‘That’s why it hurts so much.’ Her chest felt battered black and blue, and the bloody offal stench came from her.
‘You breathed, but did not wake. I thought you never would. Three days have gone by since we went into the river. In the middle of that night I carried you away. I knew there were caves here.’
‘How did you manage?’
‘We are tough. How has humanity given us such trouble when you are so little and puny and weak?’ Going to the entrance, he pulled the skin to one side and stared out.
‘Where are my clothes?’ she asked.
‘Everything is wet.’ He pointed to her pack, which lay behind her.
She emptied it. The contents were sodden, ice-crusted.
‘Could you make a line for me?’ She held out the rope. Every movement hurt her chest.
‘I have much to think about.’ He returned to the door.
Turning away, she opened the bearskin. The area between her breasts was bruised yellow and purple. He must have struck her many times with those hard hands, but he’d saved her life. The question she kept coming back to was – why?
Tiaan tried to make a drying line while holding the skin around her. It proved impossible. She was too weak; the uncured skin was heavy.
Ryll snorted. His face was distorted in what she assumed was amusement. Yellow streaks around his mouth made a smile as wide as a shovel.
‘What?’ she said furiously.
He let out a great bellow, unmistakably laughter. His chest pumped, his leathery cheeks inflated like a trumpeter.
‘What are you hiding, little one? Had I not stripped off your wet clothes and put you in the bear you would have frozen to death. I massaged every part of you to keep the blood flowing.’
She ducked her head in mortification. When she finally looked up again, he was still staring at her middle. She managed to pull the skin up that far.
‘You are a mature woman,’ he said. ‘Have you been mated?’
‘No,’ she said uncomfortably.
‘You have only just matured?’
‘I am twenty. I have been a woman for six years.’
Ryll looked sympathetic. ‘You are not permitted to mate either?’
For some reason she found his sympathy irritating. ‘I choose not to mate!’ she said sharply. ‘I have had many offers.’ That was not true. Her cool manner and total absorption in her work had been off-putting to suitors and, after all, in the manufactory there were many more women than men.
‘You choose not to mate?’ he said incredulously. ‘But when you are ripe you must mate, if you have been matched.’
‘Human females do not go on heat. We can mate anytime we choose. Or not! I have waited six years for my lover, and now I am going to him.’ Poor Minis. There had been no time to think of him with all her own troubles.
‘Your customs bewilder me.’
Ryll was staring at her, as he must have while she was unconscious. This alien creature had been examining her, while she lay all unknowing. ‘I feel so …’ To her horror, Tiaan began to cry, great choking sobs. Once begun, she could not stop.
The lyrinx regarded her impassively. Eventually the tears reduced to sniffles. She wiped her face and sank down in the skin, next to the fire.
‘What was that called?’ asked Ryll.
She found herself smiling at his curiosity. ‘I was crying. Also called weeping or sobbing.’
‘I know those words. Why do you cry? What does it do?’
‘I felt sad, and embarrassed and ashamed; and afraid.’ She had to explain those emotions as well.
‘Why did you feel that way?’
‘Because you’re a male and you had the advantage of me while I knew nothing about it. You might …’ As the thought occurred to her, Tiaan’s mouth opened wide and she tried to get away. Her bearskin, dragged into the fire, began to smoulder.
He sprang to beat it out. She limped the other way, putting the fire between them and making an incoherent sound in her throat. She felt a churning, vomitous horror.
He went still, baffled. ‘I don’t understand. What emotion are you feeling now? Why were you afraid? I was not going to eat you.’
‘You’re a male!’ she choked. ‘And … And …’ She could not say it.
The bony crest on Ryll’s head flashed from lizard-grey to brilliant reds and yellows. Without a word he stalked to the mouth of the cave, tossed back the skin and hurled himself through.
Tiaan watched him crash down the steep slope. She could not even think of escape. Her muscles felt so wasted she could not have walked a hundred steps. Shrugging off the bearskin, she examined herself. There were scratches and bruises all over her body. Making a drying line with the rope, she cracked ice off her clothes and hung them near the fire, stood her boots upside down beside it and unpacked the rest of her gear. Hacking strips off a chunk of bear meat, she put them on a hot stone to sizzle.
In a scrap of bearskin Tiaan found yellow fat – rendered bear tallow. Scooping some up in her fingers, she began to work it into her boots. Her precious tools had specks of rust. She rubbed them clean and coated them all with fat. The missing pair of pincers cried out to her.
The meat was giving off such appetising aromas that Tiaan’s mouth watered. Cleaning her hands with snow, she sat down to dinner. It was as delicious a meal as she had ever eaten – chewy and with a strong flavour. She ate the lot, put more on and packed snow into her pot to melt.
Her belly was full and Tiaan was sitting by the fire, combing the knots from her hair when Ryll reappeared. Nodding curtly, he squatted by the fire and began rubbing bear fat into a patch of torn skin on his arm.
She watched him in silence. His every movement simmered with barely controlled energy, whereas she felt as if she had been living off her own body.
‘If I have offended you, I’m sorry.’ It sounded the right thing to say. Did he have any concept of what ‘sorry’ meant? She hoped so. Her life depended on his whim.
Ryll glared at her from under those massive brow ridges. His eyes caught a ray of light coming in through the entrance.
‘I am not a man, little one. I am lyrinx, unmated male! You have insulted me deeply.’
She did not know what to say. ‘I can only judge you by my own kind.’
‘We do not, we cannot mate without invitation. It is unthinkable!’ he glared at her. ‘Can it be that human males would dare such a crime?’
‘Time was when it was almost unheard of,’ she said, remembering things her grandmother had told her. ‘Men and women were equal once, but our kind have changed since the war began. Men have to sacrifice their lives in battle, and women must breed new men. Their sacrifice is deemed greater than ours.’
Ryll’s enormous mouth flew open, showing the purple scar at the back of his throat. ‘Decadent species! We will overcome you sooner than I thought. Besides,’ he went on, ‘what would be the point of mating with another species?’
A number of points occurred to Tiaan though she did not raise them. ‘You do not mate for pleasure?’
‘Of course we do. Once we are matched.’
The conversation made her uncomfortable. She finished her hair, put the brush away and sat forward, soaking up the warmth of the fire. Something occurred to her.
‘What did you mean when you said you were an unmated male?’
Again his crest flushed, this time bright yellow. ‘I have not yet been chosen by a female as her mate.’
‘Are you not old enough?’
‘I am old enough!’ The words came out in a snarl.
‘Then why?’
‘I am incomplete!’
She looked him over, comparing him to the other lyrinx she’d seen. He might be smaller, though certainly no less fierce. What was different?