her wares on her payang, despite her hex paper. It had surely stolen her pearl necklace. Dungan’s further inquiries indicated that bat-men were not exactly common here. Salome did not say out loud how little she thought of Musun’s protections.
A baby’s bawling drew the merchants’ eyes toward a young woman hurrying toward the tea house. She carried the infant and a war axe in either hand. Intrigued, the two abandoned their conversation with Musun and followed.
“And put some wine in it!” the woman was demanding of Jinta, who was sharing the same skin of goatsmilk. The baby was suddenly asleep, before she even supped. Teary Lura, the mother, returned to her own home. Dungan and Salome asked after Iba, and were told that she was too brave for her own good, cut wood and bamboo alone in the forest. Salome began applying her warpaints. Dungan ate some nuts to pet himself up. The two decided to head up the woodcutter’s path; it seemed a little safer than the route of the kidnapped goat.
Black and white monkeys chirruped in the canopy, not even noticing the two humans on the path, whose eyes were drawn to the contrast against the foliage. Suddenly, a dark shape crossed the gap in the trees, accompanied by a mournful squeaking. As they stared at the sky, the two adventurers then saw the form again, climbing in the air along the cliff, and then out of sight over the jangal at the top. It had indeed looked like a man-sized bat.
At the bamboo grove, further down the path, much of the cane had been cut, a small bundle freshly so, the length of a man’s leg. Salome removed one piece and stowed it in her pack. There was no sound of chopping, no response to their calls, only the low cooing of the wind. They marched on.
A rain squall suddenly began dumping water on the two, drenching whatever parts of their clothes that were not already dripping with sweat. A large, lightly-colored form was coming up the path through the downpour! It was ourang-outang, white of fur, striding on its feet. A necklace sparkled from amidst its pale hair.
Each side paused their forward progress.
The ape suddenly spoke, the Naruan tongue, in the accent of the civilized and educated. It inquired as to what the two were doing in the forest, and was evasive about its own mission. Dungen answered that they were following the woodcutter, and the ourang-outang asked what they knew about roaches in academic language. Salome showed the primate the barb in her possession and asked after a giant flying bat. Munta, the scholar, asked if she was sure she hadn’t confused it with a flock of swifts, as the birds were numerous here. He rambled on about a guano pile the height of a house, and insects. He didn’t seem to trust the adventurers’ intellectual capacity, and suddenly found reason to turn around and head back down the path.
Salome tried to recall what she knew about sophisticated monkeys or apes. She had heard that some created the mischief of homonculus wine, which allegedly made the drinker vomit up a mouse-sized version of themself. Stupid monkeys. The path led to a tunnel through the cliff, which the ourang-outang had already entered, now a silhouette against the light coming from the far side, sparkling as though there was a watery surface beyond. It was late afternoon.
“I do not trust this haughty animal,” Salome said, as she ignited a torch from her pack.
“Do you smell that? Smells like benzoin,” Dungan said.
The tunnel had a small side passage, curving before the edge of the torchlight. That was the source of the vanilla incense odor. The two heard splashing down where the ape had disappeared, and decided not to be distracted by branching routes. A pile of clothes and a machete lay upon a boulder on the shore of the glittering pool at the end of the tunnel: the ciffs were shaped in a circle, at their base in the middle, Quiet Lake.
“Dungan, avert your eyes!” Salome barked.
Iba was naked in the water, and appeared to be making love to a column of the liquid, orange fish swirling inside. She yelped on hearing the voice, and dove underneath the surface. When the woodcuttress emerged sheepishly to claim her clothes and blade, she seemed angry and responded monosyllabicly.
“What were you doing in the water?!”
“Peace. Found peace.”
“Strange way to find peace.”
“You’ve spoiled.”
“Hmmm. Maybe I’ll take a dip.”
“The village seemed peaceful.”
“Ha. Old fools. Cruel as all small villages,” the large, homely woman uttered, grimacing. She set off for the tunnel, presumably to head back home.
“Dungan, avert your eyes!” Salome stripped and got in. It wasn’t fully peaceful, as the birds that nested in the cliffs above were creating a racket. White streaks dripped down the escarpment toward a beach choked with foliage. A small path seemed to lead there from the boulder landing. The water was cooler than expected, pleasant and clear. Salome dove under the surface and opened her eyes. Golden and orange fish were numerous, as was vegetative detritus, but nothing odd.
When Salome was back on shore, and dressed, the two adventurers decided to return to the village. They did not search for the ourang-outang or investigate the scented side-passage. A strong breeze blew back on the path outside the cliffs, exposing a brightly-colored snake in the foliage next to the path. Dungan could see that it would take twenty minutes to cut through the undergrowth to avoid the serpent. He jabbed the dirt near it with his staff, and the reptile slithered away into the thicket. Iba had apparently retrieved the bundle of bamboo that she had made at the harvesting grove.
When the travelers had almost reached the village the wind gusted again, revealing a roach standing on its back legs, its head even with their bellies. The adventurers acted quickly, too quickly, Salome slicing into vines with her chakram, and Dungan clobbering the ground with his staff. The roach chirped, in Naruan like the ape, “Are you good to eat?” and swung its two little knives, catching Salome on the arm, its little barbs adding scratches beside the small cut. She swung back furiously, taking off two of its limbs (it was already missing one), and it fell to the ground. The forelegs kept twitching even though it was dead.
“A talking giant roach!”
“With civilized weapons!”
“We should drag it back to the village … and charge people to see it!”
Each took a roach-knife, fashioned from some sort of chitin. Definitely not a good fit for human hands. They hefted the body between them, since it was pretty light, and set off for the settlement.
“Ah! Don’t bring that horrible thing in here! Throw it in the river!” Jinta screamed when they arrived at the tea-house fence.
“Keep that away from my goats!” Ghikri yelled.
“We think it’s what kidnapped your kid.”
“I don’t care!” growled the old man, clutching his hand.
They carried the dead roach to the river and tossed it in the water, bidding the strange creature good-bye. After some reassurance, Jinta let them sleep on the ground under her eaves, following a meal of some tasteless gruel.
As Salome was applying her ochres in the morning, the tea house was beset by a number of distressed villagers. Lura, tears streaming from her face, clutched her baby. The infant was no longer crying, its eyes had turned black, and it was grunting “Odoyoqodoyoqodoyoqodoyoqodoyoq” in a horrible, low voice. A boy came up from the riverbank shouting, “Musun’s boat is gone, and her beads are spilled everywhere!” Ghikri arrived last, his hand dripping pus, “My billy-goat has burst and is now swarmed with roaches!”
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