Chapter 14

14

- Anter’az -

“He’s not worth it,” Alba says. “Let him run. He has no honor, and now everyone knows. He will return without his spear.”

“The men might understand what that means,” I say as I pick up my pack and take her hand. “But they might not.”

“Does it matter?” she asks as she comes with me. “When you return to your village, you will tell them all what happened.”

“It will be days,” I fret. “By then, Tarat'ex’s no doubt untruthful story will be known to all. It is very hard to change what men think they know about something.”

“Let them think what they want,” Alba says as I pull up the net that hides the cave opening. “You will tell them the truth.”

We get down into the cave, I replace the net, and then we crawl until we can stand up.

“How did he find us?” Alba asks the question that’s bothered me since the spear hit her.

“Tarat'ex is a good tracker,” I tell her as we make our way through the cave to the hollow on the other side. “We may have left a trail that he could follow.”

“You mean, I left a trail.”

I drop the pack of meat to the ground and stare out at the hollow. Suddenly the place feels less secure. “You didn’t live your whole life in the jungle. It takes the boys years to move in the woods without making a sound or leaving a trail that can be tracked. The smallest thing can give a tracker a clue to where you’ve passed. And coming here with you, I wasn’t as careful as I usually am. It could just as well have been me.” I turn around. “But we don’t care! The vral will guard our secret fortress from anyone that wants to hurt us.”

Alba smiles. “He could scare anyone.”

“He could indeed. So could you, by the way.”

She tilts her head. “I? What you mean?”

I grin. “What you said about not feeding trash to the vral. That was a new Alba.”

“Oh. Yes, that was… unusual for me.”

“Do more of that if you want,” I tell her. “And you can say more of what you called me right before that.”

Alba gives me a little smile. “You liked it? You’re not insulted by it? Or offended?”

“I’m thrilled by it,” I tell her, taking hold of her shoulder and turning her around so I can check her wound. “It makes me feel happy. Come, take this off and I will get my medsin .”

“Yes, my love .” Alba obediently pulls her dress off and lies down on her front on a leather sheet. I get my remedies out and start boiling a small pot of water while I examine the cut.

“That looks painful,” I tell her, impressed by how she’s handling the injury. “The spear got close to the spine.”

“It burns and stings,” Alba mumbles.

“It will burn a little worse for a moment.” I carefully wipe the blood off her and open the wound to see inside. “No muscles severed, and also no tendons. Later I will sacrifice a good piece of meat to the Ancestors for sparing you.”

“You not will use the venom on me, please,” she pleads. “Just pour frit over it if you have some.”

“I have frit,” I tell her. “Perhaps it is enough. But I would also like to use a weak venom that usually works.”

“Just a little,” Alba agrees.

Using warm water, I gently clean the wound as well as I can, then pour strong frit over it. Alba hisses with the sting, but when I apply a bit of diluted fersal venom, she doesn’t react because it doesn’t sting.

I find some herbs that sometimes have a good effect and crush them to a paste before I smear a good amount over the whole injury. Then I cover it all with one of the clean leather pieces I keep for this purpose. “You don’t like sap, but I will use some here.”

“Do what you must, dok, ” Alba says.

“Dok?” I inquire as I heat the special sap to make it soft. “Is that my name?”

“‘Doc’ is what we sometimes call healers on Earth,” she tells me. “Is a short word for ‘doctor’. On Earth, you’d be Doctor Anter’az.”

I put the sap in a circle around the wound, then press the leather piece into it and hold it there. “Stay still. Almost done. Doctor Anter’az. I see.”

“I been thinking,” Alba says, putting her hands together under her cheek and resting on them. “This hollow should have a name.”

“It should,” I agree, pressing the leather into the herbal paste and waiting for the sap to set and keep the leather in place. “How about ’Alba’s Hollow’?”

“But I didn’t discover it. Also it sounds dirty, almost. It make men think of women and their… you know. Hmm. ‘Anter’az’s Hollow’.”

“Sounds lonely,” I object.

“What about ‘Vral’s Cave’? To keep people away.”

“Ah! I think we have it. Vral’s Cave it is. Perfect. Nobody will want to seek it out.” I take my hand off the leather piece and check that it’s sticking to her skin.

She tries to see what I’m doing, but not even Alba is so alien that she can see her own behind. “Anter’az, why you not afraid of the vral?”

“Did I say I’m not afraid? The vral is one of the few Bigs that really scares me. It’s venom… well, it doesn’t work the way I told Tarat'ex. It sends you to sleep, while still keeping you alive and tied up in its web. When the vral gets hungry, it wakes you up. Then it plays with you for a while, torturing you and biting pieces off you before it kills you. Or so it’s said. It’s somewhat similar to the voron’s venom, only much worse.”

“Mmm. And the budrfleye? ”

“The what?”

“The thing we saw today. Big colors, you steal its venom.”

“That was a voron,” I tell her. “Little Tren’ax was stung by one, remember?”

She sighs as if comfortable. “I will never forget that. You know, I thought you had killed him. It look like you bited him.”

Now that her injury is treated, I notice Alba is practically naked again in my cave. My hunger for her reawakens. “I did bite him. I was sucking the venom out of the voron’s sting, but the holes closed up right away. I had to make new holes.”

“He was screaming.”

I reach out and run my hand down her back, enjoying the smoothness and the lack of coarse stripes. “The voron’s venom makes you scream wildly. Not from pain, though. It’s just the way the venom works. And then you go limp.”

“Mhm. Will I be all right, doc?”

I let my hand make a light circle on her wonderfully bare back, staying well away from the wound. “If there’s no festering baktria .”

“Bak. Ter. Ia,” Alba says clearly. “Or sometimes we call them ‘germs’ or ‘bugs’.”

“‘Bugs’?!” I ask, pretending to be shocked. “You had me try to say an endlessly long alien word like bakrak-kretteria-kia, full of alien traps and roots to trip over, when there’s another, much easier name for it?”

She hides a yawn with her hand. “Well, ‘bugs’ can mean other things, too. So ‘bacteria’ is more correct. Oh, I love what you’re doing there…”

“Is good?” I ask.

“Very good.”

I keep circling my fingers on her back. “So it works. I sometimes wonder if it’s possible to make pain less severe if the skin has other and more pleasant things to do, also. Such as this light touching.”

“It works,” she says as she repositions her head on the side, eyes closed. “It makes me want to sleep.”

“Then do so,” I suggest. “You’re safe here.”

“Thank you,” she says drowsily. “For everything.”

A soft rain starts falling outside in the hollow.

I keep circling Alba’s back with two fingertips while she sleeps. I say a silent prayer of thanks to the Ancestors who in their kindness let me find her and bring her to my cave.

But my thoughts keep returning to Tarat'ex. It’s no surprise that he fears and hates women. He will always say and do whatever he thinks will bring him into favor with the two chiefs. And it seems to work. He’s now the food master of our tribe, a position of responsibility that most other men could fill just as well or better. It’s concerning that it was him who tried to kill Alba. He wouldn’t do anything if he thought the chiefs wouldn’t approve. Taking a chance on something big like this is something he would never do. Certainly not if it involved this much effort.

The only way he would track Alba and me in the jungle and then try to kill her with his spear would be if the chiefs had asked him to. They may have told him that they will support him in becoming chief if he kills Alba first. I can’t think of anything else that would be worth it for him.

“What is going on in my tribe?” I mutter to myself. “Have they all lost their minds? Have I? ”

What if they’re right? What if this soft, sweet-smelling, round and remarkably resilient woman sleeping peacefully at the opening to my cave is an agent of Darkness? If so, she has succeeded remarkably well in sowing trouble in our tribe.

No, I don’t want to think about it. It ruins the happiness of having Alba here.

“Perhaps we can just stay,” I whisper. “Perhaps that’s the way I can keep you with me forever.”

But now the tribe knows where we are.

- - -

“ T his is unpleasant,” I seethe, trying to pull a glob of something sticky out of my hair.

We’re having a late and relaxed breakfast, enjoying the fact that we have nothing in particular to do today.

“Sap,” Alba says, chewing on a piece of fruit. “I told you. We need hats.”

“It was never a problem before.”

“It was a problem,” she counters. “You just not know about it.”

I struggle with the sap, but it’s stuck to my hair in a way that makes it impossible to get out. “I know about it now because of you .”

“Yes,” she chirps happily. “Now you know there is serious problem that we must solve.”

“Can we first solve the problem of getting this out of there?” I ask, using both hands but only able to remove a tiny fraction of sticky stuff.

“There are two ways,” Alba informs me. “One is to cut off the hair with the sap in it.”

“Do it,” I decide on the spot. “This is silly.”

“It will look ugly and men will say, that warrior has no style.”

“I don’t care,” I growl, annoyed because all my fingers have sap on them. “I never had style before.”

“Also, I will say, Anter’az has a bald spot.”

“What is the other way?” I ask quickly.

“I try some of the oils and juices and maybe it will help get the sap out. And then we make hats so that this not happen again.”

“All right,” I growl, giving up on the sap in my hair. “We'll make hats.”

She gets her various leaves and nuts, then goes on to put them in my hair, one after the other.

It's pleasant enough, sitting and looking out at my hollow while my head is being caressed. But it also means my hair is being pulled a lot more than I usually enjoy.

“Finished soon?” I finally inquire as an already sore part of my scalp gets one too many pulls.

“I been finished for a while,” Alba chirps. “No sap left, almost. Now just trying some new things. You like the color red, right?”

“I like red for sunsets and the blood of prey creatures,” I state cautiously. “What are you trying to tell me?”

“Tell you?” she asks with alarming innocence. “Oh, nothing. Except that red hair is very stylish. My friend Piper has it, and everyone in the tribes stare at her.”

“Surely that's because she's a woman,” I suggest, “and not because of her hair.”

“Yes, I think so too.”

The cave is quiet for a few heartbeats.

“So…” I prompt.

“What?”

“So do I have red hair now?”

“Just a spot. Right here .” She touches a point at the back of my head. “Like I said, very stylish. Okay, we're done. The redness will go away. I think. Let us make hats!”

I check with my hand. She got rid of the sap, but now my hair is sticky and lank with all kinds of other things that smell weird. “If it will help for this not to happen a lot, I think that’s a good idea.”

Alba gets some of the straws and leaves that we collected and sits down to sort them. “The hats should be big, but not too big. Only so that they keep sap and fluids to not drip on our hairs. But sometimes the sap goes through the hat. We must think of a way for that not to happen.”

“I seem to remember saying that we can put sap on the outside before we wear the hat,” I point out. “And you said that the sap would get sticky and run into the hair anyway. And that makes sense. But I’ve been thinking about it, and I wonder if I might know a way to make it work.”

“Oh!” Alba says, her face bright. “How?”

“You’ll see,” I tell her as I sit down to watch her make the hats.

Her fingers are slender and quick as she weaves the leaves together. “Now I’m excited.”

“Then you are easily excited.”

“Maybe I am,” she says. “But something that would excite me more is if you were to heat water for the bathtub.”

I immediately go hard. Alba and I always Mate after we bathe, last night twice. It was absolutely wonderful. “We both like the water.”

“We do,” she says, giving me a smile that makes the world shine and my manhood twitch.

I start boiling water, having already emptied the bathtub of the old water this morning. It’s a tedious task, but I want Alba to always have clean, new water to bathe in. Nothing else will do.

“Finish the hats,” I tell her. “While the water heats up, I will go out and get sap.”

“ Okay, ” she says in her bright, alien way.

I can’t resist, so I bend down beside her and bury my nose in her hair, drawing in the scent of her. “My love.”

“Mine too,” she says as she reaches up to stroke my cheek.

Walking through the cave, I grin like a maniac. How can one man be this happy?

I lift the net that conceals the entrance and slowly stick my head up from the hole. There’s no obvious danger, and the vral is in the center of its web as usual.

I climb out and replace the net.

Then I spot movement right underneath the vral’s great web. And I know that these, the happiest days of my life, are over.