Transforming Culture IP3

Chapter 3 of Island People

← Previous Scene .._____________________________________________.. Next Scene →

Island People is a young adult fantasy book centring on a young prince. The book starts with his kidnapping and follows his adventures as he not only escapes from his kidnapper but gains critical allies and friends. 

The entire book is scheduled on Substack, and there are several sequels. This is a book I wrote years ago, so it is in a bit of a rough form. Critiques and comments are more than welcome, they are requested.

The first difficulty was the constant riding. While Seth had a good seat and had ridden long hours on various hunts and trips, the Heroiini basically never, ever descended from their horses. Indeed, they were always extremely uncomfortable when forced to dismount, even for short times. His companion became impatient when Seth was forced to descend for a ‘call of nature’, and so an opportunity for him to just ‘stretch one’s legs’ was out of the question. The ‘points of contact’ between Seth and his horse, or, rather between Seth, his clothes, and his horse, were becoming ‘points of contention’; being rubbed raw. The pain, at first sharp, had turned into a throbbing and, oddly enough, an itching.

But this was an explicable problem. The problem that was worrying him the most was in his head… literally. More and more often, he was experiencing waves of dizziness. His vision was strange. His hearing was… odd, particularly when the Heroiini was speaking. It was almost as if he was hearing an echo of everything the Heroiini said, and each echo had slightly different meanings.

And he was hungry and thirsty all the time. It was a good thing the Heroiini had brought along plenty of food for Seth because he was going through it at a prodigious rate. Even the Heroiini seemed surprised, although he had little to compare it to, as Heroiini only ate occasionally, more for pleasure than for nutrition.

Seth noticed that all of these feelings were accentuated the longer he and the Heroiini spoke. Indeed, after a particularly long and intricate conversation, Seth would almost pass out. Yet, as time went on, he grew more and more eager to converse. Almost as if in a fever, he would ramble on, asking question after question. More and more, the questions dealt with how the Heroiini lived and how they felt. He came more and more to understand the anticipatory frustration of a young male’s life, to glimpse the power and pleasure of being an alpha male. The Heroiini’s stories of his childhood would leave him with a vast feeling of imagination, one of a herd, galloping in the middle of his tall elders.

One evening Seth was overcome with a wave of frustration; frustration at the clothes that he wore between himself and the horse. Suddenly, they seemed overwhelmingly confining, irritating, and filthy. The frustration grew and grew, and suddenly he leapt off his horse and was tearing at his trousers. In his frenzy, he continued tugging vainly at them for several minutes before remembering his knife. Seizing it, he made a slit in the material of his trousers and tore them up along the seam, from side to side. A little more work and he wore nothing at all that would lie between himself and the horse. Eagerly, he mounted the horse again, the change from frustration to comfort almost painful “when he reseated himself. Why had he ever worn such stupid clothes? Why would anyone do such a thing?

The Heroiini had stopped abruptly when his charge had leapt from the horse and then watched him with amazement. While no Heroiini was ever so foolish as to wear clothing that came between him and his horse, Farmers and the other races invariably wore such. He opened his mouth to ask Seth what he was doing and then lapsed into silence. What was there to ask?

The fever came on Seth again, but this time not in the form of questions. He began to speak of the ground they were traversing, its beauty. He commented on the grass, how luxurious it was, and how it differed from other grasses they had passed over. He spoke of his own frustration and desire for a Wife. He spoke of the joy of riding under the stars. He spoke of the different gaits of the horse and the beauty and uses of each one. He spoke more and more rapidly, jumping from subject to subject. He seemed to have no control over what he said. His vision blurred more and more, seeming to be almost double. The dizziness rose in greater and greater waves, until, in one final wave, blackness overcame his vision and he slept.

While he slept, Seth’s body finished a process it had been performing over the last several days, a transformation that it had never performed before. From the inside of Seth’s thighs and groin, skin meshed with skin, nerves with nerves. An intricate system of exchange was finalized, a system that was able, at a moment’s notice, to detach from the horse; but that would normally allow for the exchange of a myriad of bodily functions between Seth and his horse. Their nervous systems were welded into an integrated whole. What the horse saw, Seth could see; what Seth wanted, the horse would want, and vice versa. Not one as the Human body is one, but far more one than any mere ‘rider’. Seth slept on, and the body worked on… at first from resources from Seth’s scant reserve, and then able to draw on the much vaster reserves of the horse. None of the contacts were visible from the outside, at least not while his clothes were on. Heroiini and Humans were always the closest together, physically anyway, so the minor changes that Seth’s body made in his face and limbs went unnoticed in the darkness. Heroiini and their horses slept little, or perhaps it is better to say that they slept differently. While never undergoing the unconsciousness of Humans, a Heroiini’s body has its resting cycle, with parts of the mind awake while the rest rests. So Seth’s captor was awake, and both horses were plodding quietly along, but his captor was accustomed to his captive’s periods of unconsciousness… a weakness of the other races that Heroiini instinctively despised.

As dawn drew near, the Heroiini did begin to notice some changes. Ever aware of their surroundings in a herd, he first noticed small things about the way Seth’s horse was moving. A led horse, with a Farmer on its back (or, worse, one of the other races), moves with a certain stiffness, a certain awkwardness. A Heroiini and his horse move with a unitary grace. The sounds of the steps this horse was making, small changes in those sounds, caused a startled attention. Glancing over, he noticed as well a difference in the way the Farmer was sitting. Farmers, even the best riders, sat ‘separate’ from their horses, two, not one. But this boy, even in his unconscious state, was sitting differently.

And then, even more powerfully, came the smell. Horses are alive to smell. They use it to warn them of danger and to inform them of the presence and nature of other horses. And the Heroiini shared the sense of smell and its meanings with his horse. Before today, before right now, the smell from the horse and the Farmer had been just that, ‘a’ horse and ‘a’ Farmer. A stallion, of course (Heroiini would never geld their horses, and no Heroiini could bring himself to put a male on a female horse), even a Farmer male. But now the smell was that of ‘rival’. Each Heroiini male/horse unit was a rival to the other. Alpha males, of course. But even solitary males always scented each other as ‘rivals’. A herd could only have one male.

And now the boy and his horse had that smell. And it was evident from the behaviour of the other horse that it, too, sensed the difference. The glances that it sent their way, before relatively docile, were now actively… not hostile…

But competitive.

← Previous Scene .._____________________________________________.. Next Scene →