Return to Krell

"Respect," she replied. She was prominent in her field, but some people still treated her like a little girl at times. As much as she respected Barnes and valued his tutelage, he still saw her more like a granddaughter than as a fellow academic. She was hoping that this expedition would win her some more clout with the higher ups at the UAS, show them that she was capable of getting her hands dirty in the field.

"I will teach you the patterns," the teacher said, "come."

Many of the other females were already hard at work on their own necklaces. They were weaving together plant fibers to make string, slotting beads onto them, and then arranging them in colorful patterns. They added shells here and there, sometimes a small piece of carved wood. The work was surprisingly intricate for the large and outwardly clumsy reptiles.

So each female made their own necklace, as if wearing their hopes and dreams on their sleeve for all others to see. It was an odd concept, one that was foreign to human society where such aspirations and heartfelt desires were kept under lock and key, only to be shared with one's closest confidantes. Just as the Krell wore their official information on their skin, so too did they put aspects of their personality on display via these items of jewelry.

There was no need for dating services on Krell, if someone sorely wanted a mate, then you would be able to read it in the patterns on their necklace. Looking for friends to share in a hunting trip? Just go looking for hunters, their aspirations would be woven into their jewelry.

The teacher placed a large, flat leaf in Lena's hands, about the size and shape of a water lily. She began to pile it with beads and fronds of dry grass, selecting them based on color and shape as Lena became weighed down by the load. When she was done, she directed Lena to return to her place in the circle. She sat down in the mud, placing the laden leaf at her feet. It was obviously there to prevent the beads from getting lost or dirty in the wet soil. The teacher crouched in front of her and began to weave the fronds together, braiding them into a stronger strand. When that was done, she deftly threaded the beads onto the string, creating a colored pattern that reminded Lena of a coral snake. It was surprisingly delicate work, and it was immediately obvious to Lena how the colorful bands would look when the piece was finished.

She began to copy the teacher, who seemed pleased by how quickly she had understood. Perhaps the juveniles had needed more instruction. She explained to Lena how the pattern that she had arranged communicated the pursuit of knowledge and a desire to be respected and recognized, but it was steeped in Krell mythology, and coupled with the often lackluster translations she didn't glean much useful information from the exchange. She elected to just do as the teacher instructed, rather than making an attempt to understand the finer points. There was something about the twin suns being sisters, a lake spirit, too vague and metaphorical for an accurate translation.

The teacher left Lena to her own devices for a while, tending to her other students, and before long Lena had finished assembling what was to be the base of the necklace. She had ended up with a disk of beads, one bead thick and ten beads deep, the pattern that the teacher had shown her repeating around its circumference. It was quite pretty, and Lena was proud of her handiwork. It was just as good as any of those made by her immediate neighbors. She had a few beads left over, as she had made the necklace smaller than those of the other students so that it would fit around her relatively tiny neck.

Noting that she was done, the teacher returned to examine it, turning it over in her massive hands as she inspected Lena's craftsmanship.

"Good, but small. You are also small, no matter. Come, next we add shells."

Lena rose to her feet and walked over to the pile of materials, where the aliens had assembled a large stack of assorted shells. They had obviously been gathered along the shore of the lake, or perhaps on the muddy bottom, coming in all shapes and sizes. They were not unlike the seashells that one might find littering the beaches of Earth, spirals and conchs, snail and clam shells.

"What do these represent?" Lena asked.

"Just for looks," the teacher replied dismissively. They were just decorative then? Fair enough. Lena selected the shells that she liked the look of, returning to her seat with a handful and beginning to attach them to another string that was placed at the bottom rung of the necklace, the shells having already been drilled with holes at some point. She noted that they still smelled of the lake. They must have been collected recently. Come to think of it, all of these materials seemed to have been recently harvested. She asked the teacher if that was the case, and the dark-scaled Krell seemed pleased that she was showing an interest.

"Materials must be collected on same day, only beads are reused. Unused shells must be returned to the lake, unused reeds left to decay. The magic is strongest when fresh."

Ah, it was part of their superstitions then. The beads were artificial in nature and so they seemed to be exempt, but all of the organic components had to be collected and used on the same day, or else returned to nature.

Before long Lena had finished, and a chain of assorted shells now dangled beneath the colorful bands of beads. There was only one touch left, the wooden charms that she had seen some of the females carving. There was a pile of them on a flat leaf beside the reeds, polished smooth like pebbles on a riverbed, about the size of Lena's palm. They too were organic, and so they must have been fashioned earlier that day, the ashen color suggested that they had come from the mangrove trees.

Carving was something that Lena was not well versed in, and so when the teacher handed her a charm and one of the obsidian knives, she didn't know where to begin. The knife itself was the size of a small sword, she wouldn't have been able to make good use of it even if she had been a master whittler.

"Have you never carved?" The teacher asked her, cocking her head. Apparently carving was as common as writing here, in fact it might be the Krell equivalent. There was no paper here, no computers, no means of storing information besides carving it into wood. In a sense, Lena was illiterate by Krell standards.

"No," she admitted, "can you show me?"

The aged Krell sat before her on the mud, taking the items from Lena's hands and beginning to explain the purpose of the wooden medallion as she chipped away at it. The knife was incredibly sharp, cutting through the dense material with alarming ease. Where had they obtained obsidian? Like the beads, was it imported from some far off land where the rocks breached the surface of the swamp?

"Charm is for strengthen body or mind," she muttered as she chipped away at the wood. "You must engrave a rune, and the rune grants power. Beads are your hopes and wishes, rune is what you wish to better about yourself. Admit the flaw, and the rune will help correct it. This rune must be carved by you, but since you cannot carve, I will help."

Lena watched as the alien carved a swirling character into the wood, and then handed it back to her. She threaded a string through the hole at one end, adding more beads to decorate the bare string as the charm hung from the top layer of the necklace like a pendant. Finally it was complete, Lena holding up her newly minted necklace, smiling as she admired it. The fact that she had made it herself gave it more value than some random trinket that had been bought from a store, and perhaps that was the point. Though she couldn't read the necklace in the way that the Krell did, she knew that the pattern embodied her quest for knowledge and her desire to be recognized for her accomplishments.

"What does the rune mean?" She asked, the teacher rumbling her reply.

"Make you grow taller."

Lena suppressed a laugh. That was a magical power that she could certainly use.

"If women make the necklaces, where do the men get them?" She asked, the thought only now occurring to her. Most of the males that she had seen had been wearing them, and the village elder had been absolutely covered in several layers of decorative jewelry.

"We make for them, a gift for mates," she said as her tone turned sly. "He must bare his desires, admit his flaws. Only then can we make necklace for him."

Lena chuckled again, the Krell females were crafty.

"What about the elder? He had a lot of necklaces."

"For ceremony," the teacher explained, "elder carry hopes and desires of whole circle."

So the elder wore the equivalent of every necklace in the village? It probably wasn't that simple, Lena was sure that they must have pooled some of the elements together, as the elder had not been wearing a hundred separate necklaces. Still, it was a heartwarming concept, to have the leader of the village literally carry the hopes and dreams of his kin.

"Better than most," the teacher said, her comment directed towards Lena's handiwork. She took it from the academic's hands and draped it about her shoulders, the dangling shells tickling the bare skin atop her breasts. "You know all I can teach, scholar. Take it back with you."

That was her cue to leave, and Lena thanked the teacher profusely before exiting the circle of juvenile Krell, heading off towards the lake in order to find Sleethe. She suspected that he was probably lounging in the water, and sure enough, that was where she found him.

"Hey Sleethe!" She called, her voice carrying out over the lake. He opened one eye sleepily and wound his way back towards the shore like a massive alligator. The dark water poured from his scutes as he climbed up the muddy shore.

"Look," Lena announced, twirling for him as she sported her new necklace. "Anyone would think I was going native."

He examined it for a few moments, clearly still groggy, and then warbled in approval.

"Maybe I'll make one for you soon," she added with a grin, and the idea seemed to fluster him. She laughed at his reaction, taking him by the scaly arm and steering him towards the village.

"Alright, I'd better get some work done. Let's get back to the temple."

CHAPTER 9: SECRET HISTORY

The flashlight played across the murals, illuminating the engravings as Lena examined them. Much of the Krell script was phonetic, and so it was fairly easy to piece together what the carved runes were trying to convey. There were some that she just couldn't get her head around, too complex to be parsed by her, or by the computer's algorithms. Still, it wasn't too hard to infer meaning through context.

She had begun beside the entrance, moving clockwise as she walked around the circular room. It was logical to assume that if the Krell wrote up to down and left to right, then the pictograms and reliefs were likely arranged in a similar pattern. She had employed Sleethe's help in some places, having him lift her up onto his shoulders so that she could reach the higher murals.

She was fairly confident that this was a history of their race, which was immensely exciting, but she had no frame of reference. The Krell didn't record time in any way that she could understand. They didn't have a calendar, at least none that she had been able to uncover so far. Whenever she asked Sleethe about it, he was only able to give her very vague measurements that only related to him personally. She could carbon date the wood, but that wouldn't be of any help if the murals were describing events that had transpired far before the walls that they had been inscribed onto had been erected.

Still, a history was starting to come together, one that grew more unusual the more that she learned about it. By the time that the twin suns were getting low in the sky she had collected detailed pictures of each and every mural, adding to the ones that were already in the computer's database, and with the help of some photo editing software she had managed to clean them up as best she could. That left her with a catalog of murals, arranged in the correct order, and with a ninety percent accurate translation of the runes.

Lena took a bite of her protein bar, flicking through the images, Sleethe sitting behind her as he looked over her shoulder at the images flashing by on the trio of screens.

"Ok, let's start from the top. I'm going to read, and you're going to tell me if it's right or wrong. Got it?"

He huffed affirmatively, and she brought up the first image, careful to record everything with her wrist device.

This first mural showed a group of Krell going about what she now knew to be their usual business. They built, cultivated plants, lounged on the mud and swam in the lakes. It seemed very peaceful. The best translation that she could come up with, a combination of machine learning and her own interpretation, was displayed to one side.

"So, an indeterminate number of years ago, the Krell were minding their own business and living their lives. Then..."

She scrolled to the next image, this one showing half a dozen Krell who were hiding inside a thicket of mangrove trees, while a trio of cigar-shaped Broker vessels descended from the sky to land in a clearing. The drawings were fairly crude, reminding her of Medieval etchings, but they did a fair enough job. The Krell appeared afraid, confused, their snouts emerging from between the pale trunks as they looked on.

"The Benefactors came, and they landed on your planet."

Sleethe nodded, and so she moved on to the next picture. This one depicted a closeup of one of the cigar-shaped vessels, a hole opening up in its hull. It looked much the same as the ship that she had arrived on. The Krell were slowly emerging from the forest, taking a few tentative steps towards what looked like a refrigerator with two legs and four tentacles. The thing seemed to be greeting them.

This was where things got a little more abstract, as the runes appeared to record a conversation between the Krell and the Brokers.

"The benefactors sailed from the skies. They had seen the...purity of the Krell and they...were envious of your flesh. Do I have that right? What was it that they wanted from you?"

Sleethe pushed his fingers into his bicep and rumbled a reply.

"Strong."

"They were envious of your strength?"

The story was written from a Krell perspective, and so she had to take everything they said with a pinch of salt. Depending on how long ago this had happened, it could have been warped by retellings, little more than a legend at this point. She scrolled to the next picture. This one showed a circle of very large Krell, and a Broker at their center, waving its tentacle-like arms as if it was giving a speech. It was hard to tell how big everyone was. The Krell didn't do much for measuring scale, because their heights varied so dramatically. If they were elders then they must be big, they were dwarfing the Broker.

"The elders of tens of ten villages, well that's a hundred. The elders of a hundred villages convened, and the Benefactors asked for their help. They were a peaceful race of...what's this word Sleethe?"

He leaned in close and examined the rune.

"I give, you give," he rumbled.

"What do you mean?"

He reached over and plucked the half-eaten cereal bar from her hand, then retrieved one of the now sodden flowers from the floor of the temple. He mimed exchanging the items, and Lena snapped her fingers.

"Traders! Thanks Sleethe. So they were a peaceful race of traders, who were threatened by...well this rune must mean 'Bugs'. This one must be describing the war with the Betelgeusians."

Sleethe nodded, slamming his massive fist down into his palm, as if crushing an insect.

"Bugs hurt friends."

She leaned back and reached up to scratch him under the chin, the giant reptile cooing happily as she ran her fingers across his leathery neck. She sometimes forgot that he had served as a Linebreaker in the UNN, he must have been in many battles against the Bugs.

"The Benefactors had lost their villages one after another, and prophesied that the Bugs would come to the homes of the Krell as well, unless the two races allied to fight them off. In exchange, the Benefactors offered their debt. Sleethe, is this the birth of the Coalition?"

He nodded.

Amazing, she knew that the Coalition had existed long before humanity had become its third member species, but to uncover the events surrounding its founding was of great historical significance. She moved on to the next slide.

"The Benefactors were few, weak of body but strong of mind. The Krell were many, weak of mind but strong of body. The Benefactors bade that they become kin, and in doing so become protected by the...circle."

The next picture was a carved relief of a Broker, its blocky body painted with runes and markings. Had it undergone the very same ritual as Lena? It was so hard to make out any features on these depictions, the Brokers did not seem to have eyes or mouths, and they were shaped more like artificial constructs than living things. Were those suits, perhaps? Maybe it was just artistic license by the Krell, expecting a primitive tribal culture to accurately depict an advanced alien was asking a little too much of them.

The next carving in the sequence portrayed many Krell being led onto the cigar-shaped vessels. The perspective was a little off, but it was obviously attempting to convey that a great number of the reptiles had been taken away.

"The Benefactors took the...strongest of the people away. They taught them...conflict. This must mean war or fighting, the Brokers taught the Krell how to fight. Not too different from what we're doing I suppose, teaching the Krell how to use human weapons and then sending them into battle as auxiliaries."

She was starting to feel a little guilty, but she pressed on.

The next one showed what looked like Krell in strange body armor, wielding weapons that she couldn't identify and which had probably not been accurately reproduced anyway. This mural was like some grand tapestry depicting a monumental battle, with such care and attention to detail. The Krell were killing scores of Bugs, easy to identify by their six limbs. How had she not put two and two together while she had been taking recordings of the murals? Granted, they were a little crude.

The Krell had clearly won some kind of victory against the enemy, and the only evidence of Brokers being present was the depiction of their ships floating above, spewing fire like dragons. Air support, how quaint.

"The Krell took back the stars one by one. Where the Benefactors had fled their homes, they...recovered? Recaptured? If I'm reading this right, it looks like the Bugs captured the Broker colonies one by one and drove them off, and so they employed the Krell to take them back."

The next slide showed what was almost the opposite of the previous relief. This was a battle that the Krell were losing, Bug drones cutting them down and swarming over their bodies as the Broker ships retreated.

"The Bugs...changed? Adapted? There was a stalemate, guess the Bugs developed new ways to counter the Krell and slowed their advance."

She moved on to the next picture, Sleethe blowing warm breath in her hair as he watched. This one was a carving of a Broker holding some kind of sphere in its tentacles.

"Many people born from the swamp were lost, and so the Benefactors returned, asking for more soldiers. There were none left to give, and so the Benefactors bade them to make more, but it was not...the season? Oh, it wasn't mating season, you couldn't make more babies. The Benefactors used their...strength of mind, to build the metal eggs."