Chapter 2: Kro

I had a hard time getting to sleep that night. The question just kept running itself through my brain: would I be stuck here forever? I didn’t even know how I got here in the first place; how would I ever figure out a way back? Kezalo said the people who came before me just disappeared one day; did they find a way back? If so, where and how? I was going to have to ask Kezalo everything he knew about them, anything that could possibly be a clue.

How long had I been away already? A day? I could only imagine what my parents were going through. Knowing my mom, she was probably yelling in the cops’ faces by now trying to get them to post a missing persons report for me, while they calmly tried to tell her that 48 hours was the rule.

Eventually I somehow got to sleep, because the next thing I remember was Heleen waking me up the next morning. “Clay, wake yourself! It is morning!”

I wearily opened my eyes. I will say that there are far worse sights to wake up to than a beautiful naked girl standing over your bedside with a friendly smile. “Morning, princess,” I grunted.

“I thought to bring you to breakfast,” she said. “And after, my father asks me to give you a tour of the village.”

“Sounds good to me,” I shrugged. I reached for my jeans that I’d laid on the floor by my bed. I pulled them on and slipped my feet into my shoes, not caring to reuse my socks from yesterday. Stretching and yawning, I followed her out the door into the village that was just starting to come alive.

“Do you want to wash before beginning?” Heleen asked me.

Wow, there was a novel idea. I hadn’t showered since the day before yesterday, and since then I’d been in a car wreck, gotten lost in the woods and been chased by hungry lizard things. I must have been a mess, and I probably stank to high hell. “Where do I do that?”

“Please follow,” she said.

She led me around the back of the guesthouse, where I found an ingenious contraption of wooden wheels and bamboo chutes, connected to ... I couldn’t even figure out where it began. Heleen pulled a lever, a wheel began turning and a tube tilted down, allowing water to flow into a sort of upside-down funnel ending in a cleverly designed showerhead, and stream down to the wooden floor beneath it, which was complete with a drain.

I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it, but these people actually had a working plumbing system.

But I noted with some dismay what they didn’t have: privacy screens.

Well, duh! As if the perpetual nudists who lived here had any need for privacy screens. Looking around me, I could see other people using their own showers, right out in the open in full view of everyone. And why wouldn’t they?

But that kind of put me in an awkward position. Just because I was stuck living indefinitely with these people who went nude 24/7 didn’t mean I was ready to take the same plunge.

Heleen sensed my apprehension. “Is something wrong?”

I hesitated a long while before answering her, as I concluded what I’d have to do. It wouldn’t be especially comfortable, but it was one type of discomfort I’d endure to avoid another. “No, I guess not,” I said at last. I slipped out of my shoes and stripped off my shirt and jeans, leaving my boxers on. I was a bit unprepared for how shockingly cold the water was, but I shouldn’t really have expected anything different. Besides, in the warm climate here it wasn’t so bad.

There were a few small containers made of polished bamboo with different markings carved into them on a shelf in front of me. Heleen showed me which one contained the herbal soap formula and which one was for my hair. I finished using them and lifted the lever I saw her use to shut the water off. She handed me a comb that looked like it was carved from some kind of animal bone. It seemed to work surprisingly well, though I found myself wishing for a mirror.

“Do you have anything I could use to shave?” I asked, rubbing the stubble that had grown on my face over the last two days.

“Shave?”

“Yeah, you know, cut the hair off my face?”

She thought on that for a second. “I can ask someone. Now I think we should go.”

I wrung as much water as I could out of my boxers, and toweled off with a cloth that Heleen handed me. I pulled my clothes on over my still damp shorts. It was going to be a little uncomfortable for a while, but I’d get through it.

I followed Heleen to one of the plazas, where a number of people were seated at communal tables. There were lots of dishes of chopped fruits and some sort of bread creations being passed around as the people ate and chatted amiably. “We may sit wherever you like,” Heleen said.

“Does a princess really sit and eat with the common folk?”

“Why not?” she said. “They are my people.”

“Clay!” a voice called. I looked in its direction to find Tekia seated at one of the tables, waving me over.

I smiled back at her. “I guess we’ll sit there,” I said.

I hadn’t lost much of my celebrity appeal. I still got plenty of attention as I approached the table. But then, so did Heleen. “Pelamo, Veseed,” they greeted her, bowing their heads reverently as she passed.

I took a seat next to Tekia, who greeted me with “Pelamo, Clay.”

I turned an eye back to Heleen, sitting down on the other side of me. “That means ‘hello?’” I said. When Heleen nodded, I turned back and said “Pelamo, Tekia.”

“Pelamo, Clay,” said someone else. I noticed for the first time when he spoke that the hunting guy from the woods yesterday was seated across from us.

“Oh, hi, uh...” I started to say. “You know, I don’t think I got your name.”

He looked at me curiously, uncomprehending, until Heleen translated for him. Then he nodded, and gestured to himself and said, “Jazum.”

“Jazum,” I repeated. “Well, pelamo Jazum.”

Tekia turned to pick up a bowl of something, which she began placing on a plate in front of her before handing it to me. I started to say “thank you,” which I’d already established with her by this point, but then got a different idea. I turned to Heleen and asked, “How do you say ‘thank you?’”

“Valesa,” she said.

“Valesa, Tekia,” I said. Tekia grinned wide.

The contents of the bowl were like round crackers with a pit in the middle filled with some kind of orange-colored jam. They were actually quite good. I had time to enjoy about three or four of them before I caught someone approaching out of the corner of my eye. I turned and looked up to see the lead spear woman approaching the table. Impulsively I shrunk back from her; I mean hey, her gaze seemed to be on me, and her gaze was scary. But after doing no more to me than simply acknowledging my presence, she turned her attention to her fellow hunters. “A reshuk,” she stated sharply.

Tekia and Jazum nodded, immediately rising from the bench and following her away, though Tekia did pause to give me a small wave. I turned to Heleen. “What did she say?”

“They are going to practice now.”

“Just like that? She barks, they jump?”

“Shimara is Kemkuva. Lead hunter. She must be strong and hard. She must be an example to other kuva.”

“Kuva, that’s regular hunters, right?”

Heleen nodded.

“Well, she’s definitely that. Among other things,” I grimaced, remembering how she was by the stream yesterday.

We finished eating, and then Heleen beckoned me to follow her as we began my tour of the village. She guided me past some of the residential houses, to a house full of jars and bottles of herbal concoctions, where I found the medicine man from yesterday, or yubaga as Heleen called him, treating some man’s shoulder injury. For a people who didn’t appear to have labs or actual hospitals, looking around the little infirmary there appeared to be no shortage of medicines they had come up with.

She showed me the school, where children arranged in semicircles knelt in front of low tables, writing with black charcoal-like implements on woven sheets while a woman of about 40 instructed them, using a hanging board of some kind of smoothed wood behind her to write on for the class. Personally I wouldn’t have guessed that these people had their own writing system. I made a note to myself that I would have to stop underestimating them.

On the eastern edge of the village were the farms and orchards. There were people here ranging in age from 13 to 65 working in the fields, tending or planting their crops, or harvesting fruit from their trees. There were livestock in pens, but most of them didn’t look like any animals I’d ever seen. There were some animals that Heleen called borfin, which had bodies like pigs but their faces looked more like an old bulldog that had been given a Botox injection. And apparently I’d eaten some meat from these animals yesterday. There were some other equally bizarre animals, some kept for their milk, others for ... other things they provided. And then there were chickens. Yes, just plain, ordinary chickens. It was kind of refreshing to know that human wasn’t the only animal this world and mine had in common.

Our tour eventually took us to the range where the hunters and warriors were training. Some of them were firing arrows at painted targets, while others sparred with wooden staffs. There were cross-shaped wooden dummies riddled with slashes from people hacking at them, or pumped full of arrows, some of which where being hacked at or shot at now. There was clearly no gender discrimination in this job; men didn’t seem to have any problem choosing women as sparring partners, or getting beaten by them in a number of cases. Presiding over the whole thing was the lead spear woman, Shimara, barking instructions to anyone she saw doing something wrong, and occasionally ordering someone to spar with her before she quickly mopped the floor with them. At least she was good enough to then give them pointers ... or she could have been telling them “On your feet, maggot!” for all I knew.

I spotted Tekia and Jazum practicing their archery. “Hold up,” I told Heleen, and began moving to approach them. I was about halfway to them when a wooden staff was raised in front of me to block my path, with Shimara holding it. “Kisamas!” she barked.

“Look,” I said, holding my hands up to try to calm her, “If I knew what the hell kisamas was I’d be happy to do it, but I don’t, so I’m afraid I can’t.”

“Kisamas!” she repeated, pushing at me with her staff.

“Ooookay, we’re gonna have a problem,” I muttered.

“Clay!” came Tekia’s pleasantly surprised chirp as she came sauntering in my direction.

Shimara immediately whirled on her, snapping “Reshuk jurunas! Makot jon so pelezen!”

Heleen stepped up to my side. “Geharemas. Jon hi, hatak e kwed ji kro sufom chigol.”

Shimara looked at Heleen unpleasantly. She huffed her indignation, and turned away.

I looked at Heleen with raised eyebrows. “Well, I’m impressed. What did you say to her?”

“I told her if she didn’t let you stay I would tell father she was rude to you.”

“Your dad commands a lot of respect, doesn’t he?” I said.

“Father can make her not Kemkuva anymore.”

I paused—and then both of us cracked up laughing. We laughed a little longer than we probably should have, until I looked at poor Tekia, who had no idea what was so funny. “I’m sorry, Tekia,” I said.

I don’t think she understood the words, but she seemed to get my meaning. She brightened up a little, and began tugging at my arm. “Mezas!” she chirped, pulling me by the arm to the archery range.

When we got in front of the target she’d been using, she picked up her bow and quiver and shoved them into my hands. “Uchumas!” she said, smiling brightly.

“Uchumas?” I repeated.

“Shoot,” Heleen translated for me, stepping up to my side again. “She wants you to shoot.”

I looked at the target in front of us, and frowned. “Oh, no, bad idea,” I said shaking my head and trying to give the bow and quiver back to Tekia. “I couldn’t shoot the Great Wall of China if it was two feet in front of me!”

Even without knowing what I was saying, Tekia seemed to be getting very good at reading me. She gently pushed the bow and quiver back to me and said, “Benas.”

“Try,” Heleen translated.

I grimaced, took a few seconds to stare at the target, and shrugged. I pulled an arrow from the quiver, gripped the bow in front of me, and tried as best I could to align the arrow on it. Pulling back on the string was a bit harder than it looked; the thing was pretty damn taut.

I suddenly realized I wasn’t hearing any arrows around me. I stopped to look around, and was mortified to find that all the other archers had stopped practicing to watch me. Oh, this wasn’t going to be pretty.

Squinting one eye, I tried as carefully as I could to align the tip of the arrow with the center of the target. I took my time, trying as hard as I could to get my best aim. I finally released the string—and the arrow flew about six feet before drooping pathetically into the dirt.

For what seemed an eternity, but was probably only a few seconds, there was dead silence. Then somebody laughed. Then someone else. And someone else. It grew until Tekia turned and yelled something at them, getting them all to stop and resume their practice, though most of them were still grinning and gossiping with each other. I turned to Tekia, giving her an ‘I told you so’ kind of shrug.

Tekia stepped up and pulled an arrow from the quiver, placing it in my hand. Then she moved to my back, took hold of my bow arm, and—pressed herself against my back. Even through my clothes, I could just feel her nakedness against me. I tried to gulp, for all the good it did me.

She carefully positioned my bow arm. My jeans suddenly got very tight as she reached around to take hold of my other arm. She had to let go of my bow arm, since I was a bit larger than she was, so that she could more effectively guide my arrow arm. She gripped my forearm, guided my aim, and helped me pull back on the arrow. She took hold again of my bow arm, by the upper part this time, to steady the bow. We held like that for a long moment, until finally she said, “Uchumas.”

I released. The arrow flew, striking the target just a few inches southeast of the bullseye.

Tekia released me, and stepped forward, grinning at me proudly. I smiled honestly back at her. “Valesa,” I said.

She smiled back, making my smile widen—and then shrink down again when I looked up to see Shimara watching me from a few feet away with her hands on her hips, with a look that seemed to ask if I was done wasting her hunters’ time.

“Come, Clay, we should continue,” Heleen said.

I nodded to her, and stepped up to hand the bow back to the smiling Tekia. I paused there, lingering in her gaze as we both held the bow until Heleen called my name again, and Shimara barked that same command at me again. I turned my head back as Heleen and I walked away, seeing Tekia watching me go, as were many of the other hunters before Shimara stepped up and commanded them all to get back to business.

Continuing the tour, we observed the wood smiths and the metal smiths, the shops of craftsmen and artisans, and the botanical gardens placed to give more cheer here and there. Eventually we stopped for lunch, which consisted of a few items of produce that I didn’t recognize, and wasn’t particularly fond of, but ate anyway out of a desire to not appear rude. The bits of meat we were served were pretty good, but I found myself questioning more than I had yesterday where exactly this meat was coming from.

Heleen told me we’d seen most that there was to see of the village, and asked if there was anything specific I’d like to do now. I told her I was hoping for a chance to speak with her father today. She said he had some business to take care of, but she could probably get me in to see him later. Until then, we’d have the afternoon to ourselves.

We took a seat in the village square, shortly before the children were released from their lessons. We were soon surrounded by running and laughing kids playing with wooden sticks and hoops and woven balls. Before yesterday, if someone had told me I’d be seeing dozens of children running around playing naked, I’d have found the idea perverse. But looking at it now, there was something just so ... innocent about the whole thing. So natural, even. So ... free.