The pirate and the dove

Elan chewed on a type of tree bark mixed with the seaweed she had gathered and dried when she had been searching for moonstones. She chewed the bark and seaweed every night after twilight until she blead from her sex by the third week. She washed herself in beach water

At first full moon she would whisper the incants and stare into the night sky reading the stars

It was something they both knew much about. Elan, because her mother taught her the strange characters of the sky and how they moved across the horizon of the sky all the days through the seasons. Her mother taught her the secrets of the stars. She learned to memorize the characters

Raoul asked her about her strange sounding incants with his questing gestures and some words they both knew

He patiently smiled with an indulgence that suggested he found the chants useless

She smiled and drew a picture in the sand

They were by the shore and watching the full moon

She drew a picture of a baby in her mother’s arms. He was impressed with her ability to draw and praised her with his words but his gestures filled in enough to express his genuine praise

For a moment she looked away. She lowered her eyes. Then she smiled looking back up at him

Her eyes looked at him like, it seemed to him,a child basking in the first compliment ever said and with the same unabashed modesty of not knowing how to feel

Then she pointed to the baby and then at herself

She pointed to the mother and made a gesture to her eyes to express tears falling for the mother and touched her heart. It was then when she repeated the incant and gesture and she expressed to him this way that it was not for faith she did the ritual and drew two females in the sand to tell him it was a way to remember her mother because it was something they did together

In this way he asked her about her herbs and he made a frank gesture to her sex and pointed to the baby in her drawing

She realized he must have seen the evidence

It had been seven days since

But she became upset and stomped on the baby she had drawn and obliterated the image in the sand

He saw her eyes become angry but then fill with tears before she started to run into waves

When he caught her going under the water she was sobbing into the waves what sounded like “ma-ma”

She would always wonder if he had only waited for her monthly flow before he decided to claim her with his sex

or....

if he had only been waiting for her consent

It was soon after this that it happened

He had built a fire in the sand and dried her hair with a hide in front of the fire. He began to talk to her with words of his own language, interspersed with hers and gestures as he ran his fingers through the red tangles as they dried and he then he pointed up to the night sky

She had begun to know his words from his repitition but with only a dullness of interest, at first, she found herself listening to his story of the stars. And other things he began to babble on about 

His story was about his voyages. He told her how the sky watched over everyone and how they determined when it was time to leave home for a journey but also he told her how they guided them to their journey and helped them know how to go back home

In this way they had began to build their own private language between them; sometimes using their eyes to say what they could not find words for. Sometimes they used voice and tones of sound, sometimes expressions or her pictures

Elan did not realize that in this way she had begun to respond to him with a sense of trust towards him nor notice that she had begun to relax with him

Those visits with the village women had happened less and, in parallel, inadvertently, her trust of him also had started

The last time he went to a village woman had happened the day before this conversation

Which had been, in part, behind some of her anger

....because it happened then before that it was the first time he put his hand on her in such a way to tell her he meant to have her

But it was because she had pulled away from him that ....made him angry

But she had pulled away out of fear and out of habit 

.... and they went to the stall by the market place where those women “traded”

and made her sit outside the doorway where she could hear .... forcing her to listen

But now.... when he used her pictures to tell her another story.... it was a sad story

and it was about his own family.... and it was a very sad tale

It was the surprising sadness of his eyes that changed her towards him and so she reached for his hand

and then she placed it where he had

he would never know if it was the picture story he told her or the woman’s sounds from the night before that changed her mind

The men on the boat immediately noticed the change between them

And their resentment of him grew