Strangely, I didn’t feel any shame about last night. It had felt weirdly... right. There was no denying Buroudei and I were getting closer. What exactly that meant, I couldn’t be sure. But I wasn’t exactly unhappy about it. I felt the shadow of a smile flicker across my lips as I turned to see where he was.
I gasped and reared back, yanking the blankets back up despite the heat. There was an alien here, but it wasn’t Buroudei. I squinted, realization dawning.
“Rika?”
Rika’s tail swished and she dipped her head in a way that I could only imagine was some kind of acknowledgement. I nodded slowly, reaching for the tunic that had dropped to the floor last night.
“Did you leave this for me at the other tent? Thank you.”
I slipped it on over my head, catching a whiff of myself when my arms were up. Yikes.
“Doesn’t look like you guys have much water around here, but is there anywhere to wash?”
I mimed smelling myself and making a face, then pretended to scrub under my arms.
Rika watched me with her head cocked and what I swore was the small pull of an amused smile. She was seated next to me on the sand, but she stood, then, clearly understanding what I was asking. I stood too, and as I did I felt the tension of a full bladder. Oh God. How am I going to ask about that?
“Um... Where...” I looked around, face on fire, trying to find a delicate way to ask about where I was supposed to pee. Screw it. Maybe there was no delicate way. I squatted on the ground in a pantomime of peeing, then jumped up, hoping she caught my drift. Her smile got bigger.
She grabbed a valok plant from among the items on the shelves in the tent, slicing one half of the round skin off. She gave me the open part to eat from, which I took. She kept her half of the hard rind in her hand, beckoning me to follow. I did so, slurping all the way.
The sun outside was beating down with ferocity, though it didn’t seem very high in the sky yet. The sand was hot on my feet, and I half walked, half ran, bringing my knees up, trying to keep my feet in contact with the ground as little as possible. I finished the valok gel, then pulled my arms inside the short-sleeved tunic, trying to keep my head down and face out of the direct sun. I was 99% sure I’d gotten a wicked sunburn, along with all my other ailments, yesterday, that Rika had miraculously patched up. If I could avoid that this time around, that’d be swell. Rika watched me with interest, and I offered her a paltry smile.
“Yeah, I probably look crazy to you, eh?”
She answered me with a quick quip.
She took me just outside of the tents to an area of boulders. I made a beeline for a long shadow cast by the largest boulder, keeping my eye firmly on the dino-centipedes I saw grazing on the other side of the huge rocks. Rika didn’t seem bothered by the huge animals, and she sidled up next to me. She held her valok rind up, indicating that I should do the same with the empty rind I now had. I snaked my arms out of the tunic and watched.
She used her valok rind to dig a small hole in the sand. She pretended to squat over it, then stood and filled the hole in with sand.
OK, seems easy enough.
I dug a small hole the way she had, then squatted. I began to relieve myself, sighing, only to realize that Rika was still staring.
“Jesus! Privacy not a big thing for you guys?”
She said something I did not understand, and I did my best to ignore her. It was pretty unlikely she’d ever seen anyone like me before. I couldn’t blame her for being curious, especially if she was some kind of doctor. I quickly finished my business and filled the hole in, tossing the valok rind down to the sand. Rika tossed hers, as well. Then we began walking back to the tents, me with my arms tucked firmly back into the tunic, my hair doing a mostly crappy job of shielding my face. If I was going to survive any length of time in this place, I had to go back to the ship for supplies – extra clothing, sunscreen, and spare boots.
As we walked through the tents, I noticed that everything was pretty quiet. Nobody seemed to be around. I wonder where everyone is. I tried to ignore the fact that by “everyone” I really meant Buroudei. I couldn’t stop wondering about him. There was an ache, deep in my abdomen, that had taken root. An ache I was pretty sure his absence caused.
I saw everyone else soon enough. A large group was gathered where the fire last night had been blazing. Approximately thirty men stood in a clump, and on the outskirts of the group was a much smaller collection of women and children. Something about the balance seemed off.
“Why are there so few women?” I blurted, suddenly realizing why the population seemed so skewed. Rika clearly didn’t understand my question, and she gestured to a tent just ahead of us. We kept walking past the group, but I couldn’t stop myself from staring. At the centre of everything, keeping everyone’s attention rapt, was Buroudei. He was speaking, his deep voice booming with authority, his arms outstretched in some massive gesture. His skin gleamed beneath his blades in the sun, his muscles tightening and rippling with every movement. It seemed like he was these people’s leader, and I’d heard more than one person refer to him as Gahn. I wondered if it meant something like “king.” Or maybe, considering all the blades strapped to his body, “warlord.” Despite the heat, a shiver ran through me to witness him – to see him commanding everyone with such power. Everyone, even the other strong-looking warriors, was standing still, deeply respectful and attentive as Buroudei spoke. My ears strained to understand him, even though I knew that would do no good. Alien language learning had been slow-going so far. Unfortunately. I chewed my lip as the group moved out of view. I really, really wanted to be able to talk to him. The intensity of that desire caught me off guard. This wasn’t simple curiosity about a new language. This wasn’t an academic thing. I wanted to talk to him. To learn about him, understand him, figure out what made him tick. Although, so far, it kind of seemed like what made him tick was me.
Rika pulled aside the flap of the tent we had reached. This one was different than the others. It was smaller, tall and narrow, with an opening at the top. She led me inside.
There wasn’t much inside the tent. A small pit was in the centre, and along the perimeter of the tent were random-seeming objects like small rocks and collections of dried grass and some other plants I hadn’t yet encountered. I stood, unsure of what we were doing here, when Rika bent and grabbed a couple of the small dark stones from the ground. She placed some of the dried grass in the pit, then smacked the stones together until a spark flew onto the dried grass, igniting immediately.
If I hadn’t been sweating before, I sure was now. It was already hot in here, and the fire was adding to it. I coughed as smoke began to billow. It didn’t smell like wood smoke – it was more herbal than that. Not altogether unpleasant, other than the fact that I was having trouble breathing. Eyes streaming, I felt Rika’s hand on my shoulder. She pushed me down to the ground, below the smoke line, and my vision cleared as I sat. Before I knew what was happening, she had pulled her tunic up and over her head, sitting before me totally naked.
My cheeks grew doubly hot as I tried not to stare. A quick look told me that her body was strong and powerful, though her skin was starting to show signs of age. She also seemed to be, apart from some decent pectoral muscling, completely flat-chested. A glance between her legs (she was sitting cross-legged, so it was kind of hard to avoid) told me that she was indeed female, though. No hair anywhere on her body, besides her head. She pointed to my tunic, her claw catching on the fabric.