Ferox

By Chris Brausch

The year is 2987, a thousand years since the Global Catastrophe. Post-oil and post-iron, the islands of New Zealand labour under the tyrannical Fong dynasty that has enslaved the masses to provide for an aristocratic few.
Somewhere on the plains of the South Island, a man and his son fight for their lives, hunted down by the Emperor’s forces for daring to be free. If the youth can escape the onslaught of their pursuers and make it to the forest, he might survive the day, but in that inhuman wilderness lie legendary terrors even more menacing than the men trying to kill him.
Meanwhile far to the South, a rebellion of its own threatens to shake the empire to its rotten foundations, as a rogue warlord and his allies eagerly await the return of an exploratory ship from the depths of the Southern Ocean.
Alone on an island to the east, an old man watches the stars and keeps track of mankind’s destiny. For the antipodean isles, a millenium of cultivator oppression may face its biggest challenge yet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329520431

Book preview

Ferox

FEROX

Red in Tooth and Claw: A Cautionary Tale

By Chris Brausch

Copyright:

Published by Waoko Books/Lulu.

Copyright © 2013 Chris Brausch.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is almost purely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Context material used by kind permission:

p. 195 (Guardian Weekly); p. 137 (Prof. Blurton-Jones).

All other lyrics and material used in lieu of answer to applications by the author.

If the owner of the copyright of any material published herein wishes that their material be withdrawn

or be monetarily compensated, please contact the author using the email address below.

ISBN 978-0-473-26529-8

To contact the author for comment, discussion or copyright enquiries:

[e-mail]

Epistemologies & Etymologies: Wild Words.

Fĕrox, fĕrōcis adj. high-spirited, dashing, fiery, impetuous, warlike, bold, wild [Latin; cf. fĕrus wild, untamed, uncivilised, savage; same root as Ancient Greek thér, Æolic phér, a wild beast].

Fiadh n. deer; [Irish, from Old Irish fíadach hunting, the chase; cf. Welsh gwydd, Breton guez savage, from Proto-Celtic veidos* wild; cognate with Old High German weide a hunt, Modern German Weide pasturage, Norse veiðr hunting; hence fiadhaich wild, fiadhair fallow or uncultivated land].

Wild adj. not domesticated or cultivated (chiefly of animals & plants, and especially of species allied to others that are not); unrestrained, irregular, out of control, wayward, unconventional; tempestuous, violent. [fr. Old English wilde in the natural state, undomesticated, uncultivated, cognate with German wild, Gothic wilþeis, Old Norse villr wild, from Proto-Germanic wilthijaz, Indo- European weltiyos grown with bushes and underbrush].

Wao n. forest, scrub, uncultivated land, where reside mysterious beings and lost spirits. [Maori, fr. Proto-Malayo-Polynesian wayǝj* vine, Proto-Oceanic wa(w)o*, waɣo(s)* forest, jungle, reverting scrub > Gela ao primæval forest; Proto-Polynesian wao* forested inner region of island, bush, scrub, weeds, jungle > Tongan, Samoan vao, Hawaiian wao id.].

Yĕ Mandarin yĕ, Cantonese jĕ, Jap. ya (HIRAGANA: no): open country, field; wild, untamed, uncultivated, rough, rude, unruly [Middle Chinese jia*, Old NW Chinese ia*, fr. Old Chinese l(j)a’*; Perhaps cognate with Tibetan la mountain (pass), Zangskar la border, frontier, from Sino-Tibetan la* area far from settlements, wilderness].

This book is dedicated to the Chinese...

If it is true that their civilisation is the oldest of all, that simply means the poor sods have been suffering under tyranny longer than everyone else. If freedom blossoms there, there’ll be no stopping it for the rest of the world!

I could have used Russians as the baddies, or Americans, or French, or Niueans, but I didn’t, for the following reasons:

Chinese culture is more exotic and interesting;

Chinese are manipulators of ecology and cultivators par excellence, and lend themselves more than anyone else to the sociological ideas discussed in the book;

If anyone’s going to invade the rest of the world in the foreseeable future, it’s China. Admit it.

Narrators note:

The following text is a natural translation of future events which take place in a context foreign to present day readers of the novel. Please bear in mind that measures of time, distance and weight,   code   words   and   comms   procedure,   and   slang   and obscenities have all been rendered into the nearest New Zealand English equivalents. For example, rather than saying a fall of 7 s’chit, or directly translating it into metric 11.769m., it has been expressed as  thirty feet, or  twelve  yards.  A certain  someone doesn’t refer to himself on the radio as One Alpha, because in reality he’s speaking a mish-mash form of Chinese, but One Alpha is the current English-speaking military protocol. I think you get the drift.

Language notes: A section on the pronunciation of languages, a glossary, list of characters and a gazetteer are to be found at the end of the book.

PROLOGUE

When the Chinese invaded, New Zealand was totally unprepared. Until then the only direct military aggression on its soil was in 1985 when France, in an embarrassingly incompetent but arrogantly unapologetic act of state terrorism, bombed a Greenpeace protest ship in Auckland harbour, killing a photographer. When some of the bungling agents were caught, the home of democracy and free speech threatened New Zealand with economic boycott and continued to turn unsuspecting coral atolls into radioactive wastelands. The sun set over the Pacific’s last European colonial power, and it began to rise over a new, East Asian hegemony. However, as global society began to melt down in the early third millennium, New Zealanders felt assured of their security in their friendly, green country, relatively unpopulated and politically stable, and far from the desertification, climatic instability and resource depletion, and the ensuing general social chaos, that characterised life in the rest of the world.

That began to change after the attempted Fijian conquest of Samoa and Tonga in 2027. Innumerable devastating hurricanes, and droughts over much of Viti Levu drove drastic measures, and thousands of experienced and well-armed Fijian soldiers swarmed from the holds of leased cargo vessels, led by a vanguard of ex-SAS troopers. They crushed local police militias and New Zealand was shocked by its inability to react in the defence of their erstwhile protectorates, outnumbered and outgunned by the army of their tiny Pacific neighbour. Only the intervention of Australia was able to remove the occupiers, and that at a bloody cost to both sides. In recompense for its help, Australia annexed the island nations itself, democratic morality undermined by economic reality and the mounting toll that the arid nation had begun to pay to climate change.

By now, huge swathes of the world, in Africa, South Asia, the U.S., Brazil, China and Australia, were becoming unviable for human life. Salinisation and depletion of arable land; heat stress that made areas simply too hot to live in for much of the year; sky-rocketing prices for dwindling supplies of metals and oils; an unstable climate of droughts, huge storms, flooding of coastal areas. There had simply become too many people for the earth to support and society began to eat itself from within.

Geopolitically, China and the U.S., the unchallenged super-powers of the early 2000s, had long understood the implications of humanity’s inexorable downward slide. China, unlike its rival, was unburdened by democracy and the need to engage in global P.R., and for years it continued a covert policy of electronic warfare and industrial sabotage before the U.S.A. was forced to react. New Zealanders, worried by events but reassured by distance, felt that if the rest of the world went to pot, nobody would notice their lush little paradise. Of course, the rest of the world knew of New Zealand through tourist campaigns and documentary TV, the last verdant land, the real home of the free. Immigration of Australians fleeing their thirsty continent was brought to a halt, a policy which brought with it the menace of a trans-Tasman military invasion. There was one other bastion of hope for the world, of course: Antarctica, and as the ice melted and grasses poked through, the little antipodean nation was poised to become a stepping stone to the last human gold rush.

It never happened. In 2031, while a high-tech blitzkrieg of tanks and missile strikes stormed across Siberia into the Northeast of an enfeebled Russia, Chinese marines entered Subic Bay in the Philippines and marched through the streets of Hanoi. They didn’t bother with Taiwan or Korea, now hellish, industrial wastelands in the throes of total collapse. They needed oil, fertile land, slaves. The United States could no longer fail to act, despite its own crushing droughts and economic failure, but when they did it was too late. China, in command now of both it and Russia’s nuclear stockpiles, gambled on America’s  impotence,  but  as  their  armoured  forces closed on the Bering straits, total nuclear war broke out.

At the time, the Chinese 7th Nuclear Expeditionary Force, led by the aircraft carriers Mao Zedong and Jiang Qing – also known as Mao’s Wife – was steaming past the Solomons. As allies of the U.S., Australia launched a pre-emptive strike on the naval flotilla, while ICBMs split the heavens above China, Russia, Europe and the United States. The Mao was quickly sunk, while Chinese nuclear submarines turned all of Australia’s festering, sand-blown cities into huge, glass car parks. Reduced to a tattered remnant the fleet turned for New Zealand, and in anticipation of resistance, destroyed Auckland with one of its two last atomic weapons. They needn’t have bothered. When the Chinese marines hit the beaches along the south coast of Wanganui, the defence was as heroic but pitifully futile as the charge of the Polish cavalry against Hitler’s panzers. With the beach-head made good, the soldiers pushed inland, taking their time and ravaging the countryside and its inhabitants with apocalyptic gusto. Within a week, the North Island was theirs, and two weeks after that so were the South and Stewart Islands. It was a new beginning, a new order on a planet where elsewhere reigned only chaos, and they dug in, as a long nuclear winter compounded the ecological collapse of their old world.

PART ONE: Chînd: Presage of Menace

The first, energising spark of intuition within the mind, as it awakens to the threat of imminent physical conflict.

1.

There are no second chances in nature. The calculating murderer; the flesh eating  gourmand with blood on his lips; the slug slaying warder of a spinach patch – no young thug or tea-drinking old granny has a claim to immunity. If you’ve killed, caused to kill, or live off the products of killing, then you’ve lost any claim to karmic clemency; you’ve no logical right to plead innocence in the face of a brutal, bloodthirsty death.

A thousand years later.....late Autumn, 2987.

Once again Tarraq was caught between a rockhead and a gorse patch. They were hundreds of miles from the nearest cultivation, a squad of rangers charged with hunting down the remnants of a particularly savage group of raiders. Unfortunately, Captain Numbnuts was doing his best to get Tarraq and his crew killed instead. From a hundred metres to his right came the thump of the automatic weapons of their fire support team, while directly ahead over a gorse and pampas covered berm, light explosive and ballistic rounds whizzing their way downrange found their abrupt ends, alternating between the cracks of scrub and flax and the thwock of soil and sand. He had no doubt that it was having the desired effect of keeping the enemies’ heads well and truly back down in their shells.

He and the captain had already scouted this little rush-filled ditch ten minutes before, doubled over, knee deep in sandy slurry, looking for a bit of dead ground to access the enemy’s left flank. There were half a dozen of that scurvy band left, holed up behind a tussock and scrub-covered dune bank. Their only escape route was over fifty metres of open ground into a patch of bush that dropped steeply from a scrub covered ridge above the flats where they now were. The doubtful haven offered by the forest proper was out of reach now, even for the most desperate of sprinters, but without mortars or air support, Tarraq and his mates would need to fight through them, kill them man to man, or they’d slip away in the fast approaching night. Hence the flanking manœuvre. He and seven other lightly-armed men were now bustling their way through thorny, six-foot tall scrub with Tarraq at their head, panting heavily with the exertion of the trailblazer. It was like walking through a tight, spiky hedge – lengthwise. Even wild animals would leave this sort of vegetation alone.

They had only minutes before they were supposed to be in position. They’d be late, but only because the captain had terribly underestimated the distance along the ditch they needed to go in order to be in line with the enemy. As soon as he’d started to hit the thick, energy sapping scrub, his highness had told him to stop, kicked a line in the muddy soil and called it quits. Tarraq shook his head at him, gestured further up the ditch, but they were soft as grain-fed hogs these dink nobility. The officer crouched, leaned into the berm and crawled up to the brow. A two second peek was enough to reinforce his already made up mind. When he’d slithered back down, he returned to Tarraq and, in a disconcertingly nonchalant way, he gestured to the mark in the ground, then the adjacent point on the berm, and then turned on his heel. Together they crept back to their own line.

Well, fuck him. Ten years of crawling through crap like this had taught Tarraq that just at the point you thought you’d gone way to far, you were probably only half way there. More importantly, he was the best scout in the Rangers, a title earnt in some respects through simple longevity. For him, reading terrain was second nature. It’s what you had to do to get around, after all, a primal but typically under-utilised skill in a modern agrarian world. So now when he returned with the assault team he ignored the captain’s kick mark and continued on another fifty metres. The crest of the berm on his right became lower as they pushed ahead. The sludge underfoot lessened as the ditch shallowed until they were forced to crawl through sparse tussock with a bare two feet of cover.

Far enough. He gestured a halt and  the others arrayed themselves in a line below  the bank, well spread out and now perpendicular to the enemy line. The young fighter sucked in deep, felt the fire well within as he and others regained their breath. Before the inertia was lost, he gave the closed fist signal for the assault to begin, and the drab, mud-spattered covey of killers slithered over the brink.

The thump and chatter of the fire support, muffled until now by the berm, suddenly became raw and visceral to his ears. Less than twenty metres ahead of him the landscape was disintegrating, branch by branch, leaf by leaf. He had chosen the point perfectly and the assault team crouched and crawled forward in thick cover towards the unseen defenders. Tarraq was furthest downrange, with his own men only to his right. If the raiders were arrayed as he had guessed, his own line of advance would take him a fair way to their rear while the centre of his line swept through the enemies’ points of cover. He was super conscious, his eyes unblinking, scanning an arc ahead of him and hoping his neighbour in the team was doing the same. He fingered the trigger of his rifle as he advanced in a half squat.

Soon the cover fire from the fire support would peter out as they crossed in front and then it would be up to Tarraq’s team. His commander was leaving it late though – he could see the dust raised by the incessant rain of friendly rounds as they tore the scene ahead to shreds. As abruptly as it stopped, automatic fire erupted from ahead and to the right, from the enemy’s direction. His man but two along sprang backwards amid a faint, misty spume of pink, rifle popping off a few stray rounds in reflex. Tarraq and the rest of his team dropped to their guts and returned fire. This wasn’t going to be a simple stitch up, and now they were a man down.

Fetu could see in his father Marko’s eyes that the game was up. The six of them, all men, crouched behind the dune as the incoming hail of bullets whizzed and snapped overhead. Branches and twigs of the short scrub cracked, spun and dropped around them. There was no way to return fire so they crouched in cover and watched their flanks, waiting for the inevitable assault team to poke their heads over the top.

They’d been on the back foot for days now, after a straight forward towah – your standard pillage and plunder lightning raid – had by some horrific turn of luck coincided with the arrival of a platoon of reiver-busting rangers in the same valley. It had all gone well until then. There had been twenty of the raiders at the start, mounted on short, stout-legged ponies, horses of tough physique and fiery temper that ran on the smell of a grass-stained rag. They were armed with a motley armoury of stolen, captured or jury-rigged firearms, complemented by bladed weapons, each to their taste.

Many of the bondsmen had been out in their fields, weeding, hoeing, or fixing stone fences – whatever tedious, unmanly chore their crops demanded of them. As the raiders burst from the scrub onto the shingle riverbed, startled farmers dropped tools and ran, shouting towards their ramshackle homes. Men and women closer to their fortified, rock-walled pele house, rushed to gather in children, livestock, anything of value to them, and herd it all into the small, ramparted yard next to the tower of the fort. It was, however, a sad fact of life for the farmers that they really had nothing of value for the reivers to take. Their daughters would suffice for some light relief, though at maturity around here they tended to assume an aspect of peculiar ghastliness, which Fetu put down to their diet of low-grade grain products. It was probably also due to the policy of their dynastic overlords in taking as courtesan or sex-slaves any pubescent girl of passable countenance, thus denying their slave genetics of anything but regression to deeper, abysmal ugliness. The chaff and grit they were left to subsist on, after the lords had taxed out the very life affording starch, ensured that the villagers would never attain better in the way of physique than a stunted, rickets-laden stump.

But in the pele houses would be armed overseers, with their store of beer and preserved meat, with weapons and ammunition to purloin, horses or even vehicles, and stores of gro-gas, batteries or other equipment. That was one way that made the reiver’s life more satisfying than the life of a farmer. There were no surprises in a field of grain, or in the claims of the lord as he took his share, along with everyone else’s. But what treasure awaited behind every smashed portal, inside every jimmied open chest! They roamed the wastes, slaves to none, the only real downside being the people who wanted to hold onto all that stuff themselves.

A small detachment of soldiers was usually assigned to most moderate-sized villages, acting as tax agents, keepers of order, protectors of royal stores, not to mention defilers of slave girl virginity. If they were keeping regular sentry, maintaining their weapons and ready and waiting at the right end of the recoilless cannons in the overlook stations of the pele towers, then Fetu and his comrades would be reduced to gory masses of high-nutrient fertiliser as soon as their steeds set hoof into the open. Reiving as a viable career option just wouldn’t get off the ground. But they generally, in fact almost without exception, weren’t. Reivers were rare and for the most part relatively incompetent themselves, or at least treated as so, and as a result the Empire’s representatives were normally half pissed or sleeping off a hangover, in an opium induced stupor, or off traipsing the countryside hunting, raping or otherwise avoiding the interminable boredom of sitting in a fort and waiting for nothing to happen.

This time was no different. The raiders romped past the stone hedges, as gap ridden as a peasant’s gob, millet in the fields trampled beneath their horses’ hooves as they closed on the fort. Two soldiers on a motorbike appeared in the distance, two-stroke screaming as they sought to beat the raiders, racing for their lives toward their safe haven. Fetu and his band didn’t slow a beat, even as they nobbled a few unlucky peasants who had chosen to take the same direct route to the fort as the invaders. The cleverest direction for a slave to take would have been anywhere but there – even twenty paces to the side would have sufficed – but they had no way of knowing that their lives meant even less to a reiver than they did to their lord. So they ran to the dubious protection of their soldier wardens and shared in their fate.

Fifty metres before the walls and it suddenly became apparent that someone had stirred from their dope den, and the fearful rip of a chaingun tore apart the chilly morning air. Two riders and their mounts vaporised mid-stride, but it was too late now for the defenders as the raiders reached the walls, where the chaingun was unable to bear. The attackers’ automatic weapons slammed away at the ramparts and gun-ports, while one of their number, Fayd, levelled an old and dented but still perfectly persuasive grenade launcher at the now closed and bolted main doors and turned them into toothpicks. Grenades were lobbed over the walls and through the newly gaping gate, and raiders, mounted or otherwise, leapt over the cowering or smouldering peasants and into the courtyard.

The yard itself was no safe zone for them as the tower still gave the defenders a protected vantage to bring their small arms to bear or drop grenades, no matter the damage to the farmers or their goods below. The Fong were fighting for their lives now. Hundreds of rifle rounds and half a dozen rocket-propelled grenades later and the fort  belonged  to  the  reivers. There had been three soldiers defending, not counting the pair on the bike – they must have decided on discretion and had beaten a retreat. The last in the tower still clung to life until the bitter end, when he was unceremoniously dumped over the tower’s ramparts, falling to crack his skull on the rocky basal plinth below.

There was barely enough ammo to be found to replace what had been expended, and certainly not enough big bangers, but the fort’s larders were healthy enough, perhaps recently resupplied. The raiders, down to sixteen now, loaded up their horses as best they could and headed off  at a more leisurely pace, back down the riverbed they had come up, assured that there’d be no mines laid there.

When Fetu heard the sound of the two-stroke he thought initially that it had to be the two likely lads coming back to take stock of what was left, but looking back he saw not one bike but four, all bearing down on the horsemen’s tails. With a soggy, bone- crunching thump, the fighter next to him was sent flying forward off his saddle, a fist-sized chunk of neck and shoulder scooped out by what must have been a large-calibre sniper rifle. Seconds later another rider’s head exploded like a rotten pumpkin, and now it was time for the reivers to flee for their lives.

A dozen made it to the scrub line, and from there pushed their ponies on through thick gorse and broom, ducking low in the saddle to present smaller targets. The strategy now was simple – drive the horses on as fast as they could to put some miles between them and their pursuers. However, they were on a gradually declining river terrace with sparse cover and soon the Fong would get them back in their sights. The river itself became a gorge at the end of the terrace, half a mile away, with deep, unfordable pools, and they were cut off by enemy fire from the side stream on the other bank that they’d come down earlier that morning. Fetu’s father Marko, the unofficial leader among equals, got them to stop in a bouldery slip at the bottom of a steep, tree-filled gully.

We either swim or climb, either way we have to lose the horses, he said.

Then it was all for nothing! All the food and ammo!

Well, you can stay and eat it if you want. You can have mine too!

There really wasn’t much to argue about. The river option was going to be hit and miss. At least if they climbed the gully they’d have a bit of protection and they’d get above their pursuers.

Up they went. Marko put their last machine-gun on a high, overlooking lip, and the gun crew gave the others a bit of cover until they managed to find a way out of the gulch, tiptoeing a precarious line over a craggy, razor-backed spur that led to a scree slope on the other side. For the whole day after they kept ahead of the enemy, keeping their heads down with the gun and forcing them to make some sketchy, exposed runs. The night was spent picking their way through treacherous gully systems and then the next day they took up as they had left it the afternoon before. But as the day wore on, the gorge with its gnarly spurs and scree slides, which favoured their delaying tactic, opened out into a flat shingle bed. Several miles north of the river the deep, drab green of the forest descended to the plain. Marko was adamant that this was their only salvation, but several remonstrated, ancient fears surfacing.

The tigers though, Marko! We won’t last a night in there! Trust me Taanay, we’ll be okay, those stories aren’t really true.

How the fuck do you know, Marko? This time it was Moyren, always at the objectionable end of the spectrum.

Look, just trust me, for fuck’s sake! What other option have we got? We’re buggered if we stay out on the flats. They’re bound to get some air onto us soon too.

It didn’t matter, north or south, no one truly thought they’d make it to the bush anyway. Five more died that day. The machine-gun ran out of link early on and they dropped their gear except for a few satchels of ammo and food, and ran. Just before dusk, within spitting distance of the bush line, they finally had to stop. The Fong had used the open ground well and, as the reivers crested the last of a series of shallow, scrubby dunes, they realised that they were trapped.

A scrappy tongue of bush beckoned from less than a hundred yards away over a treeless, marshy flat, but the enemy would cut them down in an instant. Already, withering fire was kicking up sand and dirt from the embankment protecting them and rounds that overshot sprayed the open ground they needed to traverse. Dense thickets of gorse and flax snaked up shallow re-entrants either side of their hideout so there was no question that the enemy would be able to come at them from their flanks.

Marko was resolute. If we can keep them off ‘til nightfall, we could make it to the bush in the dark.

The others mostly stared off into space, vaguely waiting for the attackers to step over the brim, awaiting the inevitable.

Whatever Marko. All good man, we’ll take a few of the fuckers out first anyway. Taanay had moved beyond already. Some men, like him, had an ability to accept their violent death as though it was a case of running out of sugar for their tea. Marko couldn’t help but grimly grin.

Okay. So I reckon we forget the front. Put three on each flank, just wait for them. Whoever doesn’t get hit first up, use your grenades then move up and help. Yeah?

Yep.

Sweet.

Whatever.

Marko, Fetu and a lean-faced guy with killer’s eyes, Karoy, pushed out to their left flank and found a decent piece of cover to peer out from. Marko crawled over to Fetu. There was still fire behind his bloodshot eyes, despite two days of fatigue. His face and hands were covered in blood from hundreds of cuts after miles of crashing pell mell through brambles and thorny scrub.

Take this satchel boy, and when we get hit, don’t fuck round. Run. Get to the bush while they assault, it’s your only chance.

But you guys, I can’t...

You’re the only one except me who’d make it, Fetu. You have to remember everything I taught you, okay? Everything!

But we can all go. If I can do it...

Marko grabbed Fetu’s shirt, pulled him close. It wasn’t anger, it was utter, deadly gravity.

You’re the only one who can make it, son. Just do what I say for once, eh?

No more to say, he just stared into his son’s eyes. He dipped his head and put his forehead on Fetu’s shoulder, held it there a few seconds, then drew back, taking a deep breath.

Good luck, etáma, Marko said, waiting until the message had hit home. Finally Fetu nodded, then looked away down his gun barrel. He pulled out his last two grenades and put them beside him handy for use.

The wait was crushing. To the west, in the direction of the enemy, the sun was out of sight and starting to stain the sky with the blood red vestige of its waning light. Night on the moors was a time of fear and unknown, an unforgivingly peril-filled landscape inhabited by great, razor-clawed evil. Fetu couldn’t reconcile what he knew with what his father had just told him. And yet, the earnestness in those eyes, and some other murmur of memory...He knew he just had to trust him and run.

When the cover fire stopped, Fetu tightened up, his eyes lasering through the gloom. It was the other flank that they hit, however, Taanay opening up on full auto at some unseen target. Had his father known they’d come that way? Too late to ask, as Fetu turned to throw a grenade he saw Marko throw his, then get hit by a stray enemy round, and fall. Now, his father’s eyes were full of fear.

Run, boy, run!

And so he ran. Breaking cover and leaving his rifle behind, he felt the grenades explode, the air pressure increasing for a split second, but the dull booms merged with the din of the ensuing firefight. The barren ground was pitted and treacherous but his young ankles were up to it. Just as the first enemy fire began to zip past his head, the looming shadow of scrub was suddenly in front and he hurtled in, snapping branches and vines heedless of their resistance. Now for the hard part.

From where Tarraq lay there was nothing to see but the low sand bank ahead and the tops of the scrub in the dip behind it. To his right the other men were firing from their prone positions. Several grenades exploded to their rear, deafening but ineffectual. After they’d thrown a few of their own in response, Tarraq shuffled forward and peered from beside the bank, but could see nothing.

He yelled to the guy ten yards to his right, What can you see?

Fifteen metres up, right of my arc here.

I’m gonna move up! Tarraq prepared to shift forwards. Go!

He went, crawling around the dune, rifle cradled in front, eyes scanning. To his right, others crept forward as well, while their partners gave them covering fire. Another shot from the enemy’s direction and one more of his men stopped in his snake-like track, letting out a hoarse scream and rolling back into a hollow clutching his neck. His buddy raised himself to his knee and shot rapidly while scuttling forward a few steps, then dived back into cover. Ten paces to that man’s right, another ranger fired in the same direction. The first shooter lay in cover, removed another grenade from his pouch, pulled the pin then lobbed it a mere ten paces in front, yelling grenade!

By the time it went off, everyone had shrunken back and covered their ears, but as soon as it had gone off they were on their feet in their pairs. Tarraq moved too, into the darkness, surprisingly open under the scrub in the dip behind the next dune bank. More firing from the right, then came the calls from his men.

One dead enemy here!

I got two dead here!

Move up through! There should be at least three more, maybe four! shouted Tarraq.

As they cleared the area, Tarraq saw to his left, over the far side of the open ground between them and the forest, the merest shade of a running figure, barely perceptible in the gloom. He aimed and fired, continuing even after he was sure the man had either reached the bush or was lying face down in the dirt.

What’s up, Corp? yelled one of his guys.

Saw a runner. He might have made it.

We got two more dead here, that’s five.

Okay. Just keep sweeping through. We’ll reorganise on the far side.

That was the last of them. In the open they pooled and searched the bodies. Nothing terribly exciting came of it – standard phenotype, dark hair and eyes, tattooed to the hilt, clothing a mixture of cotton, wool and leather, and decked out with captured trooper-issue pouches and knives. Some had long, parang-style machetes, still sheathed. He kicked one in the now motionless ribs.

Fucking rebels, he thought to himself. How many do we have to kill before it ceases to be an option to honest-to-goodness, hard-toiling slavery? Tarraq well knew the answer: Never. The more the Fong squeezed the peasants, the more the soil itself rebelled. As harvests continued to dwindle and the dynasty’s taxmen drew off more and more, so the risk of a quick death in reiving became preferable to slow starvation and scurvy, watching one’s body, and those of one’s family, decay like rotting walnuts. If not for the rangers, Tarraq too would have been a reiver, but he had been co-opted from his family when still young and conscripted into the Fong army. Maybe if not for the ruthlessness of the Empire’s recruiters, he’d be lying here too with his brains on show. He was roused from his musings by the voice of his Captain, sounding plaintive and whiney for someone who was so obviously enraged.

Who the hell gave you permission to change the form-up point for the assault?

There was no obvious answer, so Tarraq simply sighed and looked at the ground. Here we go...

And you let one of them go! The fire teams saw him, just you arseholes got in the way.

Well if you’re that worried about him we can go in and look for him...sir.

Why couldn’t he just piss off and let them do their job?

Don’t you patronise me, you shabby little worm!

Before Tarraq had the opportunity to shoot the officer in his foul-mouthed, imperialistic face, one of the captain’s henchmen cracked him in the skull with the butt of his rifle, and he slumped to the ground unconscious.

Cuff this filth. I want him to be awake when I kill him.

No one but the Fong’s guard was quick to comply and there was a sudden, seething tension. Tarraq had been right, he’d saved their arses this time and countless other times. In fact, without him they’d have lost track of the raiders a day ago. He was one of them. But the Fong wasn’t just an officer – he was a minor deity representing the self-installed gods that created, controlled, and perpetuated their fucked up world. Even to an atheistic tribe like these soldiers, revolt was tantamount to denying the natural order.

Then there was the massive, fanged monster that loomed, simmering, behind the captain.

Tarraq would face his fate alone.

No one’s messing around in the dark in that crap, said the Fong officer, oblivious to the tenuousness of his position, or perhaps all too aware of it. Release the tiger!

2.

The five natural senses are these: hearing, sight, smell, taste and touch. Now compare man with the beasts! Is there a man who hears as keenly as the boar or the mole? Is there a man who sees as clearly as the lynx, who can see through a wall four feet thick? A man whose sense of smell equals that of a vulture, which scents its prey seven leagues away? A man whose sense of taste equals that of a stag, which perceives the  virtue and  evil in  every plant,  and which eats nothing which will harm it? Is there a man whose touch is as subtle as the spider’s, which feels the finger before the finger touches it?

-Les Livres du Roy Modus et de la Royne Ratio (from John Cummins: The Hound and the Hawk).

Karn didn’t intend to catch anything so large. From his eyrie on the flanks of the range he followed his line of rat- traps, tailing and gutting as he went, his woven flax kêt pack beginning to bulge. He could hear the distant reports of gunfire from the Taik gorge, a running battle that had continued since the previous morning. The doings of the cultivators didn’t concern him or his kind – the more they killed of one another the better. They were loud, clumsy, blind. Oafish despite their cleverness, even. But their capacity for destructiveness and brutality was the measure of Karn’s world. Not only did he and his clan keep their distance, the Fong, or the Gheul as his people sometimes called them, had no idea there was even a distance being kept. Where Karn called home, the Fong called wú: wasteland – infertile, perilous, empty of humanity – and through a combination of luck and intent, Karn and his kin were left to their own devices.

So he stealthily followed his path, feet noiselessly and effortlessly padding a well-worn trail that sidled slowly downward through systems of bluffs and razor-backed ridgelines, ducking in and out of well-vegetated gullies where he had his traps set. By late afternoon he was near the end of his loop and not far from his night’s bivvy. The fighting in the gorge had shifted onto the flat dune land that lapped up against the bush. It was old forestry and even older crofting. The forestry had left a strip of prunings and rotten logs, interlaced with gorse and brambles, good habitat for hares and the bottom of Karn’s run.

Before he could head back out of the scrub the fight crested the nearest dune and any attempt to creep directly to the cover of the forest might have exposed the bushman to even greater risk of discovery than staying put. There was no reason for concern. Every part of the forest, this part included, was pocked with hidden dens for just such eventualities. Karn deftly finished packing his catch and equipment into his bag then began to scurry back up the tunnel through the spiky scrub. The gap was barely three feet high, even less in parts. His clothing was adapted for just such grovelling, leather and bristly-haired hide impervious to the fallen thorns that carpeted the floor of the path.

His route took him under the rim of a ridge where a gap in the gorse gave him a view of the activity below, though also preventing him from climbing further while there was still light in the day, so he stopped and peeked down. It was almost dusk, still light enough to Karn’s eyes though no doubt starting to get quite dark for the combatants. Hundreds of years of living in darkness, depending on it for survival, had led to his people’s eyes adapting, giving them superior night vision. It was a slight edge but an important one, and added to his sense of security.

The consistent volume of shooting, what was no  doubt covering fire, had  increased abruptly in what seemed to be a final assault. Concussions of grenades interspersed with rapid small arms fire. Someone was getting nailed. Suddenly, a fighter broke cover and sprinted across the open ground and crashed straight on through into the scrub, unharmed. Karn frowned. This was getting complicated. Even if the runner found the track he was still some time off, especially in the darkness, but if he was pursued then Karn could be in trouble. He’d have to be very unlucky, but no hide was truly beyond discovery.

Evaluating his options, Karn decided to keep watching as long as he could and then creep away, waiting until he heard the fleeing fighter’s approach. The fighting ceased quickly and the tedious protocols of winding up a shoot-out began. Before anything much happened, the bushman heard the escapee shuffling closer. In fact, he was so quiet that Karn was almost caught by surprise and he hurried on up the path, half crawling through parts, until the crux of the track – a tight squeeze beneath a large fallen log. He cautiously but quickly pulled through after him his gear in its leather drag-bag, then backed himself up into a hidden alcove nearby. It was quite dark now and getting cool. Karn could find the bivvy from here without much trouble, even in a pitch black night, but what happened here in the next minute would shape his decisions for the coming day – it was better to wait and see.

The log he’d passed under, two feet in girth and still solid heartwood, was perched on a supporting lump of rock and soil that seemed stable but that in truth was anything but. There was design in its fragility – one of Karn’s clan had dug out the soil below the fallen log, leaving a hair-triggered deadfall sitting on an unlikely prop of wood and rock, hidden to casual inspection. There was only one way to fit through the obstacle without being crushed and it constituted one of an extensive array of precisely calibrated deadfalls, collapsing rock steps, fatally undermined log bridges and similar structures that his people used to protect their turf. Their continued construction and maintenance, carefully ensuring the camouflage of conscious intent, was key to perpetuating the myth of the wild wood. Non-Dyak – the Fong, their peasants, raiders – all considered the forests, moors and scrublands beyond their rock enclosures as unforgiving and treacherous to the extreme, areas of crumbling rock and fatal falls, where the terrain itself sought their death for trespassing. Just as important, their other function was to kill tigers – smash, topple, dismember or impale them in a selective but robust fashion. Such thick-skinned and bulkily muscled brutes made tough targets, so two ton boulders or fifty yard drops were the order of the day, made to fit their specifications.

Such was the trap that Karn sat beside now. In this case, however, though a pig or deer would pass safely below, a clumsy human could possibly dislodge it, a shame considering its lethal beauty, not to mention the effort involved in its construction. Before he could turn back round to go back down the tunnel and kill the interloper before he passed under the trap, it was too late. A teenage boy of perhaps fourteen or fifteen winters, face bloody and scratched, nervously poked his head under the tree trunk and then gingerly felt the sides of the narrow gap before dragging himself through without touching the sides. To Karn’s surprise, the youngster seemed to be able to see easily as well as him and he silently slipped his dagger from its sheath. He was confident in the kill and yet...something about the way this boy moved, his awareness, perturbed Karn. Where hesitancy creeps in at a kill, the ending is always less than assured. Karn half closed his eyes for a second, took a silent, deep breath, and raised his knife.

Then he heard the tiger, Châk. Its sound was unmistakable: an ominous combination of sub-audible thudding footfall and faint rasping and dragging, as the huge beast forced its way through the twiggy tunnel. It was a big one. In a split second Karn weighed the hazards. As the young human passed by unaware he wrapped an elbow around his neck, jammed the wrist of the same arm into the boy’s carotid and choked him out. Pulling the unconscious body with him he sat back into the alcove, sitting his victim back into a choker position in case he woke too soon. Seconds later the tiger was at the log. He could see its piercing yellow eyes, short snout sniffing out the scents of two human morsels at large. They had a savage hunter’s cunning but they were unable to judge the relative wisdom of pushing under a dodgy-looking log as opposed to barging through the dense scrub beside it. As the thick musculature of the animal forced its way through the gap, the wedge was dislodged and with a sickening crunch the creature was pinned.

Sorry big guy but you started it. Karn would kill other prey quickly and cleanly whenever he could but, for this poor mutant, death would be slow. If he didn’t suffocate soon he’d starve later, but either way no sign of a humane killing could be left.

He waited until the reiver boy came to. I didn’t kill you. If you struggle, I will.

Who are you? The youngster sounded confused, but more unsure than afraid.

That does not yet concern you. What you must accept is that without me you will die. If you do not follow my instructions exactly, you will also die. Do you understand?

There was a brief pause. Yes. I understand.

Karn admired this young fighter’s decisiveness, his acceptance of the precariousness of his circumstances. Best perhaps to keep him alive, he may yet be of some use.

Good. We will need to bivvy tonight, then leave before dawn for deeper forest. I don’t think they’ll send another tiger, nor enter the forest themselves. Not before morning at least.

Karn knew that his captive must be puzzled by his speech. Chungwa was not his native language, though all Dyak studied it in their youth. His grammar would be excellent but his accent would surely seem odd to his lowlander ears. Throughout the empire courtly Chinese had almost no dialectical differences but the commoners and slaves spoke Chungwa, a creole of Chinese, English and Polynesian languages. Karn’s own mother tongue was unrelated and to all intents and purposes indecipherable – as inaccessible as Egyptian hieroglyphics without a Rosetta stone.

I think there was a tiger behind me. I wasn’t sure what I heard...What happened to it?

It is dying. Unfortunately we will get no use of it. I will release you soon. When I do, you must follow me precisely. It is not far.

Okay.

Karn withdrew his elbow from around the boy’s neck, the razor-sharp obsidian blade in his other hand still poised. There was very little room in the trail