Sold to the Neanderthal!

by Jackie Boxx

  Lana uttered a short prayer to the Gods who looked after girls, and shut her eyes, ready to die.

  Then something happened.

  A loud thunk sounded not far away from her, and the daggertooth screamed. There was the sound of a huge body hitting earth and when Lana opened her eyes she saw the huge cat lying on its side, moving feebly. A long spear of black wood jutted from its ribs.

  Lana recognized the spear and turned to see Hrok, breathing heavily, moving towards her. “I told you,” he said, shaking his head with his usual infuriating patience. “The forest is dangerous.”

  As Lana watched, the Sun Man strode up to the prone daggertooth and finished it off with an efficient thrust of the knife in his belt. Then he reclaimed his spear, wrenching it from the cat’s dead body. Turning back to her, he nodded to the right—roughly the direction he’d come from, Lana realized—and grunted, “Come.”

  Once again Lana was following the Sun man. Nor was she happy about it. Her exhaustion was matched by the adrenaline coursing through her veins; she was in a strange state of excitement and oddly frustrated fear.

  “You’re not going to skin the daggertooth?” she demanded. Such waste would never have been countenanced among her own people; she decided it was more proof that the Sun people were simple-minded barbarians, barely worth speaking to.

  Ahead of her, Hrok shrugged. “It was not a hunt,” he said. “I had to kill it to save you, not from any other need. To take its skin would be…dishonest.”

  Lana sneered at him, then spat at his heels. She was disgusted and angry. She wanted him to try and strike at her so she could strike him back, with enough force to knock him down like the coward he was.

  “Hey!” she said, stooping long enough to grab up a handful of dirt and fling it at his back. “Hey, look at me! A woman of the Black Tiger people is speaking to you!”

  Hrok had stopped, but not to confront her. They had come to a broad clearing, cushioned with many small soft plants. Hrok lay down among them. “Here,” he told Lana, as though this would explain everything.

  “What?” Lana demanded. She kicked at him with her bare foot. “Tell me! Where are your friends? Did they grow tired of laughing at me?” She was determined to force a reaction from the Sun man. And she was determined as well to follow through on her task.

  Before she could kick him again, Hrok took hold of her ankle and pulled sharply, so that Lana toppled over onto him. She cried out, beating at the Sun Man with a rage, but Hrok took her wrists as easily as he had her foot, and held her captive, calmly watching her rage at him.

  He smelled horrible, all rancid sweat and rotting skins. He was hideously ugly with his huge nose and broad, grinning face. He was a monster, an animal, fit only to be put to death. The daggertooth itself was not so wretched a creature.

  Then, without knowing what she was doing, Lana crushed her mouth against his and kissed him hard, as she had never before kissed a man. Suddenly her contempt was gone, changed into something else as crushed grapes in a jar are transformed in time into a bitter but intoxicating liquor. Now Hrok seemed delicious to her, a ripe fruit to be feasted on until her mouth ran with his juice.

  She could not get enough of him. It pleased her that he was lying beneath her, and she adjusted herself so that she sat astraddle his powerful groin. She rubbed her lithe body against the roughness of his, wanting to merge with him as the Earth Mother did with the Sky Father in the oldest of her tribe’s legends. Hrok moved more slowly than she, but it was clear he wanted her as badly as she him. Lana could feel him hard against her, his hips churning slowly as though his body, independent of his mind, were demanding entry into her. Hrok reached between their bodies and carefully guided his stiffness into the wetness of her sex.

  Lana gasped at a pain that gradually gave way to a burning, piercing pleasure, and cried out as Hrok clapped a hand onto either of her firm buttocks, holding her steady on top of him. Lana wailed in the pleasure of being impaled on him, her middle rolling and jerking in time with his. He was in her; the idea was itself intoxicating to her. She had taken him into her body and held him there; it gave her a strange feeling of power, a glorious strength that she had never known while running or hunting.

  They loved for long minutes, until the sun finally died, bathing the wood in shadow. She reached her climax shortly after he reached his.

  “You are…strong,” Hrok panted, then broke into a laugh. A loud, strong laugh, a man’s laugh. Lana laughed with him. Sometimes, in her tent at night, when she had finished pleasuring herself, she felt a strange hollowness. Not so now; now she wanted to run and laugh and cry out. And she wanted to do it with Hrok at her side. It was a strange thought for one of the Black Tiger tribe

  “Why do they call you the Sun people?” Lana asked him suddenly. She raised herself up on one elbow, smiling down at him. She could only dimly see his face, but it seemed more handsome to her than ever in the dim light. The question had been in the back of her mind for some time: why would such dark beings be named for something as shining and powerful as the sun?

  “I will show you tomorrow,” Hrok told her. “When we reach home.” With that, he shut his eyes, falling into a deep sleep. It startled Lana to see how easily he slept, as though there were no daggertooths or skinwings anywhere in the world. Was it foolishness? Or a confidence whose depth she could not conceive?

  Home. The word struck a strange note in Lana. Hrok did not say they were going to his home. He spoke to her like a man who has just claimed a mate from another tribe and was making ready to take her to his people. And that, Lana thought, was exactly what he was. He had bought her, she reminded herself, and his home would be hers—at least that would be what he was planning.

  But Merron was expecting her to kill Hrok and his men before she returned to the grasslands—to her born home. That brought the memory of her task came back to her in a sickening rush. Merron would tell her that she owed the Sun man nothing, that the feelings she felt for him while they lay together were nothing but a sickening aberration—as though she had felt love for a beast. But she couldn’t lie to herself so.

  Merron was wrong, she told herself firmly. And if that meant all the elders were wrong, if the whole of Black Tiger tribe were wrong, so be it. She settled herself beside her man and fell asleep next to him.

  ***

  The next morning they made love again, and feasted on sweet fruits Hrok picked for her. He led Lana back through the forest to where his two friends awaited them. The other two Sun men smiled lopsidedly at her, but said nothing. Lana found herself blushing, then the four laughed out loud.

  They made their way through the forest, more slowly this time. The trees began to thin out, the sun and sky breaking through the foliage. By the time the day was half over they had reached a cleared area, filled with structures unlike any Lana had ever seen; they were like low hills, the roofs thatched with bundles of dried grass and moss. Sun people worked around them, drying skins and fish, and sorting grains. They glanced incuriously at the newcomers before returning to work.

  “Come,” Hrok told Lana, leading her to one of the structures’ open doors. Inside there were skins and tools. It was like one of the communal tents Lana was used to, but much larger. In the center was a vast round stone, flat and a dull gold color. It had been laid under a hole in the roof that allowed the sun to shine down onto the flat surface. There were many charred places on the stone, where cooking fires had apparently been lit. Lana realized that the stone served the same purpose in the dwelling a hearth-fire served in the tents.

  “Sun stone,” Hrok told her, then pointed at himself. “Sun people,” he added. “The stones are the center of our homes. They warm us like the sun and give us light. Each day we make a special fire here, and make a small offering to the Gods.” He began moving about the stone, gathering sticks from a storage area and arranging them on its surface.

  Lana smiled and reached under her garment for the seed-pouch. “Make a fire then, Sun man,” sh
e told Hrok. “I have something to burn on your stone.”

  END