by Edward Lang
“But not all of them?”
“No, not all.”
“What did the ones who didn’t get taken – what did they do?”
She frowned at me like I was crazy. “Run.”
Okay, I deserved that one.
“Did you try to go back to your old tribe?”
She looked sad again. “We try, but skiris between us and old tribe.”
“You couldn’t go around the skiris?”
She shook her head. “No. Far away, only one way through mountains.”
Okay, that made some sense, too. Maybe there was a pass they couldn’t get through because of the skiris.
“The ones who didn’t get taken – the women who aren’t slaves – how did you get separated from them?”
She frowned. “Separated?”
“You alone, not with your small tribe. Why did you leave?”
“Ah… I went to find food. Big storm… separated. When I went back, they were not there.”
“So they’re still out there?”
She nodded and looked afraid.
“You’re worried about them?”
“Worried?”
“You are afraid for them? That something bad might happen?”
She hesitated… then nodded slowly. Something seemed to be bothering her.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
She chewed on the inside of her lip meditatively. “We not know why skiris attack. We lived with them for very long time with no fighting… many, many, many years… not friends, but no killing… and then they attack. Very strange.”
My mind was tumbling over and over with questions – but one came to the forefront.
“What was his name? Your man?” I asked.
“Tarum.”
“I’m sorry.”
She looked at me, confused.
I put my hand on my chest. “I’m sad.”
She gave me a melancholy smile, then kissed me. “Thank you. I am sorry Katie. But now I have you, and you have me… and I am happy.”
I smiled back at her, then kissed her…
…which led to a deeper kiss…
Which led to more baby-making.
As she slept in my arms that night, though, I couldn’t go to sleep. My mind was running wild.
Lelia had a tribe out there.
Should we leave the safety of our cave and go find them?
If we did, there would be a whole to-do list of things we would have to worry about: temporary shelter every night, attacks from wolves, exposure to storms…
And if we did leave the cave and venture out into the wilderness, what about these skiris she had mentioned? What would we do about them?
But after some time spent dwelling on those details, more disturbing ones came to the fore.
I kept returning to what Lelia had said about Katie.
She died with you?
She is rakala, too?
You came here to find her?
The questions would have seemed insane before this conversation. But knowing that Lelia’s people actually had a word for what had happened to me, well – that suddenly opened up possibilities that I wasn’t sure I could deal with.
What if Katie had come here after her death?
What would I do if I ever crossed paths with her on this world?
I had fallen in love with another woman now… could I even go back to Katie?
And if I could… would I?
The marriage vow was, Till death do us part.
Death had definitely parted us. At least once, maybe twice.
…or maybe not.
What if death had brought us to the same place?
What would I do if given a second chance?
The possibility seemed insane to me – or rather, it made me feel insane to keep thinking about it – and so I pushed it out of my mind.
But it took me a long while to fall asleep, and my dreams were uneasy.
15
We continued the next couple of weeks in domestic bliss. Lots of sex, which became even more passionate and emotional for me as time went on. Turns out that I really was falling in love with her.
I finished Lelia’s bow, then made a dozen arrows for her as well.
After I explained what I wanted, she wove together thin, pliable branches into basket-like quivers, which we carried the arrows around in.
We practiced continually until we became pretty damn good. In fact, I brought down a buck on our fifth attempt at hunting. Unfortunately I only wounded it, and we had to track its bloody trail for two hours before it finally bled out. I wasn’t happy about the suffering I’d put the creature through, and resolved to get better – but still: we managed to feed ourselves for another week based solely on weapons we’d created ourselves.
And Lelia continued to teach me things about this new world I had come to inhabit – mostly about new berries, herbs, and nuts. It seemed that only a handful of different trees could exist far up in the timberline where my cave was. The farther down the mountain we went, the greater the variety of plants there were to find.
The entire time, she learned English at a faster and faster clip. I was constantly amazed at how retentive her mind was when it came to vocabulary and grammar – and how quickly she could make intuitive leaps in a language she’d only started learning a couple of weeks before.
And with more time spent together, it was inevitable we would argue. We had a couple of spats about the proper way to do things – how to clean the buck I’d killed, for instance. But the friction would soon resolve, and we would go back to a far more pleasurable type of friction later that night.
But I started catching her staring off into the fire more often, a cloud of melancholy hanging over her. I would hold her or try to make her laugh, and she would shake off the sadness with a smile and forced cheerfulness… but I knew it never went away. Not entirely.
I knew what she was thinking about, because she wore the same look as everyone else who has lost someone. Whether she was thinking specifically of her mate or her female tribeswomen, I didn’t know… but I was well acquainted with what she was feeling: grief. It had been my constant companion ever since the day Katie died. It had gone underground when I came here to this new world, and had lessened dramatically once I met Lelia – but the sadness still came and went. More than once, she caught me staring off into the fire, too, and tried to distract me with a kiss.
It usually worked.
But she had replaced what I had lost.
I might have been able to replace the man she had once known – but I couldn’t replace her tribeswomen.
And so my brain toiled day and night with exactly how we might go about reuniting them.
Finally, about two weeks after she’d told me, I broached the topic over dinner. We were eating a third deer we’d killed – courtesy of Lelia this time.
“I have a question,” I said.
“Yes,” she said immediately, and grinned, scrunching up her nose adorably.
We had a little in-joke about the phrase ‘I have a question’ leading to sex – mostly because I had asked it a lot when we were first beginning to explore each other’s bodies.
I have a question – does that feel good?
Yes!
I have a question – do you like this?
Yes!
So now, when I asked an open-ended question, she playfully acted like I was going to ask about sex.
I liked that game, because it often DID lead to sex.
But not this time.
I smiled at her. “Good, but I have a different question. How would you feel if we left here and went looking for the women in your tribe? The ones you got separated from?”
She stared at me for a moment in confused silence.
And then she burst into tears.
“Hey – hey, what’s wrong?” I asked, taking her face in my hands and staring into her eyes.
“I don’t know,” she sobbed, but she smiled.
“Are you sad?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Happy.”
“Happy that we’re going to go find them?”
“Yes… and no.”
“So you’re happy about something else?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
I was thinking, Oh, she secretly hates it here. She hates this cave, she would rather be out in the wild –
But she smiled through her tears and say, “You love me.”
I stared at her. “What?! Of course I love you – why would you think I didn’t?”
“I do think you love me, but… you will go find people you do not know… you will leave home… for me. You love me.”
Now I understood.
I smiled back, tears misting my own eyes. “I would do anything for you, babe. Anything.”
She kissed me hard, her tears salty on her lips.
But contrary to normal practice, we didn’t proceed directly to the baby-making.
We began talking about what finding her tribe would entail.
How would we eat?
“Berries and food we gather,” Lelia said, completely unconcerned.
Where would we spend each night?
“In caves or in trees.”
I was reasonably sure I could figure out the shelter situation on the fly, but there was one giant issue confronting us.
“How many days between when you lost your tribe and you found me?” I asked.
She frowned, not understanding.
I picked up a rock and put it on the cave floor. “This day is when you left your tribe.”
Then I picked up another rock and placed it about two feet away. “This day is when you found me.”
Then I tapped several spots between the two rocks.
“How many days from this – ” I pointed at the first rock, then at the second. “ – to this?”
She thought for a second. “Five days.” She looked unsure. “…no, six. Six days.”
No wonder she’d been so ravenous when she’d seen the venison roasting over my fire.
As for finding her tribe, a six-day journey didn’t sound so bad on the face of it.
But we had been together roughly three weeks since she’d come into my life. That was almost four weeks from when she had gotten separated.
“Does your tribe move around a lot?” I asked.
Lelia frowned. “Move around?”
“Do they stay in one place, or do they go from one place to a new place?”
She shrugged. “If place is good, they stay. But we left home when skiris attacked.”
Leave aside the absolutely mind-boggling question of How the fuck are we going to find them out there amongst thousands of square miles of wilderness?
Instead, focus on the second worst question of How far could they have traveled away from us by now?
Worst case scenario: if her tribe had been continually on the move, they could potentially be more than 30 days’ walking distance away.
During the six days after Lelia got lost, if the tribe had marched east while Lelia went west, that was 12 days’ difference… and then another three weeks of marching east made over 30. (Seeing as Lelia stayed in one place, but they might have kept moving.)
Even worse than that, though, was they might keep moving east. If they kept going just a little slower than the two of us could follow, it could take us months to find them. If they kept going at the same speed or even a bit faster, we would never catch them.
I didn’t think any of that was likely, though. Humans don’t move relentlessly unless they have a reason – like escaping enemies or searching out food. Other species were like that, too. Sure, birds and dolphins and chimps and all sorts of other animals might move around season to season, but they tended to stay in one place for as long as possible.
I doubted these elf women were that much different. Lelia herself had said that her people tended to stay in one place.
It’s just too much effort to constantly be on the move. You expend too much energy, and that’s not sustainable, especially if you haven’t foraged enough food or caught enough game to keep going. As soon as they were relatively sure they were safe from the skiris, Lelia’s tribe would have slowed down to rest.
So it wasn’t like they were going to keep moving every day… but they still could have already gone pretty far. And they might keep moving slowly, which would just put more distance between them and Lelia and me.
Now on to the absolute worst problem: how to find them in the first place.
I mean, they could have gone in virtually any direction. North, south, east, west…
But there was no use worrying about that until we got a better view of the surrounding area. Lelia and I would have to go find a bird’s-eye view of the terrain and figure out which way her tribe would have been most likely to head.
Unfortunately, my cave just wasn’t high enough to see much more than the treetops closest to me, plus any mountain ranges dozens of miles away in the distance. Anything between the two was… well, I couldn’t see it from the cave.
There were far more dangerous things to consider, too.
“What about the skiris?” I asked.
Lelia shook her head. “They have home. They do not leave home much.”
I remembered what she said about how it was odd that the skiris had attacked them after so many years of leaving them alone.
We not know why skiris attack. We lived with them for very long time with no fighting… many, many, many years… not friends, but no killing… and then they attack. Very strange.
“Are you sure the skiris won’t leave home and start hunting us?”
“…no,” she admitted. “Not sure…”
“And what about the wolves?” I asked.
Lelia thought for a second, then conceded: “Wolves are problem.”
Great.
We talked a bit more, then proceeded to the baby-making.
I was happy to temporarily forget all the obstacles set up against us, but I knew what we had to do tomorrow:
Go do some reconnaissance.
16
The next morning, I set out to finally get a better view of the land around me.
It might help to paint a mental picture of the terrain first, though.
As I’ve said, I initially woke up in this weird-ass place on top of a small mountain, with a peak about 500 feet taller than the spot I woke up.
On either side of that mountain peak were two ridges, almost like cliffs. So I basically woke up at the bottom of a gorge.
The sun set somewhere behind the 500-ft mountain, so I was going to call that the west (even though I was on an entirely new planet and I had no idea if the sun actually set in the west here). Which meant that my cave was in the southern cliff face.
The southern cliff face was about 150 feet tall, which meant that if I could climb up to the top, I could get far enough above the treetops to see what was out there. No need to scale a 500-foot mountain just for the view. If the cliff didn’t work well enough, I could tackle the mountain later.
I explained to Lelia as best I could that I was going to climb up the cliff face – with the starting point being the cave – so I could get a better look around.
“I will go with you,” she said happily.
“Uh, no.”
She frowned. “Why not?”
“Because you don’t climb.”
“I climb!” she said indignantly.
“You don’t climb mountains.”
“I climb mountains!” she shouted even more indignantly.
“Look, I have safety equipment,” I said, pointing to my harness and all the ropes. “You don’t.”
“Then I will use yours, too!”
“We can’t use them at the same time.”
She was looking more and more pissed off. “You do not know where the people were! I know. You need me with you to show you!”
Shit, she was kind of right.
I had no ide
a where she’d come from, and no idea of the lay of the land. She might be able to identify landmarks that her tribe had passed by.
If I was Lewis or Clark, I definitely needed a Sacajawea.
“…fine,” I grumbled.
She was ecstatic when I gave in.
The problem was, now I needed to figure out how to safely get her up the cliffside.
In the end, I decided the best thing was to give her the safety harness. I was no Alex Honnold – basically the best free climber in the world; dude never used ropes or safety equipment, and was basically a man without fear – but I could make it up the side of a 150-foot cliff with my crampons and ice axes alone.
It helped that it wasn’t a sheer cliff. It more of an 85-degree slant than straight up, and there were plenty of cracks and footholds.
But in order to get Lelia up there, we were going to do a technique called belaying from above.
Without getting too technical about it, I was going to attach one end of a rope to Lelia’s harness. (Formerly my harness, which I was loaning to her.)
Then I was going to climb the cliff first. I would go 30 feet above her while she stayed put behind me. I would carry the other end of her rope with me.
Then, using pitons, short sections of rope, and carabiners, I would attach myself securely to the cliff face so I couldn’t fall. That secure attachment was called an anchor.
Then I would thread her rope through a locking device, which would be attached to the anchor.
Then I would use good old-fashioned manpower to safely help her scale the cliff.
Every time she ascended a foot, I would take up the slack and keep her line taut.
If she fell, no sweat – the device attached to the anchor would make sure that the rope locked, and she couldn’t fall further than a foot or so.
And if she couldn’t actually free climb, I could haul her up all on my own… though I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that. Hauling 90 pounds of hot blue elf chick up a cliff face is still hauling 90 pounds.
Once she got up to me, I would lock her off at the anchor, then we would repeat the process all over again until we got to the top.
It actually went off without a hitch. I explained the process to her several times until I was fairly sure she got it. The most important parts were she had to know when to STAY, when to CLIMB, and when to STOP.