Two old men and an old woman sat in a dusty room, watching the world go by. Such as it was. It was all the world they had, it would have to be enough.
Besides, they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
“I’m bored again,” said one of the men. The words were very nearly a whine, spoken in a voice completely at odds with their sullenness, a voice made for pronouncements, documentaries, and extolling the virtues of chocolates.
“You’re always bored,” said the woman. Her words were tired. She wasn’t.
The other man didn’t say anything. He didn’t even blink.
“That’s scarcely true. I loved having nothing to do back in the good old days.”
“Please, let’s not talk about the good old days again. We just did that. And they weren’t that good.”
“They were wonderful!”
“No they weren’t.”
“Well, what else IS there to talk about, eh?”
They all watched the world again. It hadn’t done anything.
“The bad times,” said the second man. His voice was dryer than a mummy’s innards, and just as expressive.
“We don’t talk about the bad times,” said the first man.
“We should,” said the second man, conserving his syllables with effortlessness that spoke of practice. “Less dull.”
“Well, those weren’t any fun at all,” said the first man. “I’m sure none of us want to think about THAT sort of thing.”
“You’re thinking about it, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” said the woman.
The second man didn’t say anything. He also didn’t blink, because he couldn’t.
“Hell with it,” said the first man. “I’ve always wanted to know exactly how you two ended up like this. Right. So. Back in the day…”
….in the day, it was a hot, muggy late afternoon and the world was just tipping over into evening, which meant it was time for me to wake up and go get something to eat. I was feeling my years a bit, I’ll admit, but I was as stout as anyone a third my age, never mind what that upstart that chased me out of my territory had to say about it. The cheek! That land had been mine for years-on-years, and if he hadn’t landed that lucky shot and that other lucky shot and the lucky bite that had almost gotten my spine, I’d have shown him a thing or two.
Well, enough whining. I got up and then I walked off into the woods to – wait, no, I got up and then I fell over.
Oh damn, I’d forgotten about it again.
I got up while very carefully not putting any weight on my left rear leg and hobbled off into the sunset, trying not to make too much noise and failing at it, as I told myself.
“Myself,” I told myself (who, for most of my life, had been my only conversation partner – as is usual for my kind), “this is not a good time. Having this sort of problem is a bad time, and the only good thing about it is that it might be over pretty fast.”
“I agree, self,” I told self. “This isn’t good. And I haven’t eaten for too long. My ribs are starting to poke my tongue when I groom myself, and my stripes are getting dull and flat enough to look like dead grass. I need to eat.”
So I limped away to my new hunting grounds – which were much smaller and shabbier than my older ones – and focused on trying not to brush my foot on anything. It smelled funny when I broke the scab.
“This isn’t good at all, myself,” I said about an hour later, as I watched a big, healthy, juicy sambar hind bounce away into the brush with the most infuriatingly indolent shakes of her legs. “And it’s getting too familiar.”
“Be patient,” I replied. “Remember when that crocodile almost bit off your tail? You surprised it and had a good meal that night. You can turn this around too.”
“Easy for you to say,” I said, and so-
“Did you do it THAT often back then?” asked the woman.
“Do what?”
“Talking. To yourself.”
“I do it just as often now, I just do it inside my head. You two wouldn’t stop complaining, remember?”
“I don’t complain,” said the second man.
“You looked at me. It was the way you looked at me.”
The second man didn’t say anything. He just looked at him.
“Anyways, may I continue?”
-and so I went down to the river for a drink. Nasty, bitter stuff that water was; salty and as conducive to nourishment as liver to a day-old cub.
“And how nourishing is that?” asked the woman.
“Not at all. Milk is the preferred food.”
“I’m no mammal, you’ve got to tell us these things.”
“Noted and acted upon.”
And while I was at the river, sipping this dirty, brackish stuff and getting more and more frustrated by the minute – it’s one thing to die of starvation, and another to die of starvation with a mouth that feels like it’s been scrubbed with grit and insects – what did I see down across the way but a human, filling a bucket of water.
“That’s strange,” I said. “I haven’t seen those for ages.”
“Well, I did get pushed into the edges of things just now, didn’t I?” I replied. “No wonder this is bad land – salty water, wary game that runs too fast, and there’s humans. Well isn’t that just the dhole’s lunch.”
“Hah, I’d rather have dholes than humans. Look at it. Look at that ridiculous gawky thing. How can it even stand upright? And that ridiculous face! It looks like a bird had a baby with a monkey. A naked bird!”
“And an ugly monkey.”
“I don’t think it’s even seen us, so it must’ve been a blind monkey too. What a nuisance.”
“Absolutely.”
“Should we warn it off?”
“No. Let’s see what it does.”
The human filled up its bucket. Then its other bucket. Then it put them both on some sort of ridiculous stick and picked them up, shoulders sagging. Why it did that I still have no idea – it didn’t even take a drink!
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Utterly and fully.”
“Look at it, just taking up as much of that filthy rubbish as it can hold. And for what reason?”
“None at all. Infuriating, isn’t it? Look at it. Stupid. Slow.”
“Pointless.”
“Surprisingly fleshy.”
“It is, isn’t it? They aren’t that meaty normally.”
“Must be a special case.”
“Yes.”
I watched the human begin to walk away. Slowly. Oh-so-slowly.
“I think I’ll go after it.”
“Whatever for?”
“Well, just in case it scares up something to eat with those clumsy feet. It might flee right into me.”
“Clever. But it’s more likely it’ll walk right into a bear or tread on a snake at this rate – only they could sleep soundly enough to not hear it coming.”
“Hah, yes. In that case, I’d best stick extra close to it.”
“Just in case something kills it, yes? Scavenged meat tastes no less sweet, and better my mouthful than someone else’s.”
“Yes.”
I moved closer now, and followed the human down its little human path, as broad and as obvious and strange-smelling as the human itself. Well-trod, it seemed – there must be many that used it. But only the one right now.
“All by itself.”
“Very brave.”
“The forest is frightening after dark, isn’t it?”
“No, not really.”
“Well, for other things. That aren’t me.”
“Because of me.”
The human tripped over a root and made some sort of stupid human noise, then looked around anxiously.
“He’s worried.”
“I wonder why? He certainly hasn’t seen me. He can’t smell me. And I KNOW he hasn’t heard me.”
“He can feel me. Anyone can feel when they’re being hunted.”
“Hunted? By me? …Well, I suppose he is.”
“How curious.”
“Yes.”
I really was very close now. I watched the human move on again, quick-stepping now, looking behind itself every few steps, breath coming faster. I could see its chest heaving as I smelt the sweatdrops.
“It’s just one human,” I said.
“Just one,” I said.
“Anyways,” I said, as I slowly bunched up my leg muscles, bringing my body to bear for a spring, “this is just what I was talking about. A turnabout. Providence.”
The story stopped there for a moment while everyone, speaker included, digested that.
“And what did it taste like?” asked the woman.
The first man thought. “Do you know, I’m not quite sure?” he said. “Peculiar, I know, but it seems to have slipped my mind altogether.” He growled absently to himself as he checked dusty memories. “Strange,” he decided. “I remember that it was strange.”
“That’s strange,” I said.
“I know. Barely any effort involved. I think it died before the bite.”
“Amazing.”
“Is it all gone already?”
“It seems so.”
“Well, I WAS hungry. I suppose it’s only to be expected. And besides, it wasn’t as much meat as all that. So scrawny.”
“But so much meatier than a monkey.”
“Yes.”
“Just the once, though.”
“But… one meal. That was one human, not one meal.”
“Oh surely not. A meal ends when you’re full. I don’t feel full at all, do I?”
“Not at all. I believe this trail should be followed. Yes indeed.”
The trail led me to a very strange place. Wood and stones and dirt and clay, all piled up into shapes. Like anthills. If the ants were a hundred times the size, and noisy, and smelly, and surprisingly fragile.
“I don’t like this. Too many of them. Is it possible to have a home in a place like this? So many of these things. Taking up space. Chopping up bushes and trees. Putting water in ridiculous little buckets.”
“Don’t mention the water. Just thinking about it makes me angry. It’s like an itch inside the inside of your throat’s insides. Except worse. It makes my teeth squeak.”
“Why would they want it? It’s so stupid. Look!”
A human had staggered out of one of the strange shapes. He was yawning in the darkness, and seemed to be adjusting something near his legs.
“What’s he doing out here at night when he can barely see in the daylight? That’s even stupider! These things are idiotic.”
“Yes. I’d be doing them a favour, really.”
“Absolutely.”
It gets a lot easier the second time, you know. And the third time, about two weeks later. Of course, I had to wait until I was really hungry again, to properly argue the point to myself. By the fifth or sixth time – I think? – I no longer really had that particular issue.
Tell me, do either of you really know what it means, this human word: ‘king’?
“I don’t think so.”
“No.”
I think I learned what it means, based on what we’ve all overheard since. It’s something like a mother. Except you can never get bigger than her, and instead of cuffing you if you disobey her, she kills you.
Regardless, I was king for several years, and I can tell you this: it’s a miraculous thing for your self-esteem.
I was still…a bit slow. I was still…not quite as young as I used to be. But it didn’t matter one whit. And the respect, I tell you, the respect – do you know that one moment you get, when the prey knows you’re there, and it knows it should’ve started running two seconds ago? Humans can live that moment for days. Days! More than a hundred, all thinking that same thought. For days!
I would hunt, and I would kill, and I would watch them scurry and moan for hours and hours. It was amazing, I tell you.
Two years, and dozens of humans. And truth be told, before that first kill I hadn’t been sure if I would make it another week.
“So what happened?”
Nothing unexpected, really. Good things never last.
You see, one day some new humans appeared. Humans with strange machines. Humans with strange machines that weren’t afraid.
This annoyed me. You can’t imagine how annoying it is to not be feared, for a king. So I decided to do something about that. I wasn’t even hungry that night and I planned to hunt – that’s how annoyed I was.
Come to think of it, I wonder if it was the water. The water was so terrible. A mouthful of that stuff would drive a saint to slaughter, and I had a good bellyful that night.
“The big one?” I wondered.
“Yes, the big one with the ridiculous moustache.”
“That sounds good.”
So I crept into the village – that’s what the humans called it, and I usually didn’t press them this closely, but they’d REALLY tried my patience this time – and made my way to the building that I knew the strange humans were in. They’d tied a donkey or something a good ways off, why I’m not sure. I don’t think I was even hunting anything that wasn’t a human by then, there just didn’t seem to be any satisfaction in it. Well, non-humans tended to fight back a lot harder. My station’s dignity would not be enhanced by a broken rib.
“Asleep?”
“It seems so.”
I walked in, and yes, they were asleep. And what a lovely picture they made: four of those strange men, and one other.
“Maybe not just one,” I decided.
“A good idea. After all, this isn’t quite about food, is it?”
“No. Now that you mention it, that’s a bit odd, isn’t it?”
“A bit. But it’s only my right.”
“It is.” And I paced forwards and let my claws slip out and I trod very heavily on a sharp thing sitting on the floor. With my injured foot.
Well, I had a good set of lungs on me still, and I used them. And deaf and blind and dumb as those men were, they couldn’t help but wake at that yowl in their ears – AND one of them was between me and the door.
“They’re just humans,” I reminded myself at the back of my mind, as I took the big one with the ridiculous moustache between my teeth. There was a lot of shouting and small, frail limbs smacking against my sides. One of them was fumbling with one of those strange machines and seemed to be ignoring me, of all things. “Just humans.” My breath caught for a moment, and I slipped on my hurt foot and landed on the floor, half-expecting to cut myself again. But the sharp thing wasn’t there. Funny, how I couldn’t catch my breath.
I realized that something was hurting an awful lot. I looked down, and the human that wasn’t strange had planted the sharp thing in my chest and was twisting it back and forth like a misplaced tooth. I wanted very much to hit him, but my legs were turning lazy. I felt tired again.
“That’s silly,” I said.
“Yes, humans don’t have teeth.”
“I think I know this one, don’t I, self? Did we take his daughter? Or his son? Maybe a wife?”
“I’m not sure, and I’m even less sure if it matters. It’s getting hard to see. Almost human-blind really.”
“Oh dear,” I said. The human in the corner had finished whatever it was his machine did and was pointing it at me, but it was just then that I couldn’t see or hear much of anything. I’m not sure what happened next.
“So what did they taste like?” asked the woman.
The first man thought about it. “All right,” he said. “Not fatty, though. Very lean and not a great deal of meat. You had to work at it fairly thoroughly. But why do you ask?”
“I didn’t check at the time.”
“Really? Now I’m curious. Tell us.”
“All right.”
Unlike you, she wasn’t that old when this happened.
“I wasn’t OLD. Just a bit creaky.”
I’m sure.
She was past adolescence and young adulthood and into the broad, well-worn beginning of the current that was middle age, with two litters of pups already behind her. She was well-fed enough (a second difference)
“Enough with the editorials!”
and was currently aiming to add to her bulk with a seal. Which, for those in her audience who are less enlightened
“Stop it!”
is a fatty delicious animal shaped like a rolly-polly ball of meat. They are best eaten by ramming them violently from below when they’re at the surface, so as to minimize the directions in which they can escape.
They really are very tasty.
Now, it so happens that in her eagerness to consume an especially fat and unaware seal, she perhaps was overhasty. But then again, ramming speed does not afford substantial time for doubt, and it looked seal enough until her teeth sunk into it and decided it wasn’t.
“What was it?”
Some sort of flat thing with a human on it. She’d seen humans before, and never bothered with them because they were lean and scrawny. Well, this one was scrawnier than most, and it was just disgusting. Nothing but hard bone and muscle, amazing there was any room for blood in there. Which apparently there was; quite a lot of it, in fact. It was also making some noises that were just on the upper edge of her hearing, very loudly and shrilly.
So she spat it out and swam around for a while to see what it would do. She was curious, after all. You didn’t see quite as many humans back in those days. In the end she shouldn’t have even bothered – some more of them came, dragged the flopping, leaking human into a floating thing, and left after pointing at her a lot.
“You didn’t even eat it?”
She invites her audience to consider whether they would waste stomach space on dirt and stones.
Humans did strange things, and none of it meant much to her. She didn’t think about it any further until the next day, when she bit another seal and found that it wasn’t a seal at all. It was attached to a strange sort of shiny object that got stuck in her teeth and seemed to be attached to another floating thing.
Then she was dragged up alongside it and yanked out of the water, where she suffocated in a large amount of pain for some minutes while a human tried to find her brain with a strange exploding stick, succeeding on what was probably the fourth attempt.
“That was quite horrible,” said the first man.
“It’s over and done with. At least it didn’t take too long.”
“And you said it happened the very next day? It took them simply ages to work up the nerve to interfere with my doings.”
“You’ve been here longer than I have. I guess times change.”
“For them, not us. At least, not as fast. And speaking of speed, will the sluggard here get around to speaking his part?”
The second man didn’t say anything.
“Go on then,” insisted the first man. “You’ve heard two, the least you can do is tell one.”
“You talk too much,” said the second man.
“And you talk too little. Look at us – I, myself, have had no company but my own voice and the very occasional partner-in-dalliance since my mother left me to run wild. And our esteemed lady here never knew her mother past birth.”
“Nor my children,” added the woman.
“And yet here you sit – you, who have basked with dozens – and remain the most anti-social of us all! Pray tell us, how does this come to be?”
“If I had talked as much as you two,” said the second man, “I would have been killed in annoyance.”
“Make up for lost time and give us your story,” said the first man. “We’ve got all day here.”
“Fine.”
You are large. You are old. You are one of many, many, many in your family on the riverbanks. You have outlived most of them.
There aren’t as many of you as there used to be. And one day, some humans come and drop explosives in your river. And your organs rupture against your scales and you die.
“That’s it?” asked the woman.
“Yes,” said the second man.
“What about the part where you ate them?” asked the first man. “Surely that stuck in your head.”
“I don’t recall it.”
“Not even the first time?”
“It was a long time ago. And it happened often.”
“How often?”
The second man paused to think. He did not rush.
“Often.” A verbal shrug. “It was no matter.”
“Of course it was!”
“Do you remember your first deer?”
“…no.”
“Your first seal?”
“No.”
“They are no different. Not to me.”
An uncomfortable silence reigned.
“Cowards,” said the second man, very calmly.
It reigned a little harder.
“Well, now we know better than to complain when you don’t say anything, you morbid thing,” said the first man.
“Yes.”
“Still,” he continued, wistfulness touching him, “telling the old stories… it does put the fire in your veins again, doesn’t it?”
“A bit,” agreed the woman. “A bite.”
A pause for thought. “Yes.”
“Ah yes. Nothing like the bad old days to get your heart moving – if any of us still had one of those. And revenge does make the blood stir yonder. Tell me, what is the relation of the current master of the house to my procurer again? I believe he is the great-great-nephew of that man, the one who wanted a new rug, no?”
“Yes.”
“And his father, the father of the master of the house, he did obtain our graceful lady and hang her – most fetching – set of jaws over the mantelpiece on a somewhat-gaudy plaque?”
“Yes he did. And he took my biggest tooth for a gold necklace.”
“And the man himself of this house, he would be the one who claimed our quiet friend here and had what was left of him stripped fleshless and mounted?”
“Yes.”
“Hmmmm.”
There was a space in which ugly thoughts grew and became beautiful to the mind’s eye.
“I believe I have an idea,” said the first man.
“So do I,” said the woman.
“And I,” said the second man. His voice now had a tone: irritation.
“Unity is the thing,” said the first man. “Now, I summarize our situation thus: two of us are lacking teeth, two of us are lacking a body, and two of us are lacking a proper set of skin. Coincidentally, each of us has one of these things.”
“It seems that way.”
“Yes.”
“I also notice from the time that it is a quarter to two past midnight. This would be fifteen minutes before the man of the house takes his nightly walk downstairs to empty his bladder.”
“I’ve noticed that. He’s predictable.”
The second man said nothing. He was growling (rumbling, really, a roaring bellow slowed down) at a pitch just below the perception of the human ear, and making the dust on his display stand dance.
“Now, given that we all share such common ground – even if how we view it varies,” continued the first man, “I believe that it would be to our advantage to work together. For a short time.”
“I agree.”
The growl grew deeper, and the floorboards creaked.
“We are in accord then,” said the first man. “Now, let’s get ready. We may only have one chance at this, but we can still turn this around one last time.”