Stolen: Blue Barbarian Series

by Rena Marks

  The rest of the people are no longer milling about. He takes us to another room where the pool overflows into small, individual shaped pods of shallow water.

  He looks at us expectantly.

  “Does he want us to bathe in such shallow water?” I ask Atareek.

  “I’m not sure. There aren’t even any hettria leaves to dry with. Nor are there soapcakes.”

  We stand around dumbly, and the leader looks confused. He points beyond him and there are several people bedded down in the pools of water.

  I gasp.

  The situation seems to dawn on Atareek at the same time. “They sleep in a pool of water? No way, Hannah.”

  “Jose,” I murmur automatically.

  But the air is growing colder by the minute, and I shiver. The leader keeps motioning us toward the pool. I dip my toe in. “The water’s warmer than the air,” I announce.

  Hot spring pools are the norm on this planet. In fact, most of the water is warm.

  Even the leader is beginning to shiver as he waits for us to understand. I reach out slowly and touch his arm. It’s like ice. I touch Atareek’s. Naturally his temperature has risen to combat the cold.

  “I don’t think they can control their body heat,” I say. I bring Atareek’s hand to clasp the leader’s arm, and the leader’s eyes grow large at the warm emanating from Atareek. Then he touches me, and is satisfied to see I’m just as cold as he is.

  He points at the people lying in their shallow beds and I shrug. “Bedtime,” I say to Atareek. I bend and begin stripping my moccasins. My tunic follows next, along with my leggings. The leader watches me curiously. I turn my back to Atareek so he can untie my band of leather and the leader’s eyes drop to my rounded butt.

  I’m sure he’s staring at the oddity of no tail.

  Once he unties my leather, Atareek strips. I release my breath. I thought I’d gotten used to nudity after living here, but I’m surprised at how much insecurity is rolled up in being the only one naked.

  The leader unabashedly checks out Atareek, still noticing the lack of tail.

  I enter the shallow bed first. The water is much warmer than the air and my skin, and it soothes me with its heat. Atareek follows and the level of the water rises, covering me up to my breasts. Only my head is dry, as the level of the bed is higher where your head lies. I curl up against him and the leader nods quickly and then leaves us. I imagine to return to his own family, or pod, however they do it.

  “This is weird,” Atareek comments.

  “Gives a whole new meaning to the term waterbed.”

  “Is there such a term?”

  I nod, kissing his shoulder. “On Earth, people filled a plastic balloon with water to sleep on. It also had to have a heater, because water isn’t warm on Earth.”

  “Hmmph. It is strange. But then again, we’re being strange right now.” He wriggles his toes just out of the water, and it makes a small gurgling splash.

  We’re whispering because no one out in any of the other pods are talking. In fact, quite a few are snoring. It’s real. They actually sleep in a recessed ditch of water.

  “I’m not sure if I can sleep in water,” I say. But even as I say it, I realize the warmth of the pool is soothing my aching muscles. We’ve travelled extensively today through rough terrain. We fell through the hole, were yanked this way and that. And the pool is so warm and comforting. I cuddle onto Atareek and fall into a deep sleep.

  Chapter Eight

  Temperature change is what wakes them each morning. Obviously, as there’s no light underground. Gradually I hear the murmur of voices, a few splashes. Children begin running around, tails flipping this way and that. They’re giggling, energized and full of life.

  “Grand day, my love,” Atareek murmurs. His voice rumbles vibrations under my head.

  “Good morning, my darling,” I respond. “I guess this way of life is a timesaver. There’s no bathing involved.”

  I sit up and stretch, and now the air is just as warm as the heated water. My exposed skin is drying quickly.

  Atareek is staring at my breasts longingly. “I prefer the art of bathing our mates,” he grumbles.

  “Well, when in Rome, we must do as the Romans,” I say.

  I watch his eyes light up at a new saying he can slaughter.

  By the time I get out of the water bed, my top half is already dry, so I begin binding my breasts with the leather strap. Atareek ties me, and I slip on my halter, rolling my tunic into my backpack. Since we’re indoors and it’s warm, I skip the leggings and wear my short, asymmetrical skirt that we’ve made.

  Atareek dresses in his loincloth, and we put our backpacks up on one of the shelves.

  It’s warm in the main area also, and several women are wearing loincloths like the men. I catch Atareek’s eye and grin. I still remember the long, old-fashioned skirts the village women wore before we arrived. Of course, they also had bushels of hair, which none of the striped villagers have. I imagine so much swimming has put a damper on the hair growth.

  Just then a striped naked toddler runs screaming past us, chased by an older child. He leaps into the pool and I panic. So does Atareek, his hand clenches in mine and he looks like he’s going to jump in. But instead, the toddler breaks the surface and begins to swim like a fish, his strange tail propelling him like a dorsal fin.

  “Holy shit,” I murmur. “He’s a fish.”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  “Ho, Veelencha. Atareek.”

  The chief has his name correct, and I smile through the slaughter of my own.

  “Good morning, Hekran,” Atareek says. Apparently they traded names.

  The chief brings us to the center of the room, leaving the tiny children to swim on their own. They’re completely comfortable with the children being alone in the water.

  Some of the villagers are making food. In the morning, they eat seafood since it’s so plentiful. I imagine the men head out to hunt later in the day for variety’s sake.

  My pharmacist friend from yesterday brings us all bowls of breakfast. The seafood looks like it’s combined with some sort of rice noodles and a bit of seaweed. I taste the noodles and they’re bland, but crunchy. A bit like bean sprouts at home. The crab is rich and meaty, so it’s a nice combination. But it’s strange to eat standing up, even though we’re not talking since the chief doesn’t understand us and we don’t understand him.

  Several of the other people wave at us from across the room and we smile, since our hands are engaged. When we finish eating, several of the hunters stand and begin pulling on swords. The face paint is brought out.

  “At least some things haven’t changed,” I mutter to Atareek.

  “No, they have,” he says, staring at the men.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They don’t paint their eyes to shield them from the sun’s glare. I wonder if they’ve forgotten its purpose?”

  He motions to the chief, and indicates the black jar of paint, and points to the chief’s face. The leader looks confused, but nods. Atareek steps in and traces an outline from his hairline at his temples, over his eyes and across the bridge of his nose. Other hunters come by to watch.

  He fills in the black color, and the chief closes his eyes when he approaches his eyelids. When he’s finished, Atareek turns to me and hands me the jar of paint. I paint his on, and the chief’s eyes widen when he sees the final product. One of his hunters grunts.

  The chief shrugs and barks out an order. The other hunters paint their own eyes in the same way.

  “I guess they’ll see the benefit as we’re out hunting in the sun,” Atareek says.

  Then my friend Eretar comes around and has a basket. She motions to me that she’d like to go up and hands me another empty basket with a small knife.

  “Vencha. Bingpa.” She’s pointing to the rest of the progression.

  Atareek looks amused. “Doesn’t look like anyone gets your name right.”

  “Not sure why it’s so
damn difficult,” I grumble.

  “Maybe they’ll start calling you beautiful, like I do,” he says gallantly. It makes me smile, so I give him a kiss. We break away when we notice the others staring at us.

  Our procession waves goodbye, and then we head back up the way we fell through.

  This time when we get to the giant pillow we landed on earlier, I notice there are vines that hang from the twenty foot ceiling. Hunters grab a vine and begin climbing. They’ve obviously done this a lot throughout the years, because there’s no hesitation.

  Atareek takes my backpack and basket, and has me go first. My climb is much slower than the others, and when I get to the top, the chief is there to pull me through. This time, someone has lit a flame so there are at least shadows to flicker about. As soon as it begins to get crowded, someone opens the bark to the tree and hunters begin filtering outside. When Atareek reaches the top, we make our way outside together.

  The rest of the hunters are laughing and squinting their eyes. They seem to have just figured out that the black paste on their eyes keeps out the sun.

  The chief motions for Atareek. He looks at me a little worried. “Will you be all right?” he asks.

  “Of course. I’m with Eretar. And it looks like she has a bodyguard in the way of that striped dude.”

  “They’re all striped dudes.”

  “They all look alike,” I confide.

  He kisses me, and then he’s off. I turn to Eretar. “Shall we?” I ask.

  She smiles, and babbles something in her language. I shrug. We walk for a bit, and she points out areas of herbs as we walk. The striped guy hangs out way behind us. I kind of wonder if females are protected up on the surface. I guess I’ll never know.

  Eretar gestures to a plant. It looks like a cactus, except it’s red. She begins to pluck out the spiny needles. I squat down and carefully pull one, too.

  I stop, shocked. The “needle” is soft. I bring it up to my face so I can look closer. It’s actually a tiny, folded leaf, not a needle at all. Eretar giggles. I suddenly laugh, because my shock must look ridiculous to her.

  “It’s just that reverent mother told me about this,” I explain. “This makes a skin balm. It’s kind of like rosemary back on Earth. The needles get stiffer when you dry them, but these are fine. They’ll grind up when dried.”

  Of course she doesn’t understand a word I say, but she babbles in her own language. She pulls out her knife and slices a hunk of the plant off, and so I pull out my own knife to do the same. She nods.

  Now I get what the little bone knife was for.

  We tie the bundles together with a thin vine from the same plant, and she pulls a couple out for later use, tossing them in the baskets. Then we move up to look for other herbs. We walk a bit, and I recognize the area where Atareek and I had been yesterday. The place where a vine shot up to grab my ankle. It’s a bit darker there, like the canopy of bone trees grows thicker. I point to the area and her eyes grow wide. She shakes her head. She calls out to her security guard and he grunts, then moves to the area, barely stepping in. He stands there, and I’m wondering what he’s doing, when I notice the sky grows considerably darker. Then, a vine shoots up to grab him. He calmly bends to slice it off his foot, and steps back into the clearing.

  “That’s what happened to me yesterday,” I tell them. “It’s a creepy area.”

  She nods, even though she doesn’t understand anything. Her guard moves a safe distance away again and we continue on. Eventually she points out another plant. It has tiny purple flowers.

  I lean down to sniff it. “We’d call this lavender,” I tell her. “Course, here lavender can probably kill you.”

  “Lauf. Derrr.” She grins, like she pronounced it correctly. But suddenly I get an idea.

  “You know, we have to head back soon. I wonder if we can make the chief understand that we can bring you, implant our language to you, and bring you back safe and unharmed?”

  She looks confused.

  “I’ll think about it,” I say, and then begin chopping some lavender. She joins me and we work in silence for a bit.

  The day wears on, and at some point, I stand to stretch. She grunts, her lower hand on her back also.

  I laugh. “I feel like an old woman,” I say, while massaging my buttocks. There’s a noise out in the clearing beyond us, and it’s the guys returning. They have bulging leather sacks tied between them, and Atareek is with the chief.

  “You’ve collected all that?” he asks, his eyes wide.

  Our baskets are overflowing. “We just kept going and going. How was hunting?”

  “They do it much different,” he says. “They all work together and get larger animals. As opposed to us who all go separate ways and hunt on our own, bringing a variety of meat into the village.”

  “That is strange,” I say, as our entire progression heads back to the magical tree. I like to think of it like that, but it’s actually the scary dark spot a few feet from the tree that’s magical, where evil vines shoot up to grab your legs. The tree itself is just an ancient, hollowed out tree that somehow has the bark cut to create a peek-a-boo door. It’s actually a clever idea.

  The guard who came with us is tying our baskets to a rope-like vine, and I imagine we’ll lower them down instead of throwing them into the great black hole.

  The underground people enjoy the evening’s feast. There’s laughter and dancing, and the little ones swim. Atareek and I sit with the chief and Eretar, and we talk though there’s not much understanding.

  Atareek tells the chief that he’ll show him how our tribal dancing goes.

  He gets up and does a beautiful dance around the flames, and my chest almost bursts with pride. He’s so beautiful, sure in his movements, and graceful at the same time as strong. I know every woman in the tribe is staring at the play of muscles that move in beat to the drums, but I’m happy because I know I get to run my hands over every inch of his beautiful blue skin.

  He gives me a look as if to say, “Join me.”

  I’d like to laugh, because I wondered how much longer his energy could hold out in the high paced dance. Slowly I rise and take steps toward him, shimmying my hips and arms more the way a belly dancer does. This, my friend Tessa had taught me in her dance studio. While all the others learned ballet, Tessa taught a few of the women to belly dance. It was one of the trainings she had on the alien ship during her abduction.

  Atareek’s eyes smolder as I dance around him, his breathing deep. My dance is to give him a break from his. Everyone in the tribe is quiet as they stare, spellbound. Then Atareek takes my hand so we can dance together. It’s slower now and he begins to recover.

  Suddenly, a striped woman appears out of nowhere, sidling up to Atareek and smacking me with her bushy tail. She runs the flat of her palms down his chest and lower, across the cuts of his abs.

  “Bitch, please. That’s my man,” I growl.

  She turns, jabbers something in her language and jumps in for an attack. Atareek’s face grows hard, and he grabs her arm, which is raised to strike. Blaedonians have a lot more strength than humans, and he’s not about to let her attack me.

  I’m prepared for their increased strength, though, and I’m not about to allow myself to get hit. I drop to the ground and kick out with my leg, sweeping it over her ankles and knocking her to her ass. Then I bound up to my feet for the upper hand.

  The chief’s voice rings out in a snarl and then someone is behind me.

  Eretar attacks the fallen woman, and it’s a vicious fight. Atareek picks me up, moving me back from the flying fists and snarls. Yet it’s over quickly, with Eretar the victorious one. The rest of the people cheer, and the tramp who is bloodied on the ground is hauled away.

  The chief tries to explain something, but we have no idea what it is. It seems as though he apologizes.

  Atareek sets me on my feet, and talks back to the chief.

  “It is all right. I know how embarrassed you must be. But you cannot he
lp that one of yours is a hole of an ass.”

  That makes me flinch, but I decide not to correct him. Hell, the chief can’t understand that he slaughtered the term anyway. I head to Eretar, touching one of the spots on her cheek that is swelling.

  “I have something for that,” I say, and point to her cave of herbs where I have some of mine. We make our way there, and I have her arm draped over my shoulders, though she’s quite able to walk on her own.

  The chief mutters harshly to his people, and then he and Atareek follow us.

  In her herb cave, I gently push her to sit on a stone ledge, and then I use a bit of fabric to wet. I wring it, open it and roll some herbs inside. This batch is amazing. When they are wet, they act like an icy hot patch. I place the compress on her cheek, and she winces at the strange sensation. These are part of the special herbs that reverent mother was running low on.

  I use one of her skull pots to heat some water and dip another fur in that, then cover her raw knuckles and the back of her shoulders. She’ll be sore there tomorrow. When the compresses cool, I take the one from her cheek and place it over her hands, then re-dip the warming clothes and use the heated one on her cheek. I explain that I’m alternating cold and heat, but naturally she can’t understand.

  The chief and Atareek watch, and the poor man looks miserable. He’s apologetic and disgusted, at the same time.

  By the time I remove the last compress from her cheek, the swelling and bruising is gone. It works like a miracle if the injuries are caught just as they happen.

  The chief looks excited, and babbles something to Eretar, who reaches up with her finger tips to feel where the swollen lump had been. Her eyes widen as she realizes it’s vanished.

  They jabber back and forth a bit while I spread out the fur to allow the herbs to dry. They can be used again and again until they lose their potency. The other furs I give a dip into the now boiling water and remove them with a stick to spread them out to dry. They’re still trying to apologize.