>>>>>>
Jaws and teeth, anger and ripping—my leg, what happened to
my leg? Roaring, screaming, fur—
I regained consciousness in the midst of blackness and the
stench of death. I blinked as the dark materialized into a blunt muzzle as big
as my head, and full of sharp teeth as long as my fingers. The muzzle moved
closer, blasting me with the foul breath, and I tried to turn away, which
produced an electric shock of pain in my left leg. I could not escape the
gaping mouth hovering over me. The giant panther bent over my face—and licked
me soundly from my collarbone to my hairline. I couldn't breathe for the slime
and the stink. The panther backed away with a gentle growl, very pleased with
itself.
"Carnossus say she like you."
Once again, I heard the voice before I saw the speaker.
Looking up, I could barely see the whites of two dark eyes. The speaker smiled
then, and I could see two rows of sharp white teeth. Carnossus the panther sat
below the woman, haunches folded, paws outstretched like a sphinx. The moon shone
through a hole in the center of the roof above me, illuminating a circle as
wide as my arms' reach, but deepening the shadows in which my companion sat.
"Wwwwhaaa—" my mouth wobbled as I fought to get
the word out. "W-w—what... What—"
The face loomed over me. "You feel now?" she
asked. Reaching down, she cradled my shoulders in her hand and propped me
slightly up, cupping a smooth clay bowl against my mouth as she did so. I
choked as a thick, dark liquid splashed against my face.
"Drink," the giantess commanded. I had no choice.
The liquid tasted awful. It burned in my mouth and left a
horrible essence in its wake, but she pressed the bowl to my face till it was
empty. She continued to hold me up for a bit afterwards. I raised my hand and
felt her arm, sinewy and rock-hard. I could sense the warmth radiating off her
impossibly-smooth skin, as if her body were made of obsidian.
The hut I was in had a fire pit at one end, over which stood
a spit with a small kettle hanging from it. I glanced down at my leg. Two thick
branches braced it, tied on with vines. She had torn the ripped pieces of my trousers off from around it. I wondered if I was going to have to wear pelts like
my caretaker. The medicine I had drunk took effect, and abruptly my body became
very heavy. My head lolled, so she lowered me back down to laying on the pelt.
"Sleep now," she murmured, "heal."
Sleep...
Sounds faded from my ears as I closed my eyes
again.
The sun shone brightly through the skylight when I regained
consciousness again. The woman was not in the hut, but Carnossus snuggled next
to me like a big, stinky cat, with one forepaw draped over my chest and her
muzzle so close to my face that her whiskers rested on my cheeks. I turned away
from the rotten-meat breath and saw, through the doorway of the hut, the
tallest person in the world heading straight for us. She wore pelts fastened to
her body with thongs, and her hair was braided and strung with beads, vines,
and shells.
"Shetara!" she thundered.
My caretaker stepped from her position beside the door to in
front of it.
"What have you done?" the newcomer demanded, and I
recognized the voice from when I had first arrived in the jaws of Carnossus.
"She is no harm, Deloma," Shetara affirmed.
Deloma shoved Shetara out of the way and stepped inside the
hut. Immediately, I inhaled fur as Carnossus wrapped her body over me. Her
flank rested on my broken leg, and I couldn't restrain a small moan of pain.
Deloma tried to reach me, but Carnossus blocked her hand with her teeth,
growling threateningly.
"Begone, panther!" Deloma demanded. "The
human cannot stay here. She must be brought back to where she came from!"
Carnossus wouldn't budge. If anything, she laid heavier on
me, pressing into my leg and raising the pain level from unbearable to excruciating.
I couldn't move even if I wanted to.
There was a hint of smugness in Shetara's vice as she
observed, "Carnossus save the life, Carnossus decide the fate. We send her
away, she die fast."
"If she remains here, more of her kind will come!"
Deloma tried again, but Carnossus snarled at her. "That is a risk we
cannot take. She must leave now!"
One last attempt from Deloma, and Carnossus bared her teeth.
The giantess could not lay a finger on me.
Shetara chortled. "Carnossus say no."
I could feel the sustained growl vibrating against my belly.
Deloma hissed. "The human may stay until she is well
enough to survive—and then she must leave."
"We shall see."
Deloma left, and finally, Carnossus slipped off. She began
rubbing her face on my chest and humming loudly, leaving the stench of rotting
foliage from her fur on my clothes. Shetara reached out and rubbed Carnossus'
shoulders. The panther sank to the floor, her head still resting on my midriff.
Shetara smiled at me. "Carnossus never see like you
before, never defy Deloma before. She like you very much. I like you, too. You
different." Shetara reached over and lifted a lock of my red hair.
"Like flame," she muttered, watching it glint in the sunlight as it
fell. "I call you Little Candle; is good?"
I was feeling considerably safer in the company of Shetara
and Carnossus in light of the way they defended me. I nodded. Shetara busied
herself around my splint, spreading a poultice that stung and then cooled
quickly. She ladled a liquid into a coconut shell dwarfed by the size of her
hand. Using a woven cloth, she smoothed the liquid onto my forehead. It smelled
nice, and I began to feel very drowsy. Shetara started humming a strange,
haunting melody.
"You sleep now, Little Candle," she murmured, and
I discovered that there was nothing else I wanted to do. I closed my eyes and
drifted off to the sound of her voice.
>>>>>>>>>
And so it went for many days. Sometimes I would awaken in
the middle of the day, sometimes at night, but each time, Carnossus was there
to greet me, and Shetara managed to enter shortly thereafter to tend to my leg
and give me medicines to make me sleep. As I got stronger, I would sit up more,
and as my leg healed, I could stand up for stretches (supported by Carnossus)
and slowly hobble my way around the hut. Shetara remained adamant that I never
left the vicinity of the hut.
"You stay, Little Candle," she would remind me.
"No go out. Not safe."
I always assumed she was referring to Deloma and others who
felt the same as she did. The other woman did come frequently, still trying to
get Shetara to send me away. Though we spoke the same language (something I
didn't expect here in the Amazon jungle), Deloma and some of the others
constantly treated me like a new kind of rodent, speaking at me and around me,
and constantly fearing an infestation of my kind. They referred to me as
"the human"—as if they were not. Were the Amazons more than just
another race, but another species?
Shetara was the only one who would talk to me, and her
vocabulary seemed far more limited than Deloma's. I asked her how long I had
been there, and she informed me it had been "many days." I wondered
from time to time what the others at the compound I had left behind what felt
like a lifetime ago were doing about the fact that I wasn't returning. I knew
fractures like mine took several weeks to heal, maybe even a month or so—but
the medicines Shetara used seemed to have some special super-healing
properties, or perhaps I spent several days asleep at a time.
[...]
I made it about five paces before I had to stop and rest. I
smelled stench and heard a low growl by my ear. Carnossus stood behind me,
watching. I tried to diffuse the tension by scratching the enormous panther
under the chin. It worked. Carnossus hummed happily and threw her paws forward
in a stretch. She looked up at me and deliberately bent down to nudge my legs.
She was offering to carry me. Willingly, I gripped the fur at the scruff of her
neck and did my best to clamber aboard the cat as big as a Clydesdale. She bent
down to make it easier for me, and soon we two were making even better progress
through the jungle.
Carnossus seemed to know where I wanted to go. We followed
the path Shetara had taken not long ago, her large footprints visible in the
mud. It led to a large pool fed by the Amazon River. There was no one in sight.
Carnossus bent down and I slipped off her back, landing
gingerly on my injured leg. The bone had healed pretty nearly, but it was still
sensitive and stiff from disuse. Crouching by the water's edge, I listened
carefully. In the muted silence of the jungle, all I could hear was the quiet
lapping of the pool.
In retrospect, had I looked down, I would have seen the
creature lunging for me from the clear depths of the pool, but as matters
stood, I knew nothing of the ambush till long, wet arms wrapped around my neck
and hauled me into the water. I had only a brief gasp of air before the
creature that grabbed me pinned me tight against a wiry, scaly body. It swam
deep into the pool and out toward the River—and yet the appendages holding me
were very much like arms. Human? No; the skin felt like that of a shark. The
braided hair bearing shells and seaweed seemed familiar. Did the Amazons who
served as my hostesses take fashion cues from these beings? The water skimmed
over my bare feet. We pulled up with a jerk, and the creature kept me pinned
with one arm, gripping my face with a slimy, webbed hand. I could see long,
narrow shapes circling overhead. I tried to break its grip, but the arm had a
smooth membrane hanging from it that resisted my attempts to wriggle.
The next
thing I knew, globs of slime attached to first one ear then the other. I
remembered feeling the same sensation one of the first times I woke up after
Carnossus brought me to Shetara. I felt the blade of a bone knife press against
my throat as a female voice hissed through the slime, "You should not have
come, human! No one shall discover our secret, and now you shall pay!"
It took a few moments for me to realize that the creature
holding me prisoner and the one speaking were the same. The way she pulled my
head back to see the caimans overhead in an obvious threat to slit my throat
and let them feast on me gave her away. But how did she know I had deliberately
arrived at the pool, and was not some passerby who stopped for a drink at that
pool? The way she called me human reminded me of Deloma. My lungs burned for
breath, but this creature—was I becoming acquainted with my first
mermaid?—would sooner let me drown than offer me any kind of breathing
apparatus.
A dark shape hurtled through the water toward us, striking
my captor in the arm and breaking her hold on me. The sudden release caused me
to involuntarily gasp—forgetting that I was still submerged. The water filled
my lungs and I blacked out as the dark shape filled my vision.
I regained consciousness to the feeling of something wide
and heavy pumping rhythmically on my chest. I coughed up the water in my lungs
as I sat up to get the heavy thing off my ribs. My eyes focused on the thing in
my hands just as it extended a long pink tongue and licked my face. Carnossus
had saved me once again—even though, being a cat, I never expected her to
follow me into the water and dive so deep. I rubbed her head to let her know I
was okay, and she hummed softly and turned back toward the bonfire blazing
against the side of the cave. Her rump was still wet, and for some reason she
dragged it along the ground instead of walking, which I didn't understand till
I saw that her body ended in two wide flippers instead of two legs and a tail.
Was this sea creature not the panther I knew?
The sea-panther crawled toward
the flame and curled up next to it. I looked around the vicinity. Near my feet
was a small pool not unlike the one I had entered. Perhaps this was where I had
been brought out of the water. The cave extended twenty feet upward, and the
perimeter was clearly visible in the light of the bonfire—but who had made it?
Certainly the sea-panther would not be capable of such a thing.
I heard a
splash from the pool, and another shape emerged, this one much longer than the
sea-panther. It had long hair braided with shells and seaweed, large, blinking
fish eyes, flapping gills in the middle of the face, webbed hands, fins under
the arms and along the spine, and long legs that ended in wide flippers. A
mermaid! It had to be one—though it was very different than the conventional
concept of a mermaid. The sea-panther arose and shook itself—and as I watched,
its flippers extended into legs and a long tail, which it stretched, cat-like.
It was Carnossus; she could change her shape to become an aquatic creature! Did
that mean she was in league with the mermaids who grabbed me?
The mermaid turned to look at me, but I closed my eyes
quickly and pretended to be unconscious still. I heard her turn away and snuck
a glance. She dragged her long body over to the fire. The water evaporated from
her shark-grey skin and left strange brown marks. As I watched, the brown
expanded, and the fins and flippers shrank and disappeared. When she was dry
and fully human, she reached next to the pile of wood against the wall and
picked up some pelts with thongs. Once she fastened them on, I immediately
recognized her as the one who had nursed me back to health after I had been
attacked by the caiman.
Shetara turned to me, her smile white against the blackness
of her face. The gills had been replaced by a nose, and the eyes were not so
bulgy.
"Little Candle!" she cried, reaching toward me.
I shrank away. She was one of them, one of the ones who wanted
to kill me! "H—h-h-how... Y-y-you—" I spluttered.
Carnossus stalked over on four legs and licked my face
again, as if to confirm that they were still the ones I could trust. I wiped
the saliva from my eyes. Carnossus laid down next to me and put her head in my
lap. Her jaw covered half my leg. Shetara sat cross-legged in front of me. Her
knees were practically as high as my head.
"My sisters and I—people of the water," Shetara
explained. "It is secret from others. We hide from outsiders, they never
find us. Little Candle is first one to come so far." Shetara grinned at
me.
The pieces began clicking together in my mind. "In the
water," I mused, "the mermaid who attacked me—"
"Deloma." Shetara frowned, "She no like you.
She scared bad of humans. Humans take her one time, she escape very hard. She
say all humans evil, all humans is kill, kill all time. We believe, because we
never see others. Then Carnossus bring us Little Candle, and you hear us, and
speak our tongue, so Shetara say Carnossus keep Little Candle safe, Deloma no
can harm."
Carnossus, sensing that she was the topic of our
conversation, growled happily and shoved her head against my middle. I had to
brace myself to keep from falling over. I couldn't help noticing that she still
smelled; only, this time, it wasn't rotted vegetation—Carnossus smelled like
the Amazon at low tide.
"But why me?" I asked aloud.
Shetara shrugged. Her wide hand cane down and ruffled the
giant panther's ears. "Who knows? Carnossus no say why, she say only,
So!"
I shook my head. "Wait a minute, you say I'm the one
speaking your language—Shetara, where I am from, everyone speaks my
language, this language I am speaking now."
Shetara looked at me and shook her head. "No one speak
our language except people of the water. You only human who speak our tongue."
My head was spinning. I stood, pushing Carnossus away as I
tried to make the gargantuan woman understand. "Shetara, we are speaking
my tongue right now."
She shook her head. "We speak tongue of the water.
Remember?" she raised her hand to my head and pressed a finger on my ear.
Something squished between her finger and my earlobe. Then I remembered the
lumps of goo.
"Uandino," Shetara explained. "Shetara find
uandino in there when Carnossus bring. Not know who put it. You hear with the
uandino. You only one."
I reached to my own ears, but felt only the lobes and the
ear canal opening. I could not feel the uandino on my ears. I gasped,
"What does it mean?"
Shetara shrugged her wide shoulders. "Little Candle
save the water-people," she answered simply.
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