"Did you notice?" Inata asked.
"No, what?"
"Our feet are starting to sink into the ground. The earth is turning soft, and the colour of the grass is getting paler and paler."
"Now that you mention it..."
Jumping from slab to slab, the twins continued their descent toward the planet they hoped to find below. Melio struggled more and more, constantly trying to escape. The more altitude they lost, the deeper they sank into the ground, first to the ankles and then to the knees. That was when the little ginger cat took advantage of it and sprang out of Hichy's arms. He vanished beneath a milky layer and darted off like a wild beast.
Though they could no longer see him, the twins could hear and smell him thanks to their exceptional senses. Melio reappeared a few minutes later with a small rodent in his jaws.
"I've never seen a field mouse so pale," Hichy remarked, catching his little cat. "Look! It's almost transparent."
Beneath the animal's translucent skin, one could see the blood circulating in its arteries. Its entire circulatory system was visible, as if in a biology book. The few nearby trees resembled spectres, and the light passed through their trunks.
The phenomenon grew even stronger as the children continued their descent, to the point that they passed straight through the next slabs. They were no longer anything but clouds, where life was barely perceptible. And yet there existed an entire fauna and flora inside those worlds of cotton, a life that the people far below ignored, thinking they were dealing only with masses of water and ice.
Having nothing left on which to place their feet, and being quite unable to climb back up for lack of any surface that would let them push off, the twins had no choice but to let themselves be carried and continue their descent. They sped through the sky and the clouds and finally caught sight of the world lying below.
There was a planet like theirs, perhaps even their own. Their perception of up and down had been so badly shaken, their senses turned so completely upside down, that nothing would have surprised them any longer, and they had not the faintest idea where they were. There were fields, roads, and villages. It was an inhabited, cultivated, exploited land like the one they came from. They chose a place far from any habitation in order to land there discreetly, sheltered from curious eyes.
"Ah! It feels good to be back on solid ground!" Hichy exclaimed. "I just hope the people here aren't upside down and don't have feet instead of hands."
"True, that really wouldn't be a great footing," his sister replied with a laugh.
"Very funny. You went to clown school."
They set off on foot along the road near which they had landed. They must not draw attention to themselves. They had spotted a farm a little farther on, one that had seemed just next door from the air, but proved much farther away when one actually had to walk to it.
"I'm hungry!" the brother complained.
"What good is it to give me information I already have?" Inata asked. "You're always hungry. Warn me when that stops being the case."
Covering that little line, which had looked only a few centimetres long from the sky, took them more than an hour. Walking, that universal and timeless means of transport, had become completely archaic to them. One gets used to comfort and speed too quickly, forgetting that one did without them for millions of years.
They stopped before a thatched cottage from whose chimney thick smoke was rising. The smell of a good meal cooking leapt to their nostrils. They knocked timidly on the door, on their guard and ready to run at the slightest danger. A large woman, to whose dress a string of children clung, opened to them. They were everywhere, snotty-nosed, sitting on the floor, crying or playing, a good dozen of them altogether like a pen of piglets.
The people of the place did have their heads above and their feet on the ground, two arms, two legs, and a torso. They wore rather simple-looking clothes, but ones similar to those the twins were used to. They would have looked entirely human if what served them as noses had not been replaced by snouts. The woman let out a kind of pig-like grunt that made poor Melio's fur stand on end. The little cat was terrified.
"Good day, madam," Inata said. "We have come from far away, and we are hungry. Would you be so kind as to offer us hospitality?"
"Oink oink!" she replied.
It seemed like a positive answer, since she extended her hand toward a large table surrounded by benches, covered with dirty dishes, wooden children's toys, and leftovers from the previous meal. Hardly had they sat down when grunts burst out from every direction to greet the arrival of the father of the family. The brats quite literally threw themselves at him, wriggling with joy. In addition to the snout in the middle of his face, the man sported two boar tusks on either side of his mouth. He stopped for a moment, surprised to see two strangers in his home, and addressed them in a strong porcine accent. At least they could understand him.
"What are two members of the Celestial clan doing among the wretched peasants that we are?" he asked them. "We have already paid the tithe and the salt tax. We have no money left."
"We are not part of the Celestial clan," Hichy reassured him. "We're starving and only looking for something to eat. Unfortunately, we have nothing to pay with, but we'll leave you in peace if you don't have enough for us," he added, though his stomach was twisting with hunger.
The twins were about to take their leave when the man stopped them with his big hairy hand.
"Stay! We have enough to feed you."
Then a conversation made up of grunts began. The woman seemed to protest at her husband's requests, though it was not really possible to understand what they were saying. After a while she nodded and took one of the youngest children by the arm. The little one immediately began to protest and cry, but his mother seized him without ceremony and handed him to his father. The little boy struggled so violently and screamed so loudly that the man gave him a great blow to the head.
"You are completely insane!" Inata cried. "You're real lunatics! What are you doing to him?"
"You told us you were hungry," the man said in surprise. "And we have no meat left, so..."
The twins stared at their hosts in horror. Golock had never spoken to them of anthropophagy, and they did not know that such a terrible practice still existed. It was all the more vile because their hosts were ready to sacrifice their own children.
"You can't do that!" Hichy explained. "We would never agree to eat your son, and we would be extremely offended. We would be obliged to report this to the Celestial police," he lied.
"And yet every month, at the market, we sell..."
"What?!" the twin exclaimed. "Right, we're going to have to explain a few basic notions of humanism to you."
The children launched into long explanations about morality and respect for others. The husband translated their words to his wife in the form of grunts, and she nodded, seeming to share the twins' point of view. Why is it wrong to eat human flesh? It was difficult to answer that question, and it was not certain that religion had nothing to do with the rules called the fundamental rights of human beings. For even with their snouts in place of noses, it was obvious that those peasants were not animals.
"Do you think it's because the Celestial order doesn't regard them as full citizens that they're like this?" Inata asked her brother in a whisper.
"I'm afraid so. It's not that they're especially wicked, but they are terribly ignorant. They have no access to education or books."
After that long discussion, their hosts agreed to give up their macabre plan and served them a simple vegetable soup instead. Hichy would rather die of hunger than sink to such extremes. They all sat down to eat. The child who had nearly been put in the pot had come back to his senses and was happy to find that he was still alive among his brothers and sisters. The twins made the peasants swear, in front of their children, that they would never harm them again. Melio had taken the opportunity to go looking for rodents and other prey, with which he liked to play sadistically before swallowing them. Then, at the end of the meal, Hichy and Inata said farewell to the man, the woman, and their children and took their leave. The boy whistled for his cat, who landed in his arm, arriving from who knew where.
"Golock could have warned us!" Inata fumed as they resumed walking along the road. "By wanting too much to shelter us, he failed to prepare us for the harshness of the world we have to face."
"For all we know, it was some kind of test."
"You think so? One never knows with him and the power of his magic. Maybe those people don't even exist, or they're actors."
"Yeah... that seems a bit far-fetched."
Night was already falling, and they had planned nowhere to take shelter. They decided to keep walking, since they could see as well as in broad daylight. Is sunset not also called the cats' hour?
Perhaps it is also the wolves' hour, for mournful howls began to sound in the distance. They could sense the presence of a pack less than five kilometres away.
"Which direction should we go?" Inata asked.
"How should I know? There is no centre or outside here. There is no perceptible movement of the ground. And it certainly wasn't those peasants who could tell us. They themselves knew nothing of the world around them."
"Then let's go straight ahead until we come across someone who can tell us."
The presence of the wolves was drawing nearer. Whichever direction they chose, they could feel them coming from right and left, ready to catch them in a pincer movement. Melio's fur stood on end, just like the children's, whose flesh prickled with goosebumps. They could not run away any longer anyway...