“Go, now, but be careful and silent!” Boro asserted in a whisper. “I think there’s a trap somewhere, so I’m taking a round-about way.”
Mati nodded and poked Sata, then motioned for Rini to follow her up to the escape tunnel.
Sata barely managed to hold her tongue as she squeezed herself through the rocks once more.
Mati followed Rini up to the tunnel near the ceiling. She looked back and saw Boro walk casually out of the sleeping cave. Instead of aiming for the nearest cavern entrance, he headed for the water cave. Mati smiled, turned, and wiggled through the rocks.
Boro’s heart pounded in his chest as he did his best to look like just another lizard going down for a drink after eating his fill of grubs. Evening was at hand, and the passageway would soon be nearly dark. No one seemed to recognize him.
He drank little as he wanted to remain quick on his feet. As he pretended to drink, his mind raced, trying to decide which cavern entrance was least likely to be a trap.
He remained undecided on the way back to the cavern, but then stepped into enough light to be recognized.
“Hey, everyone! There’s the freak!” a large male boomed.
The clearest path of escape was a small side entrance, so Boro judged it his best bet, perhaps his only bet. Most of the males, and some of the females,
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began calling loudly for blood. Boro started running as fast as his reptilian legs would go.
“Your friend will NOT get out unharmed,” the half-grown female lizard informed them as the three outcasts crouched behind a boulder where twelve young lizards had awaited them, all wanting to know more about stars.
Mati set her jaw, looked into Rini’s eyes in the fading light, then into Sata’s. “We have to leave soon anyway, so we’ll do it side-by-side with Boro.”
Rini
nodded.
Sata hesitated, whined a little, then collected herself with a deep breath and nodded also.
“We’re coming too!” the young female declared.
Her friends all nodded vigorously.
Mati
frowned.
“Don’t give us that grown-up look! If we have to take risks to learn about the stars, then we’ll do it.”
Mati looked at the young reptile faces around them. Some were still children. The leader and a few others were old enough to mate, but barely.
Rini looked at Mati. “Whoever’s going, we have to go now,” he said aloud.
“Boro would be here by now if he’d gotten out safely.”
Just outside the minor cavern entrance, in the half-light of evening, Boro didn’t see the first spiked tail swing toward him, but he felt it pierce his body deeply as pain shot from his inner-most organs, outward to every scale of his thick hide.
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Remember, Boro, you’ll be home soon, Kerloran whispered to Boro’s mind.
Somehow, Boro found the courage to take a few more steps, only to feel another tail spike pierce his side.
Against his will, Boro fell onto the sand, and suddenly, all around him, a commotion of screaming and hissing erupted, forming a complete circle close around him. He glimpsed a green female he knew, just out of heat but still very beautiful. A blue female and a small gray male both moved too quickly for any of the big males to hit. But for some reason, many young reptile voices were also snapping and hissing, and occasionally yelling something about stars. Then everything went dark.
For a minute that seemed to last an hour, tails swung, teeth snapped, and claws ripped at anything they could find. Soon, no one was sure exactly who they were fighting. The enemy was anyone within reach.
In the fury of the fight, the large brown male, who had proudly sunk his spikes into the outcast’s belly, didn’t notice when his tail caught a female child and sent her flying against a rock with a bone-breaking crunch.
“ENOUGH!” the leader of the cavern boomed in his loudest, deepest voice, standing tall on a nearby boulder.
With some reluctance, especially from the large males, the two sides parted, one into a ring completely surrounding the other. For a long moment, everything was still and silent.
Then the small gray male from the inner group walked boldly toward the outer ring. He looked so weak and harmless, walking alone, that the large males laughed and parted for him. They fell silent with shame when he collected the broken body of the little female and carried her back to the inner circle.
Her friends gathered around, threw back their heads, and screamed their grief to the first few stars of the gathering night, and anyone else who cared to listen.
The grown-ups in the outer ring, who had bravely protected their culture from the freaks who claimed to come from the dreaded Rip in the universe,
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slowly filtered away to eat cactus fruit or brew shmur.
Deep Learning Notes
The word “freak” is one of many words we use to mean “unacceptably different.” It has no fixed meaning, because we are all different in one way or another. Differences that are okay today might be seen as freakish tomorrow, and today’s “freaks” can become tomorrow’s “interesting characters,” just depending on the swings of social opinion, usually driven by our media and leaders. This seems to be a constant part of human nature, but is less so during good times, more so during wars, famines, and other bad times.
Just so you know, in your own heart, without telling anyone else: would you have been in the group who “protected their culture from the freaks,” or in the group who risked their lives for a chance to learn about stars?
After the fight, why would most of the adults go off to eat cactus fruit or brew shmur?
