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MY name is Varang, and I am a pirate. When I was a child history began with a volcanic upheaval, and my village was shattered and drifted aloft, circling the simmering mountain like constellations.
Here on the archipelago of eruptive aftermath we don the coat of ash to endear ourselves to the volcano, since though it shattered and released our village up into the clouds it is also the sole reason why we have not frozen to death. Some way down below it blinked like a red eye drawn into grey lid, and supplied sparing warmth high up into our home. One day we shall die of the same warmth.
We hollowed out the rocks and lived inside. We hunt below and shy our wastes and excrements away from our homes into the earth where we no longer belong. I enjoy dumping our wastes off the clouds, it is the second most enjoyable activity for me and ranked after creation.
After a few deaths some of which I engendered I began to feel lonely. I felt hollow after dragging my father off to the cliff and dumping him down the sky with other fleshed and rancid carcasses. I was fifteen. When you are fifteen and your father up the archipelago of volcano begins to delve into otherworldly thinking, that is, the earthly way of thinking, and starts to take you as a daughter seriously, when you have been helping, you will be sad too. Here I do not believe we have another way except to hop and fly between the islets in the sky and wear the ash, so the mountain sees us and knows us to be its own, when the time comes. This too is an order of my creation, which I will expound later.
So now all order was null and my father died, and in the clouds there were nothing but us and some winged creatures. The creatures we ride down to the earth to pillage and rape and burn, feed on the same stuff we hunt and rest comfortably in the sky while the other living things won’t. That was what we did at first, after my father died and some kindred folks gathered around me, and I inspected my surroundings, and realized I had very few things but the fire which initiated memory and history, as well as bones of things which flew up here with me and perished in the cold.
(Another note on history: I asked my father once where is ours before the fire and lava sprang up, but he gave very unsatisfactory answers, and he sounded senile. Some names lived and died without accomplishing much but loving their Order. So I am very carefully writing down the beginning of our history, in case my offspring lack in memories. For now things are starting great.)
I went to Wukula’s cave to discuss what would happen now that I tossed my father down the sky, or rather I thought of the things I would tell him on my way over, because as fond as I am of Wukula he is one of the strongest and stupidest I ever know, but this is good—strongest and stupidest survive well.
Wukula was blowing air out of his mouth, he said it was indistinguishable from the howling winds outside. Here the rocks became very bare and few herbage remains after years of dryness in the sky. When it rains it rains below. I made my own cave beautiful with the relics of bones and stones and soot, but Wukula and a lot of others kept their homes as empty and utilitarian as possible. Wukula showed me a grub emerging from the fruit he bit into, I smiled. Maybe we will keep it so it will be the first of its kind here since history. Then I laid out plans to Wukula and he listened, and agreed.
Together we roused the youths from their homes and made ourselves beautiful in this new barren world, from door to door we let the elders know that we plan to sweep down beneath the clouds and take from their orderly folks, since they have plenty and we have few. Whoever objected to this were killed and eaten and their remains were fed to the winged crowd before being tossed off. I just told you before that my favorite thing to do is creation. Here I created a new world of vigor and erased whatever sorrow that haunted us. We bled the constellations and blood traveled between old woody vines entangling these. I confiscated and kept everyone’s sorrow and horror in my kuru. A kuru is a little cord that makes one know happiness or sadness or hurt. When later we went down the sky to raid, I would push my kuru against the earthlings’ for a kiss of devastation. To spare them from any further devastation I took their kurus for good so I can stow them away all in my own.
There are now two orders out there which we are both alien to. Science and magic bomb at one another from corners of this world which I’ve never reached before. They entertain me like dreams. Rakx who likes to watch American TV told me it is all a part of capitalism and modernity and something very serious. I don’t quite appreciate it when something bigger and stronger wins the Old Order because we might be discovered too. We love the Old Order because we can swoop down and loot loot loot but they hate us massively. I am now thirty years old and living better than I did two decades ago. I made up a new rite for wedding and a new rite for burial. Since there used to be a holy tree we pay obeisance and pray to, and now there isn’t, we discontinued that line of thinking and abolished religion. When I die there might be a new order among them pirates, but now we are out of misery and free from worldly duties. Reproduction began. Children who were born naked soon became coated with ash too. First they are blue like deep dawn, then they become grey like quiet fire-ravaged mornings. I think it is all gaining momentum and inertia, this dying and birthing.
Rainwater lapped my skin when I dove down the grey pregnant clouds and rushed landward. At the tip of the land coming out of the forest stood an earthman.
He was naked and blue like a baby of our own, but dressed extensively on the lower body. His face was a weird one, because no one in the world really looked like that, his face. He had a surety which I disliked at the first glance that explained his inner makeup, like he made careful choices of his own body and became who he was today, and was proud of it. I was gobsmacked because I felt some mysterious walking creature had picked up one of the carcasses we had tossed off the islands and fused it to its own self. I opened my eyes wide to see if there is really a form bulging against his skin trying to burst forth, but rain made it impossible.
He did not squint or frown like a normal person while his face was tilted up at me and thumped by raindrops. Again, I was gobsmacked by my earlier intuition and did not realize I had slipped off my beast and walked up to him, very strongly compelled. My eyes were riveted to him like he’s the end of a long boredom. His lower half was covered by a green drenched fabric, and he carried a few new-fangled things on his shoulder. His skin was glistening and sultry with all the wetness. My chest felt tight against the constriction of the rope bind. A furious flight of thoughts blazed up in my head. yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes So I pulled an arrow from my quill before he could object and transfixed his foot yes yes yes yes yes in case he escaped.
There used to always be a music of blooming hope in such scenarios, when nice stories were told. In those days Jake Sully’s story was all over the radio and there was always a hopeful orchestra of keyboard and harps accompanying the story’s climaxes. I could hear a sound twanging and reverberating in my mind that drove me crazy, but I acted calm. Rainwater felt like a mess on my skin, I do not like the rain. I watched him pull the arrow out of his foot with a hushed expletive and whistled at him.
“I am impressed.”
He winked at me, almost too confidently.
He offered me gifts of things called guns and bombs and showed me their brilliance, and he claimed there’d be some more delivered to me. I cocked my head as he showed me the mechanism of their works, and far into the forest long plumes of fire bloomed and bloomed, ponds were illuminated by thunderous explosion. He said he learned my reputation as a great pirate queen.
There is an interest in the way that he speaks, and a glint in his eyes irrelevant to the rain. I walked around him holding the arrow steeped in his blood and watched and watched and watched and watched. Because I liked his confidence, his face, his shoulders, his arms, his torso, and the shape suggested by the fabric-covering I took him up on my ride and flew up to the rocks above the clouds where it is dry.
Back then my first reaction was distrust, because I knew he could not have been so generous without expecting some return. However to have anyone to distrust was a welcome change, after having been venerated and feared for so long.
Interrogation session one turned into seduction, and I had no intention to conceal my reception to his appeal. I had been firm at first and tranquilized him with pulverized ikran scales and demanded his intention, but he was very evasive, and tried to tantalize me with the grandeur of farther worlds and how I could gain dominion over them with his weapons and my people on our winged fleet. My brain was doing the same thing I heard when I listened to the Jake Sully story on the radio—to vividly imagine, and I see a land of infinite carnage carnival as well as thousands of kurus severed and their hoards of horror submitted to me. Since he could not lie I imagine what he said was calm and true. I ingested no drugs, but I was flying over the horizon with the pictures he painted me and giddy as I hadn’t been in so long.
When I collected myself I repeated keenly to myself that he could not be trusted. So I said:
“I do not trust you."
What he did next made it hard for me to contain my sex. Before when I watched him in the rain my head already began to revolve around fucking. My innards were squirming and shot into an erratic series of pain which I observe only happen to me when I am in heightened horniness. At the moment fucking was a dire concept which I was not sure is as important to the camouflaged earthmen as it was to me. With their extraterrestrial order and mining companies I did not know if they loved the motherlodes more or fucking. The man before me loved killing but I did not know about the other part.
He said:
“You could do to me whatever you wish.” And it made me gleeful. Seeing me gleeful he smiled wider. I was gleeful and uneasy with concupiscence but I needed to do what my brain demanded me to do, so I took my blade and sliced at his chest. He barely winced, since he’s forewarned already by his foot which now was bandaged and applied with herbs. A string of blood beaded from the cut. It was a garish contrast of colors this red against blue.
I cut him open at many places and stitched him back impeccably. By the time I was done his sweat gathered above his brows and his jaw was set so rigid his teeth might crack. Part of me had expected to see something deceitful from underneath his skin, clad around his blueness like the pith of some fruit. I was tempted to cleave open his chest and to see his heart, I said to him when I finished up stitching and applying poultices to the gnarlier wounds. With ragged breath he retorted:
“I will see to it and talk to the executor of my will, so you can get it first thing on the day that I die.”
He grimaced while reaching for the long-strapped shoulder bag that came with him and fished out a pill box, took two and swallowed them straight down. When I tried to grab at it he kicked it away with his faulty foot and hissed at the pain, warning me:
“Don’t touch that. It ain’t doing you good, cupcake.”
I was irritated by his first refusal of my whims but I backed off. That night and a few nights after he slept next to me while I masturbated. Then one night I couldn’t hold it back anymore and peeled his clothes away, forcing him awake. He looked groggy for the first few seconds. I looked at him and tried to gauge if he was as sex-obsessed at that moment as I was. He grabbed at my arm and made a sound of confusion. I told him that I needed to fuck him or him to fuck me, whichever way the pink-skins held in fashion but I needed fucking. He began to laugh maniacally and his previous gaudy couth had all worn off. Instinctively I hissed at him and fell upon him to claw at his mouth which continued to emit sounds of laughter, and left four new streaks of blood across his jawline. He turned us over and folded my body upward so my sex was served up to him. When he pushed my loincloth aside and fucked me I felt my entire person was compressed and verged on implosion in his embrace, the blood seeping from his cut and falling onto me as he fucked me and constricted me beneath him. It was a bliss and a mistake because my sex craze for him had reached a feverish pitch that night and did not decline after.
Afterward he told me I was like a spring. He tried explaining to me what a spring is but I could only comprehend it on an abstract level. A few days later he brought me a ballpoint pen and a notepad and wrote his name for me, cursing a little as the pen went out of ink. But in the end he took the spring out of the pen’s casing and showed me what it was.
“You are like this,” he said while clicking the pen on and off, on and off. I snatched the pen over.
“Why am I like this?”
He then smirked in a way that I knew immediately was about fucking. I pulled his hand towards me and imitated what he wrote on the paper. Miles Quaritch. He then offered to teach me how to write my own name. I refused, and said that I don’t need it and hated the way he pronounces my name, at which he fell silent. He did not seem to mind it after all because he did not change the drawl or saccharine courtliness with which he addressed me but it made me regret it a little bit.
I did ask him later if he was like the spring too, he considered it in a non-joking manner, and said yes, but his elasticity was not quite at its best now. He thought himself a bit done and worked, and at that he laughed a bit drily. It made me regret asking him that altogether.
Now everyone in my pirate archipelago had guns and bombs, little babies had them, imbeciles and invalids too. Every raid was as inconsequential as exciting for us, there was no difficulty. Capitulants came to us few but constant, trickling into our group, fattening us up, I was excited and happy for the prospect we now welcomed. I always looked at Quaritch with wary eyes when he turned his back, however, because there had been no fundamental differentiation between him and the fire that destroyed my village, both so unbidden and frankly out of nowhere.
In our deepening trust we began to share more about ourselves like in an old-fashioned dating program. He told me about his hate for Jake Sully, and pride in his home planet and America, a place that represented that planet well enough, and Texas, a place that represented America well enough. He said that when he was young he was employed by America to blaze guns alongside guided missiles across the world to spread its gospel. I asked him if it, his home planet, had very much history.
“More than I can remember for sure. What I remembered mattered very little to me, and I to it. It was right bleak.”
It got me thinking and wondering at the immensity of that history. For something having a history vast beyond individual memory is diabolical to me. It also got my heart thrumming. I wish I could employ a squadron of scribes to dig down into the ground and find history for me. But that would be harder than creating future. But I got to writing it down later (now, I’m doing it), so it might have an option to be tossed down the floating rocks or be cherished and remembered. Somewhere down the line the drive of violence could not persist forever, I foresee that already, but it might be worthwhile so someone can see why the history began with me and the shattering and burning of my insignificant home village.
I then asked him if he came to me for his home planet and America and Texas, in a way which I supposed would not alarm him with its purposefulness. He thought for a moment, blinking, as if it required great deliberation. He then said yes.
One day Quaritch brought a camera up here. It was not a video camera like the ones they make TV with but a static one. He snapped a lot of pictures of me while I polished knives and picked arrowheads and tended potions and administered medicines or merciful poisons and fell into states of calm abstraction. I looked at the pictures he took of me, and found many of them focused on my face, my face at different moments and angles. When I glanced back at him quizzically, he touched my face the way I liked to touch his, back of his hand gliding fleetingly past my cheek and said nothing glib.
He only came clean to me about his plan to capture and execute Jake Sully. In a blood thirst that entrenched in anciency there was bound to be some fuckiness. I suggested perhaps we should abduct and rape him instead and spare the involvement of the big mining company mercenaries which he officially belonged to, but he thought I was humorous and insisted on fighting.
The day before we flew for his home base I tortured him again, flames on his skin instead of knives. It took me effort to get him to admit he was not there for the extraterrestrial order and the big mining whaling colonization companies and America and Texas but himself. Something very tough must be dislodged before this admission could come forth. I was glad it had not cost him life. I was crazy about him and did not want him to die, but it was intolerable how he could not moult from this cozenage and transition into something else. I helped him arrive at the realization, but he took up the flames and scorched me back once he recovered. It was a real fire, sampled and skimmed from the surface of the lava lake within the mountain. I hissed and glared at him as he seared me with bloodshot eyes but I did not fight back.
And at that night he allowed me to make him beautiful. I threaded feathers behind his ears and painted him like we were melded from the outset of history. Although he said initially that he was loyal to his planet and his army, I can see his eyes glint and his blood boil when he saw his new image: I snapped a photo of him when it’s all complete.
He fought foolishly and valiantly, as I suspected he really just wanted another opportunity toward final martyrdom. When I woke up beside him, right in our cave, every bone in my body hurt like hell because I managed to prevent that suicide. And since he is still comatose I will wait here till he comes to. In the meantime I will take some of the pills he’d forbidden me from taking and jot down these things of historical import.