Page 6 of Feast

As luck would have it, Rolf had a bushel of wild ksh berries stored away. He didn’t much care for the flavor himself, but it provided a source of energy when other food was scarce. He took one of the round, white, eyeball-sized fruits and carefully squeezed the juice into the tiny creature’s mouth.

The creature accepted the ksh juice hungrily.

Rolf went through a half dozen of the berries before the little animal was finally sated. Not long after that, it drifted off to sleep in Rolf’s lap, full of ksh and warmed by the orange fire.

Rolf stared down at the softly snoring creature and wondered what the rot he was getting his foolish self into.

He had always been a loner.

There were other free ukkur out here in the wilderness. Other escaped slaves from the nith-owned ksh farms. Most of them preferred to live in small packs of three or four, but not Rolf. He had always preferred living on his own.

And now here he was taking care of this utterly useless being.

But his instinct to protect it was so strong.

He would feed and cloth and protect the tiny creature, knowing full well that it would provide nothing in return. Nothing except that warm, painful, good feeling in Rolf’s chest that he didn’t have a word for.

It would give him a purpose beyond mere survival, and that was a gift beyond measure.

“You need a name,” Rolf whispered to the tiny thing curled and snoring on his lap.

But Rolf struggled to come up with one. For several days he could not think of a name. Then, on the third day, the little stem on the creature’s belly dried up and fell away, and that's when it came to him. He would call the creature Ika. It was the word to describe when a ksh berry is ripe and breaks away easily from its stem. It seemed like a fitting name.

CHAPTER 3

Ika was a little mystery.

Rolf had to invent a new way to think of Ika. It was clear that Ika was not an it, not some ordinary animal that one might find scurrying through the shadows of the forest. Nor was Ika a he, an ukkur like Rolf.

So Rolf began to think of little Ika as she, without fully understanding what that meant, except that she was different from every other creature in the world. She was special.

And she was full of many surprises.

One of the first surprises was that she grew, and she did so with astounding rapidity. Because of this, Rolf realized that she must be an infant of her species.

There was a reason he had not recognized this fact immediately. All the other creatures of this world—the nith, for example—hatched out of eggs that the adults expelled through an ovipositor tube. As for ukkur like Rolf himself, they were never young. As everyone knew, the ukkur were created by the nith, artificially grown and brought to maturity inside nutrient tanks, introduced into the world fully formed and ready for slave labor.

But Ika was different.

She had just fallen right out of the hole between another creature’s legs with a stalk attached to her belly. Rolf had never seen or heard of anything like it.

Over the coming months and years, Ika grew and grew.

Soon she learned how to crawl about on all fours, and not long after that, she began to walk, trundling about the den on unsteady legs. Her limbs became leaner, and the fat little belly hollowed slightly beneath her tiny ribs.

She smiled. She laughed. Sometimes she screamed and screamed while water leaked from her eyes. Whenever that happened, Rolf would comfort her and try to figure out what was wrong.

At night they slept together, her tiny little body huddled against Rolf’s for warmth.

He spoke to her all the time, not because he expected her to understand him, but simply because it pleased him to do so. It had been a long time since Rolf had had someone to talk to on a regular basis, and he had not realized how much he missed it.

Then one night after dinner, Ika looked up at him, her big dark eyes glittering in the firelight, and she made a sound that was different from her usual giggles, grunts, and gurgles.

“Ruf.”

She was trying to say his name. It was her first word. She repeated it over and over, and Rolf smiled while his heart panged with that warm, happy feeling.

“Ruf, Ruf, Ruf.”