He turned her head and looked in her eye from only an inch away. She doubted him, he could tell, but he forced himself to wait silently and without motion.
A minute later the sound of feet on the path grew and then drew even with them. Nothing indicated they had been seen. The guttural voices were audible.
“Will we arrive at the town in time to join the ruckus?” one voice rasped.
“We have to watch for any that try to escape along this river trail, so we won’t be the first ones there, but if we hurry, we’ll be there in time…” a responding voice faded as the column moved towards Walnut Creek.
After they were out of earshot down the trail, Alec felt the woman’s body tremble violently against his. Her eyes widened, then tightened, then opened, and she began to take gasping breaths. He raised his head back away from her, and looked up and down the trail. The lacertii were almost out of sight, beginning to spread out above and below the trail, but no others appeared to be following.
“What do we do?” she asked. “I’ve never known that lacertii really existed; I thought they were just in stories…”
“What is your name?” he responded, trying to figure out the next step.
“I am Leah.”
“Leah, Walnut Creek is about to be attacked. Before we came here, my friends and I were at Riverside. We got there as a lacertii force was finishing up a devastating attack. There were no survivors, the town was completely destroyed, and we were lucky to escape. Now Walnut Creek is about to be overwhelmed. Do you know a safe short cut we could take to get there? I’d like to warn the town and my friends…”
A distant explosion came from up the river just then. They both stopped to listen. Alec imagined he could hear faint screams.
“Doctor, I think it is too late for us to get back,” Leah said as she grew paler.
“Are there any other settlements in the mountains? Places we could flee to, and warn?” Alec asked her, the horrifying reality of his situation not yet sunk in.
“If Riverside is also gone, there is nowhere else, except maybe a miner’s cabin here and there. The river flows a long way out into the plains before it comes to Goldenfields, and I don’t know of any other places,” Leah replied in a low, despairing voice.
“Let’s try to get down by the river to watch for boats. Maybe someone managed to escape from the town that way. If we don’t see anyone, we’ll have to try to get down river as far as we can and get away from the lacertii. They’ve attacked two towns in less than a fortnight, and we need to get out of their territory.” Alec thought the plan sounded as good as anything he could imagine. Natalie and Ari may have escaped off the docks and he might be able to reconnect with them. If not, he had no idea what to do other than just move down river as fast as possible. He wanted to keep Leah occupied so she didn’t have time to panic.
“Do you have a knife?” he asked her as he started to move in the direction of the river bank.
“Just this small one,” she said holding out a feminine belt knife.
They arrived at the riverbank, and stood on a bluff looking out over a wide curve in the river. Up stream, a column of smoke was visible.
Behind them, Alec heard the sound of lacertii on the trail again, either more patrols or the same one backtracking. “We’ve got to be quiet, and get out of sight. Let’s drop down the bank a little bit below their view,” he whispered.
As they scrambled down, a deer trail led them to a shallow cave in the bluff, and they stepped in, listening and watching for anyone else. A noise above gave away the approach of the patrol. Alec and Leah pressed further into the shallow opening, out of sight from the top of the bank.
Leah grabbed Alec’s shoulder hard and nodded her head towards the river. Looking, Alec saw a very crowded flatboat, riding low in the water, coming around the bend. Several men on each side had long oars and were furiously paddling the boat.
Above them, the patrol too saw the boat. An arrow fell into the river, far short of the fleeing refugees. A shout from the boat indicated the patrol’s detection, and the men began to paddle to keep the boat on the far side of the river’s current, while the patrol leader cuffed an archer for spoiling their surprise.
As the boat moved to its closest approach to the bluff, a steady rain of arrows began to fly. A quarter of the missiles reached the flat-bottom, and screams of fear and pain began to rise, but the oars and the current carried the boat along quickly and soon the refugees were safely beyond range.
The two refugees in the cave stood silent. Alec felt Leah’s hand clasp his. Alec returned the squeeze with ambivalence – on the longboat he had seen Natalie, but there had been no sign of Ari.
Chapter 9 – Surviving Walnut Creek’s Fall
A lacerta’s body plunged through the air in front of their cave and fell into the river below.
“That’s what he gets for giving us away with his first shot! His stupidity cost us a chance to wipe out that lot. There were to be no witnesses, and now a whole boatload is free. There’ll be hell to pay for that, I’m sure,” they heard the leader tell his charges. “It’s not our fault a boat got away from the docks. That’s what we’ve got to remind the higher ups.”
The sounds of the patrol withdrew out of hearing, while Alec and Leah remained crouched in their river bluff cave.
After a few minutes of silence, Alec spoke. “The best way for us to travel is to do what they did. We ought to make a raft and float down the river to get away from here.”
“Can you do that?” Leah asked him.
“Let’s get as far downriver by foot as we can today, and then we’ll try to put a raft together. Since we don’t have an axe to cut down trees, we’ll have to try to find enough debris that we can tie together with some rope and vines. Are you ready?” he asked his new companion, wondering about her fitness to travel in the wilderness.
She nodded her head. They stepped out onto the narrow game trail and began to walk downstream, making the wide bend around the outside of the river’s curve and following the trail down to lower ground as the river straightened out and moved away from the mountainside.
The sun was falling rapidly towards the horizon now, and the game trail entered a swampy piece of bottomland. Alec led them off the trail away from the river, hoping to find the main trail before dark and follow it around the swamp.
As the ground rose quickly, he stopped and looked both ways before stepping out onto the narrowing trail that came from town. “Keep your eyes open for lacertii, and let’s move fast until dark,” Alec said in a low voice to Leah, and then he began to pace down the trail, away from the second destroyed settlement he’s seen in the mountains.
Two hours later the last traces of sunset faded and it became impossible to see the trail any longer. Alec took Leah’s hand and led her off the trail to a large cluster of rocks protruding out of a hillside. Circling the rocks, he found a crevasse among them, which led to a small, low shelter between three boulders leaning against each other.
“Let’s spend the night here,” he said wearily. “Help me find stones we can pile in the entrance so that no one can sneak in tonight.” Together they found stones and rocks that provided more security.
Alec spread his cloak on the ground and they sat down, leaning against one another in the cramped quarters.
“Are we safe tonight, doctor?” Leah asked softly.
“I think we’re safe. No one’s going to find us in here without making noise removing those stones, and I don’t think the lacertii even suspect anyone got away from the town in this direction. We can rest tonight and then try to build our raft tomorrow if we find all the materials we need.
“My name is Alec. No one calls me doctor,” he said, weakly smiling for the first time in several hours.
“What do you think we can do about food, Alec?” Leah asked a few moments later.
Feeling his own stomach clutch at the thought of food, Alec realized they had a major problem to consider. “I’ve got a loaf of brea
d in my sack,” he said, considering.
“Let me give you some herbs I’ve got that I think will be good for you and your baby, and you can eat them with a piece of bread,” Alec decided as he began to rummage among his medicinal plants. They both ate a meager meal that didn’t satisfy their hunger. But Alec decided to preserve the bread for as long as he could under the uncertain conditions.
Exhausted by the day’s horrific events, they lay down together on Alec’s cloak, with Leah’s cloak over them for blanket. In the small confines of their shelter, Alec was conscious of resting against Leah’s body from ankle to shoulder, although he couldn’t see her in the pitch black.
Above every issue on his mind stood the question of Natalie. Was she safe? What would her journey be like? How would they meet again? How long would it take for them to find each other safely? He hoped with all his heart that they would reunite somewhere in the Dominion in the near future.
Ari’s absence from the boat disturbed him. He took for granted that the wily ingenaire would escape the turmoil at Walnut Creek. Alec wondered if he should wait along the river to meet Ari as the older man made his way down the Giffey in the same direction Alec and Leah and the other refugees were heading. Alec doubted the chances were good for them to find one another here in the wilderness, since their goal was to avoid detection. He could only make his way towards safety and hope for fate to bring them back together. Deep inside, Alec could not imagine a future that did not include a reunion with the older man who had made his life so different and so much better.
Only that morning he has been playing prosperous doctor in a tidy store in a small island of civilization, and now he was huddled in a pile of stones in the middle of a hostile wilderness. If he hadn’t felt the strange sense of reliving his last escape a few days ago, Alec wasn’t sure how he’d be able to cope with this uncertain scenario.
He realized that for Leah, there was no previous escape through the woods to draw on for strength and comfort. “Do you go to church, Leah?” he asked her.
“I haven’t been to church since I was a little girl. My mother used to take my brother and me to hear the priest talk about God and Jesus and John Mark. But when the priest died from the flu, no new priest came and no one went to church any more,” she said softly.
“Do you remember any prayers?” Alec asked.
“Bits and pieces, but not really.”
“‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name,’ does that sound familiar?”
“Yes, it reminds me of sitting next to mother in the pew, with the sunlight coming in the windows,” she whispered.
Alec began to recite the full prayer, and as Leah’s memories were touched, she joined in more of the phrases towards the end.
“I feel safer now…thank you,” she said, and put her arms around Alec, breathing slowly and regularly as she drifted off to sleep.
Chapter 10 – The Raft and the River
Dim light creeping through cracks and crevasses in the rocky fortress brought dawn to Alec and Leah’s cramped den. They slept on through the emerging morning’s chorus of early rising birds as their bodies and minds recouped from the previous, terrifying day. Eventually, an insect walked across Leah’s face and her hand brushed it away. A second later her eyes popped open and she felt a moment of stunned clarity as she recollected the past day and the new life she was awakening to.
Her hometown was gone, her fear of her husband was erased, and the only future she could envision was the next few days she’d spend with the boy beside her, trying to stay alive. Her eyes studied his face in the filtered light.
Though he seemed so young, she realized Alec had made many good, spontaneous decisions yesterday. He’d avoided the lacertii, brought them away from danger, and suggested the rafting plan as a way for them to escape. Leah already had faith in Alec’s ability to lead them to safety. It was too bad her doctor was so young. She couldn’t imagine clinging to him for comfort and protection if they survived to make it to a city where she could safely have her baby. But that was so far away she didn’t spend much time considering the problem; she just reminded herself she was fortunate to be alive. She felt a quiet relief deep in her soul amidst the terrible change in circumstances, as she realized she was going to keep her baby after all. She had agonized over the question of ending its life, convinced that if she didn’t, her husband’s rage would have killed the child sooner or later.
She reached over and rubbed Alec’s shoulder, then pressed harder as his face twitched and he rolled over and began to awaken.
“Alec, doctor, the sun is up,” she said softly. She watched his eyes blink open, and saw him gathering his memories of where he was and why.
“I thought you were Natalie,” Alec said as he sat up.
“Did you want me to coo and kiss you and wake you with love?” Leah retorted.
“No, Natalie never did that. I just meant that I didn’t remember for a second where we were. Let’s get up and get out of here,” he said with evident confusion that amused Leah.
They quickly removed their makeshift wall and crawled out of their snug den, glancing around as they crouched by the entrance. They both stretched and groaned as they stood and leaned against the stones. Alec broke off two more small pieces from his loaf of bread, and they stood silently chewing their breakfast.
“Let’s head down to the river to see about building a raft. Keep an eye open for good vines and wood we can use,” Alec said as he shouldered his pack and began walking.
By the time they reached the water’s edge, each was trailing long tails of vines. They dropped them in a heap with their packs and went back to retrieve the best logs they had spotted in the woods. Through trip after trip they laboriously dragged these down to the riverbank. Then they went up and down the riverbank looking for further potential rafting logs, and hauled those to their location as well. Hot and sweaty with his shirt off and the sun overhead, Alec decided they should break. “We’ve got enough here to build, I think. Let’s have some lunch and then see how we tie these things together.”
After breaking off more from the disappearing loaf of bread, Alec went up the riverbank briefly and came back with an armful of plant roots. “Eat some of these. They’re good for you, and we’ll probably have to eat them for the next few days anyway. They’re all up and down the river, I imagine.”
Leah dutifully took three of the roots, which provided much more to fill her belly than the two stingy scrapes of bread she’d had so far that morning. The roots didn’t have much flavor, and they were stringy; Leah sighed as she imagined how tired she’d be after several meals with roots for the main course.
Idly glancing at his hands as they held some of the swamp roots, Alec realized that Leah’s fingers could weave and tie the vines to hold the logs together better than he could, so he accepted his role as laborer and pushed and pulled and held the logs in position for Leah’s dexterous fingers to tie into location. In a couple of hours’ time they judged the raft was large enough and sturdy enough to launch.
“Let’s move it down by the water’s edge, then get things ready to take with us,” Alec said, crouching beside a corner of the raft to heave it towards the bank.
Leah lined up at the opposite corner.
“Alright, one, two, three, pull,” Alec said.
The raft didn’t move. Alec’s stomach churned.
“Let’s try again. One, two, three, pull,” Alec grunted as he dug in his heels and strained.
After several seconds, Leah began to laugh at their predicament; the raft built on land was too heavy to move just a few feet to the river! Alec watched her for several seconds, and after he saw the sincere humor in her eyes, he grinned and chuckled as well. “Well, that’s a practical lesson in raft building, I guess,” he sheepishly admitted. “Let’s take it apart and move it down to the water.”
It took longer to take the raft apart than it had taken to build it, and Alec began to fret over the time as the sun passed its ze
nith and began to descend. He felt an urgent need to leave these mountains, where humans met death at the hands of lacertii. They laid sections of the raft in the water in a still pool along the river’s edge, and Leah patiently rewove the log portions together, until they had a vessel, of sorts, almost fifteen feet on each side, floating in the water.
Alec went into the woods and selected a long limb to use as a pole, and asked Leah to weave smaller twigs together at one end to make a rudimentary oar. “I’m going to go grab some more of those roots for food, and then I’ll be back,” Alec told Leah. “Please put our things on the raft and I’ll be back in five minutes.” He went back up the riverbank and gathered the unappetizing plant bulbs, knowing that at some point soon they might have nothing else to sustain them.
When Alec got back to the raft, their cloaks and two small bags were in the center of the raft, and Leah was sitting complacently beside them, rocking gently on the river’s waves. Alec waded out to the raft and dumped his findings on it. “Are you ready?” he asked with a grin, satisfied that they were going to be able to escape from the lacertii.
“I’m as ready as ready can be,” she smiled back, and Alec began maneuvering the raft out of the pool into the river’s current. He felt the current grab the raft as the water began to rapidly deepen away from the bank. With one last shove Alec propelled them away from the shore, then held on as he felt the raft answering to the water’s power. Alec scrambled on, and cautiously stood up as it rocked in response to his movement. “I guess we’ll get used to it, won’t we?” he asked rhetorically.
“We’ll get used to it if we want to stay alive, I imagine,” Leah agreed. She looked at the sun setting on the right and the mountains towering on the left, and felt relief at getting away from the disaster that had befallen her community. She felt a sudden desire to wash away the sweat and the fatigue and the tension of the past day’s dramatic escape. “Close you eyes for a moment while I get in the river,” she told Alec, starting to remove her clothes.
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