The Far Side

by Wylie, Gina Marie

  “Don’t be silly, Kris. That fucker was going to shoot someone. You, me, that girl -- he was going to try to kill one of us. No offense, but I’m a fucking Patton conservative -- I want the other dumb fuck to die, not me or my friends.”

  “Is she a friend?” Kris asked.

  “Well, she’s terrified, for one thing. Most assholes want to prove that they’re big assholes. They don’t tremble -- they bluster. She has a leather collar around her neck with an iron ring on it. I don’t think it was decorative. I never thought I’d be freeing slaves, Kris, but fuck! Freeing even one slave feels good!”

  “Ezra is worried that Melek might get rough with her.”

  Andie laughed and gestured where the girl was sitting on a rock, drinking some water one of the men of Melek’s patrol had offered her. The men were vying, Kris thought, for the young woman’s attention, trying, she was sure to make some sort of point.

  “She’s a freed slave,” Andie explained. “You know, one of those who didn’t escape with Melek’s ancestors, who stayed behind and ended up in chains.” Andie laughed. “You have noticed that they love both chocolate and peanut butter -- even that shit in the MREs?”

  Kris shook her head. “Well, the guys love it. Now, half of them have offered her some and she likes it too. The other half, the ones who gobbled down all they had, are kicking themselves, not as able to make time with her as well as the rest.”

  “Ezra was afraid that you and I don’t know the language well enough. We’d be screwed if anything happened to him.”

  “Maybe. Melek isn’t a dummy. Ezra really hasn’t been paying attention to how much English Melek has been learning, but it’s nearly as much as Ezra’s learned of Melek’s language. Come on; let’s go see what’s up.”

  Andie walked over to the circle of men around the girl and Melek met her eye. “Andie,” Andie told him, pointing to herself. “Melek,” she said pointing to him. She shrugged, pointing at the girl.

  “Chaba,” Melek replied. Melek turned to Kris and came up to her.

  Kris didn’t understand the words, but it seemed like a formal statement of something. He made two fists and turned the back of them towards Kris, showing her his tattoos. He touched them to her forehead, and then lightly beat on his own forehead, the fingers of his fists facing his head.

  Andie spoke softly. “Kris, hold up your hands as fists, thumbs together. Jerk them apart, as if you were breaking a chain.”

  Kris didn’t see how that could be significant, but when she did what Andie suggested, there was a sigh from Melek and the others. Her confusion was compounded when they began to stomp their right feet in unison.

  Andie laughed. “What do you want to bet that their idea of a cheer is stomping the right foot?”

  It wasn’t until Ezra and the other man returned that anyone got around to asking the girl more questions than her name.

  Ezra spoke to Kris and Andie, while the other fellow filled in Melek. “Collum looked all over the area and couldn’t see anyone else. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the odds are they’ll miss them eventually and start looking for them. I suppose maybe if she was running away, maybe she thought she could escape easier in the mountains, or if they were coming, she could see them from further away.”

  In spite of the ease that they had learning the girl’s name, everything else was a struggle.

  Ezra finally shook his head. “This is taking too long. It’s like trying to piece together English like King Alfred would have spoken in 900 AD. A word here, a word there, but everything is different, and there’s at least one more language overlaying her basic tongue. I have no idea why those two were up on the flank of the mountain, and the girl just shakes her head ‘no’ when we ask her about it. She’s terrified, that’s for sure.

  “In many slave cultures, the masters practiced ‘group punishment.’ That is, they punished everyone for the sins of just one. At a guess, she’s trying to rely on our ignorance to keep others from being punished. She seems certain that we will return her to those others.

  “The bottom line, though, is that we need to get our shit together and get ready to get out of Dodge sooner rather than later,” he told Kris and Andie.

  He spoke for a while with Melek, and then was back. “Kris, you and Andie are in good shape when it comes to backpacks. Andie can use mine, and you’ve got yours.”

  He huffed a sigh. “The girl has to come with us -- the only way Melek will leave her behind is if he cuts her throat first. There is no way we can afford to have someone along -- besides me -- who can’t carry their own weight, so she’s going to be carrying a hefty pack as well.

  “Right now, Melek and his men are fashioning packs of their own. We’re lucky in that the previous tenants left everything inside, and it’s merely dusty for the most part. And, while most of it isn’t serviceable, there’s a lot of it, and not so many of Melek’s men, so a couple of them have been set to cannibalizing bits and pieces to fix the gear in the best shape.

  “It’ll be dark before we can be ready to go, and so we’re going to have to wait, as it’s what they call ‘double dark’ or ‘dark twice’ with the moon rising and blocking what little starlight there is. So, expect to go before first light in the morning -- we’ll hope that we get off before they have scouts out and get enough of a head start that they can’t catch us.”

  The rest of the afternoon and evening they supervised packing the MREs. They took the extra packets out of the boxes and tossed them into the back of the cave. Each person got three sets of utensils, while Kris and Andie held back the napkins for use as emergency TP, while leaving the regular TP that came with the rations for the others.

  Ezra had seen them saving the kleenex and had laughed long and hard. “Do you know what we call MRE toilet paper in the Army?”

  “Something with fuck or shit in it,” Andie replied brightly.

  “John Wayne -- because it’s rough, tough, and doesn’t take shit from anyone.”

  He pointed to other piles they had made. “Keep the Tabasco sauce and the creamer, and we’ll try to include enough of the heaters to match up with them.”

  “Why?” Kris asked.

  “Well, the heaters are a powdered mixture of magnesium and iron. Just add water and they produce a fair amount of heat. On the other hand, toss a heater pack into a fire and you get a bright flash. Even better, get a heavy jar, fill it with small rocks, dump in a heater or two’s powder, and keep it dry until ready to use. Then add water and run like hell.

  “Another thing you can do is mix the Tabasco sauce with the heater, sprinkle some on a fire and scoot again. A poor man’s tear gas.”

  Andie whistled. “You guys in the Army have entirely too much spare time to figure this stuff up. What about the creamer?”

  “It’s a flammable powder. You figure it out,” he told her with a straight face.

  Andie laughed. “Okay, we’ll take what we can. Anything else we should know about?”

  “The meals are very balanced -- but they are low in fiber. The crackers aren’t really Ex-Lax like some will tell you, but they are high in fiber, so it works the same way. A comedian said once in a USO show ‘I just had my fifth MRE -- none of them had an exit strategy.’”

  He waved at the heaters. “By the way, the heaters give off hydrogen gas -- so one of those IEDs put near a fire give a lot of extra bang for the buck.”

  They finished up before the moon occulted the sun, and then everyone sat down to a meal, before finishing loading and adjusting their packs. There was no doubt about it, Kris thought, hoisting her pack. It was doable, but after a week or so she’d be really buff -- or dead of exhaustion. She didn’t ask how Andie was doing, because she knew Andie would explode with anger at the thought that she might not be as strong as anyone else. And in truth, so far as Kris could tell, Andie was as strong as she was.

  They had a guard in the high exit tunnel, while the rest of them slept.

  * * *

  Melek awoke, and
for a moment the darkness pressed down on him and he fought mild panic. Then he remembered the observation post and relaxed for a second, but then remembered what had happened to the post, followed quickly by the events since then.

  The world, he thought, was a strange place. If they’d been in the observation post during the storm, they’d have had to leave in a hurry, grabbing a few rations and a little gear, but not much more than what they had now. And there was a reasonable chance that they’d have been killed in the storm.

  Moreover, even if they’d have survived, they’d have noticed the ancient enemies and most likely would have been noticed themselves. Lieutenant Menim would likely have already shown his true colors, so he wouldn’t have been a factor. Odds were, a few of the faster and stronger soldiers might have survived, but it wouldn’t have been all of them, and it would have taken a good deal of luck for any of them to have survived.

  He sat up and used the small flashlight Kris had given him, to sweep around the nursery chamber. The men were still asleep, although as usual the two young women had gotten up earlier than the rest and were missing. Really, was it their fault what had happened?

  To remind him, the light woke up the strange new woman. She looked at Melek with a mixture of fear strongly tinged with terror. It was frustrating. The Broken Chain fighting order, which he belonged to, was dedicated to finding a way to return to their ancestral home and freeing those that had been left behind. He was as certain as he could be that this woman was a slave and thus should be ecstatic because he’d cut off her collar. Instead, she reacted like he’d been sawing on her throat.

  And her language! It was teasing and tantalizing! There were so many words almost like the ones they used! But they were so different! And there was at least another language mixed in with it, as well.

  She saw what was making the light and made some sort of sign that Melek was sure was warding off bad luck. The flashlight had been on a metal ring in Kris’ pouch, and she’d parted with it without hesitation, as if was of no account. He laughed at that. The greatest scholar in the Fingers would have given his nuts to look at it!

  There were so many contradictions, so many things that didn’t make sense! He’d finally figured it out, he thought, when he saw their reaction to the Big Moon. Scholars reported that if their theories were right, anyone who lived on the far side of the moon wouldn’t even know that something like the earth under Melek’s feet existed. Such a person would be surprised, then, seeing the twin worlds -- Ezra and his two companions were surprised, ergo, they had to be from there.

  He got up and went to the spy-hole watch post. They hadn’t bothered to put anyone there overnight, relying on the darkness to keep them safe. He cast an experienced eye on the sky and saw that it was about a half hour or so before light would spill into the world.

  He sighed, knowing the next few hours would be a matter of life and death. He would have to be quite careful or it would be death.

  He went back down and roused the corporals and they got their privates going as well.

  Ezra appeared and they started working to haul the packs up separately from the men. It took most of the next half hour, and then the men were going up, with Collum bringing the strange woman with him.

  Ezra went up, then Andie, then Kris and last Melek. He had mixed feelings leaving the rookery behind. It was, he was positive, for the best. They would have to keep a close eye out for dralka, but it was unlikely that they would find the old rookery. It was unlikely the ancient enemies would find it either and it would be a much better watch post than the other had ever been.

  Still, the rookery had once housed dralka, and that wasn’t a good thing, bringing back bad memories. A lot of people had died in the early days from dralka. Shalnuksis, the fast runners, had been bad too. But the shalnuksis had been fairly stupid as predators went, and it was easy to lure them into traps where archers could be waiting out of reach, and where they could fill the monsters with arrows in complete safety.

  Tarin, now those were predators! Thank the gods that they were large, slow-moving and even slower breeding! He laughed. Large? They were four and five times the height of a man! And in the north, they too had larger cousins like the dralka had. Those were seven and eight times as tall as a man!

  He joined the end of the line, just behind Ezra. Collum was ranging far ahead as a scout, appearing every half hour to signal that all was clear.

  They made good time, staying level, near the top of the ridge. They saw nothing -- not ancient enemies, not even dralka.

  They had a hasty meal break later than usual. Once again he tried to ask the stranger woman questions, but she was fatigued from having to carry her pack and her water jug.

  Ezra made a point of digging a small pit with his knife and having everyone put what was left into it, then Ezra covered it up and tamped the dirt down, finally spreading debris over it. When they left the camp, he had Corporal Rari, who was quiet and unassuming, make sure that everything was done to obscure that it had been used.

  When Rari returned, Melek fell in beside him. “You are from an old East Finger family, yes?”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “You speak a lot closer to what the girl speaks.”

  Rari shook his head. “Sergeant, that’s like saying we’re close to Arvala, because it’s closer than Shandu of West Finger. It’s a long way from the way we used to talk and how she talks.”

  “Still, you helped a few times yesterday,” Melek told the young man.

  “Ezra helped a few times as well,” Rari pointed out.

  “I want you to talk to the woman, learn what you can.”

  Rari stopped and faced him. “Sergeant, you are Broken Chain. I understand that, and I’ve never said -- as others have -- that Broken Chain shirks. Please don’t do this to me, Sergeant.”

  “I am the only Broken Chain and I have too many other duties now -- I can’t do this. Ezra, Kris, and Andie are too important. Even now, Collum carries the weapon Andie fashioned that can kill a dralka with one shot.” He tapped the young man’s wrist. “I know what tattoo you carry, Rari. I ask you, is the gift of this weapon not enough to satisfy the Sachem of the Dralka’s honor? For these few days?”

  Rari turned and started walking again. “You remind me of duty and honor,” Rari told Melek. “I am shamed.”

  Melek chuckled. “The world is twisted these last few days. Nothing is as it should be. But there are clear signs, Rari, signs that we don’t dare ignore. This may be the single most important event for our people since the last ship cleared the docks in old Shindar for our last voyage from home.”

  “Corporal Destu is our leader, Sergeant, and he’s gone north. But before he left he told me that I was to make sure that nothing happened to either of the women that didn’t happen to me first. I have that oath as well to carry out.”

  Melek nodded. “And nothing would happen to them without my being dead first and Ezra too. And, in case you haven’t noticed, Ezra and those two women are powerful warriors.”

  “It’s true? The tall one killed the bastard Tengri?”

  “Aye, she shot him like Ezra shot the dralka. She nearly severed the man’s head from his body. Collum says it isn’t likely he could hide all the bits and pieces because there were so many and spread over a wide area. I don’t know how their weapons work, but they are surely effective!”

  “Aye, I watched the little one build the weapon with Collum. That was...” Rari swallowed. “It was like watching my father shave a bow when I was little. She knew what she wanted, and all Collum could do was little tasks. Children’s tasks.”

  “Aye, but still, she’s a woman and small at that. We are going to have a devil of time unless we meet Captain Dumi coming south.”

  Rari nodded. “You will have the help of the Dralka, I swear it, Sergeant!”

  “Well, that’s good. Watch the stranger and learn what you can from her. Rest assured that Ezra and I will help out.”

  About a half hour be
fore the sun would hit the rising tide of the Big Moon, Collum was back. “There’s a fair-sized stream a mile ahead, Sergeant. There’s a narrow canyon to the right -- avoid it. Just cross the stream and camp in some of the boulders there.”

  Melek nodded. “Now, I will go behind us and see if there is anyone on our back trail,” Collum told him.

  Melek watched the big man go and smiled when the worthy was some distance off.

  Being entrusted with rendering a report on the fitness of a junior officer was a position of great importance and while no one had told him anything, he’d been sure that at some point that someone would be sent to pass on his fitness. Collum, he was certain, was the one. Of all the men in the patrol, only Collum sported a ring on his left hand and no tattoo.

  Collum was a member of the King’s Guard and had told Lieutenant Menim a tale about being in trouble for diddling his sergeant’s daughter. It was true; they were lax about such things in the West Finger. The people of the East Finger had been the staunchest of the conservatives, before everyone had fled the drought. Middle Finger had been much more conservative than West Finger, and the addition of most of the people of the East Finger had made it more so. Still, the King’s Guard -- that sort of offense should have seen Collum expelled and sent north on a dralha hunting expedition. True, the observation post wasn’t a pleasant post, but compared to dralha hunting, it was paradise.

  Melek was, then, positive that Collum wasn’t nearly as simple as he sometimes appeared. He was almost certainly a very senior sergeant -- or worse, a senior captain.

  They found the stream and it was brash, but crossable in safety. On the other side, there was a pile of wood that had been dead for a century, and in spite of storms and floods was quite dry. They had a fire going in no time, and everyone relaxed and rested for an hour as the light gradually faded.

  Melek had all but forgotten his earlier speculations about Ezra and his two companions, when the City of Light rose.

  He saw it and thought nothing about it -- he’d seen it all of his life, after all.