Page 7 of Feast

Before long, Ika’s vocabulary exploded. She learned her own name. Then the words for various things around the den. Food. Ksh. Stone. Water. She learned the word for hot when she burned her little hand on an ember that had tumbled out of the fire pit. In the winter she learned the word for snow.

Eventually her words connected into sentences, and sentences became questions.

She was infinitely curious about the world around her. She loved looking at the simple drawings Rolf had made on the cave walls, and she asked him about the different creatures. Rolf told her about all of them. Graceful krelks, fearsome aboliths, loathsome nith, and strong ukkur like himself.

“Where Ika?” the little one asked, and Rolf helped her add a drawing of herself to the wall.

Little by little, Rolf took her out into the forests around the den, though he was always exceedingly cautious of wild predators, and even more so of nith that might be patrolling the area.

He remembered the marking he had seen on the bigger creature’s hip—the nith marking—and his greatest fear was always that the nith would come to take his Ika away.

Rolf would never allow that.

He would protect Ika to the death.

“Rolf, what are these?” Ika had asked one night, tracing her little fingers over the scars on his shoulders.

He explained it to her as best he could. He told her how he had been a slave on the ksh farms. How the evil nith masters had beaten and whipped him. How he had finally escaped and come to live here by himself in this den at the foot of the mountain.

Soon Ika began asking the other question that Rolf had been expecting.

“Where did I come from, Rolf?”

“I found you, little one. The gods left you for me as a gift.”

That was half true at least. Rolf didn’t know how to tell her the whole truth of the matter. He didn’t even understand it himself.

He gave her the metal ring. It was too large for her small fingers, so Rolf fashioned a braided leather necklace with the ring as the pendant. He told Ika that he found the ring at the same time he found her, but he could not bring himself to tell her about the dead creature that had been wearing it, nor did he take her to visit the place where he had buried that creature’s body under a cairn of stones.

Someday he would tell her. Someday when she was a little older.

Ika became the center of his life. She was everything. The polestar around which Rolf’s entire universe revolved. And as she grew, the beautiful, nameless feeling in Rolf’s heart grew with her. The Ika feeling.

Her dark mane grew long, much longer than any ukkur’s mane, until it practically enveloped her tiny body. A wild mass of dark hair with skinny arms and legs poking out. Rolf couldn’t bring himself to cut it, so instead he used rawhide cords to tie it back in ponytails and pigtails.

As Ika got bigger, other changes happened.

One day he heard her screaming and rushed back to the den to find her sitting there with blood smudged on her thighs. It was leaking from that cleft between her legs, the place where her piss stick should be. For many days, Rolf was terrified that she would die, but eventually the bleeding stopped. Later they both learned that it was just something her body did from time to time.

“Rolf, when will my piss stick grow?”

He definitely didn’t know how to answer that one, and he quickly changed the subject. He felt bad that he couldn’t explain these things to her, but he understood as little about it as Ika herself did.

Still Ika continued to grow.

Her legs lengthened. Her hips widened. Her chest developed those large mounds that Rolf had seen on the creature that had died.

It was around that time when Rolf decided it would be best for Ika to sleep on her own mat, separate from him. She had balked at first, but eventually she got used to it.

Rolf’s heart filled with pride as he watched her grow. She was intelligent, imaginative, resourceful, and clever. She saw things that he had never noticed. She viewed the world from a perspective he had never considered.

Simply put, she was wonderful.

But underneath all the happiness, there was a bad feeling that Rolf could not ignore. Something hard and cold like a granule of ice in his boot.

Ika was turning into the spitting image of the creature who had died.

It wasn’t just the shape of her body that was the same. It was the face too.