Escape from the Drowned Planet

by Helena Puumala

  Mikal took Marah’s mug, filled it with tuber-beer and handed it to her with a gracious gesture. She smiled her thanks and he repeated the action for Jocan.

  “Careful with the tuber-beer, Jocan; it’s strong,” he warned him as he handed it over.

  Jocan took a sip and made a face, but said nothing. The “little wife” giggled while watching him, apparently feeling more free to express herself now that the Chief had left the table. Marah sat down in their husband’s chair and waggled a finger at the girl.

  “Lassa, observe and learn,” she said.

  Then she turned to look at Mikal and Kati.

  “So is it really true that you have come here from the stars?” she asked.

  *****

  Later when Kati thought about that evening, this part of it, the hour of conversing with the past-middle-aged Tribeswoman, always struck her as amazing. Marah proved to be an astonishingly knowledgeable conversationalist. She also had a hunger for more information and learning, and she seemed to be absolutely thrilled to have an opportunity to ask questions of people who had travelled from afar. Kati imagined that moments like this were the highlights of her life, a chance to drink up knowledge from the rare travellers who stopped in the Alif village, no doubt always hoping that more of them would halt there. Marah was interesting because she, herself, was interested in all that the visitors could tell her, and she had a natural grace about her that allowed her to ask questions politely. She had none of the dumb arrogance that the men of the Tribes displayed, nor was she self-effacing the way the other women seemed to be. How she had managed to remain true to herself under the conditions of her existence, Kati could not fathom, but she had, and her Tribe was the richer for it. Lassa, for one, was learning an enormous amount about the world outside the Tribal lands as well as about the reality beyond the confines of the very world itself. She sat perched on her stool, her eyes wide, listening to everything that Mikal, Kati, Yarm and Jocan were saying, her intelligence obviously working hard to absorb it all. And then Kati noticed the children all around them, crouched among the evening shadows, also listening intently, and perhaps even understanding some of what they heard. Marah was a teacher; she had turned the drop-in of guests into a temporary school room.

  It could not last, and it did not.

  The Chief lumbered back to the table accompanied by his pack-leader, Yaki. Yaki had an expression of self-satisfied triumph on his drunk’s face, and he was staring at Kati. Her stomach did a nasty flip to see it, and she was glad that she had had nothing to eat since grabbing a mid-afternoon snack while on the back of her runnerbeast. It meant less stuff to churn around in there, even if she was hungry, just as her fellow travellers must be. Mikal grabbed hold of her hand and squeezed it hard. That was all right, she thought, part of the roles they had agreed on.

  “So,” said Chief Komak, settling back into the seat that Marah had quickly vacated for him. “My wife has now entertained you, travellers. It seems to me that it would be only fair if your wife, Mikal, would now entertain me and my men.”

  A silence fell around the table. Kati stared at the table top, not daring to raise her eyes to look at anyone. She barely dared to breathe, her only connection to sanity seemingly the hand Mikal was enveloping in his.

  “What kind of entertainment did you have in mind?” Mikal asked at last. “I know that Kati can recite poetry, she sings fairly well if you have a musician to accompany her, and I’ve seen her do killer impressions of people we’ve met....”

  “No, no, no! Nothing hoity-toity like that!” The Chief leaned back in his chair and roared with laughter.

  Mikal noticed that both Marah and Lassa were eyeing their husband uneasily. He had a suspicion that they had a fair notion about the direction this was heading, and it was not good. Definitely not good. He might have to stun someone yet, probably that stupid, smug-faced Yaki.

  “I want your wife to entertain us with the arts of love,” said the Chief of the Alif Tribe. “Preferably with my pack-leader Yaki here, who has no wife of his own to warm his bed.”

  Jocan and Yarm both drew ragged breaths. Mikal did not, controlling himself very carefully. He merely caressed the limp fingers he was holding and tried to think how he could buy some time.

  “Look,” said the Chief, raising his arms up and out, to indicate the area around them. “My people have built up the fires all around so we have light. There is a nice patch of grass behind your seats, and we have chased the children away from it. Come, let us have this lovely woman demonstrate the arts of love with Yaki, in honour of this, the prophesied Night of Conception.”

  “No way,” said Kati. It was a croak and perhaps only Mikal heard her.

  Mikal slipped his hand out of hers and, instead, wrapped his arm around her shoulders. He knew that he had to choose his words very carefully.

  “Chief Komak, surely you don’t think that I am going to allow my wife to cavort with your pack-leader, or any man for that matter, while I stand by and watch? You have three wives, yet I don’t hear you offering one of yours for Yaki’s entertainment.”

  “But I have only one young and pretty one,” protested the Chief with a sly laugh. “And I need Lassa pure for my seed. And even Lassa is not as comely as your woman, this Kati. She has set Yaki’s heart aflutter, and the same with many of my other men who want to see more of her charms.”

  Mikal very much doubted that it was Yaki’s heart that was aflutter.

  “No,” he said flatly. “I will not have it. I absolutely forbid it.”

  “But we must have our Conception Night entertainment. A public demonstration of sexual love adds luck to the later goings-on; it makes it more likely that things will happen as they should. I want to make sure that there will be a bloom of babes nine months from now, including my own prophesized two.” The Chief managed to almost sound hurt by Mikal’s refusal.

  Mikal said nothing, merely stared back at the Chief.

  “Well, then, I will make another suggestion.” Now there was an undercurrent of a threat in Chief Komak’s tone of voice. “If you will not allow your wife Kati to demonstrate the arts of love with Yaki, you will surely agree to have her demonstrate them with yourself as her partner? Surely you, the ardent, possessive husband can do the honours for us on this Night of Conception?

  “If not,” and now the threat was out in the open, “my men can hog-tie you and you can watch thus while Yaki shows what he is capable of with your wife, whether or not she is willing.”

  Mikal saw Yarm and Jocan each do a quick assessment of the odds they were facing. Their faces were white, just as white as he was certain that his own was. Kati was a limp rag inside his arm; he remembered suddenly how embarrassed she had been—such a long time ago--at the sight of the Kitfi couple cavorting blindly in front of them. This was no doubt harder on the poor girl than it would have been on an average Lamanian woman!

  “Three stunners, and there have to be at least seventy men around us,” Yarm muttered to Mikal. “We don’t have a chance, even if many of them are drunk.”

  Mikal agreed with his assessment. Besides, he was not, according to the oaths he had taken, allowed to start a war, not for any reason, including to save the woman he loved embarrassment.

  He looked at the Chief again and saw a smug expression on his face, and its mirror on Yaki’s face. Suddenly he realized what had happened. They had manoeuvred him into this position! It had never been about Yaki and Kati; right from the start the Chief and his pack-leader had intended that it would be him and Kati who were the centrepieces in their erotic ritual! Not that he did not think that Yaki wouldn’t rape Kati if they refused to co-operate; indeed, he was sure that Yaki would do so without as much as a qualm. But for some reason, perhaps because strangers brought luck, these people wanted their porn act put on by passing travellers, in this case by Kati and him!

  Abruptly he felt Kati give her shoulders a shake; she visibly stiffened into a functioning body beside him. She looked around her, no doubt
doing the same quick count that Yarm, Jocan and Mikal had each already performed. She then looked directly at the Chief and at the pack-leader who stood beside him, a picture of insolence.

  “Fine,” she said in a cold voice, pitching it towards the two Alif men. Probably only Mikal was close enough to hear the tremor in it. “This sex show, it’ll be the price of our passage.”

  Chief Komak raised his eyebrows; then he nodded.

  “Agreed. This—as you called it, sex show—will serve as the price of passage through our lands for the four of you. It will be the tribute, as is.”

  “Then let’s get on with it.”

  She was getting up out of her chair, tugging at the sleeve of her jacket. Mikal stopped her, grabbed hold of the jacket sleeve and shook his head. He got up beside her and pulled her into his arms.

  “Let me lead you, love,” he whispered to her. “Don’t run off faster than you need to go.”

  “I want it done and over,” she muttered back, nearly in tears.

  “No you don’t, love. You and I are going to burn the socks off their feet. We are going to give them a show they won’t forget very soon.”

  “We are?” She sounded maybe a tiny bit more curious than scared.

  “They don’t know who they tapped for their porn. I was trained on Borhq, my father’s world, I had to go back there for two years when I was a teen, and an older clanswoman named Alysh was my teacher, and she taught me well. It’ll be all right, love, I’ll make sure that you’ll be all right.”

  “But I might as well be a virgin,” she whispered unhappily. “There never was anybody but Donny, and from what I’ve heard and read since, he wasn’t much of a lover.”

  “Well then, be ready to be surprised—pleasantly.”

  “In spite of all this.”

  She raised her eyes to his, and then to glance around them. Somehow while they had been talking Mikal had managed to guide them to the patch of grass on which the action was to take place. All the faces, blurred in the light of the fires and that of the stars high overhead, frightened her again; how could she stand this invasion of privacy?

  “I would much rather have waited until we could visit my mother and stepfather’s vineyard, and have seduced you in their garden house after lubricating your morals with a bottle of their best white—or red—either would have been good.”

  She giggled.

  “That’s much better, love.”

  She realized that he was peeling off her jacket.

  “Do you mean that—the word ‘love’?”

  He buried his face between her breasts. He jacket had fallen on the ground and she realized that crazy as it was, her body was responding to his, and she wanted him madly—now.

  “Mean it? More than anything, love.”

  *****

  She was not sure how much time had passed but she was lying on the ground, under the brilliant stars and in the light of the fires, wrapped in a blanket that Marah had brought over to Mikal who had gently enfolded it around her. He was standing next to her, pulling on his clothes, laughing—laughing—with Marah. The absurdity of the situation dawned on her--it was easy to have a sense of humour when you’ve just enjoyed the best sex of your life—and she found herself stifling giggles. Couples around them, she noticed, were slipping away, hand in hand. Well, seemingly, Mikal and she had performed the job of an aphrodisiac, and that had been the whole point of the show, had it not?

  “Well, Mikal,” Marah was saying, “it seems that you know some things that no man of the Alif has ever learned. Impressive.”

  “I had a great teacher,” he replied with a laugh. “My father was a man of the world Borhq, and the Borhquans believe in teaching their young men the arts of love. I was trained by a clanswoman when I was a teenager, and I’m pleased to say, I still remember my lessons.”

  “Rosine showed me some of those things,” Jocan said smugly, coming to stand beside him.

  “Well, Rosine is an amazingly intelligent and experienced young woman, for all her youth,” Mikal commented generously.

  Kati watched Jocan’s eyes widen; he had realized what he had just revealed about Rosine. Not that it was in any way a surprise to either Kati or Mikal; they had noticed during their time on The Seabird that the sailor girls had a free and easy attitude to sex.

  She began to struggle up from the ground, awkwardly, wrapped as she was in the blanket. Mikal turned to help her and once she was upright, stooped to pick up her clothes.

  “Is there somewhere that Kati could dress in a semblance of privacy?” Mikal asked Marah, looking around them.

  Most of the people had left the village centre. There were several groups of men who had started playing games with round stones that apparently each participant threw, in turn, into a circle drawn into the dirt. A couple of more handfuls were busy playing with cards that were nothing like the decks Kati was familiar with. At the table where the travellers had conversed with the Chief and two of his wives, there was no-one but Cinthi, the middle wife with a pale, sickly-looking girl of about ten. Chief Komak and Lassa were nowhere to be seen, and Kati assumed that they had gone into the large hut to perform the act necessary for the prophesied conception.

  “I’ll take you to the Old Women’s Hut,” Marah said. “All of you. I have friends there and it’s a comfortable place. Your things are there already and your runnerbeasts are outside.”

  Jocan and Marah led the way, with Kati and Mikal coming next, and Yarm bringing up the rear.

  The Old Women’s Hut proved to be a comfortable place, indeed, a hide-covered structure like all the others in the village, but quite large, almost as big as the Chief’s residence. There were a half-dozen old women living there and they had divided half of the living space into little sleep alcoves for each of them, leaving the other half as a common living area. Kati was led to the nearest of these sleeping spaces with her clothes, and quickly dressed in the little bit of floor space that was not covered with a straw mattress and blankets.

  In contrast to the simplicity of the sleeping quarters there were treasures in the common area, useful objects apparently gleaned over long lifetimes; oil lamps to light the hut at night, like the present, and cushions and seats to lounge upon. The occupants were obviously proud to be able to show off their little elegances, and thrilled to be entertaining visitors from far away; as one of them said, they were not usually invited to meet with strangers who came to the village.

  “But Marah tells us what is going on,” said one wizened lady, who was introduced as Ninu. “She keeps us informed, and we try to help her as much as we can, whenever we can. We’re keeping your things safe right now. They’re in Mora’s alcove right now.” She pointed towards one of the sleeping cubicles. “And now we get to talk with you, the visitors.”

  “And Mora and I got to help the boy, Jocan, with the runnerbeasts,” said a well-preserved specimen with the name Leni.

  She had set to making tea for the visitors on a little stove that looked a lot like the one Jocan and Kati used when they camped. Jocan went over to help her; the two of them bantered like old friends over the pot of water.

  Suddenly a small storm arrived at the door flap shouting:

  “Marah, Marah! Help me!”

  It was Lassa, in tears, wearing only a skimpy shift over her slight, young body.

  “Oh, Marah, it’s all gone wrong!”

  She grabbed hold of the older woman who tried to soothe her, patting her on the back.

  “What’s gone wrong, girl?” asked Ninu, peering at her carefully.

  Lassa turned to look at her, tears running down her face.

  “The conception. The prophesied conception. I finally got him—my husband, the Chief—to pass out his seed, but he wasn’t inside me. I couldn’t get him inside me, he was soft like always, and when the seed came it went all over, none of it inside me. There aren’t going to be any babies; no matter what the Seer said.”

  “Lassa, girl,” Ninu said scornfully, “that man can
’t make no babies, except maybe sickly girls like Cinthi’s child. Right Marah?”

  “Right,” said Marah, looking somewhat amused.

  “But what then? Why would the Seer prophesy such a thing, if it can’t happen?” Lassa had stopped crying, perhaps from surprise.

  “Maybe we should ask our guests that?” said Marah. “Some of them come from worlds other than this and have knowledge we don’t.”

  “If you’re asking for help in conceiving a child,” Mikal spoke up, “I am useless to you. I have been equipped with what we call ‘clips’, which prevent me from impregnating any woman. I’d have to have a doctor or a healer remove them before I’d be any good to you.”

  “Thank goodness,” Kati subvocalized to her node, and only partly because she did not want to get pregnant herself.

  “And I’m getting to be an old man,” added Yarm. “I have never had a child, so there is no way to know if I’d be any better than your Chief, at it.”

  “Jocan here is a red-head,” said Leni unexpectedly.

  “What?” That was Marah and Ninu in unison.

  “How did you know?” Jocan demanded.

  Leni reached over behind his left ear and ruffled the hair there. She turned Jocan’s head so that all could see the little patch of bright red there.

  “I happened to notice it when we were watering the animals. You ran your fingers through your hair and that peeked through. Thought it was interesting.”

  “Very careless of me,” muttered Jocan.

  Lassa wasted no time. She rushed over to Jocan and wrapped herself around his torso before he had a chance to digest what was happening.

  “Hey,” he began to protest when she slipped a hand into his pants, but he was very young and his body visibly did an override.

  “Is there someplace we can go?” Lassa asked urgently, peeking at the other women from behind Jocan’s shoulder.