PETRICHOR
If we capture this female, is it still considered poaching? We left our territory to investigate the thing that fell from the sky, and found females. We haven't seen females in literal ages. Do the old customs and rules even apply? We don't know who defends this area any longer, but if we did, we'd make an offer of a fair trade for this one. Of all the females that have arrived, she needs males the most; she is in the poorest condition. We've spied her husbandman attempting to obtain rations, but it isn't enough to sustain her; she's wilting right before our eyes.
I'm not surprised they have ignored our note in the dust. We knew it'd be unlikely they'd be able to read our language, but Maceous had hoped.
They do accept our offer of food and drink though, which is promising. They give a cursory look around for us but neither the female nor her husbandman call out for us to join them.
Instead, once she has finished drinking and eating, the female rallies enough to boldly initiate a feeding, and finally, her husbandman seems interested in providing for her.
He backs her to Maceous' smooth-barked foreleg.
We stare down at them in shock.
"Are you inviting us to join?" Mace wonders hopefully.
Her voice shakes with repressed laughter when she asks, "Yoor goeeng too fuhk mee agannst eh tuhree?"
She isn't responding to Maceous, but to her husbandman.
He subdues her with a playful hand over her mouth. "Shuht uhp, en eye'll geht yoo awf agannst eh tuhree, woomahn."
He keeps his hand over her mouth to maintain silence, and his unease when he glances around is palpable, wise, and understandable. I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling compelled to share our intentions, and make him a tribe-joining offer simply so he can have peace of mind in this moment.
Yet I say nothing. None of us interrupts as he returns his attention to her, his hand cupping between her legs. It appears as if he possesses plenty of pollen, as he rapidly brings her to peak, and yet—
"What is the knothead doing?" Bortammos whispers beside me.
The husbandman takes a step back from her instead of feeding her.
"She is failing to thrive! Can't he see he's starving her?"
I shake my head, confounded. "Maybe he's young. Maybe she's not yet a full scion and without her family's permission he doesn't feel welcome."
She tilts her head up, looking in our direction. We fall silent, waiting politely for her to call out to us. They speak a stranger's tongue; that's not unexpected. She can still call for us if she is interested. That is one of the ways; the other two would be her tribe accepting a trade, or least desirable—we poach her.
I'm hopeful that she is going to choose the most preferable option, until her husbandman distracts her attention from us. "Noww yoor woohred ahbowt teh tuhrees ahgann?"
"Weer maykeeng sohm aneemahls vehree uhpset. Kant yoo heer tem? Leeson; eye thawt eye herd ah wuhrd."
"Trahnslayter leerns, 'membr? Yoor prahblahblee leerneeng spaysuh sqkwerrl."
"Whut eef eets uhn aleeann mowntayn lyuhn? Yoo dohnt noh!"
When they begin bickering, we resume our conversation. Bortammos slants me a look. "He doesn't appear so young. If I were a sapling I would have fed that female. He must be soddish."
The husbandmen in question seems to be growing excited at her torrent of words as they squabble and even goes so far as to clasp her and bite her neck.
Instead of struggling, she wraps all her limbs around him and relaxes.
"He subdues her with his teeth like an animal?"
"Interesting."
Yet he pulls back again. He looks around.
Mace peers around with him. "He's worried about an attack." He attempts to sniff his foreleg without bringing his head any further down. "What he needs is the protection of a group."
"Yet they've left theirs," I muse.
"Let's approach him. We can make an appeal to join our tribes."
I want to make this appeal. Caution holds me back. Uninterested females run. This one doesn't look strong enough for a chase, and her male may be physically better off, but his exhaustion is apparent. "Let them rest; we can watch over them, give them until night's fall. We can bring them more tapriklut to keep the Ak'rena from shrieking over them. She seemed to tolerate the taste."
Mace bares his teeth. "By night's fall she could succumb to starvation. Look at her."
I tip my head. "Rush her now and she'll push herself until she's dead." As if to illustrate my point, instead of resting as she so desperately should be, she's pacing with her husbandman as sounds begin to disturb them.
"I believe we're about to see the landowner tribe make an appearance," Mace says. He sounds as discouraged as I'm sure we all feel. We had worked to make this end of the clearing as inviting as possible, adding warm sandy soil perfect for lighting a fire, we'd even provided the tinder and wood, and if our heartstones should happen to be arranged in such a way that the female might notice them, and might even be coaxed to blood them...
We had hoped. But she hasn't so much as glanced down yet, and now with her tribe's arrival, she might not be allowed to blood us even if she suddenly decided to.
Interestingly, it's the husbandman that backs her to the sandy area, and he nudges her to stand right over our heartstones, even going so far as to join her on top of them.
I glance to the other two and see we're all in agreement: this seems like a positive sign.
That is, until all underworld breaks loose
YOU ARE READING
Alluvial. Valos of Sonhadra Book 1
Fantasía.Someone's using me as leverage against my family. I was your average citizen, innocent of any crime worth going to prison for, and yet here I am. But this isn't a regular prison ship. *Torture.* Experiments. They alter me. And when the ship crashes...
