by Inmon, Shawn
He caught Senta-eh’s eye, and could tell that she also thought he had overreacted.
“It’s fine. He just needs to let off some steam. He’ll be back.” Alex tried to sound confident, but raised his head up as high as he could to watch horse and rider become an increasingly distant cloud of dust. “Seriously, where’s he going to go? Back to Hakun-ah?” It was obvious that he was trying to convince himself as much as anything.
Senta-eh and Versa-eh slowed their horses to a walk, then stopped altogether. They turned and stared back down the path. Finally, Senta-eh said, “He’s stopped. Good. He’s coming back this way.”
Alex squinted back down the trail and had to admit that Senta-eh’s eyes were better than his. For a long minute, he couldn’t see anything at all, then was able to determine that the dot and dust cloud were moving back toward them.
“I’ll tell him I’m sorry when he catches us. But, let’s try to act like everything’s normal, okay? I don’t want to make it any worse.” Alex turned and started moving ahead at the same pace he had previously.
The path ahead of them rose up over a small hill then disappeared beyond it.
Fifty yards before he got to the hill, the sound of the hooves of Werda-ak’s horse thundered behind them. Alex steeled himself, determined not to look over his shoulder to see how fast he was coming. Just as Werda-ak came even with Senta-eh, he unleashed a trilling, blood-curdling scream. “Aaaaa-yiiiii-yiiiii-yiiii-yiiii!”
Alex hunched his shoulders instinctively, as though a terrible blow was approaching him, but Werda-ak simply rode past him, smiling and waving, then continuing on.
Well, I guess I didn’t break his spirit too bad.
Alex shook his head and spurred his own horse onward. He glanced down at Monda-ak, whose tongue was lolling. “Keep up as best you can, boy. When I catch up to him, I’ll give it to him good for wearing you out.”
When Alex reached the top of the rise, Werda-ak was nowhere in sight. The trail disappeared again as it turned right around a cliff wall.
“Werda-ak! Wait for us. We don’t want to wear the horses down on the first day!” Alex’s shout echoed back to him, but there was no reply.
A bad feeling settled into the pit of Alex’s stomach. He grabbed the bridle, leaned forward, and kicked his horse in the ribs. He skidded around the corner and almost ran over the back end of Werda-ak’s horse, but the boy was not on it. Menta-ak whinnied, veered to the left and stood onto its hind legs.
Alex flew off backwards, landing on his back and having the air knocked out of him. For a moment, all he could see was stars.
He sat up, ready to really let Werda-ak have it when he saw he was looking down the business end of a heavy spear. Alex held his hands up like every hero ever caught by surprise. A young man held the spear two inches from his nose. Behind him, Werda-ak struggled against two larger men who cuffed him around the head until he was still.
Versa-eh was the last to the party, as Senta-eh seemed to have disappeared.
“Rundi-ak! What are you doing?” Versa-eh’s voice rang with contempt and derision, as only the voice of a teenage girl can.
The man—who Alex now saw was more of a boy than a young man—said, “I am about to kill this man who kidnapped you.”
Versa-eh tilted her head to the left, an expression that had survived the centuries. “Don’t be an idiot.”
Rundi-ak’s face clouded. Like most young men, he didn’t like having his shortcomings pointed out by others.
“He did not kidnap me. My father asked him to take me to Grinta-ah.”
“And I am telling him that he will not take you to Grinta-ah.”
Alex was taking stock of the way the boy stood, how he held the spear, and which direction he was most likely to thrust it when Alex made his move.
At that moment, a strong voice rang out from above. “Drop the spear. Let the boy go.”
Five heads turned to look up at Senta-eh, standing on the hill above them, bow strung and drawn and an arrow pointed at Rundi-ak.
Alex said, “Listen, just put the spear down and we can talk about it,” just as several hundred pounds of ferocious fur and fangs scrambled around the corner and launched at Rundi-ak. Monda-ak hit him high and the boy tumbled over backwards. The dog didn’t land on him but turned immediately toward the two men who were holding Werda-ak. He stepped slowly toward them, growling deep in his chest. He poised to spring when the men made the choice of discretion over valor. They turned tail and sprinted. Monda-ak took two steps toward them, but Alex clicked his tongue twice. He turned back to the frightened boy still trying to decide what had hit him. The boy tried to stand, but Monda-ak bared his teeth and growled, and the boy plopped back down.
“Thanks,” Alex said to Senta-eh, then turned to Rundi-ak. He reached a hand out to him to help him up, then looked at Monda-ak and said, “Good boy.”
Versa-eh stepped in front of Rundi-ak and dusted off his shoulders. “Go home.”
Crestfallen, the boy said, “Don’t you want to come with me?”
Versa-eh didn’t even need a moment to decide. “No, my father is sending me to Grinta-ah. That is where I am going. Go home.”
The boy’s shoulders sagged. He began to say something, closed his mouth, then tried again. Finally, he gave up completely and trudged away.
I don’t know if I’ve ever actually seen someone’s heart break, but I think I just did.
Alex glanced up to see that with the danger past, Senta-eh had once again disappeared from the hill above.
He looked at Versa-eh, gauging the impact of what had just happened. If there was an impact she didn’t show it. In fact, she looked like an assassin casually wiping their blade after running someone through.
“I’m not going to stop you, if you want to go,” Alex said.
Versa-eh looked at him as though she might be reevaluating his intelligence. “If I’d wanted to go, you couldn’t have stopped me. But, why would I want to go and eventually be the wife of a chief in a village built into a hole in the middle of nowhere. I’ve been waiting for father to make an arranged marriage for me so I can get out of here.”
Alex tried to hide his surprise and play catch up. “So you’re going to marry this man in Grinta-ah?”
“I might,” she said casually. “But probably not. Since father arranged it, you can be sure this benefits him but that he gave little thought to me.”
Alex revised his opinion of the young girl. Don’t assume that because she is young, she is malleable or dumb. She is definitely not.
“But I will meet him,” she continued. “I don’t know how this man will respond if I don’t marry him, but I hope that by you delivering me, it will go easier for my father. He only worries about himself, but I still don’t want to do harm to him.”
Senta-eh came around the corner and halted next to them. She glanced at Werda-ak, who was standing off to the side, trying to look small. “Did they hurt you?”
“No,” Werda-ak answered, but that lie was evidenced by the swelling and redness around his head and neck.
As patiently as he could, Alex said, “I know these fast horses are a temptation. There may come a time when their speed and our ability to ride them will save us. But, we can’t wear them out. They are beautiful, but they will not have the stamina that our old horses did. We need to moderate our pace. Understood?”
Werda-ak’s face reddened further. He didn’t reply, but jumped on the back of his horse and sat sullenly. Alex and Versa-eh remounted, and they started off at a moderate pace once again.
Alex had a sudden memory of a conversation he’d had with a buddy while he was on deployment. Alex had wondered why their Lieutenant had made a certain decision, and had questioned the wisdom of it. His friend had smiled and said, “Not my circus, not my monkeys.”
But, this is my circus, and these are my monkeys.
They rode on through the warm spring sunshine. The sun set at their backs and they passed several spots that would have made go
od camping spots, but Alex pushed on. No one complained.
When it was almost dark, Werda-ak, who had ridden quietly at the back of the pack since the incident, spurred gently up beside Alex.
“I was wrong.”
No doubt, was Alex’s initial thought, but he knew that sentiment wouldn’t do any good. Instead, he said, “I remember what it’s like to be young.”
Werda-ak looked at him skeptically. Behind him, he could almost feel Versa-eh agreeing with him. Alex was only thirty-one years old, but to them, he knew there was almost no difference between him and their parents.
“When you’re young, it’s easy to act first and regret it later.”
A lesson I never learned, or I wouldn’t be here, lost in Kragdon-ah.
“But, we are a team. A family. When we do things, we need to consider how it will impact everyone else, not just at that moment, but in the future. If those people that lay in wait for us hadn’t been incompetent, or if they had been a little more committed to their cause, you’d be dead right now.”
Alex glanced at the boy out of the corner of his eye, and saw that while he understood the concept of death, and that it was perhaps possible for him, he couldn’t really relate to it.
Still, Werda-ak was contrite. “Thank you for choosing me to come with you. If you hadn’t, I would still be back home setting my trap lines and trying to decide which of the girls I grew up playing with would be my mate. I never would have met Frina-eh. I never would have seen all the things I’ve seen.” He reached down and patted the neck of his horse. “I never would have had a chance to be on such a fine horse as this.”
Behind him, he heard Versa-eh say, “Who is this Frina-eh? Come back here and tell me about her.”
Werda-ak fell in with Versa-eh so they were riding side by side and began telling her the story of their adventures in Matori-ah, how they had fought the dragons, and how he had been injured.
Alex listened at first and realized that the boy was a natural storyteller. The facts were mostly right—mostly—but the colors were more vivid, the dangers and close calls even more dangerous and closer.
They rode on for another hour, into full darkness. Alex wished he had Tokin-ak with them to navigate in the dark. Eventually he realized that his horse was flagging and that the talk he gave to Werda-ak also applied to himself—he needed to conserve the horses’ strength.
It was too dark to find a good campsite, but Alex heard a small brook babbling off to their right, so he knew they could at least water the horses and let them graze and rest.
Many days travel to Grinta-ah, he remembered the trader saying. Does it matter if we push ourselves and the horses too hard and make it there in twenty days? Or go easier and make it there in twenty-five?
Alex resolved not to push them so hard going forward.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Arrival
Alex stuck to that resolve. It didn’t take them twenty or twenty-five days to reach the big water, though. They traveled for forty-seven days before reaching it.
They had a few close calls on the trail—run-ins with both animals and people, but they emerged unscathed.
One thing Alex noted was that the farther they rode from Winten-ah, the more the wildlife changed. He saw birds that looked like cousins of the karak-ta, but were smaller. Leathery-winged, ugly birds that circled wherever there was a dead carcass. There were rats the size of small dogs—rodents of unusual size, as Alex dubbed them in tribute to The Princess Bride—and lizards that skittered along the ground until they were threatened. Then they sprouted wings from their backs and half-jumped, half-flew, all the while making a loud clacking sound. Alex found these creatures unnerving, but they didn’t bother anyone else.
On the late afternoon of the forty-seventh day, they rode to the edge of a butte that gave them excellent visibility of the land below. Alex had begun to think that perhaps the map he carried and all the legends he had heard were wrong, and that there was no big water.
From the edge of that butte, though, he saw it with his own eyes. He hadn’t known if it was a broad river or a new sea, but upon seeing it, he knew. It was an inland sea. Even from his high post, he couldn’t begin to see the far edge.
He had once read a factoid that if the water of the Great Lakes was spread out over the entire continental United States, the water would be twelve feet deep. Seeing the sea in front of him, he calculated that it had covered a more narrow portion of the country to a much greater depth than twelve feet.
“Okrent-ah,” Versa-eh said.
Alex had always heard it referred to as the big water, but it made sense that this would be its name—“ok” meaning water and “rent” meaning something beyond large, so big as to be almost inconceivable.
That definition also applied to the settlement of Grinta-ah. Alex had never encountered a civilization in Kragdon-ah that consisted of more than a few hundred people, but Grinta-ah sprawled for what looked like miles in both directions. There were hundreds of buildings both large and small, and the same could be said of boats on the river. What caught Alex’s eye first was what looked like a three-masted tall ship docked at the edge of town. That spoke to a level of technology several eras ahead of what he had expected to find anywhere in Kragdon-ah.
Senta-eh and Werda-ak both seemed even more stunned than he was at what spread out before them.
At least I’ve seen a city before, but to them, this must be like seeing an alien civilization combined with unheard of levels of stama. Will they even want to go to this place, or will they want to burn it to the ground? I won’t have any part of that. That’s not the mission I accepted this time. They can organize an army and march thousands of miles to tackle these guys if they want.
Versa-eh seemed mostly unimpressed, though somewhat excited. It was hard to tell in a teenage girl.
“Have you been here before?”
“Yes. Father brought me here two summers ago. That was when the man who thinks he will be my husband saw me and started bartering with father for my hand. I would be his youngest bride.”
“Youngest?” Alex asked, surprised once again.
“Yes. He has three wives already, but desires a fourth.”
Alex had many thoughts on that, but held them to himself.
As a man who couldn’t make marriage work with only one woman, I can’t imagine wanting to add in three more.
He looked around and said, “Let’s make camp here for the night. Senta-eh and Monda-ak can hunt, I hear water running, so Werda-ak can fish, and Versa-eh and I can set up camp.”
They dismounted and everybody went about their assigned chores. They had done this same routine so often that everyone automatically went about their jobs. Alex scoured the area for firewood, and Versa-eh dug their firepit and unrolled their blankets around it.
When Werda-ak returned with the horses and a large carp, the fire was burning hot. Monda-ak had also returned and was laying contentedly next to Alex, who said, “Did you see Senta-eh?”
“No. Isn’t she back yet?”
Alex turned to Versa-eh. “Stay here. Clean the fish, please. We will be back as soon as we find Senta-eh. Werda-ak, can you track her?”
His tracking skills hadn’t been much use to the group since the invaders’ trail had gone cold. He didn’t even answer, just set off in the direction she had gone. Quietly, Alex said, “You too,” to Monda-ak. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Werda-ak. He just wanted both of them on the case. So they could locate her as quickly as possible. She had gone out hunting as they set up camp dozens and dozens of times. She had never been gone this long.
Both Werda-ak and Monda-ak seemed to be on the same trail, one following visual clues, the other his nose. They had only gone a few hundred yards when Alex noticed a clearing ahead, ringed by trees. Werda-ak stopped suddenly and gaped.
Standing in the middle of the clearing was the single largest animal Alex had ever seen, and that included Godat-ta the bear. In the twentieth century, Alex wou
ld have called it a moose, but this animal stood at least twenty feet high at the shoulder. The sheer enormity of it awakened a primal fear. What he saw next scared him more. It was her calf. The cow was vigorously pulling branches from an elm tree and chewing placidly. The calf was suckling. Dinner time for both.
It could have been a scene out of National Geographic, except for the cow’s size. Even the calf was big. In his head, Alex estimated that it probably weighed a thousand pounds or more.
Then the real problem became clear. The tree the moose was chewing on was just a few yards from a rock wall. Three-quarters of the way up that wall—thirty feet from the ground, but not that far from where the cow could reach if she wanted—was Senta-eh.
Senta-eh was a warrior who had faced death many times, so she wasn’t scared, but she was in a predicament. Almost all animal mothers will protect their offspring, but moose cows are famous for taking that to an extreme. Forget being between a cow and her calf. Just being nearby when the cow feels the calf is vulnerable is enough. The cow didn’t have antlers, but when you weigh three or four tons and have a bad attitude, that doesn’t matter.
Senta-eh had her bow slung over back, and clung precariously to small hand and footholds on the rock face. It was obvious she couldn’t go any higher and coming down was not an option. The cow was not yet aware of her presence, which was good, but she also didn’t seem to be in any hurry to finish her tree buffet and move along. If Senta-eh slipped or lost her grip, she would land less than fifteen feet away with a beast big enough to block out the sun standing between her and an open path.
Monda-ak stood at attention, but he obviously wanted nothing to do with a creature whose baby was already five times his size. Werda-ak bent and picked up a stone then skirted the clearing to the left. The cliff wall ended there and the butte dropped off steeply. He stood with his heels at the edge of the hill, pulled in a lungful of air, threw the rock, and shouted, “Run!”
The cow’s head snapped down at the sound of the shout, just in time for the rock to bounce off her chest like a tiny piece of gravel. She tipped her head back and an explosive grunt escaped her. She spotted Werda-ak immediately and Alex was sure he would be trampled.
