by Andrew Lane
The village gradually appeared ahead of the van – a collection of wooden houses and barns. Old, rusty cars were parked by the side of the road, and dogs and chickens wandered freely around. As the van arrived in the village, and Levan steered it off the dirt road and parked it under the spreading branches of a tree, people began to emerge from the shadows.
Tara gazed around, taking it all in. The villagers were all dressed in clothes that had once been brightly coloured – reds and greens predominated – but were now faded by years of sunshine and washing. The skin of anyone under thirty was smooth but tanned a deep brown; the skin of anyone over that age was like leather that had been crumpled up and smoothed out many times. The eyes of the children and teenagers were wide and wary; the eyes of their parents and grandparents were almost invisible in the wrinkled skin.
She had a feeling that she was an awfully long way away from a Wi-Fi hotspot.
Levan stepped out of the van. Smiling broadly, he said something in Georgian to the assembled villagers. His hands were spread out to either side to indicate peaceful intent.
Rhino opened the passenger door and stepped out. He removed his sunglasses as he joined Levan – Tara assumed that he was deliberately making eye contact rather than hiding behind the dark lenses. The villagers stared at him, obviously knowing straight away that he was a foreigner. Fingers were pointed, and whispered conversations were held.
A man stepped forward from the crowd that had gathered. His hair was dark, streaked with grey, and he had a full beard. His eyes, which hadn’t quite vanished in the creases of his face, were startlingly blue, like chips of seawater turned to ice. He said something to Levan, and the guide responded with another flood of Georgian. The man, who seemed to be acting as a spokesman, asked another question, and Levan answered again. The spokesman nodded, opening his arms wide to encompass the village and the crowd. Something seemed to pass through the assembled villagers, some ripple of emotion. Tara could feel things relax. Whatever had been said, it had apparently led to their acceptance.
Levan turned round and gestured to the three of them to join him and Rhino. Tara led the way, with Gecko next and Natalie reluctantly third.
‘This is the village of Ruspiri,’ Levan pronounced, ‘and this is the head man of the village, Shota Gigauri.’ The head man nodded, grinning, when Levan mentioned his name. His teeth were stained brown, probably by tobacco, and five or six of them were missing. Tara assumed that dentists were hard to find all the way out in the wilds. ‘We are welcomed to the village as honoured guests. There is an inn with rooms where we can stay, and the people of Ruspiri will do whatever they can to help us.’
‘Do they know what we are looking for?’ Rhino asked.
‘I have not said definitely – only that you are in search of animals that live in the mountains.’
Shota Gigauri said something, and the villagers laughed.
‘He says,’ Levan said, flashing his teeth in a smile, ‘that you are all very young and very small to be looking for wild animals. He thinks the wild animals will end up looking for you!’
Rhino glanced over at the three of them. ‘Gecko – you think you can show them some of your stuff?’
Gecko nodded. ‘I have had a look around. I think I have got some routes worked out. What is the state of the roofs – am I likely to fall through?’
‘They will be firm,’ Levan promised. ‘They have to stand up to regular storms.’
From a standing start, Gecko suddenly burst into a full run, taking the villagers by surprise. He headed for a pile of wood that had been stacked and corded, running up it as if it was a set of steps. From there he launched himself into the air, reaching up for the edge of a roof. He pulled himself up to the roof so smoothly that it seemed effortless, and ran along its edge like a man running along a tightrope. At the end of the roof he leaped across to the next one, hitting it and tucking himself into a forward roll that Tara suspected was more for show than for balance.
The head man put his head back and laughed hugely. He clapped his hands together, and said something to Levan.
‘He says maybe you can outrun the wolves and the bears,’ Levan translated.
‘I do not need to outrun the wolves and the bears,’ Gecko called back with a cheeky smile. He pointed at Natalie. ‘I just need to outrun her.
The villagers seemed to understand what he was saying without the need for any translation. They all laughed. Suddenly it seemed as if the five of them had been accepted into the village.
CHAPTER
thirteen
Gecko was sweating, and not because he was free-running across the rooftops of the village of Ruspiri. No, he was sweating because he was unloading boxes and crates from the back of the Mitsubishi Delica that he and Rhino has managed to steal from the thugs who’d tried to steal their cargo.
Rhino had moved the van to a patch of open ground just behind the inn where they were staying. The accommodation was basic – beds made of unpainted wood, rough sheets, woollen blankets woven in many colours – but they had all slept for ten hours straight. Natalie had claimed she hadn’t slept a wink, of course, but Gecko had heard the snores coming from behind the closed door of her room. He smiled, remembering. She may have been as beautiful, skinny and long-legged as a fashion model, but she snored like a bull.
He hoisted the last crate in his arms and carried it to the cleared area where Rhino and Tara were opening them up with crowbars.
Between them, Rhino and Tara had managed to pile up a whole heap of mechanical components, boxes of electronics, pistons, wires and thicker cables. Already they had assembled something about the size of a child’s bed out of sections of steel that had circular holes punched through them to reduce the weight. Tara was working on one side and Rhino the other, bolting what looked like metallic shoulder joints to the corners. The boxes of electronics had already been fitted inside and linked together by cables, and a rudimentary neck was beginning to form at one end.
‘Can you tell what it is yet?’ Tara asked.
‘I think I saw something like that in a sci-fi film once,’ Gecko replied. ‘It did not end well for humanity.’
Rhino looked up and raised an eyebrow. ‘Believe me, when we’re out in the open and this thing is hauling our rucksacks around for us, we’ll be grateful.’
‘But we are going into the mountains,’ Gecko pointed out. ‘This thing cannot climb – can it?’
Tara looked up in alarm from where she was plugging a series of cables into sockets. ‘Neither can I! I don’t have to, do I? That wasn’t in the brochure!’
Rhino shook his head. ‘We’re looking for things that are like us, remember? Two legs, two arms, roughly the same body mass. They aren’t going to live up on the higher parts of the mountains like goats. If they exist, they’ll be lower down, where they can build a community, grow food and hunt. No climbing required.’
‘Thank heavens for that!’
Rhino glanced across at her. ‘Do you think you can finish this thing off? I need to ask the head man some questions.’
She nodded. ‘Leave it to me – I’m good at high-tech jigsaw puzzles.’ As Rhino stood up, she gestured to Gecko. ‘OK, hand me a cross-head screwdriver.’
‘A what?’
Rhino glanced from the one to the other. ‘Right – I’ll leave this in your expert hands, then.’
Rhino found the head man and Levan sharing a bottle of some dark liquid in the shade of a walnut tree.
‘Georgian wine,’ Levan said, indicating the bottle. ‘Locally produced. It is . . . diplomatic . . . to drink. Will you join us?’
‘Happy to,’ Rhino said. He sat down.
Shota Gigauri produced a glass from somewhere, wiped it with a cloth, set it in front of Rhino and poured a glass of wine for him.
‘Have you asked our host about the Almasti?’ Rhino asked. As Levan opened his mouth to answer, Rhino raised his glass to the head man and took a sip. The wine was thin, vinegary, but he could drink it.<
br />
‘I have mentioned it,’ Levan answered. ‘I hope you do not mind? No? Well, he says that there have been stories in Ruspiri for many generations of a tribe of people who live further up the mountain. They do not come down this far, and they do not trade with the villagers here, but sometimes, perhaps once every few years, one is glimpsed by hunters in the bushes, or silhouetted against the skyline on a ridge. He says that the people of this tribe are small, and they are hairy.’
The head man seemed to be followingthe conversation. He tapped his forehead several times and said something in Georgian.
‘He also says that they have thick foreheads that hang over their eyes, although he probably says that about the members of any village apart from his own.’
‘It sounds like there might be something up there after all,’ Rhino mused.
Shota Gigauri raised a hand, as if he had just remembered something. He delved into first one pocket and then another, looking for something. Eventually he pulled out an object, which he held out to Rhino for inspection.
‘What’s this?’ Rhino asked, staring at the object. It was a turquoise stone that had been carved into a shape that might have been a bird, or a snake, or something abstract. ‘I’m not in the market for trinkets.’
Shota spoke for a while. Eventually Levan had to hold a hand up to stop him so that he could translate. ‘He says that the villagers sometimes find things like this near the mountains, as if they have been dropped. They sell them for a lot of money in the markets closer to Tbilisi. Apparently the stone is quite rare. They believe that the Almasti make them, but they are not sure.’
‘The trouble is, if they are that hard to meet, I’m not sure we’ll ever get close,’ Rhino said regretfully.
Levan said something to the head man, and he answered with a long sentence involving much arm-waving.
‘He says,’ Levan relayed to Rhino, ‘that you may be in luck. He says that for the past few months something has been taking their chickens and raiding their grain supplies. For awhile they thought it was wild dogs or mountain foxes, but the village dogs seem to be scared of it, whatever it is, and stay away from it, where they would normally bark at a wild dog or a fox. The villagers have set traps, and watched from hidden places, but the thief, whoever or whatever it is, is too cautious for them. They have never seen it. The older villagers say that it is an Almast that has come down from the mountains, possibly thrown out of its own tribe, but the younger villagers just laugh at them.’
‘Ask him,’ Rhino said carefully, ‘if he would accept our help in finding out who or what this thief is. We have cameras, and traps that we can set.’
Levan relayed the message. Shota Gigauri nodded emphatically, and said something directly to Rhino.
‘He says that he would be very grateful,’ Levan translated. ‘The harvest has been poor this year, thanks to the weather, and they cannot afford to lose any food. He says that the village cannot repay you except in gratitude.’
‘Tell him that their gratitude, and their friendship, is all that we need.’
Tara tensed herself and stabbed the spear-like metal shaft into the ground. She twisted it a couple of times, feeling stones grind and move beneath the sharp tip as it penetrated further into the ground. When the sphere on top of the shaft was level with her eyes, she stepped back and admired her handiwork.
The shaft and the apple-sized sphere were both coloured a neutral grey-green. Only the band of shiny glass that ran round the circumference of the sphere made it at all obvious to anyone who might have been looking out for it.
The thing she had just planted like a high-tech sunflower was one of a bunch of twenty that had been packed together in one of the boxes that had come with them from England. Tara wasn’t sure whether they had been Calum’s idea or Rhino’s, but she had to admit they were a stroke of genius. Inside the sphere that sat on top of the shaft was a low-light camera and a vibration sensor. Thanks to the transparent lens that ran all the way round the sphere, the camera could take a single digital photograph of everything around it, but it would only take that photograph if triggered by the vibration sensor. That sensor was connected to the shaft, so it could feel any vibration in the ground for a radius of fifteen feet or so around it. The shaft also doubled as a Wi-Fi antenna, so that the photograph could be transmitted instantly to Tara’s tablet.
This was the final sensor in the package. Like the rest, it had been planted in a ring just outside the boundary of the village. When Tara activated them at sunset, the sensors would form a net all around the village. Anything that touched the ground around the sensors would trigger a photograph to be taken, and an alarm would sound on her tablet. Fair enough, some of the images would be village dogs, or maybe some of the locals themselves, but if something was sneaking into the village to steal supplies then she was sure she would capture its picture.
Tara was exhausted. She wasn’t used to this much physical effort. She had walked around the village twice now: once to check out the best locations and the second time to plant the sensors. The ground was stony, and some of the shafts had required a lot of pushing. As far as Tara was concerned, her role should be to sit somewhere comfortable and use her computing skills, not install a comprehensive sensor network by hand, but everybody else had something to do. Well, apart from Natalie. Nobody was quite sure where Natalie had gone.
Once she had got her breath back, Tara reached out and twisted the sphere ninety degrees clockwise. That switched it on. The tiny battery inside would keep it working for a week or so before it needed to be recharged.
She glanced around. It was lunchtime, and she could see villagers returning from the fields and the hills for food. She realized that she was hungry as well. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and she’d been working hard. Time for lunch, she decided. Sensor network testing could wait until later. It wasn’t as if they’d be using the sensors until sunset, at least.
Gecko stood in the central area of the village – not quite a square, but the junction of several paths and the nearest thing to a middle that the village had. The inn where the five of them were staying stood on one side, and a sort of village hall on the other.
Five of the local boys and girls stood in front of him, hands by their sides as if they were in the army and on parade. They had all seen his exhibition of free-running skills earlier on, and Rhino had decided that it might make the team more accepted in the village if Gecko could give the kids some training. He’d run it past the head man, through Levan’s translation skills, and the head man had enthusiastically agreed.
‘Right,’ he said, clapping his hands. ‘Time to put some of these moves together.’ He knew that they didn’t know what he was saying, but at least he was attracting their attention. And they’d already got the hang of ‘Yes’, ‘No’ and ‘Stop, you’ll hurt yourself!’.
He gestured to the improvised training course that he had set up. First was a two-metre-high pile of oil-stained wooden blocks that looked like railway sleepers. Second, a couple of metres away, was a wooden pole set up parallel to the ground about a metre and a half up and running between two trestles. Third, he’d used some of the railway sleepers to build a rough set of steps that finished in mid-air at about head height. Jumping distance from the top of the stairs was a thick wooden table whose rough surface was about waist height. All in all it was a neat little improvised free-running course.
He pointed at the first kid – a small, cheeky boy with a wide, gap-toothed grin. ‘You – go!’
The boy ran towards the pile of wooden blocks and stopped when he got to the flat side. Gecko wasn’t sure he’d be able to make it, but the kid jumped as high as he could. His fingers clamped on the top sleeper and his feet scrabbled to push him up. It wasn’t elegant, but it worked. Once on top he jumped down on the other side and ran at the suspended pole. He pulled himself up and walked precariously along, using his arms for balance. At the other end he jumped back to the ground and made for the wooden steps. He was up the
m in a flash. He hesitated on the top, judging the gap to the table, then leaped for it. He hit just millimetres from the edge, and converted his forward momentum into a clumsy roll, which took him to the other side. He sprang back to his feet, grinning from ear to ear, and turned to look triumphantly at his friends.
‘Good!’ Gecko called. He pointed to the next kid – a girl who was a few centimetres taller and a few years older. ‘Now you.’
The girl was more thoughtful, less impulsive. She considered for a moment before sprinting at the pile of sleepers, calculating her best approach. Just before she got to them she leaped like a hurdler. Her foot hit the middle sleeper at the same time as her hands caught the top, and she pulled herself smoothly up. Instead of climbing down the other side, she jumped straight for the horizontal pole. Gecko held his breath, but she landed with perfect balance on the end of the pole and before he knew it she had run delicately along like a gymnast on a beam and leaped down from the other end. She took the wooden steps two at a time, then jumped for the table. She landed right in the middle, absorbing the impact by bending her knees, then converted her forward motion into a perfect handstand at the far end of the table, hands clamping round the edge, before toppling forward and landing on her feet with a gymnastic flourish.
‘Now that,’ Gecko called admiringly, ‘is just showing off.’
She turned and flashed him a smile before scampering back to her friends.
The next kid looked like he wanted to back out now, before he hurt himself. Gecko smiled reassuringly at him. He still remembered the time it had taken him to learn how to free-run, and the bruises, scrapes and sprains he’d picked up in the process. It was a matter of faith – starting a run knowing that you were going to get hurt, not knowing how you were going to get through to the end, but doing it anyway hoping it would all turn out OK in the end and the hurt wouldn’t be too bad. After all, it was only pain.
