Chapter Nine
The importance of being able to communicate well had never been more evident. Zhor felt the frustration Ah-na must feel as he struggled to explain what he had witnessed with mime. There were just some things that simply could not be expressed with grunts and gestures!
One of them had to learn the language the other spoke, at the very least!
He understood abruptly and very clearly why Ah-na had decided he was little more than an animal.
He had nothing to show her that he had evolved well beyond being merely an intelligent beast.
He did not even have the ability to try to convince her with words! That would have been enough even without the trappings of a civilization that had been lost!
Without it, he had nothing.
He scrubbed a hand over his face. Maybe he was relying too much on the gestures because he did not expect her to understand? She would never even begin to understand—they would never begin to understand one another—if he could not give her words to use and convince her to share her language with him.
“I did not see all that happened. I was drawn by the sound of an explosion, but I did see that there was a party of zorph below the ship and launching arrows and stones at it, so perhaps they caused the crash? I saw several smaller explosions and then the ship began to fall. When it landed here, it broke into many pieces.
“I think that I had already begun to approach when you came out and then fell. I do not know how I would have caught you otherwise, though I do not actually recall moving closer or thinking that I would.
“I am certain, though, that this is where the ship crashed.” He shrugged. “Very likely the zorph took it. Even if they did not bring it down, they saw, and they would have come as quickly as they could to scavenge what was useful. Or any number of others might have seen it and come.
“This is a world that has lost all semblance of civilization and, I think, in some ways it is worse than before we were civilized.”
Annika stared at him, hard, trying to absorb something from what he was saying.
Naturally enough, she couldn’t. The best she could do was try to make a note of words he repeated.
He’d used the word zorph several times. “Zorph? What is zorph?”
He frowned thoughtfully. Finally, he used his hands to frame his upper body, waist to the top of the head and then dropped to all fours.
She stared at him blankly for a moment before she remembered thinking the creatures she had seen on top of the plateau had reminded her of myths of centaurs. The excitement of thinking she understood filled her. “Up there?”
He frowned and glanced up, following her pointing finger with his gaze. He was still frowning when he looked at her again. “Ah-na ….” He pointed at his eyes. “Zorph dere?”
That she got! She nodded eagerly. “Yes! I saw them. When we circled the plateau just before we crashed, I saw several of them. They look like—at least from that distance—a mythological creature we called centaurs. Probably not all that much like them—because they were supposedly half man and half horse, but the torso looked like it must be a lot like yours—or actually ours—and then it had a lower body that looked like a four-legged animal of some kind.”
“You went up there when you’d seen zorph there?” he bellowed furiously.
Annika stared at him, dismayed and stunned at the abrupt transition to anger.
Zhor struggled with his temper. “Zorph.” He growled and made a pantomime of killing something by chopping at it.
Annika gaped at him, unnerved for several moments before it finally sank in that he was acting out aggression not expressing it.
She thought.
She was fairly certain that he was trying to say that he thought the zorph were dangerous and viciously aggressive and that made her very, very uneasy as soon as she began to think she understood.
Because she thought he might have been telling her that it was the zorph that had carried away the ship, and that would mean they had also found Phillips and Stoddard. And that might mean they were dead now even if they’d survived the crash.
According to Zhor.
The zorph might not be as hostile toward humans as they were toward Zhor and his people.
Or, they might be more hostile.
But she didn’t see that she could rule out the possibility that the zorph had rescued them just on Zhor’s word alone.
She didn’t know him. She’d only been with him a matter of days, less than a couple of weeks based on Earth calendars, she was sure, and probably almost half of that time she’d been senseless, too out of it to notice much of anything.
But of course, he had saved her. Whatever his motives he had risked his life to save her. She didn’t doubt that, because despite his ability to fly, she was sure he wasn’t accustomed to carrying passengers and catching her mid-air must have been as dangerous for him as it was for her. She thought it might be rather like a good swimmer trying to save someone that was drowning—that it was risky because a hysterical person could drown the would-be rescuer.
He’d fed her and kept her safe.
She’d felt like a prisoner in some ways, but then again she couldn’t say for sure that that had been his intention. Clearly there were dangerous primitives around and that would be reason enough to keep the door bolted.
All in all, she thought she could acquit him of evil intentions—or being evil, period.
There was the little matter of the sex thing, but, unfortunately, she couldn’t blame that on him. She had actually been the first one to make a move—no point in arguing that, in the heat of the moment, she had lost her mind and had desperately wanted comforting in the only form it might be offered.
Still, it wasn’t a conscious decision on her part—well, she didn’t suppose it was on his either. But, in point of fact, it wasn’t exactly what she’d had in mind until he got going good and convinced her it was a good idea.
She supposed she must be drawn to him at least on some level—well, physically, certainly not intellectually!—or she would have fought him off—or tried—regardless of the fact that she’d instigated the whole thing.
Must be his animal magnetism, she thought wryly. It certainly wasn’t his clever repartee—although she was beginning to think she’d sold him short and he was a good bit more intelligent than she’d believed.
Could she take his seeming honesty at face value, though?
She could think of several motives that might inspire him to mislead her and there could be more she would have no way of thinking of since she didn’t know his mind or customs.
Frowning, she moved away from Zhor and examined the scarred areas of the ‘umbrella’ more closely. Upon closer examination, she did find some materials embedded in the canopy that could have come from their ship—nothing to get excited about but maybe something to support his claim.
He played stupid when she began trying to convince him to take her down to the ground so she could look for more clues. It took her a little while to figure out that that was what he was up to, but she was sure of it the minute she got down on all fours and started moving cautiously to the edge. He caught her ankle and dragged her back the moment she went down on her belly in an attempt to get close enough to look over the edge.
His lips were tight with anger, but he scooped her up and leapt from the tree top, spiraling downward on the air currents.
He seemed to dismiss her the moment he lit and set her on her feet.
Shrugging inwardly, deciding to ignore his foul mood, she focused on searching the ground for anything dropped or any sign of something heavy being dragged.
If the zorph had taken the debris, as Zhor suggested, she reasoned, there should be sign of it. They didn’t have wings. They would have had to climb the tree and used something to lower the pieces to the ground or shoved them off to crash on the ground.
And the latter scenario seemed very unlikely if they’d been risking their necks to collect things of potential value.
She didn’t find anything to suggest primitive tools or beasts had been used to remove the debris, not directly anyway. She found quite a few tracks—some of them large enough they might have belonged to a beast of burden rather than a very large zorph, but she still didn’t see that that completely ruled out the possibility that Zhor and or some of his cohorts might have removed the wreckage and possibly taken Phillips and Stoddard.
What made her very uneasy was not being able to come up with a motive for whoever had taken Phillips and Stoddard.
Someone either had, though, or they’d walked away. She didn’t find any remains, not even dried blood.
Or the company had sent someone to collect them and they’d simply abandoned her to her fate.
Unless the zorph were cannibals?
She didn’t suppose that term could technically be applied when they weren’t the same species, but she didn’t feel like splitting hairs. The zorph weren’t animals as far as she could see. They had to be intelligent enough to know that the makers of the crashed ship weren’t animals either, so taking them for food would have been a form of cannibalism.
Particularly since, as far as she could see, this world was pretty abundant with all sorts of life—which would make it a choice not a necessity.
Weather could account for the dearth of evidence to an extent, she knew. Rain and wind and sun could have scoured away blood in this time. Wild creatures could have fed … very likely would have.
It occurred to her after some thought that, if the ship had been destroyed to the extent that it wasn’t useful even for temporary shelter, the two men might have decided they would be better off to wait for help near the buoy she’d dropped.
Zhor flatly refused to cooperate with every attempt to convince him to take her to that location, however. Instead, he returned to the habitat with her and, after what she perceived as a lengthy lecture forbidding her to attempt the climb to the plateau, he left her again.
This time, he closed the door.
And locked it, she thought, from the other side.
Annika was more disappointed than angry or resentful, mostly because she was of no mind to face trying to climb up to the bluff again and she wasn’t terribly crazy about being hauled around by a winged man, either. She’d hoped to learn more with the excursion, but she had seen plenty to think about.
She settled to sift through the impressions, trying to ignore Zhor’s attempt to lead her to conclusions that might or might not be true.
Despite his attempt to convince her—she thought—that the zorph had taken everything, he couldn’t know, for instance, what had transpired after he had rescued/captured her. She’d been pretty out of it, but she had been very aware of his presence on the cot next to her while she’d swum in and out of consciousness. She recalled that he had flown around with her for quite some time before he had taken her to his place.
That meant he wasn’t present to witness anything that happened after the crash as far as she could see.
That didn’t rule out that he knew second hand from people he’d known who had been at the site, but it suggested he had presented a theory, not fact.
Or he had something to hide and he was deliberately misleading her.
Well, she couldn’t determine that until and unless she managed to gather some evidence/facts.
That meant climbing the bluff again or convincing Zhor to take her to the place where she’d dropped the buoy.
He returned several hours later with food and the appearance of someone who’d been in a fight—with someone else, or something.
Or he’d crashed.
Something had distracted him, or he’d gotten a cramp or something like that and he’d fallen.
It would never have occurred to her that he might have an accident, but it wasn’t as if walking people didn’t stumble over things in their distraction or just trip over their own feet and fall down.
That wasn’t a terribly reassuring thought since she was so dependent upon him to get anywhere.
He didn’t want to talk about it, however, refused to even attempt to explain what had happened.