Sound.
The trickling of the nearby stream. The rustling of the leaves from an overhead tree. The far off screeching of a monkey. And then nothing. Nothing except for the steady throbbing of the hearts inside her womb. They were thriving.
Touch.
There seemed to be some sort of rough-hewn hemp all around her, with gaping holes in and around. Her fur was all matted up and pressed unevenly against this chafing lattice, and her stomach seemed to roil in sickening fright and anger.
Shift.
The squelch of wet leaves beneath her paws, which disintegrated as quick as specks of dust as she pressed down upon them. She was by a bank. The leaves were so delicate that her sharpened claws tore through their gauzy consistency effortlessly.
Scuffle.
Nothing, except for the bulge of her stomach which hung through the bottom of this cage. Spasms of pain erupted through her lower back and her neck stinged from the bite. She whined. Softly, because the trees have ears.
Smell.
A pungent waft of wet pine crept through her nostrils. Decaying flesh aroused a fresh hunger- she was not strong enough to hunt, provided she could escape this prison, but no scavenger would dare touch the dead when her claws even came a mile near the flesh. Deer, it seemed.
Shift.
Nothing, except her own blood, which dripped from the gashes across her torso. The blood had clotted into dried clusters, but it stank as fresh as the day those claws had raked through her fur, and the day she had thought she would lose her life, and perhaps those of which she was breeding.
Scuffle.
Timuri slowly opened her bruised eyes, wincing as she did so. As she tried to straighten herself into a standing position, her stomach again grazed the tight confines of the hemp lattice again. Her legs buckled under her own weight, and now that her stomach descended far below her ribs, her movements seemed more sluggish and her senses dimmed.
Strain.
She lifted and arched her neck as far out as it would go, only to see nothing but tall capering pine trees. A small stream meandered across some flat rocks dejectedly and it looked as if a light rain had fallen, which covered the leaves and grass with a translucent green glow. Her first thought was to get out of the cage. But how? Hemp was her only weakness- as a child she would try and claw through the clumps that hung low from the pine trees, but would fail. She tried biting against the thick rope, and instantly—
Taste. The sour taste of hemp encompassed her mouth. Her canines tugged and tugged on the various thin strands that had constituted this thick monstrosity of a cell.
Shift.
As she sliced through one portion, her eyes wandered to the other part. This was going to be a long day’s work. Her stomach heaved again, and she hurled the contents of her week’s old hunt out in an instant. The taste of half-digested tough meat made her wretch in further disgust.
It was nicer, Timuri thought, when she had kept her eyes closed.
***
Sunset.
Sunrise.
She ferociously clawed apart the remainder of the cage and stretched languorously on all fours. The dappled sunlight fell on her skin, subtly highlighting the black spots on the canvas of yellow. Her instincts were to find a den, and soon. Timuri knew that the scratches were infected, and that muddy water would do nothing to clean out her wound. She decided, instead, to follow the track of the stinking deer so she could break her forced fast.
As Timuri navigated her way through the forest, the destruction overwhelmed her. The foliage was ripped to shreds. Dead animal remains littered the ground on which she walked. Nothing remained. It seemed as if Shorasa’s tribe had left nothing. As the sun sank promptly below the horizon, her pace increased and eyes became keener, sharper. She scanned the trees around her, whose shadows under the light of the moon cast eerie slanting lines.
Then, she heard the soft keening of a dear from at least ten miles away. Anchoring her swollen calves into the grass she crouched in complete silence. The long strands of grass sashayed comfortingly against her skin. There was a moment, as she stood in keen expectance, where anything was possible.
A moment passed.
Then, another.
Timuri ran. Her curved body cut across the desolate terrain with practiced ease. She could only think of flesh. Her canines longed to tear into flesh. She was not only eating for herself.
She had to get there first.
She had to.
But when she finally came to the deer, she also came eye to eye with Masuri. Her twin sister. Those eyes did not thrive with life, but were empty with the dullness of death. Her torso had been sliced open with the same trademark claws. Timuri’s head sagged lower and lower in the shame of grief.
This was now a world where leopard killed leopard.
***
Sunrise.
The rough bark scratched comfortingly against her flesh as she lay, her body aching in hunger and exhaustion. She knew the birthing day wasn’t far along now, and she had yet to find a den. However hard Timuri tried, to focus on the lazy warmth of the sun or the soft whistling of the wind, sleep would not overcome her and her thoughts circled in a dizzying rhythm. So while her unborn children slept, Timuri dreamed with her eyes wide open, and soon the ground became her heart and thrummed with life, and the sky became her eyes, and stretched endlessly onwards.
She remembered fondly the first time she had been with Lasaro. They had mated, and for her, they had been the softest mornings and the most passionate evenings. She no longer measured the days by the sun, but by his coming and going, and almost immediately after that she had grown heavier in a symbol of their bonding. But then…
Crash. Timuri’s reminiscing was disturbed by a far off clatter. She lurched to her feet with an unsteady gait, her body showing lesser and lesser of its nimbleness with each passing day.
She had to find Shorasa.
She had to confront him, she owed that much to Lasaro, and now Masuri.
***
The days seemed to pass in an agonizing slowness. Timuri wove her way through the forest by moonlight, and slept in the day, surviving only off the discarded meat that Shorasa’s tribe had left. It infuriated her further, to have to eat their remains, but what choice did she have? There was no fresh game left.
On the third day, as she was approaching the borders of the forest, the rocks grew sharper below her feet, and the trees sparse. The ground was strewn with shrapnel-like rock, and there was only one spiny tree in sight. The sun was looming ahead and she was tired.
So tired.
Timuri wanted to lay her head down and sleep, sleep and never awaken. She hadn’t slept the day before, and now there was no way of her continuing. An hour passed. A threatening growl rumbled from some distance away.
Her ears pricked up, and she arose as swiftly as she could.
It couldn’t be Shorasa, he would have fled after leaving her in that pathetic excuse of a cage to die.
It came again, more menacing. A command to bow and accept defeat. This was not her territory. Timuri signalled back that she was female, not looking for a fight. A few minutes later, a young male leopard slinked into her sight. He seemed wary, but strong, fuelled by the conflict that raged around him and determined to put an end to it.
“Which tribe do you hail from?” He asked first, trailing in slow circles around her, eyes never leaving hers, and his body erect, as if he expected a fight from a near birthing mother. If she wasn’t so exhausted, she would’ve laughed.
Those whose mates were dead gave their mating tribe. It took her a minute to remember this.
“Thavi. I am of the Thavi tribe”.
He almost choked on his surprise, before critically giving her a once over.
“No. You do not look as if you are from the desert savannah… unless, of course-”
“My mate is dead.” Timuri finished simply.
For a moment it seemed as if his eyes softened, and then it was as if she had imagined it, for they seemed to range over the large bulk of her stomach.
“What is your birthing count, and why are you at the forest border?”
“It has been near seventy suns.”
His eyes narrowed.
“I will ask again. Why are you at our forest border?” She did not miss the claim.
“I bear no trouble. My journey is uphill, to track the Shorasa rebels, who destroyed this forest. I will not let him destroy another home.”
This time, he came this close to scratching her. The malice burned heavily.
“You are who he has been tracking? It is your fault that so many lives have been destroyed. He wasted an entire forest… to get to you!”
“I have told you everything you have asked of me. I am sorry that it has come to this, that he brought his rage here. But neither of us can do anything to change what has happened. How far are the Amuri hills?” She stopped, her lungs heaving from the effort.
“You will not be able to make it.”
Timuri’s eyes welled up suddenly and without warning.
“You don’t understand. I have to.”
He looked at her, and then sighed.
“I am Rarakh, of the Amulyan tribe. Come with me.”
And so, Rarakh took her through the forest and to a hidden shelter. Timuri’s relief seemed to palpate through the smooth stones. She lay down with the females almost as soon as she came. As one of them slowly cleaned and kneaded her fur with her soft tongue, she slept. And when she slept, she dreamt.
***
Timuri is watching, watching the fight quietly. She has no place and so she sits, sits cautiously at the edge of the marked ground.
Lasaro has the upper hand. He jostles Shorasa to the ground and then pins him beneath his muscular calves. Dust and sand flies into the air as their paws change positions constantly, and as they scrape against the ground, it billows out in invisible clouds.
Shorasa is doing something, clenching the ground with his paws repeatedly.
Timuri squints, squints harder as she peers past the dust piercing through her eyes. She surges, surges forward in silent warning.
She hears him before she sees him. His breath sounds so intrusive. He comes up from behind, behind Lasaro and the next minute both of them have him pinned down.
Timuri roars, roars in part panic and part anger.
Leopard kills leopard.
Lasaro is not moving. Timuri stops, stops right before she reaches him. She does not want to say goodbye, but she escapes for her children.
He runs, runs across the desert savannah behind her. Shorasa is limping, but he still catches up to her. His companion is nowhere to be seen.
Timuri bounds, bounds forward.
Shorasa is only a couple feet behind.
Shorasa growls, growls from behind. Timuri doesn’t even turn. He scratches, scratches her back hide.
Her amber- black eyes contract, and then she looks back, back, right into his.
“Mate with me, Timuri, or face the consequences.”
She clutches sand between her foreclaws and flings it in his eyes. When they open again, Timuri is gone, gone, away from him and away from everything she once loved.
But it does not stop there.
Shorasa stays on her trail with a fierce determination, tracking her scent by the hour. His friends pan out in various directions, and soon Timuri’s gait slows out of compulsion. At nights, the dunes were desperately cold with nowhere to rest her head, and the sands shifted constantly. Her feet would sink and form soft depressions where her paws lay for more than a second, and she would constantly have to double back and cover her tracks.
She dared not sleep for more than a few hours each night, and those too, were troubled fits. In the day, the sun would grow hazy with warmth, and her fur would stick uncomfortably to her body. Come noon, her long shadow would fall a feet behind her and her sweat would mingle with the dust which was everywhere. It got in her fine white whiskers, which had turned a dirty yellow and coated her eyelids which were as dry as her soul. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth which was where bile would collect slowly. But when she spit, she also retched, and her stomach would heave.
Shorasa was behind her.
The sand told tales of destruction, and at night, she could hear the hunting snarls.
Shorasa could catch her.
Timuri had not thought of what had happened. She had never wanted him. She did not even know him.
Shorasa was hunting her.
The desert sweltered at day, and lay motionless in the night, and the piercing cold wind carried the voice of the dunes, and they urged her on, away, out.
Shorasa was behind her.
He would catch her.
He was hunting her.
And he would make her his.
When she had reached the end of the desert, large blisters flamed underneath her paws. As soon as she entered the forest, the moisture from the leaves entered them and forced them to crack. Her first memory of the forest was blood mixing into the leaves.
Red met green. Leopard killed leopard.
As she had hid in whatever foliage she could find, she prayed they would not enter the Amulyan forests. Surely, he would not cross another boundary? And then she remembered that Shorasa had killed Lasaro, and everything became desolate again.
The forest regaled her a little more than the desert had. The canopies seemed to touch the sky, and the little light that filtered through them were soaked in by the deciduous leaves which hung boldly down from fibrous branches. Water that ran from the rivers was first soaked up by thick roots that ran along the ground, and then it was propelled through the trunks. The trunks! Timuri had never seen such thick wood before, so thick was it in girth and so sturdy that she found herself marveling. She had thought, wistfully, that nothing could destroy it.
One night, as she was sleeping beneath one such tree, she was awoken with the sensation of pain. It flared through her neck where she had been viciously bitten. It was a leopard’s canine.
Leopard killed leopard.
Shorasa was right in front of her.
“Timuri, there is nowhere you can go that I will not find you.” His eyes glistened with lust and the thickness of its salvation dripped from his jaws.
“When will you leave me alone?”
“Why would I leave you alone?” He stepped closer, but Timuri retreated, panting, afraid. There truly was nowhere she could go.
“Mate with me.”
“You killed one of our own. You killed him. You-”
He snarled in unbidden anger.
“You should have mated with me, not with him.”
Timuri’s head reeled from the blood that was gushing down her neck. It was a superficial cut, but it stung.
“Cage her.” His friends were suddenly all around her. They enclosed her in a tight circle.
“My blood of life lines your tongue, the blood of my mate lies undigested in your stomach. No sane leopardess would mate with you..”
The words reopened all her own wounds along her lower back, and as more blood reddened the sweet, sweet leaves the world just seemed to fade,
And then she is awake, awake to face the
Sunrise.
***
“He’s going to tear your unborn children from your womb and eat them.”
Timuri shrugs off the urge to flinch. She walks out of the shelter’s hidden rocky entrance, and looks out into the forest. The sunlight dappled in intricate shadows upon the smooth stone, soft but determined. There, but wanting to disappear.
“Look. Look at your home, Rarakh. Do you really want this to happen somewhere else, and then another territory, until one by one every single ecosystem burns with his wrath?”
Rarakh’s eyes blaze and his mouth curdles into a snarl.
“Your brain seems to have swelled as large as your stomach.”
“Our Earth smoulders under the changing sun. You know that. Don’t let it burn further under him.”
“Why are you telling me all of this?” He moved one step closer to her, heaving in the wake of their electric conversation.
Timuri wanted to look at another, she wanted to feel what it was like to mate again, but she didn’t.
Her eyes remained fixed on the ruined foliage.
“You know why.”
“I cannot come with you.”
“What is holding you here?”
“Who will rebuild the forest?”
“It cannot be rebuilt.”
“I can rebuild it.”
“The herds have left. There is nothing left. Nothing.” Timuri’s voice breaks.
Rarakh shoulders away, but before he goes, there is a split second where his head bends ever so slightly.
***
The snowfall is a day old, and the slushy water mixes into the ground in little pools under the midday sun. Her feet slip on the sliding mush and struggle to work their way upwards. The cliffside is slippery, loose with small rocks that rush down with the water. It extends as far as her eyes can see, like an impenetrable wall of snow and stone, the only obstacle between her and him.
Rarakh forces her to take the lead and picks up the rear instead, his steady gait a steep contrast to her unsure childlike steps. She is forced to test the loose ground beneath her feet before she places them. When Rarakh insists that they continue throughout the night, Timuri begrudgingly agrees. The moonlight forms an iridescent glow around the white ice, forming an unearthly halo around it. As they near a bend in the road, Timuri pauses, heaving from the uphill climb. Her ears flatten against her head.
She can hear it.
A rushing sound.
Rarakh stiffens behind her.
“Do you hear that?”
“Stick to the side.”
The path is narrow. Too narrow. As she tries to adjust her rounded body sideways, her foreleg grinds, and then, she is slipping,
down,
down,
until her body crashes against a rock. Her sides implode in pain. The white halo merges into the black, black night and she hears only that rushing sound before the darkness takes her once again.
***
Rarakh growls in frustration as he takes in the unconscious leopardess. He had known this would happen. The rush of the ice mixing with loose soil fills his eardrums, a sound echoing with danger.He sinks his teeth on one side of her neck, dragging her hefty body. He doubted her unborn children were even alive.
But she was beautiful. The snow had fallen in a light blanket on her magnificent fur, which shone with the health of her birthing. Her legs were swollen, but strong, and streamlined.
She had been born to hunt.
The sound came again.
He knew that once the avalanche gathered speed, it would thunder downwards, and take both of them down in wintry deaths. Rarakh’s eyes scanned the cliffside with age-old expertise, looking, looking for the cavern.
The sound was closer,
His eyes moved as quick as a hornbill from one edge to the other,
The sound was closer,
Left to right, as cautious as a light footed deer,
The sound was closer,
Up and down, as focused as a fox.
The avalanche was almost upon them, a raging mass of stone and ice and dirt, hurtling, hurtling,
There.
Rarakh’s shoulders flexed outwards as he dragged her and himself to safety, his eyes darting in all directions. And as she lay, the avalanche hurtled down outside, and the snow fell lazily on the mountaintop and the wind toyed with their fur.
Rarakh watched.
Her swollen belly bled into the ice, the red that stained green now staining crystal white.
Rarakh just watched.
***
Icicles. They extend inches from her face, and the first thing she sees when she awakens. Timuri shifts, and she can feel the blood trickling down. Rarakh is sitting there, motionless. Large drifts of snow reach right up till the little cave on the cliffside, a natural cavern built right into the ice. Gushes of freezing wind run their cruel fingers through her fur.
“There was an avalanche.”
“An avalanche?”
Her voice is filled with pain. His eyes ranged over her again.
“An avalanche.”
“What did you do?”
“What had to be done.”
Her eyes wince, as she straightens onto her fours. Her curves are larger now, even more rounded and it hangs lower, almost till her ankles.
“You knew about the cave.”
It wasn’t a question, and he doesn’t answer. He shifts closer, and slides his paw across the red leaving a broad line of blood.
“You can’t continue uphill.”
Timuri shifts uncomfortably under his scrutiny.
“I know another way.”
She moves closer too. Their eyes are inches away. His face is so close. Despite the wind, she feels warm, strangely warm.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You wanted to get there fast.”
He shrugs and retracts, and the moment is over, as if it had never happened. Her frustration with him is unbounded, and that scares her. Timuri knew that she had days left before she would have to stop. But those days she would spend hunting him.
Hunting him as he had hunted her.
Reclaiming her place as he reclaimed his own.
Destroying him as he had destroyed her.
“Take me.”
***
The river cuts its way through the mountain, cold and determined in its design. The frigid water freezes near the edges in a glassy stillness that reflects into Timuri’s eyes.
“This is suicidal.”
“Your entire idea was suicidal.”
Rarakh shrugs off her words as easily as he shrugs off her opinions and fords his way through into the water. The current is strong, with a mind of its own, and as it moves, it takes everything with it. She sees him paddling in the opposite direction, struggling to find a sure crossing.
Timuri doesn’t think.
She is now inside the water, neck- deep in the woes of a forgotten river. And it thrives. The surge of the current is so strong, she is immediately left thrashing, just to stay afloat.
The force of a herd of buffaloes propels her onwards, and suddenly, she is lost, the river is moving downhill and Rarakh is nowhere in sight. The water moves on and takes her with it, away. Her head is submerged deep underwater. As her legs move in repeated cyclic positions to take her above water, the current makes it work all wrong, submerging her deeper and deeper.
The water pushes her.
Timuri sinks further.
Her thoughts spiral into a deep dark abyss, but this time, she forces her eyes to stay open against their will.
The water pushes her.
Timuri sinks further.
She needs to break free of this current, and so she grabs on to the nearest solid thing she can feel. Then, she isn’t sinking anymore. The rock seems to support her weight, its hard surface jutting out below so she can rest her legs there. Slowly, she propels herself upwards, sticking out her entire head as far as it would go. By the time she drags herself out of the river, wet fur heavy with a thousand shivers, her feet slide on the ice, the watery surface slick with her relief.
Just as she turns to look for Rarakh, a shadow falls behind her. Timuri knows it is him. She recognizes his scent. The same scent she associated with hatred. With betrayal. With fear. With revenge. In the span of a single breath, she whips out her claws and ferociously draws first blood, right across his neck. The same neck where he bit her.
“I caged you and left you to die.”
“If you wanted me dead, why didn’t you kill me, as you killed him?”
His friends, who were advancing, retract, when they hear this. Timuri, too, recoils in shock. The pain of the river was nothing compared to this. These leopards were of the Thavis. What were they doing all the way up in the desolate hills? And why were they with him?
Shorasa’s eyes harden into two pupils of stony ice.
“I thought you wouldn’t go anywhere.”
“I’m not your puppet.”
“And I am not your mate. I want to change that.’
She spat at his feet, barely stopping herself from retching.
“Mate with me, Timuri. Make your children mine. In days, we will rule the hills, the forests, the desert. They would grow up happy.”
“Happy?”
He snorts in impatience.
“You can never give them a fulfilling life.”
“Who is this tribe who follows you?” She raises her voice, and they close in again, ears pricked up. The air was thick with the tension of a fight.
“They had nowhere else to go, after Lasaro.”
“And what did you tell them happened to him, Shorasa?” Her voice rochets off the cliff this time.
“Mate with me or I’ll kill you and drown your cubs before they ever get to open their eyes.”
“You don’t get to decide my life.”
Rarakh emerges from the river at almost the same time as another leopardess.
Her spots are darker, her skin paler, her body the epitome of languorous beauty, as Timuri’s used to be. Her own back throbs with the dull pain of birthing already.
She goes and stands next to Shorasa, this mysterious leopardess, as Rarakh comes and stands by her. He takes a minute to survey the scene, a single Timuri against an entire tribe. And he shakes his head, and leaves, without another word, back to the gushing river with its woeful currents.
As Timuri watches, her thoughts spiral down, into a dark, dark abyss.
***
The scent of leopard crawls across the ice, its vehement layer peeling through her soul, a yearning to be part of a tribe again. The sun is at its peak, glaring overhead.
The silence doesn’t last long.
“Mate with me.”
“Never.”
“It’s such a waste-”
“Stop.” Her voice was rich with confidence, with a comforting lilt to it.
Shorasa glanced at her irritatedly.
“Now is not the time.”
“Can’t you see she’s birthing?”
“I’m not blind, Alakoya.”
Alakoya. That was her name. Timuri was struck by her. This was no ordinary leopardess. But to be Shorasa’s mate… the thought twisted her insides as a bite twists a deer’s guts.
Shorasa pounces, his body coiled in a male challenge. Each fur on his body stands upright, as if electrified in some strange, unworldly passion. Timuri forced herself to look at him. An ugly scar ran from his left eye till his nostril, cutting his nose into two miserly bits. It gave him a perpetual sneer, and when he looked at her again, she could see his bloodshot eyes.
“You wouldn’t dare kill a birthing leopardess.”
“She came running back to me.”
“I didn’t come running back to you, I came to take back what should be mine.”
She was barely registering the words. The pain came stronger than the currents, in definite ripples from minute to minute.
“You have nothing.”
“These are my people as much as they are yours.”
Alokaya interjected again, stepping between the both of them.
“What is the story here, Shorasa?”
The murmurs of others reached out in assent, forming a solid wall around him. Shorasa seemed to shrink under their gazes, flatten himself against the cold and desolate ice, make himself disappear.
“The story is irrelevant. She betrayed her mate and then forced my hand in her hurry to get away.”
“When has anyone ever been able to force you?”
His eyes blazed as he glared into Alakoya’s assurance.
“I want Timuri.”
This time she growled, a fearsome growl, with a deep, throaty element to it. It had the sturdiness of the rocks, the litheness of water, the freshness of new born leaves.
“You would force her to be yours?”
The shrug seemed nothing compared to her jab an instant later. Her claws seemed to reach in and cleave out his stomach, leaving a roil of blood near the river bank. No one moved to help him.
“You took us into this godforsaken mountain-”
“You said Lasaro died in a hunting accident-”
The Thavi’s seemed to separate themselves from Shorasa. His few friends seemed very few indeed, as sparse as grass in the desert.
As Alakoya stood tall, Timuri stood with her, and gathered strength in the numbers before them. Their numbers.
“What do you want to do to him?” Timuri asked Alokaya, who simply averted her eyes.
And so, Shorasa left, left with his tail between his legs, his blood flowing freely, his eyes downcast. He would never survive the humiliation, she thought, and even if he did, where would he go?
Leopard did not kill leopard.
***
Timuri looks into the faces of her three new-born sons. Their delicate whiskers and blinking eyes whisper tales of future, of warmth, of love, of kindness.
And they seem to promise her, amongst the ice and the snow, that the future held new struggles, but struggles that could be overcome. And as Timuri felt a new peace flow through her, the peace of birthing, the wind whistled outside the caves and told a different story.
She clawed apart the rest of the icicles and stretched languorously.
The meagre sunlight fell on her skin.
***