If there were ever a least comfortable position to sleep, it would be what Jayda was doing. The rough bark and knots of the tree poked unmercifully into her back, keeping her only half asleep. But she was used to it by then, it was the only safe way to sleep.
Her mother always taught her, stay vigilant, stay alive. Not the most encouraging words, but then, survival was more important.
She knew the mother she had wasn't her birth mother, but she wouldn't have survived if she was.
She remembered fully her first parents, and something about a place with a roof. She couldn't tell why they had a roof, the trees do most of that work anyway, and they survived better. But she remembered the roof distinctly, because it caved in on her mother, the beam crushing her skull like a bird's egg. The next she knew she was being dragged by the hand into the woods with the sound of gunfire.
Those were hungry days, just her father and her. Not that the days before were much better, but hunger is more noticeable when all you can hear are the wild woods.
Her father's scratchy beard was stiff with his lips, but they softened sometimes, when Jayda said she loved him. He couldn't say it back after a while, he couldn't say much of anything.
The sun began to tint the early morning mist a bright pink and the memories faded into the night. The hunt for food would begin again when the rest of the humans woke up. Jayda stretched, her joints cracking like dry twigs.
She stopped and listened for any more movements, but all was quiet. Bright-Eyes stood watch over the group. He really didn't have a name, there's no need for o ne when you can't speak it, but Jayda imagined what everyone in the group would be called and his eyes were the sharpest- hence Bright-Eyes
He noticed Jayda stir and pivoted to search the forest for danger, his eyes alert but distant, as if he couldn't process everything correctly. She watched him until he looked at her with a positive expression. She stood slowly, carefully trying not to wake the others.
Her pants and oversized shirt rustled through the underbrush. The rest of the group wore more revealing clothing that was easy to move in, it was important to be able to run. Jayda wondered for a moment why they wore clothes at all, perhaps it was a learned trait, some kind of shame that needed covering.
She grew up with clothes that covered more to protect against the wind and sun. Perhaps her shame was more than others, maybe she was behind on their progress. But her skin seemed to burn more easily in the sun than that of her fellow humans.
She didn't remember everything about the state of the world, but snippets of what her parents taught her sometimes came back at random moments.
Something about a war, a battle with the scary ones with fur. Jayda named them horse-arms in her mind, she'd seen plenty of them riding around on horses and their arms were long and deadly. Her father, however, called them apes.
She moved carefully through the brush away from the rest of the group. The group of humans were bound together by some survival instinct, they hated being alone. Alone is how you got caught. Her second mother kept her close until she was shot by the apes. Since then, Jayda craved the feeling of aloneness, to be reliant on herself, but the group always seemed to find her again.
The trees chirped quietly with the beginning of the day, soon the birds would be loud enough to wake the others. She stood erect, letting the cool wetness of the mist brush against her skin. The air was crisp and she could almost drink the smell of wet wood and leaves. For now, she was safe.
She climbed the wall of a small cliff and saw the river on the other side. A large waterfall fed the river and the roar led her to cast caution to the wind and dash with glee down to the river's edge.
She cupped the clean water in her hands and began to splash it on her face. She dipped in her hair and washed her scalp and let the grime flow away. It was a habit learned from her father and she felt better afterwards. Her thoughts seemed to become clearer when her skin was clean. She looked up at the falls and breathed the mist.
Then her heart leapt to her throat. A black figure was shuffling along the cliff above the water. She stood quickly and climbed over the slippery rocks and stopped behind the sheet of falling water. Her heart was beating rapidly and she was glad for the loud water to hide the sound of her movements.
She watched carefully, crouched down to stay out of the line of sight. The ape leapt from outcropping to outcropping down to the opposite edge of the water that she'd been just a moment before. It held a spear with a tip long enough to cleanly gouge out her innards.
The figure held the tip of the spear over the water, watching carefully. A long and breathless time passed. Jayda's muscles were beginning to cramp from the uncomfortable position, but she didn't dare move.The cold water was making her grip sore and weak against the slippery stone. She couldn't feel her fingers.
Suddenly, the ape exploded with speed and stabbed the water and drug up a fat fish skewered at the end of the pole. An unearthly cry of delight burst through the masking water and it held up its catch.
"Nice going Ziro! You can actually catch something!" The other voice broke the air and the first was joined by another ape with black hair.
Jayda felt tears form at the edges of her eyes as the fear held her still. Two of them, the group hadn't seen an ape for months and there was two of them so near the group. Jayda hoped that Bright-Eyes would spot them before they found the rest of the humans.
A crack shattered the air and Jayda felt her stomach leap into her mouth. A stream of words she'd heard her father say left her mouth before they were silenced. The stone she was holding cracked under her fingers and she was falling into the churning water below.
Her shoulder hit the bottom and she writhed in pain before she felt herself flipping over in the water. Her head broke the surface in time for a single breath before she was swept under again. This time, her skull cracked against a stone and little lights popped up in her vision. She could feel herself loosing consciousness and she felt her body tug upwards.
-
"Brutus, are you absolutely sure about what you heard?"
"Yes, I didn't say those words and you for sure don't know those words. The only other thing was this human."
"But… everyone knows that humans can't speak."
Jayda felt the words swirling around her cranium with increasing volume. A pounding headache was forming, well, everywhere. She groaned to try to banish the sounds, but they kept getting worse. It was like the time when she lived under a roof and she caught a serious fever, everywhere it hurt then too.
She tried to roll over and cover her head to keep the echo from reverberating around her skull.
A hairy hand grabbed her shoulder and she turned quickly to wrestle it off. She caught sight of the two apes that she'd seen earlier, one was completely soaked.
She scrambled to her feet, ignoring her headache and began to run up the steep slope.
"Wait!" One of the creatures shouted after her.
She dashed up the side of the river and scrambled through the underbrush. She kept low, glancing back to see that both of them were indeed following her. a terrible stitch tore at her side and her breath came in shallow wheezes. She looked down at her shoulder and saw a mess of bloody skin. She could also feel a stream of blood dripping steadily down the side of her face, but she couldn't stop.
She fell into a dry creek bed overgrown with ferns. Scrambling upward, she continued to run along the path, the light getting fuzzy at the edges of her vision. She looked back and couldn't see the shapes anymore and she turned back in time to see a log that had fallen across the creekbed long ago but not in time to dodge it.
She smashed headlong into the bark and fell back in a daze. The sky grew dark and she felt herself passing out for the second time that morning.
-
"Why do we have to drag this human around?" Ziro complained to Brutus.
Brutus turned to his fellow ape and glared.
"You are eternally lucky that ape shall not kill ape, or else I would've finished you off years ago."
They both dragged behind them a makeshift cot with the ragged human female sprawled on it. Her wounds were clumsily bandaged from what they could find to stop the bleeding. Normally, they would've been taught to just leave her, or even brought her back as a hunting trophy. But they were chimpanzees, and not gorillas, luckily for the human. She'd been knocked out, twice, and been through a traumatic situation, twice. That would probably break the tiny brain of any human, but there seemed to be something different about this one.
Ziro sighed again, "she's so heavy."
Brutus' brows furrowed, "you weigh twice as much and I had to carry you back when your leg broke in that incident. I think you can handle this scrawny human."
Ziro huffed, but didn't say any more. They'd been friends for as long as they could remember and had been through many mishaps, but this one was shaping to be the strangest.
Of course they'd seen a human before, but they normally had wild and distant eyes. They couldn't be reasoned with and the ability to speak was not among their small list of talents. But somehow, some way, they thought they heard words coming from this human- That warranted investigation.
The underbrush was growing thin and they saw the beginnings of the village the two called home. A few houses thatched together with wood and sticks, some of the larger buildings had stones or mud. They aimed for the closest shack, one with bits of glass and beads strung up by the doors and windows that chimed together in a bright symphony.
They could see a large orange head through the open window and hurriedly picked up the pace.
"Julius!" Brutus called out.
The head perked up and a wide face turned to the window. Two small eyes brightened to see the chimpanzees coming out of the woods. The head rose, revealing a huge set of shaggy shoulders. The orangutan disappeared from the window and appeared in the doorway, "Ziro! Brutus! For what do I owe the pleasure?"
His eyes fell on the cot, and the bloody human laying on it.
"Great Caesar," he gasped.
Moving quickly, he loped forward and Ushered them inside.
-
Jayda fought to wake up, but the more she tried the more tired she seemed to become. She rested for a moment in the darkness of unconsciousness before trying again. This time her eyes opened.
She saw a roof decorated with dried plants hanging in bunches. She tried to reach up and touch her pounding forehead, but her hand was restrained. She looked down and saw that her wrists and feet were tied with rope to the flat bed. Panic set in and her breath came in short gasped as she wrestled against the bindings.
Suddenly, a hairy hand clasped down on her shoulder.
"Safe, human… safe," a voice said softly from beside her.
She stopped struggling, but every limb was shaking uncontrollably. She looked up into two large brown eyes set back in a long face, the forehead sloped back more than a human's. She hadn't seen the apes up close before, usually they were charging from far away, firing weapons at her kind.
The hand withdrew and the face turned to look at something beyond her line of vision.
She tried to turn her head, but a burst of white-hot flame erupted from her temple.
She groaned and shut her eyes tight against the pain.
"Julius," the ape said, sounding like he was speaking to something behind him.
She heard the shuffling of something large moving closer to where she was bound. She felt the moisture of cold sweat beading on her face and her muscles froze in the only reaction she associated with these creatures, fear.
Her head stopped pounding enough for her to open her eyes again. This time, she saw three pairs of eyes looking at her, two belonging to apes with dark hair and light skin. The third was much larger and had wide cheek flaps, Jayda wasn't completely sure what kind of creature the third was, it had similar features of the other apes, but she'd never encountered the orange one before.
The splitting headache came back with a vengeance and she whimpered from the pain. The orange one pushed the other two gently away and placed a hand on her forehead. A deep cooing emanated from deep in its throat, she flinched and groaned louder than before, trying to get it to stop.
The orange ape withdrew its hand and moved it to the back of her neck, lifting her up and causing the headache to worsen.
She felt a brim of a bottle pressed to her lips, and it spoke in a deep voice, "drink, feel better, no pain."
The pounding in her head was so bad that Jayda did as she was told and drank the sweet liquid coming from the bottle. Desperation for relief overwhelmed her survival instincts if it had the slightest chance of taking the pain away.
She heard a satisfied grunt and felt herself lowered back down and the orange ape's hand withdrew. Her stomach churned, but after a few moments, her headache faded away and a dull feeling came over her limbs. She could think again and see the room more clearly. She turned her head and noticed the other two apes watching her carefully.
-
Brutus stared transfixed the human. Now that Julius had administered the medicine, she was staring around the room, seemingly trying to take in every detail. Normally their eyes didn't seem to register what was going on around them besides the basic instinct. This one seemed to consider what she saw.
She finally turned her eyes to him and looked straight into his. He was taken aback by the way her gaze held his.
"She likes you," Ziro said with a chuckle, "look she's even copying your expression."
Brutus aimed a punch at Ziro's shoulder and he grunted in pain.
"Stop," Julius warned, "you'll scare her."
She started tugging at the bindings on her wrists and feet. They only put them there so she wouldn't hurt herself or them when she awoke, but seeing her discomfort twisted his stomach over like they committed some kind of betrayal.
"Can we untie her?" Brutus asked aloud.
Julius turned to answer and behind him, the human nodded.
He froze, the human nodded. He approached the bed and looked directly into the human's frightened face.
"Brutus?" Julius said in a warning voice, he hadn't noticed the human's movement.
"Can you understand me?" He asked seriously, studying her reaction carefully.
Ziro laughed out loud and even Julius let out a chuckle.
"Haven't you heard? Human see, human do," Ziro mocked.
"Shut it!" Brutus found himself growling at him.
The human watched the exchange, and Brutus could swear he saw a single tiny nod. But the moment passed and she continued to stare ahead without a reaction. He sighed and stepped back, scratching a spot on his brow.
"Told you," Ziro sneered.
Julius clapped a large hand on his shoulder, "Don't be discouraged Brutus, you were able to show this creature some civility and that is a noble thing. But the scrolls say, 'Don't cast your shawl before man, for he will trample it and turn his back on the decency of apes'."
"I know what I saw and heard," Brutus said with waning confidence.
Their thoughts were interrupted by a sound coming from outside towards the center of the village. All three apes straightened up.
"You two will be late," Julius announced, "go home, quick! You still need to change and get the smell of human off you."
Ziro moved quickly out the door, but Brutus paused and faced Julius, "you will be kind to her, won't you? Can you keep her here until I get back?"
"Of course, she's safe here."
Brutus glanced at the human, "I'll be back."
Then he left, leaving a sinking feeling behind him.
Julius sighed, and then a deep chuckle escaped his throat.
"Imagine that, a human understanding ape speech," he glanced back at the human female, "I wonder what you would do if you had brains."
She continued to stare blankly forward, but what Julius didn't notice was her fingers carefully feeling out a knot and slipping an end free.