Yinet took another moment, before extending her fingers in her beckoning fashion. “Ara. Litty.” She didn’t ask for our men. Maybe because Gerret wasn’t with her. Remy and Schaef got the message, remaining on their rocks.
Lizzy couldn’t resist as she got up to follow me, turning back to Schaeffer. “Now, you be good boys. Stay. Sttaay!”
“Lizzy!” She jumped and laughed at my snap, falling in behind me.
Yinet only cocked her head. We all had a lot to learn about each other. Lizzy’s humor might not make the process easy. As I reached Yinet, I stuck out my face for the nuzzle. “Good morning.” I made the sun gesture I’d worked on with them, showing it in the rising position.
“Gud morn!”
Lizzy giggled at Yinet’s nuzzle, her fur tickling. “Good morning, Yinet.”
I glanced back at Remy and Schaef, just as Gerret popped up the face of the terrace. He gestured to them to go with him. Schaef gave Remy the jerk of a head and they headed back down the face of the cliff. I turned back to Yinet. “I guess it’s just us. Where to start…”
“Start with why we’re here, total honesty.” Lizzy smiled playfully, but spoke seriously.
“Way too much, too soon. I need to understand them better, like all this.” I rolled my head back to look up the cliff, then reached my hand out to follow an artistic curl carved in the stone.
“It wasn’t all done with chisels. Where’s their technology. Did they do it themselves, or someone else, another species? Or did they just find it like this, a previous civilization.” I pulled my hand away from the wall. Damn, now I was sounding like Schaeffer and his alien pyramid theories.
“That’s a lot to pick apart at this stage.” Lizzy reached out her hand to touch the wall too, but stared sharply at Yinet. “You…” With her other hand she waved to the village below the terrace. “You and your people did this?” She faced back to the stone, letting her fingers slip into a crevice, pretending to scoop it out. “You did this?”
Yinet studied her gestures for a moment. “Yettt.” She stood up from her bench. “Cum.” She held her hand upwards, pointing even higher up the cliff. “Tory.”
I was willing to go wherever she wanted, but ‘tory’. I played with the word a bit. “Tory?”
“Story, silly!” Lizzy grabbed my arm. “Remember, no ‘s’ sounds. You told them stories, now she wants to tell us one.”
That made sense, I started so many drawing sessions with ‘I want to tell you a story’. Clearly Yinet had been putting my words together for some time.
“Story time.” I gave our hostess a nod and she started up the cliff, walking, giving Lizzy a hand up. Flip-flops weren’t ideal for the task, but probably better than blisters.
We climbed, higher and higher, all the way to the top terrace. There we entered another cavern, the ceiling covered with the plants that glow bright. She led us back into a long corridor.
Immediately I found my drawings, stuck to the wall. In one row were the stories I’d told about me and Lizzy. In another were also the drawings where I’d tried to describe our journey to and from their planet.
My cheeks felt hot as Lizzy laughed at my artwork. “I need to give you some lessons before you run into any other alien species.”
“Hey, it got the message across enough for them to start talking to us.”
Lizzy shrugged and went back to the art display.
Soon my pictures were replaced by others, older, carved into the stone. Carved with a precision that excluded any chisel. I ran my fingers along the lines, feeling the sharp edges, no nicks, hesitation notches or irregularities. “Wow. How’d they do this?”
“How, might not be the question you want to ask.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Lizzy stood in front of another wall, staring at a mural. I backed up, taking in more of the carvings. It took a second before I realized what mesmerized her.
I saw the mountain, the beautiful face so intricate in smaller detail, but it was only one of many carvings on the wall, interconnected drawings.
I followed Lizzy as she took a step deeper into the artwork. The next image was of the same mountain, but no city cut into its face.
Next came a city almost like our own, but it wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t artistic like the cliffs. It was broken, destroyed, and from it came a flood of creatures, led by what had to be the LR.
In three simple carvings, I’d learned these people came from a higher civilization, but I could see more carvings. I started back through history, standing before each panel to take it in, to understand what I saw and to record it in as much detail as I could.
Lizzy was at my side, staying close and quiet. Yinet also made no sounds, offering no explanation. This wall needed no words. Art was our common language.
By the time we reached the last of the carvings, I needed air. I needed the light of a real sky. We made the terrace and sat down on the long benches. Yinet sat down across from me, staring at me. She was waiting.
“I don’t know what to say. Your people have been through so much, and survived. Now we’re here to upset everything.”
Lizzy leaned on my shoulder. “I don’t think she wants us to be sad. I think she put your drawings in there for a reason. Did you notice how the ones of how we got here follow their lives? The others were placed above or below those, while our travel was in direct line. We’re part of their history now. They see us in themselves, at least I did.”
So did I. At one point in the drawings, ships lifted off their world, up beyond their atmosphere. “Is that why you were curious about us? Because your people once went out there?”
She
