The Wraeththu Chronicles Read Online Free

crags. Plants were becoming fewer, so we gathered as much as we could carry to feed the pony later on. Cliffs reared black and gaunt in impressive silence toward the darkening sky. Splintered rocks littered the ground, and strangely, brackish, milky pools of water lay in the hollows of them. Cal warned me not to touch it. As there was neither brush nor wood to gather, we could not light a fire when we camped for the night. We huddled uncomfortably under a blanket, too tired to keep going, too discomforted to sleep. For the first time since that first night, Cal deigned to touch me. We sat with our backs pressed into an overhanging rock with the blankets swathed around us. Awkwardly, Cal had put his arm around me, more because he was feeling miserable than because he wanted to hold me, I think. I realized that now I was absurdly disappointed that he had initiated nothing physical between us. It is difficult to work out why I had changed my mind about that. I thought that Wraeththu were on the way to not being exactly human, and it was part of their glamor, I suppose, that forbidden and secret sensuality they shrouded in ritual and reverence. Cal had spoken only briefly of such things and then only dropping meager hints; to test my reaction, I think. He once said, as we lay in a sandy hollow at night, that I possessed a rare and stunning beauty. His words had come to me out of the darkness, I could barely see him, and I had laughed, too loud, immediately, in sheer embarassment
     
    "Don't be ridiculous!" I had cried, more aggressively than I had intended, because I felt nervous, and just a little scared. He had smiled in a horrible, sneery way.
     
    "Pell, that's one thing about you that is unattractive," he said. "You must know you are beautiful. It is more conceited to deny it. If you think that kind of modesty is becoming, you're wrong. It's just pathetically human. When someone tells you you're beautiful, you don't have to say anything at all."
     
    I squirmed in humiliation for hours afterwards, and would not speak to him, but I knew he was right. Mima and I had always thought ourselves superior to all our peers, and not just in looks. But I had always thought
     
    it ill-mannered to let people know that. Cal was of a different world. His kind are proud of themselves and because none of them are truly ugly, Wraeththu are never ashamed to admit they are beautiful. Only in a world where ugliness prevails is it a shame to be vain, a cruelty to appreciate loveliness in oneself. Just being around Cal kindled my sexuality. I must admit this worried me. Had I possessed, unknown within myself, the inclination to desire another male? Perhaps I was being subtly brainwashed, and yet... sometimes, when I looked at Cal, out of the corner of my eye, in the evening, in the red light, it seemed a woman stood there; a woman who might have green hair or wings; something strange, unearthly. Sometimes I was frightened, sometimes just confused. Was my mind losing its grip on reality? The heat of the desert. .. ? I was in awe of Cal's magic; that which I could sense beneath the surface and his precise yet languid movements; his cat-like pride in himself, called to me, softly but insistent, like an enchantment. His eyes mirrored an intimacy long-gone, but it was caught within him for ever. That night, crouched under the gaunt, black cliffs, I longed to touch his face, to make him look at me, instead of the middle distance where old memories replayed themselves on the night, but I could not bring myself to move. My previous life had been cut off and had floated away from me, Mima's face was fading and her hands were mere wisps that reached for me, but I was still young, inexperienced and frightened. The beast slept within me but I was not ready to wake it.
     
    The next day, we made our way up into the mountains. Starting at dawn, we followed a winding, stony path between the rocks, always traveling upwards. Cal told me he thought that once water