Page 200 of Mates for the Raskarrans #1-6

CHAPTER EIGHT

Dazzik

T he moment Sam closes her eyes, the whole dream around me grows hazy, shifting and changing.

The soft glow of the travel tent darkens, all the warmth bleeding out of the light.

The air changes, growing somehow brittle and sharp, everything around me perfectly straight and utterly unnatural.

The bed she is standing beside no longer has soft pelts atop it, but a grey fabric that looks coarse and uncomfortable.

I look up and spy a tiny sun near the top of this strange place, casting a bright, piercing light downwards.

I shield my eyes, flinching away from it.

“Welcome to my home.” Her lips are twisted with displeasure, as if she no more likes this place than I do, and yet she calls it her home. I look around again, hunting for any sign of comfort, any hint that a person with thoughts and feelings could live here, and find none.

“Dreary, isn’t it?”

My attention snaps back to Sam as she steps around the bed and up to the smooth, flat wall. She trails her fingers along its impossible surface as she turns to me.

“I much prefer the tents and the trees and the cute little wooden huts of your world. Everything Mercenia built was so grey.”

“Why did you choose Mercenia as your tribe’s builder, then?”

A grin spreads across her face, but even her brightness seems dulled here, as if the tiny sun overhead bleeds all the colour out of her.

“There wasn’t a lot of choice for me back where I came from,” she says.

She drops onto the bed, perching at the edge of it. The sight of her on a bed ought to tug at that place low in my stomach that needs her, but I feel nothing but a growing sense of unease as she pats the space next to her, meaning for me to sit alongside her.

“Not much of a home is it?” she says, gesturing round us.

“This is what Mercenia calls a ‘single occupancy suite’. ‘Suite’ makes it sound so much grander than it is, don’t you think?

” She gives a low laugh. “I used to wonder why they gave us these individual rooms - must have taken up a lot more space than sticking everyone in together would have. But I think they realised that loneliness was a weapon they could use to control us. All alone every night, no one to talk to, we couldn’t make each other happier.

Couldn’t give each other something to fight for. ”

Her words bite into a tender place in my heartspace, for do I not know this so intimately? Loneliness is a weapon, and Basran wielded it against me just the same.

“We raskarrans, we need our tribe around us,” I say, and my voice comes out rasping.

“Humans do, too. That’s what I am, human.”

“Human.” I taste the strange word, feel the shape of it in my mouth. I think of her words, how she hopes to prove she is real by showing me how I could not have invented her. It is working, I think. All this strangeness around me - I do not think I could have created it in my headspace alone.

Overhead, a strange wailing sound starts, and in my surprise, I push her body behind mine, looking round for the threat that I am sure must be coming.

But the sounds seems to come from a small box in the corner between two of the flat, flat walls and the equally flat ceiling.

It is a box no bigger than my hand, and I marvel at the lungs on a creature so small that could make so much noise.

“What manner of creature is inside here?” I ask, walking over to it, peering at the little holes in the front of the box, trying to catch a glimpse.

Sam tugs on my arm, laughing. “It’s just a speaker. It’s a kind of technology that creates sounds.”

“Technology?” I have a sense of what this word means, but not enough to fully understand what she is saying.

“Technology is just…” She casts her eyes to the ceiling, hunting for the explanation in her headspace. “Fire is a technology for cooking and creating light. Traps are a technology for catching creatures. Technology is just something you make to do something for you.”

“And you have made this box to screech at you?”

She laughs again. “I didn’t make it. Someone else did. I would rather not have it screeching at me every morning, but there we are. It’s to wake me up, so I get to work on time.”

“Every morning? You sleep so heavily that you need this?”

She shakes her head, eyes glimmering with amusement. “You know when you’ve had a really long day, and you go to bed exhausted. The next morning, you don’t want to get out of your cosy furs, you just want to snuggle in them and snooze.”

“I know this feeling, yes.” A little too well of late.

“Mercenia would work us so hard that I’d feel like that every day. If they didn’t sound the alarm, none of us would be up in time to start our jobs.”

“You speak often of this Mercenia. Is he a builder or a tribe chief or something else to you?”

“Mercenia isn’t a person,” she says, frowning as she thinks on what to say next.

“Mercenia is… an organisation. Imagine if there was a tribe that was in charge of all the other tribes. You have your tribe, there’s Gregar’s, Walset’s, Darran’s…

All these tribes, and they are controlled by another tribe.

That other tribe tells them what they should spend their time doing.

Darran’s tribe fish, Walset’s tribe hunt ensoukas.

Gregar’s tribe build huts for everyone. Your tribe do all the cooking for everyone else.

You wouldn’t have any choice in it, because the tribe in charge has all the control. Does that make sense?”

“It does not make any kind of sense,” I say.

“But I understand what you are describing. So Mercenia was another tribe, and they told your tribe what to do? But they were not good leaders, I think, if you were so tired each day that you required that screeching to get out of bed. Did your leaders not rally against them? Your warriors not fight to protect you?”

Her smile is slow, but brilliant, shining through the dull grey of this strange world.

“You’re a good man, Dazzik. You’d protect your tribe from someone who would do them harm.”

She has many wrong ideas about me - I have no tribe to protect, after all - but in this, she is not wrong.

I have done many things I am not proud of in my seasons, but I can say with certainty that I tried to protect my tribe.

I stood up against Basran. I did not succeed, but it is the trying that matters.

“Our tribe chiefs were not good men,” Sam continues.

“Mercenia would offer them a better deal. More food, better huts, nicer furs. All they had to do was to not fight back, to not rise up against Mercenia. Plenty of people didn’t mind that others suffered, as long as they weren’t the ones suffering.

If they benefitted, they didn’t mind what happened to anyone else. ”

I seethe at this, but I know it is not an impossibility. Did Basran not do the same to my tribe? Did he not make it so that others suffered and he benefitted?

“I have known a male like this,” I say. “That is one thing I have no trouble imagining.”

The screeching sound, which had quieted while we spoke, sounds again, a shorter blast this time. I am grateful - my ears do not appreciate the tone of it.

“Time to go,” Sam says, rising to her feet and holding out a hand to me.

“Go to where?”

“Work,” she says.

I think of my own day, rising with the sun, eating a morning meal, deciding on what best my time be used for.

Forage, hunting, repairs, rest. It is my decision what I do.

My mistake to bear if I choose wrongly, but I would take that over being told by screeching sounds what to do and when every time.

“Brace yourself,” Sam says as her fingers close tight around mind. “You think it’s weird in this room? It’s about to get a lot stranger for you.”

I do not know how such a thing could be possible.

But then she steps toward the door, pulling it open and drawing me outside.

We step out into a narrow tunnel full of people that look just like Sam, except their heads are bare, no bird’s nest of hair, just shiny, rounded scalps.

They walk with their eyes cast down, not speaking to anyone.

Not greeting their tribe brothers and sisters even as they fall into step beside each other.

Sam follows after them, turning back every so often, glancing from our conjoined hands up to my eyes, as if to check I am not frightened by this strange place we walk through.

I am not frightened, not if she walks without fear in her gaze, but I am disquieted.

Everything I see as we follow after the marching people confuses me.

From their clothes all the same, to the strange smoothness of the walls and floor, to the downwards tunnel we enter, the floor moving lower in even drops.

And more and more, I do not understand where these visions of this place have come from.

This is my dream, my headspace, but these things that she talks of, the things I have seen, make little sense to me.

I cannot fathom this world. Even studying it as I am, I cannot make it make sense to my headspace.

At the bottom of the twisting downward tunnel, we come to another door, and then we are out of the strange smooth cave, and into an equally strange, smooth world.

Everything is grey. There are no trees, no plants underfoot, no blue in the sky, no birdsong to give colour to the air.

It is almost like we are still in a cave, only there is sky overhead.

Sky between huge, towering structures. Huts that stretch higher than the canopies of my forest, all of them with a constant stream of strange, grey people erupting out of them.

So many people. More people than I have ever seen in my lifetime. How is a tribe so big?

How is a tribe so big controlled by another?