by Matthew Lang
“How can you tell on me if you get eaten exactly? Or are you speaking of an afterlife?”
This time Adam did laugh, just a bit. “That was a joke, Duin. Don’t worry about it.”
Duin shook his muzzle. “You are a very strange man, Sir Adam,” he said, wading out into the lake and ducking himself under the surface.
“Just call me Adam, Duin,” Adam said. “I’m hardly a sir.”
“If you say so, S—Adam,” Duin said. “Would you be offended if I asked you about your land?”
Adam shrugged and squatted to lower the buckets down on the large pebbles that covered the bottom of the pool and spilled out around to the dry shore area. “You can certainly ask,” he said, dropping his now battered gym bag onto the shoreline next to them. “But I don’t know if I’ll be able to explain it to you properly.” He stared at the green-and-white bag. Or the once green-and-white bag. Suddenly he was bone-tired and wondered just how long his unending day here had really been. Adam reached into the left pocket of his cargo pants and pulled out his phone. Amazingly it still worked—and somehow the screen wasn’t cracked. The rugged outdoor case Rusty had bought him years ago clearly did work in extreme environments. Hitting the Power button, he stared at the screen, on which two words were written in neat capital letters: NO NETWORK.
Suddenly the enormity and sheer unreality of his situation came crashing down on him. Adam felt a tightness in his chest and weakness in his limbs as tears welled unbidden in his eyes. He very nearly dropped the phone, only maintaining enough presence of mind to turn it off to conserve the battery.
“Adam?”
“I want to go home.”
Dripping water as he walked back to shore, Duin knelt next to where Adam had slumped to the ground and gently took Adam’s hand in his. “Tell me about this land of Australia?”
Chapter 4
“I’M SORRY,” Adam said, blinking at the tears threatening to spill down his cheeks. “I don’t do this at home, any of it. I live in a city, I go to uni, I go to work, and I study chemistry. I don’t ride through the wilderness on giant lizards fighting monsters and collecting water. I just….”
“What’s your sky like?” Duin asked.
“What?”
“Your sky. What color is it?”
“Blue,” Adam said. “Well, mostly blue. It’s gray if it’s cloudy, black at night, and red like yours at dusk or dawn.”
“And your city, it is above the ground?”
Adam bit his lip and nodded. “Most of us live above ground in houses or apartments. I live in an apartment, just a small little place, but it’s big enough for me. One bedroom, a bathroom, kitchen, and an area to eat and relax or watch TV. God, I’m going to miss TV.”
“What is tee-vee?”
“Moving pictures… stories. Do you have theater here?”
“I know what it is.”
“Imagine theater, but recorded, so you can play it back whenever you want, and that’s television. Kind of.”
“Magic?”
“Not really, but… might as well be, I suppose. Look, Duin, I’m a lazy sod of a city slicker. I buy my food, clothes, entertainment, and…. What the hell am I doing here, and how the hell am I going to survive? I have no skills here. None.”
“You saved my life,” Duin said. “I may not know much else about you, but you are a great negotiator.”
“Yeah, I can talk,” Adam said. “Woo-hoo. That’ll get me far.”
“It has got us both here, alive, and probably fed shortly,” Duin pointed out. “And apparently you can hold your own in a fight.”
“Not as good as I’ll need to be, unless I have Darius looking over my shoulder.”
“So you train,” Duin said. “You improve and you survive. But first, you bathe. You will feel better once you’re clean.”
“And we should get back with the water before they send Xavier out to turn us into toads?”
“Turn us into something,” Duin agreed. “Probably not toads, though. Come, the water is quite refreshing.”
“Let me get out of all this first,” Adam said, tugging at the knots of his shoelaces.
Duin wrinkled his nose as Adam peeled off his shirt and T-shirt. “You might want to clean those as well.”
“I stink, I know,” Adam grunted. “I’ve also got a bag of clothes to clean here as well.”
Duin grunted, the sound a peculiar combination of canine and human. “Let me get the muck out of my fur and I will help you.”
Adam grinned. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”
When Duin considered himself clean enough and came over to lend a hand—or paw—he marveled at the softness of Adam’s modern fabrics, and Adam spent a few minutes helping him read the care labels that were still inside, although he had no answers when Duin asked exactly what viscose was and how it was made.
“It feels like really soft, stretchy silk,” Duin said. “I wish I had clothes like this.”
“You can borrow them if you like, once they’re dry.”
“Adam, look at me. Do I look like I need clothing?”
“Well, back in the cave maybe,” Adam said with a grin. “You should at least wear a pair of my trunks. I’m not sure Esmeralda needs to see you naked.”
Duin sighed. “No, if I wear those, Magister Xavier will want them because they are new and different. Best keep them for you. Come,” he said, his breath huffing out in a drawn-out sigh. “It is time to fill up those buckets and make our journey back.”
“Oh, my favorite part of the day,” Adam said, his voice flat. “Still, I do want to eat tonight. Can we wait until we’ve got the water to put clothes back on?”
“That is probably a good idea,” Duin said, throwing one of Adam’s T-shirts over a nearby bush to dry out a little. “We are unlikely to catch cold here.”
Adam smiled, enjoying the warm air on his skin. “Not unless we try really hard, no.”
Feeling slightly better about his predicament, Adam was able to admit that this place, at least, met the definition of jungle paradise. The rock face they had climbed down earlier that day rose sheer and majestic behind the tall trees, and the waterfall thundered into the riverbed, kicking white spray high into the air. The stones around their feet were round and smooth, and the entire pool would easily be Olympic-sized, had it been deeper. It was also nearly completely hidden, with low shrubs and ferns growing right up to the water’s edge, some of which Duin indicated were edible.
“I knew we should have brought Zoul,” Adam said. “We need someone to haul this food back.”
“We can come back,” Duin replied with a shrug. “I sort of like being outside.”
“I can tell,” Adam said. “You smile more out here.”
Duin stilled and turned to face Adam, framed perfectly by the thundering falls in the deeper end of the pool. “You treat me like a person.”
“Well… you are a person,” Adam said. “I think the fur’s kind of cool, and… well, I’m looking forward to seeing what you look like inside, now you’re clean.”
Duin snorted. “Much the same as anyone else, I would imagine.” Then his eyes narrowed. “Adam, stay very still.”
“What? Why?”
“Because if you move, you might just spook it.”
“It?”
“Shut your eyes.”
“What?”
“Shut your eyes.”
“Duin, you said we were safe here.”
“We are,” Duin said. “Trust me. Close your eyes.”
“Fine,” Adam said, closing his eyes. “You do realize I’m standing naked in a pool by a waterfall in what could be called a tropical paradise?”
“If you say so.” Duin’s voice came after a short pause. “Although I am not sure I understood the significance of that. Do not move. Not a muscle.”
“Okay,” Adam said, his mind racing with the possibilities.
It was amazing how much the absence of one sense heightened the others. While the roar of water on rock
still dominated, he could just hear the soft swish as Duin moved through the shallows at the edge of the pool, and fancied he could feel the man’s presence as he moved closer, closer and—
There was a loud splash, a wave of cool water splattering his shins, and a cry of triumph from Duin.
“Got it!”
“Got what?” Adam asked, opening his eyes.
Duin stood before him, his lower jaw open in a canine grin, one hand raised and clasped around a wicked-looking crustacean. It was a brownish purple in color and about a foot and a half in length, with eight segmented legs sprawling out from beneath its armored body, waving helplessly in the air as its flattened tail section flapped in an attempt to get free. It looked, for all intents and purposes, like a strange cross between a lobster and a trilobite. Adam started and nearly lost his footing on the smooth stones as he recoiled from the spindly legs and large waving claws.
“What the hell is that thing?”
“Dinner, I hope,” Duin said. “I do not know what they would call this, if anything at all, but w—I have always called them chtick-tick.”
“Chtick-tick?”
“That is what the kanak say when they catch them,” Duin said with a shrug. “It is as good a name as any.”
“And why did I have to close my eyes?”
“It was about to crawl over your feet, and I did not want you to scare it off.”
This time Adam did jump, and would have fallen if Duin hadn’t grabbed him with his free hand. “What was it doing down there?”
“Looking for food, I believe,” Duin said, nodding at the grape-sized tadpoles that swam here and there throughout the entire pool. Just like us.”
“Just like us,” Adam echoed. “I’m surprised there aren’t any fish, to be honest with you.”
“There are flitterfish,” Duin said. “But they do not live in the water.”
“Where would you find them?”
“Up there,” Duin said, pointing into the nearby trees, where the rhomboid fliers Adam had seen earlier were hanging from the underside of the branches, their scales a silvery-blue shimmer and their wing-fins a metallic blue-green.
“Oh,” he said. “Are they edible?”
“If you can catch them, yes.”
“Right,” Adam said. “Okay. Water?”
“Water,” Duin agreed. “I will find something to bind the chtick-tick.”
“And then we’ll probably have to make a second trip for the foodstuffs you found.”
“Or for more water,” Duin added as he tore off a section of trailing roots curtaining down from a low-hanging tree branch and expertly trussed the chtick-tick up so it couldn’t use its claws.
“If we are, I’m bringing Zoul.”
AND PERHAPS unsurprisingly, that was exactly what happened. By the time Adam, Duin, and Zoul fetched enough water, fern fronds, and caught a few more chtick-ticks and other small shrimplike crustaceans, Esmeralda and Xavier had collected a fair amount of firewood, which appeared to surprise Duin.
“I suppose even a princess has to pitch in at times like these,” Adam murmured.
“I am more surprised the necromancer does not find wood gathering beneath him,” Duin replied quietly.
“Necromancer?”
Duin nodded. “Magister Xavier.”
Any further comment Adam would have made was interrupted by the return of Darius with a twitching bundle that turned out to be a brace of spiders, each one the size of a large dog, hairy legs twitching slightly as they hung off his saddle.
“Spiders? Does that count as a successful hunt?” Adam asked Duin carefully.
“You would not want to hunt one of the larger lizards alone, so yes,” Duin said, smiling slightly.
“I’ll take your word for it,” Adam said.
Duin’s tinder was put to use creating a cooking fire, and Adam and Duin were allowed to take charge of the cooking of the spiders, which as far as Adam could tell, consisted of cutting the head and poisonous fangs off the spider before charring the hairs off the rest of it. According to everyone who wasn’t Adam, spider was very good eating, but the spider’s hairs were known to cause an unsightly rash on human skin. The chtick-ticks and shrimplike marin, as Esmeralda called them, were boiled in a large cooking pot with the fern shoots to create a rather plain soup that Adam would probably have seasoned liberally with salt back at home, but with hunger pangs gnawing at his stomach, he dug into his food with gusto. Spider, it turned out, had a texture much like shellfish, although there was a smoky aftertaste to the meal that he wasn’t completely sure about. Still, with five mouths to feed, not counting the lizards, who had a mix of fresh spider and dried fruit, the meal was very soon over. There had been little conversation, bar some grumbling from Xavier about missing his creature comforts, but that stopped when Esmeralda pointed out they couldn’t return to Aergon, so complaining about things wasn’t going to achieve anything.
Despite wanting to ask question after question, Adam was too tired to do more than eat his fill and help with the little cleanup that was necessary. Afterward, Esmeralda, Darius, and Xavier took turns bathing, guarded by their vigilant mounts, and Adam couldn’t quite shake the feeling that the three were very careful never to leave him and Duin alone at camp, with Darius and Xavier especially careful not to leave them alone with the princess. Still, when he was finally able to seek his allocated pallet of hard bamboo, folding up a soft cloak for use as a pillow, none of this was at the forefront of Adam’s mind. He sank gratefully into a deep sleep and didn’t wake when the others sought their own bunks.
Chapter 5
ADAM AWOKE with the distinct impression he’d overslept. His entire body ached, and he felt as though he had gone several rounds of boxing at the gym, and then been severely beaten in a quarterstaff fight. Of course, the reality of his situation sank in rather quickly when he looked around his bedroom and found the last day or so had not, in fact, been a dream.
Turning his head caused enough pain to make him whimper, his ribs and inner thighs protesting most strenuously. In the dim light of the room, he could just make out Duin sitting cross-legged in front of his bunk, dressed in a loose shirt and leather trousers. His shaggy brown hair still fell like a mane around his shoulders, but it was a bit less scraggly, and it looked like someone had attempted to drag a comb of some sort through it—and most likely given up. He appeared to be cracking open roasted nuts, placing the kernels into a small leather bag.
“How long—” Adam coughed, clearing his throat. “How long have I been asleep?”
“Long enough,” Duin replied. “You looked like you needed it, though.”
“I feel like crap,” Adam groaned. “I don’t want to move, but even without moving, everything hurts.”
Duin’s low chuckle filled the room. “Magister Xavier thought you might need this,” he said, reaching for a small stoppered gourd bottle. “He said it should be rubbed into your muscles when you woke up.”
“What is it?”
“Something to help with the pain,” Duin said. “Past that, I cannot say, but Esmeralda has agreed it should help.”
Adam groaned. “I’ll risk it. I’ll try anything right now.”
“So, where exactly does it hurt?” Duin asked.
“Everywhere.”
“I am being serious, Adam.”
“So am I.”
“Oh,” Duin said. “Sorry. In that case we will have to get your clothes off again.”
Even chuckling hurt. “You know, normally when a nice man asks me to get naked, it’s for a completely different reason.”
“It is?”
Adam groaned as he rose into a sitting position, nearly hitting his head on the bunk above. “Never mind,” he said, pulling his shirt over his head to hide the flush on his face. “I’m rambling.”
“You had better come here,” Duin said, patting the mat of soft woven rushes he was sitting on. “I think the bunk might be a bit cramped.”
Adam grunted agreement
and very slowly lowered his pants and trunks inch by painful inch down his legs. After a moment, Duin came over to assist and folded the garments before placing them back on the bed. Then he helped Adam to the floor, maneuvering him so he lay on his front. As Adam paused to adjust himself so he wasn’t crushing his privates, he felt a slight shift in the mat as Duin knelt next to him. Adam heard the sound of the cork popping from the gourd container, and immediately a subtle aniseed smell reached his nostrils. Then hands were spreading a warming oil over his back, the calluses on Duin’s fingers catching only slightly on his skin. Surprisingly, Duin proved to be a good masseur, expertly seeking out the knots of tension in Adam’s muscles and easing them into relaxed compliance, lingering long enough to be sensuous before moving on. Either that or he was guided by the loudest groans, cries of pain, and the amount of flinching Adam did every time he found a new ache. After a while, Adam was in considerably less pain—either the oil did have its promised pain-relieving effect, or the massage itself was doing him the world of good. He was also feeling a good deal warmer, his skin tingling slightly, almost as if it was being pressed up against a vibrator. His lips quirked at the thought of a full-body vibrator, but as Duin’s hands moved down his spine to knead his ass, the feelings of warmth, sensual touch, and the buzz on his skin created an altogether different sensation, which he had honestly thought he would be too sore to experience. His groans became softer, and he caught himself arching into Duin’s touch and gasping in pleasure when Duin’s fingers brushed past his balls as the man massaged his legs.
“Are you all right?” Duin asked.
“Oh, um, yes,” Adam said quickly. “I feel so much better. I don’t know what’s in that oil, but it’s fantastic.”
Duin’s hands worked down each of Adam’s legs in turn, kneading each thigh and calf before rubbing gently at Adam’s feet, manipulating his ankles and releasing spots of tension he wasn’t even aware he had—as well as many he wasn’t aware could be soothed through massage.
