Rantza Of The Jungle

Brought up by the Folk in their hidden African crater-realm, Rantza must seek her own kind in the strangeness of the Outer World beyond...

Rantza howls at the blood moon. She was bleeding. She draws her lips back from her sharp white teeth, tilts her face to the sky, and howls like a beast of the forest. The night valley is still and vibrant around her. She wears a necklace of shells, there are white stripes smeared down her cheeks and across her forehead. She wears nothing else. Turok stirs beside her. He reaches out his huge paw of a hand to reassure her. Shooting stars rip the night sky above them. Like the seeds of alien children falling to Earth.

His touch is warm and strong. She looks down at him and smiles. She feels safe with him. She'd always felt safe with him. She reaches down over the bristly fur of his well-muscled chest and stomach, to touch his fuck-stick and draw her finger along its length. The expression on his big flat face shifts from concern, to pleasure. They roll together. He mounts her from behind, their mating is the coming together of rutting beasts, she braces to receive him, snarling out her pleasure, caught up in the primal urgency of the sky fucking the earth, flooding her with seed as the rain fertilises the soil to bring forth new life, shaking the mountains with their raw lust...

As he finally withdraws from her aching core, she sees the trace of her blood on the fat head of his cock. They both know it is good. It is right. They fold into each other, coiling into a sleep of tangled limbs, beneath the blood moon.

With morning they follow the river as it eventually broadens into a wide wetland lake where giant turtles bask on glistening mudflats, barely raising their huge heads to watch the interlopers pace past. By noon they reach the wrecked fuselage of the plane. Masked in living green, it had been slowly infested by creeping plants over the years, as though submerging into its slow inexorable decay. She looks at it with no trace of recognition. If she expected an inrush of memories, there were none. If she expected a vague familiarity, she feels nothing. She looks questioningly across at Turok's hulking form. He simply shrugs his huge shoulders and scratches his forehead in a deliberately comical fashion intended to make her smile.

She thinks back to the village, the huts aglow with night fires on the broad curve of the slow river. She'd gone seeking advice and guidance, to ask why the moon is red. Inside the head-woman's domicile, she asked the wise earth-mother. The words the crone spoke run around inside her head. They're abrupt, as if cruel, telling her 'You are not of the folk.' Hurtful words. But things she'd always suspected, always half known. Her breasts are high and rounded, while the others have down-hung, almost pendulous dugs. Rantza has less body hair too, a scut of auburn in the nook of her groin, at her armpits. She'd often wished she wasn't different. But it was inescapable. Now she was being told why. She was of age. There would come a time for mating. She blushed, her eyes downcast. It was time for her to leave the land of the Folk, and return to what she'd been told was 'her own people'. She feels confusion and resentment. As if she was being rejected by those she loves, exiled from everything she'd ever known.

'Here' said the earth-mother, draping a bright ruby pendant around her neck. 'This is a talking-stone which enables you to understand the speech of others. It will aid you.' But Turok was also there to guide and protect her on the long journey. Turok, who was always there for her when she needs him most. She smiles at the memory of how she'd once woven a chain of flowers, and draped it around his proud fuck-stick. She'd been claiming him. As he had claimed her.

She carries a shoulder-sack woven from reeds strengthened with straps of beaten leather, it contains her knives, tinder-flints, salted fish wrapped in leaves, and a coil of rope. He carries a crude stone-tipped spear. He uses it to dislodge rusted sections of the wrecked plane. This was supposedly how she'd arrived here in the valley, as a baby. Or so the head-woman had told her. The other two occupants of the craft -- her natural parents, had not survived. In accordance with the traditions of the Folk, they'd been burned and returned to the cycle of natural energy. And she'd been raised and cared for and loved. But now was the time for her to discover her own truths.

Beyond the twisted structure that had fallen from the sky they trek for two days, resting beneath shady trees, drinking from sparkling streams of water that cascade from high in the ring-mountains, eating succulent fruit that hangs low from the trees where gaudy birds shriek and apes play. They hide in tall reeds as a group of riders pass, astride heavy-footed ostrich-birds, she couldn't be sure if the rider's faceted insect-eyes were part of a helmet, or not. Turok is solid, a reliable presence by her side. Herds of antelope flee across the grassland, disturbed by the lazy wandering of a glyptodon, its armadillo-scales catching the sun's colours, its heavy club-tail leaving a furrow through the ground. A sky-boat chugs erratically above them, an unwieldy assemblage of sails and rotors, dishes and moving panels, leaving a trail of coal-fire smoke in its wake. She'd been told they were hunting cloud-whales, although she'd never seen any such creatures. A drone of human-sized bees cluster in a forest of tree-tall sunflowers.

Following guidance given by the head-woman, using the plane-wreck as an orientation point aligned to a triple-peak mountain formation ahead, they approach the lost city at the foot of the towering rim. Cliffs so steep, so black, so pitted with scars, rising to buttresses so far above their heads that they dwarf everything and seem to cast a gloom over this corner of the world. She throws her head back, squints her eyes against the shimmery purplish brightness of sky, and gazes upwards towards the towering crest. Clouds scud across the rim of the great wall, making it appear as if the upper ramparts are frozen in the act of eternally toppling down to crush them.

It's as though the ruins of the city grow organically out from living rock, grotesque with basalt spires, fuzzed between prickle-bushes. Turok was scared. A superstitious fear of the ancient peoples who'd abandoned their city here. There are giant columns and towers of stone, crumbling and dense with liana creepers, tiers of monstrous steps designed for a race of giants, smothered in cascades of gaudy yellow blossoms, and dark temples that tunnel into the solid rock-face of the mountain in treacherous mouths toothed with needles of stone. The stories say the ruins remain intact across ten-thousand years. Since the deluge that sank and drowned the ancient's mother-continent, leaving far-flung colonies such as this abandoned to dust and decay. There are still symbols of monstrous winged entities and beasts that are only part-mythical carved into the walls. The travellers feel a huge unease, as if the stone gaze of a million unseen eyes are watching them.

'Let us not seek danger when danger is eager enough to seek us out,' cautions Turok, his eyes searching the hidden places above them.

His words also speak to her own secret fears. 'Yet I must pass through here, as the earth-mother says. But Turok, you are free to return to the village if that is your wish.' The breeze stirs her russet hair playfully across her shoulders and breasts, momentarily veiling her proud nipples, then thoughtlessly flicks it away in a game of conceal and reveal.

'I fear for myself' grunts Turok, his eyes suddenly downcast. 'But I fear for you even more. We are mated, despite what the earth-mother forbids.' Rantza smiles up at him. Yes, the village head-woman feared the miscegenation their copulation would bring, but they're already way too late for that.

The silence of centuries lies thick and cloying here, a living silence more sinister than sound, more terrible than fear. Then, up the long pull of the steep climb, the stench of rotting vegetable matter and excrement hangs in the air, and there's the solitary sound of protracted groaning... or just the wind blowing through broken rocks? Dozens of spiders as big as her splayed hand scuttle away through bristling sedge. A startle of black shades detach themselves from high blackness in a whirling scatter of bats, a stippling of shadows that envelops them. The flight of wide marble stairs, running with moss and weed, ascends ever higher, he a few paces ahead of her, his stone-tipped spear held warily ready. He places his weight upon the highest step... and it tilts, as if on a pivot, he loses his footing and falls backwards, catching her in his wild tumble, and they crash head-over-heels down the worn stone tiers, to collapse in an ungainly huddle at the bottom, bruised, shaken and slimed with filth.

It's only as she squirms around that she sees they are surrounded by four pale figures. She sees the feet first... leather sandals, sunless white skin. Three of them wear light armour, ornate gold chest-plates and greaves, with crested helmets drawn in around leprous bone-white faces, emaciated arms, with hands clutching short stabbing swords. The third is a naked woman, but all are cadaverously thin and wasted. Turok rubs slimy muck from his eyes and squats stupidly awaiting Rantza's lead. He has muscle. She has intelligence.

She lets an age slide by. Then holds her hands out in front of her, palms down, in a gesture intended to show conciliation. 'We were not aware that people lived here,' she says carefully. 'We just wish to pass through to the outer world beyond.'

One of the soldiers gestures wordlessly with his blade. Less threatening than offering invitation. The two interlopers stand unsteadily, still unsettled by the abrupt, and -- they now realise, deliberately engineered, fall. And they walk in the direction indicated, stooping through a dark and previously-ignored portal into the deep gloom of a dankly-smelling passage. The low-ceiling drips wet with lichen, moss and sprouting grey mould. It opens out into a hall filled with a forest of towering fungus fat with huge seedpods. Gaunt naked people harvest chunks of vegetal flesh into bowls, they're so skinny they're sexless wraith-like bundles of bones. Rantza is unable to breathe for the scent of pulpy spores that rise like steam into the foetid air, tainting the slanting gold light that hangs on its dullness, a dusting of dry pollen that sticks to their faces and skin, making Turok's dark hair ludicrously fair.

As she looks up at him in curious gaze, his face slurs into a spectrum of shades, melting into skewed light. The floor shimmers and ripples in hallucinogenic tides. Then there's a short barking sound. A slithering uncoiling cable of quivering warted green lashes and flexes across the stone floor. It ends in a bulbous shape, a tip that tapers into a vicious barb. Their silent guardian soldiers tense. The arrow targets one of them, strikes upwards with the speed of a snake between his legs, spearing him in the anus and further, lifting him physically as he settles in writhing agony onto the skewering spear burrowing into his intestines, elevating him bodily off his feet, his face contorted into long mute torment as his limbs twitch in tortured spasms. Ascending, as though crucified on rays of light, until suspended level with her head.

'Cre-Crak-Lree-Ler-Cre-Crak.' His voice is etched from acid, a voice that rattles in an alien croak. Her eyes crawl upwards to fix on his distorted face. Then beyond his face, to scintillating shapes perched on the solid stone plinth behind him, where she's able to discern the outline of a massive creature. One of nine. Part vulture, part pterodactyl, as big and bigger than a man. Worse, three of the grotesque beings are mummified in discoloured layers of frayed cloth, three others are barely more than skeletal remains with patches of rotting diseased skin hung in dismal remains. The penetrated man's mouth twists and reshapes, as though tasting sounds, spitting them out. The hapless sacrifice is impaled on the scaly tail of one of the winged serpents. With rising horror Rantza realises that it is this monstrous entity that is operating him like a cruel puppet-master uses a marionette. 'Ishtar' it says in a voice of hollow unhuman timbre. 'Ishtar. Ishtar will persist. Through you, Ishtar will persist.'

The creature's unblinking black eyes glimmer with cold intelligence, set deep into wells of thin green scales, a high crest surmounting its beaked skull, with needle-sharp teeth drooling saliva. She realises that it is this hideous symbiosis between reptilian monsters of a bygone era, with the hallucinogenic fungus, that keeps the slave population in eternal submission. A nightmare cult that unnaturally survives out of time, and is approaching its perverted end of days. She fights down the rising gorge of revulsion choking her throat, as the attacking spores soak into her skin. The world tilts in a storm of light. And she is swallowed in a gulp of blackness.

'Why is the moon red?'

She wakes, the air peppered with acrid and clammy odours. A woman with dead eyes looks down at her. Rantza forces herself to ask 'Who are you people?' Her throat is dry and tastes foul. But the bright ruby talking-stone pendant is still around her neck.

'I am Phutra. We serve the Marah. In return they grant us eternal life.'

She has been moved aside, into a corner of the hall, pushed up against a wall of brittle dehydrated fungus. As though the city's human slaves are so conditioned to harvest the mushroom flesh that they keep gathering it for nine Marah, although only three of them survive, and so it is stacked here in dusty mounds to dry and rot. She glances around hastily. Her shoulder-sack lies a little way away, close beside where the previously-impaled victim crawls on hands and knees groaning, slowly attempting to stand.

'Where is my mate? Where is Turok?'

The woman with dead eyes points, and Rantza gazes in horror. Turok has been strapped to a raised frame, he is anally impaled by the Marah's barbed tail, while a pulsing umbilical hoods his penis, flexing and gulping in squirming motion. 'The Marah drains his elixir, which will renew us and give us life.'

'They will kill him' says Rantza gravely.

The naked Phutra nods. 'That is likely. Yet as a result, we -- who are aged, dry and barren, shall live.'

Rantza was brought up by the Folk not to fear hurt, to face danger with resolve and calm reason. She thinks simply and cleanly, and her decisions were always clear-cut, even when her motives were sometimes obscure. But this ancient horror of vile perversion is almost too much to bear. She hides her face in her hands as if from terror, her breasts shimmer as she sobs, yet her agile mind was working furiously.

'Phutra, the elixir that Turok generates in his balls is not inexhaustible. You must realise that. There will be elixir for the Marah, and for certain of the favoured slaves. Are you favoured? I think not. I fear you will be excluded from the favoured. You will age and die without it. Such is your sad fate.'

The woman turns her dead eyes on her, with the shadow of new interest.

'Help me, and I will ensure you benefit from his virility. As I have.'

The woman seems conflicted, looking this way and that. 'What must I do?'

'A small thing. Reach my bag for me, it has been cast over there, on the floor.'

The woman searches with her dull eyes. The previous victim of the barb now stands, resting for support against a stone pillar, massaging his tender buttocks warily. The bag lies in a heap at his feet. The woman moves across, as though to show concern, whispers to the man and grips his arm in a gesture of comfort. Then she stoops to retrieve the bag. She waits for a moment. Then shuffles back across to where Rantza crouches. All the while, Turok is groaning in waves of something midway between agony and orgasmic ecstasy as all attention is focused on his spasming ordeal.

Rantza smiles her gratitude, and turns away, as though horrified by the torment being inflicted upon her mate, she digs deep into her bag. Yes, the contents are undisturbed. Her fingers close around her tinder-flints. She strikes them sharply. No-one even seems to notice her furtive activity. She strikes sparks that flare and die, using her naked body to shield what she's doing. The next shower of sparks fall into the desiccated fungus wafers, where they gutter and glow. Then fade, leaving only a faint smoulder of grey smoke. She strikes again, the sparks ignite and hold, flickering into fingers of faint flame, where the compressed mushroom-flesh begins to glimmer. The flames catch fast, dancing and leaping through the dehydrated material into a roaring conflagration. People turn and stare dull-eyed, as though unsure how to react, so deadened by their mindless slavery they're no longer capable of independent thought.

Rantza awaits her moment. By the time they're alerted to action there's an inferno of flames, she can feel its burning heat on her bare skin. A stab of terror strikes through her temples, as though she's picking up the Marah's mental alarm, the shock of it causes her to stumble forward as the terrified slaves run in a panicky confusion. The flames are circling the walls, the intense furnace heat causing it to leap across to ignite new flares of fire, while the haze of spores suspended in the air start detonating in sharp smoky explosions that dance in constellations of lightning. It's at that moment she leaps forward, razor-edged stone knife in her hand, to where Turok squirms and spasms against his bondage. She slashes at the barb impaling him. It lashes in wounded reaction, spraying a green ichor of gouting blood. She slashes again and again until it severs, the amputated snake-body wriggling away leaving a slippery trail of gore. The umbilical is easier. Two sharp cuts and it falls away, dribbling stolen semen.

The Marah is a banshee screaming in her head. All of the scattered slaves obviously feel its mental radiation even more intensely. Some attempt to fight the conflagration, colliding with others who are trying to flee, or simply running around in circles howling. The soldiers in crested helmets use their blades to carve an escape route through living bodies. Then the mighty ancient monster out of time strains and stretches, its long-unused wings spreading in dark leathery menace, it beats the air with its wings then launches itself from its perch in a desperate flight, it lifts momentarily, then crashes down into the blaze setting off a hail of fiery comets.

Rantza cuts Turok free, he staggers dazed and confused. A cluster of slaves grovel and fight each other to get drops of the semen oozing from the deflating umbilical. Phutra seems on the verge of joining them, until Rantza pulls her around. 'Show us how to reach the outer world. Show us the way.'

After a moment of indecision, conditioned to follow instructions, she turns and obeys, leading them through the roaring chaos of flailing jostling bodies and clouds of sickeningly rich smoke towards the steps leading up and out. Rantza leads Turok like a big docile child, he stumbles and lurches drunkenly beside her as the slave woman draws them into a series of dank passages, interrupted every now and then by screaming people shoving past making good their own escape. They begin to climb a spiral staircase, long neglected and worn, as the sounds drain away behind them and the air clears by degrees the higher they ascend.

Eventually they pause to rest. Phutra looks up at her two companions. Her eyes no longer dead. 'The voices that command in my head are gone' she says simply, 'it's like I'm finally waking from a monstrous nightmare.'