by Calista Skye
“Irresponsible idiots!” I scream and launch into another bout of kicking. It doesn’t help, but at least I’m doing something, and at least it keeps me awake. Because with the gentle movements of the sack and the soft lining, I can imagine getting drowsy in here. He made absolutely sure I was comfortable in here. I guess he can’t be all bad.
A coldness goes through me. No. He insulated the sack like this so nobody could hear me yelling. He planned this far too well. And I played right into his hands, feeling bad after I treated him so rudely at first.
He tricked me. A freaking caveman tricked me, a pretty sophisticated woman from a much more advanced civilization. Easily, too.
Still, after the first bout of panic, the fear isn’t that bad. I didn’t get the impression that Rax’tan is a crazy killer. I didn’t even find him that charming. More goofy, maybe. On the other hand, many serial killers on Earth were said to seem totally harmless to strangers. Until they got their victims to themselves.
I adjust my position and jab one finger into one of the air holes. If I can make it bigger, maybe I can escape from this sack.
But after five seconds of twisting and pulling, I know I can’t widen the hole. The skins and furs are just too thick and strong. No wonder my abductor had to use a steel blade to make those holes.
I guess I’m stuck here until Rax’tan stops and lets me out. When he does, I better be ready to pounce on him, bite him and try to scratch his eyes out. And then run into the woods.
A cold and steely determination fills me. I will never give this kidnapper a second of peace and calm as long as I am with him. I’ll scream and kick and punch and rebel every step of the way.
I will stay alert and ready for anything.
I adjust my position again, curling up and trying to get comfortable.
- - -
I wake up with a jolt.
There’s no movement anymore. Rax’tan has stopped moving.
I stay still, cursing myself for falling asleep in here. But it’s sooo dark and warm and soft and quiet.
Very freaking quiet. Maybe Rax’tan is standing still because he’s met a creature and he’s waiting for it to pass. Or he’s hiding.
I can’t hear anything at all.
I scramble to change my position again, getting my head as far up as possible so I can see out one of the airholes. And I do see something. It’s a tree trunk, seen from up close. Very, very close, so close I can study the details of the bark.
Shit. He’s hung me on a branch.
He may have tired of carrying his heavy sack and is now walking away, leaving me here, unable to escape and doomed to die of hunger or to be eaten by any curious dino that comes along.
The other airholes don’t give me any view out at all, because they don’t align properly through all the layers of the sack.
The lack of movement gets me close to panic again. I have to get out of here!
Two seconds later, I can feel how the sack is lifted off the branch. Light floods in and blinds me as the sack is opened and folded down to my neck, where it’s tightened again. So now my head is outside the sack and the rest of me is still inside.
“You damned outcast shit,” I hiss, squinting enough to see Rax’tan’s face over me. These are the worst words I know in his language.
“I’m not an outcast,” he says calmly and puts the sack and me down on the ground. “But I understand your confusion.”
“I’m not confused,” I counter. “But you are a dead man. My tribe will come looking for me. When they find you, they’ll kill you like they’d slaughter a crazy rekh.”
“The men of your tribe are good warriors,” he says calmly, sitting down beside me. “They are also married, I understand. They have their own females to concern themselves with. Drink some water.” He has a smaller sack that appears to contain liquid, and he holds it up to my mouth.
I twist my head away, clenching my fists inside the sack. “Let me out of here!”
“In good time,” he says and takes a swig from the water sack, himself. “Right now, I think it would be better to keep you like that. You did tell me you can be fierce. I don’t want to see just how fierce you can be right now.”
“I’ll kill you,” I hiss. “First chance I get. You won’t have a second of peace for as long as I’m near.”
“You seemed quite peaceful while I was carrying you.” He takes a piece of roasted meat out of his other bag and holds it out, raising his eyebrows.
Again, I twist my head and close my eyes. I will accept nothing at all from him. I’m on hunger strike, starting right now.
He takes a bite of the meat himself, chewing happily on what is probably food from our village, from the party last night.
“You have no honor,” I state, hoping to strike a nerve. It might be a risky thing, seeing as only my head sticks up from the sack and I can’t defend myself. But he has to know that I don’t approve of this. A caveman may have no idea that what he’s doing now is just plain wrong. “No real man would just take another person.”
He keeps chewing and looks around at the trees. “My honor is intact. In my world, a man takes what he needs. It can be the difference between life and death.”
“It is,” I agree. “And by taking me, you chose death.”
He frowns at me and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Will your tribesmen really come after me?”
I snort. “Of course. They are very loyal.”
“But they are not married to you.”
“Every member of our tribe has equal worth. If one is missing, the whole tribe will go to search for her. Did you know we can fly on irox? My friends will be here in no time, and they will feed you to it.”
He glances up, where the dense canopy of leaves barely lets occasional sunrays down to the ground. “I will take my chances.”
I take a deep breath and calm myself. I have no idea where I am. This is the middle of the jungle, and it could be anywhere. There’s no clearing, no mountain within sight, no landmarks at all. “Where are you taking me?”
“Home,” he says and bites into another piece of meat. He seems entirely undisturbed.
“And what will you do to me?”
“I haven’t planned anything in particular. But I think there are many possibilities.”
“Such as?”
He lets his gaze drift up and down the sack I’m in. “I’m sure some things will occur to me.”
It’s obvious what he’s thinking. I even saw his crotch twitch. “If you think I will mate with you, you are very mistaken.”
I have the satisfaction of seeing his face drop a little. “Oh. You will not allow me to Worship you?”
I know what that means. It’s the cavemanese term for oral sex. “I will absolutely not allow anything like that at all.”
He looks worried. “Really? But the shaman…”
“I don’t care what your honorless outcast shaman said about what to do when you meet The Woman in the jungle. I am not The Woman, and there will be no Worship or Mating ever. So you should just let me out of this sack and let me go home. I will persuade my tribesmen not to hunt you down like a wild rekh.”
He looks away, deep in thought.
Hey, if he thought he could just abduct a woman and she would then have sex with him, then he’s pretty far off. You can never be sure what these guys think. They have never seen women before and have no idea how things work. Their shamans prepare them for meeting the mythical Woman in the jungle, and they are then required to go down on her. But that has nothing to do with reality, and I guess I have to explain to this guy what he can and can’t do.
“The men who are married to alien women were honorable, and did not just… steal a woman they liked,” I state, bending the truth just a little. “No woman will like a man who steals her.” I don’t remember if cavemanese has a word for ‘abduct’.
“What did they do?” Rax’tan asks.
“Oh, good things. They protected the woman and helped her
survive in the jungle and did absolutely not force her to do anything. They helped her go home to her village. And they also never put her in a sack.”
“And then the women Mated with them?”
“If the man is extremely honorable and kind and good, then they maybe wanted to mate. After a long time. After he had proven himself. And after he’s taken her to her home. But it is hard to make a woman want to mate with you. You must be very honorable and respect her.”
I’m aware that I’m treading a fine line here. On one hand, I must make him understand I won’t have sex with him. On the other hand, I probably shouldn’t make it seem completely hopeless so that he will just rape me because he sees that as the only way.
“Trials.” He nods. “I heard of them. Grave trials. Bringing the man close to death. Only then will the woman agree to Mate. Provided the man promises to be her obedient servant until he dies.”
“That’s not really it,” I say, not too sure. “I mean, it depends. But nobody expects the man to be her servant. That’s not what marriage is.”
“It does sound like it, the way your tribesmen describe it. They don’t call themselves servants, of course. But what else can it be? They have promised to protect the woman and her offspring with their lives, provide food and safety for them. In exchange for Mating. But I suppose Mating must be so wonderful that it’s worth it. For them.”
I desperately want to scratch my nose, but the sack is tied around my neck and I can’t get my hands out of it. I scrunch up my face several times, trying to alleviate it.
“Got an itch?” Rax’tar reaches out and scratches my nose very gently.
It helps a lot, but I ignore it. “It’s not a servant thing. Marriage means that you’re one. Two people become one. And they share all of life’s dangers and rewards. Now let me out of this sack!”
He doesn’t move. “They become one? So they become less than two.”
“That’s not what it means at all. Let me out of this sack, or I will stop talking to you.”
6
- Phoebe -
He takes out his water pouch again. “You should drink something.”
I turn my head and look the other way, tears of humiliation and hopelessness burning in my eyes. Only my head is sticking up from the sack, and I am completely at the mercy of this man. And he hasn’t even tried to redeem himself.
“Probably better to not talk too much in the jungle,” he says and gets to his feet with one agile movement. “I do prefer to avoid the Bigs.”
He takes a step closer, and for a moment I think he might pull the sack up over my head again. Instead, he lifts it and me into the air as if I weigh no more than a kitten, grips the sack close to the opening, and puts me over his shoulder again. I’m still helpless, and I feel like a baby sitting inside a backpack her father is wearing. But at least he carries me high enough to allow me to see over his shoulder and past his head as he starts walking again.
I sniffle a little still, and for a moment I consider screaming at the top of my lungs, becoming a nuisance. My mouth is pretty close to his alien ear. But if those noises attract any dinosaurs, it’s a fair bet he’ll drop me to the ground and make his escape, leaving me for the monster.
So I keep silent, at least for now.
He has a strange way of moving through the jungle. I’ve seen the guys in my tribe walking in the woods, and they walk in straight, steady lines. They’re very quiet, and they keep looking around for dangers, but Rax’tan is on another level altogether.
He also looks around all the time, to the side and backwards, as if his head was mounted on some extremely well lubricated ball bearings. But he mostly looks down on the ground, both close to his feet and further away. And he doesn’t walk straight ahead, instead taking a winding route through the trees and the small hills and rocks. He seems to let the terrain determine exactly where he’s going, but he often does things I don’t understand, like backing up fast or turning around for no apparent reason and backtracking several steps before he picks another way. It’s as if he’s reading the ground like a map, letting it guide him. It seems a very inefficient way of making headway in a dense jungle. I probably shouldn’t mind it if it takes him longer to bring me wherever he wants to bring me, but my brain can’t make sense of what he’s doing.
“Why don’t you walk straight?” I hiss into his ear.
“Many Bigs and Smalls in the jungle,” he says softly. “Better to not meet them. They leave tracks where they like to go. We will go where they don’t.”
Ah. He’s reading dinosaur tracks. Fine, I’m no more interested in encountering one of those horrors than he is. I’ve seen some of them up close, and they give me the major shakes. Not like Troga the dragon, of course. Nothing will ever scare me like she did. But a wild dinosaur can be almost as deadly as she ever was, and when you see one, you feel that danger in your very bones. Humans were never meant to live alongside those things. And on Earth, humans never did.
Unless you count the birds, the dinosaurs’ closest descendants. It’s pretty telling that there are only very few birds on Xren, if indeed they are birds. We’re not sure if the turkeypig is a bird or a mammal or what, and I know Tamara struggles zoologically with how to classify it.
Rax’tar bends down and walks slowly through a clump of low bushes with dense foliage, and I can’t help but notice how he holds his large hand in front of me, making sure none of the whippy branches hit me in the face when we move past them. Okay, one tiny point in his favor.
We pass the bushes, and then he quietly goes down on his knees and stays there.
For a moment, I wonder what the hell he’s doing. Is he exhausted?
Then I feel him tremble, and the leaves on the bushes we just walked through start rustling in a pulsating rhythm. And then I see the huge dinosaur walking past on the other side of them. It’s one of the weird ones that doesn’t look anything like the dinos that lived on Earth. It has two large forelimbs, but its rear is held up by wheels that are so organic-looking they have to be part of its body. I have heard of these things, but I’ve never been able to picture one. But here it is.
The head is two tall stalks that each looks like half of one giraffe neck split down the middle, with one eye on each stalk. It would be comical if it didn’t have two mouths as well, one on each little head, both bristling with untidy, needle-like teeth that I never saw any giraffe rocking. The eyes are deep red and have the coldness of a reptile. Yep, getting out of the way of this thing was absolutely worth going through the bushes for.
Those bushes block most of my view of the dino, but still it’s a mesmerizing sight. The wheels have hubs and spokes and everything, but they’re clearly part of the creature’s body, not something it has made or attached. They grew there, and it seems to work. The forelimbs walk normally, except each of them has two knee joints pointing in oppsite directions.
Suddenly, one of the heads shoots down and to the side like a striking cobra, and a second later it comes back up again with a whole not-sheep in its mouth. The crack when the dino’s jaws shatter the not-sheep’s spine makes me cringe.
“A skranter,” Rax’tar says softly. “They look heavy and clumsy, but it’s always best to get out of the way. They usually have company.”
I see it in the same moment he says it. That huge thing is not alone. In it’s wake there’s a pack of much smaller beings, quick and agile and scurrying after the skranter in a chaotic mess.
“Gvart,” Rax’tar says just as I’m about to ask him what they are. “The skranter will scare many Smalls as it passes, and then the gvart will attack those smaller things. They can also be a danger to us.”
I believe that. The gvart have eight legs each and long, pointy tails. If they weren’t soo green they’d be pretty rat-like, except the size of dogs. I would not like to be the center of attention for those things. If we’d been caught out by the skranter and its entourage, this could have turned pretty nasty.
Rax’tar waits until the who
le group has passed, then walks on in a new direction. I absolutely approve. The further we get away from those things, the better.
Seeing the skranter and its friends has put my idea of making noise to annoy Rax’tar on the back burner. I will not do anything to attract more of those things. Or worse things. As they say, better the devil you know. I will make that my guiding principle from now on. Say what I will about Rax’tar, he hasn’t snapped my spine yet.
As we keep going through the jungle, I start to notice how he makes things as comfortable as possible for me. Despite the density of the trees and bushes, no branch ever comes close to hitting me in the face, and although he often jumps onto a rock, across a dry creek, or down from a small ridge, I’m never jolted or shaken. He dampens the movements with his arm, making sure I just float softly in the sack. It’s weird, but it makes me feel valued.
Shit, I really have to work on my self-esteem.
He keeps going for what has to be several hours. It’s actually not a bad way to travel through the jungle. I’m pretty high up for a good view, and I don’t have to exert myself at all. Rax’tar sometimes stops and crouches down when he’s avoiding a dino, and I sometimes see the creature he’s hiding from and sometimes don’t. I’m glad he sees no reason to confront any monster just to show me what a great fighter he is. The less danger we’re in, the better. And for some weird reason, I do feel safer carried helplessly in his sack than I have since I came to Xren.
All the married girls say the same thing: their cavemen make them feel safe, and that’s quite a feat on a planet as deadly as this. And now I’m feeling it. Being in the village is okay, I guess. I feel moderately safe there, because I assume that our guys will protect us all if something bad would go down. But now that I have the undivided attention of one caveman, and he plainly takes responsibility for keeping me safe, I understand what the girls mean. It’s a load off my mind, and I’m surprised at just how much of my thoughts have been taken up with worry and fear.
I should be afraid, of course. He has kidnapped me. But I don’t get the feeling that he means me harm. Still, the worst harm people do to each other is usually not done on purpose.
