Page 192 of Mates for the Raskarrans #1-6

CHAPTER FOUR

Dazzik

I am disoriented when I wake, confused for a moment why I am not in a travel tent, why there is not a comfortable bed beneath me. The dream was so real, like my waking dreams of Nelsah, that it lingers in the front of my headspace long after the waking world should have taken hold.

A nightmare. A strange nightmare. A result of my ‘counting mouthfuls’, as Nelsah put it.

It is not the first time I have dreamed out my desires for companionship.

I was young when the sickness came, have grown knowing that a dreamspace would never come to me.

But I have dreamed before of a soft female body moving under me, arms and tail wrapped about me, woken with my cock aching almost as much as my heartspace.

But in those dreams, the females have always been faceless, unknowable.

They did not have names and they did not have features, never mind ones so unlike my own.

Sam. Her face comes to my headspace as easily as her name. That nest of wild hair, framing round eyes the colour of the sky. A small, blunt little nose, pale skin with strange markings dotted across the bridge of her nose, her cheeks.

I find I think about those strange markings most of all. Like the stars in the night sky, but on her face. I would like to look on them again, I think. See what constellations I could find in them.

I scowl at myself. I could have dreamed a tall, striking raskarran female.

Instead, I have imagined myself a soft, pale female.

One who is not well suited for a life under Lina’s trees.

She is pretty in her strange way, but she has no claws for climbing, lacks strength in her limbs for drawing a bow, or wielding a spear.

Her skin would not blend with her surroundings.

Even if she could be quiet as a whisper, her prey would spy her coming from a distance away.

A female who would require the comforts and securities of a village and a tribe. Things I cannot provide. It is a clever nightmare, twisting a knife deep into my gut, and I am reminded of Nelsah’s words to me in my previous waking dream.

You will not need it.

I glance at my cave, at the supplies within.

I am not gifted with any sort of connection to my goddess, not possessed of any foresight. Portents and omens are not things that have come to me before, but that is how these dreams feel. As though I am being warned of something.

Unease settles in my belly as I contemplate how best to spend my day. I should resume my forage, or attempt to set more traps, but it is hard to think of it as worthwhile when it seems that all the signs would point to it being unnecessary.

And the only way that it would be unnecessary would be if I am not destined to survive this season.

Echoing from my past, Basran’s voice sounds in my ears.

You will not survive a season without us. You will be as dead as your goddess before the rains come.

My scar pulls tight on my face and I scratch at it.

It has been nine seasons since I fought my brother for the heartspace of our tribe and lost, but the scar Basran gave me that day still aches from time to time.

Some days, the ache is so bad, it is as if I can still feel the sting of the acra bark he ground into the wounds as guard against proper healing - to ensure that I would always bear these marks.

It is the cruelest part of being made outcast, and it is done so that all might know what you are at a glance.

So that no other tribe might take pity on a lone male and take him in.

Basran did not think I would survive long on my own, and it is true that many outcasts do not.

There are creatures in Lina’s forests that choose isolation.

The merka beasts guard their territories fiercely, only allowing others to enter when they require help with a hunt or to find a mate.

Raskarrans are not made this way. We need our tribe around us.

It is not just that bearing the burden of hunter, warrior, healer all alone is more than any male has the strength and wit to do well. It is that we need companionship.

I think of Nelsah, visiting me in my waking dreams. She has been my only company for many seasons.

I am under no illusion that she is real.

The real Nelsah died long ago - I have only the shadow of her left to me.

But that shadow has softened the edges of my loneliness, has kept me going when I thought I might give up.

Now she tells me that I do not need my supplies. Hints to me that the time for me to return to Lina’s embrace is come.

And the same night I am dreaming of some other female. Not just a fondly remembered friend, but a new female talking of being my mate. I wonder if my heartspace sends me one last softness, one last pleasure to enjoy before I breathe my last.

I push the thoughts away. It is useless to read meaning into dreams, even if they feel like portents.

If my goddess desires me back in her embrace, she will take me.

There is little I can do to change that.

For now, I should continue as if I am to survive another fifty seasons yet. I should get to work.

So I set my traps in the best places near to my cave.

I do not hold out much hope that they will catch me anything - most creatures are to their beds for the big rains already, and those that are not are not worth catching, anyway.

Like me, they will be struggling to survive, barely enough meat on their bones to make a good snack.

But I set my traps for them all the same.

A small chance is better than no chance at all.

I take a different path for my forage, looking for new bushes grown since I last walked my territory.

I wander far, pausing to rest late in the afternoon, when hunger nips at my stomach hard enough that I have to stop, snack on the forage I’ve gathered so far.

I gnaw on some roots - not succulent and soft as they are after boiling in a broth, but hard and difficult to chew.

It makes them take longer to eat, deceiving my stomach into feeling fuller than it actually is.

A trick I learned in one of my early seasons as an outcast.

Better to be hungry now when I have work to do to distract me than during the big rains when idleness will be my constant companion.

It is a gloomy thought, but one I am glad to have. If I am thinking like this, then perhaps I am not so ready to give up as I was starting to think myself.

As the night approaches, I find myself wandering near to one of my favourite places on my territory - an old outpost. I do not know which tribe it belonged to.

Perhaps Walset’s, perhaps another that once lived close to his territory.

In the days after the sickness, so many tribes left their territories - to merge with another nearby, to become marauders, or just to wander in Lina’s forests, searching for something.

For a reason to carry on, I suppose. The tribes that remained all reduced their territories, leaving outposts and hunters’ huts to be reclaimed by the wild.

This outpost was overgrown with vines when I found it, but I cleared it up and the structure beneath all the mess remained sound.

I have maintained it over the seasons, coming here often when I need a place to sit with myself and my thoughts.

I climb up onto the platform, setting my bag of forage by the trunk, then heading out into the centre of the outpost, where the canopy is thinnest overhead.

I lie back, staring up at the sky overhead, watching as the blue of it deepens until it turns black, the stars speckled across its surface like those strange, pretty marks on Sam’s face.

The small moon, Aerfin, is full and rounded, while the larger is in a shadowed phase.

Felmat wraps himself in the night’s darkness to better hunt his female.

“Tell me the story of the moons.”

I glance over to my left, where Nelsah is sitting, her knees pressed close to her chest, her arms and tail wrapped around them, her head tipped back as she stares up at the sky.

“I have told it to you many times.”

“Tell it again!”

Her voice goes higher, softer. The piping tones of a youngling.

When I look at her closer, I see her face is softer, younger, also.

Most often she comes to these strange waking dreams as the grown female she never had the chance to become, but sometimes I get the Nelsah I remember from before the sickness arrived at our doors.

“ The very first raskarran to find himself in the dreamspace was the hunter Felmat,” I say, and I am surprised how much I sound like my own father did, when he used to tell this story to me.

“He desired a female from another tribe, Aerfin. She was the most beautiful of all the females, and Felmat’s heartspace beat only for her from the very first moment he spied her amongst her tribe sisters. ”

Nelsah grins, little fangs flashing in the moonlight.

“Aerfin had many suitors who wished to name her their mate, but they only desired her for her beauty. Beauty is a fine thing, but it is also fickle. It changes with the seasons, can be lost to an accident or to sickness.”

These words stick in my throat, difficult to speak, but Nelsah does not flinch. This version of her does not yet know that she will lose her own beauty to sickness, and her fierce spirit with it. I clear my throat before I continue.