The Girl who Rode the Unihorn

Silent scream

Tha an saoghal a’ crochadh air a’ Mhàthair.

The whole world depends on the Mother.

Proverb from Leabhar an Leaghaidh Mhòir —

The Book of the Great Melting

Ròna of the Spreckled Cheeks[1] tapped her heels against the flanks of the giant aon-adharcach - the one-horned, the unihorn she called Faithful, or in the language of the Children of the Mother -- Dìleas.

The animal stood taller at the shoulder than a man (and so towered over the girl when she stood next to him) and was of a more solid build than the horses that ran wild in the Wayp (though in some ways, resembling those), and was covered with a matted fur coat, suitable for its snowy habitat, and was crowned with a single horn that jutted out from his forehead, a thick, formidable weapon.

Although the unihorns were usually fiercely independent and resisted taming or domestication of any kind, some years before, Ròna had found the colt at the edge of a meadow, still barely able to stand on its tottering legs, beside the bear-wolf ravaged body of what she could only suppose had been his mother, and had brought him home to her father’s croft – or small farm. There she had raised him as her own. (Her practice of adopting stray and wounded animals was a predilection her parents had not always approved of, but as they had not been able to squelch it, they had come to tolerate it.) Thus, the creature had imprinted the girl as his mother, sister, comrade, friend, from its very earliest days.

From where she had paused at the edge of the forest, mounted on her huge animal companion and perched in her saddle (really little more than a stiffened blanket woven from mammoth wool), Ròna surveyed the field before her.

She was a slender young woman, of less than medium height and with a compact frame. Besides the shock of deep dark red hair that flowed to her shoulders, a color they called ruadh in the FT[2] -- a color term used only in reference to hair or fur, never to inanimate objects -- the most striking feature about her was the startling intensity of her eyes, whose focus had been accentuated from her long practice of aiming down the shaft of an arrow, and whose green gaze was as sharp as the razor tips of the long projectiles she carried in her quiver.

Her plaid – the tartan-patterned light blanket draped over her shoulders and belted kilt-like around her waist – was hung with flakes of crystalline frost, which had accumulated over the night she’d been patrolling on the lookout against poachers -- those who’d cut the trees or kill the creatures of the forest or fish from the lake, all sacred to the Mother.

Besides minding the family’s herd, Ròna had the informal responsibility (that is, not officially conferred, but widely acknowledged[3]) of caring for and protecting the forest and the fields and the waters and all their inhabitants around the village of Balnabane.[4] She’d taken on this role several years before while still a child, when she’d come upon her brother Seumas uprooting a fir sapling. The act – or even the idea -- of desecrating the Mother’s body enraged her, inflamed her child’s heart, and shook her scrawny frame. Though her brother was much larger than she was, she attacked him with the ferocity of a wild cat protecting its cubs; she picked up a stick and chased him away, and after replanting the little tree, she’d camped out in front of it, refusing to come home, despite the entreaties of her parents. She guarded it, cared for it, watered it until it looked like it could live on its own again. It was from this that she acquired the far-ainm -- or nickname -- of the Little Sister of the Forest -- Piùthrag na Coille in the FT.

She rode her unihorn mount lightly, directing him with a tap of her knee or thigh, or a pat of her left hand. In her right hand, she carried a bow that was curved like the horns of a tarbh-allaidh – a wild bull – whose rack joined together in the likeness of a cap in the center and curved down and finally up to the ends.

The tall grasses wafted back and forth before her in the breeze. Bees half the size of her hand murmured above the wild flowers -- tall clumps of violet rhododendrons, purple heather blossoms, scatterings of white daisies, and a blanket of bright yellow primroses, a scene interspaced with a dappling of blue bells and tall stalks of thistle -- cluaran in the FT –each stalk capped with a delicately variegated white and purple crown.

Butterflies whose wings spanned from her fingers to her wrist – known in the FT as dealan na bàn-dè, or “lightning of the Goddess” – skipped across the tops of the assorted grasses and herbs.

Beyond that, in the near distance, a copse of firs and pines introduced the forest that graduated into a grove of redwoods thousands of years old.

She listened. The wind susurrated in the upper branches of the trees – conifers and pines with their needles, aspens with their parchment-white mottled barks, and oaks with their broad, fingered leaves. Under the whispering of the wind and the rustling of the leaves, she heard a murmuring drone rising up from the branches and the trunks, and from beneath that, a whispering from the under-carpet of mycelium, the synapses of fungi, that connected all. She eavesdropped as if on a conversation in another room that was low, distant, muffled (if conversation was the right word).

She braced herself with her knees pinching the unihorn’s flanks and perched herself upright on Dìleas’ back. She took a deep breath and let out a high-pitched call. This note quickly took on a melodic quality in the form of a song of some unhappy, far-off occurrence - something that had happened long before she was born — but its words of sorrow, loss, and pain that once was and perhaps would be again echoed in her heart the same way the sound of her voice echoed from the high hills between which the small valley was nestled.

She swung off Dìleas’ back onto a tree stump. There she stood and broke into another song, one that was happier – a quick-paced tune that celebrated the man whom the original singer had loved: a song that Clann na Màthar – the Children of the Mother – had brought with them from the Tìr fo na Tuinn – the land under the waves -- when they fled the Great Melt. The lyrics were humorous and the tune lively. The song was not to be taken totally seriously in its celebration of the Fair Donald’s “great bonnet,” which on his head was higher than the roof joist. (Evidently, this Donald was a tall fellow.) She loved the song – it made her spirit laugh, and when she sang it, her voice rose high to penetrate the distance between her and the giant beasts she was summoning home.

In the distance, she heard an answering trumpet of the woolly mammoths of her father’s herd, first one and then another, and at the edge of the clearing, she saw the shaking of the trees that presaged the coming of the parade. First there was a distant, gentle waving of the upper branches, an occasional collection of trumpeting as the herd made its way through the forest, and as the massive beasts pushed more closely through the brush, the sound of foliage bending, cracking, and breaking grew louder, and the trees nearer swayed dramatically, and finally the first mammoth breached the wall of the forest across from her.

When Ròna saw the massive cow mammoth who was the leader and protector of the herd, she called out, “A Bheathaig Mhòir, a ghràidh! — Big Bertha, my love!”

With a raised trunk and a trumpeting bellow, the mother mammoth charged forward. The others in the herd, startled into action by their leader’s sudden movement, not knowing whether its impetus was attack or flight, stampeded behind, advancing across the field in a cloud of dust, dirt, and flying grass.

A bevy of startled quail, following a long, low warning whistle from the covey leader, rose in frightened flight from their nestling place in the meadow of knee-high foliage.

Dìleas planted his feet solidly and lowered his snout to aim the one-horn at the charging behemoth in the event of a collision, but otherwise he made no sign that he was disturbed by the charge. He was accustomed to the ways of the mammoths and knew that for all their intimidating size and bluster, they were timid creatures.

Ròna fixed her bow crosswise over her shoulder and stood quietly and still on the stump as the beasts pounded and shook the earth in their charge forward, and just as quickly as Big Bertha had started, just a few woman-lengths from the girl, the mammoth stopped suddenly with a four-footed landing – much like a bull-leaper’s dismount – and rooted itself in the ground on its column-thick legs, coming to a halt close enough to Ròna that the girl could feel its hot breath on her face and arms.

Ròna stroked Bertha’s trunk, which was much thicker than her own slender arm, and swung herself atop Dìleas. Tapping the unihorn’s flanks with her heels, the girl turned her mount, and saying softly, “Trobhadaibh! -- Come on! – A h-uile duine! – Everybody!” she started the herd of mammoths the way back to the pasture where the animals stayed the night.

This assemblage traversed through the coille – the forest. The trees were spaced widely. The mammoths themselves, having acted over the ages as caretakers and maintainers of the forest by their ambling bulks, had kept the lanes wide and clear, free of entangling branches, and flourishing with yummy browsable undergrowth for the smaller denizens of the woodland.

Ròna heard an inaudible shriek, though it wasn’t really through hearing, per se, that it came to her, for it was a silent scream that was passed from tree to tree, from the tallest redwoods to the slender white-barked birches. She saw the tops of the trees shake stormily. The unsounded screeching of the trees shot a galvanizing jolt through her body. The tall redwoods trumpeted noiselessly like gathering mammoths calling everyone together. The oaks bellowed mutely like one-horns, angry and threatening, while the slender birches cried out voicelessly in distress like blind mouths screaming for help.

These wordless shrieks pinioned Ròna with sharp stabs through her frame.

She caught her breath and jumped down from her mount. In succession, she put her ear to the rough bark of a mother yew tree, placed her hand flat on the ground, dug her fingers into the soil, and listened to the fibrous synapses of the intertwined roots and the fungal mycelium. The import of what she heard shuddered through her body from the intricate network she had tapped into.

In a skip and a bound, with a grabbing of and a gripping on Dìleas’s shaggy coat, she vaulted atop the unihorn.

She reached back over her shoulder and unslung her curved bow. The weapon readied in her right hand, she let out a wild shriek – the shriek of a hawk about to swoop from its aerie perch down on a coineanach mòr – a giant rabbit about the size of medium-sized madadh-ruadh – a red fox. Only, Ròna was filled with a rage unlike that of some predator on a routine errand to collect breakfast for the nest, but that of a fearsome mother eagle protecting her brood from a thief that would steal her hatchlings.

All blood left the center part of her body and flooded to her arms and chest and legs. Leaning forward, with a tap of her heels to urge Dìleas forward, she gave a sharp command – “Air adhart! -- Forward! Ruith! -- Run! -- Ruaig e! -- Chase it down!” and the massive quadruped broke into a charge.

~~

Sanctuary

’S craobh an sealladh a bu bhòidhche leam a chunnaic mi a-riamh.

The most beautiful sight I ever saw was a tree.

Proverb from Leabhar an Leaghaidh Mhòir —

The Book of the Great Melting

It wasn’t that far until behind a thick copse of maples and over a ridge, Ròna came on a couple of local men standing at the base of the thick-trunked, broad-branched oak tree – of all the denizens of the forest, most sacred to the Mother.

There stood Bhaltair Beag -- Little Walter -- who lived in a cabin by the shore of the lake and supported himself by cutting peat and gathering fallen firewood, which he then sold as fuel around the community. Walter was a wizened little man, white-haired and cringey, who eyed whomever he met as if they might hit him.

He was holding an axe, but when he spotted Ròna charging up – or to be more exact, when he first heard her, and turning, saw her – as if hoping not to be seen holding the tree mangler, he quickly tossed it into the underbrush with a low, underhanded, motion.

“An aire! – Watch out!” Walter warned in a hushed voice -- not a whisper, not quite a shout, intended to be heard by his companion but not by Ròna herself. “’S i a’ Phiùthrag! -- It’s the little Sister!”

Not that Walter’s caution had really been needed because Dìleas’s crashing through the underbrush and the overhanging branches was warning enough.

Walter’s companion, Duncan Macpherson, or as he was known, Donnchadh na Misge – Duncan of the Drinks – froze with his hand on the rope that looped down from the overhead canopy of foliage. He was a big straggly- haired, sloppy fellow, an enthusiastic bòdhran drummer at any cèilidh up and down the mountain range that constituted the Wayp, such so that he was always welcome and was always sure to be gifted with his fill of food and teatha na Màthar – tea of the Mother -- and to be sent on his way in the morning with a few coins in his pocket, and as he was generally quite handy with small tasks, he otherwise earned a meagre living hiring himself out for occasional odd jobs to anyone else who needed an extra set of hands.

With hardly a break in her unihorn’s gait, Ròna charged into the middle of the two, bowling them over like grasses before a mammoth rush. She pivoted her mount to face the men, who were scrambling to their feet. “What’re you doing!” she demanded.

“Nothing?” Little Walter said.

“Just looking …” Duncan added.

“What’re you looking at?”

“Just stuff.”

Silence.

Then as a non sequitur, Little Walter offered: “The squirrels are gathering nuts early.”

“I’ve noticed that,” Ròna observed coldly.

Duncan, still frozen in his wave, added, “I saw a mammoth with an extra thick layer of wool.”

Ròna nodded at the observation.

Little Walter broke the silence: “Big Walter[5] did something funny the other day,” he said, referring to his son.

“Did he, now?”

“Something you might relate to: He found a baby fox lost in the forest and brought it home, and he’s been feeding it. They seem to have taken to each other.”

“He’s always been a bit of a buaireadair – troublemaker. It’s good to hear he’s finally becoming a man.”

Silence as thick as overcooked porridge.

Presently, Ròna added: “But that’s not funny.”

“No, I guess not,” Walter conceded with a shrug. “Just what he should do.”

Ròna turned to Duncan who was still frozen in his wave. “A Dhonnchaidh – Duncan – The trout are thick up at the north end of the loch. You going fishing?”

“Still working on my boat,” Duncan answered. Trying to appear as if his frozen posture were a natural position to be stuck in, he made as if to lean into the rope. “Have to put a new keel on it.”

“Come over to my dad’s house,” Ròna invited. “Talk to him. He’ll help you with that.”

“Thanks, maybe I will.”

Silence again.

The arrow was notched, half-cocked, and ready to shoot. Ròna pointed with the tip of the arrowhead at the axe handle that protruded from the underbrush. “What’s that?” she asked, as if she had just noticed it.

“What?” Little Walter asked innocently enough but fooling no one.

“That thing you chucked under the bush.”

“Nothing …” Little Walter repeated in a childlike manner, as in, nothing to see here – but at the same time taking a step to occlude Ròna’s line of sight.

“Whole lot of ‘nothing’ going on.”

“Oh, that!” he exclaimed as if surprised to just now notice it. “I guess it’s an axe!”

“What’re you doing with an axe? You know you’re not allowed to chop any trees in the Mother’s forest.”

After a moment of deep reflection: “Chopping fire wood from fallen trees.”

“There’s not a fallen tree around here.”

“There could be. No harm in looking.”

A noise overhead: A blue jay – with its broad wings folded back to resemble a bright blue overcoat, and its black crest sweeping back like the rudder of a ship (resembling a fashion popular amongst younger teenagers in the village and surrounding area) squawked and chittered and scolded as if calling out Liar! Liar! Liar! while it flapped its wings vigorously.

Ròna looked up. “Dè tha dragh ort, a charaid?” she asked. “What’s bothering you, friend?”

Duncan looked away quickly from the disturbance as if he were afraid that he was about to be told on.

Ròna shot a question at him. “What’s that in your hand?”

“What?”

“That,” she said, pointing her arrow at the rope.

“Oh!” as if he had just at that moment noticed what it was that was coiled in his hand. “A rope!” he announced surprised. As though it were a snake he’d just discovered, he released the strand and snatched his hand away.

At Duncan’s slackening of his grip on the line, it whipped away from him and up. As the tension in the rope went slack, there was a rustling in the branches, a clattering, a muffled shout, and a stream of cursing overhead.

Turning away from the noise up in the tree as if he’d not heard anything, Walter tried his best not to look.

Duncan jerked his gaze upwards, as if he had just now come across the man dangling high overhead in the branches of the tree and had paused to stare up in curiosity.

The man at the other end of the rope yelped in protest as his support line suddenly went slack, and he dropped a good woman-length, and the monkey of Ròna’s wrath came into full view: a stooped, broad-backed man with the posture of a forest ape who was swinging uneasily from the ropes that had secured him high in the branches of the towering oak whose branches arched high and spread wide and whose roots stretched out far beneath all the other trees, and whose all-encompassing span had sheltered and nurtured the entire forest going back to the time of the Great Melt itself.

Ròna’s heart pounded. Her eyes lanced darts of fury. Her face tightened in angry concentration. Her eyes narrowed to slits that saw only one thing: This monkey-man who was now swinging from the branches with the jagged-toothed saw that he’d used to hack away at the tree’s limbs.

A deranged murderer!

It became apparent to Ròna as she urged Dìleas forward that the monkey-man was too high up in the tree to reach although even as high up as he was, she recognized him: Robert Morunx, who had come to the Wayp requesting sanctuary several years before. On account of his being a half-speesh[6] – the son of one of the people of the Wayp and a Zziippp – he’d applied for asylum based on the claim of having been a victim of specism in the DownBlow. The Mothers had allowed him to settle on a small plot of land near Coille na Màthar – the grove of the Mother.

He was a short, broad-shouldered man with a balding patch on his forehead, and he walked with a stoop such that his arms seemed to dangle forward towards the ground, a trait that had earned him the far-ainm – the nickname – of Rob a’ Mhuncaidh – or Rob the Monkey, a resemblance accentuated by his continuously sneaking surreptitious glances to his side and behind him, as if casting about for something to snatch and run away with. And like a troublesome, mischievous monkey he was thought to resemble, he’d been nothing but a disturbance ever since his arrival, his motto seeming to be Get one over on them before they could even think of bamboozling you.

In a moment, Ròna decided if she couldn’t reach her target, she could bring it down to her. As Dìleas did a clomping prance, she arched up, and in a single motion, she lifted the bow, drew back the arrow, and fired a shaft.

The arrow flew directly and exactly and severed the rope that was looped over the branch above the muncaidh’s[7] head and secured him mid-air. As the line went loose, the man dropped suddenly in what must have been a stomach-lurching plunge, breaking through a couple branches along the way.

“Hey!” he shouted reflexively, startled, unaware of what had happened. Using a DownBlow expletive, he called out, “What the ratfuck’re you doing!?!”

No sooner had he yelled than Little Walter and Duncan responded with a cacophony of shouted warnings, half of these in the FT.

“She’s cutting the line!”

“Thig a-nuas! -- Get down!”

And several others that were unintelligible.

But before the muncaidh-man in the tree could process any of that, Ròna had swung Dìleas around and was circling for another angle. Again, she loosed a bolt; this one cut through another support-rope. Morunx fell another length as if through a hole in a floor, bouncing at the extent of the tie before dropping again.

By this time, Morunx had figured out what was happening. He’d spied Ròna as the cause of his predicament and shouted to her in Simspeek,[8] “Stop that!”

But even if Ròna had had any inclination to heed the muncaidh’s demand, she had already drawn and aimed and released her next arrow. Just as with the previous shots, this dart cut through another tie line with a whizzing sound.

Morunx felt that support give away -- the one that had held him upright -- and he flipped tòn os cionn – ass-over-head -- and plummeted three woman-lengths towards the ground with a sickening, heart-stopping plunge. In the process of the fall, he lost grip on the saw, and it clattered down the length of the tree ahead of him, only itself to come to a halt and swing at the end of its securing line.

Morunx let out a scream – non-worded, or a garbling of words that sounded more like an animal’s shrieking -- and just as he came to a bone jerking stop and a bounce at the end of the tether, Ròna sliced through the last support line.

With a satisfied outrush of breath, the girl watched the tree mangler plunge from the middle branches of the desecrated Mother of Trees towards the ground.

It was paradoxically fortunate for Morunx that the man hit nearly every branch on the way down, each tree limb delivering a stunning blow as if in reprimand for his assault, each thud accompanied by an incoherent shout or groan or moan, but each impact also slowing the velocity of his fall, bringing the plummet to intermittent pauses, slowing his descent, although just for a moment reversing the direction of the rebound before plunging again.

Finally, he bounced off the last thick branch and dropped two lengths to the ground, only to have his descent stopped by a joint-separating jolt as the last length of rope reached its limit. His foot tangled in the snare of the rope, he dangled upside down, pendulating back and forth.

“What’re you doing!?!” he wailed, more rhetorically than anything else as it was perfectly obvious what Ròna had just done.

His swinging at the end of the rope banged him into the tree trunk, and upon that impact, he cursed a blasphemy from the DownBlow: “Damn the Profit!”

Then swinging out away from the tree, he shouted an order with all the ferocity a ridiculously upside-down man could muster: “Let me go!”

Although it was sure that no one would obey.

Slyly and a bit maliciously complying with his demand, Ròna responded with, “Ma tha thu ga iarraidh … If that’s what you want,” and with a deft stroke, she cut the rope securing him to the last branch, and the man swung clear, slammed into the trunk one last time, and plummeted the last span to the ground where he landed with a thud and -- as the air was forcibly compressed out of his lungs -- an ooff.

A mass of bruises, scrapes, and cuts, and plastered with needles, nettles, bits of bark and leaves that he’d accumulated during the course of his drop, Morunx took a long moment to recover enough to even start groaning. At the base of the tree, he lay in a crumpled heap, his nearly inaudible moaning being the only sign that he was still alive – like that of a little boy just thrown from a mammoth calf and splayed across the ground – these grew in volume and intensity until finally his groans intermixed with curses, which were first generalized and not directed anywhere or at anyone in particular, but soon became fixed – as soon as his head and his vision cleared – on Ròna, seated on her unihorn mount above him.

“You … you …” He was groping for the vilest, most insulting, dirtiest imprecation: “You giant vagina!” he shouted. “You did that!”

“Yes,” Ròna agreed, “I did,” an admission that brought a hint of a fiamh-gàire – a smug smirk of pride – creeping into the corner of her lips and eyes, a smile not unalloyed with the amusement that always came to her when she contemplated how the Downblowers thought the word that signified the source of all life was an insult.

She vaulted off Dìleas’s back and strode to the crumpled man who lay as if a squashed bug at the base of the broad oak trunk.

“I’ll have you arrested!” he threatened from his back.

Ignoring his threat, she asked, “What were you doing up there?”

Well aware that it was permitted to prune deadwood from the forest, Morunx temporized. “Trimming the hair of the Mother.”

Ròna lifted her chin in acknowledgement. A slow nod, one that purposely gave her time to consider his justification.

She glanced at his two assistants – Biorachan Beag and Biorachan Mòr, as she thought of them – Little Pointy Head and Big Pointy Head.

They mirrored each other with noncommittal shrugs and spread hands.

Contemplating what to do, Ròna scrutinized him long and hard (well, not objectively “long” per se, but to Robert Morunx, it seemed like an excruciatingly interminable length of time): Would it be worth it to arrest him and haul him in front of the Council of the Sisters?

Sensing her indecision – and taking it as his get-out-of-jail-free card -- Morunx gathered himself into a less uncomfortable position.

Looking up at the tree, Ròna assayed the damage. Fortunately for Morunx, it might be supposed that he’d not had much of a chance to inflict much maiming. She weighed the possibility that his claim of just pruning deadwood would carry weight with the Sisters. Or at least justify giving him the benefit of the doubt.

“Well?” he asked with a smirk, sensing that he might snake out of this predicament. “Can I go?”

He stood and brushed off himself the accumulated foliage, twigs, bits of leaves, brush, and other nondescript vegetative debris that he’d accumulated in the course of his descent.

Ròna hesitated in her answer. Reflecting on the question, she cast a glance down. Her vision fell on a small form on the ground.

She stooped and picked up the body of the murder victim and thrust the tiny corpse of the vibrantly electric-blue butterfly – dealan na bain-dè in the FT, literally the lightning of the goddess -- at Morunx and demanded, “What’s this?”

“Nothing,” which he contradicted by adding, “I don’t know.”

“Did you do this?”

“Not that I know of,” which he apparently feared might not be a sufficient enough denial, so he followed that with, “What if I did?”

But his equivocation was enough to spark her decision.

She pulled the rope tight. “Tiugainn. – Let’s go.”

“What!” Morunx yelped in indignant surprise. “You can’t!”

“I can and I will,” she said, snatching up the bit of rope that dangled from the branches, and using it and that which still remained tied around Morunx’s waist, with a deft whipping and circling motion, Ròna whipped the trailing length of the former guide and support line around the man whom she was making her prisoner. In a moment, she quickly cinched him, calf-tying being something she’d learned many years ago working her father’s mammoth ranch.

“What for?!” Morunx protested – as much against the ropes that now bound him as against her words.

“Desecration of the Sanctuary.”

“It’s just open land!”

“It’s the Mother’s forest.”

“Nothing but a bunch of stupid trees!” The protest of a child declaring that being denied what he wanted was unfair.

Without answering Morunx, Ròna called out to the other men, who had been standing frozen by the spectacle. “You! I know who you are. Don’t be slinking off like stinkcats in the underbrush! You’re coming with me.”

“Càite? -- Where?”

“Cha d’ rinn sinn dad! -- We didn’t do anything.”

“He said he had approval.”

“Tha fios agaibh nas fheàrr! -- You know better than that!” she snapped back, although Ròna would not have liked to admit it, this last claim was probably true. She knew the muncaidh-man well and knew him capable of any deceit to get his way.

“You don’t have any reason …” Morunx muttered feebly in protest. He spoke in Simspeek since despite the length of time he’d lived in the Wayp, he had never bothered to acquire more than a passing acquaintance with Teanga Clann na Màthar -- the Tongue of the Children of the Mother.

“We’ll hear what the Sisters say about that,” Ròna retorted without pausing.

“I was just trying to make a profit,” Morunx complained. “What’s wrong with that!?!” Before she could answer, as if she were going to attempt an explanation, he wailed, “They’ll send me back!”

“You’re lucky. If I had my way, I’d give you the short road to the DownBlow,” she said, alluding to the edge of the cliff that plummeted several thousand woman-lengths to the Land of Smudge.

Morunx again changed his tone, pleading, “It’s my right!”

The unvoiced thought glimmered across Ròna’s mind: Was the man really that stupid? But she’d had enough of this shit – a mammoth pile of mammoth shit, as it were -- and if she heard him, much less heeded him, the girl gave no sign, for his complaint was drowned out by her shout: “Thusa! A Mhic a’ Phearsain! -- You! MacPherson” she called out. “Cuidich mi -- Help me,” she commanded in a tone and with an authority that could not be challenged.

With that, she gave a click of her tongue against her teeth, and Dìleas left off browsing amongst the high ferns – tasty treats indeed! – and ambled over. Ròna gripped his shaggy mane at about head level, and using that hold as a lever, she swung herself back into her mount.

“Thoir an ròpa dhomh. -- Give me the rope,” she ordered.

MacPherson hurried to hand her the free end of the rope that bound the muncaidh-man, and she secured the line around the unihorn’s thick neck and shoulders.

“Let me go! Untie me! Better not …”

But his protest was cut short by Ròna’s bark: “Dùin do chlab! -- Shut your snout!” There was something about the young woman’s tone -- the sharpness and fierceness of it that would not suffer disobedience and implied dire significances should she be ignored or disobeyed -- that stopped Duncan’s and Walter’s ears to the imprecations, unconvincing threats, and feeble attempts at orders of the hog-tied lump of humanity now tethered to Ròna’s mount.

Even Morunx himself quickly moderated his demands into pleadings and weak entreaties: “Please … I won’t do it again … begging you …”

“Thalla! -- Away!” Ròna commanded the unihorn. She set off, glancing back periodically to keep an eye on the three men arrayed behind her ambling steed: the most important being the hog-tied miscreant, the defiler of the temple of the Mother, the desecrator of the holiest of sanctuaries, now alternately groaning and swearing and pleading as he was dragged along – or at best, when he could manage it, lugged in a stumbling gait; and of lesser concern, the other two men whom she knew and who should have known better (but they’d be dealt with later).

And so tugging, half dragging, frequently yanking to his knees the entangled one, Ròna led the straggly caravan towards Taigh nam Peathraichean -- the House of the Sisters.

~~

[1] Ròna -- or more precisely, Ròna Gruaidh-bhreac ni Màiri ni Iseabail ni Raonaid ni Sìne ni Sìle ni Magaidh ni Mòr ni Ùna – Ròna of the Spreckled Cheeks, daughter of Mary, daughter of Isabel, daughter of Rachel, … and so on and so forth till the exhaustion of the iterations of more than 300 generations (or so) of foremothers since the ship they called An Long-dìon – the Refuge – had brought the original settlers from an seann tìr – the old land – at the time of the Great Melt.

[2] FT = a polysemic acronym: Forbidden Tongue / Forbidden Thought

[3] As a matter of fact, there were no “official” positions amongst the people of the Wayp. One ‘moved into’ a role by inclination or tendency, or assumed it by practice or informal agreement amongst the People.

[4] Balnabane -- A transliteration from the FT, Baile na Beinne, or “village of the mountain.”

[5] Big Walter -- Bhaltair Mòr -- was Little Walter’s young son. Naturally, the child was presently smaller than his father, but he could hardly be called “Little Walter,” too, as that would be confusing, and “Little Little Walter” would be awkward and inelegant, so in a spirit of irony, and perhaps in anticipation that one day he would grow to be larger than his father, he came to be known as “Big Walter” even though at the present time he was smaller. If that makes any sense.

[6] Half-speesh – a species epithet, pejoratively and dehumanizingly referring to someone who was the product of a Zziippp and Anboarnh parentage.

[7] Muncaidh – Metamorphosed Untypically Neuronal -physiological Contagion Affected In-utero Devolved Humanoid (though some experts favor Mutant Ungendered (by) N- Contagion Anomaly Initiating Deviant Humanoid): Mutated humanoid sub-species, thought to have been reverted to ancient ancestral hominid form through exposure to the Z-virus during gestation in utero of a human mother. Sometimes, muncaidh-man or muncaidh-woman, etc. A cognate with the FT word for “monkey” – muncaidh.

[8] Simspeek / SIMSPPIWEEEEC – (Written and pronounced “Simspeek.”) Simplified Interpersonal Messaging Speech Parlance (for) Phonic (and) Inscribed/Written Expression (and) Exchange (of) Efficient Effective Communication. The only authorized and official language in the Monstrato corporate domains (notwithstanding the existence of such non-standard varieties such as TokTok -- the patois of the Zziipps – and the outlawed FT of the Wayps, and other such extra-territorial languages).