CHAPTER 2
Aliens. This place was inhabited by small, red, humanoid aliens. Brilliant. Cat had seen too many sci-fi shows in which the cute, childlike aliens turned out to be viciously sharp-fanged killers to be taken in by this one. Wait—cute, and childlike? Child-like? She stared back at the turquoise-eyed creature, and suddenly all the alien features resolved into something entirely familiar and comfortingly non-threatening: a human toddler, covered from head to foot in some sticky, dark-red substance, with the fingers of its left hand firmly planted in its mouth.
The little person solemnly regarded Cat, then pulled the fingers out of its mouth, smacked its lips a few times, and stated: “Bubbafump.”
Oh. Human it might be, or at least a semblance of it, but the locals apparently did not speak English, and Cat had no way of understanding what the child was saying. Stuck on an alien planet, and the automatic translator was broken.
Well, at least this was a sign that the insects-as-rulers theory had just been her overactive imagination. She put on her best librarian’s story time face, pasted on a smile she did not feel, and brightly asked: “Yes? What did you say?” The child looked at her consideringly, then turned around on its unstable legs, and toddled back in the direction where it had come from.
“Wait!” Catriona called. “Wait for me!”
She brushed at the seat of her skirt, which still had some leaf mould clinging to it, and ran after the baby. It had turned right on what was clearly a path through the woods that had been made by feet walking along the track. The child was toddling along the path, but when it glanced around and saw Cat coming up behind it, it giggled and began to run. Cat sped up her walk to catch up with it, but suddenly they rounded another bend, and she stopped short.
There on the ground, stretched out a full length across the path, was a man. His arms were splayed out at his side, one leg bent at an odd angle. He, too, was covered in the sticky and slippery-looking dark red stuff. Cat gasped. Blood? Was he—dead? Please, no… Cat had never dealt with a dead body before; this situation was bad enough without the horror of a corpse! The child looked at her again out of its solemn turquoise eyes.
“Bubbafump!” it said again, pointing at the man on the ground.
Cat looked. To her immense relief, she saw the man’s chest rise and fall in a shallow breath. Then she noticed something she would have seen immediately if she had not been so preoccupied with this body that was so suddenly flung across her path: there was a large puddle, or pit, full of the red stuff, just a few feet to the side of the trail. It was an irregular circle some ten or twelve feet across; the sides sloped down a couple of feet to the surface. Cat sniffed. There was something familiar about the scent in the air, something that reminded her of arts and crafts, of—clay! The red stuff was clay! Only then did she notice the two large tin buckets, one that was partially filled sitting on the edge of the clay pit, the other lying on its side in the path.
The baby had squatted down beside the man on the path and was batting at him with its sticky hands.
“Bubba bubba bubba!” it chanted; shlup, shlup, shlup went its clay-covered hands against the man’s clay-covered chest.
“Oh, is bubba your alien word for daddy?” said Cat, still in her mode of artificial brightness (she could keep up that mode for hours on end—she had had to often enough at work). Then she remembered her predicament.
“What are we going to do, munchkin?” she asked the baby, seriously this time. Not that she expected an answer, but it seemed rude not to make conversation with the only other person in the vicinity who was conscious. And it helped her get a slightly better grip on exactly what was going on. Slightly.
Cat dimly remembered the first aid class she had taken back in high school. Something about applying tourniquets, and giving the Kiss of Life. Oh dear, she hoped it wouldn’t come to that! Kissing perfect strangers—alien strangers at that—had not been part of the plan for her holiday! Especially not when they were unconscious and covered in mucky clay.
She took a closer look at the passed-out stranger (who kept on breathing—thank goodness for that). Under the clay that was smeared over the better part of his head and body, she could see that he was fully dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and pants, though it was impossible to tell what colour, texture, or even cut the clothes were. They seemed simple and straight and did not look like anything that would be normal men’s clothing as far as Cat was concerned—say, a hoodie or jeans. His shirt appeared to be more of a tunic or smock; the pants were straight-legged. On one of his feet he wore something resembling a moccasin or pull-on shoe of some kind with a drawstring; the other foot was bare, the clay-covered toes long and slender. His hands, too, flung out by his side, were slim, with long fingers. Cat’s eye travelled to his face: a sharp, slightly hooked nose, high cheekbones. Hard to tell if he wore a beard, as there was so much clay smeared on his face, but of his hair some strands had escaped the clay bath; it was longer than Cat was used to seeing on men (apart from the neo-hippies who had sprung up recently around Greenward Falls, but then they usually favoured dreadlocks for ease of care, or non-care, as it were).
“Very well, munchkin,” said Cat, “let’s see if daddy has a pulse. That, I think, I can do.” She knelt on the path beside the unconscious man, and reached for his wrist. The baby stopped slapping at him and looked at Cat with its big turquoise eyes.
“Gah?” it said.
“Yes, quite,” Cat replied, absently, while searching with her fingers for the pulse point. His wrist, slender though it looked for a man, felt solid and strong. She found the pulse, and remembered something about counting the beats per quarter-minute—but a glance at her own wrist where her watch was supposed to be reminded her that she had left the timepiece at Nicky’s place that morning, as yet another act of rebellion against schedules and drivenness. So she just randomly counted the pulse beats for a while; they seemed regular and reasonably strong to her. Good. So he was in no imminent danger of dying.
This allowed Cat to get back to thinking about her own situation. So, now she was in a magical forest, with pitch on her thumb, clay on her hands (and—oh no, some had got on her skirt, and her blouse as well. Drat!), no purse, no idea where she was or how to get back to where she had come from, an unconscious clay-covered man at her feet and an incomprehensible clay-covered child staring at her (when it wasn’t smacking the clay-covered man).
And then Cat heard a new sound coming from the forest beyond the clay pit. A voice—indubitably a human, female voice.
“Bibby! Bibby!! Bibby, where are you? Babe? Where have you run off to again? Bibby!” The voice came closer, approaching through the trees. A stocky woman came striding into sight, her grey hair pinned in a coronet on the top of her head, her long skirt multi-coloured and multi-tiered.
“Bibby!” she called again.
“Ahn!” said the baby, happily, toddling towards the woman.
“There you are! What are you doing in the Wald? And where is your scatter-headed father again? And—oh, who might you be?” The woman had caught sight of Cat, looking at her with a critical frown on her face for just a second, before her eye fell on the prone figure on the ground. “Now what has he done to himself?” she asked in an exasperated tone.
Cat suddenly noticed that she had understood everything the woman said. Had the automatic translator suddenly started working? Oh, no, she had never had one of those. The aliens must be speaking English, after all, or perhaps being transplanted into their world made her understand their language.
The baby pointed at the man.
“Bubbafump!” it said to the woman.
“Yes, Bibby,” said the woman a little impatiently, “I can see that Papa went thump—again. What I want to know is how he did it, and what injury he did to himself this time! You—” she pointedly looked at Cat, “were you there when it happened?”
“No, I’m afraid I wasn’t,” said Cat. “I’m very sorry, I only just arrived here myself.”
?
??No need to be sorry. What do you mean you only just arrived? Oh, never mind that now; we need to deal with this young fool.” She knelt down on the ground beside the man and lightly slapped his cheek. Shlup, shlup.
“Boy?” She lifted his eyelid briefly, then shook her head and clicked her tongue. “He must have been getting some more clay, wouldn’t wait until someone was there to look after Bibby. And of course he took her along; never goes anywhere without that child, young fool.” (Ah, so the child was a girl?) “Probably fell in the clay pit, judging by the look of her, and he pulled her out and then slipped when he got out himself. Hm—that leg doesn’t look good.” She lifted his twisted left leg up and felt along the knee, then placed it back onto the ground.
Her hand came away stained a bright red, which made Cat instantly realise that she had been very silly to mistake the dull red-brown of the clay for blood. She thought she should feel faint—she had always considered herself squeamish about blood, having never been exposed to much of it—but she experienced none of the ringing in the ears, clouding of vision, or sense of vertigo that she had read were the chief symptoms of fainting.
“Very well,” said the woman, whom Cat was fast coming to regard as something of a bossy person, “I don’t think anything is broken, and he isn’t bleeding so badly that we can’t take him to his house before patching him up. Do you think you can take his legs, if I get him under the arms?”
She suited action to words; knelt on one knee behind the man’s head, slid her stocky arm under his neck, and raised his upper body against her chest. She slipped her hands under his armpits and stood up with a groan. Cat tried to do as she was bid, stepping between his feet, squatting down, and picking up his two legs. (The ground under him was extremely slippery and very muddy. Cat refused to think about what this was doing to her lovely beige leather slip-ons.) She tried to stand up, but quickly realised this method of carrying the man wasn’t going to work very well.
“Uh, ma’am,” (where had that come from? Cat hadn’t called anyone “ma’am” before, ever. But it seemed to fit this woman; somehow Cat felt she needed to be addressed with respect), “perhaps it would be better if I took the head? I believe I am taller than you; I can’t see it being good for him to have his head lower than the rest of his body—if—if—if it’s agreeable to you?”
The woman looked up at Cat with a quick tilt of her head.
“Very well, you are right. Put down the legs, and we will switch.”
Cat gently lowered the legs back to the ground, noting with a slight wince that she had already got her sleeve bloody from the man’s injury, and came around to his head. She inserted her arm between the woman’s body and that of the man, slid her hands under his armpit, and lifted him over against her body (mentally giving up her blouse and skirt for lost). His muddy head lolled backwards awkwardly, and his arms dangled at his side, the hands drooping in the mud. Not very functional. Cat remembered a picture in a first aid reference guide (Dewey decimal call number 616.025) of a more effective way to carry an unconscious person against oneself, and she decided to try it out. From under his arm, she fished for a grasp on his sleeve. After some difficulty, she managed to grab a hold of the slippery, muddy fabric and pulled his right forearm up across his chest. She grasped his wrist in her left hand, his forearm just below the elbow in her right and, using his arm across his chest like a holding bar, pulled him back firmly against herself, bringing his head to rest against her shoulder. She reached for his other sleeve, pulled this arm, too, across his chest, managed to lay it over the other arm, and had him in a firm hold without either head or arms dangling or dragging on the ground. Carefully, she raised herself to a standing position.
The woman gave her a shrewd look. “Hmph, it’ll do,” she said, then moved to the legs. She picked up the hem of her skirt, which nearly swept the ground, and bundled it into her waistband, exposing a pair of sturdy calves and feet encased in moccasins similar to the one the man still had on his foot. She turned her back to Cat, then stepped between his legs, squatted down, carefully lifted up the legs around the knees, tucked them under her arms, and rose to her feet again.
“It won’t do that wound any good,” she said to Cat over her shoulder, “but we need to get him to a place where we can look after him.” She stepped sideways, turning them and their burden along the direction of the path. “Come, Bibby!” she called authoritatively. The little girl obeyed instantly (she was obviously used to being told what to do by this woman) and toddled along behind them as they set off along the forest path, carrying the unconscious man legs-first to wherever the woman was leading.