Page 7 of Caveman Alien’s Horn (Caveman Aliens #26)

7

- Cora -

I’m not sure I understand what he means about there being life inside the tree, but my eyes widen all by themselves when he takes off a piece of the tree’s bark and outer layers of wood. There’s a dark opening into the tree, which must be hollow.

I take a step back. If there’s some kind of lifeform inside it, it may want to come out.

But instead, Sprisk steps in and holds out a massive hand in an invitation to join him.

I’m curious, so I grab it and step thirty inches up into the tree, partly hoisted by Sprisk.

“Very nice,” I exclaim when I crane my neck to look up. Down here, the outside of the tree trunk has the same area as a good-sized house. Whoever excavated it left the side walls thick, so in here, the diameter is only about thirty feet. That’s still the footprint of a two-bedroom apartment.

There are no rooms that I can see. But there are floors, separated by thick nets with a wide mesh. Those nets fill the inside of the tall hollow, which stretches most of the way to the top.

It’s like being inside an industrial smoke stack filled with nets.

Sprisk carefully puts my pack down, then climbs the nets so fast he looks like a giant spider in its web.

The nets aren’t sticky, though. They’re made from ropes about the thickness of my index finger, and the mesh is large enough for me to put my head through. I can’t see myself getting stuck in it, and it looks like it’s fun to climb it. There are so many levels and slack-hanging nets that even if I lost my grip on one, I’d only fall about six feet before I’d land softly in another.

Sprisk climbs up and around and along the sides. It looks like he’s just enjoying himself, like a kid let loose at a playground.

Finally he falls and crawls and jumps until he’s back down at the ground level, which takes him about five seconds. “You see how secure it all is. I wanted the boys of the clan to live in here. They could climb and play without any risk of falling. They could sleep here, too. No rain can get in.”

Gazing up, I spot a ceiling way up there. Small windows have been cut in the side of the tree all up along its length. They let in bright rays of light, especially higher up. I suppose whoever carved this space wanted the walls to be especially thick and sturdy down here, where they carry the full weight of the tree.

“Who made?” I ask, yanking on the nearest netting and finding it safely attached to the wall.

“The nets? I did. And some of the boys in the clan. Bakitan is a good net-maker, despite his hand. Although they never got to see this place. I wanted it to be a surprise, but then it wasn’t needed anymore.”

“Who made”? I repeat, sliding my hand along the wood. It’s been roughly hewn, but there are no splinters sticking out, no dangerous edges. “All clan?”

Sprisk looks up. “Just me. It took years.”

“Uh…” I begin, sure I didn’t understand what he said. The mass of the wood that’s been removed from here must be in the hundreds of tons, far too much for one man. Even a remarkably strong, eight feet tall caveman with immense energy. “Just you?”

“It took years,” he repeats and picks my pack back up, brushing invisible dust off its bottom. “The wood is softer than it looks.”

I put a fingernail to the wood and try to push it in, but the material is just as hard as any oak furniture I ever knew. “Uh-huh.”

“Come along,” Sprisk says and climbs twenty feet in two seconds. “It’s nicer higher up.”

I shrug and follow him, finding the climbing easy in the large-mesh netting. It’s angled a little bit inwards, so that the climbing gets easier. I do believe this was made for young Foundlings.

The thought of escaping does cross my mind. I could try to run again. But whenever I’ve tried, it very nearly ended with disaster. When Sprisk wanted to give me to the two creepy outcasts, it forced me to decide. And coming with him was the obvious decision. He hasn’t harmed me, and he’s saved my life at least twice. The jungle seems to vanish around him, as if he has the cheat code to it. I can’t help but like the way it feels to be around him.

And he has a look in his eyes that’s both pain and lust. And guilt, I think. He’s a troubled one, no question about it.

“But so am I,” I mutter to myself as I climb. “He’ll find out soon enough. Then we’ll see who’s the crazier one.”

“It will be safe here.” Sprisk puts my pack inside a net that’s attached to the wall. There are many other things being held like that. There are pots, wooden boxes, wickerwork baskets, and wooden tools of various types. I already suspected that the Foundlings don’t use metals much, and this seems to confirm it. I can’t see any iron items anywhere, no sword or knife or hammer.

So how did he carve out the entire insides of this huge tree?

“Come,” he says and climbs on.

I have to control myself to not look up his loincloth. Judging from the bulge, he’s packing something interesting. And not too human.

He stops by a round window the diameter of a soccer ball. Making himself comfortable, he stretches his legs out and leans back on one of several nets placed there, manspreading like nobody else in history. “This is my favorite spot. Try.”

I gingerly sit back on the net with my knees primly together. The net has finer mesh than the one we climbed up on, and it supports me in the places where I need it. With my weaver’s eye I notice that the nodes are well made, smoothly braided together instead of just tied with knots that would feel like hard pebbles against my back.

I find myself leaning back, stretching out and putting my feet up to be supported by the net opposite me. “Oh…”

“Nice, yes?” Sprisk asks with satisfaction. “I’ve spent many pleasant hours sleeping right here. And just thinking.”

It’s been years since I’ve been able to just lean back and relax. Even in my home in the other tree, I had to curl up on dry hay to sleep, and the hardness of the wood was always right beneath me. Here, it’s like sitting back in an armchair that adjusts itself after me and my movements.

I can even lean my head back. “Nice,” I say with feeling as I can’t help closing my eyes briefly, just to test how it feels. “ Very nice.”

The window is placed so that it’s easy to look out from where I’m sitting. I see the dry clearing below us, with its dozens of dead, fallen trees, as well as the regular trees of the jungle in the distance.

“How happen?” I ask, pointing lazily out. “Why dead the trees?”

“I don’t know,” Sprisk admits with a lightness that I like. Some guys I know would have made up the craziest stuff to not have to admit there was something they didn’t know. “It can’t always have been like that. For some reason, all the trees right here died.”

“Mmm,” I reply, not sure what to say. “Is nice place.”

“And safe,” Sprisk rumbles. “No Bigs come here.”

I hide a yawn behind my hand. There’s a wonderful draft coming up from below, caressing my skin. “So safe. But not safe from Sprisk.”

“Sprisk is here,” he admits. “He’s mostly safe for good people. Very safe for Cora.”

“What you do,” I ask, pleasantly drowsy and not careful about what I say, “if outcasts come back for me? When you yelled them?”

He adjusts his position, getting more comfortable. “If they had started to think I’d let them have you, I’d have killed them both. I got close to it when they waved their knives. It made me angry.”

He says it with such matter-of-factness that I don’t doubt it. And his eyes back there… I shudder at the memory. Those were the eyes of a killer. I make a mental note to not make him angry unless I really have to.

I yawn again. All right. I’ve been abducted, but I’m none the worse for wear. I’m far from home, but I seem to be safe for now, in this tree that feels like the inside of a wooden smoke stack.

Although as long as Sprisk is around, the word ‘safe’ may not be the most accurate. He had more of a plan with this than I thought. And from what Astrid told me, these cavemen really like getting Earth girls good and bred. That may well be his intention.

It’s just not going to be me.

Even if he were to somehow seduce me, with his sincere face and his bright smile and his giant muscles and totally irrational confidence, he’ll be foiled anyway. PCOS and endometriosis are tough enough on the fertility separately. When you have both, and both are on the severe side of the scale… well, it’s not impossible. But having babies of my own should probably not be part of my definite plans for the future, as my doctor gently told me the week before the abduction.

“I never thought I’d be happy about that,” I mutter to myself. “But here we are. No tentacled alien hybrids to give birth to.”

“What?” Sprisk asks.

I give him a little smile and scoot an inch lower on the netting. “Not. Is not thing.”

“Ah. Not thing.”

I swear his bassy voice makes the whole tree shake.

I lay my head back and close my eyes.

- - -

I wake up to the smell of meat being grilled. Sitting up on the netting, I rub my eyes and notice it’s much darker in this wooden smoke stack. But there’s no smoke. So my drowsy brain shrewdly concludes that someone is doing some cooking outside.

Well, I need the outside anyway, so I climb down the nets and step out of the tree.

Sprisk has built a fire and is busy grilling skewers with a variety of ingredients on them.

I stand there and watch him for a moment. He’s squatting by the fire, cutting pieces of meat and vegetables with a piece of sharpened stone. The flickering flames light him up, his massive muscles shining.

He looks unconcerned, his back to the jungle. He just looks up to scan the sky for dactyls once in a while.

There’s something so primal about the scene, I feel a thrill go through my lower regions. I wonder how many hundreds of generations of my male ancestors on Earth looked just like that, and how many times my female ancestors did what I’m doing, looking at a guy like that and thinking hmmmm…

On the other hand, I could sneak away right now. He wouldn’t know it until he checked on me. He’d have to track me through the woods at night, which might be really difficult.

No, I won’t do it. Not now. The jungle at night is worse than in the daytime. I won’t get far before I’m eaten by something horrible.

And I’m curious about how that food might taste.

I deal with my most pressing errand behind the trunk of a fallen tree, then go over to the fire. “Wind is good.” Suspecting I’m not using the right word, I sniff the air so he’ll know what I mean.

“I always liked the smell of meat being cooked,” he says slowly, clearly wanting to teach me the right word without correcting me. “I had some dried meat ready for us. Sit there.” He nods to a spot next to him. “The smoke won’t blow into your eyes.”

I take his suggestion, but add a foot or two of space between us. The ground is dry, and the thick tufts of withered grass are as soft as a foam mattress.

The jungle is its usual hyperactive self around us, with movements and rustling and distant howls and grunts of fighting or possibly quarreling dinosaurs. But in this dry and withered clearing, we have a pleasant distance to it. No monster can approach without us at least hearing it step on broken branches or dry grass, and in the light from the fire, we should be able to see it, too. Only dactyls could really surprise us.

I look up to make sure we’re not about to be swooped.

“Not many irox here,” Sprisk rumbles. “They don’t like this area. No Bigs do.”

“Is dead,” I ponder as I rip a handful of brown grass strands out of the ground and rub them between my fingers. “Dead all land.”

“Mostly dead,” Sprisk corrects. “But there are strange growing things at the edge of the clearing. Perhaps you saw them?”

I squint towards the nearest edge of the jungle, but I can’t see anything unusual there. “No.”

He turns the skewers, causing drops of grease to fall into the fire and make it hiss. “You will tomorrow.”

“And then take me home,” I suggest.

He doesn’t reply, which is a full reply in itself. He has no intention of letting me go home. At least not for now.

For some reason, I don’t care that much. It looks like I’m about to eat some meat for the first time since I came to this hellhole, and I’m salivating at the prospect. I can handle a vacation with this strange caveman if it means he’ll feed me well. And if it’s a short vacation.

“Stay here.” Sprisk gets to his feet and calmly walks out of the light circle from the fire. He stands there for a few moments, staring into the dark and looking tense.

A small shape passes him, waddling on two powerful legs and keeping its distance to the caveman.

“Your friend,” Sprisk growls as he sits back down.

Eric the vismonk comes over to me, looking at the fire.

I carefully reach out and shape my hand in the sign for respectful greeting.

Eric looks at my hand and makes the sign for laughing. It is the first time I use that greeting sign with him, because it’s usually reserved for adult vismonks and not the young ones. But he got that dactyl good, and he sure earned my respect.

“What do you think about this?” I ask him in English. “The place seems safe enough, and those skewers smell good. Should we stay for a while? See where this is going?”

Eric makes a sign that the vismonks use a lot and means ‘be quiet’. I think they use it reflexively when someone makes sounds in a place they don’t really know.

“I think we’re fine,” I tell him. “If that fire won’t attract enemies, I don’t think my yacking will.”

Sprisk takes two of the skewers off the fire and hands me one, cool end first.

“Thank you.” The steaming and sizzling pieces of meat are larger than I’d normally want them, but they should be a good size for Sprisk. I blow on the first one. It has a nice, dark crust all over and looks like a piece of beef.

I gingerly take a nibble with my front teeth. The meat is tender and very hot.

“Yum,” I marvel. “Spicy, too.” I take a bigger bite.

Sprisk bites into his own skewer, his long tongue making a frustratingly short appearance outside his lips. “The alien sounds are nice to listen to. So strange, like the alien women in the clan.”

“I say, is nice eat,” I explain in his language. “Meat is good. Smell is good,” I add so he knows I learned the word he wanted to teach me.

“It’s a spilo and a pilak ,” he tells me. “Smalls only. They have the most tender meat. Bigs have much more meat on them, but it’s sour. And tough.” He shows me by pretending to bite into a piece of dinosaur meat and having to rip the pieces off. Again I get a short glimpse of his fangs and tongue. It's definitely unusually long, and it looks hyper dexterous. I wonder what he can do with it.

“Big meat not nice,” I agree, although I never tried any dino meat and hope never to be tempted.

Indeed there are two types of meat on the skewers, not that different, just like chicken and lamb on Earth. Every third piece is a chunk of some kind of sweet root that I think I can identify, because the vismonks gave them to me and I ate them raw. It’s delicious, and I wolf it all down while trying not to look too uncontrollably hungry. He did abduct me, and being well fed is the least I can expect from him.

Without a word Sprisk hands me another skewer and starts to prepare two more.

I offer it to Eric, but he looks at it and turns his head away. The vismonks don’t really believe in cooking food, I think.

“You guys eat everything raw,” I remind the young alien creature as I chew. “And you seem to survive just fine without eating any meat.”

Sprisk ignores my English talk as he pours water from a cup into a thick-walled mug that reminds me of earthenware. He hands it to me and I sniff it. It’s a sweet-smelling fruit juice.

“Smell good,” I state, making good use of the word he taught me. It tastes good too, and I drain the mug in no time.

Sprisk refills the mug and drinks some himself from a wooden cup.

“You’re not the most talkative guy,” I tell him in English. “Are you having second thoughts about this whole project?”

I don’t expect him to reply, and I’m right. But it gives me an idea. What if I were to only speak English with him and force him to learn it? It might be cruel, but why should I accommodate him after he brought me here against my will?

I take a piece of meat off the skewer and hold it up. “Sprisk.”

He looks at me, raising his eyebrows.

“Meat,” I say in English, enunciating carefully. “ Meat. ”

He nods and gives me a small smile.

I point at him. “You now. Say ‘meat’. Meat .”

“Mid,” he rumbles, looking confused.

“Mee-tt,” I repeat.

“Meat.”

“Good.” I point to all three ingredients on the skewer. “Food.”

“Fud.”

“ Food.”

“Food.”

I point to the meat.

“Meat,” Sprisk says, then points to the three ingredients. “Food.”

To avoid misunderstanding, I slide the other type of meat off the skewer and hold up both of them. “Meat.” I point to all three, including the cooked root. “Food.”

I keep it going for a while. Sprisk is a good sport about it, and he’s a surprisingly quick study. After a half hour or so he’s learned the names for a few dozen things, including grass, ground, woman, caveman, fire, and vismonk.

As I run out of nearby objects, I get to my feet. “Wait here.”

I get into the tree, climb the nettings, and retrieve the pack that Astrid got me. I bring the whole thing back to the fire and sit down.

“Backpack,” I teach him. “Pot. Medicine.” I take out a chunk of dried food and hold it up, looking at Sprisk and raising my eyebrows.

“Meat,” he identifies the piece.

I open the small pot marked Sobriety and sniff it. “Wine.”

Sprisk sniffs it, too. “Frit.”

“Wine,” I insist.

“ Freeettt, ” he says, enunciating just as carefully as me, as if he’s teaching me now.

But I’m not giving in. “Wine.”

There’s a glint in his eye. “Frit.”

I sniff it again, exaggerating the sound, and close my eyes, acting as if the smell of the booze is the most wonderful thing. “Wiiine.”

He copies my movement. “Friiit.”

I shrug. “All right, I guess it is a caveman invention. We’ll call it ‘frine’, agreed? Frrrreyen .”

“Frine,” Sprisk says easily and with a satisfied smile.

We spend some time teaching each other words in our languages. I have a head start on him, so when it's something I really need him to understand, I'll have to use cavemannish. In fairness, it's also a much easier language to learn than idiom-heavy English. I can’t expect him to learn it. But I can teach him some of it.

The night is dark, and the blue moon is nowhere to be seen, even though we have a clear view of the sky in this circular clearing.

As I look around, I notice a strange, bluish glow at the edge of the jungle. “What is that?”

“What is what?” Sprisk asks, reasonably enough.

I point. “Is… fire. In jungle. Not fire. Just…” I point at our campfire and make the vismonk sign for 'light', which I always thought was a highly intuitive and clever one.

“Light?” Sprisk slowly gets to his feet. “I'll show you.”