by Mark Jeffrey
“Maybe they’re looking for you guys,” Max suggested.
The foursome laughed aloud at that. “They’d be lining up every five minutes,” Justin Blue explained. “No. They don’t do a lineup just because we’re missing. Something else is going on.” He looked behind him at Marvin Sparkle. “You there! Big man! Let’s go — hurry it up!”
Sparkle glowered but did not argue.
THE ERITHS SANG as they marched through the dewy day. Their voices rang out across Mirror Lake. The girls were all dressed in the same Bondsman’s Young Explorer uniform that the boys wore — khaki shorts, button-down short sleeve shirts with medials and patches of various kinds and a kerchief with a slider.
But slowly, other voices appeared. At first, these newcomers were so faint that Max wondered whether they were merely hearing an echo of their own song off the Lake. But quickly, they became clearer. They sang a different song, one with two claps between stanzas.
Something something some-thing, clap! clap!
Now, they could make out other figures besides the Eriths, moving in the trees. Initially, they seemed shadowy half-substantial mirages of the forest. Then they solidified, translated into the crisp afternoon as if from a netherworld of shadow and leaf.
Clap! Clap!
It was another girls’ campsite. “Dewsbury! Dewsbury!” these newcomers cried louder when they caught sight of the Eriths.
But the Eriths only shouted them down.
“Erith! Erith! Hurrah, huzzah, huzzah!”
The dirt paths the Eriths and Dewsburys walked merged suddenly and the two campsites were soon literally shouting in each other’s faces as they marched.
Then another set of voices rang out nearby.
“Ellesmere! Ellesmere! Huzzah! Hurrah!”
“Hollyann! Hollyann! Huzzah! Hurrah!”
Now four campsites converged. Within moments, four lines of girls, all jostling and out-shouting one another, marched side by side. Cherry-red faces screamed at each other in the thin afternoon haze.
They were soon joined by two more boy’s sites on either side as they marched: Metallak and Ossett, bringing the total to six.
And then all six campsites poured out into an open field. They could hear more girls and boys singing now from different directions in the forest.
“Erith! Erith! We’re the brightest and the best!”
“Ellesmere! Ellesmere! We’re here, we’re here, we’re here!”
“Metallak! Metallak! We’re here, and we attack!”
“Ivybridge! Ivybridge!”
“Featherstone! Featherstone!”
“Hollyann! Hollyann!”
The girls shouted across the greensward at the boys and the boys did the same. Both sides clapped and laughed, pointing and pumping their fists in the air as if it were a pep rally.
The company hung back under the cover of trees. “There,” Marvin Sparkle said. Max looked: several Sky Chambers were parked at the far end of the field.
“Ah,” Will Turnip said, seeing now as well. “They’re looking for you two.” Sparkle’s eyes glinted. Max rolled on the balls of his feet: would Marvin actually kill these kids if he thought they were in danger of discovery? He touched his own sternum: the answer was a clear yes.
He could not hide his relief when Turnip simply said, “C’mon. We can hide you.”
THE COMPANY MADE its way through the woods around the field, swinging wide and far around the Admin lodge. Max could hear Fell Simon’s megaphone-amplified voice on the wind every now and then. But other than a word or two, he couldn’t make out what he was saying specifically.
They emerged on a main trail again — and the four boys insisted it would be perfectly deserted with the assembly going on — no one else would dare be absent. Soon they came to trail loop where all the boy campsites were located. As they rounded the top of the ring, the path rose significantly, and they found themselves at the foothills of Mount Griswold. As before, an arrangement of twenty green canvas tents on wood platforms greet them.
“Metallak,” Will Turnip said. “This is our campsite. This is where we live.”
“Well. When we’re here, anyway,” Caddy Fenton said to a roar of laughter.
“There are three tents that are vacant,” Justin explained. “We’ll hide you in one of them for the rest of the day. Then tonight, we’ll get you out to Snake Island.”
INSIDE THEIR TENT, Max decided to take a nap — he was exhausted. He urged Marvin to as well, but the massive African refused, saying someone had to keep watch. He didn’t trust mini-Planet Furious to do the job properly. “Suit yourself,” Max said, and curled up on on of the two old mattresses on rusty springs that each tent was equipped with.
As he drifted off, he heard the foursome jamming with acoustic guitars in one of the nearby tents. The instruments themselves must be contraband, Max thought. They were playing a song — a distinctly Planet Furious song, Max knew. He knew their style, there was no mistake about it — but it was not a song that he had ever heard before. It was rock: outlawed, and certainly not something that was part of the Bondsman’s control system in any way. In fact, it felt distinctly like a protest, a lament, an accusation aimed at everything the Bondsman stood for:
It starts so simply
You get yourself a job and a wife
And then twenty years have passed
And you’re an extra in your own life
You’re tired of the treadmill
This wasn’t how it was supposed to be
What happened to the American Dream?
Home of the brave, and land of free?
Your tie is a noose, your gold watch a shackle
Your shoes might as well be cement
The clock is your master, and it ticks ever fast
And this is the Modern Lament …
Max smiled. This was the first good thing he’d seen in this world since he arrived. It was always Planet Furious that came to his rescue in bad times, and here they were when he needed him, once again.
MAX AWOKE WITH a start.
He found himself staring into the face of the Bondsman.
“Max Quick,” the Bondsman said. “I am here to kill you!”
For a moment, Max panicked. Where was he? Had he been captured? He very nearly lit up with his star-power and began fighting.
But then, the Bondsman took off his mask. It was Justin Blue. He laughed uproariously — as did the other members of Planet Furious. Max looked down at his hand — he held a cheap plastic halloween mask of the Bondsman by the rubber band. Marvin Sparkle said across the room and even he could not keep from guffawing like a thirteen-year-old.
Max rubbed his eyes. “That’s not very goddamn funny,” he said.
“Yes,” Sparkle said. “Yes, actually it is.”
Max sat up and shook his head.
“Here,” Justin said, calming down at last. He handed Max a picnic-style food box. “We have a stash we stole from the mess hall. It’s Bondsman-food, so you can’t eat a lot of it, but it’s better than starving.”
Nodding, Max took the box and tore into it, not realizing how ravenous he truly was until he started eating.
Marvin Sparkle did much the same.
LATER, THAT SAME evening, the rest of the Metallak boys arrived, seemingly exhausted. As Max peeked between the tent flaps, he saw that they look unkept, disheveled. They were dirty, sweaty. Grass and dirt stained all of their uniforms. And their kerchiefs were not straight, and some had removed them altogether and wore them as bandanas on theirs heads — or worse, used them as bandages for their bloody limbs.
“Damn. What happened?” Justin Blue asked one of them.
“Oh, there you are,” the kid replied. “God, I hate you four. But today, you were the smart ones. I wish I had ditched with you! You missed one of the worst days ever.”
He proceeded to explain that Fell Simon had questioned them all about Max Quick — and since no one seemed to know anything useful, Simon made them run and do pus
hups all day long in the hot sun. Everyone was sunburned and dehydrated. Forty or so kids were in the infirmary from heat exhaustion right now. “We went up and down Mount Griswold at a sprint — twice. It was absolute murder.”
“Is he gone now?” Justin asked. The kid nodded. “Simon left. But some of his men and their Sky Chambers are still at the Admin lodge. They’re down at the waterfront. They’re swimming.” Then, he turned towards the sanctuary of his sleeping bag. And without fail, all of the rest of the kids likewise crawled into their tents and collapsed, unable to face even another moment of consciousness.
MIDNIGHT. Armed with bows and arrows stolen from the Archery range, mini-Planet Furious came to their tent and silent motioned for Max and Marvin to follow them out of Metallak.
The other boys were completely passed out; not a one of them so much as stirred. Nevertheless, they did not use flashlights.
The woods were soaked in thick darkness. But it helped that the night was a windy one. Gusts rattled the branches high above. Twigs like thin, bony fingers clawed at the starry vault above. A din of wind and creaking wood easily cloaked the sound of the company’s feet on the crunchy forest floor.
After about fifteen minutes, they reached a path with twin gullies dug into it. It tilted up at a steep angle, making Max’s calves burn with each step. “Old Stagecoach Road,” Justin explained to Sparkle, who was questioning him.
“But Mirror Lake is that way!” Sparkle protested, stopping. “It is not up the mountain, it is down! We’re going the wrong way!”
Scowling, Justin said, “Trust me. This is the right way.”
But Marvin would not move.
Tim Timson circled back from the lead of the group and approached Marvin Sparkle. He tapped Justin on the shoulder; indicating he could leave now. Justin nodded and regrouped with the other three.
Tim looked up into Sparkle’s massive eyes. At that moment, Max realized he had said exactly nothing since they had first met the foursome. Timson said, “You came to I-Val looking to contact the Resistance.” Sparkle folded his arms and said nothing. “Very well. Then I will go first. I am you contact. The Resistance sends me into town whenever it knows someone is approaching. I was sent out to meet you, and as usual, I brought my friends with me. That’s what we were doing there, not ditching to see a movie. We were there looking for you. In fact, if you’d only signaled your true intentions when we first met, we never would have had to enter the town. You’re here to meet Ulrich, right?”
Sparkle’s eyes grew wide. Apparently that had been the right thing to say. He nodded slowly.
“Very well then. We can take you to him. And, yes, the way to get to Snake Island is to go up the mountain, not back down to the Waterfront. Or did you want to go swimming with Fell Simon’s men?” Marvin shook his head. “Good. Let’s go then.”
Marvin watched the small back of Tim Timson recede with a new respect in his eyes.
So did Max, who stood dumbfounded. “Well. I guess that’s how he becomes the leader of Planet Furious then.”
TIM TIMSON waited a long while before he flicked on a flashlight. But even when he did, he kept it carefully trained only on the ground directly ahead of him. Several times, he stopped and peered into the woods, trying to discern if anyone was following.
The wind was really whooping it up now. Trees thrashed all around them.
Over a period of about an hour, the company ascended a series of rock ledges in the forest gloom, enduring the bites of mosquitoes that swirled in a lazy haze. But at last, they broke into a flood of starlight on a rocky field.
They were very high up in the air – that much was immediately clear. And when Max turned to look behind him, he was startled to see just how far up Mount Griswold they had actually climbed.
He could see little lights of the camp far, far down below. And the deep black of Mirror Lake, vast and wide, a plane of smoothed jewel stretching off into the distance for miles and miles, reflecting the Milky Way in the night sky perfectly. And Snake Island curled in the middle of like a smudge of shadow.
As they kept moving up the tilted mountainside field, they came upon a large stone fence, built long ago. It had two swinging iron gates beneath a granite arch. Each gate had an iron face such that when they closed, the faces appeared to be kissing.
The Kissing Gate, Max thought. He’d seen it marked on the map that Marvin Sparkle carried. Odd to see a work of art like that in the middle of the wilderness, Max thought.
But the Gate itself was nothing: It was entirely overshadowed by an astonishingly huge tree that the stone fence had been built to encircle.
Max gaped as he looked up. Impossible that any tree could be that big! He was staring up at a gnarled mountain of wood and leaf. This tree was easily thousands of years old. Maybe even tens of thousands. The trunk alone was the size of a city block. Giant ropey roots clutched the very rock and soil of Mount Griswold like elephant trunks made of bark. Millions and millions of leaves danced overhead in the night breeze, tickling the warm stars.
Following Timson, the company went through the Kissing Gate and approached the based of the great tree. Timson suddenly knelt to the ground. His fingers searched the crunchy leaves for something. Within a moment, he’d found it: a ratty rope. He pulled. A trapdoor in the ground between two tree trunks swung open.
Max peered in. It was a hidden entrance to a cave system.
By the thin starlight, Max could just make out a stone spiral staircase that wound down into the darkness.
Seven: A Centurion’s Tale
IT TOOK SEVERAL days for the Lost Legion, as Giovanni had dubbed them, to come out of their grief. They remained camped at the tomb, going in and out of the catacombs at intervals, and then coming out to wail into the night sky.
During this time, Giovanni sent a steady stream of servants down with fresh meat, dried fruit, rare cheeses, water and wine. He also sent blankets and tenting, but these were always refused; the men preferred sleeping in the open air, and luckily it was the dry season and no slashing rains came to bedevil them.
There was always at least one servant on site who stoked the fire in the camp, and made sure it was supplied always with freshly chopped wood. Cooking implements were also provided, though they too went unused.
When at last all of this was done, and the centurions of the Lost Legion had spent their misery, Appius appeared on the doorstep of Giovanni’s Villa early one evening.
Giovanni hurried to the great hall when he heard of his arrival and sent for Ragazzo at once.
“Greetings, Appius,” Giovanni said through the boy translator. “Be welcome in my house.”
“Thank you,” Appius replied. “I have not been courteous during my stay. And that is unlike me. And you have been nothing but courteous, and for that I thank you.”
Giovanni grinned broadly. “However you have come to be here, Appius, under whatever circumstances, the town of Cyranus is yours as well as mine. I am the Lord of Cyranus, and it is my duty to look out for all who name our nestled hamlet home. Your thanks, though appreciated, is unnecessary.”
Appius bowed low and then saluted Giovanni solemnly. But Giovanni saw something more in his gaze as he did this, some look of wonderment that had not been there before. Appius was scrutinizing him with a rapt gaze. An almost affectionate gaze.
“I have lost one family,” Appius said, “And gained another.”
“That is kind of you —”
“You miscomprehend. I should tell you … I studied the markings on the walls in the catacombs, Giovanni. I wished at first to prove that you were lying. What if you had slaughtered our families and then simply gone down in that catacomb and written their names on the oldest walls and named them our kin? It was a possibility I could not ignore.
“So I decided I would make certain that, father to son, the names held from the back of the cavern all the way to the front. For I deemed a deceit on that scale too detailed and arduous to give credence.”
Giovanni
and Ragazzo both gasped in turn. Appius had actually read all those names and meticulously cataloged their relations? That was an immense amount of work.
Appius laughed slightly at their reaction. “Yes. It was a tedious task, equal to the cleaning of the Aegean Stables! But you would have done the same in my sandals. You would have had to have been sure.”
Giovanni slowly nodded. “Yes. Yes I suppose I would have.”
“I drove my men nearly insane, insisting that they help in the midst of their deep grief,” Appius said with a sheepish shrug. “But they, too, were eager to prove this a falsehood, so at the very least we could lose ourselves in battle and avenge our slain kin and friends. There, at least, would have been a release that soldiers could understand.
“But I found no such evidence. The names held, linked, from son to father to son to father. But I did discover something very curious as I did this.
“As I followed the chain of my eldest son, who died an old man, I was grateful to find, I discovered that his descendants fell from catacomb to catacomb to the front of the cave, where the most recently dead are to be found.”
Giovanni stared at Appius, anticipating what he would say next, not daring to believe it.
“His line ended with he who was your father. You, Giovanni, are my heir and direct descendant.” Appius smiled for the first time since Ragazzo had met him — and he recognized the broad grin, because it was the same grin that Giovanni habitually wore himself.
“You are my son!” Appius said and held his arms wide and embraced Giovanni suddenly.
This man before him, Appius, was his own great-grandfather many times over.
At first, Giovanni was too stunned to return the embrace, but then did so fervently, laughing. Tears streamed down his cheeks in amazement.
