Do Not Attempt to Treat a Wounded Behemoth. It Will Eat You
Christopher took Teren on a tour of the palace. Teren was puckish, unsteady on his feet but quick, eager as he moved from room to room. He did not yet speak, but the boy was like a walking hurricane lamp: he pushed light into every room.
He was strange though – strange beyond all experience.
After dinner, Christopher lost him, and after a feverish search he found Teren sitting and weeping in the garden: not crying as a child cries, from hurt or fear or need, but the sobs of some ancient being.
A great deal of the time he laughed: giddy, wild laughter.
Mostly he just sat on Christopher’s shoulders, playing with his hair, humming in perfect pitch, and watching with infinite eyes the world around him.
Christopher did not know – had no way of guessing – how much of eternity Teren had yet unfurled in his mind.
He was the Immortal, born from a soul in the first apple of the first tree.
At each death the Immortal was reborn in a new body; they had lived thousands of lives, never forgetting a single thing they had seen.
Nighthand had told Christopher that it often took several years for the great golden whirl of the world’s knowledge to fall fully into place in the Immortal’s mind, and that the young Immortal lived with sudden new memories and ideas bursting upon them.
‘It’s why they don’t speak much,’ he had said. ‘They are finessing their inner world.’
That night, after everyone else was asleep, Christopher approached the wrought-iron gate of the behemoth’s enclosure. The creature’s wound was bad. There was a smell in the air of the walled garden, of something on the cusp of rotting.
Christopher hadn’t told even Anya what he planned. He had with him bandages, a tub of antiseptic mistflower ointment and his sword slung over his back.
There was an unsteady footstep from behind him, and he turned to see that Teren had followed him out into the moonlit garden.
‘Teren! You’re supposed to be in bed!’
But he was not sorry to see him. He explained to the boy what he was going to do; Teren, he knew, would understand. Teren laughed, a giddy peal of delight. Christopher lifted the little boy and put him high in the crook of a tree. ‘You wait here,’ he said. ‘It’s not safe.’
He approached the gate, and the behemoth came lumbering over the grass towards him.
Their eyes met. Even though he was braced for it, Christopher was winded as it came: the flash of green-gold behind his eyes, and the thread that felt like it was unspooling from the core of his body, linking to the creature.
This time, Christopher was ready for the lurch of dizziness, the pressure in his head, and it was easier to meet them, to stay on his feet. He gripped the gate.
He could feel the behemoth’s pain – could feel where it was located.
A deep gash had been gouged in its flesh on the left hind flank, running down towards the leg.
Before his eyes arose an image of a ship, hunting the behemoth – a crew of masked men, laughter, a clamour of jeering voices, and the hurling out of a harpoon.
Christopher opened the gate and slipped inside, closing it behind him.
‘Steady,’ he whispered. He was sweating, and his breath was harsh in his chest. ‘Gently, OK? Look, I’m going to kneel down.’
The behemoth was suspicious. He could feel the thrum and jag of it – it was wary and angry. He could feel its mind: huge, slow, untrusting, powerful.
This is to heal you. He tried to push the thought through that quivering thread of light.
He took a daub of the cream, and rubbed it on the behemoth’s wound. It bellowed in anger and reared up. It trampled backwards over a rose bush and its huge torso collided with the wall, which shook, showering dust and lichen on to the earth.
Christopher swore. The golden thread wavered. He could feel the creature’s anger rising. If he let the connection snap he’d be trampled to death. He pushed further, deeper, backwards into the untouched, dormant places of his own mind, and he thought, Please. This is the only way out of pain.
The behemoth stepped closer. It bent its head.
Swiftly, his heart racing, Christopher smoothed more cream on the wound, and this time the beast only gave a low rumbling growl in protest. As quickly as he could – the pressure in his skull was mounting – he wound the bandage around the creature’s entire flank, double-thick, fumbling, and secured it with three knots.
The behemoth stamped, hard, at the earth. Its pain and impatience swept over Christopher: it was like being battered, again and again, by a too-rough sea. It had been less than sixty seconds, but the strain of holding the thread had almost bent him double. The behemoth opened its mouth, and roared.
The connection broke. The thread vanished. And the behemoth charged.
Christopher ran for the gate. He had no time to open it – he vaulted over it, and landed on the other side. The behemoth’s head crashed into it two seconds later. Christopher swore.
‘You,’ he said to the behemoth, ‘need to learn to relax.’
He lay flat on his back as the behemoth snarled and paced on the other side.
Christopher’s whole body felt foreign to himself. He was dizzy; the world lurched on its axis. He bent and vomited into the bushes.
‘You nearly died,’ said a small, haughty voice. Jacques flew into sight from behind a tree, where he had been watching. ‘You were very stupid, young man! A behemoth is not a thing to play with.’
‘I know that.’ He turned to Teren, and Teren, watching him with wide and seeing eyes, held out his hands.
It had been stupid, perhaps. But far more than that – it had been an overwhelming thrill.
He could still barely breathe. But he had glimpsed the secret of something entirely other, alive and infinitely strange, full of knowledges in shapes and colours entirely new.
It felt like the world had cracked open.
‘You must never do that again. Never!’ sniffed Jacques.
Christopher smiled, and said nothing.
But that night he wrote a letter.
If Irian didn’t know what was happening to him, there was yet someone who might.
In the end he kept it very simple. He wrote only that he had felt something, a kind of unspoken speech with the creatures, and he had thought that the sphinxes, who were ancient scholars, would know what it was and how it had come to him.
Then he crossed out ‘ancient’, in case that was insulting.
He left it outside the fendthorn, in the green post-box for the ratatoskas who came to collect messages.
The envelope read: Naravirala. The Sphinx Peninsula.