Halo: Primordium (2 page)

Through the filters of my Forerunner armor, my skin sensed heat, and I glimpsed blossoms of fire, searing blasts of energy trying but failing to reach in and cook me—then, more buffeting, accompanied by the gut-wrenching shudder of distant explosions.

Came a final slamming impact. My jaw snapped up and my teeth almost bit through my tongue.

Stil, at first there was no pain. Fog filed me. Now I
knew
I was dead and felt some relief. Perhaps I had already been punished sufficiently and would be spared the attentions of hyenas and buzzards and eagles. I anticipated joining my ancestors, my grandmother and grandfather, and if my mother had died in my absence, her as wel. They would cross rich green prairies to greet me, floating over the ground, smiling and filed with love, and beside them would pad the jaguar that snarls at the sabertooth, and slither the great crocodile that darts from the mud to put to flight the ravenous buzzards—in that place where al hatred is finaly extinguished. There, my good family spirits would welcome me, and my troubles would be over.

(For so I had seen in the sacred caves.)

I was not at al happy when I realized yet again that this darkness was not death, but another kind of sleep. My eyes were closed. I opened them. Light flooded in on me, not very bright, but after the long darkness, it seemed blinding. It was not a spiritual light.

Blurry shapes moved around me. My tongue decided to hurt horribly. I felt hands tugging and fumbling at my arms and legs, and smeled something foul—my own scat. Very bad. Spirits don’t stink.

I tried to raise my hand, but someone held it down and there was another struggle. More hands forcibly bent my arms and legs at painful angles. Slowly I puzzled this out. I was stil wearing the broken Forerunner armor the Didact had given me on his ship.

Stooped and bent shapes were puling me from that stinking shel.

When they had finished, I was laid out flat on a hard surface.

Water poured cool and sweet over my face. The crusted salt of my upper lip stung my tongue. I fuly opened my puffy eyes and blinked up at a roof made of woven reeds thatched with leaves and branches. Sprawled on the cold, gritty platform, I was no better than a newborn: naked, twitching, bleary-eyed, mute from shock.

Cool, careful fingers wiped my face clean, then rubbed grassy juice under my nose. The smel was sharp and wakeful. I drank more water—muddy, earthy, inexpressibly sweet.

Against flickering orange light I could now make out a single figure—black as night, slender as a young tree—rubbing its fingers beside its own broad nose, over its wide, rounded cheeks, then combing them through the hair on its scalp. It rubbed this soothing skin-oil on my chapped, cracked lips.

I wondered if I was again being visited, as I was at birth, by the supreme Lifeshaper whom the Didact claimed was his wife—the Librarian. But the figure that hovered over me was smaler, darker

—not a beautiful memory but solid flesh. I smeled a woman. A young woman. That scent brought an extraordinary change to my outlook. Then I heard others murmuring, folowed by sad, desperate laughter, folowed by words I barely understood . . .

words from ancient languages I had never heard spoken on Erde-Tyrene.

How then could I understand them at al? What kind of beings were these? They looked human in outline—several kinds of human, perhaps. Slowly, I reengaged the old memories within me, like digging out the roots of a fossil tree . . . and found the necessary knowledge.

Long ago, thousands of years before I was born, humans had used such words. The assembled shadows around me were commenting on my chances of recovery. Some were doubtful.

Others expressed leering admiration for the female. A few grinding voices discussed whether the strongest man in the vilage would take her. The tree-slender girl said nothing, merely giving me more water.

Finaly, I tried to speak, but my tongue wouldn’t work properly.

Even without being half-bitten through, it was not yet trained to form the old words.

“Welcome back,” the girl said. Her voice was husky but musical.

Gradualy my vision cleared. Her face was round and so black it was almost purple. “Your mouth is ful of blood. Don’t talk. Just rest.”

I closed my eyes again. If I could only make myself speak, the Librarian’s imprint from ancient human warriors might prove useful after al.

“He came in armor, like a crab,” said a low, grumbling male voice. So many of these voices sounded frightened, furtive—cruel and desperate. “He fel after the brightness and burning in the sky, but he’s not one of the Forerunners.”

“The Forerunners died. He did not,” the girl said.

“Then they’l come hunting him. Maybe he kiled them,” another voice said. “He’s no use to us. He could be a danger. Put him out in the grass for the ants.”

“How could
he
kil the Forerunners?” the girl asked. “He was in a jar. The jar fel and cracked open when it hit the ground. He lay in the grass for an entire night while we cowered in our huts, but the ants did not bite him.”

“If he stays, there wil be less food for the rest of us. And if Forerunners lost him, then they wil come looking for him and punish us.”

I listened to these suppositions with mild interest. I knew less about such matters than the shadows did.

“Why?” the dark girl asked. “They kept him in the jar. We saved him. We took him out of the heat. We wil feed him and he wil live.

Besides, they punish us no matter what we do.”

“They haven’t come for many days to take
any
of us away,” said another voice, more calm or more resigned. “After the fires in the sky, the city and the forest and the plain are quiet. We no longer hear their sky boats. Maybe they’re al gone.”

The voices from the miling circle duled and faded. None of what they said made much sense. I had no idea where I might be. I was too tired to care.

I don’t know how long I slept. When I opened my eyes again, I looked to one side, then the other. I was lying inside a wide meeting house with log wals. I was naked but for two pieces of worn, dirty cloth. The meeting house was empty, but at my groan, the dark girl came through the reed-covered doorway and kneeled down beside me. She was younger than me. Little more than a girl—not quite a woman. Her eyes were large and reddish brown, and her hair was a wild tangle the color of water-soaked rye grass.

“Where am I?” I asked clumsily, using the old words as best I could.

“Maybe you can tel us. What’s your name?”

“Chakas,” I said.

“I don’t know that name,” the girl said. “Is it a secret name?”

“No.” I focused on her, ignoring the silhouettes of others as they filed back in through the door and stood around me. Other than the tree-slender female, most of them kept wel back, in a wide circle.

One of the old men stepped forward and tried to pluck at the girl’s shoulder. She shrugged his hand away, and he cackled and danced off.

“Where do you come from?” she asked me.

“Erde-Tyrene,” I said.

“I don’t know that place.” She spoke to the others. No one else had heard of it.

“He’s no good to us,” an older man said, one of the shril, argumentative voices from earlier. He was heavy of shoulder and low of forehead and smacked his thick lips in disapproval. Al different types of human being were here, as I had guessed—but none as smal as Riser. I missed Riser and wondered where he had ended up.

“This one fel from the sky in a jar,” the older man repeated, as if the story was already legend. “The jar landed in the dry short grass and cracked and broke, and not even the ants thought he was worth eating.”

Another man picked up the tale. “Someone high above lost him.

The flying shadows dropped him. He’l just bring them back sooner, and this time they’l take us al to the Palace of Pain.” I did not like the sound of that. “Are we on a planet?” I asked the girl. The words I chose meant “big home,” “broad land,” “al-under-sky.”

The girl shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“Is it a great star boat, then?”

“Be quiet and rest. Your mouth is bleeding.” She gave me more water and wiped my lips.

“You’l have to choose soon,” the old, cackling one said. “Your Gamelpar can’t protect you now!”

Then the others went away.

I roled over.

Later, she shook me awake. “You’ve slept long enough,” she said.

“Your tongue isn’t bleeding now. Can you tel me what it’s like where you come from? Up in the sky? Try to speak slowly.” I moved lips, tongue, jaw. Al were sore, but I could talk easily enough. I propped myself up on my elbow. “Are you al human?” She hummed through her nose and leaned forward to wipe my eyes. “We’re the Tudejsa, if that’s what you’re asking.” Later I would put this word in context and understand that it meant the People from Here, or just the People.

“And this isn’t Erde-Tyrene.”

“I doubt it. Where we are is a place between other places.

Where we came from, we wil never see again. Where we are going, we do not want to be. So we live here and wait. Sometimes Forerunners take us away.”

“Forerunners . . . ?”

“The gray ones. The blue ones. The black ones. Or their machines.”

“I know some of them,” I said.

She looked dubious. “They don’t like us. We’re happy they haven’t come for many days. Even before the sky became bright and filed with fire—”

“Where do
they
come from—these People?” I waved my arm at the silhouettes stil coming and going through the door, some smacking their lips in judgment and making disapproving sounds.

“Some of us come from the old city. That’s where I was born.

Others have gathered from across the plain, from river and jungle, from the long grass. Some walked here five sleeps ago, after they saw you fal from the sky in your jar. One felow tries to make people pay to see you.”

I heard a scuffle outside, a yelp, and then three burly gawkers shuffled in, keeping wel back from us.

“The cackling bastard who fancies you?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “Another fool. He wants more food. They just knock him down and kick him aside.”

She didn’t seem to like many of the People.

“Valey, jungle, river . . . city, prairie. Sounds like home,” I said.

“It
isn’t.
” She swept her gaze around the gawkers with pinched disappointment. “We are not friends, and no one is wiling to be family. When we are taken away, it brings too much pain.” I raised myself on my arm. “Am I strong enough to go outside?” She pressed me back down. Then she pushed the gawkers out, looked back, and stepped through the hanging grass door. When she returned, she carried a roughly carved wooden bowl. With her fingers she spooned some of the contents into my mouth: bland mush, ground-up grass seed. It didn’t taste very good—what I could taste of it—but what I swalowed stayed in my stomach.

Soon I felt stronger.

Then she said, “Time to go outside, before someone decides to kil you.” She helped me to my feet and pushed aside the door-hanging. A slanting burst of bluish white glare dazzled me. When I saw the color of that light, a feeling of dread, of not wanting to be where I was, came on me fierce. It was not a good light.

But she persisted and puled me out under the purple-blue sky.

Shielding my eyes, I finaly located the horizon—rising up like a distant wal. Turning slowly, swiveling my neck despite the pain, I tracked that far wal until it began to curve upward, ever so gently. I swung around. The horizon curved upward to both sides. Not good, not right. Horizons do not curve up.

I folowed the gradualy rising sweep higher and higher. The land kept climbing like the slope of a mountain—climbing but narrowing, until I could see both sides of a great, wide band filed with grassland, rocky fields . . . mountains. Some distance away, a foreshortened and irregular dark blue smear crossed almost the entire width of the band, flanked and interrupted by the nearest of those mountains—possibly a large body of water. And everywhere out there on the band—clouds in puffs and swirls and spreading white shreds, like streamers of fleece in a cleansing river.

Weather.

Higher and higher . . .

I leaned my head back as far as I could without faling over—

until the rising band crossed into shadow and slimmed to a skinny, perfect ribbon that cut the sky in half and just hung there—a dark blue, overarching sky bridge. At an angle about two-thirds of the way up one side of the bridge, perched just above the edge, was the source of the intense, purple-blue light: a smal, briliant sun.