Scourged by Kevin Hearne

Author:Kevin Hearne
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

i’ve heard of the Amazon, o’ course, but it’s not something I can really comprehend, a vast river spanning a continent that’s the breadth of nine fecking Irelands or something like that. We have lots of bonny water on the Emerald Isle but not concentrated in a river that bloody wide or long. And it doesn’t hide alligators and piranhas and the like either, or huge great snakes that have somehow become euphemisms for a man’s mickey. I’ll tell ye what, lads: The day I see a mickey that can wrap itself around a full-grown man and squeeze him to death is the day I stop even trying to have sex.

The tree I use to shift in is right by the bank of the Amazon, near a city in Peru called Iquitos. I don’t realize it when I get there, but later I find out that ye can’t get to this city by car. Ye have to either fly in or float in on the river. Or shift in, like me, using a tethered tree. They have local transport in the city, roads and such, but the roads don’t cut through the forest otherwise. Still, it’s not a wee town. It’s half a million people, and it smells like they’ve been here for a while.

Siodhachan told me that most of this continent got colonized by the Spanish and Portuguese. Those were a couple of the big colonial powers, along with the British, French, and Dutch, who used gunpowder and disease to make the world such a European bollocks.

“The Irish,” he says to me during that history lesson, “were among the first to be colonized.”

I shan’t lie to ye, that sticks in me arse like a toothpick shoved in sideways. Can’t blame anyone who’s resentful of those colonial powers or the destructive swath they cut through the world. Whole peoples have been erased by them, others enslaved by them. But it goes further than the human cost, as far as the earth’s concerned. Gaia herself has paid a huge price for such arrogance.

Here in Peru, for example, the Incas had four hundred different kinds of potatoes, and the Spanish wiped almost all of them out. They brought a few kinds back to Europe, and that became a huge staple food for the Irish, which is why Siodhachan bothered to tell me about it, but the diversity was gone. There used to be a whole bunch of bananas too, if ye will pardon me pun, but now ye have just a few kinds left and some plantains. Siodhachan says he regrets not saving some of those in a seed bank or something like that, but he didn’t realize it was happening, because potatoes and bananas don’t have death screams. Extinctions are sad, lonesome exits by the last few specimens, often silent and always tragic. And they’re still happening.

Something around Iquitos is fed up with that. It’s decided humans are the problem, and much like Bavaria told me to take out the problematic kobolds, it’s taking out humans in this isolated city surrounded by the jungle.

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