Yulim was a timid man, which did not bode at all well for his chances of survival. Men were vicious beasts, and the search for food was a never ending competition. Those who were timid, like Yulim, would be last to receive meat from the tribe's leader.
The other tribesmen talked openly and scornfully of Yulim's plight. If he'd stick up for himself more, they would say, in their guttural language, then he might be permitted enough food to live off of. Surely even such a small, unfortunate speck of a man could show a little backbone at some point.
However, Yulim never showed even the faintest desire to hunt. He never showed the dimmest twinkling of the warrior spirit which was all that kept men alive in that world. Yulim simply kept to himself day to day, doing odd jobs for the other, stronger tribesmen.
When the other men in the tribe came of age to marry, they did. Yulim did not; no woman would have him, which, to the big, burly men of the tribe, was a sure sign that he was doomed. Rejection from the female populous held a deeply negative connotation of which the tribesmen were aware only on an instinctive level; more than a judgment on simple looks, the females, in deciding not to marry Yulim, had decided that his line was not worthy of going on.
And why not? The men agreed with the women in this, that Yulim was useless, and so too would his children be useless.
How, exactly, Yulim went on as long as he did, none of the other tribesmen could have told; he was given the smallest, least nutritional portions, and he was given increasingly fewer of these over the years, yet he still persisted onwards. It seemed to those who knew him that Yulim could survive without food altogether.
Perhaps things would have ended there, since he was no great deterrent and was, indeed, useful for his uncomplaining labor, had he not made the mistake of acting human just once.
It was a hot, sunny day. The valley in which the tribe lived was filled with sunlight and, most unfortunately, deep humidity. The tribe's hunters had gathered for their biweekly meeting, and all in attendance were sweating profusely. The leader of the hunters, a large, bulky man, was suffering the most of all.
"Yulim!" he bellowed. "Yulim, fetch us water!"
Yulim, who had been cleaning another part of the campsite, dropped his tools immediately and rushed to fulfill his master's wishes. A river ran through the valley some hundred meters from the campsite of the tribe; Yulim had visited there many dozens of times over the course of his life.
This, time, though, when he arrived at the cool, inviting river, he found a female.
Yulim was not talented at communication; he had, even by the day's standards, a rudimentary vocabulary. "H-h-hello," he stammered.
The girl (for she could not have been much older than eighteen) did not say anything back, but fixed Yulim with the most piercing stare he'd ever received. Her entire body seemed to coil, as though she was preparing to spring up and run at any moment.
Yulim, seeing her tension, tried again. "Hello," he managed to croak out. The girl did not relax. Yulim, unaware of what to do, decided that action would be the best course; that was what he'd been taught by his tribesmen his entire life, and had not, until now, found a suitable instance in which to apply the teaching.
"I no hurt you," he said, taking a hesitant step towards the girl. She stumbled back away from him, lost her footing, and fell, shrieking, into the water.
The river to which Yulim had gone was not terribly huge; it's banks were thirteen meters apart, and, at the center, it was perhaps four to five meters deep. Still, the girl floundered in the water, clearly unable to support herself.
Yulim, who was not given to decisive action, stupid stupidly, looking down at the poor, flailing girl. "What wrong?" he asked. The girl continued to sputter, trying and failing to keep her head about the water. "Why you no swim?" Yulim asked.
The girl continued to flail, but her battle with the river was turning in the river's favor; her head had begun to sink below the surface. Finally, seeing that she was in danger, Yulim grasped that he alone could help her, and so, jumped in.
The girl continued to flail even after Yulim had grabbed her and dragged her up in the water. He let loose a large cry of pain when one of the girl's flails him in the right temple, but he did not let go of her. He dragged her up onto the bank.
The girl was obviously quite distraught over what had befallen her. She continued to flail her arms and legs after Yulim deposited her on the side of the bank. Yulim, in his attempts to calm her, only managed to clime on top of her to pin her down, and, using his arms, pinned her hands to the ground.
It was in this position that Yulim's fellow tribesmen found them.
Never having been outside the Nile River Valley before, Yulim was unaware that the girl he was sitting atop of was actually the daughter of the leader of one of the numerous desert tribes of Africa. The tribesmen, though, who had left the valley for food and trade, recognized her at once.
Without question, they took Yulim and threw him bodily from the valley, promising that if he ever returned, they would feed him to the desert tribes. This was more kind, they said; in this manner, Yulim could meet his end upon his own terms, and not the surely gruesome terms of the girl's father.
Yulim tried to explain, as he was being hustled out of his only home, that he was just trying to rescue the girl from the river, but he found, to his dismay, that he lacked the vocabulary to do so. The tribesmen made Yulim know that he would be killed if he ever returned.
Yulim wandered through Egypt's deserts, hungry and thirsty, for days. He should have succumbed to the thirst after less than a week, but somehow, he did not. Instead, he continued moving, sadly, lost, through the desert.
After two weeks, the ordeal was telling seriously on Yulim. Though he had always been resistant to the tribe's efforts to starve him out of existence, he had always been able to live off of whatever scraps they deemed fit for him. Now, though, he received no nourishment whatsoever, and his human body was, after all, human.
Yulim was reduced to a bare crawl, moving slowly along, though he had no idea where he was going. Perhaps he thought that if he simply traveled long enough, he would eventually reach…something. What that something, Yulim would not have been able to say.
Eventually, the heat and the lack of food and water caused Yulim to collapse. Clutching at his burning chest and stomach, Yulim wondered, in his rudimentary way of thinking, what death would be like.
He lay like that for a time that, to him, seemed years, but was, in reality, only a few minutes. When next his intellect summoned the power to perceive reality around him, Yulim was shocked by what he saw.
Hovering about his prone, helpless form was a great, shining creation of what seemed to be wood. The night sky of the desert was illuminated by the great, floating thing, which put Yulim in mind of a boat, though he'd never seen such a boat.
It was enormous – at least one hundred meters long and thirty meters tall. It possessed enormous, billowing sails made of a material Yulim did not know. But even it's proportions were not the most amazing things about the boat.
The first true amazement was that it was, somehow, giving off it's own light. Yulim had encountered exactly two things that gave off light in his life: the sun and fire. A wild thought dashed through Yulim's dim consciousness – could this be the sun?
The second true amazement was that the ship was flying. It was actually above Yulim, as it was. Again, Yulim tried to remember seeing things that could fly, and the only thing he could remember were the assorted small birds that lived in the valley. Yulim checked the great ship for wings and found none; he had no idea how it could possibly be supporting itself.
As he watched, the ship banked in midair and descended slowly. A man appeared at the railing above Yulim's head. Seeing possible help, Yulim reached up, but was too weak to rise himself off the ground.
He didn't need to rise himself from the ground, for at that moment, the man standing on the great ship pointed something at him, and he began to float upwards. Yulim was alarmed, but did not have the strength to resist the invisible force that was lifting him up, up towards the little man on the great ship.
Yulim flew smoothly over the railing of the ship and landed, softly, on it's deck. The man at the railing approached the ailed Yulim and laid a calm, reassuring hand on his forehead.
"Don't worry," he said in a foreign language that Yulim, nonetheless, understood fully. "You'll be okay in short order. And then, you and I…we will begin to learn…and prepare."