The Isle of Blood

“Perhaps if you and Will Henry would talk less and focus more on the task at hand, we might make better time,” the monstrumologist snapped. With each minute the unnerving fire in his eyes grew brighter and colder. He paused only once about halfway up, when a gust of wind came rushing down the defile. He lifted his head and allowed the wind to bathe his face, eyes closed, arms spread wide for balance. The wind died to a gentle trickle, and he resumed the climb at a quicker pace, as if he had smelled something promising in the wind.

At the top, with the vast heart of Socotra spread out before me, I saw little that I would deem promising. The central plateau was a flat, nearly featureless landscape, crisscrossed with lines of scrub and clusters of green-crowned trees that looked like giant umbrellas turned inside out. Their exposed, interwoven branches reminded me of wicker baskets at first, and then I decided, No, they are more like the intricate weave of a nidus ex magnificum. Two were clinging to the rocks above the riverbed, and we rested for a moment in their meager shade. The day had grown hot, though the dry wind still blew.

“Awaale,” the doctor said. “Let me borrow your knife for a moment. I want to show Will Henry something.”

Warthrop rammed the blade into the trunk of the tree and sliced downward, making a six-inch incision. Thick, bright red resin oozed from the tree’s wound.

Awaale groaned softly. “Bleeding trees? How did I not guess?”

“This is Dragon’s Blood, Will Henry,” the doctor said, “from which Socotra derives one of her names. It was highly valued in antiquity. They say Cleopatra used it for lipstick. This particular species, like the one you saw earlier, grows nowhere else on earth.”

“It does not look like any tree I have ever seen,” said Awaale, carefully wiping the blade clean on his trousers. “But this island is full of things I’ve never seen, and I have seen many, many things.”

Warthrop pointed to his right. “The Hagghier Mountains. And, on the other side, Hadibu.”

In the distance the range undulated in the noonday heat. The tallest peaks reared their saw-toothed heads more than five thousand feet into the air and thrust them into the billowing clouds draped over their jagged shoulders. They puffed their broken cheeks and blew a flurry of wind that stirred the monstrumologist’s dark hair.

“Hurry, gentlemen,” he said. “I think there may be a storm coming.”

The wind off the mountains played with our hair for a while and flicked at our collars. The wind was dry, though, the sky clear, the sun high and hot. After we’d traversed a mile or two, when the gigantic serrated teeth of Socotra sidled closer to our right, the wind grew tired of toying with us and began to prod and push, with an occasional thirty-mile-per-hour shove thrown in, testing our will to hold our northerly course. At one point a massive gust hurled me to the rocky ground. Awaale helped me up and said to the doctor, “If we walked in the gully, the wind could not reach us.”

“If we walked in the gully, a flash flood could sweep us off the plateau and into the ocean,” Warthrop answered testily. Both hado raise their voices to be heard. “But you are free to do as you wish.”

“I think I am not so free, because my wish is to be off this accursed island!”

“I did not ask for you to come!” returned my master.

“I did not come for you, dhaktar. I came for—”

“Yes?” The monstrumologist whirled on him. “Tell me. What did you come for?”

Awaale glanced at me. “For the unspoiled beaches.”

Warthrop stared at him for a long, awful moment. He started to say something, and when his mouth came open, the wind abruptly died. The sudden silence was deafening.

An object tumbled out of the sky and landed at the monstrumologist’s feet. Thin and shriveled, yellowish gray and speckled with gore—a human finger.

We followed the doctor’s thoughtful gaze upward. A shadow was descending from the cloudless sky, a whirling mass of blood and shattered bone and the blasted bits of a human carcass. The doctor was the first to react, and his reaction was to shove me as hard as he could with a panicked cry of “Run, Will Henry! Run!” In two strides he had outpaced Awaale and me, making for a tight grouping of Dragon’s Blood trees clinging precariously to the lip of the three-foot-deep gully along which we’d been hiking. The big Somali scooped me up under his massive arm and followed, shouting in abject terror, “What is this? What is this?” as the bloody rain began to slap and spatter the hard ground, popping all around us. A large piece of an organ—probably a portion of a liver—fell directly in front of him, and Awaale hopped over it with that peculiar grace that is born of desperation. We joined the monstrumologist beneath the relative safety of the trees. He was tearing through the rucksack, looking for our ponchos.