Or did those 22 elves just appear out of nowhere?
…like me?
“Don’t your people have babies all the time?”
She frowned again. “Need men.”
Duh.
“Yes, but – if you have only 22 people in your tribe, weren’t some of them your parents and grandparents? Weren’t there old people who had been having babies for 10 or 20 or 30 years?”
“Ohhhhhh,” she said, realizing where our communication had broken down. “I grow up in big tribe. We leave big tribe to start small tribe. Old not come, children not come. Only young, like me.”
“Oh.”
Now it made more sense… sort of. Apparently once the tribe got too large, it would split up and send a certain number of members out to start over in another part of this world. Maybe once there were enough men and women of reproductive age, they split off into a smaller group to go and live separately.
That was the only reason I could think of why they would do that. But I was dealing with a completely foreign culture on a world with two moons, so who the fuck knew how they did things here.
For a second, I wondered why they wouldn’t just establish a town or village. Then I remembered we were talking about hunter-gatherers, and probably nomads, who were roughly analogous to Stone-Age people on Earth.
I mean, Lelia’s species hadn’t invented bows and arrows yet. No way had they gotten to the point where they were building permanent structures. They were probably cave dwellers at best.
And this cold weather wasn’t exactly suited to an agrarian society. If you can’t grow crops, you can’t settle down in one area permanently.
Now I understood a little better.
But hadn’t they ever heard of ‘safety in numbers’?
Or was it that resources were so scarce, that only a certain number of them could live in any one area?
“How many in big tribe?” I asked.
She thought for a second. “Hundreds. Two hundred, three hundred.”
Okay, it made more sense now. The big tribe had either been lightening its load on resources, or sending out a small group to colonize a greater area.
And if you’re sending out pioneers to the New World, you’re not going to take along Grandpa and infants. You would send out the youngest, healthiest, and most likely to survive… and once they had established themselves, then they could settle down and start reproducing.
“So the skiris fought the men in your tribe and killed them all?”
She nodded.
“And the women ran away?”
“Yes. Most.”
“Most?”
“The skiris take some.”
I stared at her in horror. “…to eat?”
“Do not think so. No, to do work.”
“As slaves?!”
Lelia frowned. “What is slaves?”
“A slave is when a person thinks he owns another person and makes him work for him for no – ”
I was about to say ‘money,’ but we hadn’t exactly broached the topic yet, and I didn’t even know if money was something that even existed in this world.
Plus there was the even more complicated issue of historical slavery in the US versus other types of slavery – like the enslaving of those who lost wars in ancient times, or the more recent version of human trafficking for sex.
In the end I just said, “Uh, and treats him very bad, and never lets the slave go.”
Lelia frowned. “Very bad.”
“Very, very bad,” I agreed.
She looked incredibly unhappy. “Maybe slaves.”
“But not all of them?”
“No, not all.”
“What did the ones who didn’t get taken – what did they do?”
She frowned at me like I was crazy. “Run.”
Okay, I deserved that one.
“Did you try to go back to your old tribe?”
She looked sad again. “We try, but skiris between us and old tribe.”
“You couldn’t go around the skiris?”
She shook her head. “No. Far away, only one way through mountains.”
Okay, that made some sense, too. Maybe there was a pass they couldn’t get through because of the skiris.
“The ones who didn’t get taken – the women who aren’t slaves – how did you get separated from them?”
She frowned. “Separated?”
“You alone, not with your small tribe. Why did you leave?”
“Ah… I went to find food. Big storm… separated. When I went back, they were not there.”
“So they’re still out there?”
She nodded and looked afraid.
“You’re worried about them?”
“Worried?”
“You are afraid for them? That something bad might happen?”
She hesitated… then nodded slowly. Something seemed to be bothering her.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
She chewed on the inside of her lip meditatively. “We not know why skiris attack. We lived with them for very long time with no fighting… many, many, many years… not friends, but no killing… and then they attack. Very strange.”
My mind was tumbling over and over with questions – but one came to the forefront.
“What was his name? Your man?” I asked.
“Tarum.”
“I’m sorry.”
She looked at me, confused.
I put my hand on my chest. “I’m sad.”
She gave me a melancholy smile, then kissed me. “Thank you. I am sorry Katie. But now I have you, and you have me… and I am happy.”
I smiled back at her, then kissed her…
…which led to a deeper kiss…
Which led to more baby-making.
As she slept in my arms that night, though, I couldn’t go to sleep. My mind was running wild.
Lelia had a tribe out there.
Should we leave the safety of our cave and go find them?
If we did, there would be a whole to-do list of things we would have to worry about: temporary shelter every night, attacks from wolves, exposure to storms…
And if we did leave the cave and venture out into the wilderness, what about these skiris she had mentioned? What would we do about them?
But after some time spent dwelling on those details, more disturbing ones came to the fore.
I kept returning to what Lelia had said about Katie.
She died with you?
She is rakala, too?
You came here to find her?
The questions would have seemed insane before this conversation. But knowing that Lelia’s people actually had a word for what had happened to me, well – that suddenly opened up possibilities that
