by Lizzy Bequin
But Rolf quickly dispelled that thought.
The larger one had just died. Possibly it was diseased. It wasn’t worth the risk.
As for the smaller one, well, it hardly had meat enough on its little bones to make it worth the effort. And besides, if it had come from inside the bigger one, it could be diseased too.
The best thing would be to simply get rid of it.
Leave it outside for the gollan birds to eat. Yes, that’s what he would do.
Rolf reached for the small creature. As he did so, his fingertip grazed its little hand. Tiny fingers seized around Rolf’s finger, clutching him with surprising strength for such a miniscule being.
As that little hand squeezed Rolf’s finger, an unknown feeling squeezed at his heart.
It was a feeling he had never experienced before. Beautiful and painful and intense. His language held no word for this new emotion that ached behind his ribs. He only knew that the feeling made him want to protect the small creature for as long as he lived. To feed it. To clothe it. To make it safe and comfortable and happy, no matter what.
“Huh,” Rolf said.
The little creature had finally stopped crying. For the time being at least.
Rolf scooped the squirming thing up in the palm of his hand.
“You’re cold,” Rolf said, as if the little creature could understand him. “Let’s get you warmed up.”
Cradling the little animal in one hand, with the tube and bloody sac draped over his arm, Rolf set to work building a fire in the fire pit at the center of his den using wood that he had stored in a pile by the wall. Once Rolf had gotten the fire going, he sat close to it, nestling the little creature on a dry pelt in his lap.
After a bit of inspection, it seemed to Rolf that the bloody sac was not a part of the creature and did not have any feeling in it, so he snipped it off with a sharp obsidian knife, leaving part of the tube behind like a stem.
Rolf looked down at the creature, studying the rest of its strange anatomy.
What b’gods was the little thing?
In a way, it was built somewhat like an ukkur too. Two arms and two legs. Two eyes and two ears. Two nostrils, one mouth.
But this one was even smaller and weaker than the one that had died. And where the other one at least had blunt teeth in its head, this one had no teeth at all. Its little eyes remained tightly shut, as if the tiny creature refused to acknowledge the world. And its legs were too weak and uncoordinated to carry its weight.
Like the bigger creature, this little one also had no piss stick. Just a tiny cleft between its useless legs.
More thoughts turned round and round in Rolf’s mind like the wheels of a ksh mill.
After a time, the creature stirred restlessly in Rolf’s lap. It sputtered and coughed and started to scream again.
“What’s the matter?”
The creature only answered with more screams. Was it in pain? It did not appear to be injured. Yes, there was blood, but that was from the other creature, the dead one.
Hungry, perhaps?
Rolf tried feeding it some dried krelk meat. The little thing had no teeth, so Rolf bit off a small portion of the meat and chewed it thoroughly until it had formed a soft paste. He tried to feed this to the tiny thing, but the creature had no interest in that food whatsoever.
“What do you eat?” Rolf grunted.
He suddenly remembered the pale, sweet fluid from the dead creature’s chest lumps. That stuff looked and tasted somewhat like ksh juice. He decided to give that a try.
As luck would have it, Rolf had a bushel of wild ksh berries stored away. He didn’t much care for the flavor himself, but it provided a source of energy when other food was scarce. He took one of the round, white, eyeball-sized fruits and carefully squeezed the juice into the tiny creature’s mouth.
The creature accepted the ksh juice hungrily.
Rolf went through a half dozen of the berries before the little animal was finally sated. Not long after that, it drifted off to sleep in Rolf’s lap, full of ksh and warmed by the orange fire.
Rolf stared down at the softly snoring creature and wondered what the rot he was getting his foolish self into.
He had always been a loner.
There were other free ukkur out here in the wilderness. Other escaped slaves from the nith-owned ksh farms. Most of them preferred to live in small packs of three or four, but not Rolf. He had always preferred living on his own.
And now here he was taking care of this utterly useless being.
But his instinct to protect it was so strong.
He would feed and cloth and protect the tiny creature, knowing full well that it would provide nothing in return. Nothing except that warm, painful, good feeling in Rolf’s chest that he didn’t have a word for.
It would give him a purpose beyond mere survival, and that was a gift beyond measure.
“You need a name,” Rolf whispered to the tiny thing curled and snoring on his lap.
But Rolf struggled to come up with one. For several days he could not think of a name. Then, on the third day, the little stem on the creature’s belly dried up and fell away, and that's when it came to him. He would call the creature Ika. It was the word to describe when a ksh berry is ripe and breaks away easily from its stem. It seemed like a fitting name.
CHAPTER 3
Ika was a little mystery.
Rolf had to invent a new way to think of Ika. It was clear that Ika was not an it, not some ordinary animal that one might find scurrying through the shadows of the forest. Nor was Ika a he, an ukkur like Rolf.
So Rolf began to think of little Ika as she, without fully understanding what that meant, except that she was different from every other creature in the world. She was special.
And she was full of many surprises.
One of the first surprises was that she grew, and she did so with astounding rapidity. Because of this, Rolf realized that she must be an infant of her species.
There was a reason he had not recognized this fact immediately. All the other creatures of this world—the nith, for example—hatched out of eggs that the adults expelled through an ovipositor tube. As for ukkur like Rolf himself, they were never young. As everyone knew, the ukkur were created by the nith, artificially grown and brought to maturity inside nutrient tanks, introduced into the world fully formed and ready for slave labor.
But Ika was different.
She had just fallen right out of the hole between another creature’s legs with a stalk attached to her belly. Rolf had never seen or heard of anything like it.
Over the coming months and years, Ika grew and grew.
Soon she learned how to crawl about on all fours, and not long after that, she began to walk, trundling about the den on unsteady legs. Her limbs became leaner, and the fat little belly hollowed slightly beneath her tiny ribs.
She smiled. She laughed. Sometimes she screamed and screamed while water leaked from her eyes. Whenever that happened, Rolf would comfort her and try to figure out what was wrong.
At night they slept together, her tiny little body huddled against Rolf’s for warmth.
He spoke to her all the time, not because he expected her to understand him, but simply because it pleased him to do so. It had been a long time since Rolf had had someone to talk to on a regular basis, and he had not realized how much he missed it.
Then one night after dinner, Ika looked up at him, her big dark eyes glittering in the firelight, and she made a sound that was different from her usual giggles, grunts, and gurgles.
“Ruf.”
She was trying to say his name. It was her first word. She repeated it over and over, and Rolf smiled while his heart panged with that warm, happy feeling.
“Ruf, Ruf, Ruf.”
Before long, Ika’s vocabulary exploded. She learned her own name. Then the words for various things around the den. Food. Ksh. Stone. Water. She learned the word for hot when she burned her little hand on an ember that had tumbled out of the fire pit. In th
e winter she learned the word for snow.
Eventually her words connected into sentences, and sentences became questions.
She was infinitely curious about the world around her. She loved looking at the simple drawings Rolf had made on the cave walls, and she asked him about the different creatures. Rolf told her about all of them. Graceful krelks, fearsome aboliths, loathsome nith, and strong ukkur like himself.
“Where Ika?” the little one asked, and Rolf helped her add a drawing of herself to the wall.
Little by little, Rolf took her out into the forests around the den, though he was always exceedingly cautious of wild predators, and even more so of nith that might be patrolling the area.
He remembered the marking he had seen on the bigger creature’s hip—the nith marking—and his greatest fear was always that the nith would come to take his Ika away.
Rolf would never allow that.
He would protect Ika to the death.
“Rolf, what are these?” Ika had asked one night, tracing her little fingers over the scars on his shoulders.
He explained it to her as best he could. He told her how he had been a slave on the ksh farms. How the evil nith masters had beaten and whipped him. How he had finally escaped and come to live here by himself in this den at the foot of the mountain.
Soon Ika began asking the other question that Rolf had been expecting.
“Where did I come from, Rolf?”
“I found you, little one. The gods left you for me as a gift.”
That was half true at least. Rolf didn’t know how to tell her the whole truth of the matter. He didn’t even understand it himself.
He gave her the metal ring. It was too large for her small fingers, so Rolf fashioned a braided leather necklace with the ring as the pendant. He told Ika that he found the ring at the same time he found her, but he could not bring himself to tell her about the dead creature that had been wearing it, nor did he take her to visit the place where he had buried that creature’s body under a cairn of stones.
Someday he would tell her. Someday when she was a little older.
Ika became the center of his life. She was everything. The polestar around which Rolf’s entire universe revolved. And as she grew, the beautiful, nameless feeling in Rolf’s heart grew with her. The Ika feeling.
Her dark mane grew long, much longer than any ukkur’s mane, until it practically enveloped her tiny body. A wild mass of dark hair with skinny arms and legs poking out. Rolf couldn’t bring himself to cut it, so instead he used rawhide cords to tie it back in ponytails and pigtails.
As Ika got bigger, other changes happened.
One day he heard her screaming and rushed back to the den to find her sitting there with blood smudged on her thighs. It was leaking from that cleft between her legs, the place where her piss stick should be. For many days, Rolf was terrified that she would die, but eventually the bleeding stopped. Later they both learned that it was just something her body did from time to time.
“Rolf, when will my piss stick grow?”
He definitely didn’t know how to answer that one, and he quickly changed the subject. He felt bad that he couldn’t explain these things to her, but he understood as little about it as Ika herself did.
Still Ika continued to grow.
Her legs lengthened. Her hips widened. Her chest developed those large mounds that Rolf had seen on the creature that had died.
It was around that time when Rolf decided it would be best for Ika to sleep on her own mat, separate from him. She had balked at first, but eventually she got used to it.
Rolf’s heart filled with pride as he watched her grow. She was intelligent, imaginative, resourceful, and clever. She saw things that he had never noticed. She viewed the world from a perspective he had never considered.
Simply put, she was wonderful.
But underneath all the happiness, there was a bad feeling that Rolf could not ignore. Something hard and cold like a granule of ice in his boot.
Ika was turning into the spitting image of the creature who had died.
It wasn’t just the shape of her body that was the same. It was the face too.
Would the same thing that happened to that creature also happen to Ika? Was that a natural part of her species’ life cycle? Would she someday have to transfer her life force into a new little Ika?
That idea terrified Rolf. It kept him awake at night.
He also worried about what would happen to Ika after he was gone. He still had many years left, but he was not young. Eventually he would pass on. When that happened, who would protect his Ika? Another ukkur?
Rolf did not care for that idea at all.
From time to time other ukkur would pass through Rolf’s territory. They usually traveled in packs of three or four. They would stop by Rolf’s den in their yearly migration, looking to trade goods. Whenever this happened, Rolf would tell Ika to hide inside the den and remain quiet. He made her think it was a game, but really he was worried that some other ukkur might try to steal her away.
At first Ika thought that hiding was great fun, but as she got older, she was reluctant. Nevertheless, she obeyed Rolf. Ika was always obedient.
Sometimes the foreign ukkur who visited brought news from other parts of the world. In particular, they shared tales about something big happening in the lands to the south. Supposedly the ukkur were massing an army to defeat the nith once and for all. There were even rumors to of strange creatures from the stars who were able to make new ukkur inside their bellies.
When Rolf heard these rumors, his mind turned to Ika and the dead creature that she had fallen out of.
He considered taking her to the southern lands. Maybe that was where she belonged. And maybe they could find some other, younger ukkur who would take care of her and protect her after Rolf was gone.
But Rolf could not bring himself to do this.
He was too worried about losing Ika forever. He was afraid that someone would take her away and he would lose that warm, happy, painful feeling is heart. Without that feeling, he would surely die. He could not lose his Ika.
So Rolf and Ika lived like that together in the mountain den, and he kept her hidden from the world.
CHAPTER 4
Ika was hiding.
She hated it when Rolf made her hide.
It only happened two or three times every year. Other ukkur, usually a pack of three or four, would pass by bringing news from other places and looking to trade. As soon as Rolf caught their scent on the breeze, his normally happy demeanor would become stern, and he would command Ika to go inside the den and hide herself from sight until the other ukkur were gone.
Reluctantly, Ika would obey. She always obeyed her Rolf.
When she was little, the reluctance had not been there. Hiding had been a game for her. An adventure. And besides, when she was little she was scared of the strangers. What would she want to meet them for anyway? She had her Rolf, and that was all a little Ika needed.
But as she grew, so did her curiosity.
She wanted to look at the other ukkur. Study the shapes of their bodies. See how they were different from Rolf. And more important, how they were different from her.
Now, at eighteen cycles of age, it was almost demeaning that Rolf still forced her to hide.
But Ika did as she was told.
She never defied her Rolf. After all, he was her protector, her provider, her caretaker.
This time, however, she had selected a hiding place where she could spy on the mysterious visitors from far-off territories. There was a heap of musty old animal pelts that Rolf kept stacked against the back wall of the den. Ika had buried herself inside these warm furs, only allowing her eyes to peek from the shadows. From this position, she could see out of the entrance of the cave.
The view from the mouth of the cavern was of a pale gray overcast sky that was sifting a fine powder of snow onto the ground, like the powdered ksh that Rolf would put on the sweet treats he prepared f
or her every year on her finding day.
But it was not the sky or the snow that Ika was watching now.
It was the ukkur.
There were four of them this time. They stood just outside the entrance to the den speaking to her Rolf. They were dressed in cloaks made of dark animal pelts, and their breath puffed out in white clouds on the cold winter air.
Something about those three tall, dark, and confident figures stirred funny feelings in Ika’s belly.
Her fingers unconsciously fidgeted with the metal ring on the necklace around her neck. A nervous tick.
The leader of the pack stood at the forefront, conversing with Rolf. He was a tall one, every inch as tall as Rolf, and every bit as broad in the shoulders. But that’s where the similarities ended. While Rolf’s hair was gray like weathered wood, the young pack leader’s hair was a deep, rich brown, almost like Ika’s own. It hung around his face in thick, lustrous locks.
Ika’s fingers itched with an unaccountable urge to run her fingers through that hair, and she caught herself unconsciously stroking the fur pelts that she was hiding beneath.
But even more striking was the pack leader’s face. His features could have been carved from stone. High, perfectly angled cheekbones, a squared-off jaw, and piercing eyes set beneath a straight and serious brow. His features were perfectly symmetrical except for a deep scar across his right eye.
It was a warrior’s face.
Ika had never seen a warrior before, except for Rolf, who had killed many evil nith in his day. She loved to hear his stories of blood and guts and courage. But now, seeing this ukkur warrior with her own two eyes, Ika’s pulse pounded a little harder in her ears.
It pounded in other places too. The shameful places that made her different.
Ika turned her eyes to the other three ukkur companions. One of them wore a coarse beard like Rolf did, but it was an attractive sandy color. The other was the biggest and bulkiest of the bunch, a dangerous looking brute with his hair cropped close to his hefty skull. The last one was the youngest, not much older than Ika perhaps, with short blond hair and a handsome, honest face.
Even though she was warm beneath the pile of fur pelts, Ika shivered at the sight of these ukkur.
