by T J Trapp
Occasionally splashing through the small, muddy creek, they came out of the ravine, walked across a bowl-shaped meadow, and back into a dense forest. Well into the forest, they arrived at a small shack.
“Go in,” commanded the Mother. “Stay there. Sit still. Do not talk to each other.” All seven of the captives went into the shack, compliantly sat down, and did not talk to each other. The stench in the room from old urine was intense. Erin was in despair – she had been controlled by a neckband once before and had only been released with Alec’s medallion; now she was unable to do anything to shield her riders or complete her mission. Her five riders were mortified, and dejected – they had not protected their Princess and had not offered the least resistance to the Mother.
The elves stood outside, mumbling in their language. The Mother communicated with her clutchmen mentally, but spoke aloud to her apprentice. Alec heard them agree to leave the apprentice to watch the captives; the others could continue to patrol in case there were more intruders. The apprentice was further instructed to stay alert, and not dally with the women captives tonight. The elf Mother told him that she would return tomorrow afternoon and take the prisoners to the city when the replacement patrol arrived.
The seven sat in the shack. The Mother opened the door and took one last look at them. She eyed the mud-coated woman who had been victimized by the elf apprentice, and at the man who had displeased her. Then she smiled maliciously.
“Go and please her until morning,” she said to Thom, pointing at the muddy woman. “Accept him,” she said to Nikka. Then the Mother closed the door and left.
Thom began reluctantly crawling towards the muddy woman, his intentions clear. Nikka retreated until her back hit the corner of the shack. Thom continued to crawl towards her. At first, a look of quiet desperation covered the woman’s face. Then it was replaced with a look of hope. She was prohibited from speaking, but she pointed at the mud on her arms. The crawling rider was half on top of her before he understood what she wanted: it would please her for him to clean the mud off her. Thom began to lick her arm, using his tongue to loosen the mud and clean her. Nikka made fake sounds of pleasure as he continued.
Although it was hard to ignore them, Alec sat in the shack, shivering slightly, deep in thought.
We need to get free and recover our rings – and my medallion – before the elf Mother returns, he thought. If Erin and I aren’t wearing our rings, she can make us do anything she wants, whenever she touches us. He thought about how long they had been on the path through the elf lands, and how long it would take the elf Mother to return. We have less than a day to escape before she returns. But we can’t escape unless we can figure out how to beat these slave-bands around our necks. He remembered his last conversation with Sarah, as she lay dying on the battlefield. Sarah said these bands had an easy counter that high-tech worlds discover. It is my puzzle to solve, he thought.
29 – The Elves
Alec lay awake in the darkness, trying to ignore the sounds of licking and moaning, and the mumbling of Bon, the rider who talked in her sleep. He wanted to hold Erin but was unable to move.
The ability to control others was apparently not a talent that an elf was born with – the elf Mother generated an energy field and used lines of energy to gain control. Alec went over everything he knew about energy fields, and lines of energy, and shielding from fields, and twisting lines. Everything seemed to come to a dead end. Not right, he thought. It doesn’t seem right.
The elf Mother is using something to generate the lines, he thought. What? Besides her ring, of course. Then he slapped his hand on his thigh. The band!
He was trying to make the problem too hard. The answer to the Mother’s ability to control was within the band. How did the band work? How did the band know when to inflict pain? What was it about the band that caused pain? Or pleasure? But – the bands weren’t alive, and weren’t electronic, like exercise trackers on his home planet. By themselves, the bands couldn’t understand the instructions given by the elf Mother. The Mother’s ring was just like the one Erin had given him. Alec thought about how he had communicated with Erin when they both wore their rings, or how Erin could sense truth. He thought about the level of technology in this primitive world, or lack thereof compared to his Institute.
Think. He listened to the sounds of the night, of Rhor snoring lightly, and Bon still talking in her sleep. Then the solution came to him, and he chuckled aloud.
Erin looked at him, startled by the sound of his voice. She had been watching him, and even without her ring, knew he was puzzling through this. Now, she could see his elation. She wanted to ask him what he had figured out.
Alec looked at Erin and thought to himself; I think I know the answer! Then, he said to himself, aloud, “I think I know the answer.” Pleased at the sound of his own voice, he looked at Erin and said to himself, again aloud, “Yes! I know the answer!” Erin looked at him wide-eyed. She tried, but she could not answer him.
Alec continued to talk to himself, aloud. “It is dark, and we can’t do much right now. We will see if we can’t do something when the morning light comes.” Finally, he was able to drift off to sleep.
Alec had nightmares all night about unsuccessfully attempting to please elf ladies.
✽✽✽
The elf apprentice was up and fixing himself breakfast. The sounds of licking and moaning had finally ended with the first morning light. The two riders were laying in the corner both exhausted. Alec could see blood coming from Thom’s mouth and tongue. Nikka had no speck of mud on her.
The smell of food wafted through the cracks in the shed door, and Alec’s stomach started grumbling in response. No one had fed the seven yesterday, and it was clear the apprentice wasn’t going to feed them this morning. He had not even left them any water.
Alec had hoped that while the apprentice was preoccupied with preparing breakfast, he could try what he now knew. Unfortunately, the elf was positioned directly in front of the door, utensils clattering against his metal plate. Alec could hear when the elf finished eating and then heard rustling noises. Then the elf opened the door, which squeaked loudly as it opened. The elf stood in the doorway, silhouetted by the morning sun, naked, every hair on his body catching the early light.
He looks furry, thought Alec. He wasn’t used to seeing naked elves.
The elf looked at Erin leeringly; then he looked at the two women riders.
“You women,” he said, imitating the elf Mother’s bark. “Get on your hands and knees! Crawl over here.” The three women resisted for a few seconds and then complied, crowding together before the naked elf’s feet.
“The Mother told me not to do anything last night, but she didn’t forbid anything this morning,” he said, grinning. He looked at Erin and said, “Look up at me.” She complied. The elf patted her on the head. “Nice hair. Too bad I can’t have you.” He looked at her another long minute. “Maybe some other time. Crawl over to the corner,” he said, and Erin complied. Then he looked at Nikka and Bon.
“I already had you,” he said to the freshly-cleaned rider, who was glossy and damp from being licked. “I want to try someone new. Up on your knees!” he said to Bon. She tried to resist; Cryl tried to get up and help her. “No, no!” said the elf to the man. “Stop!” He stopped. “Now, punish yourself until she returns, but do it quietly.” Cryl started rolling on the floor in intense pain. By now Bon had lost mental control and had risen to her knees before the elf. “Now,” said the elf apprentice, running his tongue across his lips, “crawl over there by the fire and spread yourself out on my sleeping blanket.”
He’s new at this, thought Alec. And, his commands are not precise.
As soon as the woman passed through the doorway, the elf slammed the door behind her, again throwing the shack into darkness. Alec felt that this might be his only chance to act before the elf Mother returned. He looked at Nikka, still on her hands and knees in front of the door.
“Nikka should
open the door,” Alec said aloud, speaking to himself. Nikka obligingly reached for the latch but recoiled in pain and backed off.
“Now I am going to try to open the door,” said Alec, still speaking to himself.
Don’t hurt yourself, thought Erin. I don’t want you to be in pain! – then realized that Alec could not sense her thoughts without the rings, and she couldn’t move or talk to him.
Alec stood up, walked over to the door, and opened it without a problem. As before, it squeaked loudly as it opened, and Alec stepped outside cautiously. The elf was occupied with Bon on the blanket, thrusting and grunting, and didn’t notice the creaking door. I need to take care of the elf, he thought. Alec moved to the other side of the shack, hoping that the sacks with their weapons were still where the apprentice had dropped them the day before. They were. Alec grabbed his staff and started pulling it out, but the bag fell sideways, and the swords and knives clattered out. Oh no, thought Alec. He turned just as the elf, still naked, came scrambling around the corner.
“Stop!” shouted the elf.
Alec stopped cold.
The elf reached out to take the staff from Alec. Just then Bon came around the corner, hate and anger in her eyes. The elf turned to look at her.
Okay, I ‘stopped’ – I have fully complied with his command, thought Alec, and now I can ‘go.’ Alec took hold of his staff, raised it, and bashed the elf apprentice over the head with a very hard blow. The elf collapsed in front of him. Alec ran over to the sacks; one held neckbands and a key. He immediately removed his neckband and snapped it around the elf’s neck. Then he ran back inside the shack and removed Erin’s neckband and those of the five riders.
They rearmed themselves. Rummaging through the sacks, Alec found a small pouch with their rings and his medallion. The riders found food for their group, and enough clothes to outfit all of them, after commandeering the clothing of the elf apprentice.
Alec looked at Erin, dressed in the brightly colored elf clothing, and smiled. “You look …”
“Gaudy?” she finished, holding up the corners of the tunic and wrinkling her nose. In turn, she laughed at Alec’s outfit, which was too short to cover his legs fully, and tight over his chest.
As they ate, Nikka, Bon, and Erin commiserated with each other over their ill-treatment, and the men listened sympathetically, apologizing for their inability to intercede. The Theland riders had always had a great spirit of camaraderie within their ranks. Thom in particular was ashamed at his own behavior.
Erin walked over to the elf apprentice, still sprawled where Alec had bashed him.
“He is going to die,” she said.
“Well,” Alec said, “I intended to kill him, not just harm him.”
“We need to heal him,” said Erin. Alec looked at her. “Yes, he deserves to die for his actions,” Erin said, “but a dead elf will make it tougher to get the elves to work with us. My mother taught me that sometimes actions that are the best for my people and Theland must come before personal justice – what you call ‘revenge.’” Alec and Erin sat next to the elf, laid their hands on him, and shortly he was healed. He sat up, slowly shaking his head, and buried his face in his hands.
“Lay down,” Erin commanded sharply, and the elf apprentice complied. “On your belly. And be quiet.” Erin assigned Rhor to be the elf’s handler.
Now that they were reunited with their rings, Erin and Alec again were able to communicate by thought.
How did you get free? thought Erin to Alec, not wanting the elf, or the other riders, to hear.
Sarah gave me the clue, he thought back. I was trying to figure out how the neckbands work. They must be like your rings – the band must be able to sense the victim’s feelings. So, if you are wearing a neckband, and you think that you have followed orders – you feel that you have done what you were told to do – then there is no pain. You feel good. But, if you think you haven’t? Then – boom. You feel pain.
Is that what you were figuring out last night? Erin responded. Alec nodded. But – how were you able to stand up, and talk, and open the door?
By this time, they had walked far enough away from the shack that they could not be overheard.
“I changed how I thought, and how I felt,” explained Alec. “I decided to interpret the orders very literally so that I would feel that I had complied.”
“I don’t understand,” said Erin.
“In places like my home planet, Earth, there are lots of people who need to use complicated information and actions. Engineers, physicists, chemists, lawyers, accountants, and lots of other people must interpret information in very precise manners. When you’re conducting a chemistry experiment, it can make a big difference if you heat something for ‘about five minutes’ or if you heat it for precisely ‘four minutes and forty-five seconds.’ And for some things, like physics experiments, you must be more precise than that – you might have to measure something in nano-seconds. That was the clue. Low-tech worlds, like here, tend to process information more broadly. You probably would not need to measure anything in nano-seconds.”
“I don’t even know what a ‘nano-second’ is,” said Erin, “much less whether I would ever need to use it.”
“It’s one-billionth of a second,” said Alec helpfully.
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Erin said, somewhat annoyed by his lapsing into wizard-speak. “What’s a ‘second’?”
Alec remembered that he was in a world where people did not use clocks and told time by the position of the sun against five moons and the shadows of their hand passing across the ground.
“Well, think about it this way. You could either say that you are in the Land of the Elf, or you could say that you are standing near the elf shack.”
“Both are true,” said Erin.
“Or you could be even more precise, and say that you are standing right here, next to me.”
“Still true.”
“So, if somebody back home asked you where you are, all three answers are correct. And if you told one of your soldiers in Theland to ‘come here,’ he might think you meant the Elf Land in general, or this shack, or right here by us. Your soldier would comply if he did any one of those things.
“When the elf Mother said, ‘stay there,’ when she had us go inside the shack, at first I assumed that she meant to stay in the shack. If I tried to leave I would feel pain because I would be going against what I felt she meant. But! Then I decided that the world was divided into two places: ‘here’ and ‘there.’ Since she said ‘stay there,’ she meant the spot where she was standing would be ‘here,’ not ‘there.’ See? ‘X marks the spot,’ as they say.” Erin looked at him quizzically, and he continued.
“Every place else besides the spot where she was standing would be ‘there.’ That meant, if I had to stay ‘there,’ I could be anywhere except ‘here’ – the precise spot where the Mother was standing when she gave that order. It meant I could go outside the shack if I stayed away from that one place. I was complying with what she commanded me to do, and I felt that I was following her orders. That’s why I did not feel pain as long as I felt that I was following her orders.”
“That sounds like splitting hairs, my Great Wizard,” Erin said.
He laughed. “It is, but since I convinced myself that I had complied with her orders, it worked.”
“But you could speak, in the shack, when no one else could.”
“Someone else was speaking,” Alec replied. “Bon was talking in her sleep.”
“But she wasn’t talking to anyone, just herself.”
“Exactly!” said Alec. ”So I figured that as long as I was just talking to myself, out loud, then I was okay. We were told not to talk to each other; but the elf Mother didn’t say anything about Bon not talking in her sleep. Or me not talking to myself. Out loud.”
It took Erin a moment to digest Alec’s explanation.
“How did you overpower the elf apprentice, since the Mother told us not t
o harm him?”
“She said not to ‘harm’ them. I think if I had threatened him, or just poked him with my staff, I would have been in pain. But I wasn’t trying to ‘harm’ him; I was trying to ‘kill’ him!”
“Oh,” said Erin.
“And when he told me to ‘stop,’ I did. Once I had stopped, he didn’t tell me I couldn’t start again, so I felt that I had complied with his direction.
‘That’s why this neckband mind-control stuff doesn’t work well against people who are used to precise directions and thinking in precise ways. I don’t know what would happen if they had a good trainer,” Alec mused. “It’s possible that with enough time, they could figure out how to be precise enough to make it impossible to disobey.”
“We need to go back to the shack,” Erin said, pulling his train of thought back to the moment. “What is our next step?”
“I think we just hang tight,” Alec said. “Rest, maybe eat a little more and wait for the elves to return. Even if we wanted to get out of here and go back, the elf Mother’s patrol is between us and the ravine. We can’t outrun them, so we might as well face them here.”
Erin shared their plans with her five riders.
“Would it be better to ambush them?” Nikka asked. “The ravine is narrow. We could wait on top and rush them. We would have the advantage of both our weapons and surprise.” Erin sensed that the woman badly wanted to avenge the attack against her body.
“No, I don’t think so,” Erin said gently. “We still need to meet – peacefully – with the elf leaders, and that would be …. difficult … if we kill off this patrol squad.”
Erin banished the naked elf apprentice to the confines of the shack and arrayed her five riders to best face the elves when they returned. Erin practiced responding to the energy twists that she had seen. Around midafternoon, Erin sensed the elves before Alec heard them.