by Jean Kilczer
A tall member of the group, perhaps six feet, came forward while others hung back. “Hello, Huff,” he lisped through bony mouth parts. “Does your liver flourish in good health?”
“My liver is joyous, Thail, and yours?”
“Also well. And your friends?”
“This cub who rides my back with broken ribs over his liver is Terran Jules of Earthworld.” He turned and lifted a paw toward Sophia. “And the Terran female who is his lifemate is Sofa.”
“Sofia!” she corrected.
Thail chuckled. “Welcome, my friends. May the Pru pa never find your path.” He clacked his beak. So did the crowd.
“And to you, my friend,” I said, knowing that the Pru pa meant storm, among other dire definitions, including hubris. “Are you the leader of your people?”
He glanced back at the crowd. Some in front who heard our words clacked softly and their round shoulders shook.
A Cleocean in the front said, “Does family need a leader?”
“I would be honored,” Thail said, “but we have no need of leaders when all govern themselves.”
“Oh, sorry,” I said.
“No offense taken.” He turned and walked toward the village. We followed. The people parted to make a path for us. Children touched me and Sophia as they skated by, lifting their luminescent balls with their minds to bounce in air.
A great slab of ice was carved into a Cleocean leaping, into the sea, I imagine, a fish, and a crescent moon, perhaps a religious symbol.
Sophia gestured toward it. “Did your people do that, Thail? It's very beautiful.”
He waggled his head. “No, we haven't the dexterous hands for it. Our Slattie friends created it in exchange for some fish. It was a bargain.” he turned to me as we walked. “I understand your curiosity, but consider that we need no laws who break no laws, and all work, and share. But you look weary. We have none of the amenities of your civilization. Still, what we have is yours.”
“I am honored.” I rubbed my forehead. I felt chilled, yet my cheeks were warm. “I count civilization in the treatment of all races and species, my friend.”
He gazed at me and I felt a common bond in his searching violet eyes.
“I'd just ask for a place to lie down out of this wind,” I said, “if it's all right, and some fish, if you can spare it. We haven't eaten…”
He clucked. “It is all right, and we can spare it.”
He led Huff to an igloo and Sophia helped me slide off his back and go inside.
It was even warmer than I'd hoped for, with a musky smell of kelp, and the brown furs that covered the floor and a platform made of tied bones and stretched skins.
Three Cleoceans sat around a common bowl of mauve liquid, sucking things through reeds that jetted within it. They looked up and clacked as I entered. I nodded and smiled.
“Lie here, honored guest.” Thail folded furs on the platform and Sophia helped me to lie back on them. I closed my eyes. I would've slept if I wasn't so hungry. The soft clacking and chirping of people outside, the muted crash of ice crunching against the shore, mixed with the mournful wind that curled around igloos and fluttered the fur curtain as though seeking entrance.
I kept an arm protectively against my right side. There is nothing worse than being wounded and having the wound injured again.
“Jules?”
I opened my eyes. Sophia sat on the platform beside me with a dried skin that held pieces of cooked fish and an orange tuber. “I beamed the raw fish with my stingler,” she said. “Very well done.” She picked up a pill on the dish. “Digestall. The test was positive for the fish and the tuber.”
I put the pill in my mouth and she handed me the canteen. I realized I was thirsty and drank my fill.
“Save some room for the food,” she said.
Hunger is the best condiment. The fish was burned around the edges. It had a salty taste and little flavor, and smelled like kelp, but I ate it as though it were caviar, and stripped long pieces off the tuber and ate that, though it tasted more like fish than the fish did.
“Some more water?” Sophia asked.
I nodded and drank. “Did they feed you?”
“Not yet. I wanted you to eat first, but they have fish and a tuber for me too. How do you feel?”
“I'd say not so hot, but I feel hot.”
She laid a hand on my forehead. It felt cool.
I touched her cheek. “Have I told you that I love you?”
“Not enough times,” she recited. “I want to hear it every morning and…” Tears glazed her eyes and she choked up.
“Like an alarm clock, woman,” I whispered.
“Yes, dear, like that. You look worn out. Sleep now.” She kissed me lightly on the lips.
“Not if you keep kissing me.”
She smiled and covered me with a blanket that had lain folded at the foot of the platform.
I relaxed back and sighed. “I haven't been this warm since we left Earth for this frozen, friggin' snowball of a planet.”
She started to answer but I dozed off.
My dreams, spun by fever into tangled webs, were strange and frightening. All Mother appeared, dragging her bellyful of eggs with eyes that watched me, and widened her crimson mouth. Huff leaped at her throat and ripped it open. Boss Slade wielded a whip with shark teeth that snapped at me. Azut beamed him with a stingler and Slade slid into the Flaming Pit. Blackroot rose up from the Pit into coils as thick as tree trunks with lamprey teeth that spun into my chest like a circular saw.
I cried out and jumped up. Pain lashed my right side as the muscles spasmed. I gripped the bone edge of the bed and gritted my teeth so I wouldn't scream. The three Cleoceans were gone, the mauve bowl with them.
“God, make it stop. Please!”
Jules. It is Spirit.
Help me, Spirit!
I will. Do not fight me this time.
OK! Just stop this pain. I can't stand it.
I felt him probe deep into my mind, past my shields, past the flower that protected my essence, past the bee that held my deepest thoughts and unspoken desires.
No! I sent.
No? Stop it, Jules.
All right! Hurry.
He found the main switch and threw it.
Thank you, I sent and sank back on the furs as the pain ebbed and flowed out of my body. I closed my eyes and sighed.
Sleep now, Terran Jules. May Great Mind cherish you.
Sleep, Syl 'Via sent, that knits the raveled sleeve of care.
You've been reading our plays again, I sent sleepily.
There is something in them, she sent, for every occasion and turn of events.
I sank into a peaceful realm where no dreams haunted my sleep.
* * *
“Jules! Wake up!”
“Spirit?”
“Thail. Come, I will help you up.”
“What's wrong? Did the Cultists find us?”
Thail clacked in the darkness of the igloo and glanced toward the entrance. It was night.
“I will help you to stand the way your Sophia does.”
I heard the tenseness in his voice. He spread a webbed hand behind my back, his other hand under my neck, and lifted me to a sitting position.
“The bastards found us!” I said. “Right? They must've tracked our scent.” I stood up carefully. “Where's Sophia? And Huff?”
“Taken to separate hiding places so their scent will not be easily traced.”
“Are they safe?”
“Only Great Mind can answer that.”
“You know about Great Mind?”
We started toward the door.
“Our sages sometimes touch with His mind. Come! Time is lessening.”
I held my right side as we went into the frigid night air. Wind lifted snow and fragments of ice to fly at us and snap at my cheeks. I tightened my hood as Thail led me to a wide igloo. We passed a stack of kelp, tubers, and dried fish. I scooped up a handful of the kelp and rubbed it on my
jacket as we walked to hide my scent. I realized that I didn't need help. The pain had diminished to a dull ache. I could live with that. A good meal, Spirit's help, and sleep had worked wonders. My cheeks no longer felt hot.
“In here.” Thail held back the fur entrance as I walked through. “Do you endeavor to hide your Terran scent with the kelp?” he asked.
“I do. I should've told Sophia to do it too, when we came here. How close are the Cultists?”
“Our forward lookouts returned and told us perhaps a foot of wet sand more as the tide recedes.”
“That's some clock, Thail. The tidal flow.”
He hurried to the back wall and pushed a square block of ice until it fell into a space behind the wall.
I heard Slattie voices outside. “They're here!” I checked my stingler as I went to the entrance. Green glow. Full charge.
In the soft light of the moon I made out about ten Slatties, but I thought there were more moving behind them, “Damn,” I whispered and returned to the wall, “we just ran out of the sands of time.”
I helped him lower the wall by pushing ice blocks through with my left elbow.
“I can step over this,” I said, when the hole was about three feet off the ground, and I did. He came in behind me and quickly fitted the blocks back into the wall.
As he lifted the heavy ice, I slid the blocks together to close up gaps between them. Thail fitted the last one, forcing it in place, as the Slatties' voices grew clearer. They had entered the igloo.
“Where to now?” I whispered.
It was dark and I couldn't judge the dimensions of the space we were in.
“Come.” He took my hand in his clammy webbed fingers and led me down a narrow corridor. I kept my arm against the carved wall of ice to maintain my balance.
“Are Sophia and Huff hiding in a place like this?” I asked.
“Yes, the tunnels are connected. Please, follow me.”
Thail had no problem seeing in the dark and I thought that Cleoceans must be nocturnal hunters of the sea who didn't believe the myth that Druids would eat them at night.
“How are your damaged ribs?” he asked as he lit a lantern and placed it on the floor. “Better.” I looked around. We were in a small cave.
He gestured toward the lantern. “One of the amenities of civilization that we trade for with off-worlders.”
He sat on a mat and laid another one next to him. “This is another luxury we allow ourselves.”
I used the wall to ease myself down to it and slipped on my gloves. “Do you have to hide from the Cultists often?”
“No. Usually they pass through our region without contact. We have nothing they covet. Once they tried to convert us, but we slid into the water and out to the open ocean, past their proselytizing and their abilities to follow. I imagine they gave up on us as lost infidels.”
“Then why this hideout?”
He clacked, closed two pairs of eyes, and leaned his head back. “We are a people who abhor violence, but we are not naive, my friend. We know the ways of the worlds.”
“You know what they do to Druids?”
He nodded. “A constant desolation in our hearts. The Druids are our friends. We weep for them.”
“But there's no way you can help your friends?”
He peered at me. “How, exactly?”
“Fighting alongside the Rebels. These Cultists are savages. Do you know what they do to prisoners?”
“That's why I have taken you here,” he said softly, “so that it does not become your fate.”
“It just seems…” I picked up a pebble of ice and threw it against a wall.
“We came to Kresthaven to live simply,” he said, “and without conflict.”
“Sometimes that's not possible”
He sighed. “Our race has been embracing the technologies of civilizations such as your own. In the end, our children desired baubles, toys that they play with for a while, and then discard. Even religious holidays became nothing more than the acquisition of trifles.”
“So you came here to escape all that?”
He clacked softly. “Our people became poor members of technological societies who craved the things they could not afford. There was no work, no place for them in such cultures.” He traced a line in the hard ground with a clawed finger. “In the end, they turned to mega dreams to drown out the cravings, and lost their souls to the illegal merchants of drugs. Our females sold their bodies to buy drugs. Our males became gangsters to profit from drugs.”
“Mega dreams? The crystals stolen from Spirit of Halcyon?”
“The same.” His furred cheeks crinkled and I thought he smiled.
“I helped to execute the Dream Czar of Halcyon, my daughter Lisa and I.”
He nodded.
“But it was the Kubraen Briertrush who actually killed him and closed down his drug cartel.”
“You are the astrobiologist they call Jules Rammis of planet Earth.”
“Yes, but I'm sorry that I brought trouble to your house.” I gently rubbed my right side. “Now Granbor expects us to rid the north sea of these Cultists.”
“Granbor is in anguish over the murder of his people, but he is foolish to think that you and your team can accomplish this without the help of the bullion.”
“The Bullyarns? Who are they? I don't think the Rebel movement is capable of defeating the Cultists. There are too many Cultists and they're too well armed.”
“The trouble with being pacifists is that when you turn the other cheek, as one of your major religions advises, you get slapped on that cheek also.”
“What are you saying, Thail? Have you decided that your people should fight the Cultists?”
He chuckled. “We would be slaughtered. No, I was thinking more of bullion.”
“What bullyarn? I'm sorry, my friend, but you're talking in circles.”
“Which brings us back to the beginning. Bullion. Enough gold could buy the services of professional soldiers of fortune. Trained soldiers who would bring their special weapons and go against Lord Aburra.”
“Wait a minute, are you saying you've located the starship from Fartherland that crashed into the north sea? Is that what you're telling me?”
“We have.”
I leaned back against the cold wall. “Oh my God! Do you know what that bullion is worth?”
“I believe we do. The salvation of the Druids.”
“I've heard it's worth a million creds.”
He folded his webbed hands over his downy belly. “Do you not find it ironic that a people who came to Kresthaven to live simply, a people who shun material wealth, should find this cornucopia of treasure, this essence of conspicuous consumption?”
I leaned closer to him. “A cornucopia, Thail, that can hire us enough mercenaries to drive these vicious nut case bastards all the way to the fucking south sea!”
“You've read my mind, except for the more colorful words.”
“Why haven't your people brought up the gold?”
“The bullion lies within the vessel, which settled without holes at the bottom of the sea.” He flicked a glance at my holstered stingler.
“This weapon is useless underwater, but my team has tools onboard our boat that can burn a hole in the hatch and open it. How deep does she lie?”
“Not deep. By Terran measurements, perhaps a hundred feet, or thirty meters, or fifty-five kicks.”
“She's well within reach with our gill units. What if we hadn't stumbled into your village?”
“We would have sent an emissary to request your presence here.”
I rubbed my forehead. “If I only knew the location of our boats.”
“That should not be a difficulty for my people. We will also engage our Druid friends to search for your boat.”
“Boats.”
“Boats?”
“Two. Two boats.”
“Then two boats. This turn of events bodes well for our Druid friends and the Slatties who fight the…
nut cases, as you call them.”
“My team will be tickled to leave this war to professional mercenaries and return home to Earth.”
“Who will tickle them?” He blinked two sets of eyes.
“Just an expression.”
“Speaking of returning home, the Cultists might well have moved on by now.” He stood up. “Wait here with the lantern while I take a different branching that ends in high ground and unlimited visibility.”
“You see well at night, don't you?”
“I can see by the light of stars when Maiden Moon hides behind clouds. I'll return when I am certain that the Cultists are gone.”
“I'll wait here…with the lantern.”
“Yes.”
I fell asleep waiting for Thail to return, and woke up when I heard voices from the tunnel he'd taken. “Thail?” I called. “Sophia. Huff?”
Silence.
A sudden fear spurred me. I got to my knees, drew my weapon, and peered into darkness. I tried to stand, but the effort cost me in pain and I slid back to my knees.
Movement in the branching tunnel.
“Thail!” I called again.
A blue flash. My stingler was suddenly scorching hot. I yelled as I dropped it and held my burned hand, then reached for the stingler.
“I wouldn't try that again, scud,” a Slattie voice said from the tunnel.
I used the wall to pull myself to my feet and did my best to relax my chest muscles, though my breaths were coming fast.
Five Slatties, with blue bands around their forearms, came into the cave with weapons drawn. I leaned against the wall as they surrounded me.
“Where are the female Terran and the traitor Huff you were traveling with?” a Slattie, scarred from shoulder to chest, asked me.
“They're gone,” I said. “They left when they got word that you were coming.”
“You lying scud!” He lifted a paw to strike me. I blocked the blow, but it knocked me to my knees. I stayed there, my arm pressed against my right side, and watched their legs, like white columns, flicker in the lantern light Great Mind, I thought, don't let him hit me in my ribs!
He didn't. He kicked me. I screamed as pain exploded in my ribs. I fell, and curled up, protecting my side.
“I think this human is damaged,” another Slattie said. “You would not want to destroy Lord Aburra's prize, my captain.”
