by Nathan Long
***
There’s a way to ride a cen-whatever-they-are. I’ve seen pictures. This wasn’t it. My arms and face hung down one side of the smelly bastard’s flanks, my legs down the other, all getting whipped by the springy stalks of the blue grass while my nose and eyes filled with gritty, alien dust and my internal organs got a brutal shiatsu from bouncing up and down on the cen-tiger’s butt.
It was a long ride. The too-big sun was burning the snow caps of the far mountains candy-apple red when we finally cantered past a pair of armed Aarurrh look outs and down a trail into a wide ravine with a stream winding through it.
I was barely conscious. The endless pounding gallop had jumbled my brains to cream of wheat, so I only got impressions: trees like droopy palms hanging over the creek, a sea of leather tents spreading to the canyon walls, the smell of meat and shit, pony-sized cen-tiger kids and cen-tiger chicks with four boobs to go with their four arms trotting alongside the column staring at us, the feel of cool air as we left the dry dust of the plains. I couldn’t imagine how Sai felt. Maybe he didn’t feel anything. Maybe he was dead.
We stopped in the middle of the camp so One-Eye could report in with some cen-tigers standing outside a big tent. I should have been taking in details. This was the enemy’s camp. I should have been noting defenses and escape routes, figuring out the chain of command, but it was dark and I could barely turn my head, let alone focus my eyes. I got nothing. My old CO, Captain MacFerson, would have been disgusted with me.
When One-Eye was done gabbing he dragged us off to a pen filled with animals that looked like those jungle pig things with the floppy snouts, only orange and shaggy and with six legs. They backed into the far corner of the pen, making an annoying “Keee keee keee!” sound and rolling their eyes. One of One-Eye’s flunkies untied my bonds, which started an agonizing attack of pins and needles, and left us alone.
Finally a chance to check on Sai. His bandage was solid with dried blood and he was out cold, but he was still breathing. I couldn’t do much to help him. I could hardly help myself. In fact, blissful unconsciousness was about the only thing that held my interest just then, even though, with all my aches and pains, I didn’t think it would be possible to sleep.
***
The next thing I knew I was being rudely awakened. It was morning. One-Eye was dragging me and Sai out of the cage by our ankles. He turned us right-way-up, knocked the dust and pig shit—or whatever it was—off us with his big paws and shoved us ahead of him. “Go.”
I could barely walk, I was so stiff and sore, but Sai could barely crawl. I got an arm around him and limped him through the crowded camp, leaning in to whisper in his ear. “How you doing, Sai? Anything broken? I mean anything new?”
He didn’t look up. “It matters not.”
I didn’t like his attitude, but we couldn’t talk anymore. We’d reached a tent. The tents of the camp were pretty much all the same, tall, five sided teepees made of a patchwork of stitched together skins (some of them too purple and human-looking for my liking) with various bits of caveman decoration, bones, skulls, feathers, painted stick figure symbols. This tent was like all the rest, if maybe a little better taken care of.
One-Eye pushed us through the flap into the smoky dimness and I found myself face to face, or actually face to boobs with my first up-close she-cen-tiger.
CHAPTER FOUR
CAPTIVES!
Funny, even though she was a monster and all, I liked her right off. Maybe because her face reminded me of a fat old tabby named Queenie that my Aunt Cici had when I was a kid. Whatever it was, the big she-beast who was smirking at me like Mama Bear finding Goldilocks in her bed made me feel more relaxed than anything I’d come across so far on this nasty-ass planet.
Not that I had any time to bask in her warmth. One-Eye pushed in behind us, made a quick speech to Queenie, shoved Sai at her like he was a pound puppy, and fast as he could, steered me toward the back of the tent.
There, facing away from us, her four legs tucked up under her on a bed of straw and her gold and purple fur tinged red by the light of a skin lamp, was a younger, skinnier Aarurrh chick, braiding her long mane as if there were nobody in the tent but herself. One-Eye didn’t like this much and got pretty stiff. He made some sort of demand, which she pointedly ignored. He repeated it, roaring, and she at last consented to look around.
I guess she was the goods as far as Aarurrh went; a face like a naughty kitten under a peek-a-boo fringe of dreads, a slim upper torso, and four perky breasts. One-Eye quivered beside me. Kitten played snooty to the limit. She gave us a lazy, half-lidded once over, then looked past us to where Queenie was squeezing Sai’s muscles and checking his teeth and his head wound. I thought I saw an evil little look in Kitten’s eye, and then she squealed like a school girl at a Justin Beiber concert and sprang to her feet. She rushed across the tent, snatched Sai off the ground as easy as you’d pick up a sack of groceries, and crushed him to her.
One-Eye seemed to think this wasn’t part of the plan at all. He tried to get Sai away from her, pointing at me and then at Queenie. Kitten turned her hindquarters on him and started cooing to Sai and smoothing his hair and checking out his clothes like he was a new Barbie. One-Eye began complaining to Queenie. She just shrugged, as if to say, “Girls will be girls.”
One-Eye glared at Kitten, but she was done with him. Growling, he stalked to the tent flap and threw it open. Standing right outside with a hand up like he was about to come in was a young, handsome—at least by giant, tiger-headed monster standards—Aarurrh. I could tell he was heart-throb material: trim, strong, and half a head taller than One-Eye. He had a face like the MGM lion and a swoop of dreadlocks that hung down over his big, brown eyes and made him look shy and sweet. Hell, if I’d been an Aarurrh, I’d have let him take me to the spring dance.
His magic wasn’t working on One-Eye. With a roar like a Harley at full throttle, One-Eye decked Handsome with a pair of simultaneous lefts. Handsome staggered, yelping. I backed up, expecting the fur to start flying, but instead of fighting back, Handsome went down on all fours and bowed his head.
One-Eye growled and and cuffed him on the ear, then started dragging him off by the dreadlocks.
Kitten cried out and started forward, but Queenie held her back. One-Eye stopped and roared something over his shoulder that was definitely a threat, then headed off, Handsome in tow. The kid looked back and exchanged forlorn looks with Kitten as the tent flap swung shut, then Kitten exploded into tears and threw herself onto her straw bed, Sai flopping over her arm like a Raggedy Andy with half the sawdust missing.
Queenie hugged Kitten with a couple of arms and stroked her with the rest, but she didn’t spend too long on it. I got the feeling this happened a lot.
I was beginning to think that everybody had forgot about me and that it might be time for a quick sneak out the door, Sai or no Sai, when Queenie turned and beckoned to me with a paw and a grin. I hesitated. Was I here to be a slave or a pet or lunch? I wanted to pick “none of the above.” Queenie snagged me with a long arm and pulled me close. She started pinching my arms and both of my legs all at once. You know how I feel about being manhandled. I pushed one of her huge hands away with my little one. She laughed, impressed. She spoke the purple guys’ language worse than One-Eye. “Rmmm. Damn strong, hin? Good. Get much work from you...”
Great. Warm, friendly, but still a slave driver.
***
Slave driver wasn’t just a figure of speech, neither. Half an hour later I was out on the prairie digging in the dirt like I was on an Alabama chain gang.
Sai wasn’t with me. Queenie’d had another look at his head wound, smeared some green muck on it and put him to bed on a pile of straw out behind her tent. I guess they didn’t get slaves so often that they could afford to let one die on them.
No spa treatment for me. After a five-minute breakfast of some meat I prayed wasn’t breast of purple guy, and a bitter lump of some kind of grain mash, I was trudging
through the camp in a line of slaves and Aarurrh females. I checked out the other slaves. All purple guys like Sai. They didn’t check me out. They just stared straight ahead, glassy-eyed.
This time I was awake enough to case the camp, and came to the conclusion that Sai and me were gonna have our work cut out for us when it came time to escape. Almost every Aarurrh male I saw was a warrior. Even the kids were armed, and the population of the camp looked close to a thousand. It filled a wide section of the canyon all the way to both sheer walls. I liked those walls. I didn’t figure the Aarurrh for good climbers, even with all those arms. Their back ends were just too heavy. With my new leaping ability, I could probably scale those walls like they were so many ladders. But what about Sai? Maybe with a rope. Maybe not even then. Okay then, plan B, whatever that was.
The little creek cut the camp in half. We walked beside it, heading upstream. There were a couple narrow bridges scattered along it, even though the creek was slow and shallow enough that a kid could have waded through it. Maybe the Aarurrh didn’t like getting their fur wet. Maybe that was another way out.
The only easy way up to the prairie was the trail we’d come down when they brought us in. Beyond that the canyon walls narrowed down until they were no wider than the stream. They might have opened up further on, but the canyon took a left turn about a quarter mile up and I couldn’t see past it. I’d have to try to sneak out and go exploring later.
As we slogged up the trail Queenie introduced herself and Kitten. “I Hranan of Hirrarah tribe. That my daughter, Murrah. You say Hur-Hranan and Hur-Murrah when speak, hin?”
I nodded. “Hur-Hranan. Hur-Murrah. Got it. I’m Jane...”
She stopped me with a laugh and a cuff on the shoulder that was like being hit with a sofa. “That not your name. You got only two name: ‘good girl’ and ‘bad girl,’ hin?”
I ground my teeth. “Yeah, I hin alright.” I don’t deal with authority real well. If somebody tells me I gotta go one way, I want to go the other way, just on principle, but all my juvie time, prison time, and my stint in the rangers, and all the beatings, ass-kickings, and “disciplinary measures” that went along with ’em, have taught me that fighting back don’t get you nothing but more lumps and more supervision. If you keep your head down and your eyes open, sooner or later they’re going to forget about you and let down their guard. You just gotta be patient and not ruin everything by tearing some big bitch’s head off with your bare hands.
I rubbed my shoulder and followed along with the other slaves like a “good girl.”
***
The work was boring and backbreaking, but nothing I couldn’t handle. That first day we dug for tubers under the blue grass. They were fat black things, like a cross between a carrot and an eggplant, but they smelled like garlic and dirt. The Aarurrh chicks worked right along with us slaves, doing the same work, but not as much of it. We dug with sharp sticks—the Aarurrh chicks used their claws—wherever we found a little blue plant with circular leaves, prying the thing out of the ground, knocking the dirt off of it and tossing it in a sack. Thrilling.
There were forty or so Aarurrh women, and only about fifteen slaves. I got the idea that slaves were quite the status symbol. Most women didn’t have them. Queenie had her nose in the air like a Beverly Hills mom with a new Mercedes SUV.
As the day went on I tried to talk to my fellow slaves. They were all purple-skins, almost all male, all burned a leathery maroon, and as dull-eyed as cows, but more than half of them spoke languages my translator didn’t understand. I don’t know why I was surprised. Not everybody on Earth speaks English, do they?
When I finally found a guy who spoke Sai’s language he shoved me away. “Quiet! Speak not!”
“What? Why?”
“Foolish woman, we are not allowed to speak.”
“But you gotta help me. I gotta get out of here. Where are we? Where’s the nearest...”
Something clobbered me on the back of the head. I hit the ground eight feet away and looked up, my eyes going in and out of focus.
Queenie was scowling down at me. “Bad girl.”
Another Aarurrh mama started slapping around the guy I’d talked to. He squealed for mercy.
For the rest of the day all the other slaves gave me dirty looks.
***
The day wasn’t done when we got back home. Queenie showed me how to kebab some of the tubers we’d dug that day, and how to chop up meat with a cooking blade shaped like half a circle. It looked a bit like an Eskimo’s chopper. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that the meat had feathers on it. Giant bird I could stomach. I’ve had worse chow. Giant bird tasted like a combination of wild duck and alligator—yes I’ve had gator; I grew up in Florida—and once the tubers cooked up they tasted a little more like garlic and a little less like dirt.
After dinner Queenie sent me down to the river to rinse off the skewers and the chopper. There were no plates, they just chewed everything right off the kebabs. I thought she was crazy sending me off on my own like that, and armed with blades and pointy pieces of metal no less. What was she thinking? All I had to do was slip into the river, float downstream ’til I was below the camp, climb out of the canyon and...
And go where?
I sighed. I finished cleaning the skewers and chopper and walked back to Queenie’s tent.
My bed was the same pile of straw Queenie had laid Sai on. I flopped down beside him, more wiped out than I’d been since boot camp. All I wanted to do was close my eyes, but first I checked Sai’s wound. Queenie’s goop seemed to be working. The edges of the cut were starting to knit together and there was no redness or puss.
Sai opened his eyes. “We still live?” He almost sounded disappointed.
“You’re doin’ fine, Sai. You’ll be up and around in no time.”
He was less than thrilled. He closed his eyes again. I should have let him sleep, but I had a question. “Sai, what’s up with these furry fucks, anyway? Why do they hate your guys so much? What did you ever do to them?”
He sighed. “The myths of the Aarurrh tell them that they once ruled all of Waar, until the Tae stole it from them and forced them to live in the wastelands.”
“The Tae?”
“The Tae. My people.” He closed his eyes again. “The Aarurrh religion is pure superstition of course. We Tae have been here since the Seven created the world and placed us upon it to serve as their custodians.”
“Custodians? You gotta mop the floors and fix the plumbing?”
“Pardon?”
“Nothin’. Never mind. Just bein’ a jerk.”
Sai lay back, but I had something else on my mind. I dropped my voice to a whisper. “Listen, Sai, I know you ain’t feelin’ so good right now, but shouldn’t we be thinkin’ about bustin’ outta this joint and hightailin’ it after your fiancée? You got a wedding to stop.”
He shook his head without opening his eyes. “There is no escape from the Aarurrh. It is hopeless. We are dead.”
“No escape? What are you talkin’ about? We’re not even chained up. We get down to that creek, I can get us up to the plains in twenty minutes. As long as you know your way home from there...”
“Unfortunately, I do not.” He opened his eyes and looked directly at me for the first time since we were taken. “Mistress Jae-En, your enthusiasm is admirable, but useless. Even if I did know my way home we would not survive the journey. If by some miracle we managed to elude the Aarurrh, who are only the greatest trackers and hunters on Waar, we would not escape the savage packs of Shikes, capable of stripping us to our bones in the blink of an eye, nor the dreadful Vurlak, the jaw of which can crush stone, nor the wild Skelsha, which can—-”
“Okay okay okay. I get the picture. But does that mean you’re just going to give up? Are you gonna let that four-armed teenybopper play dollies with you ’til you grow old and die?”
Sai shuddered. “No. That I will not do. I am praying to the Seven for the courage to find a way out. An h
onorable man would rather die than submit to such indignities.”
I squeezed his shoulder. “That’s the spirit.”
I lay back, feeling better. Sure, Sai said it was impossible, but at least he wasn’t giving up. That was half the battle. If I had to drag him around like a sack of potatoes we’d get nowhere fast.
There were two moons overhead. Well, if nothing else was going to convince me this wasn’t all some big prank Steven Spielberg had decided to pull on me, that would. I don’t care how big your special effects budget is, nobody launches another moon just to make a fool out of some big, dumb biker chick. There was a fat blue moon peeking over the sawtooth skyline of the tents, and a little bright one that zipped across the sky so fast you could see it move. They gave everything around me two shadows. Kind of pretty, but all I could think was that all that light made making a break for it that much harder.
Beyond the moons were stars I’d never seen. Riding cross country on my bike and sleeping rough all those years, I’d gotten pretty good at picking out the constellations. They were all gone. I got hit with another wave of homesickness. Not even the stars were right. Where was I? Where was Earth? I started wondering if any of those little pinpricks out there was the Sun. My sun. Man, I sure went from happy to depressed awful fast, huh? Being stranded on another planet’ll do that to you.
***
From then on things slipped into a routine; not exactly comfortable or happy, but not torture either, at least not for me. Queenie gave Sai about three days to get back on his feet. After that we’d either go up to the plains to dig for the tubers, or along the creek upstream from the camp to hunt in the shallows and under rocks for snails with finned shells and emerald green crawdad things.
The crawdads only had four legs. I began to notice that all the bugs, from winged biters to crawly collectors to hopping blood-suckers, had only four legs. Maybe One-Eye wasn’t just being an asshole when he called me and Sai insects.