(This guest post brought to you by VM!)
Varenthes stuck his hand out in front of his son, going suddenly still. The young man followed suit, confused. He gestured quizzically at his father, his spear at the ready. Varenthes simply stared ahead into the blue-white water, his eyes wide open. Then he motioned to his son to swim behind a rocky outcrop nearby, as if to hide from a foe ahead. Once there, Varenthes asked his son to peek ahead, into the near distance, slowly and carefully. With his free hand clinging to a foothold, the young man balanced himself on the spear and leaned out slightly. At first, he could see nothing – just the water and some flotsam caught in the stray shallow currents. But when he squinted some more, they came into focus: little black globules of some slick substance suspended a dozen or so feet under the surface, in a small valley in the reef. He’d never seen them before, and looked back at his father. Varenthes himself was frozen still; he wasn’t afraid, but he was also careful not to give himself away. He knew what was coming.
The black globules were bubu – oily droplets coughed up and spit into the water by a large fish called the gossan. As the duo watched, one bubu latched itself to one portion of the reef. Then, it slowly extended five or six short tendrils that seemed to stick to parts of the coral lattice, stretching itself out, and began to move around. From a distance, it seemed like an insect-like shadow lurking among the bright colours, its splayed form shifting in different ways as the tendrils reached from stem to stem, the bubu evidently seeking something but Varenthes knew not what. Then it suddenly went still, as if it had found its prey, retracted its limbs to resume its orb-like aspect, and just hung there. Varenthes’s son tugged at his father’s tunic, asking if they could resume hunting, but Varenthes refused to budge. He raised a palm advising patience and asked his son to watch carefully. As they did, the bubu seemed to shrink a little before turning a bright, deep blue, and, in a flash, sent a surge of electric energy coursing through the part of the reef surrounding it. For a moment, all the corals flashed a brilliant shade of azure, lighting up the water for a few feet around with a dazzling glow that quickly subsided into something much darker.
They were all dead, killed nearly instantaneously by the bubu‘s destructive energy. His son let out a gasp in awe, gurgling a big bubble out, and Varenthes lunged to cover his mouth, holding him close. The bubu itself had vanished but a pungent burning odour was beginning to emanate from its now-dead neighbourhood, percolating through the water before dissipating – but it wasn’t truly gone. Varenthes knew his kind couldn’t smell or taste it but the water carried this necrotic signature out to a score or so feet, perhaps more, where the blind gossan lay in wait, buried under the sand they tossed over themselves. At the first hint of this chemical signal, these orange-pink creatures – three or four to a bubu – would surge forth in a burst of particles and descend upon their meal, crisp and ready to eat.
The gossan were vicious carnivores; though they couldn’t see, they had a heightened sense of smell and it was said the whiskers around their oral cavities could sense distant changes in the composition of water. Each gossan could produce up to five bubu a day, and a gossan could eat anything a bubu had killed. Varenthes despised them, as did his village and all the villages that lived on the coast and fished in these waters. If an elder hadn’t been lost to old age, they had been to the bubu–gossan. Varenthes himself had lost his first daughter this way. There was no way to escape a bubu once it had attached itself to you except by rubbing its skein with a resin obtained from the rockwood tree, which grew deep inland. It was similarly hard to fend off the gossan: each one was the size of a big dog, with a sharp, bony ridge just behind the rim of their lips – bearing a frightening resemblance to a circular razor – built to rapidly scrape flesh off from bone. Thankfully, however, their skin was particularly soft and easily pierced by even blunt blades.
They almost always hunted in small packs, and each attack was as savage as it was paranoid. The gossan, they said, took no chances: what they couldn’t see, they would eat. And so they eat everything, sometimes even each other. Each hunting pack was led by a male gossan, and when he died or was killed, a female member of the group would turn male and assume leadership. Only the males produced the bubu, and the females did most of the hunting; the food wasn’t split equally, however: each gossan could take how much ever it wanted.
Once the gossan in front of them had finished feasting and wandered off, Varenthes slowly let go of his son, motioning to return to the surface. There, they climbed into their boat and lay their spears down across its length, small fish impaled at their hunting ends. One of them was a kugail, its meat prized for its sour flavour, and Varenthes was pleased even though they hadn’t been able to hunt for long. The kugail would fetch him enough to buy a new net. He began to collect their catch into a bag as his son grabbed the oars and began rowing. It would take them about an hour to get back, perhaps just in time for lunch… and it was then that he noticed a little black patch drop quickly out of view behind his son’s neck.
Inspiration: China Miéville’s Goss and Subby from Kraken (2010), and sea goldies.