by Edward Lang
She slapped me lightly on the arm in good-natured protest.
“Why, how did you come to world?” she teased me right back. “Mother not make Jack baby?”
“No. Well, not in this world, anyway.”
Lelia frowned. She got the implication right away.
“There is another world?”
“Yes. In my world, there are no beautiful women with blue skin,” I said with a grin, kissing her arm. “And there is only one moon, not two.”
Lelia frowned harder. “How did you get to this world?”
“I don’t know, exactly… but I think I died.”
Her eyes bugged out, and she scrambled away from me across the cave floor.
I bolted upright. “Lelia?! What – ”
“Rakala,” she whispered, real fear in her voice.
“What? What’s a rakala?”
She pointed at me. “You. You died. Then you came here.”
If people had a word for something in their language, there was either a fair chance that it existed, or that they thought it did.
“You’ve seen other rakalas?” I asked, intensely interested.
If there were others like me – people who had died and come back – maybe I could finally get some answers about what had happened.
Lelia hesitated. “…no.”
“Do you know anyone who’s seen a rakala?”
“…no.”
Great.
So we were talking ghosts and vampires ‘n shit.
“But mother of my mother said someone saw one when she was little girl,” Lelia insisted.
I could just imagine a withered old blue woman telling five-year-old Lelia stories around a campfire.
“So your grandmother told you about them.”
“Grandmother?”
“Mother of your mother.”
“Oh… yes. Grandmother told me.”
“So they’re just stories,” I said gently.
Lelia frowned. “‘Just’ stories?”
“Yeah – they’re not real.”
She frowned furiously and pointed at me. “YOU are real!”
Okay – she had me there.
I thought for a second. Just because I didn’t believe in ghosts didn’t mean that I was automatically 100% right. I knew a cameraman on my film crew who had worked on a previous show where they investigated supposedly haunted sights. He swore he’d heard voices and felt creepy presences in some of those places, and he was otherwise an entirely rational, logical guy.
And the entire vampire myth was thought to have started from people in the Dark Ages who had porphyria, a disease that makes sunlight intolerable. Not to mention that as corpses decompose, they release gas, which can make them sound like they’re sighing or gurgling – which would be terrifying to a European gravedigger circa 1100 AD.
So maybe there was something to this rakala thing.
“Do all rakala have white skin?”
She thought for a second. “No.”
Actually, that was kind of stupid of me to limit it just to my own skin color.
“Brown or black skin, maybe?”
She thought for a second, then nodded. “Yes. Not blue. Not people.”
‘People’ was how Lelia referred to her own kind: blue skin and pointy ears. No matter how much I protested, she informed me – quite cheerfully, I might add – that I was a vaklik. I had no idea what the translation was, but I assumed ‘outsider’ or ‘foreigner.’
She liked to call me her ‘little vaklik.’ I got the idea it wasn’t necessarily a pejorative… or that maybe it was, but she liked using it to tease me.
“So what do rakala do?” I asked.
She stared at me. “They kill people.”
Translation: they kill my kind.
Oh shit.
“No – babe – I would never hurt you,” I said, shaking my head and holding out one hand to her. “You know that – you know I would never hurt you.”
She stared into my eyes, and I could tell from her expression that she wanted to believe me, though she was afraid to.
“Lelia, I love you,” I said – and then immediately stopped.
Holy shit, had I just said that?
It had come out of nowhere –
But it felt right.
It felt true.
She didn’t know what it meant, though.
But she could tell it was special just from the sound of my voice.
“…love?” she whispered.
“I care about you deeply,” I said.
She frowned. “Friend?”
Crap.
“No – more than a friend.”
“Good friend?” she asked.
Damn it –
How the hell do you explain what love is?
I tried again. “When a man and a woman want to be together forever.”
That was a bit limited, too – but I wasn’t going to get into gay marriage when it was just me and a blue elf.
“Friends forever?”
“Yes, but – friends who have sex.”
She frowned some more, then pointed at my crotch, then hers. “Sex friends?”
This was not going the direction I’d intended.
“More than that. I – ”
I hesitated to say it, but it was the truth.
“I would die for you,” I finished.
She frowned again. “You already died.”
Oh…
I guess that was true…
“You stay with Lelia forever?” she asked, and leaned forward.
“Yes,” I said, and meant it.
“You have baby with Lelia?”
Oh shit…
THIS conversation had escalated quickly.
I’d gone from knowing her for a week, to saying I would die for her, to talking about having children with her.
Of course, if I absolutely didn’t want that, I probably should have been practicing the withdrawal method.
I’d just assumed that since we were obviously different species, we couldn’t have offspring.
…or could we?
And what if we did?
Would I make sure that child came into the world and was safe?
God damn right I would.
I stared right into her eyes and smiled. “Yes.”
That got her.
Her eyes teared up, and she smiled back at me.
Then she moved back over to the fur cape I was sitting on and straddled me.
Looking down at me, she whispered, “I love you, too.”
I kissed her deeply…
…and then we set about making a baby.
Potentially, anyway.
14
But the conversation wasn’t over.
As we lay in post-coital bliss after our second time making love, I asked teasingly, “So you don’t mind that I’m a rakala?”
She looked at me askance, and for a second I was worried I might have brought back up a topic best left buried.
Finally, though, she shrugged. “You are rakala, so all rakala not bad.”
I laughed. I guess that was as good as I could ask for under the current circumstances.
She leaned up on one elbow and stroked my chest hair, one of her favorite things to do. “In your old world, did you love woman?”
My throat hitched.
Shit.
Lelia saw my reaction and got scared.
“You love other woman?” she asked, her face crumpling with sadness, and she began to withdraw.
I grabbed her and held her close to me. “I love you.”
She started squirming and pushing away from me. Now she was angry.
“You love other woman – ”
“She died, Lelia. She died.”
She stopped struggling. After a few seconds, tears sprang to her eyes.
She touched her own chest and whispered, “Sad, Jack.”
I smiled sadly at her. “Thank you.”
Then a look of shock and worry flitted ac
ross her face. “She died with you?”
“No – she died a year ago. Hundreds of days ago.”
Lelia looked unsettled. “She is rakala, too?”
That stopped me in my tracks.
I had never even considered the possibility that Katie might have been come here to this world.
“You came here to find her?” Lelia asked, and I could hear the fear in her voice.
“No, she’s not a rakala,” I said, not knowing if I were telling the truth or not.
Lelia immediately relaxed. “Not rakala?”
“Not rakala.”
She relaxed and cuddled up against my side, her head on my shoulder.
“Jack mine,” she said jealously.
I grinned and kissed her forehead. “Jack is all yours,” I agreed.
She looked up at me and smiled. We kissed and lay back down on the fur.
“What is her name?” Lelia asked.
“Katie,” I said, and choked up.
I hadn’t said her name aloud for… could it be months?
One of the reasons I’d avoided talking to friends was because of that very reason: it hurt too much to say her name.
“You have baby with Katie?” Lelia asked quietly.
I shook my head ‘no,’ and my eyes brimmed with tears.
Lelia saw my reaction, and leaned up and kissed my cheek repeatedly… soft, gentle kisses meant to soothe me.
I smiled at her sadly, then kissed her on the lips.
Satisfied that I was okay now, Lelia lay back down in my arms.
Then a thought came to me.
“Did you have a man you loved?” I asked.
I heard the hesitation in her voice.
“…yes.”
I looked down at her. “He was like you?”
She frowned in confusion.
“Blue?” I clarified.
“Oh. He was people, yes.”
“Not a vaklik.”
She grinned. “No, not a vaklik.”
“Not a rakala, either.”
She frowned again in alarm, like I was crazy to suggest such a thing. “NO, not a rakala.”
I chuckled, then grew serious. “What happened to him?”
She gazed off at the cave wall. “He died.”
“I’m sorry… how long ago?”
“Hundreds of days… many hundreds.”
“What happened?”
I was expecting her to say something about sickness, or an accident during a hunt.
Instead, there was a barely suppressed fury in her voice. “Skiris killed him.”
“Skeer-us? Who’s Skiris?”
She shook her head. “Not people. Vaklik. Bad vaklik.”
“Like me?”
“No, you good vaklik.”
“No, I mean – white skin?”
She thought for a second, then ran a hand over the cape beneath us. “White fur.”
Aha.
“An animal? Like a deer or a wolf?”
She shook her head impatiently, like, Don’t you GET it? “No, VAKLIK.”
Huh… so a vaklik couldn’t be an animal. Apparently it meant a humanoid of some sort.
“What does a skiris look like?”
She thought for a second, then stood up.
Though we were discussing a serious topic, damn it was nice to watch her breasts sway back and forth with her movement.
She flipped her long, white hair over her head so that it covered her face – then parted it just enough so I could see her mouth.
Then she bared her teeth, curled her fingers into fangs, and growled. “Rrrraaar!”
Okay… hadn’t seen anything like that so far…
“How big?” I asked.
She flipped her hair back over her head, then stood on her tiptoes and held her arm up as far as she could in the air.
So – taller than me.
Definitely hadn’t seen anything like that so far.
Thank god.
She got back down on the fur cape and nestled next to me.
“And… a skiris killed your man?” I asked.
“They killed all men.”
They?
ALL men?!
“How many skiris were there?” I asked, shocked. I was assuming skiris was both singular and plural, like ‘moose’ or ‘deer.’
Lelia paused to think. “Thirty. Maybe more.”
Jesus.
A whole pack of abominable snowmen…
Thank god I hadn’t run into any skiris.
“How many of your men did they kill?” I asked.
“All.”
“Yes, but how many men is that?”
She paused, then counted by mouthing words silently. I was guessing she was saying their names.
“…eleven.”
“Did the skiris kill the women?”
She shook her head ‘no.’
“How many women were left?”
“Same. Eleven.”
One man for each woman – that was a little odd. Not only was it a pretty small tribe, I would have expected the numbers to be a little off in one direction or the other. Either more men would have died in dangerous situations, like warfare or hunting, or more women would have perished in childbirth.
“So there were 22 people in your tribe?”
She frowned. “Tribe?”
“Group of people you live with.”
“Yes. Eleven women, eleven men.”
“No children?”
She shook her head sadly. “No.”
I frowned. “How do you have a tribe and not have any children?”
She looked at me like I was crazy. “We not have time.”
Okay, now it was getting crazier. She and I had had plenty of time to devote to the baby-making process after knowing each other for just a couple of weeks.
What were the guys in her tribe thinking? Were they all gay? Or were they just REALLY into hunting, or spear-making, or anything else but having sex?
Seeing how hot Lelia was, I didn’t really see how that was possible.
“No time to have sex?”
She looked at me in bewilderment. “Yes, we have sex!”
“No, not you and me – the women and men in your tribe.”
She made a face like I was an idiot. “YES, we have sex.”
“But no children?”
“No time,” she repeated impatiently.
Okay, either these elf women were, like, working corporate jobs in the forest that took up all their time, and so they were on the Pill (yes, that was sarcasm) –
Or what Lelia meant by ‘no time’ was that the men hadn’t had time to impregnate the women before they were killed.
“The men died before anyone could have babies,” I suggested.
“Yes,” she said, smiling in relief that I finally understood. “Skiris kill men before have babies.”
That didn’t make any sense either, though. What, wasn’t there a long, unbroken chain of generations living together, having babies on the regular?
Or did those 22 elves just appear out of nowhere?
…like me?
“Don’t your people have babies all the time?”
She frowned again. “Need men.”
Duh.
“Yes, but – if you have only 22 people in your tribe, weren’t some of them your parents and grandparents? Weren’t there old people who had been having babies for 10 or 20 or 30 years?”
“Ohhhhhh,” she said, realizing where our communication had broken down. “I grow up in big tribe. We leave big tribe to start small tribe. Old not come, children not come. Only young, like me.”
“Oh.”
Now it made more sense… sort of. Apparently once the tribe got too large, it would split up and send a certain number of members out to start over in another part of this world. Maybe once there were enough men and women of reproductive age, they split off into a smaller group to go and live separately.
That was the only reason I could think of why they
would do that. But I was dealing with a completely foreign culture on a world with two moons, so who the fuck knew how they did things here.
For a second, I wondered why they wouldn’t just establish a town or village. Then I remembered we were talking about hunter-gatherers, and probably nomads, who were roughly analogous to Stone-Age people on Earth.
I mean, Lelia’s species hadn’t invented bows and arrows yet. No way had they gotten to the point where they were building permanent structures. They were probably cave dwellers at best.
And this cold weather wasn’t exactly suited to an agrarian society. If you can’t grow crops, you can’t settle down in one area permanently.
Now I understood a little better.
But hadn’t they ever heard of ‘safety in numbers’?
Or was it that resources were so scarce, that only a certain number of them could live in any one area?
“How many in big tribe?” I asked.
She thought for a second. “Hundreds. Two hundred, three hundred.”
Okay, it made more sense now. The big tribe had either been lightening its load on resources, or sending out a small group to colonize a greater area.
And if you’re sending out pioneers to the New World, you’re not going to take along Grandpa and infants. You would send out the youngest, healthiest, and most likely to survive… and once they had established themselves, then they could settle down and start reproducing.
“So the skiris fought the men in your tribe and killed them all?”
She nodded.
“And the women ran away?”
“Yes. Most.”
“Most?”
“The skiris take some.”
I stared at her in horror. “…to eat?”
“Do not think so. No, to do work.”
“As slaves?!”
Lelia frowned. “What is slaves?”
“A slave is when a person thinks he owns another person and makes him work for him for no – ”
I was about to say ‘money,’ but we hadn’t exactly broached the topic yet, and I didn’t even know if money was something that even existed in this world.
Plus there was the even more complicated issue of historical slavery in the US versus other types of slavery – like the enslaving of those who lost wars in ancient times, or the more recent version of human trafficking for sex.
In the end I just said, “Uh, and treats him very bad, and never lets the slave go.”
Lelia frowned. “Very bad.”
“Very, very bad,” I agreed.
She looked incredibly unhappy. “Maybe slaves.”