The Lizardman of Aurelheart Pt. 01

This is the first half of a two-part romance. Enjoy.

* * *

Bella laughed as she piloted the little flyer recklessly low over the forest of Aurelheart. It had always struck her that there was something fundamentally disappointing about flying: that however fast you were going, however furiously your engines thrust you forwards through the air, the actual experience inside the cockpit was paradoxically tranquil. The ground and sky were simply too far away to allow any impression of real speed. But down here with the treetops ripping past just below the plane's belly, proximity warnings shrieking in horror, she could really feel every metre per second.

This was her therapy. Whenever her glamorous, claustrophobic life became too much for her to bear - whenever she tired of Eddie and his passionless love - she'd borrow one of the company flyers and take it away from the light and noise of Davis, away from civilisation completely, out over the vast green wilderness of Aurelheart. Out where no-one but the lizardmen were likely to see when she broke every rule in the pilot's handbook.

The speed, the danger, it made her feel alive. And it was addictive. Faster, something shouted at the back of her brain. Lower.

She edged the plane lower, lower than she'd ever dared go before. Last night had been a really bad night. She heard the topmost leaves clatter and smack against the underbelly, her wake ploughing a v-shaped ripple behind her in the green sea of foliage. Her knuckles were white as they gripped the controls. A single sturdy branch would be enough to tear the lightweight flyer end to end. Her heart raced and she laughed until there were tears in her eyes.

She was just about to pull back up when something shuddered into the plane and she felt it lurch unhealthily to one side. New, more urgent sirens blared in her ears; reflexively she jabbed at a button just as the forest came up to meet her...

* * *

The first thing to intrude back into her awareness was sunlight stabbing at her eyelids. The second thing was pain.

'Uuuuuuurgh', she groaned almost out loud. Her skin screamed all over.

She forced her eyes open slowly, blinking in the harsh light. A gnarled tree root arched up from the mud just centimetres in front of her nose, heavy with green moss and a few brown-orange mushrooms. Her mind spinning incoherently, she struggled to piece together what it meant.

Root... tree root... tree... trees... forest... ... ...Aurelheart. I remember! I was flying. I crashed... but I survived. I'm in Aurelheart. I'm OK. I think I'm OK. Am I OK?

She risked a glance at her arm where it lay sprawled beside her head and almost fainted at the sight: gross, swollen, lurid pink...

Impact foam, she remembered suddenly. Bright pink emergency impact foam. The cockpit would have cocooned her in the stuff moments before impact. It had probably saved her life.

Slowly, cautiously, she eased herself up into a sitting position. Fighting back nausea she started to run her hands methodically up and down her body, checking for real damage under the swaddling layer of foam. Nothing broken: just a few scratches and more bruises than she could count.

Something creaked above her. She looked up. Her flyer hung suspended in a great forest tree. Or rather, the remains of her flyer hung suspended in the remains of a great forest tree. Shattered silver metal had been ground so deeply into the splintered wood that it was hard to pick out the dividing line between the two. A gaping hole in the cockpit window showed the trajectory of her exit.

Wow. Impact foam or no impact foam, I'm lucky to get out of that alive, let alone practically uninjured. But if I'm going to make it home I need this newfound luck to hold out a while longer. Long enough to get me out of this forest before the lizardmen find me. OK. First thing's first: on your feet, girl...

Gingerly she staggered to her feet, feeling dizzy and unbalanced. For a moment she felt self-conscious, tottering drunkenly around under a ridiculous coat of thick pink foam like an uncoordinated and effeminate yeti, before remembering with relief that there was no-one around to witness the unfortunate spectacle. Now, which way led back home, towards Davis? She turned around...

...and for the first time saw the lizardman leaning casually against a tree, watching her. Her heart skidded; she tried to take a step backwards and landed hard on her bottom in the mud.

She'd seen lizardmen before. A few of them lived in Davis. Eddie had even invited a group to one of his parties once, as a novelty. They'd looked awkward and slightly ridiculous, standing rigidly in the middle of all the glitz and gowns and gossip, dressed in their simple animal-skin clothes, huddled closely together as though afraid of the strange world around them. Living anachronisms.

This one was different. He stood completely at his ease, his back against a tree trunk, his forest-green scales almost merging into the thick undergrowth around him. Two fiery orange eyes looked down at her with a hint of amusement, as though waiting to see what she was going to do next. Bella was acutely aware that it was she - not the lizardman - who was the anachronism here.

Struggling to stay calm, she forced herself to take a few deep breaths. She knew a very little of the lizardfolk's language, Rootsong, from books, but she'd never needed to actually use it before, and the right words were slow to surface in her turbulent mind. 'Please... don't... kill... me?' she said carefully, stumbling over each word, desperately hoping she'd be understood.

'If I wanted to kill you I'd have done it already,' the lizardman replied in perfect English. His voice was thick with the rich throaty rumble of Rootsong, but his words were crisp and clear.

She let out the breath she'd been holding, and took another look at the stranger. He was short, for a lizardman if not for a human, standing a little under two metres tall. His only clothing was a simple knee-length skirt of brown pelt knotted around his hips to protect his modesty, leaving the scales of his chest, arms, legs, tail and face on display: a rich mosaic of greens in subtle mottled patterns, giving him a kind of natural camouflage. The scales on his back and head were knobbly and rough, while those on his chest and face were smooth and soft-looking, like tight-fitting quiltwork, and paler green than the rest.

Everything about him suggested "warrior". His scales bore more than a few old scars of battle as well as one or two which weren't so old. Muscles lurked beneath those scales: not showy, bulging muscles like those of a dozen pampered gym boys she knew, but rather the lean, understated layer of raw animal strength which comes from a lifetime of hard living. And of course he was armed. A large bow and numerous arrows were strung over his shoulder, and a knife sat in a leather strap round his thigh. A long, slender spear was propped up against a tree within easy reach. Back in Davis, safely hidden behind the veneer of civilisation, she remembered thinking the lizardfolk's primitive weapons quaint and harmless. Here in the deep forest, she was painfully conscious that they could kill her just as easily as could a machine gun.

While she'd been eying him over, he'd also been studying her.

'You must be the single most preposterous-looking creature I've ever seen, human,' he said at last.

Bella glared up at him from the mud. 'It's impact foam. Maybe it looks preposterous to you, but it just saved my life. And it's this colour so that it stands out. To help people find me.'

'Ingenious!' The lizardman fell silent, leaving the last word hanging pointedly in the air, a slight smile curling the corners of his mouth.

'OK. Fine. Point taken. You found me. I'll tell them to make it camouflage green next time.'

'Next time? You're in Aurelheart. You're unarmed. You're alone. And here you are chatting to a big, bad, dangerous lizardman. Whatever makes you think you'll get a next time?'

'Only the fact that I'll break both your scaly arms if you so much as touch me.'

'Ha! Well said. You've got quite a spine, for a wormskin. What do I call you, human?'

'Bella,' she replied automatically and then mentally kicked herself.

You idiot, Bella! What do you think will happen if he finds out you're Isabella Dessinger? If he knows you're Eddie's wife? That you're married to the man cutting down his precious forest? Don't you think he might change his mind about not killing you?

'Arabella. Arabella Greenholme. I'm... umm... I'm a pilot.'

'Call me Arrek. Now, it's time to get on your feet, Arabella Greenholme.' He took two long strides towards her and stretched down a hand towards where she sat. Bella eyed the hand with distaste. Pointedly refusing his help, she tried to protect what little dignity she had left by standing up on her own. She made it barely half-way upright before her shaky legs slipped out from under her and she landed back in the mud with a wet squelch.

The lizardman, to her relief, didn't laugh. His hand remained motionless, three green fingers and a thumb outspread in offer of assistance. This time she swallowed her pride and grabbed it - his thick scaled fingers feeling rough and warm as they clasped tightly around her own - and she found herself hauled non-too-gently to her feet.

'Thanks... I think.' Her tender muscles winced from the sudden upheaval.

Arrek grunted dismissively and glanced up over her head to where her wrecked flyer sat embedded in its tree. 'So were you trying to kill yourself, or are you just a very bad pilot?'

She shrugged, feeling a little less tense now she was satisfied the lizardman wasn't immediately about to murder her. 'A bit of both, I guess. But ending up in that tree was an accident, not a suicide attempt.'

'You're wrong there.' Leaning back against another tree, he pulled out an arrow and began to straighten the fletching, frowning in concentration as he worked.

'Excuse me?'

Bright blue feathers flashed between his fingers, falling obediently into perfect shape and order with a single deft twist of his fingertips. 'You're wrong about it being an accident,' he clarified, and nodded upwards towards the crashed flyer. 'Look.'

Bella frowned at the wreckage, struggling to see what she was supposed to be looking for. And then she saw it. A blue-feathered arrow sat half-buried in the flyer, piercing straight through the thin aluminium casing that protected the delicate microjet engine.

'You shot me down?' She could scarcely believe it. Was it even possible? Surely no-one could hit a target travelling at such a speed? She stared at the evidence for a few more seconds before wonder turned to anger.

'You shot me down!' It wasn't a question this time: it was an accusation. She glared at the lizardman, who carried on tending to his arrows as calmly as though she wasn't there. 'How dare you? I could have been killed!' She shouted this in the most imperious voice she could muster, every word edged with steel. It was the voice she used when she wanted to make Eddie flinch. Arrek, however, didn't even look up from his work.

'Why did you shoot me down?' she tried in a softer tone, swallowing her rage with some difficulty. In response he glanced up at the wreck.

'Do I really need to answer that?'

This time, Bella didn't need to look at the wreck to know what he meant. She knew she'd see the Dessinger Corporation logo emblazoned proudly over the fuselage.

'I don't work for the Dessinger Corporation,' she said quickly. Very technically, it wasn't a lie.

'And yet you fly a Dessinger Corporation aeroplane over the sacred forest of Aurelheart. The forest which is at war with the Dessinger Corporation. You must be very brave... or extremely stupid.'

She ran the words over in her head.

"The forest which is at war with the Dessinger Corporation". Funny how different people use different words to describe the lizardman chief Eskarog and his fighters, isn't it? Back in Davis, Eddie called them "saboteurs". Politicians went one step further than the truth, as usual, and called them "terrorists", while ordinary people seemed to be happy enough with "savages". But here, they think of themselves as soldiers fighting a "war". And not their war, oh no: it's the forest which is at war.

'And who do you work for, Arrek? Are you one of Eskarog's merry men?'

'I work and live and fight for the forest.'

'I'll take that as a yes.' Bella decided it was time to make an exit. She knew exactly how many Dessinger Corporation contractors had lost their lives at the hands of Eskarog's bloodthirsty gang in the last few years - a figure which Eddie had so far managed to keep secret only at enormous expense - and she had no desire to personally add to that number.

'It was... um... a pleasure to meet you Arrek, but I think I'd better get going now.' She smiled at him sweetly. 'Do pass my compliments on to Eskarog when you see him next, won't you?'

'Why not wait until you meet him yourself?'

Her smile faded. 'Meet him? Me? No. No no no. I'm going home. Which way is Davis from here?'

'That way.' His tail flicked up to point vaguely into the trees, as his hands were still occupied with his arrows. 'But we're going that way.' The tail flicked round to point in almost exactly the opposite direction.

'You can go that way if you like. I'm going home, thank you very much.'

'What did you imagine? That you could exchange a few pleasantries and then walk away? You are my prisoner. You go where I go, and I'm going back to my camp.'

He said it matter-of-factly and without obvious malice - Bella even thought she caught a slight hint of regret in his voice - but in a tone that made it clear that this arrangement was not open to compromise.

You're in a bad situation here, girl. What do you think's going to happen to you when you arrive at Lizardman Central? A nice fluffy bed and an escort home? Nobody's ever met Eskarog and then made it back home to laugh about it afterwards. Or at least, not in one piece.

She took a moment to think through her options. And then she started running.

She ran in the direction that Arrek had indicated Davis was to be found, blindly hoping he'd been telling the truth. She ran full-pelt, as fast as her shaky muscles would carry her, her feet splashing and sliding through streams and mud, bushes scratching at the foam swaddling her legs and then - when that had been torn away in chunks - at her skin. She didn't dare look behind her. How fast could a lizardman move? Her muscles screamed but still she ran, on and on, leaves and wind whipping at her face, until finally she couldn't run any more. She gasped for breath, her legs trembling and her heart pounding.

She turned to look behind her. Trees, trees and more trees, but there was no lizardman to be seen. She laughed exultantly, but then broke down wheezing.

Ha! Some forest warrior you were, Arrek! Couldn't be bothered to chase me, could you? I'll bet you're still back where I left you, pruning your precious arrows. God help Eskarog if the rest of his thugs are as lazy as you are.

Now what? If I could just sit down for a minute or two, catch my breath, then I could start trying to find my way back towards...

Suddenly green-scaled arms closed around her from behind.

Bella screamed in shock and tried to squirm free, but she might as well have been trying to break steel bars. Arrek's muscular arms held her tightly pressed against his sturdy chest, and the more she wriggled and hit and strained the tighter they held her. Eventually she gave up and slumped in surrender.

'Are you finished trying to escape?' She could feel the words echoing in his chest.

She nodded, shaking in impotent fury.

'Good. I need you to know that if it proves necessary, I'm quite capable of carrying you back to our camp by force, kicking and screaming if you so desire. But it's a long journey from here, and I feel this could soon become a wearisome arrangement for us both. So perhaps it would be preferable if you agreed to follow me quietly?'

It wasn't much of a choice. 'Deal', she said, and he released her from his iron grip.

Bella took a few steps away, unsteady on her feet. It felt good to be able to breathe freely again. 'So just to be clear. If I try and run again, you're going to just pick me up and drag me all the way to your camp?'

'Yes. After I shoot you in the leg.'

'...OK. Thanks for clearing that up.'

She looked up into the lizardman's eyes and he looked back down at her. He had bright orange eyes, like two rings of fire.

Oh god, no human has eyes like those. There's nothing gentle about those eyes - they're like two burning coals: hot with passion and mercilessly hard. I didn't think he had the manner of a fanatic, but he has the eyes of one. They frighten me. I can imagine seeing dancing flames reflected in those eyes as a city burns to ashes. I can imagine them blaze in exultation as they watch a man die. I can imagine losing myself in the infinite blackness of those pupils as we make wild, brutal love...

...Whoah. Where did that come from? Down, girl.

'So what's going to happen to me?'

'That is for Eskarog to decide.'

He walked a few paces into the undergrowth and stopped, looking back at Bella expectantly. 'Follow me. Do as I do. Step where I step. And make haste. We have a long way to go.'

Bella sighed. 'I'm right behind you,' she said wearily and followed her captor deeper into the forest.

* * *

Back in Davis, Bella's suite had looked out towards Aurelheart. She felt she could stare at it for hours. Out past the gleaming lifeless blocks of glass and concrete, out past the neat chequerboard of green and golden fields, it appeared as a vivid green haze stretching out to the horizon, framed by the blue mountains, and something about it drew the eye irresistibly.

'Staring at the forest again?' sniffed Miranda, coming to join her at the window. 'It looks rather lovely from here, doesn't it?'

'It is quite pretty from a distance,' agreed Jane from the sofa. 'Say Bella, you should ask Eddie to leave us a little bit to look at. Maybe even to visit, if he put in some nice paths and benches and cleared out all the insects and things.'

Bella sighed. Eddie had somehow got it into his head that Jane and Miranda were her very good friends, and took it upon himself to invite them round to "entertain" her whenever he noticed she was planning to enjoy a day at home on her own.

'It's not pretty,' she contradicted. 'And it's not lovely either. It's beautiful. Rose gardens are pretty. Aurelheart... it's wild and free and somehow... I don't know... pure. It's the only thing I can see from this window we haven't been able to tame or control yet. The only thing we haven't managed to turn into something dreary.'

Miranda chuckled: a sound that resembled someone quietly choking to death. 'Honestly, you do say some terribly naïve things sometimes, Bella! Aurelheart is dreary. Just miles and miles of trees, really. And mud, and poisonous plants, and biting things that carry disease. Pretty from a distance, oh my yes, but frankly I shan't be very sad when Eddie pulls down the last nasty tree and we can begin using that land for something productive.'

'And those horrible lizardmen sent packing,' contributed Jane.

'Sent packing to where, exactly? It's their home. Always has been. They've been there since before we even knew this planet existed.'