The Vorrh

him drop them: he had seen many wondrous and terrible sights, and was not easily surprised by unnatural phenomena, but this place bred things beyond the nightmares of devils.
    He bent and rummaged in the low bush where the spheres had fallen, found them and again inspected them. Yes, there it was: stronger in one, but apparent in both. The irises were moving, dilating back and forth, adjusting their sights: the eyes were still alive. This was magic beyond the powers of his comprehension.
    His hand was wet; he examined it and realised that one of the eyes was leaking. Placing the good one in the deepest pouch of his spell belt, he cut open the grass cage around the damaged eye and saw that one of the thorns had hooked inwards, piercing it deeply. More fluid was escaping, and the eye had started to lose its shape.
    He found a flat stone and brushed it clean. Holding the eye between the forefingers of his left hand, he laid it on the rock and, taking his razor-sharp knife in his right hand, carefully slit it open, causing the rest of the fluid to soak away into the stone. Tsungali bent close enough to see the tiny muscles, working to focus the lens, and the iris, still trying to shutter the overbearing light. Their minute energies were independent and self-willed. He probed the interior with his hungry vision; he thought he saw the stub of the optic nerve twitch, but could not be sure. The fluid and the movement attracted the attentions of other watchers, and brought the hungry curiosity of a stream of black ants to the rock. Without hesitation, they continued the dissection that Tsungali had started. He watched the eye being nibbled apart and ferried away, its muscles still alive and contracting as the insects held it aloft like a great prize, dragging it backwards along the glistening black chain of their frantic bodies. A few minutes later, there was nothing left – even the stain was fought over and diminished by the porous stone and the cooking sun.
    Tsungali put his hand protectively over the closed pouch; whatever its origins, he knew that he had in his possession a most valuable prize.
    * * *

    ‘I was born this way,’ Ishmael answered with a wince.
    They were on a high rock in the sun. Williams had carried him there, away from the killing fields of the anthropophagi. They talked and questioned each other as the white man worked on Ishmael’s wounds.
    ‘I came here from the city.’
    ‘Why?’ asked Williams, without looking up from his work.
    ‘I wanted to escape from the people and see if my origins were here.’
    ‘What, with those things down there?’
    ‘No, not them, something else. I don’t know,’ the cyclops said, catching a small movement out of the corner of his eye.
    ‘How long have you been here?’ Williams asked.
    Ishmael noticed the bow at the same time it noticed him. It moved again. Small, muscular adjustments inside its taut form caused it to stir against the warm rocks. He barely heard his companion’s repeated question.
    ‘I said, how long?’ came the murmured reiteration, from somewhere below his left knee.
    It must have been the sun warming it, or his pain and shock knitting together to create the illusion.
    ‘Answer me!’ demanded a frustrated Williams. ‘How long have you been here?!’
    ‘Sorry?! What?’ spluttered Ishmael.
    Williams moved to the other side of the prone cyclops. ‘I said, how long have you been in the Vorrh?’
    ‘I don’t know. Six days? Maybe more. I have lost count.’
    ‘You nearly lost your life,’ said Williams.
    The cyclops said nothing, but shuffled himself into a sitting position. The pain was fading and he was beginning to trust this stranger and his bag of healing plants.
    ‘How long have you been here?’ asked Ishmael.
    ‘Now that is a difficult question to answer,’ Williams answered. ‘Maybe a week. Maybe a year. Maybe much longer. I have little memory of the life I led before I entered this fearsome place. But I have been here before; of that I am certain. What lies ahead is only destiny.’
    Ishmael started to see him in a different way and said, ‘They say that the forest lives on memory, that it devours the memory of men.’
    ‘Do they?’ said Williams, handing the cyclops a cup of tinctured water.
    ‘Yes!’ said Ishmael earnestly, not sensing the irony in the other’s question.
    The bow trembled again. Its twitch displaced it, and it slid down across the rock, like the big hand of a clock. Its clatter startled the