HOWLERS

Jirra was a storyteller. Not a very popular one, yet, but even the very popular ones no longer received the recognition Jirra longed for. Speaker society had moved on from storytellers now that messages could be sent by electrical current. Currents which could travel all the way to the northern territories and back in just a day or two. Writing had replaced storytellers as the main way people wanted to get their information. Booklets, distributed from town transhubs, were more convenient than waiting for a traveling storyteller to arrive with word.

Jirra was sure that there was a way to get people interested in the spoken word of a storyteller again though. Raw information is fine to entrust to the currents…most of the time. But some things need a story! And, for that, a great storyteller. Such is the sort of statement Jirra made to his family when he announced he was going to head to the coast, through the steamjungle, and become the first Rivershead speaker to cross the sea in known history. No one who knew him well was surprised. Those who did not know him well did not put much faith in his word. So, the announcement’s reception was not what Jirra had hoped.

#

When Jirra stumbled across the children he already felt that he had seen and heard more in his weeks of traveling than in all the prior years of his life in Rivershead Town combined. He had almost fainted. Worse, he was thankful he was not a fast draw on his spine-thrower. When he had felt the tug on his brown-black tail, he leapt about and fumbled for the weapon. Fortunately, he realized it was two speakers, each about half his size. He calmed himself. He felt even more at ease when he realized they were young riverborne speakers, such as he was. Treeborne speakers, who also frequented the land of many rivers, were a bit smaller even as adults. He recognized this impulse and decided to think, perhaps hope, that it was due solely to their being children, for he had only been treated kindly by the few treeborne which had made his acquaintance.

It took them a while to accept his consolation and promises of safety. Once they had, Jirra heard something unforgettable. Though he had was not sure he would ever choose to make it into a story.

The children had lost their mother sometime in the last week, they seemed to have lost track of the days. She had been taking them to visit family in a village south of Rivershead Town, many kilometers from their own home. Their town, Tippet, lay far beyond the mountain from which the river descended. Their mother had been a star athlete, a winner of the grapple at the Many Rivers Festival. Jirra tried to recall if he had seen her compete in years gone by. His uncle was a braggart over a second-place finish in the grapple. Jirra wondered if perhaps he had lost to her.

The children’s names were Killi and Toil. Jirra worried for their sanity, despite how hardy they seemed. They had told him how Toil had gotten up in the night to relieve himself and become lost. He had called and called, fearing the darkness and the noises within it. The child ended up alone in the dark until morning. Yet, it was Killi’s perspective which was the more disturbing.

#

Toil was calling for them. Killi was awoken by the sound of her name being shouted. Killi fought to clear her head of sleep as Toil continued crying out in fear. For what felt like a long moment Killi lay still. Fear filling and immobilizing her. Eventually she felt their mother shift. This allowed her to move, “Help, help!” She cried out and shook their mother awake.

Just then, a new cry sounded, from a slightly different direction, “Killi, Mother!” Yet, crying continued from where it had been going on since Killi had woken. The two voices sounded almost identical. Killi imagined she heard the first grow more desperate.

Moving over her in a flash, their mother called out, “I hear you, I’m coming!”

Killi had fallen silent, but started to call after her, “Mother, be careful…”

Already she was out of sight, only the sound of brushing leaves and breaking branches revealed her. Killi began to weep in fear of her own. She would weep until the tears ran out, laying in quiet agony until morning. Finally, as Killi lay gazing in the direction of the two voices, Toil wandered out of the brush and collapsed.

#

When Tupa created the universe, she had made speakers large and strong. She had given them her most powerful tool, words, and with it they had conquered all before them. When the universe was new all the speakers looked the same, they walked tall over the world and built great and terrible things. Bohmi, the child-god of time, had run up to Tupa, tears in his eyes, and showed her how the speakers had been using her gift.

Great explosions of light scarred the world. In these scars masses of darkness grew, and nothing could live there. The smaller creatures fled into the margins and died weak and sick. The speakers made themselves sick, and the world with it. Tupa grew rageful, and with her saliva she spread disease into the rivers and lakes, even into the clouds. The speakers no longer knew how to speak to Tupa, and the few that had remembered Bohmi all this time knew that the sickness meant they had gone too far.

#

Jirra, Killi, and Toil had traveled to the coast, the great city of Oversee. When they had all encountered one another Jirra was not sure if any villages lay closer than Oversee did. His map also only showed the way to Oversee or the way home to Rivershead. He was somewhat happy that entering the city seemed the best bet to find directions to Tippet, for it would be his first time in the city, in any city. He assured himself that the distractions of the coastal hub would be good for the children.

Jirra had rented them a room in a traveler’s stay, where Killi and Toil slept for most of their time in the city. Jirra had gone and sat at a pub a few doors from the stay and nursed a burnberry cider. Their story would not leave his head. He remembered, growing up, how the most terrifying stories all featured howlers. They were considered to represent the basest, most underhanded tendencies in all creatures – surviving off of treachery alone.

A sailor walked in, stooping under the doorframe to enter. He was one of the tailless speakers from across the sea. They were larger and less hairy than the tailed speakers, those from the north and south, from the trees and the rivers. Here they were sometimes called oceanborne speakers, for when the tailed and tailless first met it was when the first few tailless sailed across the great sea. Jirra watched as he walked to the bar, which was only up to the bottom of his ribcage. He remembered that the tailless speakers were well known for their drinking abilities. The man ordered a drink of clear liquor and turned. Jirra motioned to him, and the man heeded the beckon.

“Pleasure in greeting, sit if you’d like.”

Jirra greeted him in trading basic – a pidgin language used along the coast. It was mostly familiar words, but with a few borrowed from tailless tongues. Jirra enjoyed the opportunity to use it, as he had never had the chance outside of his studies before.

“I will, thank you. Pleasure.” The speaker nodded. The bar chairs were compromises, too large for him but apparently still a bit small for the sailor.

“What’s the word from across the sea? I was told by my staykeeper that researchers there had made a huge discovery.”

“He spoke truthfully.” The man drank, “Some are worried that the news will be taken ill, there and here.”

“We cannot control the word, only how we respond to it.” Jirra tended to speak more calmly, more formally, as he grew anxious.

The speaker seemed to accept this answer, “They found that tailed speakers and us tailless are only distantly related.” He drank again.

“Apparently the tails are the best sign of relation, and that speaking is something we all came to separately. I understand it ill, but apparently even within the tailed and tailless there are many lineages.”

Jirra nodded, “So far this isn’t too upsetting, we’ve known that tailed and tailless cannot bear children together.”

The speaker nodded, eyed Jirra closely, his brow furrowing and then relaxing, “Yes. You’re right. The upsetting piece is that apparently some unspeaking beasts are more closely related. To each

of us.”

Jirra kept his expression carefully neutral, pleasant. “To those who believe in the stories of the divine word I can see how it would be upsetting.” Jirra drank his cider for a time, and asked the obvious question, “Well, what beasts are my brothers, and which yours?”

The speaker smiled, “I wasn’t surprised to find that the laquem who inhabit the island chains are mine. They cannot, or do not, speak, and they drive us away fiercely. But their eyes show resolve in battle, and their traps are cunning.”

Jirra admired the speaker’s frankness. He steeled himself for what was to follow.

The speaker continued after a pause, “As for you, apparently there are some ill-liked beasts known as howlers on this land. They are yours.”

Jirra nodded and drank, “Yes, I can see why this news has worried some.” He remembered Killi and Toil’s story.

The other speaker and he drank in silence for a moment. The sailor smiled kindly, “Another round on me?”

#

They’d stayed in the city for a few days, recovering. He had tried to show the children things to take their minds off what had happened, and the resilience of youth combined with the excitement of the many attractions of Oversee had seemed to add some blood and life back into their eyes, their expressions. At least, some of the time.

On one of their final nights, they’d encountered a tailless speaker juggling fire on their walk back to their traveler’s stay. The flaming sticks circled and left streaks that appeared as dying suns and the trails of flaming snakes, slithering infinity symbols into the night. Toil’s oohs and aahs lifted Jirra’s spirits. He turned, smiling, to look at the two children. Killi’s expression was dark, and unmoving. Jirra was thinking about what to say or do when Toil’s hand on her shoulder seemed to shock Killi out of it and she smiled, looking at her sibling. Jirra turned back to the fire himself, stories were rushing through his mind.

#

“There’s no reason to hate the howlers. They are what they are. They strip a speaker clean, just like we strip a capybara. They must not have anything to waste. They aren’t killing us for fun. Never heard of them playing with someone beforehand either, the way a panther sometimes does. We must kill them because they must try to kill us. But we don’t have to hate them. Any more than we might hate a pack of dogs, knowing what they might do if they catch one of us alone…”

Jirra looked at his young companions. They were camped somewhere along their path, heading away from Oversee. It was a journey of perhaps a month or so. They had left the city some ten days prior. Jirra was postponing his travel, to return the children to Tippet. “When we were in the big port city, built over the ruins of old cities going back eons, you could feel the bones of the people before us. People like us and not… While I was in that city, I spoke to a man who told me the howlers are some of our closest cousins.”

Toil responded, “How could we be cousins with them, they aren’t even speakers?”

Killi joined, “Speakers can be reasoned with, no one can reason with a howler.”

Jirra found a stick near his feet, poked at the fire. Toil and Killi looked at one another, confused. Jirra found himself regretting bringing this up. He felt sure that the children would be hearing it over and over once they got home, they had told him their town had a transhub. Jirra recommitted himself to the conversation, better to know now, to have the rest of the trip back to acclimate to the news.

“Speakers are all a bit more alike in this way, surely, but a speaker from afar told me that, and I believe him.” Killi and Toil looked at Jirra, but he did not turn his face away from the fire.

“The howlers live in the ways that were left for them.”

Jirra stared into the fire and thought about the creation myths which his grandparents had told him.

#

Tupa’s plague had decimated the speakers. In their desperation they further destroyed the world. Land and sea were made barren, and deadly to any life unfortunate enough to pass by. It was the everyoung Bohmi who hid a few speakers. The child-god took some far to the north and south, into the ice. The cold froze Tupa’s saliva and put her rage to sleep.

Others were taken deep into the forest, where they remembered the strength of the panthers and serpents. They were forced to outrun Tupa’s saliva. The heat of their struggles burned up the disease within their bodies. They meshed into the web of life and Tupa forgave their arrogance. Bohmi led a final few into the great deserts. Her saliva evaporated as it tried to follow them over the burning sand. There, their lives of austerity and hardship won Tupa’s sympathy.

Tupa allowed these remaining speakers to move past her wrath and plague, but forever after she told the speakers, “I leave you with my gifts, but I have removed all their protections. Words are no longer yours alone.”

Among the tailed speakers of the land of many rivers, the stories of Tupa and Bohmi and the lesser gods had been told and retold, changed and changed back, countless times. News of their relatedness to howlers threatened to fracture the relationship between the speaker tribes of the land of many rivers. Some wanted to wipe out the brutish relatives, knowledge of this mortal connection making them even more loathsome. Similar troubles threatened wherever this new knowledge touched with like experiences. It was new words, a new set of stories, retellings of these myths making up just a few of them, which helped bring about a generation ready to maintain peace. A generation which refused to wage war even on howlers and other non-speakers. In the land of many rivers one particular version of these myths rose to popularity, and its storyteller alongside them.

Tupa had not removed her protection of the word, nor her blessings upon the speakers. The speakers of old had failed to maintain their connections of friendship and brotherhood with the cousins whom Bohmi had been unable to save. Left without friends, in a cold and destroyed world, they had to use their words to survive. For some, the word was the only tool they had left. So, we should not hate the howler or the laquem, we should pity them, for they were forgotten