THE ISLAND
I
In the moment that he awoke, the ape-man, M’Gari, knew that he had slept for too long. In the heat of a tropical afternoon had he dozed in sight of the sea, beneath the spreading and accommodating branches of an ancient palm. Having wandered to the easternmost part of the island, he had meant to succumb just briefly to that drowsiness which had been his sole companion since his luncheon of rabbit and vine leaves. Instead, lulled by the comfort of a full belly and by the distant whisper of the ocean, he had slipped into a slumber of more than three hours duration.
During that time, he had dreamed only of pleasant things, of sunshine and food and of the life that was to come with his mate, Skirandar. Now, his eyes flicked open as, dazed and startled, he noted the position of the descending sun. With an odd, ungainly set of movements, he pulled himself upright. His breathing was ragged. His furred feet squirmed against the hot sand. He struggled for a moment to regain all of his senses, together with his equilibrium.
There were two things, he realised, which had awoken him: firstly, an unfamiliar scent in the air and, secondly, a voice, a strange and alien voice, which was most assuredly not his own, echoing inside his head.
“M’Gari,” said the voice now. “M’Gari, son of Anse, you must listen carefully to me.” It was high-pitched and sibilant, a most curious voice indeed, sometimes keening and sometimes almost querulous but always possessed of a profound and all but irresistible persuasiveness.
“Who are you?” said M’Gari. The words felt strange in his mouth for the language of English, as opposed to the eloquent tongue of his own people, was saved only for ceremonial occasions. “What do you want?”
A human male might have wasted valuable time in querying whether or not the voice had any objective reality or whether it was some symptom of incipient madness. He would have fretted and paced. He might even have considered consulting an expert.
The Beast People of this island, however, still possessed all of those instincts which humanity had long since come to overlook and so M’Gari wondered only at the identity of this intruder in his consciousness as a man might wish to know who a stranger was in his home and what was meant by his presence there.
“I am a friend,” said the voice. “One who fears that you have slept too long to stop what is about to happen. You have already smelt it, I think? That strange scent upon the air?”
The ape-man sniffed again. The combination of the aroma was clearer now: perspiration he knew and a half-familiar sort of liquor but the other constituents were new to him. A civilised person, had they shared the ape-man’s olfactory ability, might have recognised them as tar and gunpowder.
“Yes,” he said. “I smelled it.”
“And do you understand…” the voice began, now with a touch of impatience, “what it must portend?”
M’Gari reached for a concept that was almost out of reach – something from the time before of which he had heard his father and his grandfather speak. “Incomers…” he breathed. At the word, he felt a spark of pure and hectic panic.
“They have come at last as I always knew they would.”
“Who are they? And what do they want?”
There was a momentary pause, followed by an admission. “I do not know. Not for certain. Yet it is my belief that their arrival means only… danger.”
The tendrils of a new scent came now to M’Gari – the first intimation of smoke upon a breeze which had begun to stir.
“There is a burning,” said the ape-man. “From the village. Skirandar is there. I must hurl these incomers out.”
“Yes. I think that you must,” said the voice, speaking in a tone of great sadness. “Do what you can, M’Gari, son of Anse. Save whoever and whatever you are able. Although I fear…” The voice ceased for a moment and there was a burst in the head of M’Gari of something much like rushing water, although somehow a harsher, harder sound. Then the voice came back.
“I fear that you may already be too late.”
At this, M’Gari was able to make a series of connections, between the scent of strangeness, the smell of smoke and the stark pessimism of the voice in his head. For an awful elongated second he imagined what all of these might mean. There came a parade of images to his mind’s eye – great, unfamiliar vessels on the shore; a mass of new arrivals who walked solely upon two legs and were not as the people of the island were; the little settlement which had been his home for all of his life, ravaged and in flames.
Surely it was his imagination (surely he was too far away for the sound to have carried?) but it sounded to him almost as though he could hear distant, fear-stricken screams. They sounded like they belonged to one individual in particular – though this must be only his imagination.
“Do what you can,” said the voice in his head, though M’Gari scarcely heard it now and certainly paid it no heed. “But, above all else, make sure that they remember you.”
M’Gari turned away from the direction of the ocean and back towards the centre of the island.
Without further thought, operating purely on instinct, his system flooded with adrenaline, the blood pounding hard and loud in his ears, the ape-man threw himself into the dense patch of jungle beyond. He ran faster than any human and soon swung from branch to branch to speed his progress further.
In a handful of instants he was lost to that lush, green forest, a blur of simian motion. Had any observers been present on the beach a short while after M’Gari’s departure and had they chanced to be looking out to sea they might have glimpsed an odd, even disquieting sight – a shadow in the water, a great, dark, gleaming head which appeared momentarily above the surface before disappearing and leaving it as unruffled as before.
The ape-man ran on through the forest, ran and clambered and soared. He knew the terrain as intimately and to as high a degree as any other living being. He knew every tree in the jungle, every vine and creeper and he knew of all those many creatures who dwelt in it.
With every step he took he grew more and more afraid. As he ran on other, more palpable signs of the disaster became distressingly plain. First, there were disturbances in the jungle. Small animals running in the opposite direction to M’Gari, fleeing whatever disruption had arrived. Birds, exotically plumed, who had in their time borne witness to many strange sights, squawked overhead in frantic alarm.
Then smoke grew visible: thick, dark, choking smoke. Then the cries of his fellows, which he had hitherto half-persuaded himself that he had only imagined, grew audible and impossible to dismiss as anything other than real – although M’Gari could not help but realise, the closer he came to the village, the more distant the sounds became as if those who were making them were being moved further away at speed, towards the other side of the island and to the sea.
Fear and foreboding were to the ape-man novel emotions, at least in such quantity, yet he pushed them aside and forced himself onwards, out of the jungle, towards the settlement and to the disaster that was waiting there.
Only once as he ran did he call a name in desperation. “Skirandar!”
When M’Gari emerged from the line of trees which separated pure wildness on the island from that little pocket of progress which the Beast People had maintained, he understood the totality of the invasion.
The village was in flames and was already burning down almost to nothing. It had never been a grand conurbation but it represented the hard work of several islanders as well as their hopes and dreams for the future and now, it was so much ash and blackened wood. The huts that had been their dwelling-places, the great hall of convocation, the place of mysterious worship where a complex array of deities had been honoured – all had been razed.
Of the people of this village – M’Gari’s friends and rivals, neighbours and competitors – there was no sign at all. M’Gari called out in horrified rage, the name of she who was dearest to him: “Skirandar!”
No reply came at first save for the crackle of the flames. M’Gari was about to leave this place of devastation and run in search of his missing people when he heard a sound amid the flaming ruins – a wet, choked cry of entreaty. He loped swiftly to the source of it.
In the scorched debris of what had been a fledgling schoolhouse, M’Gari came across a familiar figure, the goat-man Aristophani who had until mere hours ago enjoyed a reputation as the wisest creature in the village, a teacher to young and old alike – and the nearest thing to a rationalist of which the beast People could boast.
Now he lay in a pool of his own dark and spreading blood. At first, M’Gari did not see the wound which had caused this debilitation nor could he understand how so seemingly inconspicuous an injury could have brought the goat-man this close to death. He sniffed the air and leaned closer. He saw then what had been done to the creature right enough – a patch of matted fur and beyond it a small, ugly penetration of skin and flesh, just below Aristophani’s ribcage. The goat-man panted hard and fast, each breath sounding shallower than the last.
M’Gari, like all of his people, was no stranger to death and did not fear it, believing in a vague, rather nebulous afterlife in which existence would not be so very different to island routine.
Yet the manner of a person’s death was of great importance to the Beast People and what had been done to the goat-man – cut down by some impossible machine and left to spend his last moments suffering alone in the ruins of his home – was an affront to that creed.
M’Gari reached out a paw and touched the side of the goat-man’s face in a gesture intended to comfort. Yet Aristophani weakly pushed his arm aside. He tried to speak but only a moist desperate gurgle emerged from his thin lips. A long line of spittle fell upon the fur which grew upon his chin in a formation which looked almost like a beard. Unable to form words, the goat-man instead pointed south, towards the sea.
The ape-man nodded to show that he understood – this was where the people had been taken. His instinct was to run in pursuit of them to see if his worst fear was accurate and that Skirandar was amongst them. Yet he could not leave the goat-man dying like this, unseen and unmourned in the dirt like an animal of the time before.
Aristophani seemed to know the trajectory of M’Gari’s thoughts. Through what must have been a terrific effort of will he shook his head twice from side to side.
To M’Gari the message was unambiguous. Go after them. Confront the strangers. Save our people if you can.
“I am sorry,” M’Gari said thickly, each word heavy in his mouth. Then he sprang once again onto his hind legs and ran on towards the ocean. He did not look back.
III
This was the final stretch of M’Gari’s long run and by now even he was growing weary. His movements were growing less focused and controlled. He struggled at times to regulate his taking of breaths, gulping in air too greedily, as he had once lapped up spring water as an infant. Something pulsed and uncoiled itself in his head, some advancing ache.
As he ran on through undergrowth which now grew thinner and more sparse he smelled again the rich, sweet tang of the ocean and, woven into it, those unfamiliar scents of gunpowder and perspiration.
For a while there was nothing to hear save for his own ragged breaths and the pounding of his paws upon the baked earth. There was little sign in this patch of the island of any life but then he heard again first a single scream of shrill fury and then, very close to him now, a collective moan as of a herd beset by misery and confusion.
M’Gari ignored the roaring ache in his muscles and flung himself on. It was not until he reached the shore that he found them.
A great vessel, bigger than any he had seen before – for there could be seen when the day was clear and the sun was high, glimpses of distant ships, and none of them had ever seemed even half so big as this – had weighed anchor in the deep beyond the shore.
Moving towards it were a miniature fleet of smaller boats onto which had been driven, so far as M’Gari could tell, every other inhabitant of the island.
There they all were, the hybrids and created beings. All were watched over by human beings – a race M’Gari had never seen before. Every one of the strangers carried weapons – rifles, muskets and pistols.
These too were alien to M’Gari, although from the way in which they were held and pointed, he could guess at their purpose.
And from all of those boats there rose a low wail of sorrow and anguish, a mingling of horror and absolute disbelief at what had been done to them.
For an instant, M’Gari only watched in utter incredulity, his mind struggling to absorb the bleak disaster of the scene before him. Then he glimpsed her, far out to sea, in the most distant of the smaller boats; the speckled plumage of her fur, the terrible keening of her scream.
He wasted no energy in calling her name but instead, and without hesitation, he flung himself down to the ocean’s edge and pushed himself into the water.
That generation of Beast People of which M’Gari was a part had learned to swim in infancy, some collective folk wisdom having advised the tribe of its necessity and so, although exhausted, M’Gari found the going simple enough at first. The water was warm and the sea familiar as the ape-man, with powerful strokes, pushed out towards the line of boats, each containing its terrified living cargo. He did not falter. Only once the initial surge of frantic rage had left him did it occur to him to wonder what his strategy might be – him, a single individual who had already been run ragged against a small army of strangers who had succeeded in first subduing and then capturing a population.
He hesitated in his strokes; his mouth filled momentarily with water. He craned his head upwards to see if he might see the outline of Skirandar. But he had lost the boat in which his mate was held amid the confusion of the fleet. He pressed on, lungs aching, and approached that dread Armada only for the men from the outside to notice him at last.
One of them, in the nearest boat, turned from his threatening and cajoling of the dozen Beast People in his care, apparently startled by the sight and sound of an ape-man swimming ever nearer with grim implacability.
M’Gari caught a glimpse of his lean, drawn face, his close-cropped grey hair and a scar like a sickle moon which was etched beneath his right eye.
As he came nearer to the boat, the eyes of M’Gari met those of the stranger. On both sides there was only incomprehension and fear.
To M’Gari it seemed almost as though the alien hesitated long enough for him to fall back if he wished, to let the water cover him and return to the solitary safety of the island.
But then one of the other humans on the boat spotted M’Gari too and there was a brief exchange between the strangers.
The man with the sickle moon scar brought up the long stick in his hand and levelled it towards M’Gari.
At first, the ape-man’s instincts did not fail him. He gulped in air and plunged his head beneath the waves. The bullet (though M’Gari did not know that this was the name of the projectile) passed harmlessly into the water beside him.
Even then, M’Gari might have survived had he given up or played dead. Instead, he rose again above the surface of the sea and, with all his might, bellowed the name of his beloved.
From one of the boats ahead he was sure he heard an answering cry.
“M’Gari!”
This time the bullet clipped the side of his head. Blood sprung up on his right temple. In agony and shock he fell back into the sea, the awful clog and burn of saltwater in his mouth and nose. The face of his mate passed once – searingly, beseechingly – across his consciousness. For a third time, he burst again from the sea. The man with the scar showed no mercy, save, perhaps, for the surety of his aim and the absolute finality of the shot.
A single bullet passed into M’Gari’s forehead, puncturing skin and cranial bone and moving into that remarkable, singular and entirely unique tissue which lay beyond.
M’Gari had no time even to call for his lover or to offer a prayer to the deities of the island for the good stewardship of his soul. He sank for a final time into the ocean and his body began to sink.
The boats moved on and the human occupants prepared to move their cargo onboard the bigger ship before their return to what men called civilisation.
The murderer with the sickle scar looked dolefully into the water to see that it remained unbroken before, satisfied, he looked up at the vessel which would bear them away from this place and the grand bronze plaque which bore its name: HMS Scorpion.
Meanwhile, into the inky depths did M’Gari sink, down, down into the uncaring waters. Until, at last, though he did not know it, strange but oddly tender tentacles reached out to his body and ran with almost paternal care and sorrow around his handsome features.
M’Gari would have recognised the voice which spoke then, possessed of quiet power and fury.
“Sleep well, M’Gari, son of Anse, Skirandar’s mate. Your death shall not be forgotten. It shall not be unavenged. And mark me well: in good time, it shall serve to change the face of the whole world.”