There have never been secrets between Iano and his twin brother, Miano. But that changes when his brother marries an heir of the most powerful fief of the village. With such power comes the right to see the face of the Goddess. Only, Iano's twin mus...
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A few months of living in Anuka Alika had accepted that her father had now fully given his place to her Professor. He still tested his rabbits with the antidotes he fabricated. At this point, Alika was assigned little work: observing tissues under magnifying lenses, cleaning after the professor, cooking and fetching fruits and water while the professor worked alone in his quarters for hours on end. That allowed Alika to stretch the hours she spent in the portion of the forest that boarded the river Uluh.
Alika arrived and waited. Camouflaged among shrubs, black heads picked through, orange eyes following.
Aloso, fierce and daring, always came out of the wilderness first. "Alika," he always said her name as if he had just been startled, placing the accent at the beginning of the word rather than at the end, as it was usual back in Gomeh.
Behind him, the green-tailed capuchin monkey followed, and only then did Yuni come out of the shrubs too. Aloso was already gesturing toward the field of Mbaka trees where they used to take Alika for a view over the forest. To sit and lick mangoes dry one after the other.
Alika knew their basic words and simple expressions, she could name the fruits they ate the most frequently, and she could greet them and say farewell, but their language was still as mysterious as a dark marsh.
As time passed, they created a series of gestures that allowed them to communicate the essentials. So, she understood perfectly when her friends gestured for her to follow them to the field of Mbaka trees, and for the first time, to take the lead to climb the tree.
Alika panicked at first, but Aloso and Yuni surrounded her and helped her up the first steps upward. They led her to place her hands in the safest crevices and her feet on the steadiest protuberances.
Atop the first trunk, they already had a view that showed the whole forest spanning in front of them, burning orange under the light of a rising sun, with a golden Uluh river like a belt parting the forest in two halves. "You like it?" Yuni asked like she always did whenever they showed something new to her.
"Yes," Alika said, and because she lacked words in the Anuka language, she said it in Gomeka, "it's wonderful." They seemed to understand her and Aloso took her hand, while Yuni placed hers on Alika's shoulder.
Despite the cold wind that blew over the forest's canopy, Alika felt warm. She realized that for the first time, she had made friends. Or rather, they had made her a friend. When the morning light turned from orange to bright yellow, they climbed down the tree and the Anuka took Alika to a clean source of water. They were the ones to carry the bucket for her, showing pleasure in doing the task that Alika could never understand.
They said their farewell when the ship was visible in the distance, passing the bucket back to Alika. When she spotted the professor standing atop the platform that linked ship and land, her heart started thumping fast in her chest. Even as Alika stepped foot on the platform, the professor didn't look at her, instead he scanned the forest in the distance, like a statue on a pedestal.
