by Calista Skye
Those rustling noises in the bushes are back today, about the same time as yesterday. Well, animals have their routines, too. And it’s the things that don’t make any noise I have to worry about.
The day passes quickly, and today I’d like to get back to the treehouse before dark. I pack all my stuff and walk over to Xark’on’s hole. “Hey, digger man.”
“Hey, fucker girl.”
He grins happily up at me, and I can’t help but laugh. If he knew how that would sound in my language …
“I think your hole is deep enough now,” I say. And I mean it. That’s easily twenty feet deep, more than enough to give that dragon a serious drop. “Let’s go home. There’s another hole that needs your attention.”
He wipes the sweat off his brow. “I see. So many holes to deal with. Stand back.”
I walk a safe distance away so he can toss his shovel up from the hole. Then, he climbs up and kisses me, and we walk to the pond to clean up. Xark’on swims around the pond once, and we have a splashing war that he lets me win. Then, he tosses me into the air again, but not as high as yesterday, so I squeal more because I love it than because it scares me.
He makes me practice with the throwing stars for ten minutes until he can’t stand my whining anymore.
Then we’re back at the treehouse, we eat dinner, and then I give Xark’on the paintbrush.
“So, you dip the brush into your color like this,” I demonstrate. And you apply it onto the skin like so. You drag it lightly across.” I paint a little piece of dino skin that he uses as a rag. “See?”
“Interesting,” he says, clumsily gripping it in his fist as if it’s a sword. “I’ll have to practice.”
“Yeah,” I agree, butterflies dancing in my stomach. “And you can practice with this.”
I hand him the pot with the carefully prepared liquid from the leaves.
He looks at the black liquid. “Ah. I see.” But he clearly doesn’t.
“It doesn’t look like much now,” I explain. “But put a little on the painting. Say, where the sky goes.”
Xark’on takes the new brush and dips it into the pot and then gently brushes it across the middle of his picture of Bune, right above the mountain, itself.
Then, he freezes and just stares. “Holy Ancestors!” he finally exclaims. “That’s… that’s unbelievable!”
My eyes are burning a little at the edges. This was a total success. “I just think you need it.”
He dips the brush again and makes a bolder stroke, leaving a long arc of deep blue, the color of a new pair of jeans. “It’s magnificent!”
“You can make it lighter by mixing it with this.” I show him the white clay. “And then you have to add water to keep it runny. Or oil. I think oil would be better. But I haven’t found any yet. It has to be clear oil.”
He places the pot and the brush carefully on the floor.
Then, he embraces me so hard I have to struggle to breathe. A bearhug is like a pitiful, cold embrace compared to this. But that’s fine.
“I never had blue before,” he growls into my ear with a voice that’s less clear than usual. “And you made it for me.” I think there’s a little sniffle, too.
I’ve got some fluid on my face, myself. “Every artist needs blue. I remembered something I saw once about how they make blue on Earth. For coloring fabric. It’s called ‘indigo’. And I thought, maybe there’s a plant like that here on Xren, too. And there was.”
“You spent days on this.”
“Hey, I had to do something while you were digging your trap.”
He squeezes me once more, then puts me down, wipes his eyes, and stares at the picture with the two blue streaks across it. “I can’t believe it. I’ve never seen it before.”
“Some of the other tribes have blue fabrics. Now yours can, too. The bush this comes from is very common. I’ll show you how to make it.”
He grabs the brush again and attacks his dinosaur skin canvas with vigor, painting the sky over Bune.
I kiss his shoulder and quietly make my way around the tree trunk to the other side of the house, the side from where I think I’m looking straight at the cave. This time of the evening should be perfect. I imagine Heidi just coming home on her dactyl after spending the day looking for me, and then she will look around the horizon one last time before the sun sets, and then she sees a light in an unexpected place. I’m pretty sure Xark’on never lit a torch in this part of the house. After dark, he was always busy painting on the other side.
I take a torch from Xark’on’s supply, hammer it into the joint between two boards so it stands steadily on the sill, and light it. Then, I take a cured not-sheep skin and hold it in front of the torch so it can’t be seen from the outside. I lift the skin again, revealing the light.
To anyone looking from a distance, it will look like a light blinking. As far as I know, there’s nothing natural here on Xren that does that. If Heidi sees that tiny little point of light flashing steadily on and off, I’m sure she’ll strongly suspect it’s me. And then she might fly here tomorrow morning. If she sees it. And that’s a big ‘if’.
The not-sheep skin is light, but holding it on straight arms and lifting and lowering it once a second takes its toll on my arms. After ten minutes, they are tired. After twenty, they are exhausted, and I’m bored as fuck. After thirty minutes, I start muttering to myself, and after forty I’m angrily singing the worst swear words I know to the tune of Mamma Mia. It’s too dark now. Heidi must have landed. But what if she’s on the way here to investigate right now, and then the light disappears?
My rendition of Abba’s song gets steadily more aggressive and seething, and the lyrics get so filthy, I surprise myself. And then I realize that I don’t have to keep the light flashing—if she’s on the way, she can navigate just as well by a steady light as by a blinking one. The flashing is just to catch her attention.
I put the skin down and swear once more for good measure. My arms are burning, and I think this was a total waste of time and effort. But it was worth a try.
I let the torch burn and just look out into the darkness. The jungle at night sounds differently than in the daytime. But from up here, I like it. I’m above it all. With the best man in the universe.
And now I want to be close to him again. I extinguish the torch and saunter back to his painting studio.
He reaches out to me and pulls me close without even looking at me. “What do you think?”
He’s almost finished the blue sky.
I nod. “Very nice. The brush is faster, right?”
“Faster and better. I wonder if it would be possible to make more? Perhaps some smaller, some larger?”
I caress his hard abdomen. “It would. You can make a knife, too. With a straight edge. To kind of scrape the paint out and spread it.” I’ve watched a lot of Bob Ross, so I feel pretty knowledgeable about this.
“Hmm. There are so many possibilities.”
I squeeze his hard butt, and then I sit down on the floor with my back to the jungle. Xark’on gets me a fur to sit on, and I lean back against the railing and feel peace descend.
When I wake up, it must be hours later. My back is sore, and Xark’on has put another fur over me.
He’s still painting with his back to me. I squint in the light from the torch. Now he seems to have gone a little wild with the blue color.
“Should,” I say and clear my voice of sleepy gruff, “should Bune be blue like that?”
He gives me a strange look. “Bune isn’t blue.”
“But you’ve painted it blue.”
“No. Just the sky.”
I get to my feet without using my hands to support myself, because after the signaling last night, they’re so sore I don’t trust them.
I point to the area right beneath Bune on his painting. It’s as blue as the sky above it. “Then what’s this?”
“The sky.”
“Sky under Bune?”
“There was blue sky betwe
en Bune and the ground.”
I try to wipe the sleep from my eyes. I’m still groggy. “Why?”
He leans close to the painting and carefully touches up a line. “Bune was flying.”
26
- Caroline -
It takes me a good few heartbeats before I’ve grasped what he’s just said. “It was flying? You saw it flying?”
He takes a step back and calmly takes in his picture. “The top of the mountain separated from the rest and slowly floated into the air. It hovered there, and I could see blue sky between it and the ground. It was high up. Then it sank back down. And then a rumbling noise came rolling, like thunder.”
“Bune … hovered in the air?”
“I know it sounds crazy. I never told anyone. I suppose that’s why I felt a need to paint it. So I’d remember it. So I wouldn’t think it was a dream. It was real.”
“I believe you,” I say slowly. This is the kind of information that I really want to share with the girls. We know the mountain the cavemen call Bune is in fact a gigantic old spaceship that looks as if it’s crashed here. But if it still flies, then that gives us a lot more hope of going home to Earth someday. And now I see why I thought there was something wrong with the painting before now. Bune’s peak was depicted too high, too far up from the jungle around it.
Xark’on glances at me. “You do?”
“Yes, of course. Bune is not a mountain. It’s a very large machine for carrying people into space.”
He gives the sky another light stroke of blue. “Is it?”
“It is. When did this happen?”
“Two seasons ago.”
“About a season after Troga showed up?”
“About that time, yes. Indeed, Troga was the reason I was up here then. After a season of her terrorizing the village, I wanted to get an overview of what she was doing and how long her trench was. But I couldn’t see her trench. Then Bune rose into the air and hovered. A clear sign from the sacred mountain, from the Ancestors, that I should rid us of Troga. I started looking for a site for the trap the next day.”
I’m not sleepy anymore. This is the kind of thing that Delyah really should be told. “Can you tell me more? Did it rise steadily? Was there something under it? Like a flame? Heat? Did it wobble? Fast? Slowly?”
“It was as I told you, Caroline. It rose. It hovered. There was thunder in the air. My heart beat maybe thirty times. Then it sank and settled where it had been. I thought at the time that it was majestic. Divine. Obviously the Ancestors. So dignified and calm.”
“It rose high,” I state, looking at the picture.
“It did. A whole mountain. Hovering. It was the surest sign I’ve seen from the Ancestors yet. Up until then,” he adds and gives me a sideways glance that I can’t interpret.
“It happened after we were dumped there,” I think out loud. “And it had not happened before. Or not for a long time. There were dinosaurs there, and they would not have been there if the mountain had just been airborne. They would have been afraid. Except the dactyls. They wouldn’t care. So, it happened about three months after we were dumped. But before we got too settled in the cave. We would have seen it, otherwise. These days, someone is usually sitting right outside the cave entrance, cooking or sewing or something. But for those first few weeks, we were running around in a panic most of the time...”
Xark’on looks at me emptily, and I realize that I was speaking English. “It’s okay, warrior. Just thinking.”
He keeps painting. “That was the language from your planet?”
I hide a yawn behind my hand. I don’t think it’s even midnight yet. “One of them, yes. So, there was thunder when Bune hovered?”
“There was a deep rumble, like rocks rolling down a hill.”
I nod. That would fit. There was a lot of debris on top of Bune, probably from the crash. If it actually flew for a moment, some of those would roll off, no matter how steadily and majestically it rose.
But not all of it rose. According to the painting, the lower third stayed down. “Your painting—is that exactly the way it looked? I mean, not the entire mountain rose into the air.”
He shrugs. “This is the way I remember it.”
And a caveman like him, fiercely bright and with the extreme observational skills that are required to survive for years in the jungle, would not be mistaken in his memory. His mind would not be full of sci-fi movies or other things that he might unconsciously mix into the real memory and so distort it. This is what he paints because this is what he saw. Something inside that spaceship still works. Something that makes it fly.
I yawn again. This is important, but not urgent.
At the same moment, Xark’on puts his painting stuff down and embraces me again. “Thank you for the brush and the blue.”
“You’re very welcome. It’s the least I can do after you’ve taken such good care of me.”
“But it’s not the least I can do.”
He lifts me in his immensely strong arms and carries me to the hammock, placing me on my back.
I pull my dress up to reveal my dripping pussy. Just being close to him turns me on so hard, it’s almost like it’s hard-wired. But I don’t mind. I like being ready for him at any time. And I guess this is the time.
The caveman alien licks me and fucks me again, as skillfully and as deeply and as well as ever. But this time, there’s more in it. This time, there’s a tenderness that’s new.
Yeah, this isn’t just sex. This is making love. And it’s my first time to do that.
As I scream out my climax, I realize that Bune is not important. I don’t want to go to Earth. My home is here. Here with Xark’on. The man I love.
- - -
Over the next few days, Xark’on keeps busy forging the iron spikes that will stand up at the bottom of the trap and kill Troga. He uses the iron in his ax for it.
He's a lot less intense about it than about the digging. He takes frequent breaks from his work and comes out of the forge to kiss me and to chat and to just enjoy himself. It's like finishing the trap isn't as urgent to him now as it used to be.
I keep busy weaving the mat that will camouflage the trap. It starts as a wide mesh of long saplings, and then I fill in the mesh with thinner and thinner branches and twigs. The mat must be strong enough to hold up dirt and rocks, but weak enough to collapse when Troga steps on it. It can’t sag in the middle, either, so it has to be pretty stiff.
Every day, we go to the pond to clean off after the workday. Every day, I practice with the throwing stars. Every day, I signal with the torch, hoping Heidi can see it. Every night, we fuck like rabbits up in the treehouse, Xark’on taking me with such intensity as if each time is the last.
And every morning, Xark’on is yawning because he’s been painting until far into the night. I’ve made another, fuller pot of blue for him as well as a new brush, a little wider. And he’s using a little painting knife to extend his techniques.
Xark’on digs twenty long, cruel, and extremely pointy iron spikes into the sand at the bottom of the trap, making sure they’re anchored deep down to remain vertical even when the dragon falls on them. We place the mat on top of it and cover it with grass and soil and rocks, making it look like undisturbed ground.
These are the best days I’ve had in my life. I don’t have to think deeply to know that. It’s just true. Here. On a prehistoric, Jurassic planet at least seven light-years from home. That’s where I found my happiness. With a freaking caveman alien.
27
- Xark’on -
Tomorrow, the trap will be finished. And then?
Caroline stretches in the hammock, about to fall asleep. I hold her tight.
Holy Ancestors, she made a blue color for me! Many days later, I still can’t quite believe it. But there it is. The picture of Bune can now be completed. And future paintings as well.
If there are any.
I stir, and Caroline whimpers in half-sleep.
“I’ll go to the
village,” I whisper. “It will be only a short time. I’ll be back before dawn.”
She opens her eyes. “You’re leaving?”
“I’ll be back,” I repeat. “I need something from there. And I don’t want everyone to see me. I don’t have the patience for their questions. When I’m gone, pull up the rope so nobody can get up here. Then lower it when you can hear me call to you. Before dawn. I’ll call ‘okay’. The alien word you use for everything. Nobody else will know it.”
“Okay. I mean, very well. But can’t I come?”
“You’re safer here. And if word spreads around the village that you’re there, it would take much longer to get back home. Everyone would want to see you, even in the middle of the night.”
Caroline yawns. “Fine. Hurry back, please.”
She gets up and pads after me to the ropes.
“Just pull it up about three lengths of a man,” I instruct, pointing at the pulley. “No need to pull it all the way up. You can go back to sleep. I won’t be back until dawn. You’ll be safer here than anywhere else.”
She nods sleepily.
I kiss her then go down the rope to the ground and watch as it’s pulled up. Good. Nothing can get to her. Except irox. And they fear this place too much to try.
I walk through the jungle. It’s not a long walk to the village, but it takes time because of the difficult terrain and because Troga’s trench cuts off the most natural path to take.
The only good thing about her is that she appears to scare off most of the Bigs, so this night journey is less dangerous.
When I get to the village, I call, “Xark’on demands entrance,” and the guards open the gate.
I nod to them and hurry towards my tent. It’s been many days since the last time I was here, and there’s not really anything there I need.