Jacob's Reign: A Journey Beyond

by Jonathan Giddinge

  He bent over and adjusted the knobs on the pistons of his knee-brace then turned and continued walking. The hiss from his pistons were quieter after the adjustment, but it looked like it was taking more effort for him to move his leg.

  “Is that needed right now?” I asked him.

  “Might as well stay quiet from the beginning, that way by the time we need to be quiet for the hunt, I’ll be used to the struggle of walking,” he said in a gruff tone.

  We began to walk again, with Amos in the lead. I found myself looking back toward camp over and over again, looking at the tall rusted walls that surrounded everything I had known, walls that I always saw as my protector and my small little piece of the world. I had been outside the gates many times, but this time it felt different. Maybe it was because I didn’t get the chance to say good-bye to my mother, or to Karline properly, and it was beginning to bother me. What if I never saw them again? I thought to myself. After a few hundred yards, I stopped looking back and figured it was too late to turn back. If I was going to turn back, I would have done it right outside the gates. I felt, somehow, that it was the last time I would ever see the camp. In a way it was the last, the next time I saw the tall walls of the camp I would be seeing them through changed eyes, a fresh perspective, a newly opened view of the world.

  Amos pulled out a copy of the map that my mother and Karline worked their magic on. I made him the copy, so he could lead our way, but I didn’t mark out all the paths on his map, just the one I wanted him to follow. I would leave the party and go off on my own to the deep valley when the time was right, and I didn’t want him to know that until it was time. Going to the deep valley was my destiny, my responsibility, and I didn’t want to take anyone with me just in case we ran into trouble. If something was to happen, it would happen to me alone, possibly a fatal mistake, but it was mine to make and I wasn’t going to lead anyone to their death. The valley called to me in my dream the night before, it was the land that I saw in my vision just days earlier. I had to stand at the edge of the valley and look out over its lush vegetation and wander at its endless streams and waterfalls. It was something I needed to see alone, and I had a feeling that I was to be the first person to lay eyes on it since the war.

  The land directly to the north of the camp was mostly flat plains that stretched on for miles. The distant mountains looked like buildings surrounding the vast plains, keeping guard over the landscape. Dry grasses grew sporadically on the planes and became dense farther north. The ground was dry and cracked from a lack of rain and was only livable for small snakes and lizards who scurry from crack to crack hiding from the heat of the sun.

  We walked in silence and spread out, with nearly ten feet between each person. I kept back a few paces to keep an eye on the men. If I saw them dragging or walking sloppy, then I would know it’s time for a break. Monty slowed his pace, but widened his gate for a few steps and I thought it might be time for a break when suddenly he dropped his pack and rifle and took three large steps before diving to the ground. The group stopped and turned to Monty as he scurried on all fours for nearly fifteen feet before dropping to the ground again. He laid there for a moment, motionless, then he jumped to his feet and yelled, “Ha!” as he held a giant lizard high above his head.

  “Supper’s on me tonight guys,” he said with pride as he returned to the group.

  Hunter patted Monty on the back, “Good job, kid,” he said. Monty snapped the neck of his captive, then put the dead lizard just inside the top flap of his pack before putting it back over his shoulders and grabbing his rifle.

  Amos grunted his approval before turning and continuing the journey. The rest of the men followed him, but I stayed back for a moment to marvel at the men that I chose to bring on this trip. I realized they were the right people with the right mindsets and the right attitudes. I rejoined the men and it was at that point that I noticed that the dried and cracked terrain was slowly becoming completely barren, with no shrubs and no dried grass. The ground had become harder, dryer, if that was possible, and the cracks more frequent.

  Hours later we came across rocks about the size of my head. There were probably more than a hundred of these large rocks and behind each one there was a path dug into the ground, like they had been dragged to their location. We slowed our walk as we all looked around us in amazement. The farther we walked in the field of rocks, the larger they were, until the boulders were nearly the size of two men, maybe three. As with the smaller rocks, these larger boulders looked as if they were dragged to their location and the trenches they left behind them went on for as far as the eye could see. Amos stopped in front of a boulder that was twice as tall as him and twice as wide. He dropped his pack and adjusted his bear pelt cape. He was staring at the surface of the boulder as I joined him and dropped my pack near his.

  “Giants?” I asked.

  “No,” he replied with an aggravated tone. “The giants you hear about in stories are real, but they aren’t big enough to move boulders this large.”

  “There seems to be no pattern to them, no reason for the layout,” I began. “I would understand if they were laid out in a pattern, or set up in a circle like the ancient pagan sights, but this makes no logical sense.”

  Amos grunted to himself for several minutes, it was like he was holding a conversation with another part of himself, in a language that only he knew. Then he turned to the group, which was now gathered behind him, waiting for his verdict. “Whatever the case, however they got here, they are the perfect cover, we camp here tonight,” he said.

  The men dropped their packs and rested in the long shadows of the boulders while Amos and I walked around the stones examining them. “Have you ever seen anything like this in your travels? You’ve been this far north with my father, yet you seem to be surprised by them,” I said.

  “We were further to the east, by quite a bit and never passed through here,” he began. “However, down south in the Valley of Death I saw something similar. It was many years before you were born. Your father and I were hunting down a group of raiders who kidnaped a child from a nearby camp and we crossed through a valley whose ground was flat and dry, much like this place. The stones were smaller and there were fewer of them, but it was the same story. Rocks dragged from somewhere off in the distance.”

  I place my hand on one of the towering boulders, the surface was rough, with deep pits. I was dumbstruck by the forest of boulders and tried to fathom their meaning and their source. Did someone or something drag them to their spot, or did they move themselves? Where did they come from? Why were they here, in this location? Was there something special about this place? Was this even meant to be their final resting place or did something halt their journey to some other location? These were the questions swarming around in my head. I was compelled to know the story, but I knew that I probably never would. It was a tale hidden by time, kept secret by the desert sands and the ancestors that walked the earth before us.

  I pulled my eyes away from the stone before me, and looked over to Amos. He adjusted his goggles to get a closer look, but still leaned in close to the stone, so close that his nose was nearly touching the surface. “Any idea, Amos?” I asked.

  “Well, hard to say,” he said. After a moment he looked over to me, then back to the stone. He rubbed his hand along the surface as he circled around to the back side to examine the trail left in the desert floor. “Odd,” he said to himself. Amos looked up at me, “With the size of this, and its weight, you’d think it would have dug a deeper trench in its wake, even with the hard desert ground.”

  He stood, adjusted his goggles, and sighed loudly, “Don’t know,” he said as he returned to his pack and took a seat next to it.

  The men resting in the shadows looked to Amos for answers. He ignored them as he reached into his pack for his fire-starting kit. Cadman noticed this and pulled a canister full of oil from his pack and handed it across to Amos.

  “Lizard,” Amos said motioning to Monty.

/>   The food was cooked and split between the men, I had dried meat in my pack, so I passed, allowing each of the men a larger portion of the lizard. As they ate I stared at the darkening sky, focusing on the cluster of stars that made up Zion as it slowly moved across the heavens. It still amazed me that I was not looking at a mystical afterlife, but it was instead, a group of space stations. I had heard stories of space travel, but never actually put it together until reading my father’s death book. I tore a chunk of dried meat off and chewed it slowly as I continued to stare at the stars. Are they truly up there, or are they long dead? If they are still there, why are they waiting to return to us? Do they not know that we’re here? Can they really help us? What sort of technology do they have?

  Too many questions passed through my head, questions that I would never have the answers to. That was my way, I questioned things. I was always out to learn more and find the answers to long forgotten questions, or even ignored questions.

  “How much longer ‘till we get to the hunting grounds?” Frank asked.

  Amos turned to me for the answer and the other men did the same. I pulled the map from my pack and opened it. I marked an “X” on the map where we were camped for the night, I would add the stone forest when I had more time. I looked for a moment, feeling the men staring at me, but I didn’t want to rush the answer. Finally, I said, “Looks like it might be a day and a half, maybe two days until we get to where I think the herds should be this time of year. We have at least a half a day of walking before we’re out of the flatlands, then some rocky terrain with some hills, then the canyon. Not far from that we should start seeing signs of the herd,” I explained.

  After a while, the men turned in for the night and I pulled the leather-bound book from my pack and opened it to the first page. This was to be my Death Book, a log of my life as Chief of the Valley People. The pages were made from the pulp of many different trees and shrubs which made the texture rough, but they were still easy to write on. I looked across the fire to the men who were tired and ready for a night of deep sleep.

  “You picked some good men for this trip, Chief,” Amos said as he settled in.

  “I hope so. They have a lot of work to do out here,” I said before returning my attention to my book.

  “Your Death Book?” Amos asked.

  I stared at the book a moment, then turned to Amos and reluctantly answered, “Yeah.” I didn’t really like the idea of recording everything, it was just another thing to take up time.

  “You finish your father’s book?” he asked.

  I’m sure he knew the answer and was just trying to get me to admit it, trying to make the point that I needed to finish his before starting mine. I had no intention of answering him, I just stared at the blank page before me.

  “I didn’t think so,” he snapped. He adjusted himself for comfort, then continued, “I’m sure you understand the importance of the books. You should read your father’s.”

  “After the first few pages, I’d rather not,” I didn’t tell him that I had read the last page, I felt it was a bit too personal for me to be sharing. I continued, “I will be a different kind of leader, one who is honest with his people. I will not feed into the phony myths of the ancestors, I refuse to lie to my people,” I paused a moment, thinking Amos would interject, but he didn’t, so I continued. “I will lead my people to a bright new future. One full of truth, knowledge, and the chance to make the Valley People the greatest people ever to walk the earth. Together we will become many, and cover half the world, we will explore an earth that had been forgotten for so many generations, and we will never look back on the lies of the past, the lies fed to us by the men who were tasked with leading us.”

  “Whatever your father did, he had his reasons,” Amos said.

  “His reasons were wrong,” I insisted.

  “He only did what he was taught. You will do what is best,” he rolled away from me. “For all his faults, he raised you right.” I heard a loud sigh. “Good night Chief,” he said.

  “Good night, Amos,” I replied.

  I stared at the book for a moment before beginning to write.

  My father raised me with the lies of his past, the lies he was taught. I will never lie to you, my child. I make that promise to you from the start. My job, as your job will be, is to lead our people into great prosperity. I wish to be a great leader and I will raise you to be even better than I. In this book, you will find a true account of my life and of my thoughts.

  Chapter Three

  I woke to a beautiful sun rising over the rock forest. With the shadows long, I sat up and rubbed the sleep from my eyes. The shadows were dark and made magnificent shapes against the large stones and along the dry desert floor. I saw Amos standing near one of the large boulders, so I stood, stretched out my tired bones and joined him.

  “You see anything new?” I asked him.

  “I see nothing to explain them being here, or how they got here. They’re out of place here, definitely came from somewhere else.”

  “I still think it’s giants,” I said in jest.

  “It’s not giants,” he snapped. He walked around the back of the boulder and continued, “No markings on the stones. No form of writing, no images or petroglyphs. They look natural, no tool marks from man, not even so much as a scratch on most of them. It’s as if they dragged themselves into position and just decided that they had gone far enough.”

  I gave up on trying to solve the mystery at that moment and roused the men so we could have a morning meal and hit the trail once again. As the men readied themselves and Amos brewed a stew, I took my book out and sketched a few of the boulders. I made notations about them and left plenty of room to write the explanation, in case I ever found one. I’m no artist, but I did the best I could to show the reality of the strange forest that surrounded me and my men.

  After we ate, we wasted no time in continuing our journey. It wasn’t long before we were clear of the rock forest, the stones at the edge were even larger than the ones we slept among. The land became more and more rocky as the day moved along, and the land was no longer flat. We slowly made our way over rolling hills and shallow valleys, careful in our footing not to twist an ankle this early in our trip.

  After many hours of walking under the late summer sun, we came across an old traveler’s post with just a few structures left standing. It was a good time to let the men rest and get a look around us. Scattered throughout the post were relics from the past, items that were just left behind as if the inhabitants were forced to leave in a hurry. A rotted and broken cart with dried blood smeared on one side sat in the middle of what was clearly a market with shops laid out in a semi-circle. Bits of dry-rotted wood and hand-made mud bricks were all that remained of the shops.

  “Let’s spread out and get a good look around, then we can rest for a bit and eat,” I said.

  The men dropped their packs and spread out to get a good idea of the surroundings before letting down their guard. As the men looked through the few remaining buildings, or what was left of them, Amos and I walked the perimeter to make sure that there would be no surprises. As I walked around, I gathered things that could be reused. Glass jars of all sizes for my mother, small pieces of steel for the blacksmith, a small pouch holding hand-forged nails, and a spool of twine.

  We topped a hill on the north end of the post and had a clear view of everything for miles to the west, south and east. On the western side of the post was a shaft dug into the rocky hillside, it appeared to be a mineshaft, or maybe the entrance to an underground home. Around the opening were dry rotted logs that were clearly brought to the location; there were no trees in sight. To the north, about eight miles off, was the canyon pass that was noted on my map. The towering cliffs looked taller than I could have ever imagined.

  Amos adjusted his eyes and scanned the horizon for danger, “There,” he pointed to the south. “You’ll need your glass.”

  I grabbed my spyglass from a side pouch on my pack
and scanned the south for whatever it was that Amos had no trouble seeing. After a moment of searching and messing with the focus, I saw what he was seeing with ease. It was a raiding party traveling from west to east and crossing the flat lands that we had recently crossed ourselves.

  “They’re heading east and are far enough that they are no threat to the camp, and no threat to us either,” Amos said.

  “That’s a pretty good size party,” I said.

  There had to be nearly one hundred raiders crossing the flats, some on horseback, some in carts pulled by oxen or horses, and some walking alongside the carts and horses. I pulled the glass away from my eye and could barely notice the dust cloud kicked up by the raiders.

  “I agree, they’re no threat to us or to the camp. It’s best we just ignore them,” I said as I folded the glass back in on itself. “See anything else to worry about?”

  Amos didn’t answer right away, he was diligent in his search, but then spoke up, “I see nothing.”

  I returned the glass to my pack before Amos and I joined the men, who had finished their search and were resting in a shaded spot near the mineshaft entrance.

  “I’m guessing that you guys found nothing of notable import,” I said.

  “Nothing,” Frank said.

  “You find anything, Chief?” Hunter asked.

  “Nothing nearby. But we did see some raiders down south crossing the flats we just passed through,” I began. “Good thing we left when we did, we might have been in their path if we waited,” I added.

  “Big group?” Frank asked.

  “Near a hundred,” Amos said as he took a seat near the men.

  Hunter sat up straight, “Something we should worry about?” he questioned.

  “No,” I said as I leaned against the remnants of a stone wall.

  Amos lifted off his bear pelt and pulled a bag of dried meat from his pack. He passed the bag around to the other men, then to me. I waved him off; I wasn’t hungry enough to eat at that moment. It was easier for me to just pass on the food than to explain to them that I was trying to keep the food for them; I didn’t need to eat much. I had never needed much food to get by, even though I was slightly over-weight, I ate less than most people. My mother said it might be a mutation of some sort, my body just absorbed food slower than most. I knew that they would complain and insist that I ate with them if I said something, or made a big deal out of it, so I just passed on meals quietly.