MERCH - A TSOL'AA ANTHROPOLOGIST'S TALE

By: Narses Posted on: July 10, 2004

Sitting on the tree-trunk, I wiped the sweat from my brow. Acacius looked at me, frowning slightly - I answered the question before he would ask it by wearily shaking my head. But the almost violent throbbing of the veins in my neck and the slight dizziness told me, sure enough, that I was lying. Somewhere in the distance, a sudden crash accompanied by a loud and alien ululation convinced us something large and heavy was moving by.

I took some deep breaths, not bothering about the flies for the moment. Before us, a narrow path wound itself deeper into the maze of slender treetrunks, kuzu vines, marsh ferns and many larger and smaller shrubs that had worn us out by the long, elastic roots they would weave across the path, and the barbed and thorny branches that would snap at us in a way that, in our tiredness, we thought was intentional.

Standing on a hilltop that morning, we had a good look at the canopy of trees stretching in all direction, with wisps of smoke and mist rising everywhere amongst them. Faraway in the distant, we saw a sliver of water that we knew to be the Muurn river: our goal for this day's march. But the going had been rough along the overgrown path, and the constant alertness for things more violent and dangerous than the twisting traps made by the roots and the sickly, slightly poisonous smell of the obiquitous skullcap flowers had stressed us mentally. We did not know whether we would reach the river that day.

Acacius looked at me again. "It's nothing." I growled, wiping my forehead again. "Just the bloody heat." And while I knew better, I tried hard to convince myself it wasn't the Muurn fever. I had suffered it before, you know, and without a travel companion, I had roamed for many days aimlessly through the jungle, unable to think for the aching and throbbing in my head, and by some miracle avoiding the jaguars, kuzu snakes and lesser marsh snakes - until I finally reached the coast where a fisherman found me, more dead than alive.

I was glad to have Acacius with me on this expedition. I had not been so from the start, and would have gone alone, had not Damaris made taking an Apprentice with me a precondition for receiving the fieldwork scholarship from Hashan's Academy. I consented grudgingly, remembering how a previous Apprentice companion's carelessness and impudence had him almost end up an Aalen Tsol'aa tribe's burnt offering to Mithraea - somehow I had succeeded in changing the Medicine Man's mind as the poor witless student already lay on the pyre. But I quickly found out that Acacius was different. A quiet, soft-spoken man with an excellent command of the Tsol'aa language - uncommon for one whose ancestors had left the Aalen for Hashan many centuries ago - and a true, deep interest in Tsol'aa anthropology and culture. He had not only heard of Symmachus's expeditions, but also avidly read his works, and by accompanying Heartsong on some field trips, he had learned the basics of survival in the Aalen and the Jungle.

Acacius raised his eyebrow again. "We should press on, or we won't get to that river." I nodded wearily. Though the reptilian denizens of the Muurn river would seem to make camping on it's shores a very courageous venture, it would provide a source of clear water, and we would hope that the periodic flooding would have left enough of a treeless riverbank to enable us to build a shelter safe from snakes and arboreal felines.

The aim of our field expedition was to find traces of Tsol'aa inhabitation along the banks of Muurn river. Years before, I had uncovered some carvings high up in a valley among the neighbouring mountains. The scholarly world had taken note of my findings with interest, but remained sceptical of my translation of the carvings as an archaic and aberrant dialect of Tsol'aa, doubting that the Tsol'aa ever lived this far south. Subsequently, upon reading some half-forgotten field notes of the anthropologist Symmachus, I noted that he had found and described stone arrowpoints and traces of fire-places along the Muurn river. I hoped to find similar traces of inhabitation, and hoped also that they would support my hypothesis of ancient Tsol'aa presence in the jungle and mountains of Muurn.

The expedition so far had quickly narrowed down my aims and expectations. Finding the river, and not succumbing to Muurn Fever, was all that mattered.

We staggered along the path, wary for snakes and poisonous frogs, when I suddenly felt a hand on my shoulder. Acacius looked at me, a serious and slightly frightened frown upon his face. "We're not alone." he whispered. I raised my eyebrow. "What do you mean?" "There's something in there..." he said, pointing to the wall of shrubs and trees to our left. "Not a jaguar, that's for sure. Bigger." I narrowed my eyes, but could detect no movements among the leaves and the ever-shifting shadows among them. "An okapi or tapir maybe?" "No..."

At that moment, an arrow flew past, missing my forehead by an inch to violently hit the treetrunk behind me. "Stand still!" I hissed. "But..." "If that arrow was meant to hit me, I'd be dead! Stand still." Then three figures emerged from the woods. Their skin dark and leathery, and covered by a simple skirt made from kuzu vines, their hair black and long, their faces tall and unmistakably Tsol'aa. Two wielded small bows, which they threateningly aimed towards us. The third had a knife in his hand - a very long, very shiny knife. Despite that I was used to encounters like this, I could not prevent the cold, gnawing sensation in my belly that told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was scared shitless.

The three men started jabbering amongst themselves in what I quickly recognized as a Tsol'aa dialect - one not too dissimilar from the one still spoken in the Aalen. From their excited conversation, I noted that they were considering whether we were Forestals looking for skullcap flowers or kola nuts. From the way the knife-wielding hand of the third man twitched whenever the word "Forestal" came up, I concluded that we better quickly explain that we were not. "Hold still. Let me handle this." I whispered to Acacius. Though I had not expected any encounter with living Tsol'aa in the Muurn jungle, routine had caused me to prepare for one nonetheless - and I quietly blessed my routine. I took off my backpack and opened it, loudly and clearly explaining what I was doing: "I want to speak with your Head Man. Your Father of the Tribe. I want to meet with him... I'll open my back pack. See? I have gifts for your head-man." Contrary to common perception, the more primitive tribes of the Tsol'aa care not for beads and trinkets, and will often be extremely offended when presented with such shiny, useless things (as an explorer who neglected this knowledge found out, to his detriment - for he did end up a burnt offering to Mithraea), but will gladly accept some pairs of good boots, a chopping axe or steel plow, or a sturdy knife. And those I had taken with me. The three looked at the items and nodded appreciatively, then the knife-wielding man turned around and beckoned us to follow.

As we entered the village, I remember noting with amazement that Acacius and I could have walked straight through it, without ever noticing it was there. For the "Merch" as they called themselves depended on kuzu vines for everything but their food. The treehouses - very much rainforest adaptations of the Tsol'aa village treehouses - had floors made of kuzu vines interspersed with the long and flexible roots of some other plant, and amazingly these floors could carry enormous weight without breaking. The roofs had frames made of vines, covered with long leaves. Long kuzu vines - much longer than any I had seen before - supported bridges from one tree to another. The Merch made their clothing - the men wore just skirts covering the loins, while the women covered their breasts as well - from kuzu, and weaved their supple bowstrings of the long fibers near the heart of a kuzu vine. The result was a village and a people which merged almost perfectly to their surroundings - the green vines, the dark brown skin and green clothing of the men, all that they wore and made corresponded totally to the colours of the jungle.

The village was encircled by a broad area where trees were chopped down to prevent arboreal predators from sneaking into the tree-houses and having one of the Merch children for lunch. Looking closer at this cut-down area, I noticed that the Merch were growing some of the more nutritious jungle plants. Other than that, they seemed to depend on gathering fruit and berries from the jungle, and periodical communal hunting trips. All in all, there seemed to be about eighteen treehouses. In total, I believe the Merch numbered about forty, ten of which were children. I noticed quickly that all children seemed to be older than ten, a fact which would, I believed, be caused by periodic sexual abstention not uncommon among hunter-gatherer tribes.

The head-man of the Merch seemed to confirm the notion that in some communities, leadership is a direct function of size, for he - his name was Athla - was significantly taller than the other Merch, and seemed more well-fed and less wiry as well. I do not know whether this depended on his constitution, or whether his status earned him special privileges. In any event, he appreciated my gifts with pleasure and seemed particularly enamored by the steel axe, and he gave me and Acacius permission to remain the honoured guests of his tribe as long as we wanted, on the condition that we would participate in food-gathering and hunting expeditions. Our subsequent conversation, however, deeply amazed me. Upon my questions about the history of his people, Athla was adamant that they had left the Aalen only about three centuries before.

I must, perhaps, explain why I was so amazed. There is not a people on Sapience so unsuited to a nomadic existence as the Tsol'aa. If, in the Aalen village, an inhabited tree is dead or rotten, or a treehouse becomes uninhabitable for other reasons, an elaborate ceremony is held with great mourning and public displays of grief - indeed, the Tsol'aa mourn for their homes more than for their family members. And it is well-known that young children born outside of the Aalen may often be afflicted with a strange distress, even if their families have lived in the cities for centuries. The Tsol'aa have an amazingly strong bond with their homeland under the redwoods - a bond which is, indeed, heriditary, and deeply etched upon their racial memory. My theory itself depended on this - for I strongly believed that any trace of Tsol'aa inhabitation anywhere must be a remnant of a very ancient, primeval Tsol'aa civilization. I utterly discounted the possibility of Tsol'aa migrating. But why then did the Merch move to the Muurn jungle? I tried to get an answer out of Athla, who seemed to be knowledgeable enough about the history of his own tribe, but he evaded all my questions, and seemed strangely reluctant to speak about the issue.

And, even if the Merch seemed to be adapted to their jungle surroundings well enough, the inhospitability of the Muurn jungle left its traces. Some of the people I saw bore large, open sores or ugly, dark scars which I believed were a symptom of chronic swamp rot. The wiry, lean stature of both the men and the women was not just a sign of good exercise, I concluded when I looked at the children, who seemed clearly undernourished. And there were no older people anywhere - with the exception of Lach, the medicine man. Athla said that, besides Lach, he was the oldest of his tribe, and I believe he had not passed his fiftieth year. No people in their good mind would have left voluntarily for this moist hell, filled with poisonous reptiles and amphibians, thorny and barbed plants and terrible parasites like the black screw worm, which would dig its way into the flesh of human limbs. The Merch had become masters at getting by as best as they could - but something had driven them here... But what?

All these musings were brutally interrupted when I fell violently ill with Muurn fever the second day in the village. Acacius, who shared the hut the Merch had vacated for us, woke up to find me jabbering incomprehensibly and covered in a thick layer of sweat, and immediately alarmed the Medicine Man. Lach, a small, wizened stick figure of a man, his limbs unbelievably frail but apparently still strong, his face shrivelled like the Atavian mummies I once dug up - but more about him later. Lach nodded slowly, called a young woman called Ama who was apparently his apprentice and cawed some commands in his dry raven voice. A few hours later, Ama came to feed me a thick broth of cooked skullcap and some other ingredients I gladly remain ignorant of. Acacius had to hold my head and feed me.

For two days, I had violent hallucinations of wounded people, dying people, people with limbs torn off, eviscerated, disemboweled... And the times I was not plagued by these terrible visions (which might have been induced by the skullcap), waves of nausea and diarrhoea made me excrete all moisture and solid matter out of my bowels. I would have succumbed to dysenteria on top of it all, had not the Merch forced me to drink litres of water. The third day I woke up, my fever gone. The skullcap broth had worked.

To condense this narrative a bit, I will dispense with describing all the interesting and fascinating things we found out while lingering in the Merch village, or going on hunting trips for tapir, arboreal primates and wild jungle pigs, or going on fishing trips on the Muurn river which roared nearby. I will quote straight from the quick notes in my notebook:

"Language - seems to confirm Athla's account of a recent migration from the Aalen. The dialect is clearly closely related to village Tsol'aa and easy to learn for any Tsol'aa, not a language with it's own roots deep in the past, as a theory of long-term, continuous jungle inhabitation would suggest."

"Religion - this is a mystery. The Merch seem to carry out no rituals to Mithraea or Ama'len as the village Tsol'aa call her, nor to any other known God, for that matter. Upon asking about their gods, the Merch remain silent and seem not to comprehend my questions. A primitive tribe of sophisticated atheists? Hardly. But there must be some taboo to speak about these matters to outsiders. I would ask Lach if I could approach him, but he seems to dislike me speaking to him, and I notice this Ama leading me constantly softly and subtly away from him when I try. I do not want to offend him, and should try to keep my distance."

"The lack of old people disturbs me. Surely, jungle life is harsh, but these Tsol'aa cannot have lost their hereditary longevity. I would have expected at least a few hardy old people of eighty or older. But there is only Lach, who by the looks of it has lasted for centuries. Do these people feed their old people to the crocodiles?"

"The Merch seem to have strict sexual mores. They seem monogamous as far as I can see - any woman is consistently hanging around one particular man - even if children seem to be reared by the group as a whole. Prudish people: bathing and so on are seperated activities for men and women, and this is not just because outsiders are present, I think. Pity for Acacius. It'd be nice for him to find some more promiscuous primitives on his first field trip."

"Athla's authority is not absolute. Decisions seem to be taken by the tribe as a whole. Men and Women. In these meetings, Lach's word seems to carry great weight. Athla is leading more in practical matters, particularly hunting operations and the like."

"Tonight we listened to one of the male members of the tribe reciting some piece of Tsol'aa myth. When he rose up to speak, my heart pounded with the expectation of finally hearing something about Merch religious ritual, but I was disappointed when it turned out to be an epic poem about the battle of Nishnatoba. However, the poem was extremely beautiful and moving. Not only for me. I noticed some of the faces around the camp-fire were tear-stained. Most of the motives were known to me from similar poetry of the Aalen Tsol'aa - but some words I could not recognize. I jotted them down at the back. Comparison of them with other Nishnatoba poetry could help me determine their meaning and etymology when I get back to Hashan... I slowly learn to appreciate the courteous and careful manner of speaking of these Merch. They seem to be intensely proud of their own Tsol'aa and Merch identity. I wonder sometimes if we would have been accepted as guests if we were not Tsol'aa ourselves... I remember something odd now. Upon speaking with a young hunter named La'mead this morning, he misspoke, saying something like "the accursed" when he intended to say "Merch." He corrected himself immediately, but froze when I probed about this, and refused to speak on the matter. I discussed this with Acacius. We should not be too careless in trying to find out the secrets of these people: for all we know, there may be yet an offering pyre to Mithraea on the other side of the river."

After two weeks in the village, they changed our places of residence. Acacius and I got a hut for ourselves or so it seemed at first. When, some time after sunset, I lay down to sleep, I heard feet moving softly over the hanging bridge to my door. I sat up, and noticed Lach's Apprentice, the young woman called Ama, standing in the doorway. She stepped inside and sat on the side of my hammock. I looked at her face with great apprehension, remembering the odd custom of a Dwarven tribe I once read about. They wished to test the honour of their guest by providing him with a woman the first night. The following morning, the woman would wash alone if the guest had refrained from touching her while sleeping beside her. In that case, the guests had proved his honour. If, however, the woman would help the guest to wash himself, washing his hair and face, the axe-wielding dwarves who watched the whole spectacle would quickly jump into action... These thoughts subsided quickly when Ama edged closer and embraced me.

I believe the Merch had decided that, now that we had spend already two weeks with them, we might best behave as adult Merch, which meant we had to live in pairs. Acacius had a young huntress named Tseba'a walking with him ever since that night, and I had Ama following me around everywhere. I do not know if Tseba'a and Ama had been singles before or whether some subtle rearrangement of marriages had been decided upon the preceding evening. But I greatly enjoyed her company, in the day as well as in the night, and she seemed happy to answer any question I might have - except ones about their religious rituals, or about their emigration from the Aalen. When I asked her about Lach, it became clear that she was his daughter rather than his apprentice. I was amazed, since there must have been at least a century between them, and I doubted whether the wizened little kobold of a man had been much more virile twenty years earlier. I asked her why I could not speak with Lach. "Father is a busy man." she answered. "He cares for the whole tribe, in many ways... He should not be disturbed." "But there are only a few things I would ask him..." She smiled softly. "In time, Aalen-man. Then your questions will be answered."

Four weeks after our arrival, Ama beckoned me to follow her down a narrow trail along the riverbank. She deftly moved around the overhanging thorny branches and "strangler-root" as the Merch called them. At length, the trail rose a little, and I saw we were ascending a tall cliff along the Muurn river, and as we reached the top of the cliff, which was raised above the jungle canopy and covered with short brushes only, I could see the jagged peaks of the Muurn mountains in the distance. "Come.", Ama said. Along the other side of the ridge, a small trail led to a narrow cave opening. Ama snuck inside easily enough, but I had to turn and twist myself to move into the crevasse. Inside, though, the cave was ample enough. I followed Ama down a broad hallway, illuminated somewhat by irid moss. Suddenly Ama stopped before a steep abyss down. "Come." she said. "Come and look, Aalen-man." I edged closer to the edge of the abyss, and when I looked down, I noticed the floor was only twenty meters or so below. But what took my attention was the huge mass moving around the cave-floor.

It is a well-known fact that the Tsol'aa rode spiders during the battle of Nishnatoba and perhaps some short time afterwards as well, but currently, spider-mounts only existed in Tsol'aa racial memory - or so I thought. No one knows why they disappeared - did they all expire in the many battles and wars of that time? Or did the Tsol'teth take the spider-mounts with them to their alien, deep abodes in the bowels of the earth? In any event, I was very sure that I was looking at one now - a huge barbed thorax, and a small, many-eyed head with terrible, monstruous jaws carried by eight lithe legs. "Rienha?" I asked Ama in Tsol'aa, pointing at the beast. She nodded. "Yours - the Merch's?" She nodded again. Many thoughts rushed through me at that moment - was this the only one, or did the Merch have an army of spider-mounts? "We have more." answered Ama softly. How did the Merch keep these beasts alive? "We feed them from our hunts." said Ama. A terrible thought formed itself inside of me. Did the Merch sacrifice their old to this... thing? I did not pronounce that question, of course, but Ama must have felt something, for she laughed, and said: "No, Aalen-man. These creatures do not eat people."

"Impossible.", Acacius said when I hurriedly and excitedly described the spider, after I returned to the village. "Are you sure the spider did not merely look large? Perhaps the darkness of the cave messed with your perception a bit, and Ama wanted to play a joke on you?" I shook my head and remained adamant. "Then there's a problem, here. The last reports about spider-mounts date back thousands of years - no, straight into mythology... I never really believed they were real back then... But the Merch say that they have lived in the Aalen only three hundred years ago. If they had a group of spider-mounts there, people would have noticed, wouldn't they?" Acacius rubbed his chin. "They could have moved here and found a cave filled with Tsol'aa spider-mounts, but that would be too much of a coincidence, wouldn't it?" Acacius shrugged. "Anyway, we can hardly report in Hashan that we found spider-mounts... We'd be laughed straight out of the Academy, if not the city itself." I sighed, and nodded. But I could not merely set aside the notion of spider-mounts in a cave a few miles away from here. I needed to find out how it came here, and decided to set aside my worries about Merch etiquette and finally ask Athla or Lach a straight question.

Talking to Athla proved unhelpful. "You have seen our spider. Ama took you to see our spider." he merely concluded dumbly. Yes, you bighead, that is what I have just told you! - I was going to say when I reminded myself that Athla's next sentence might well be: "Ama took you to see our spider and now you both must die." However, Athla merely smiled, and nodded. "You are almost ready to become one with us, Aalen-man." He refused to answer any more questions about the spider, or Merch history, or the epithet "The Accursed." I walked out of the hut and went to confront Lach. Strangely, when I found him gathering herbs in the open area around the village, he stopped to speak to me. His piercing black eyes looked at me carefully, and his parched lips twisted in something resembling a smile. "Ama took you to see our spiders." he noted. The use of the plural struck me immediately. "Are there more spiders than one?" "Yes, yes, many spiders." he cawed. "Lach, listen... Can I ask you how old you are?" Lach shook his head. "I'm older than you can imagine, Aalen-man. Much older..." "But why are there no other people like you in the village? Beside Athla, everyone seems younger than forty." "You are wrong, Aalen-man. Our old are still among us." "But where?" "Still among us, Aalen-man. Ask no more questions." he rasped, turned around and went back to his herbs.

During the next few weeks, we kept our heads down and tried no longer to pry information from Athla and Lach. The few times I tried asking Ama, I only received answers as cryptic as Lach's. Instead, Acacius and I decided we would watch the movements of each tribe-member more carefully, particularly Lach's. Perhaps we could follow them and catch them worshipping their spider-mount late at night. This proved not to be so easy as we imagined - for I did indeed notice the old man sneaking out of the village some time at midnight, after I had quietly left my hammock as I assured myself that Ama was sleeping, and was sitting and watching the village from the door of my hut. As soon as I rose to follow them, though, the kuzu vine creaked under my footstep, and a hand grasped me, softly but determinedly, by the shoulder. "Why are you prowling around at night, Aalen-man? Come to bed."

I did not get another chance to see where Lach was going at night, for now Ama tried to assure that I was sleeping before surrendering to sleep herself. She would pretend to be fast asleep, but as soon as I tried to leave my hammock, her strong arms would embrace me. "Where are you trying to go, Aalen-man? No other woman, huh?" The words were jocular, but her embrace most certainly was not. I began to feel that the Merch had other designs than mere hospitality by pairing us to Ama and Tseba'a - for a whispered conversation with Acacius convinced me that he was as much a prisoner of his own hut after sunset.

I soon found out something else that disturbed me. During the weeks we had been together, Ama had insisted upon regular intercourse - whether this was Merch custom, or whether she wanted to bear the child of an outsider, or whether she was serious about the "other woman" and wanted to assure I had no desire to sneak out of the hut at night, I do not know. I assumed, though, that the Merch were as fertile as Tsol'aa in general, and asked her one morning whether she was pregnant, or was trying to become pregnant. She gave me a blank stare. "Pregnant?" "Yes, you know - bearing a child." Ama blinked, and seemed not to comprehend the meaning of the word. I pointed to a child playing around nearby, and pointed to a belly. Ama frowned. "What is this about eating people with you Aalen-men? First you think we eat old men, then children..." "No, no, no..." I hurried. "Before a child is born. Look!" I gestured having a swollen belly, and walking around ponderously. Ama giggled. I looked at her in amazement. Would the Merch have no concept of pregnancy? Perhaps the rigid and monotonous diet would assure the womb would not swell as much, or the child would remain very small - but surely an adult Merch would know where babies come from? I tried to explain to her, but the disgusted and shocked look on her face told me I'd better stop. "Sexual intercourse, pregnancy and childbirth are shrouded in strong taboos among the Merch." I jotted down in my notebook. "Perhaps knowledge of these matters is shared only among women who experienced them, and not shared with younger women." Then I stopped, knowing from Ama's behaviour towards me that it was nonsense. And suddenly I realized that I had, indeed, seen no pregnant women among the Merch - while the high mortality in the jungle would necessify a high fertility as well - and that, despite the strict monogamy of the Merch, children were raised communally.

I pointed, again, to the child that was playing around. "Whose child is that?" I asked. "The Merch." Ama answered simply. "No, who is her mother?" Ama shrugged. "She is Merch. Her mother is Merch as well, of course." I frowned. Then I realized that Ama had mentioned she was Lach's daughter. I asked again: "Who is your father?" "Lach. I told you." "And who is her father?" I asked, pointing to the child. "Lach." Ama said. "Her father is Lach and you do not know who her mother is? That makes no sense." "I told you who her mother is. The Merch is her mother." "And who is your mother?" "My mother is the Merch." "What about Athla's father and mother?" "You are slow, Aalen-man. Athla's mother is the Merch, his father is Lach - as with all of us." She smiled softly. "And when you finally join our tribe, your father will be Lach, the Merch will be your mother."

I did not get to tell this to Acacius. We were taken on a food-gathering trip and returned at sunset. Ama did not tolerate any loitering around in the village, but firmly led me to the hut. Hence I had no knowledge of Acacius's plans, and I would have stopped him, if I could. However, Acacius had mixed a sleep-inducing powder of the Cohosh plants that he had ground secretly the days before, among Tseba'a's food, and succeeded in getting out of his pleasant prison as his mate was deeply asleep.

I was woken up roughly before sunrise. Ama's face hovered above me. She was pale and she looked shaken. "Aalen-man, you must go. You must go now, and join the Merch. Lach will take you." She pressed her lips upon mine. "Come back safely, Aalen-man." Beneath the hut, Lach stood, together with two young hunters of the tribe. Tseba'a was one of them. She looked sick - the Merch must have used something to awaken her - but clutched her spear firmly. But Lach took my eye immediately. Nothing seemed left of the shrivelled ragdoll of a man I had seen before - his skin, though still old, seemed sleek and oily, and I noticed muscles in his limbs where I had hardly seen any before. More impressive was the change in his voice. "Come, Aalen-man! Your time has come!" he bellowed, his black eyes flashing.

Lach led the way to the cave Ama had shown me earlier. I was not bound and could walk freely, but I was pretty sure of the fact that the two hunters, who walked close behind me, did not wield their spears to protect me against the wild animals. Lach walked fast and supply, his back, once bent, now very straight, and his arms pushing away the branches with vigour.

At the entry of the cave, we found Acacius. Or what was left of him. He seemed to have been attacked and disemboweled by some great beast - the ground around him was dark with blood and viscerals. The sight of the man who, over the week, had become my friend was too much for me, and I fainted. Lach woke me up quickly with some harsh slaps to my cheeks. "Your friend went to the lair before it was his time to join the Merch. He poisoned his woman, so she would sleep. We had to kill him." Lach looked at me coldly. "We gave him food, shelter, and Tseba'a's company..." - he pointed to the huntress, who looked at the remains of her mate without any emotion on her face - "But he was too curious. Poisoned his wife, and went sniffing about... You are curious too, Aalen-man. But you are a better man than him." It sounded more like a command than a complement. Lach grinned harshly. "Many questions, you had. Now, perhaps, they will be answered. Come, and become one of the Merch."

They led me down the cave, and, without a word, pushed me into the lair of the spider-mount, then turned and went. I hit the ground hard, and the fall knocked me out, but didn't kill me. I awoke without knowing how long I had been lying there, with a piercing ache pounding around my skull, and with a eight-metre long spider hovering above me. I would have screamed if I hadn't felt doing so would explode my battered head.

Whatever the spider wanted, it did not desire to eat me - or it would most certainly have done so while I was unconscious. I noted that I was not entangled into webs of any kind, and that I could move freely except for a concussion in my ankle. Carefully, very carefully and very slowly I slipped away from between the spider's front leg. I expected it's mandibles to attack me momentarily, and through my fear and my pain, I noticed that the sight of a whole army riding these beasts must have been spectacular. But the spider seemed disinterested, cocked it's many-eyed head a bit, but did not attack.

As I was a few meters out of its reach, I tried to stand up. I had noticed that the large spider was not the only one, but many little ones - hardly a meter long - were running about the floor of the cave. I decided that I did not want to count on the spider's inertia for too long - either the large one or the little ones would grow hungry at a point, and I wanted to find a cave or hole to run into before that would happen. But my ankle gave up on me immediately, and I fell down immediately. While falling, in the pale light of the irid moss, I had noticed a dark narrow trail leading from the location where I had fainted to my current one. I suddenly took note of a pain in my chest as well as my head and ankle. I clutched my chest. Something felt dark and sticky. Then I fainted.

I woke up in Ama's hammock. A kuzu vine with leaves bound around my chest, where a large flesh wound was in the process of healing. Ama's soft face above me, smiling. "You are Merch now." When I stammered a question about what happened, she said: "The spider touched you, and you have become one of our tribe." I felt I had finally hit upon a religious, or perhaps semi-religious ritual. Perhaps this would provide some answers about the Merch's spiritual life. "So, when someone reaches a certain age, they are thrown before the spider, who, hum... touches them, and they become initiates of the tribe?" Ama frowned, and shook her head. "Only outsiders who would become Merch." she answered, and shrugged. "It's quite simple, really. We already are Merch." She smiled broadly. "We come from the spider, and it is to him we shall return."

I stood up, crashed out of the treehouse, and ran towards Lach, who seemed to have returned to his old wizened posture, all the strength and vigour of that night gone from him. "I passed your damn spider-test..." I hollered at him, panting, "I am Merch now, so it is perhaps time to answer some of my questions." Lach looked up, an amused twinkle in his eyes, but his voice parched as usual. "Sure. Ask away." "Where do the young Merch come from? And where do the old go? What does it mean that you are called "The Accursed"? What exactly did that spider-thing do to me? What does it mean that you are everyone's father, but they have no mother?" "That's a lot of questions for an old man. Come, sit down." he said in a friendly voice, and patted a charred tree-stump. He sat down before me, his hands folded and his back bent in his kobold posture. "We took our spiders with us... he croaked. "When you left the Aalen?" "No, no..." he grinned drily. "Listen. We took our spiders with us... Down below. But many had died in those glorious wars, where we filled the lines at the front..." His voice seemed to rise. A small voice inside of me began to tell me that I knew what he was speaking about - but that was impossible, wasn't it?

The old man continued. "You Aalen-men, men of Hashan... You think we are primitive, because we walk in kuzu vines, not?" He giggled hoarsely. "But deep down below, our sciences had brought us far. We began uncovering the secrets of creation itself. So, from the gentle Horkval, we created the cruel and terrible bug-man... But our spiders... They degenerated over generations, became dull and almost blind... Still nasty enough, mind you. But nothing like the great "rienha". We could not uncover the secret of their procreation, we could not make them as strong as they used to be, for all our knowledge." He rasped on, my heart turning cold with the slow realization as to what the old man was saying. "I was an apprentice back then. And I had an idea... I climbed to the upper-world, taking our best young spider with me. The Masters did not know, they would have never let me go. But I defied their will, and arrived in the upper-world. With my spider. And I found a band of Tsol'aa in the Aalen. One of the more traditional ones, secluded, slightly xenophobic. Perfect to my needs. I showed them the spider, let them toy with it, let their children ride on its back... You should have seen their faces, all starry-eyed." The old man grinned again. There was something almost warm in his voice, but quickly the coldness took over again.

"The spider grew, and I said to the tribesmen I had to bring it to a cave, so it could lay eggs. Then, when there would be more spiders, we could ride to the other tribes and to the Tsol'aa village on our spiders. And when the other Tsol'aa would see us riding our spider-mounts, they would regard us as the true Tsol'aa warriors of Nishnatoba returned, and would rally to our banner. And then we would cross the Vashnars, and all the intruders - the Ceylon-men, the bird-men, the tiger-men - they would flee and be scattered before us." The old man closed his eyes for a moment, and took a deep breath. "There was something I had not told them. A slight modification..."

He suddenly looked up, and lay a gnarled hand on my shoulder. "Our spider would not lay eggs. If it had, it's progeny would be weak and blind... Degenerate. Down below, we had changed this young spider and some others, upon my directions. Egg-sacks removed, stinger added..." He coughed. "You must know, Aalen-man, that there is an essence flowing through all of us. The words of Sarapis himself, telling us how each of us must be. Through our research, we made inroads into understanding this essence. Of course, we could not replicate it - but we could imprint upon it, twist it's holy words a little... That's how we made the Horkval into the bug-man, and the ogres into vastly more terrible and cruel beasts. The spiders you saw, young friend, are the apex of that research."

"For with its stinger, the spider would imprint new holy instructions, new essence upon whomever he stung. The instructions would be deep, and radical, but their effects... imperceptible, at first. So, after I had my spider in my cave, I told the Tsol'aa that they should keep it happy, and well-fed, so it would lay more eggs. And all the Tsol'aa came, bringing food and gifts to the spider, as it lay in it's lair. And all were... touched. I told them the touch was a blessing, an affirmation of the ancient bond between them and the spider-mount. They can be so sentimental about their spider-mounts... They believed it all. And went to the cave. And were touched. All of them... And they were... changed."

As I heard his words, my stomach seemed to contract to a small, painfull ball and my head went spinning. Lach noticed this, and smiled slightly. "The changes become apparent after the fiftieth year. And they are rather... sudden. To ease the pains of transformation, the men are lain inside the cave, after they have eaten a large amount of cohosh... They are asleep, and will not awaken until they are changed." Lach smiled bitterly. "All good and well, until an errant Tsol'aa hunter from the village hit upon our cave. He reported what she saw to her elders, and they immediately started organizing a small army to drive us out of the Aalen. We did not wait for the fighting. We could not afford to lose our spiders. And that, my friend, is why we are called, the "accursed". Accursed for continuing to believe in the hopes and dreams of our race!"

His voice had risen, but then descended back into his usual soft rasp. "So, we perfected the union between the Tsol'aa and their spidermount. All are Merch. They call me father, for they revere me... But I am not. We manipulated our spider to reproduce asexually. And, of course, the Tsol'aa Merch are infertile. As larvae should be." He grinned widely at me, his small pointy teeth shining.

Lach had never tried to stop me from fleeing that black jungle. He just laughed: "You will come back, my friend. Eight legs will carry you, from Kamleikan if needs be, all the way to your lair." "So... let me get this straight... You are a Tsol'teth apprentice?" I asked him. He grinned his sharktooth smile. "Perhaps I will be Master soon." "Master or not, there is no way I will let you have your way with me." I screamed at him. He laughed. "My friend, sooner rather than later you will learn the true meaning of being Tsol'aa. And we will cleanse the land of all those who have intruded and taken our fields, our mountains, our forests... You will learn. Now go! For I will see you back here."

As I write this, I have been hiding and labouring silently in the library of Hashan's Academy for many years. Suicide seemed the most obvious option at first. But Lach's modifications had taken care of that: my hands would freeze in motion as I tried to slit my wrists, my body would refuse service as I tried to walk over the cliff, and assassins I hired would, for some reason I cannot fathom, refuse to kill me as soon as they saw my face. Then I decided to read everything I could about this essence Lach told me of. But Lach had been right in saying the Tsol'teth's knowledge of this far surpassed anything we knew in the upper-world, and my search proved fruitless.

I am fifty-two years old now, and the pains are growing. The herbs I took to slow down my metabolism, hoping that they would slow down the inevitable change, are wearing off. I am shunning people now, fearing that mandibles and multiple eyes may appear overnight. But the pain that is slowly starting to tear at my intestines suggest that this is a slower, and more agonizing metamorphosis. I gathered all the cohosh I could find last week, for I am now bereft of hope, and a voice inside of me is growing and tells me to surrender to Lach's mad vision, to see whether life as a spider is, perhaps, more pleasant than I thought, and appeals to my Tsol'aa pride in insisting there might perhaps be true glory in the rise of a great Tsol'aa-spider hybrid race. And I know it is not my voice. It is its voice. And it is growing, almost ready now...