The Scarlet Cavern

by Michael Dalton

  “We met in college. We got married a few years after that. Do the males here just go around claiming wives?”

  She seemed as confused by what I’d just said as I was by what she’d told me.

  “Yes.”

  “Wait. You’re saying, if I said, ‘I claim you,’ that would be it?”

  Ayarala eye’s widened a bit, then got sad.

  “Not for me, but for my people, yes. The talalong are much the same. For the cunelo, linyang and sorai, it is a bit more complicated.”

  The names meant little beyond something akin to dwenda. More tribes, I supposed.

  “Why not for you?”

  She sighed.

  “I have mated, and my tsulygoi died. No one will have me now.”

  “Just because of that?”

  “Once a female has mated, she belongs to that tsulygoi, unless another takes her away. But if he dies, or she leaves him, she is nalasin.”

  Untethered, or untied, it felt like.

  “So no male would want me.”

  That . . . seemed more than a little surprising. Ayarala seemed young, and she was beautiful. I’d always had a thing for short girls – Jacqueline was five-four – and Ayarala, alien though she appeared, was hotter than any girl I’d spent any real time with in the last year.

  “I find that a bit hard to believe.”

  She shrugged, but said nothing more.

  When the meat was done, we ate quietly. I wasn’t a hundred-percent sure I could eat something like this, but it tasted kind of like pork and didn’t give me a seizure or even an upset stomach. The sun was at the top of the sky when we finished.

  “So what now?” I asked. “I don’t know this area at all. Are there settlements? Other people like you?”

  “There are a few small villages of my people within a day or two of walking. Do you seek wives? You will not find them there.”

  “Not really, but why not? You said this land was mostly females.”

  “It is. But the dwenda females worthy of mating have all left to seek tsulygois, or were taken by them. You would not find a female you would wish take as a wife that way.”

  Worthy of mating? I decided to leave that alone for now.

  “Then what?”

  “There is the tsulygoi I mentioned. His home is not far from here. Perhaps half a day. You should go and take his wives. He had two when I came to him.”

  Alien world or not, this ongoing obsession with who had what wives was starting to grate on me. I wasn’t looking for any wives right now, let alone two.

  Besides which, after what I’d gone through with Richard, taking someone else’s wives did not appeal to me in the slightest. I wasn’t about to do to this guy what Richard had done to me. About the only thing that sustained me during the worst of it was feeling like I had the moral high ground.

  Thinking of Richard made me think of Cassie and Hunter. I was getting too comfortable, whether or not I was actually in a coma. One way or another, I had to get out and back home.

  “Will you help me with this?” I asked. “For a few days at least? I don’t know what I can do to repay you, but I’ll find something.”

  “You saved me from the busang, Will of Hawthorne. That is enough. I will help you.”

  Chapter 4

  Igot to my feet. “Let me show you something.”

  Ayarala followed me as I hiked back to the cave. I found the hole in the hillside after a few minutes.

  “Do you know this cave?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “No. I have not been on this hill. I was fleeing the busang when I came up here.”

  I dropped my backpack and ducked down into the cave. Ayarala followed me. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I pointed to the back wall.

  “This is where I came out. Except now it’s a wall.”

  But Ayarala was more interested in the crystals.

  “Oh, this is wonderful. So many large ones. We should take these. ”

  “In a minute. Look here. Do you see any way through?”

  She turned from the pocket of crystals and stood next to me.

  “No. I am sorry, Will. How did you come through here?”

  “On the other side, there were crystals like these. And I was doing this.”

  I wasn’t sure how she would react to the laser pointer, but I took it out and flashed it around at the crystals. Part of me hoped it would somehow open the wall again, but nothing happened. It was still there.

  Ayarala was intrigued, but not by the laser beam itself. Instead, she reached for the pointer.

  “How is it so small? How . . . where is the power?”

  I handed it to her.

  “You have lasers here?”

  “Not so small.” She pointed it around, then at her hand. “But it does nothing. Only light.”

  That piqued my interest.

  “You have larger ones?”

  “Yes. They are used for cutting or joining large pieces of crystal and stone, manufacturing and engraving, things like that. But they need much power. The crystals that power them are as large as you, or larger. How is this powered?”

  I took it back and opened it up to show her the battery. She studied it for a moment, then handed it back.

  “There are crystals inside, for the power?”

  “To be honest, I’m not sure. Like I said, it’s not what I do.”

  She looked back at the wall, walking over to inspect the rock. She explored for a few moments before turning back to me.

  “I would help you return home if I could. But I do not see what we can do here.”

  I sighed.

  “Me neither. Would this tsulygoi you mentioned know more?”

  “His wives might. One is talalong. They are often skilled in science and history. If you claimed her, I am sure she would help you, if she could.”

  That opened a crack in my previous certitude. If there was a way out of here, back to Cassie and Hunter, I had to take it. I didn’t have to keep this guy’s wives, after all, or do anything with them he would object to. I could figure out what they knew, and then, I guess, give them back. Right?

  Of course, that was assuming I wasn’t imagining all of this. That possibility seemed less and less likely the longer I walked around interacting with Ayarala and the rest of this world.

  But maybe even if I was in a coma, finding a way out, inside here, was the way to wake up. That made a weird sort of sense, at least as much sense as anything else right now.

  I nodded.

  “Okay, then. Let’s go find this guy.”

  When we turned back to the crystal pockets Ayarala was interested in, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before. It was up above the cave mouth, where the outside light made it difficult to see. It was a crystal, but it didn’t look natural – instead, it was a smooth, slightly rectangular plate. When I looked closer, I could tell it had been placed there deliberately. It was mounted to the wall, not growing out of it like the other crystals.

  When I tried to see if I could pull it off, it held firmly in place. I gave it another tug, and it snapped in half with a flash of light. One piece came off in my hand.

  “Ah, shit.”

  Ayarala turned to me. I showed the broken plate to her.

  “This is not a natural crystal. It is something manufactured.”

  “Yeah. What’s it doing here?”

  She turned it over in her hands. I showed her the other half on the wall.

  “I do not know. If you had not broken it, I might have been able to determine its function. But it is nothing now.”

  I studied it for a few more moments. There seemed to be engravings on the back and interior, but none it of looked like anything I’d seen before. I grunted in disgust with myself and tossed it aside.

  ◆◆◆

  After I helped her harvest the best crystals from the cave wall, Ayarala led me back down the hill to the area where she’d been living when the busang found her. I was intrigued to see that, whi
le the flora and fauna were very different, the topography was quite similar to the trail I had come up that morning. Just as with the campsite I had intended to reach, we were on a moderate-sized mountain. Below us, the hillside gradually led down to a somewhat level area in the distance. Far beyond that, maybe thirty or forty miles away, I though I could see a lake of some sort.

  Unlike the mountains above San Diego, there was plenty of surface water on the hill, and after Ayarala assured me it was safe to drink, I refilled my hydration pack from a stream we crossed. The stream flowed into the apex of a narrow canyon that got progressively deeper down the mountain. Ayarala led us around to the left, but her path stayed fairly close to the edge. Now and then I could see down into the gorge. The stream became a sizable creek tumbling over the rocks below.

  Unfortunately, it turned out that when Ayarala had said it was “half a day” to this tsulygoi’s home, she was thinking in terms of her agile, small-framed self, burdened with only a small shoulder pack, not a big hulking human wearing LARP armor and 35 pounds of camping gear on his back. It was mostly downhill, but even then I couldn’t match her pace, and she had to slow down for me.

  By the time the sun was sinking in the sky, Ayarala told me we still had about half the distance to go.

  “Is it safe to make camp here?” I asked, remembering the busang.

  She looked around. There was a fairly level area about ten yards away through the trees.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  I found a spot that would work, stripped off my armor, and began setting up my tent. Despite the extra weight it entailed, I usually hiked with a two-person tent. I was a big guy, and single tents just had too little room for me and all my gear. Some hikers could deal with sleeping on top of and around their crap, or leaving it outside; I preferred having it with me but not in my way.

  Ayarala watched me, examining the fabric and tent poles as I put things together.

  “Do you not have tents like this here?” I asked.

  “We do have similar things. But these materials are strange.” She held up a pole. “What is this made from?”

  “Aluminum.”

  “What is aloo-mi-mum?”

  “A metal. I guess you don’t have that.” Or they called it something else. But she truly didn’t seem to understand.

  When I began moving my gear into the tent, Ayarala hesitated, as if she wasn’t sure what to do. She was clearly waiting for some sign from me.

  “You can put your stuff in here, next to mine, if you want. No need to sleep out in the open.”

  She climbed in the tent with me, stepping over my sleeping bag. She regarded it for a moment and then extracted a thin bedroll from her pack.

  Unlike the laser pointer, Ayarala wasn’t impressed with my mess kit, or the freeze-dried beef stroganoff dinner I began preparing. She made a bit of a face when I handed her a share in one of my mess bowls, but she ate it.

  “What is the meat?” she asked.

  “Do you have cows?”

  “What is a coawhz?”

  “I guess not. Do you have domesticated animals?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s one of those. Big, used for milk and meat.”

  “Oh. Like a kabayang.”

  I got an impression of a docile, cow-like animal. Again, I wondered how I was getting this. It wasn’t telepathy, if that was even a thing. I was getting feelings and meanings.

  And the longer I was around Ayarala, the more cued in I felt with what she was feeling. The fear and apprehension in the beginning were gone. She was comfortable with me, if still very confused about exactly what I was. That made me wonder why she was sticking around with me, and I began to sense a texture of loneliness under all of it.

  I remembered what she’d said about being nalasin. It was possible she’d been out here alone for quite a while, with the prospect of things staying that way for the foreseeable future. So alien or not, I probably represented a welcome change in her circumstances.

  The night was cool but not yet cold, and the sky above us was clear. I lay back on a log and looked up. I looked for the moon for a moment before remembering where I was. I saw no moon, but I did see a very bright star directly above us, brighter than any star on Earth.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  Ayarala lay down beside me.

  “Kumala.”

  “A star?”

  “Not like the others. Kumala moves across the sky, though very slowly, so it takes many talons for her to return to where she started.”

  Talon was a year, it felt like, whatever that length of time actually was here.

  “As she moves, she grows dim, then bright again. This is nearly as bright as she gets. If you look, you will see her during the day. When she is dim, it is not possible.”

  Maybe another planet. But it was awfully bright for even that. I wondered if this was a binary star system.

  “Long ago, people believed she was a female in the sky, chasing the sun, her tsulygoi. She would grow close, then get with child, and leave again.”

  “How many talons does it take?”

  “To make a complete circuit, forty talons. But she grows bright twice during that circuit. Some females live through an entire circuit. If you do, you are called a ‘daughter of Kumala.’”

  Only forty, I thought. But I had no idea how long a talon was. For all I knew, the circuit took hundreds of Earth years. Or only a few.

  I noticed another, distinctly red star about a third of the way across the sky. A planet, maybe something like Jupiter?

  “What about that one?”

  Ayarala moved a bit closer to me, just setting her head on my shoulder.

  “Tatanga. Kumala’s mother. She waits for her to return with a child, but she never does.”

  “Does it move like Kumala?”

  “No. She waits patiently there. The scientists say she moves very slowly, but only their instruments can detect it.”

  I had initially assumed from her gear that Taitala was a somewhat primitive world, but that was obviously wrong. They had lasers and advanced astronomy. So something else was going on here.

  We talked for a while longer. I told Ayarala a bit more about my life. She told me about her home village, and growing up. Her mother was a wife, her father a tsulygoi who lived in a city. She went there, offered herself as wife, and came home when Ayarala was born.

  “Is it always like that? You have a child, and leave?”

  “A tsulygoi does not care for his offspring. And they lose interest in mating with females who have a child, even if she stays. There is no reason to. It is not the same with you? You said your wife left you.”

  “Not because of the kids. I care for my . . . offspring. I would do anything for them.”

  She seemed confused, but said nothing.

  “Are you going to return to your village?” I asked after a moment.

  “After mating, but without a child? I cannot. I will remain in the forest.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  I sighed. Sounded like I was right about her circumstances.

  “I know the feeling.”

  I felt the weariness of this long day weighing on me. This wasn’t a date, but the past few hours with Ayarala had gone far better than any date I’d been on since my divorce. Maybe things were looking up, whatever the hell was going on here.

  “We should get some sleep.”

  Ayarala followed me into the tent. Then she noticed the scratch on my thigh from the busang. It had scabbed over, but there was a fair amount of blood on my pants.

  “Will, you are injured.”

  “Ah, it’s nothing, really.”

  “No, the claws of the busang can spread infection. Let me look at it.”

  I hesitated for a moment before slipping out of my pants. Ayarala drew a box out of her pack. It proved to be some kind of first aid kit. There were little paper packets of bandages and other items inside. She cleaned the scratch with water,
then wiped it down with a sour-smelling liquid from a little bottle. It stung, but the cut looked better when she was done. But feeling her rubbing her hands on my thigh caused my dick to awaken. By the time she was done, I was tenting out my microfiber boxers. She seemed to notice, but said nothing.

  “Thanks.”

  “Of course.”

  I pulled my shirt off, because frankly I smelled, and I wanted to clean up before going to sleep. I found some wet-wipes in my backpack and did what I could.

  When I looked back over at Ayarala, I realized with a start that she had quietly slipped out of her clothes. She now knelt naked on her sleeping pad as she packed her things back into her bag.

  Her pale body was smooth and completely hairless as far as I could tell. I expected to see some gold between her legs, but there was nothing. Her breasts were not that large, but they were firm with protuberant nipples. Physically, at least, she looked awfully human, and awfully sexy.

  But I sensed nothing notable from her. She was just getting ready to sleep. It was as if she no longer even viewed herself as an object of male interest, naked or not.

  Still, I couldn’t help myself from reacting.

  “Ayarala, I can’t believe there are no males who would be interested in you.”

  She looked at me curiously.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You’re beautiful. In my world, you would have plenty of men who wanted to be with you. I would sure be one of them.”

  Her eyes slowly lit up.

  “You would claim me? Even though I am nalasin?”

  “There are guys who care about that, sure, but most don’t. I don’t. Jacqueline . . . my ex-wife . . . she wasn’t a vir – she wasn’t unmated when we met. Neither was I.”

  I don’t know how her face could have gotten any paler, but it did. She looked me up and down slowly. I could feel a mix of hope and confusion flowing through her, all of it bathed in that sad loneliness that had clearly been there for a while.

  But she said nothing. Waiting for me. I cleared my throat.

  “We just met, Ayarala. And I’m not . . . dwenda. If that matters.”

  “Neither matters. If a female is claimed, she is claimed.”

  I took a deep breath. I mean, this wasn’t a marriage proposal. I just needed her help for a few days to get home. If there were some mutual benefits to that arrangement, well, fine.