"Hey, wake up," I heard as something shook my arm. "Come on, stop sleeping."
"What do you want? Let me rest, Cheel," I said almost instinctively before receiving a sharp blow to the stomach.
"Who's Cheel? Hey!" the voice said as I opened my eyes in pain. Someone grabbed my shoulders, and I could see a woman's face.
"It's you... could you calm down?" I said to the young woman. I couldn't remember her name... was it Waax?
"Calm down? You're my fiancé, and you're mistaking me for another woman?" she said, pulling a dagger from her side with a swift movement and placing it against my neck.
"It's not what you think... Cheel is my sister," I replied, trying to pull the dagger away from my neck, firstly because she was so quick with her hands.
"Leave the boy alone, Waax," a male voice said. He's just confused. In a single day, he went from wandering the desert to having to fight strangers to marry a hysterical stranger. I fixed my gaze on the cave entrance. A figure stood with long, dark black, braided hair that fell over one shoulder.
"Fine," Waax grumbled as he carefully sheathed his dagger in its leather case.
"Did you sleep well, kid?" the figure asked as the light entering the cavern cast shadows on his face and torso.
"Oh, right! I haven't introduced you yet," Waax said as he stood up and smoothed his hair back. "This is my brother, Yak." He said as he stepped forward, his body now fully visible. He was a tall young man, with darker skin than mine and a slender body but broad shoulders and eyes like his sister's. He wore a loincloth and a deerskin tunic, and carried two sheathed daggers and a rather strange long bone. "Brother, he is..." He paused for a moment, thinking.
I smiled slightly as I stood up. "I'm Koh," I said, approaching Yak. Up close, I could see he was two heads taller than me; he was truly very tall.
"We've come to take you to the fire so we can eat," he said, taking my arm. "The old woman can examine your wounds later." He dragged me by the arm through the exit of my cave toward the crevices that connected to the other caves and caverns.
"Have you been living here long?" I asked, hoping to find answers to this strange situation.
"You could say so," Waax replied, looking away. I wondered what on earth that ambiguous answer meant. His brother just sighed and said,
"You'll have the answers you need in due time," his face quite serious. To be honest, I didn't know what to expect from these brothers. The girl kept saying strange things and giving ambiguous answers, and the other didn't even seem to care about the situation.
The first time I walked with Waax through the crevices, I hadn't realized how big the place was. We must have passed through more than a dozen small caverns on both sides of the crevices. Some were empty, and in others, you could see things inside, but I hadn't seen any people inside—no women, no children, nothing in particular. I started hearing voices in the distance, voices I didn't understand…
"Don't be scared, kid, we're not going to eat you," Yak said expressionlessly. The voices were getting louder, and I couldn't make out a single sentence over the noise.
"Hurry up, we're almost there," Waax said, grabbing my arm tightly and starting to run. Almost as if he were trying to drag me along the ground like someone carrying a corpse. We crossed the end of the crevice, and what I saw was astonishing. Directly opposite the place where I had woken up tied to the statue, the end of the crevice connected to a large cavern about two men the height of Yax. There were nearly a hundred people there, perhaps a hundred, or perhaps more; I didn't know, nor was I able to understand how so many people could live in the middle of the desert.
"What?" I sighed. There were so many children, young people, women, and men in one place, a few standing, many others sitting on the sand around long, flat stones. And on top of those flat stones were strange things I'd never seen before. They were like red stones with thorns; others were the color of skin exposed after a cut, a paler pink, perhaps. And in bowls made of bone, they were passing a strange, whitish liquid to each other.
"Don't stop, Koh, we have to find somewhere to sit," Waax said to me as he took my arm and pulled me through the crowd.
"This way!" a woman's voice called from the throng as an arm waved near one of the stones at the back. Waax pulled me by the arm toward that stone and sat down, nodding her head for me to do the same. I followed her more out of instinct than understanding of the situation.
"Come on, tell us how you think Kitam will take it when he finds out his wife chose a savage," a young woman with curly brown hair said to Waax, pointing at me.
"He's not a savage, well, maybe just a little," he replied, turning to look at me.
"You should get something to eat; your new friend is probably hungry," said the young man with the shaved head next to the curly-haired woman, as he handed some of those strange stones to Waax and me. She took the pinkish one from her left hand and gave me the red one.
"What is this?" I asked, holding the odd thing.
"It's food, you idiot."
"How funny your savage is, Waax!" the curly-haired woman said, peeling the outer layer off one of the stones.
"Don't make fun of him... he must be very confused by all this; it must all be new to him." The young man said, taking the thing the other woman had peeled from her hands, "This is edible. It's called pitahaya, and it's a fruit. And that thing you're holding is called prickly pear, and you have to peel it too to eat it." He took out his sheathed dagger and handed it to me. I took it and drew it from its sheath.
"Be careful," Waax said as he took my fruit and the dagger before starting to peel back the outer layer. "If you're not careful, you might get a thorn stuck in you like last time." That's what I got pricked with last time.
"And your brother, where's Yak? I need to talk to him," said the bald young man.
"I don't know, he was right behind us when we came in," Waax said, looking around for his brother.
"That'll have to wait until after lunch," said a voice behind me. "Let's eat first, and then we'll discuss that matter, Tool." He placed a pot of white worms on the table. "Eat some; you'll need to regain your strength for the ritual."
"Thanks," I said after taking a few. They were more familiar to me than those fruits I'd never seen before.
"Kin, can you go with Waax to get some pulque? I'm a little thirsty."
"Let's go, Waax," said the curly-haired young woman as she stood up and took Waax's hands. "In three days, when the blue moon illuminates the sky and the red moon sets, you will fight Kitam at the meeting place," he said, taking a handful of white worms and putting them in his mouth.
"That's quite soon. Even I can see the boy won't be fully recovered by then," said the bald Tool.