- Aurora -

I stumble after Trak'zor as we walk back to his house. I'm still half in a daze after that climax. I guess not having any action for months, but hearing other girls enjoying their husbands just a few feet away, can accumulate a lot of horniness.

Or maybe it's just him. He's the sexiest man I've laid eyes on. And while he'd still need a little coaching when it comes to the pure technical things, his pure enjoyment of my sex was just sensational.

He walks in front of me over the rocks, and his loincloth is tight over his muscular butt. The poor guy was rock hard throughout the whole thing. I should do something good for him, too. And I'm absolutely going to.

Trak'zor blows on the embers in front of his house. The sight of it makes my mouth water. That fish he served was the best meal I've had on this planet, and I'm hungry again.

“We cook?”

He looks up at me with those azure eyes. “Aurora knows how to?”

I want to roll my eyes. “Of course know how to cook. One, is Italian. Two, has Trak'zor seen size of hips?”

I point to make sure he gets it. While my waistline has decreased a lot these past months, my hips and butt are stubbornly refusing to shrink much. Which is fine with me.

Trak'zor goes to the back of the house, and I follow him. He squats down and lifts a wooden lid six feet square.

I bend down to get a closer look. “That ... is awesome.”

Underneath it is a stone-lined compartment that looks a lot more sophisticated than the food stores back at the cave. Not least because this one is filled to the brim with food. The compartment is divided into sections separated by something that looks like wickerwork. Meats are on one side, and veggies and spices on the other. Some of the food is wrapped in leaves, some is neatly bundled up, some is hanging along the sides and some is contained in small, hollowed-out stones. It's a wealth of all kinds of ingredients for food, probably all the edible products from this jungle. Except the salen fruit, of course. Even Trak'zor can't get any of that. 

A waft of cool air rises from the deep food storage as he reaches down and pulls up something wrapped in a leaf.

“Fish?” I ask.

He unwraps it and shows me nicely cut filets of something that certainly isn't fish. “Meat.”

“Turkeypig,” I state. “We call it turkeypig.”

It's one of the staple foods back at the cave, and it tastes like both pork and fowl. It's not my favorite food, mostly because we've eaten so much of it. But I'm not going to protest here. I should just be happy Trak'zor wants to feed me.

I see some dried plants I recognize and take some of them out. Then I notice a round stone in the corner of the food store. No, it's two halves of one stone, one hemisphere on top of the other so they form an even orb. What does he keep in there?

I reach down to take it, but Trak'zor's hand shoots out and grabs my wrist in an iron grip. “Don't touch.”

His face is stony and his eyes are shooting blue lightning, so I quickly pull my hand back. “I didn't mean ...”

He releases my wrist and closes the lid again. “The things in there will spoil if it's opened.”

“Ah.” I guess that makes sense. In a way.

“How you keep cool?” I ask as we walk back out to the fire.

“There's a stream underneath the house,” Trak'zor says and points. “Water pours up from the ground up on the hill and runs down into the lake. It's cool water. And clean.”

Now I see there's a small pond off to the side. The sound of gently running water comes from a steady stream of clear water that comes out from under the ground. It turns into a small creek that runs towards the lake.

This house just gets better and better. “You have indoor plumbing. Or very close.” 

“I have what?”

“Indoor plumbing,” I repeat in English. “Much special. Is dream house. And Trak'zor build this palace?”

“Nobody else dared go to this island,” he says with what I can only describe as boyish pride. “They're afraid of the Water Bigs. It is forbidden to go here.”

“But you defy?”

He concentrates on the cooking. “Yes.”

There's a dark tinge to his voice, and I'm not going to investigate that any further right now. There's something between him and his tribe. Maybe daring to tread on this island is what got him cast out?

“Trak'zor has knife?”

He just looks at me.

“I mean, not for fighting. Not for cutting Trak'zor! But for cutting these.” I point to the veggies I got out of the food stores.

He goes into the hut and returns with a knife, handing it to me. The blade is about as long as my pinkie finger.

I stare at the tiny thing in my hand. It's like a miniature knife. “Um. Yes. Trak'zor make this knife for small Woman also? Small like doll?”

He continues cutting up the meat. “Yes.”

I guess it will have to do for now. I find a suitable piece of wood among the heap of firewood he's collected, place it on the ground like a cutting board and start cutting up the various leaves and stems and roots.

Cooking together in silence is weird to me. It's usually the perfect time to talk.

But I'm not sure how much I should tell him about myself. I don't know him that well. Talking about the other girls and the cave and the abduction might make him want to do less than ideal things. Like tell his tribe about them so they can attack it. Or maybe he'll be angry if he realizes that I'm not The Woman from the Prophecy. We should probably have more of an emotional bond before I drop those bombs on him.

Little animals chirp over in the little cluster of trees and the soft, soothing thunder from the waterfall is always there in the background. It's the most peaceful moment I've had on this planet.

Trak'zor calmly puts cubes of turkeypig meat onto wooden skewers.

He probably thinks he's got everything figured out about me. The Woman, Worship, the Gift, his Mate, the women return, blah blah blah. It seems all the tribes we know about have that same belief, with small variations. At some point a long time ago, someone must have been very eager to spread that religion.

The fire crackles and splutters.

No, this is getting ridiculous. I have to fill this silence. Hey, I am Italian.

“Trak'zor often go to Bune?”

He puts more dry wood on the fire. “Not often. It's a dangerous place with many irox. But sometimes necessary.”

“Necessary?”

“Yes.”

Five seconds go by while I wait for him to expand on that.

Nope.

“I mean, why necessary?”

“Bune is forbidden. There are mysteries and secrets there, some that are useful. But many things are forbidden that should not be.”

A man after my own heart. “Like this island.”

He sends me a flash of blue light. “Like this island. Certainly swimming in the water is dangerous, with the Water Bigs around. But I made a bridge instead of swimming. Then it's not dangerous.”

“Did tribe cast out because you entered forbidden places?”

“I'm not an outcast.”

“Then where is Trak'zor tribe?”

He points roughly to the north. “That way.”

“Is far?”

“Yes.”

“Why Trak'zor live alone?”

He looks up at the sky. “Soon the sun will set. That's the best time to catch Water Smalls. Fish.”

In other words, mind your own fucking business. Fine, I'll change topics.

“Why you swim before with Aurora, even if dangerous?”

He frowns and scratches his chin. “Very unusual. But Aurora makes me feel strange. New. Reckless.”

Umm. Thanks?

I place my finished salad on a bowl-shaped leaf. It's a distant relative of a Caesar salad. If Julius Caesar had a Chinese cousin twice removed he'd never met and whom it turned out he wasn't really related to at all, then this would be that guy's salad.

Trak'zor hands me a skewer and a cup of water, so I dig in.

Yep, turkeypig tastes the same everywhere on this planet. Somehow the familiar flavor makes me feel even more at home. Trak'zor isn't that alien. He's likes turkeypig, just like everyone else.

“Is delicious,” I say with juice running down my chin. “Tender meat.”

“Tender meat is better,” Trak'zor agrees. Then he takes a pinch of my not-Caesar salad and chews thoughtfully. “And vegetables are better when mixed. I usually just eat them separately. But this is also enjoyable.”

So of course that faint praise gets me blushing. He likes my salad!

“I'm glad Trak'zor like,” I say modestly.

We finish the meal, he goes to get his harpoon, and then we walk down to the water in the orange twilight. The lake is still and the surface is darker than before. I keep a good distance to it. A terrible monster could be hiding just under it.

Little swarms of insects gather in some kind of meeting or party right above the water, and sometimes concentric rings spread out from a place where a fish has broken the surface to snatch one.

Trak'zor lifts his harpoon and stands still for several minutes, staring into the water.

Then he suddenly throws the harpoon hard, it makes a small splash and he pulls it back up by a thin line.

The thin, serrated blade is empty. He missed.

“Difficult to catch Water Smalls,” he says calmly. “They swim very fast.”

He takes up his statue-like stance again, just waiting for a fish to come close to the shore. Once more he throws the harpoon, and once more he misses.

He tries five times before he catches something. It's a little thing about the size of my hand, and it sprattles wildly with its long, feathery tail caught by the cruel blade.

Trak'zor takes it off the harpoon and slams it against a rock, killing it.

I lean in to take a closer look, expecting the fish on this alien planet to be not at all like the fish on Earth and probably pretty unappealing.

But if you squint hard enough, this one could probably pass for a fish back home, too. It has the thin, feathery fins and a sleek body with a mouth at the end I imagine is its front. But I could be wrong – its dark, round eyes are located almost exactly in the middle of the body. I think I can identify its gills, too, with one set at each end.

“Just a mouthful,” Trak'zor says. “Sometimes I only catch these very small ones.”

I touch the side of the fish. Yep, cold and slimy. “I'm sure is delicious.”

I sit down on a rock that's still warm from the sunshine, lean back onto another one and just watch him. When he's waiting for a fish to come close, in the final rays from the setting sun, he looks so much like an ancient Greek statue it's crazy. Those muscles, that powerful stance, that determination – if I were a sculptor, I'd be totally inspired right now.

His hair shines in the orange light. I think he's lived alone for a good while. That house must have taken years to build and finish to that standard. By my new cavewoman standards, it's quite the luxurious dwelling. I'll let the university know about it. He might win some kind of award for sustainability. They'll make him a professor of caveman studies ...

- - -

“Aurora asleep?”

My eyes snap open. “No,” I say, contrary to what is obviously true. “Just eyes resting.”

The sun has set and it's quite dark. I stiffly get up from the hard rocks I was somehow able to sleep on, rubbing my butt and neck. Then I wipe my mouth, because I've clearly been drooling.

“Aurora can rest her eyes in the house,” Trak'zor suggests. “Or maybe you prefer sleeping on rocks?”

“Sometimes,” I lie, trying to preserve some dignity. “Is good for the ... umm ... joints. You catch more fish?”

He holds up a little twig with three small fish hanging from it. “Not much.”

I yawn so my jaws ache. “Enough for breakfast tomorrow, maybe.”

His grunt has a skeptical tone to it.

We walk back to the house. The fire has burned down to embers again.

Trak'zor quickly guts the fish and wraps them in leaves, then places them in his food store.

“Does Aurora want to rest her eyes again?”

I've hardly slept at all for two days. And the last time was when I was carried across his back. “Maybe. Just a little nap.”

“I will prepare for it,” he says and walks to the back of the house.

I walk to a little cluster of bushes and pick a couple of the fresh-tasting leaves that we girls call Cathay Blue and that we chew on instead of brushing our teeth. I have a feeling that if I fall asleep now, I won't wake up for a good few hours.

When I go back into the house, Trak'zor has prepared a place for me to sleep.

It's a pile of the largest, whitest not-sheep furs I've seen, placed by the rear wall of the house. There's even a pillow with a pillowcase made from the same kind of fabric the clothes were made from.

I push down on the furs with my hand. The pile is soft, but still firm and supportive.

In the flickering light from the fire it looks so inviting I almost cry. “That for me?”

“I prepared it for The Woman.”

Of course. Fine, I'll pretend to be her a little longer.

I'm about to collapse from exhaustion, so I take off my clothes without much ado and slip in between the furs. They're warm, but not too hot. Just a pleasant temperature and perfect support. Just like sleeping on a cloud. If I close my eyes now, I'll be in dreamland.

It's quiet outside. All I can hear is the distant, even roar from the waterfall and the gentle sound of water running under the house to cool down the food. I think maybe I'm safe here.

“Trak'zor.”

“Aurora.”

“Water Big can come on land?”

“The Water Bigs never break the surface of the water. The air is poison to them.”

Yeah. That's what I thought. I'm safe.

I close my eyes.

Only one thing is missing.

“Trak'zor sleep here,” I mumble before I lose my grip on the day.