Chapter 16
- Callie -
The morning sun turns the ocean into finely hammered silver. The waves are small and cluck cheerfully against the hull of Crat'ax’s boat as we make our way out on the open ocean. Small drops of cool water sometimes hit my arms, adding to the fresh feeling.
Crat'ax sits behind me and paddles with slow, powerful strokes. His feet sometimes touch my calves, either accidentally or on purpose. I don’t pull back from those touches.
The air is fresh, and the breeze barely ruffles my hair.
I get a strange sense of freedom and openness out here.
It’s a very different morning from in the saucer, where we’d sometimes spend the whole day inside with the hatch closed if one of us heard a suspicious noise.
And there were many suspicious noises in the jungle.
“This is very different,” I mutter to myself. “This feels like I’m alive.”
“What was that?” Crat'ax says from behind me.
I half turn. “I said, I feel alive.”
“You do? Meaning you’ve been dead until now? Very strange. You’ve seemed so active. Only last night I swear I saw you eat and drink. And after that… are you sure you were dead?” He has a crooked smile on his lips.
“Funny man. Of course I was alive. But… oh, never mind. Why are you talking, anyway? Keep paddling, paddle-master.”
He chuckles. “You’re feeling the freedom of the ocean. Some of us love that part. The Deep is below us, and nothing bad can happen.”
“Except a krai attacking,” I counter, peering down into the depths. “Or is it too deep for him?”
“Krais will only attack in shallow water,” Crat'ax says. “They need to stand on something. They’re not good swimmers.”
“So we’re safe here?” I ask, just to check. “I mean, mostly?”
“Mostly safe,” Crat'ax confirms. “To the Deep, we look like a piece of driftwood. And speaking of that, is this a good place?”
I gaze back at the shore. It must be a mile away. “Oh. I didn’t think we were that far out.”
“The current helps,” Crat'ax says as he stows his oar and gets out the net we made. “Now, net-master, what do we do with this?”
I take one end of the net and examine it. “Let’s see. The mesh is mostly small, for catching small splix. But I know that some in the tribe prefer their splix big, so some of the holes should be big, too. Right?”
“It’s fine if we only catch small ones in the net,” he grumbles. “I can catch big ones on my own.”
I grin and decide to torture him more, because it’s so rare to see him defensive, and it’s so charming. I know he doesn’t like big splix, because nobody does. “Oh, but maybe we should catch only big ones. Look, I’ll make the holes bigger.”
“No, that’s not necessary,” he says with clenched teeth. “I only sometimes like big splix.”
“Mm,” I relent. “Some day I’d like to watch you eat one.”
“Perhaps one day you will. Should we attach the wood?”
We fasten pieces of light driftwood to two of the corners of the net, then small rocks to the other side. Then we toss the whole net over the side and watch as the whole thing quickly sinks beneath the waves.
“Oh. It’s sinking,” I observe sheepishly. “Maybe we should attach a rope to it. I mean, to the next one we make.”
Crat'ax dives in and is gone for an alarmingly long time before he comes back up, dragging the net. “Or to this one.”
“Oh, you got it! Well done!” I applaud in relief.
“I think we used too many rocks,” Crat'ax says as he climbs aboard. “Or too little driftwood to keep it up.”
“We must keep it up,” I state as I try to untangle the dripping net.
“Nothing is more important than keeping it up.” I glance at his loincloth, then at his face, checking if he gets my innuendo.
But he’s busy with the net, and anyway he never has any issue with keeping things up. Almost the contrary, in fact.
We spend a half hour untangling it, and then adding pieces of driftwood to keep one side of the net floating, letting the other side sink. We take off a couple of rocks, and then tie a string to one side.
When we throw it over the side again, the driftwood edge of the net floats while the other slowly sinks. It looks about right to me.
“The splix come swimming,” I predict. “Then they see the net and think, what a silly thing. But they don’t realize how fat they are, so they get stuck with their fins. Then we pull the net in, and they will say, not silly after all.”
Crat'ax scratches his chin. “It sounds very right. That is how splix talk.”
I frown. “Do they talk?”
He pulls the net in and folds it up. “Yes. Just like that. They’re very mocking, the splix. They always… tease us.” His jaw is clenched as if in anger.
I’m stunned for a moment, suddenly panicking that I’m helping this tribe catch sentient creatures with the ability to mock and tease their captors. On an alien planet, anything is possible.
Then I see the glint in Crat'ax’s eyes. “Oh, you terrible man. They don’t talk at all!”
He grins. “If they could, I’m sure they would say exactly what you said. Except for the big ones, which I suggest we don’t talk about anymore.”
“All right,” I agree. “No more talk about the big splix. And nobody else may know that you tricked me about the splix.”
“Hmm,” Crat'ax says and puts the net away. He comes to sit next to me, putting his hand on my thigh. “Maybe I want to tell them about that.”
I place my hand on his chest, still wet from the ocean.
“Then I tell everyone that you like to eat big splix. You will have to eat only them for the rest of your life, while I’m always enjoying the small, tender splix and showing you how good they are.
‘Mmm,’ I’ll say. ‘Such sweet splix! Very small and delicious!’”
“Well, I don’t want that.” His other hand snakes around my chest and cups one breast. “How do we solve this problem? If only we could do something to forget about it!”
I laugh and press myself closer until the heat of his body chases away the salt-chilled air. His thumb circles my nipple slowly, deliberately, drawing a soft gasp from me as I tilt my head back, offering my throat to the brush of his lips.
“Perhaps,” I murmur against his jaw, sliding my hand down the ridges of his abdomen until my fingers snake under his loincloth, “we could test how well this boat deals with soft movements.”
“And loud, joyful noises from a woman,” Crat'ax says. “We must know.”
“For safety,” I agree and loosen his loincloth. “Just make sure to keep it up.”
- - -
I sigh comfortably, hearing Crat'ax’s calm, strong heartbeat in my ear as I rest my head on his chest. The alien sun caresses my naked body, but we seem to never get a sunburn from that.
Only Riley was sometimes sensitive to the sun, so she preferred sitting in the shade and rarely ventured out to the beach.
A barb hits my conscience. Here I am, joking and flirting, and being expertly made love to by a huge bodybuilder-type alien, while Theodora is probably risking her life looking for me.
Or, as a best-case scenario, she’s holed up in the sterile saucer, staying out of view of the dinosaurs, and desperately trying to fix the alien technology in the saucer with no real hope of making it work.
“I will come and get you,” I whisper. “Just wait a couple of days more.” Because I think I’ve made up my mind that I’m going to get her here, to the village.
The tribe is better than I thought, and the resources they have are at least on par with Cora’s Borok tribe.
I like the ocean-based lives they lead, and the way they seem to make the most of it.
The absence of an interfering shaman is also something I appreciate, if Cora’s story about other tribes is true, which I’m sure it is.
I think Theodora will like it, too. If I can persuade her to come.
“I didn’t choose this,” I mutter. “I’ll go and get you as soon as it becomes possible. Crat'ax promised, and he’s not one to go back on a promise.”
It helps a little, but I know my guilt will linger and ache until I see Dorie again.
The sun fades and comes back as if a small cloud passed quickly across it. Or…
I open my eyes and turn my head. “Irox!”
In one bounce, Crat'ax pushes me off him, gets to his feet, and grabs his spear. “Stay down!”
The alien predator has nothing to do with the pterodactyl from Earth’s dinosaur past, of course. But it does look like one, with its bat-like wings, long, barbed tail, and elongated head that ends in a sharp, toothed beak the size of this boat.
I have seen one or two of these before, and the sighting always led to us girls sheltering in place inside the saucer for the whole day.
This one has turned around and comes back, starting to circle us.
My whole body jolts as it lets out a terrible shriek.
“It’s trying to scare us,” Crat'ax says calmly. “Just stay down. It will dive and attack. But it will meet my spear.”
Despite his confident words, I hear the tension in his voice.
He sees the danger here as well as I do.
There are no trees here, no trunks to hide behind.
One of those talons could rip chunks of wood off the boat and dump us in the water, where defending ourselves from air attack would be much harder.
And that beak… it could pick me up and snap me in half.
I curl up in terror. My new knife won’t do much good, despite its length.
The dactyl suddenly folds its wings to its body and comes diving, giant butcher-knife talons first.
It shrieks again, trying to paralyze us with the terrible sound.
Crat'ax tenses up as he readies his giant spear. But if he misses…
No, I can’t just lie here doing nothing. I grab the soaked net with one hand, sit up, and throw it into the air, right in the dactyl’s path.
It shrieks from anger as the net gets entangled in its talons.
It beats its wings furiously as it tries to get free, but it’s too late.
Crat'ax stabs upwards with his spear, hits the monster’s underside, and causes it to shriek again, this time obviously in pain.
The dactyl hits the surface close enough to splash us with water, then struggles out of the sea and manages to get airborne again.
But it’s lost all thought of attacking us, and it makes its laborious way towards the shore and the jungle, barely above sea level, dripping something dark.
Crat'ax dips his spear into the ocean to clean it, then turns towards me. “Are you all right, my love?” He gently helps me sit up and checks me all over.
“I think I’m fine,” I tell him. “But he got you.”
There’s a trail of two talons along his shoulder, where blood runs down his back. “Oh. I didn’t notice. But I think that ends our boat trip.”
I touch his back and arm. “Can you still move?”
He grabs the oar and starts to paddle. “Well enough to get home. It just stings.”
I reach into the sea and scoop water into my hand and onto his back. “This will sting worse.”
He chuckles as the seawater washes the blood off his skin. “It really did. Do it again.”
“I will clean it when we get home,” I promise, deciding that using that word about the village doesn’t feel all that unnatural.
“Very good,” Crat'ax says as he looks up and around, scanning for more dactyls as he speeds up the paddling. “It won’t be long.”
He’s not completely right. We’re clearly paddling against the current, and it takes us much longer to get back than to get out here in the first place. I offer to take turns paddling, but when Crat'ax lets me hold the oar, it’s so heavy that I realize I can’t really work with it.
Instead, I keep his morale up with tales of how heroic he is, how wonderful a warrior he is, and how I will reward him later.
We enter the bay and paddle towards the village in stilts. In the distance, I spot the mysterious platform. There are two men there now, sitting in a canoe and looking like they’re checking on whatever it is they’re keeping there. Again, I shudder.
Crat'ax turns his head and follows my gaze. “Ah. Hopefully that will soon be gone.”
“Gone?” I echo.
He nods, and his jaw tightens. “I will talk to the men. After the splix run.”
The canoe on the platform rocks gently as one of the men rises and adjusts something out of sight. I can’t see what they’re doing, only that whatever it is requires ropes and care.
“What is it?” I ask.
Crat'ax doesn’t answer at once. He keeps paddling, his eyes on the water ahead.
“Something dangerous,” he says finally, in a voice that tells me he’s not going to say.
The village comes closer. The stilts rise from the water like welcoming arms. But I don’t feel entirely sure what I’m being brought home to.