Future Lovecraft

GO, GO, GO, SAID THE BYAKHEE By Molly Tanzer

WRIGGLER LIVED IN the lake, and when you didn’t throw stones at him too much, he would bring up purple-scaled balık and tiny scuttling yengeç for roasty crunchings. Feathers lived in a hut in the treetops and she would help pick the highest-up kayısı when they were ripe and juicy—sometimes. Feathers was mean. Half the time, if you so much as looked at her funny, she would open her mouth wide like an O and birdy squawks would come out, eee eee eee, which, true, were the only words she ever said since she changed, but she could make them sound so angry! No one cared if she was angry, though, because even with the wings, she couldn’t fly. Wriggler could breathe underwater, and Whee! could swing from branch to branch with his long fuzzy tail, and Mister Pinch could bruise you with the handy claw on his extra arm, if he ever got mad at you. Ouch! Feathers, she looked like a birdy, but wasn’t, quite. Everybody said it was because she didn’t pray hard enough when she went on pilgrimage to Tuz Gölü, to see the Mother in the Salt.

Dicle was still a two-legs, two-hands, two-eyes, upright skin-wearer, so she still had her cradle-name that said nothing at all about who she really was. Bo-ring! But that would change soon, she knew it. When she went to fetch water, she could see, in the shiny surface of the well, two of the protuberances mammals and mostly-mammals got when they were ready to give live birth and suckle their young, and she’d had a dream about Wriggler coming to the surface and touching her between the legs with one of his long, bendy arms. Those were the signs, Whee! had said, but then again, Whee! couldn’t be trusted, not completely. Whee! wanted to be the one Dicle took as a snuggler, once she was given her true shape by the Mother in the Salt. But Dicle knew she’d rather snuggle with Wriggler, even if they had to do it mostly underwater, so he could huff and puff through his gills.

But Stag-Face said Dicle wasn’t ready for pilgrimage, or for huff-and-puff. Stag-Face said she was still a baby-girl and, since Stag-Face was the boss of everybody—those who’d visited the Mother in the Salt, those who hadn’t yet, and especially those who failed—she had to heed him. She hated it, though! Ugh! Kids like her, they couldn’t dance in the nightly revels, and they had to do all the worst chores, like climbing up the burning rocks to every single one of the hill-caves to dump out the piss-pots, or sweeping away the rubble to find the empty meat-shells when the earth shook and there were cave-ins, or weave reeds into wind-shields so people could sleep out of the dusty, gusting breezes. But Dicle didn’t like climbing, and she didn’t like to clear away rocks to find meat-shells, and she didn’t like weaving, either. She liked to run as fast as she could and she could run so fast! Stag-Face said maybe she could be a messenger, once she was old enough. But she was old enough and that was why she’d come up with the secret plan.

Well, it wasn’t a total secret. Wriggler knew, but he’d promised not to gurgle it to anyone else. In fact, he’d helped her by catching balık a-plenty, just for her. Dicle had built little fires and smoked them so she’d have food for the overnight journey to Tuz Gölü. She knew it was wrong to disobey Stag-Face, but ever since her mama had been crushed to death in the cave-in during the shivery months, Dicle had been restless. She was going to go on pilgrimage, whether mean old Stag-Face liked it or not, and when she went, she’d take her mama’s bones to the Mother in the Salt, so Mama could really rest. The Mother in the Salt would be so very pleased she’d change Dicle just how she’d always wanted, and then Dicle would come home and snuggle with Wriggler and everything would be wonderful.

The morning she left, early-early she awoke, after the revelers were all in bed and before even the dawn-time scurriers were out and about. She snuck away at a run, the rucksack she’d stuffed full of Mama’s bones and smoked balık bouncing on her back, the skin full of water slapping her hip. She’d also strapped a gleaming knife to her arm, so the beasties of the wood and the ghouls of the salt flats would see she was one dangerous girl. She bared her teeth as she ran, grr!

The path was made of cracked black stuff, and was smooth from ages and ages of people going to Tuz Gölü and elsewheres. Dicle wasn’t scared, though—at least, not at first. Back during the shivery months, right after Mama had died, she’d gone down the path a fair way before Whee! had caught her and told Stag-Face. Stag-Face had beat her, bad, and Whee! had laughed at her. That, more than anything, was why he’d never-ever be her snuggler.

Everybody, even little, unchanged girlies like Dicle, knew that time and space were the same thing, except when they weren’t. There were a few places around K’pah-doh-K’yah everyone knew to avoid, where, if your eyes worked right—which was no promise!—you could see how the trees grew backwards in time and would gobble you up, if you got too close to them. Stag-Face said those places were holy because, if you looked at them too long, or thought about them too hard while you were there, you’d get a nosebleed and that was the sign of the Mother in the Salt. Also, if an animal or person went there and he or she had a baby inside them, the baby would grow so fast it would tear its way out and make its mama or papa a meat-shell instead of a mama or a papa, and the baby would be a ghoul and never know anything except hunger. That was a bad thing and it happened a few times a year, even if everybody was careful, since time isn’t always the same and, therefore, neither is space.

Dicle ran through a few of those Mother-places the first day of her pilgrimage (She ran as fast as she could, so time didn’t slow down too much for her and make her journey take too long), but she saw more and more of them on the second day, as she drew closer to Tuz Gölü. She knew she was getting closer because all the trees had gone away, and she could taste salt on her lips when she licked them, and she was thirsty. She wasn’t scared, though, because she didn’t have a baby inside her and, if any of the ghouls said boo! to her, she showed them her knife and they slithered away back to their hidey-holes.

Then Dicle crested a hill, as the sun climbed as high as it could in the white-hot sky, and when she looked down into the valley, her eyes started to hurt from too much brightness. Ouch! But that was what Wriggler said would happen, so she knew she was in the right place. Below her stretched endless white: the Tuz Gölü, at last. When she shaded her eyes with her hand, she could see the altar at the edge of the pale lake, sitting a bit back from the shore. It was a rectangular box the size of the meeting-cave, with all these poles jutting from the top, holding up a big empty circle. The rectangular part had lots of holes in the side that Wriggler said weren’t caves but little peep-holes covered in clear stuff that kept the wind out better than woven reeds. That was strange, but Dicle fought her urge to explore. Her business was with the sacred stair and what was at the top of it. She’d show the Mother how dedicated she was by staying focused.

So, Dicle ran toward the altar, her bare feet pounding the earth, every cut or scrape on her body smarting from the salty wind, but as she drew closer, she saw something and stopped so quickly she almost stumble-tumbled—something was crawling out of the Tuz Gölü and nothing was supposed to come out of the Tuz Gölü except the Mother!

For the first time, Dicle felt scared, but she also felt curious. The thing—no, she realised, as she peered slit-eyed and scuttled closer sideways, just like a yengeç—things were not happy, not at all. One was screaming and flailing, and seemed to be missing a leg at the knee, and the other one was dragging the first as fast as it could away from the shore of the Tuz Gölü. As the dragger dragged the screamer farther from the edge of the lake, Dicle saw they were leaving a big, brown blood-smear behind them. But Dicle had seen wounds that bad before and knew just what to do. She ran closer to help them, only to feel more scared and curious than she ever had in her whole life when she realised that the things looked just like her, even though they were obviously long past the time when they should have made their pilgrimage and been changed by the Mother in the Salt.

Still, Dicle remembered her manners.

“Merhaba!” she called, approaching them cautiously.

“Get away from the lake!” shouted the dragger and Dicle understood what she was saying, even though she spoke the words in a funny way. “There’s something in there!”

“Of course there is, silly,” said Dicle. “That’s the Mother! Don’t you know?”

The screamer looked up at her and spat up a big bubble of blood, then went limp in the dragger’s arms. The dragger, who wasn’t dragging anymore, fell to her knees and vomited everywhere. Then she looked up at Dicle. Her mouth hung open, making shapes but no sound, and her eyes were glassy, empty, and bulging. She looked just like a balık! Dicle laughed and unsheathed her glinty knife.

The dragger wiped her mouth. “But we just left yesterday,” she said.

When Dicle’s mama died, Stag-Face had comforted Dicle in her distress and helped her perform the rituals after they’d dug out her meat-shell from underneath the rocks. Dicle was happy to do the same for the dragger.

“Don’t worry!” said Dicle and she patted the dragger on the shoulder, to comfort her in her distress. Then, as was proper, Dicle plunged the knife into the right thigh of the (now quiet) screamer, slicing through skin and flesh. Working quickly, she cut a long strip of meat from his shell.

“What are you doing?” whispered the dragger. “Oh God, oh, God, what are you doing?”

This person must be a stranger if she didn’t know the sorts of things even the littlest babies knew! Dicle decided to be Teacher and help her to understand. Leading by example, Dicle dipped her thumb in the (now quiet) screamer’s cooling blood and drew the insignia of the Mother in the Salt on the dragger’s forehead, then adorned herself the same way.

“The Mother knows our hearts and loves us all, her children,” said Dicle, and then began to gobble up the meat.

Once Dicle had given the stranger some water to rinse out her mouth—she’d vomited again as Dicle gobbled—she’d told Dicle her name was ‘Yıldız’, and forbidden Dicle from cutting the rest of the (now quiet) screamer’s flesh from his bones, even though that was what was supposed to happen.

“I don’t understand,” she kept saying, over and over and over again. Bo-ring! Dicle didn’t know what there was to understand, so she gave Yıldız a roasted balık to munch on. It looked so good, Dicle ate one herself.

After Yıldız ate, she said, again, “We just left yesterday.”

“How can that be?” Dicle was getting impatient. The sun was hot and she wanted to clamber up the sacred stair to summon the Mother in the Salt, so she could pray and change and then start home again. “You could not have left yesterday. You are all grown up, but you don’t know about the Mother and you haven’t changed. Did you fail on your pilgrimage?”

Yıldız laughed, but it wasn’t a happy-sounding laugh. “Maybe so,” she said. Then she pulled her knees into her chest and put her forehead on them. “This looks like the Tuz Gölü Research Station, so maybe….” Yıldız looked up at Dicle. “Where are you from?”

“I am on pilgrimage from K’pah-doh-K’yah,” said Dicle. “Where are you from? There’s not another village for a million billion klickers.”

“Cappadocia?” Yıldız looked upset. “Where in Cappadocia?”

Dicle frowned. She must be from far away.

“K’pah-doh-K’yah is how you say it,” she said, Miss Matter-of-Fact. “I live in the caves, of course, and Stag-Face is our boss. Everybody lives in the caves unless they’re like Wriggler, who has to live in the lake, so he can breathe.”

“No one’s lived in those caves for centuries,” said Yıldız, as if she knew anything! “There were too many earthquakes; they were unsafe to live in. The Turkish government forced everyone to evacuate.”

“Turkish?”

“Yes, Turkish. Turkey. That’s where we are.” Yıldız got all glassy-eyed again and went quiet. Dicle wondered if she’d have to slap Yıldız to get her to wake up, until Yıldız started talking again, but it was like she was a tiny baby. “Tuz Gölü is an endoheric basin, so if there was any runoff from the Hypersaline Resonator, it wouldn’t get into the rivers—”

“The Music brought the Mother, who came here, but was always here, and she gave us our true shapes. The Mother knows our hearts and loves us all, her children,” recited Dicle.

“The music what? The Mother?” Yıldız bit her lip. “I saw something down there…too big, it was too big, though. The lake should be less than a metre deep in the summer, and yet….”

“Come with me!” Dicle grabbed Yıldız’s arm and yanked her to her feet. “Space and time are the same thing. The Mother has always been there, forever and ever through time, so it’s deep and big enough for her! Don’t you know anything?”

Dicle took off running toward the altar, dragging Yıldız behind her. She was jitter-jumpy and restless, and anyways, the Mother would explain better, once she was summoned.

“Where are we—”

“Just come on!”

“What the hell is that?!”

Even though Dicle had reached the bottom of the sacred stair, which was made of hard rusty-crusty iron and ran zig-zag up the side of the altar, she turned around to see where Yıldız was pointing. There, at the top of the hill, terrible and looming against the bright afternoon sun, was Stag-Face. Dicle could see his antlers. He’d spotted her, and was running pell-mell down the salty sand to get to her. She began to tremble.

“Stag-Face,” she whispered. “Oh, no!”

“That man has a deer’s head!”

“Come on!” Dicle would not be thwarted. She yanked Yıldız up up up the sacred stair, until they reached the flat top of the altar. She heard clomping on the stairs behind them as Stag-Face’s hooves rang on the iron. Mean old Stag-Foot! He wouldn’t stop her, not now!

Dicle rummaged in her bag and, under the roasted balık, found the sack of her mama’s bones. She placed those at the base of the big circle and found the thing that Wriggler said was called a lever—it was just where he said it would be, on the left-hand side.

“No!” cried Stag-Face. He had reached the top and was pointing. “Dicle! Whee! told me you’d be here! Such a bad girlie! You don’t know enough, yet! You haven’t purified your heart; you haven’t learned the right songs! The Mother will not accept you for changing! She will punish us all!”

“The Mother knows our hearts and loves us all, her children,” shouted Dicle, as she wrapped her hands round the lever.

“Stop!” cried Stag-Face and Dicle heard his hooves pounding on the roof.

“He’s got a knife!” shrieked Yıldız. She was fumbling with something hanging on her belt. “Wait! Wait!”

But Dicle wouldn’t wait, even if Stag-Face had a knife. She yanked on the lever and big, crackling shafts of lightning began to curl around the circle, writhing and touching each other, just like Wriggler’s arms, and they were even the same purple-blue colour. Dicle felt a burst of heat behind her; she heard the angry sound of Stag-Face in pain, and then the salt began to sing. It was so beautiful, it made Dicle’s heart shudder and her skin crawl all over, and she felt a sudden gush of sticky hot wet over her face as she pressed her hands to the sides of her head in agony. It was blood, flowing from her eyes and ears and nose—ugh! But that was the sign of the Mother and, as the Mother emerged, Dicle began to pray, harder than anyone had ever prayed before.

Yıldız, who was now Spots, came back to K’pah-doh-K’yah with Dicle, who was now Jackrabbit. Spots took over bossing everyone because she had teeth and claws like a leopard, and she’d also killed Stag-Face with what she told Jackrabbit was called a “laser pistol”. And that was okay, because the Mother had made her understand, and afterwards Spots was the smartest of them all.

“Ahmet and I went through the Hypersaline Resonator, thinking we could visit this other place, a place up there in the sky that the star-watchers had said was okay for us to breathe and see,” Spots had explained. “The Resonator was supposed to help with the problem of too much time passing here while we were gone. But when we got there, we saw a Mother—a different Mother, or maybe the same one, I dunno—and we were afraid it would come back here through the Resonator, because we didn’t understand that the Mother loves us all, her children, and that would be a good thing! Silly us! But now everything is better.”

Jackrabbit, who had been Dicle, was sure that Mother loved everyone, but she wasn’t sure everything was better, even though she had finally changed. It was true that the Mother had granted her prayers to be the fastest of everybody, but she was now also the scaredest and rarely wanted to come out of her hidey-hole in the caves. All the sounds were so loud in her big ears! She’d almost gotten gobbled by the ghouls on the journey back home because, every time she heard something or saw something, it terrified her and she couldn’t always control her urge to run away and get deep underground.

But, she reminded herself every day, at least she could dance in the revels and she could jump higher than anyone. Not that she felt like jumping or reveling much, even for the sake of the Mother. She was very sad, all the time. Wriggler hadn’t lived more than a few months after snuggling with her. When he’d seen her true self, he’d said she was so pretty and they’d done the huff-and-puff a lot, but only for a few weeks. All of a sudden, he’d gotten sick and pale and told her to go away, so she’d gone away. When she next worked up the courage to bolt down to the lake, she’d found his corpse washed up and rotten on the bank. No one had eaten his meat and that was sad. All Jackrabbit could do for him was clean his bones and put them with the rest, for the time when the next little babies grew up and made their pilgrimage to the Mother in the Salt. And nobody else wanted to be her snuggler, not even Whee!, because Wriggler had put a baby inside her, but when it had come out, she’d gotten so scared when everyone had crowded around to see it that she’d gobbled it right up!

Being changed was sure not like she’d thought it would be. Jackrabbit was always frightened and always alone. Nothing was wonderful. Not at all.