Just Us – Chapter One – Introduction

“Are you sure about this?” Ostin asked apprehensively

He paced the small tree pole hut and fingered the knife at his side.

“Yes, of course,” Kranova answered coolly. “Rim trusted us with her cubs, we have to trust her with ours.”

She didn’t want her nerves to show. If she seemed nervous, Ostin would be even more so. If both humans were nervous, the large black jaguar in the tree outside would sense it, and become alarmed. There was a chance she could become aggressive.

Kranova held her newborn girl in a sling over her left shoulder, and under her right arm. The tiny baby suckled at her mother’s breast peacefully, as she should. She was the only one who wasn’t nervous, but completely confident and trusting, surrounded in Kranova’s warmth and smell.

Ostin draped a cozy fur over his woman’s shoulders, led her out of the comfortable hut into the biting cold, and on a footpath to leave the village. Kranova had only just recovered from the birth. She was able to walk normally again and felt her strength return as she eased into a rhythm of sleeping, feeding and keeping her baby clean.

A human body fell on the path in front of her. Kranova only sighed and stepped around it. The body stood and continued its own way after she passed.

The cold season was just beginning and the woman felt sorry for her first baby— her cub, Rim, adopted at a few months old after Kranova had killed her real mother. Rim spent her whole life in a warm and safe cavernous den. The den had been destroyed in a violent shudder of the earth that had caused a crack, deep below the cave. Malodorous gas, steam, and liquid earth— the hottest thing that ever existed— enveloped their home.

They had traveled a day away to a nearby village, the lone couple and the cub; and soon after they arrived, their child came into the world. A day away and weeks later, the smoke, smell, and ash still clouded the sky and polluted the air.

It would be Rim’s first cold season without shelter, and the least Kranova could do was show the now grown jaguar why the couple wouldn’t be joining her in the trees outside of the foreign village.

To the villagers, Kranova could never be anything but The Yaga Tokos- The Jaguar Mother, a prophesied living ancient. She refused their worship, but when she wanted something, they were quick to please her.

So, per her request, the Sonwali tribe built a shelter for her jaguar daughter, Rim. The large cat was frequently found resting near the main fire pit in the cold mornings, warming herself by the fading coals. She was never hostile to humans but disappeared into her dwelling whenever strangers started moving about.

However, Kranova visited her alone in the weeks since she birthed her human daughter, Iniyanna. But the time had come to let her daughters meet. However nervous is made her— or Ostin.

“I will kill her if she seems even the least bit aggressive,” Ostin said stoically as they passed the treeline and into the jungle.

Kranova knew this to be true. She would do it herself if it came to that.

“You are a good father,” she assured him as they approached a sturdy tree that had a woven grass tent suspended high in the branches. “Rim will be a good sister.”

The couple paused and looked up into the tree. A thick black tail flicked back and forth, hanging from an opening in the tent.

“Rim!” Kranova shouted upward into the dense canopy and clicked her tongue. “Come down and meet my cub.”

The tail stopped twitching for a moment, as though it had paused to think. It was the middle of the day, and she’d been up stalking and hunting all night. But being the obedient daughter she was, she slowly heaved herself up, hopped down branch by branch, before coming to a thud on the moist forest floor at the base of the tree.

Kranova crouched a few paces away. She pulled the hide blanket aside and put her right arm protectively around the bundle, but pulled the edge of the sling aside so the tiny face could show.

“Come,” she beckoned the jaguar. “Come see.”

Rim lifted her chin and sniffed the air before taking a few cautious steps forward. Her nose led her to the feet of Kranova and she continued to sniff her way to the swaddled treasure in her mother’s arms.

Ostin clutched the knife at his side but tried to calmly breathe through his anxiety, so he didn’t agitate the creature.

Rim’s nose touched the sling under the baby’s head, and she drew in a deep breath, then half sneezed it out with a shake of her head. Kranova laughed and stood. It was enough for a first meeting.

The jaguar licked the woman’s bare thigh as Kranova scratched behind the cat’s ear in return.

“See?” She said to both Ostin and Rim, “that wasn’t so bad.”

The couple watched the great black cat turn and climb back into her shelter, before making their own way back to the village.

Kranova wouldn’t usually stay in a crowded village, especially one that paid her so much attention. She had been on her own for years after abandoning her own tribe, only meeting up with people she stumbled upon, and going her own way as soon as she could.

Ostin was a phantom from her past. An enemy of her tribe, but quickly proved himself unlike those of his own tribe where he once was Chief. When they fell into chaos, he had been overpowered and expelled.

When Ostin heard about the Yaga Tokos from the Sonwali, he knew she had to be the spirit that called him as they crossed paths in another lifetime. Kranova didn’t trust him at first but soon learned the enemy of her enemy was her friend. Nature took its course and the two solitary people became one.

With their home destroyed, Kranova would have been fine with moving along with Ostin and Rim, but it was the cold season and they had a vulnerable newborn.

Kranova stepped over another prostrate villager as she made her way to a hut where women weaved straw and vine into mats, baskets, and fishing nets. She was determined to earn her keep until the weather was hospitable enough to take their infant and leave again.

“A group of men are going to check the opening in the earth,” Ostin told her as she was about to duck inside. “I’m going to go with them to see if there’s anything left of the den.”

Kranova frowned. It was a day’s journey one way, it seemed like a waste of energy since it had already been determined to be completely destroyed. It was a strange and new sensation for her to feel nervous about being alone, they hadn’t separated since they joined. She shook the feeling off.

“Be safe,” she nodded. “Come back to us soon.”

Ostin reached to embrace her, and she allowed him to draw her close. She normally felt safe and comfortable in his arms, but with so many eyes on them in the middle of the village, she tensed slightly instead of relaxing into him.

“I will,” he promised and kissed her cheek, then their daughter’s. “I’ll make sure Rim stays here and doesn’t follow us.”

Kranova scoffed a small laugh.

“Rim does as she pleases,” she reminded him.

“Just like her mother,” he teased as he squeezed her hand briefly before releasing her and stepping away.

Kranova watched him for a moment before stepping into the warm hut with her delicate bundle. The women present stopped their chattering at once, knowing wasted breath and unnecessary words irritated the strange woman. They had long learned The Yaga Tokos hated dramatic reverence so they only nodded in polite and silent greeting.

These women had come to the black rock den a year earlier when their village was under attack. But Kranova left them in the safety of her own home to win their village back instead of staying and getting to know them. Anything to make them leave again. She spoke very little Sonwali and really only knew the healer and one other woman in the village, the wife of the man she saved upon her first meeting with the people, the incident that gained their favor.

Over and over again, they felt they owed her some debt, and Kranova hoped to even things out before she left for good. Safely delivering her child counted for a lot to Kranova. But the women were only humbled by the honor.

An uncomfortable sigh left her lips as she had a seat and pulled a pile of straw close to get to work.

 

***

 

Ostin led the way through the trees, silent, in the misted shadows as if he were hunting. He’d been alone so long, and come across so many hostile tribes and animals, it became his new nature. Hunting the jaguar mother’s heart made him better at it. Becoming the jaguar father only tightened his connection to the forest, and the wildness inside him, loosening his grip on organized humanity.

The animal in her called the animal in him, and he knew there was no going back to village life if it were ever possible since being driven out by those he had been raised to serve and protect.

Such a final cataclysmic end to the slow decline of their tribe imprinted on him permanently. One bad season turned an ancient village into scattered, feral beasts, and he slowly lost his grasp of control. In the last days, it was his insistence that men behave like men that caused them to turn him out into the wild.

That was so long ago. He wished The Ancients whispered to him then that Kranova was alone in the forest. Why did it take them years of wandering paths, sometimes alone, sometimes finding comfort and strength in others, to lead them back together again? And only then, together and alone, did he see the absurdity of tribes and the beauty of independence.

Their walk together, from then on, would be interlaced with the people they came across. Just as the Sonwali— a far and foreign people to their home, neighboring tribes, that lived in the shadow of the mountains, brought their paths together again. But other than brief shelter, a people could not contain Kranova and Ostin.

Kranova of the Tswan Nintilo and Ostin of the Senfinda could abide no walls. Though the Sonwali wanted to make Yaga Tokos their Chieftess, but she would not have even stayed the night if not for their daughter. Kranova couldn’t live by rules, even if she made them. That was the problem with groups of more than a few.

Too many opinions, mouths, and bodies complicated the simplicity of existence. Kranova and Ostin were joined in spirit and when their wills differed, a short conversation could set them right again. Very little planning had to be made when you are just two people and the items you can carry on your back. They could never belong to a tribe bigger than them and the children they brought into the world. They’d lived among the animals too long.

Ostin paused to listen to the wind and felt his hand absently grazing the raised black scars on his chest. His pride; the symbol of his joining with the jaguar mother. He lifted his hand and ran his fingertips from the left side of his nose to his ear. The burned impression of a spearhead forever indented into his skin; his shame. The mark put on the men of his people as a symbol of defeat by the Tswan Nintilo— almost single-handedly by Kranova.

Life was strange.

The deep and cold jungle was quiet as could be. Everything dangerous was smart enough to sleep, sheltered from the biting moisture in the air. The sound of natural creaks and snaps from water soaked branches carried farther in the mist. But there was nothing out there but these men.

The other men acted like it, plodding their heavy feet through the earth and fallen foliage, talking and laughing amongst themselves. Though the whole forest was unnaturally dark by the ubiquitous smoke, Ostin crept silently from shadow to shadow, always hunting, always expecting to be hunted.

The noxious fumes that Kranova smelled before the active eruption began grew stronger as the sun set on the backs of the traveling men, and a heat beckoned as if a great bonfire was burning just around the next bend of the path.

Direct sunlight was a thing of the past, the world existed only in degrees of darkness. As light disappeared completely, the men made camp at the altar of the Jaguar Mother. A lifesize totem, carved in her likeness; one side, showing her divine, and hybrid nature, the other, a realistic depiction of her dress that created the illusion of the half-breed woman and jaguar.

She wore the skull of a jaguar on her head, and the jaw as a necklace across her collar, appearing to be swallowed by a roaring jaguar skeleton. Her first three fingers on each hand had the claw knuckle of the big cat tied at the crease into her palm, for easier climbing, and close battle with anything that stood in her way. The hide of a black jaguar, Rim’s mother, draped down her back and was tied with the forelimbs across her chest. The scalp flopped limply over the skull like a hood.

Slash marks on her left arm and side from her battle with the real jaguar father were raised in the carved wood. Festering wounds that brought her stumbling into the Sonwali village, asking for medicine. It was too late to stitch them, and they had to be scrubbed with abrasive stones and fire fluid daily to cure her fever. The scars were severe, and another important element of her intimidating visage.

The men made camp just to the sunset of the altar, but Ostin positioned himself in line with the lifesize totem, head bowed at her feet, his body stretched with his feet pointing toward the sunrise. He lived to serve, worship, love, and possess her.

 

***

 

Kranova warmed herself and Iniyanna by the main fire pit of the village. She leaned her back comfortably against the black jaguar as the dim, clouded light of the rising sun set the ashen sky to a soft glow. It’d been two days, and Kranova had rested, but couldn’t sleep well without her mate, between the constant feeding and cleansing of the newborn.

She was startled awake as Rim bolted from the open camp, into the safety of the trees as commotion in the village began steadily rising. Kranova sat up straight, as though she had been awake the whole time, and slowly eased her mind into consciousness.

The clatter of what sounded like pebbles and rainbow blades shattering against soft earth jolted her from half-dreaming sleep.

She snapped her head up and saw nothing but the stone colored sky and the tree pole roofs of village huts. Her eyes dropped back down to the source of the sound, a body, face first in the dirt, in a heap before her.

Kranova closed her eyes and sighed slowly to hide her agitation and the anxious pace of her heart. The hide draped around the body was made of the thinnest and white material she’d ever seen. It must have taken a long time to work leather so soft, and many treatments with stale urine.

A girl too young for her position lifted her head and the tinkling of green stone beads against blue and ropes of the smoothest sunshine stone filled the bitter-cold air. The young woman was barely the age of betrothal for members of the Tswan, yet her belly was beautifully round with life.

The girl had startling eyes, surrounded in what looked like charcoal-colored oil in neat lines that stroked upward. They were the color of the sky before the ash had clouded the sun. Kranova was always unnerved by this strangely decorated girl. Eerily beautiful, like an unnaturally perfect flower among choking vines and creeping moss. Like a flower that a woman would admire in nature and leave to thrive, but greedy men could not help but seize and sentence to an early, but slow, wilting death.

Kranova thought of the pile of decaying flowers at the door of her father’s hut. Left as a gift, but only reminded Kranova that life plucked from the earth rots away to dust. Crisp, delicate petals that crumbled with just a touch, after drying and fading from the pale but bright blue. The very color of this young girl’s eyes.

Hannok pulled the white hide closer around her face to block the wind from cutting into her. Her adorned arms chimed like bird bone needles being dropped in a stone bowl. The black-veined blue stones, round and smooth as tiny bird’s eggs clicked against the shining green stone beads as she moved, smoothing her clothing and laying the roping sunshine stone necklaces in an orderly fashion against her chest.

“The chief has something for you,” the girl delivered her husband’s message.

“I don’t want it,” Kranova insisted quickly, forming a thick and stormy wall of protection around herself.

Hannok’s unnaturally blue eyes darted to the bundle strapped to Kranova’s chest.

“Please come and tell him yourself, because he will not hear it from me,” she said quietly.

Her eyes, body language, and tone were demure and passive, though Kranova saw the spoiled, insolent child beneath the beautiful face and trappings. She was probably never asked to do anything. Perhaps the chief thought it would be an honor for his youngest wife to fetch the Yaga Tokos for a gift.

It was obvious to Kranova that she only resented the chore, and felt slighted somehow. Jealous of something— his attention, maybe the gift, or the high rank of a strange foreigner, being forced to soil and wrinkle her immaculate garment to show respect.

She stood, dusting off her long covering and Kranova watched her turn and walk quickly away.

There was little light that could be seen of the sun that barely began to brighten the sky. Yet the girl was already fully dressed, adorned, painted, and sent into the cold to bow before someone who would rather sleep in a cave with animals than be bothered by another human. For what? Some shallow gesture she would ultimately refuse.

Beautiful though she was, and certainly spoiled, she was too young to be married and so heavily pregnant. The Ancients doled out gifts without asking the opinions of mortals. The girl probably had no say in her position, and could only enjoy what benefits came with bearing her burden.

Kranova understood. Perhaps they were different only in why they were admired, and how they both had grown to cope with the covetous behavior of others. She didn’t want the girl’s added misery to be in vain. Kranova slowly stood and moved her cold bones in the direction of the chief’s hut, fearing what went on in the private moments between caging walls.

Ducking into the hut, she saw Hannok had removed her covering to reveal roping braids twisted in an intricate design around the rest of her loose hair. The girl rubbed her hands together as close as she dared to the fire, and wafted heat up under her covering, as another woman served her hot tea.

Even in the warm glow of the fire, Kranova saw her face go pallid for a moment as she choked down the drink, and remembered the troubling days of late pregnancy.

“Yaga Tokos,” the chief’s booming voice startled her, shattering her thoughts.

He moved fast for someone so large. Knowing she wouldn’t tolerate scraping bows from him, he whisked her into a seat and as they were both served hot food and drink. Before she could ask why she’d been summoned, the Chief started the small talk.

“We can barely tell the length of these dark days,” he began after finishing his own meal, “but the shortest day of the year has come and gone, and we are passing through the peak of the cold season.”

Kranova nodded and adjusted her bundle and garment to give Iniyanna her breakfast. It was worse with the short naps of new motherhood. To her, the season of new life should have already come. Time passed slowly with little sleep in front of so many eyes.

Surely, he knew her time with them was coming to a close and would offer her something more to convince her to stay.

“ChaRel tells me you have been asking questions about our methods of making jewelry from the sunshine stone,” he began.

Kranova resisted the urge to knit her eyebrows together, determined to remain impassive and unreadable.

“ChaRel says my words?” Kranova asked.

“I have struggled to please you,” he explained, seeming nervous.

Strange as their culture was about women, he seemed constantly intimidated by her. Such was the power of his faith. He collected wives like beads on a rope, but could barely steady his voice when speaking to her.

“I seek her wisdom on the matter,” he continued. “I offer you a trade. To please you with answers to your questions, and also to give you the opportunity to contribute back to our village as we host you, as you wish.”

Her interest was piqued, but she said nothing. Perhaps his head was not so thick as his hide.

“Access to my jeweler, watch him work, ask him whatever you like,” he tempted her. “If you will show me how you make the rainbow blades.”

“Not a fair trade,” Kranova replied. “Easy to make a good blade. But to… change sunshine stone…” she said referring to the glinting ropes and plates that lay on his chest, unable to find the Sonwali words for her thoughts.

“You keep telling us that the rainbows are revealed in the black rocks of the cliffs with normal knapping techniques,” he admitted. “And, for us, they wield beautiful, and dangerously sharp blades. But they do not contain rainbows.”

“Ostin too,” she sighed and shook her head. “But he didn’t try again.”

“He is afraid of your power. Your magic.”

“Maybe,” Kranova shrugged. “Not my power or magic.”

The only sound was the wind whistling in the vent hole at the apex of the roof, and the fire popping and consuming below it.

“My men are there now, with your man,” The chief said. “Will he reveal the source?”

“It is not secret,” she repeated.

She didn’t know how to say that she couldn’t be sure the correct stones weren’t washed away by the liquid earth but, if they were there, Ostin had no reason to conceal it. At least, as her desires dictated.

“If they bring stone, I will make a blade,” she shrugged again. “Maybe rainbow, maybe not.”

She realized it sounded like an excuse. If the blade she made didn’t contain the swirling colors, they would just say she did not enchant it. If the men harvested many stones to knap, there was a better chance of someone revealing a rainbow. It would be better if she happened to make a black blade, and someone else found colors hidden in their own work.

Kranova could not control the earth or the ancients. People will always find excuses to believe what they want. They would attribute any rainbow stone to her power no matter who revealed it.

She stood to leave, tucking her baby under the protection of a warm hide, in the comfort of her sling.

“The earth is strange,” she told him before heading back into the cold.

 

***

 

Kranova paced in her cage, but she was warm and Iniyanna was healthy. It felt like night had come already, but she couldn’t be sure.

“When your father returns,” she promised her daughter in her native Tswan language, as she tucked the child into her sleeping basket, “and when this cold breaks just a little, we can be rid of this place.”

She had agreed to make the blades. If they left now, she would be breaking her word, and the Sonwali would see it as her concealing her magic. But it wouldn’t matter because she and Ostin would be long gone and untraceable by the time they realized it.

Heavy Sonwali bodies traipsed through the jungle with the stealth of a wounded boar, relying on growing and trapping food more than hunting.

The Tswan were simple, functional people. The Sonwali spent the millennias honing crafts and becoming proficient at changing the world around them to expand their own comfort and population, as the Tswan dedicated themselves to remaining the same and upholding the ancient ways.

Kranova’s curiosity of the way they manipulated nature was too tempting. To them, natural stone was a mystery; to her, they were the ones who created magic by bending stone.

She would knap the stones they brought, and they would leave. Iniyanna was plump and the weather would likely begin to ease into warmth. If this day was not the last cold snap, it was perhaps the second to last.

As the thought whipped through her head with the cutting wind, the door flew open and the whistle crescendoed sharply.

Kranova was startled at the sudden noise and cold, but as she snapped her head toward the entrance of ChaRel’s hut, a figure appeared in the dim light of the waning moon. Her captured breath escaped with a relieved sigh. Unimpeded with her bundle, Kranova leaped to meet Ostin at the door as he shut it tightly behind him, blocking the biting wind and calming the air that turned through the hut.

They embraced tightly and pressed their lips into each other. Kranova realized how warm her skin was as she absorbed the coldness that clung to him. Ostin wrapped his arms around her and lifted her feet from the ground as she eased his discomfort.

“The Sonwali stopped for shelter just a few hours from here,” he explained breathlessly, “but I couldn’t rest without you tonight.”

Kranova heard ChaRel shift and stir in the flickering shadows that danced in the low firelight in the center of the hut. The commotion had woken her, but she politely remained at rest in her blankets to give the couple a sense of privacy. Ostin approached the fire and pulled her close for added warmth as he began undressing his woman. The heat of the flames and her body irresistible to his cold, starving flesh.

Just as he was beginning to feel comfortably warm and aroused, Iniyanna began to fuss in her woven-basket bed. Kranova pulled away and went to the baby without hesitating, leaving Ostin panting with a frustrating amount of excess heat.

Kranova lay on their bed and shushed the baby, hoping she would go back to sleep without needing to be held and nursed. Ostin came to lounge beside her in a moment, kissing her neck and grasping her with increasing fervor. Between the whining cry of the infant and her mate’s pawing, Kranova’s frustration tipped over into exasperation.

She shoved Ostin’s hands away and growled.

“I can only be a tool for one person’s use at a time,” she snapped in Tswan.

Ostin quickly retracted his hands, fearing her temper and wrath. He sighed away his own flash of anger and wiped his face with both hands. Tension eased as Kranova gave in and tucked the baby into the crook of her arm and let her feed back to sleep.

But as she laid the baby back in the basket, she was painfully aware of Ostin’s wakeful expectation. She turned into his body and he resumed a more soothing stroke with his hands. They tangled together under a warm hide. Kranova knelt over him and brushed her lips on his left earlobe.

“It’s not time, yet,” she whispered almost inaudibly.