JA-RAEL’S LIONESS
By
Angelique Anjou
© copyright by Angelique Anjou May 2005
Cover Art by Jenny Dixon, © copyright 2005
ISBN 1-58608-357-0
New Concepts Publishing
Lake Park, GA 31636
www.newconceptspublishing.com
This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.
Chapter One
Like everyone else, Elise was grateful to be alive, grateful the computer had found a habitable planet to set down on. She had probably reminded herself of that fact every single day over the past two years since their ship had negotiated a landing on the planet of Tor, now arbitrarily renamed New Earth by the interlopers, of which she was one.
It wasn’t Earth. It was close enough to sustain dispossessed Earthlings, but it still missed the mark by a long shot--at least, old Earth, in the days before their home world had entered its death throes and begun to try to annihilate the parasites poisoning it.
She remembered. The golden age had been before her time, when civilization had reached a technological peak that guaranteed comfort for perhaps half the world’s inhabitants. The economy and the ecology of the world had been reasonably stable then, according to what she’d learned in school, but even when the golden age had begun its decline and decay, the Earth hadn’t been half bad. There were a lot of days when one could see beautiful blue skies, plenty of days when it felt good just to go outside. There’d been enough food, enough water, luxuries that could still be bought. There’d been leisure time. There’d been entertainment and time to enjoy it.
Earth had become wildly unstable long before the meteor hit it, however. Like everyone else, she’d clung to life by the skin of her teeth, just trying to survive while nature wreaked havoc, destroying pretty much everything man had built.
Tor was stable, but it wasn’t like Earth in any period that she knew of, or had even read about. The gravity was roughly the same, the size, the components that made up the atmosphere, but it was closer to its sun than Earth had been … which meant that it was hot in the winter, and hotter in the summer.
Within the first week of landing on Tor, pretty much everyone had disposed of most of their clothing. They had brought all of the technology they could cram into their ship, and all the knowledge, and all the supplies, but it still took human labor to build, to hunt and grow food, and that meant exposure to the heat and humidity of Tor--New Earth.
Elise couldn’t help but think it ironic that they’d traveled light-years only to find a world that was just about as fucking miserable as the one they’d left.
She shook the thought off. “I’m grateful to be alive,” she muttered, wondering where the other evacuees had ended up.
They’d left Earth like viral spores, climbed aboard ship with no destination in mind, programmed their computers to find a place to live and scurried into their hyber units. A dozen different ships could have landed on Tor and they might never know it. They’d become ‘cave’ people, primitives, eking out an existence on a world not their own.
They were lucky the Torrines tolerated them, especially since, like children fearful of the dark, they’d established their colony within spitting distance of one of the larger Torrine cities. Because, despite the fact that the Torrines didn’t make any bones about the fact that they weren’t thrilled to have them, it gave the Earthlings comfort to be near civilization, even if it wasn’t theirs.
Spying a fallen log and the ‘shrooms’ they’d discovered were not only edible, but pretty damned good, Elise dismissed her internal complaining, feeling a surge of relief as she moved quickly to the log and knelt to pick them. It looked like enough to fill her basket. Once she’d gathered her quota, she could retreat to the habitat and cool off.
There were poison shrooms among them, but she knew the difference. Not that it mattered, really, except that grabbing the wrong thing would mean she hadn’t filled her quota and she’d have to go looking again. They never ate anything until they’d run it through the analyzer and checked it carefully, so she didn’t have to worry about making everyone sick--or worse.
Lord help them if the thing ever malfunctioned, or just wore out!
It was beginning to look like technology, for them, was going to become a thing of the past, though. Unlike some of the ships, theirs hadn’t boasted the most desirable balance of necessaries. They had three doctors (all specialists who knew virtually nothing beyond their field), but no nurses, a half a dozen engineers, but only one electronic repair technician, mechanics--but few things in need of mechanics, growers, but very little farming tools, equipment, or even plants or seeds. She was a teacher, one of a dozen, and there were only two children above the age of infancy, and one of them, the nineteen year old, couldn’t actually be classified as a child.
She should’ve known she was in the wrong line. She was always in the wrong damned line!
Or maybe not. Maybe it had been preordained that she end up just where she had just by being who and what she was, a world class procrastinator and terminal optimist.
Their ship could have been named the USS Misfit, the USS Leftovers. Or maybe the USS Dumbshits Who Thought it Would All Blow Over and They Wouldn’t Have to Leave.
Elise paused in her task, arching her aching back and rubbing it. It occurred to her after a moment that her foul mood wasn’t just the heat. She was dog tired and hungry to boot. No wonder she had opticalrectumitis!
She studied the shrooms speculatively, but as hungry as she was, she didn’t quite dare try them raw. It was one thing to have a good opinion of one’s knowledge and something else entirely to stake one’s life on it.
* * * *
In general, Ja-rael didn’t especially look forward to the annual trade fair on Tor. Unlike his own world, Meeri, the weather on Tor was miserable and he was generally so worn out from the heat and humidity by the second day of trading that all he really wanted to do was unload his beasts, take whatever he could, and head home. This time, however, he was on a mission.
This time he intended to come away with something he could use to barter for a mate.
He had to do something or the fire in his blood was going to eat a hole in his brain and leave him dangerously, savagely insane.
He’d known when he had decided to become a healer that he would never be a rich man. The way of the physician was only taught to those who were willing to dedicate themselves to helping any in need and that meant settling for what they could afford to pay. He did not regret it. He had never regretted his choice, but there were very few who could afford to pay much for his help, and many who could afford nothing at all. He had been forced by his own needs to supplement his livelihood by spending much of his time trapping the narlo for trade with the Torrine, who valued the beast far more than the Meeri.
He’d been appalled when he had finally woken to the fact that he was halfway through his prime breeding years and still had not taken a mate. Every year that passed reduced his chance of producing any female offspring at all and if he were not careful he would find himself beyond his prime altogether, and he might not even have a male child.
Of course, there were always exceptions. He knew of several males who had mated late and still managed to produce offspring--male, of course, no females--but they were fortunate even in that. The females were hard to convince to produce at all, and they completely lost interest in their mate once he passed his prime years when he would produce the strongest, healthiest of offspring.
He had never liked to trust to fate, however. The odds were against him that
he would be one of those rare individuals who managed to produce a late cub. Beyond that, he was sick to death of his own company, and even sicker of the company of the other single males, who did very little beyond complain about the cost of acquiring a mate and the lack of interest the females displayed in them even when they managed to get one.
These days females were so scarce and hard to come by that a male had to be rich even to catch a glimpse of one. The worst of it was that any male fortunate enough to produce more than two female offspring was usually so well set up already that it was hard to tempt them to part with a daughter. They knew damned well that no matter how much one suitor might offer, the next would offer more, and the one after that even more. So long as they didn’t hold out too long, until the female was beyond her reproductive years, they could pretty well name their price.
He was a healer, not a scientist, but it didn’t take a scientist to figure out that it was the Meeri mating practices that were almost entirely responsible for the fact that there were fewer females with every generation--fewer offspring at all, for that matter. Regardless of whether the male was a prime producer or not, he was lucky to land a mate able to produce two before she ceased producing at all, and in their latter years the females were even less interested in producing than the young females were.
It made things pretty miserable for the male. The only time a Meeri female was willing to mate at all was if there was a chance for breeding a cub. If she’d already produced two healthy cubs, she rarely wanted a third and if her mate was beyond prime breeding years, it didn’t matter whether she’d even had one or not, she just plain couldn’t be convinced.
It was the bane of every Meeri male’s existence that males desperately wanted intercourse with their mate purely for the enjoyment of the act itself, whether there was any chance of producing at all.
The misery of such a life should have been enough to convince the single males to remain single, but desperation was the key word in the equation. A taste of the pie was better than none of it, and as well guarded as the females were, there wasn’t a chance in hell of getting hold of a female without mating. The law stated that any male who did was to be castrated, but that was one law that hadn’t been tested in his memory. The unwritten law was death and the family of the stolen female didn’t even have to take care of that themselves. The outraged males who had been trying to barter for her generally settled the matter.
Naturally enough, stealing a mate was a rare occurrence on Meeri, but he had no trouble understanding what drove those who’d tried it.
Desperation.
It was hard to accept the fact that you were never going to have a mate at all because you couldn’t accumulate enough wealth to barter for one no matter how hard you worked.
That wasn’t going to be a problem for him, however. There was only one time of the year that the worlds of Meeri and Tor were close enough to allow for trading, but that had given him all the time he needed to round up his bartering goods. He was damned good at trapping. He had two dozen narlo in the hold of his ship. The Torrines were going to be falling over themselves to trade for such a highly prized delicacy, but he was armed to the teeth and he wasn’t letting a single one go for less than three zihnars--which was almost as prized on Meeri as the narlo was on Tor, and he was pretty damned sure that he could barter for a mate with three dozen zihnars! Hell, he could probably even get a choice mate for that many zihnars!
Chapter Two
Elise had been walking for some time along the path before she became aware enough of her surroundings to wonder where she was. She stopped, thinking at first that it was just the sort of disorientation generally associated with daydreaming. She’d expected to see something else and that was why nothing looked familiar. After carefully studying her entire surroundings, however, she realized that it wasn’t just momentary disorientation. She was in a part of the jungle she’d never been in before.
Above the tops of the trees to the east, she could see the spires of the Torrine city. She’d only visited the city a few times since they’d arrived. The Torrines were a people who enjoyed trade, but the colonists had discovered quickly enough that the Torrines had very little interest in anything they had to trade. Moreover, theirs was an extremely male dominated society. The females rarely went out in public at all, and never without being draped from head to toe in veils and the escort of an armed male guard.
Fortunately, they appeared to have absolutely no interest in the Earth females, but that didn’t stop them from being extremely disapproving of the customs practiced by the Earth people. Consequently, as much as the colonists would’ve liked to intermingle with the only other civilized species on the planet, except for trading whenever they could for whatever they happened to need, everyone pretty much kept to themselves.
She’d been so involved in her internal bitching she’d taken a wrong turn, heading east when she should’ve been heading west.
Sighing, Elise glanced down at her shrooms. They were already beginning to look limp from the heat. If she didn’t hurry, everyone was going to be complaining about her coming back with wilted food hardly fit to eat.
Getting her bearings, she turned back the way she’d just come and quickened her step, trying to make up for the time she’d lost wandering around the jungle.
* * * *
Ja-rael’s landing was more of a controlled crash that a smooth landing, but then he wasn’t much of a pilot and the crate he was flying wasn’t much of a ship. It hadn’t been when he’d traded for it. In fact, it hadn’t been operational when he’d traded for it. He’d had the devil of a time finding anyone who knew enough about the thing to get it going and an even harder time finding someone to teach him how to fly it after he’d gotten it fixed.
Mentally, he shrugged. As long as it got him back to Meeri this time, he didn’t care if it ever flew again. One way or another, this was his last trip. Either he would get enough to get himself a mate--or he wouldn’t. Every moment he dedicated to his own personal gain was time he deprived his patients of medical attention they might need desperately. He couldn’t allow himself to become so self-absorbed as to ignore the needs of those who trusted him with their health, and often their lives.
The narlo, he discovered, had made the trip well enough, but, despite the herbs he’d fed them to keep them calm, they were quaking with fear and thirsty besides since they’d become so panicked they’d turned over the trough of water he’d left for them.
Sighing, he grabbed a bucket. There was a stream near the landing field on the outskirts of Miazina. It was going to be a long haul for carrying water, but he was pretty sure his piloting skills weren’t sufficient to move the ship any closer to the source. Besides, the narlo needed time to calm down before he could herd them into Miazina.
Leaving the ship, he glanced up at the sky to get his bearings and then struck off through the jungle in a more or less straight shot toward the stream. It would’ve been easier to take the well worn path, but it would take a lot longer, too, since the path wandered in first one direction and then another. He was sweating from the heat and humidity by the time he reached the stream. Setting the bucket on the bank, Ja-rael dove in to cool off before he headed back.
He’d just emerged when he saw something that sent a shock wave through him, that so stunned him that he might well have drowned if not for the fact that he had his feet planted firmly on the bed of the stream.
Many moments passed before his stunned mind could even begin to assimilate what it was that he was looking at, and even then he was more inclined to think he was hallucinating, for, despite the legends, he’d never believed such a creature actually existed, or ever had for that matter.
It was a maned lioness.
Torn between the fear that his mind had snapped, absolute fascination, disbelief, and the anxiety that any movement would make the vision vanish, he remained frozen to the spot, trying to jog his mind into functioning.
He didn’t know whether t
o be more horrified or thrilled when she stopped and knelt beside the stream to drink and bathe.
She was the most beautiful creature he’d ever beheld in his entire life. It took his breath away, just looking at her. Her mane--streaked with gold and red--framed her lovely face, flowing from just above her brow, across the crown of her head, and then hanging loosely almost to her rounded hips, fascinating him as the wind and her movements lifted it, made it float and flutter around her like the finest of veils.
She wore nothing else beyond her mane and the short veil tied at one hip.
He realized he hadn’t even dared to breathe just about the time she pulled the veil off and his gaze fastened on the tiny triangle shaped pelt between her legs that matched the mane on her head almost perfectly in color.
He sucked in a breath of wonder then. His cock, too stunned to react before, and chilled by the water besides, stood up abruptly.
Almost as if she smelled his desire, she froze, lifting her head cautiously and glancing around.
Ja-rael held the breath he’d just sucked in, feeling every muscle in his body tense.
His mind glazed, however. Every rational thought fled.
She was alone.
There wasn’t a single male in sight.
And she was a legendary maned lioness--his for taking.
His mouth went dry, but neither doubt nor fear entered his mind. He had to have her. If he died in the attempt, so be it.
* * * *
The urge to stop at the stream for a drink of water and to cool off was just too tempting to pass up. Elise knelt, setting her basket on the ground beside her, and scooped up several handfuls of water to soothe her parched throat. When she’d drank her fill, she splashed the water up her arms and over her face and neck. A little shiver traveled through her as the cold water cascaded over her heated skin. It felt good, though, so good she wanted to just jump in and let the cool water wash the sticky heat from her all over.
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