by Gian Bordin
"No, I don’t." He felt caught that she had read him so easily.
"Yes, you do." She briefly touched his arm, still smiling. "Atun, it is no use lying to me. I will always know… And it is OK to think that I am silly. I don’t mind. There are so few occasions when I can afford to be silly that when I do it I enjoy it fully. At the coast there are no rock walls that answer back. The forest swallows the sound. So I always do it when I am here. For seven years before you came, nobody ever answered back to me."
He felt that there was a hidden hint in what she just had said, nor did he know how to react to her admission and was glad when she turned back to the rock wall, singing ever more intricate chords and laughing when the answer returned. It was contagious and he joined in. He had never seen her so playful. He was just thinking how her eyes sparkled, how beautiful she was when all at once she turned serious and said: "We better go. It is a long way home."
Once they reached the low hills extending inland from the coast, Yuen-mong turned silent. He had the clear impression that something was bothering her and would have liked her to tell him. By noon they came to a small river, where she stood still for a few second, eyes closed, the pose he now recognized as her listening to other minds.
"Let’s take a break here where we’ve water," he suggested. He felt very thirsty.
"No, we cannot. You may take a quick drink, but no stopping."
She went to the water’s edge and scooped up a handful and drank it in small swallows. He did the same and then spotted several shiny pebbles in the water. Gold nuggets? He bent down to grab one.
"Atun, come, we must hurry," she urged and started crossing the river at a shallow angle.
"Just-a-second," he replied when he saw the golden glint in his hand. He crouched and found another three. Looking over the river bed, he suddenly saw hundreds of them. "Yuen-mong, wait! Wait! There’s gold," he shouted, looking down-river to see where she was. He just saw her scale the bank. Confident that she would wait for him, as she had always done so far, he stepped into the river and collected more until his vest pocket was full. Then he started down-river too, although it was hard to turn his back to all that gold.
He had hardly taken a dozen steps when he found his path blocked by a horde of howling savages, some holding their clubs ready to strike. He turned to retreat upriver and ran straight into another group. The last he remembered was an excruciating pain at the back of his head and then everything went black.
The first thing that entered his consciousness was a throbbing headache. The ground he was lying on was grinding into his back. The light hurt his eyes and he closed them quickly. He tried to move into a more comfortable position, but found his arms tied behind his head and pinned down and so were his feet. For a moment he had no recollection of what had happened, where he was, why he was tied up. Slowly, his memory returned. He had crashed on Aros; he had been rescued by a woman, and suddenly he saw again in his mind the glitter of gold nuggets in the river and heard Yuen-mong’s urgent call "come! hurry!"
Why had he not heeded her call? She never did anything without good reason and if she said ‘hurry’ she meant it. And now he was splayed out on the ground, naked, captured by the savages. Had she not said that they usually kill all males, unless they intend to offer them as a sacrifice to the craws? Was this the reason he was splayed out like this?
In sudden panic, he opened his eyes to see where he was. He was in a sizable oval clearing surrounded by broadleafs, with low rock outcrops at one end. In fact, he was lying on bare rock. He heard voices behind him and tried to turn his head. At the edge of his vision he saw three men, the tallest one was wearing his clothing that was far too big for him. The vest looked more like a coat and he must have shortened the pant legs. On his head he wore his cap with its sun shield pointing backward. He must be their leader, Atun concluded. The one facing him wore his underpants. A short distance farther back was a group of about three dozen men in loin cloths, armed with bows and arrows. Their faces and bodies were painted in black and white stripes. They were attentively looking at the three men next to him. Beyond them, spread out under the canopy at the edge of the forest, women and children were milling around, many pointing and looking at him. The women were also only wearing loin cloths, several nursing infants on their undernourished breasts. All the children went naked. Many of the women looked pregnant.
When the one in his underpants noticed that he was awake, he too pointed at him, and the three came right up. The leader opened his mouth with a horrible grin, revealing yellowish teeth with both incisors missing and began to talk to him in an unfamiliar language with softly voiced j’s and sh’s. At the end he spit in his face and nicked him in the rips, just enough to draw blood. The other two immediately copied him. This was the signal for all the men to form a circle, each holding a bow in his left hand and an arrow in his right at breast level. They stamped the ground to the rhythm of a drum and the circle began to rotate around him. When they had completed a full round, a second drum joined in and the men started to hum softly. At each completion of another round, a new drum entered and the hum rose both in loudness and pitch, until after half a dozen full turns the roar was ear-shattering.
Atun closed his eyes. He knew that they had started the ritual for their sacrifice. Was this to be his end? Would they deliver him alive to a craw? Was this dance meant to attract a craw? Cold fear gripped him. He strained against his ropes, thrashing around violently. The roar of the savages changed into jubilant howling, and they circled around him at an increasing pace. Suddenly one by one they separated from the circle and ran through its middle, jumping over him, spitting in his face while at the same time jabbing an arrow at him, nicking him. Soon his whole body was covered by small bleeding nicks. And then the howling stopped. One by one the drums became silent. At the end, the savages retreated under the canopy, where the women served them drinks.
His whole body was in pain. He had reached a stage where he was beyond caring, waiting for the craw’s shrill scream to answer the savages’ call, hoping for the end to come fast. But no bird appeared, only the burning sensation of his battered body a reminder that he was still alive, that the ordeal was not over yet.
As the shadows grew, a glimmer of hope returned. Somewhere out there he knew was Yuen-mong. He knew that if she saw any way, she would come to free him. He desperately needed to cling to this hope.
* * *
Yuen-mong had sensed the disturbance of the savages for a while, coming from the south, but not approaching. It felt like a big group, broadcasting the kind of excitement when they returned from a successful raiding party. But then suddenly, it seemed to converge on them. She wanted to cross the Goldnugget River as fast as possible, so as to get into the no-man’s-land and out of their reach.
She instantly knew it when Atun was not heeding her call to hurry, but by that time it was too late for her to return. The savages were almost upon them. So she loped away from the river, north back into the forest and a short time later she heard the jubilant howling and could almost feel the blow that blanked out Atun’s frightened emanations.
She stopped running and leaned against the trunk of a broadleaf, closing her eyes, listening intently to the minds of the savages and searching for Atun’s. Have they killed him? She could not be sure. Why did he fail to heed my call? … Gold? What use is gold on Aros? There she had thought that he had learnt his lesson the day of the storm. He had been so intent on learning all she could teach him, so cooperative ever since then.
Not a person to dwell long on the past or to regret what could have been, except to learn from it, she turned her mind to what she should do next. She knew that she was in no immediate danger from the savages. They were going south again. After waiting for a while she returned to where she had crossed the river. There was no sign of Atun. The only indication of what happened was the trampled ground at the river’s edge and the disturbed pebbles and sand in the river bed. She spotted a small pile of gold nuggets
— the place where Atun had been struck down. What was his fascination with this shiny yellow metal that it had made him willing to risk his life?
Since the savages had taken him along, he must still be alive. They were going to offer him to the craws. A cold shiver ran up her spine. She had saved him from one, but in the end they would get him anyway. She knew that on Aros, few humans ended life peacefully, most had a violent ending, starving to death, falling prey to a craw, devoured by the night scavengers when they did not make it back to safe ground, killed by savages, succumbing to injuries. Few died of diseases; they rarely reached the age where diseases set in. But he was still too young for his time to have come.
Should she attempt to save him again? A third time? Was it worth to risk her own life for a foolish companion? No, it is not, her rational mind told her. You have tried, you have failed for no fault of yours. If she got underway promptly, she would easily reach her cave before nightfall. She was about to cross back over the river, when she spotted the three rods that Atun had been carrying, lying between boulders at the edge of the river, where they had briefly stopped for a drink. She bundled them up with her own. He will not need them anymore.
This thought brought a sense of loss. It had been good to have company, to get help for tasks that were difficult to do alone, to share things, to talk and discuss things, to learn more about other worlds, even if at times she had the need to be alone which he had seemed to understand and accept. It had been such fun to be silly this morning at sunrise, talking to the echo.
But how could she get him away from the savages. Tomorrow at dawn they would stake him out on the estuary, perform their hellish ritual of bloodying his whole body and when the first rays of sun struck, they would shrink back into the forest, chanting, and wait for the craw to claim their sacrifice. How could she even consider confronting a whole clan with thirty to forty able-bodied men, in their own camp? And if she did, it would have to be done before nightfall so that they could make it to the river and wait out the night in the water, or else they would become food for the night scavengers. It was crazy. The fool was not worth risking her own life. She could not blame herself for leaving him to the savages, but still she hesitated to leave. You have begun to like him, she mused, pondering that for a moment. It felt OK.
What she judged as a crazy, almost suicidal mission, turned into a grim determination. Maybe the very audacity of it would be her strongest weapon. She crossed over to the north side of the river and ate a hearty meal. It might be her last for a while. She hid all her gear up a tree, out of reach of the night scavengers, keeping only a pocket full of dried sweetberries for instant energy, her knife, her bow and six arrows, as well as her sling which served to hold her hair in a pony tail. At the river she had another drink and then searched for half a dozen perfectly shaped round rocks, about two inches in diameter, adding them to the three she always carried in her vest. Thrown hard, they could incapacitate, even knock out a savage, and kill at close range to the head.
Next, she cut the bark of a young broadleaf. It was hard work. When the dark brown sap began to ooze out, she smeared it over her face, ears and neck, and arms and hands. Like this no white would give her away. She was ready.
It was easy to follow the trail left behind by the savages. There was no need to hurry. Their camp was no more than four kilometers to the south. She had scouted it out before, both for curiosity and to learn about their habits. One never knew when it could become important. As she got closer, she could sense the commotion of chaotic minds. They were doing their first sacrifice ritual. As long as this was going on, everybody would be in the camp and it was easiest to get into position then. She had chosen a spot south of the camp, near the rock outcrop, away from the creek where the savages got their water, reducing the risk of encountering any women. Not that she thought they would give her away, not after she had saved one of them from certain death a few years ago. They knew that she would not harm them. The children were another story. They might venture a short way from their camp in any direction, but she had to take that chance.
From her vantage point, she could hear the drums and the infuriating howling. She would have to wait until sunset before she could dare to find out where Atun was kept. She expected him to be in the middle of the clearing, where she had seen another man being prepared for the sacrifice. She knew that he would already be hurt over all his body, but was helpless to prevent it. The nicks would heal in time.
When the last rays of the sun had vanished beyond the trees, she crept closer and scaled the far side of the dark gray rocks that gave a good view over the camp. Women were already preparing the fires placed all around the perimeter to keep away the night scavengers. She spotted Atun, naked, tied down, where she had expected to find him, about two thirds up the clearing, but well within the range of her arrows. He did not move, but she could see him breathe. She estimated the distance to the other side of the clearing. It was shorter, but it was also where all of the other women and children congregated. Maybe going straight through them was the best way to escape. She was certain they would not try to stop her and that this would create the greatest confusion. It was also right in line to the river.
Next she searched the men who were sitting on the ground to the left of Atun. She immediately recognized the headman in Atun’s clothing. He looked ridiculous. If she had ever seen a clown in her life, she would have said he looked like one. She hoped he would stay out there, parading in front of his men, showing off. He would be an easier target. She withdrew her head again. It was still too early. She had to time it such as to give them just enough time to reach the river before the night scavengers emerged, but not enough for the savages to pursue them because of these creatures. While waiting she searched the noise for Atun’s mind. After a while she could discern the familiar pattern. It told her that he was in pain, but there was also a sense of calm there. Was it resignation?
Trembling shadows of tree trunks projected into the forest as the fires became alive. It was time. She took three arrows from the hollow tube she carried on her back and climbed back on top of the rock to a spot where she could reach the clearing in one leap. The headman and his two deputies were standing in her line of sight to Atun, about twenty feet in front of him. While his two deputies were showing her their backs, the headman was facing toward her. Just perfect! Placing two of the arrows in easy reach, she readied the third on her bow. She took careful aim and let fly. A second later the arrow found the headman’s throat. For a split second, he remained upright, his hands reaching for the arrow, trying to wrench it out, before he fell backward with a gurgling sound. By then the second arrow was already on its way and hit the back of the deputy on his right. He fell forward almost instantly. She leaped into the clearing and raced toward Atun. The second deputy had turned around and was retreating backward, howling like a wounded animal, and then turned and ran to the periphery. Most of the men had scrambled to their feet.
She covered the distance to Atun in three seconds and stood over him, aiming her taut bow into the men. The dozen or so who had taken a few steps toward her fell back immediately, howling. She quickly bent down and cut the ropes. Then she yanked Atun upright and pulled him running toward the women and children. Twice he almost fell over, but she kept him going. The screams of the women and children joined the howling of the men, who now started after them. Like prearranged, a path opened up through the women, closing behind them again, and they were past the fires, running through the trees. For a short moment, some men followed, but soon gave up.
Relentlessly, she dragged Atun along. Whenever he flagged, she pulled him upright again. She could sense the first stirring of the night scavengers. They had to get to the river before they were lured out of the ground by their presence. Twenty minutes later they both stumbled into the water. Atun simply collapsed on his face, and she had to hold his head out of the water. She turned him over and cradled him on her lap. His eyes were closed, but she knew that he was consciou
s. She washed his face. It was strange to hold a man, a man helpless like a little child. Since her parents had died, she had not held another human being in her arms or had been held by one. In the subdued light of the ring, she could see the outlines of his face, and removed a strand of curly hair from his forehead. "You silly man," she whispered. Only then did the realization sink in that she had pulled off the impossible.
After recovering her breath, she forced Atun to get up. Although they were safe from both the savages and the night scavengers, they were still in danger. They could not remain in the cold water, and there lurked creatures similar to leeches. Sooner or later they would find them and she did not want to have to remove those from her skin. They usually left their head inside, causing nasty infections. She searched the river downstream until she found a set of boulders, sticking out of the water and large enough for them to sit and find temporary refuge.
Atun had not said a word yet. "Drink a bit of water, in small sips," she ordered.
He did, and then she gave him a handful of the dried sweetberries. "Chew them well."
He shivered, and she took off her vest and wrapped it around him. He seemed on the verge of fainting, so she held him against her. A short time later she became aware that he had fallen asleep.
It was a long night. Toward morning, there was the usual short rainfall and she started to feel chilly. She woke him. He briefly glanced at her and then lowered his gaze, murmuring: "Yuen-mong, please forgive me."
"You are a silly man," she said softly.
"I know. Please, forgive me."
"I will now get my gear, and then we go. The faster we are back home, the better."
After she had retrieved her gear, she forced him to eat some more and gave him the soft leather blanket she had used as protection against the cold up in the mountains, so that he would keep warm. She took back her vest to cover her own upper torso again.
