One Life Well and Truly Promised

by Richard D. Parker

  “Not far…maybe an hour,” Akintunde replied as they started up the mountain once more.

  “I’m hungry,” Akhila complained. She was not used to going without.

  “I know,” Akintunde said with a smile. “The entire mountain knows.”

  Akhila punched him lightly in the back.

  “I’ll hunt when we reach the glade,” he told her, “and we need to make spears.”

  “The glade…” She repeated, still dubious about the choice. There were caves farther to the northwest that would offer sanctuary, but they were now down the mountain and much closer to Susa. Still, her father always insisted that the caves meant security, someplace to hide. The glade, though higher up the mountain, sounded very vulnerable, but Akintunde continued up and gave her no explanation.

  They walked on, each lost in their own thoughts and fears, until the path was blocked by a thick bramble of tall sticker bushes. Without a word of explanation Akintunde immediately turned and moved up the mountain keeping the impenetrable wall of stickers to his left until he came to a near vertical cliff face.

  “Where are we going?” Akhila demanded quietly, but Akintunde ignored her and picked up a nearby stick that was almost twice as long as his arm. He handed it to Akhila and after a bit of searching found a shorter one for himself. He moved very close to the rock wall and used the stick to push the branches of the nearest sticker bush away and then he slipped through, nodding for Akhila to follow. Akhila kept close, and though the bramble was thinner against the rock face, she still had to wage a constant battle with her stick to keep the finger long thorns from grabbing at her skin and clothes. As they inched along the cool, rock wall she could hear water falling from somewhere ahead, but the foliage was still too thick to see anything.

  On and on they went, moving slowly and carefully, the thorns educating them against carelessness now and again. “Tunde, when…” she finally snapped after she received a nasty scratch on her leg, but before he could answer they finally broke free into a clearing.

  The rock face they were hugging continued on to the west for a good thousand paces before being lost behind a host of towering pines. The sound of falling water was very loud now, and Akhila instinctively realized that the waterfall hidden in the distance was both large and powerful.

  To the south, a grassy clearing stretched on for as far as she could see, though it was only three to four hundred paces across at its’ widest point. The bramble of sticker bushes ran along the eastern side and a thin forest of pines intruded from the west.

  “What is this place?” Akhila asked with wide, excited eyes.

  Akintunde smiled and shrugged. “My family just calls it the glade…or the Onion Hut.”

  “Onion Hut,” she repeated, finally understanding Akintunde’s calm assurance that this was a place of safety. In her imagination, she’d never pictured this.

  Akintunde nodded, took her hand and they sprinted off across the glade to the south. They ran for a good five minutes before Tunde veered off to the right and zigzagged his way through the thin, pine forest. Akhila followed after him with wonder. It was like they’d been transported to a distant and peaceful land…a Fairy land conjured straight from the stories the old folks would tell around the night fires.

  The waterfall was roaring off somewhere farther west. Akhila was sure they were moving closer, and then suddenly she caught sight of an odd structure nestled in the midst of a pine grove. She gasped, and then laughed in appreciation. The structure was wide and round at the base but quickly narrowed on all sides before forming a tall, thin smoke hole at the very top. From a distance it truly did look like a wild onion, discarded and left to rot on the forest floor.

  “The Onion Hut!” Akhila exclaimed. Akintunde turned and grinned back at her.

  “It’s great, isn’t it?” He replied, but didn’t wait for her to answer; instead he rushed forward and began working on the ties running down the east side of the hut.

  Up close Akhila could tell that the hut was made of cured animal hides stretched over a solid wooden framework. Near the base the hides curved inward, accentuating the overall “onion” look.

  Akhila looked about excitedly as Akintunde worked. Out in front of the entrance to the onion was a large well-used fire pit, but only a dusting of old ashes remained, and on the north side of the hut was a large supply of precut timber and a small wooden building she took to be a smoking hut.

  “We can stay here for days if we need to,” Akintunde told her as he finally pulled apart the hides that made up the opening. Akhila immediately soured at the thought, worried for her family and friends back in Susa.

  “Do you think they’re all right?”

  Akintunde frowned. “I don’t know,” he replied with a shrug. There’d been an awful lot of smoke coming from the village. The attack must have been very large. Tears welled in his eyes as he thought of his own mother and father…and his brothers, but then he shook his head. He had to be a man now…he couldn’t afford to play the child any longer. His family would be all right. They would run up the mountain and eventually come to the glade. His father had hammered the idea into all of them over the years.

  “In case of trouble, meet at the Onion Hut. Meet at the Onion Hut.”

  “Mother and Father will come soon,” Akintunde said with more confidence than he felt, “and then we’ll know what happened.” He could see tears brimming in Akhila’s eyes, and he sent a silent prayer to the gods that she wouldn’t start crying.

  “Come on, I’ll show you inside,” Akintunde finally said, preferring not to think about his family at the moment. He quickly ducked through the opening, Akhila right on his heels. Inside it was dark, but after a moment she could make out Tunde fumbling with something near one side of the hut. He scrambled around in the darkness long enough for Akhila’s eyes to adjust to the dim light and she could just make out his smile as he pushed past her and went back outside. Moments later he was rolling up large sections of the wall letting in a blast of light and a wave of fresh air. He continued working, rolling up a panel in back and then another on the south side, until the hut was brightly lit and open to the outside world.

  “It was my grandfather’s idea,” Akintunde said. “All the lower skins can be untied and rolled up so that it’s completely open except for the frame and the roof overhead.”

  “It’s wonderful!” Akhila exclaimed, and meant it. The inside was much larger than it looked from the outside and seemed even more so with the flaps rolled open. All in all, the hut was about ten paces across and the ceiling was plenty tall enough to stand up within the center area. She could see a thick layer of old rushes covering the dirt floor beneath a variety of animal skins. Some of the skins were small, some surprisingly large, but all were scraped clean and smooth. There was a fire pit directly beneath the tall, narrowing smoke hole that formed the top of the onion. Akhila suspected that if the onion was all closed up tight, even a small fire could keep the interior quite cozy.

  Now in the light, Akhila could see the sturdy, wooden framework that the waterproof hides were tied to in order to make up the smooth outer walls of the hut. It was an ingenious design.

  Hanging from the inner framework was an assortment of tools. She spotted a bronze sickle, several axes of different sizes, a broom, as well as numerous wooden pots and bowls. Along one wall there were four throwing spears of different lengths, the smallest obviously meant for a child. She also saw several slings dangling down, along with an assortment of herbs and grasses. Akhila smiled widely. This was perfect! Just like a little home!

  “Well, the first thing we need to do…is clean and sweep out the old rushes.”

  “Go hunting!” Akintunde shouted at the very same moment.

  Akhila would have been annoyed with Tunde if her stomach hadn’t rumbled at the thought of food. After their long climb up the mountain her body was craving something to eat, so she nodded.

  “You hunt while I clean and get a fire going,” she told him, a
lready the head of the little household.

  Tunde beamed at her, and it was all he could do to keep from cheering. He was very hungry as well. “Keep the fire small…no smoke,” he advised, “and be careful.”

  Both sobered at the warning, and their thoughts wandered back down the mountain toward their families.

  “There’s water up the trail to the northwest,” he told her. “A ledge leads halfway under the falls. Mother catches water in the jugs as it sprays down,” he added and nodded toward a row of small clay jugs.

  Akhila nodded. “You be careful too,” she added, suddenly afraid of what would become of her if she lost Akintunde. But Tunde was already on his way, his back to her as he jogged out through the pines toward the open glade. She watched him go until he was lost from sight and then turned and went to work cleaning and making the hut livable.

  It took nearly an hour to sweep out the old rushes and lay down new fresh grasses on the dirt floor. Surprisingly, she only had to chase away a single family of field mice who’d taken up residence within the empty hut. As far as she could tell they hadn’t done any damage to the hides that made up the walls. Her stomach was rumbling with alarming regularity by the time she’d finished, but the hut was now filled with the sweet smell of freshly cut grasses.

  She stepped outside, hoping to see Akintunde returning, but the area around the hut remained empty except for birds and a few ground squirrels. She considered taking a few shots at the squirrels with her sling, but they kept to the trees and well away from her. She watched them hopefully for a while, then sighed and gathered up a couple clay jugs and headed off toward the sound of falling water.

  The hut was set only about thirty paces from a deep, narrow chasm that was cut out of the mountainside by centuries of continuous pounding by the waterfall. The sides of the drop were nearly vertical, and as Akhila inched close to the edge she could make out the river fall below. It seemed very narrow and small to have created such a deep gorge. She followed the edge of the ravine to the north and it wasn’t long before she spotted the waterfall, spraying mist in the late afternoon air and roaring with all the power of an enraged beast. The falls actually began at the very top of the cliff face they’d hugged on the way into the glade, and she had to crane her neck to see to the very top. As she neared, she saw that the path did, in fact, lead under the falls, just as Akintunde promised. There was a wide, wet ledge that jutted out beneath the constant drum of falling water. Akhila smiled and wondered if the ledge went all the way across the ravine.

  With a thrill of wonder, she started out, moving safely underneath the wall of water, only getting slightly wet from the mists that filled the secret path. Though wide in the beginning, the ledge quickly narrowed and soon stopped all together. Akhila shivered, partly from the drenching she was getting now that she’d moved closer to the falls, and partly due to the enormous power emanating from the deluge as it poured past, only an arm length away. Suddenly the noise and power began to frighten her and she shuffled back to where the ledge was a bit wider. She set down one jug and held the other tentatively out toward the falls. When she finally managed to stick it under the water, the force of the falls nearly ripped it from her grasp. She staggered slightly but held on, and prudently moved back toward the entrance until she came across a smaller stream that was separated from the main falls. She used this less powerful section to fill both jugs. When she finally moved back out from underneath the falls she was soaked to the bone.

  She shivered again, this time from a chill as the breeze hit her, but even so she was happy to be in such a wonderful place.

  Akintunde was still missing when she reached the hut, and his absence was beginning to weigh on her mind. She was growing uneasy and had a strong desire to head out and look for him, but she quelled it. Instead, she gathered up the flint stone she found in the hut and began to work on starting a fire. She’d done it before; her mother had taught her how. Even so, it took her nearly ten minutes to get an adequate spark to hit the wad of dried moss she’d placed beneath a pile of twigs and dead leaves. It smoked heavily while she blew softly on the spark. She was about to give up when it abruptly burst into small flames. She carefully fed her creation, feeling pleased with herself, and soon she had nice little fire burning within the hut.

  The sun was now hidden behind the peaks to the west and Akhila was becoming seriously worried about her friend. It would soon be dark, and all manner of horrible scenarios were flitting through her young mind. Perhaps their refuge had been discovered and the Lowlanders had caught Akintunde, or perhaps a bear or a lynx attacked him. She fretted as she placed another log on the fire, glancing up into the growing darkness every few seconds. Finally, she’d had enough and stood. She marched out of the hut half-worried, half-angry, but she’d only gone a few steps before catching sight of Tunde returning, head down, clearly dejected. Her stomach rumbled loudly at the sight of his empty hands, but she ignored it.

  She met him at the edge of camp.

  “I’m sorry,” he explained. “I missed my only real chance.”

  Akhila frowned, very hungry, and somehow feeling it more intensely now that she knew she’d be going without. However, she was very careful to keep her face passive.

  “We’ll survive,” she told him, as they moved back to the hut.

  “You’ve got water!” He exclaimed cheerfully and snatched up a jug and drank deeply for a few long moments.

  When he was small he used to accompany his mother when she fetched water, but after his fall from the tree he shied away from the place. In fact, he’d only gathered the courage to walk out on the ledge once since he’d broken his arm, and then he was so overcome with the shakes that he had to crawl back to solid ground. He’d not returned since. He took another large gulp from the jug before setting it aside. He took a moment to admire the new rushes covering the floor, but said nothing. Akhila noticed his approval however, and grinned happily, forgetting her hunger for the moment.

  “I went to the falls…they’re magnificent,” she told him and watched with satisfaction as he studied the hut.

  “And you’ve made a fire!” he added and she felt a wave of pleasure.

  ‘This is what it’s like being a wife,’ she told herself, and then blushed in the glow of the firelight as she thought about the night to come.

  “I’ll get something in the morning,” Akintunde promised with more confidence than he felt. The glade had remained stubbornly empty of game all afternoon.

  Akhila sat gracefully. “I know you will,” she replied gazing up at him, her eyes large and luminous.

  Akintunde gulped a bit more water, only vaguely aware of the growing tension in the air.

  He sat down by the fire, well away from Akhila, but she gradually slid closer and suddenly Akintunde was very conscious of the change in the atmosphere. It slowly dawned on him that he was completely alone with Akhila. He considered the concept a moment but couldn’t figure why that would matter in the least; after all, they’d been alone countless times over the years. Perhaps it was the danger they were in, or maybe it was because this time they were utterly alone, with no one anywhere near.

  Akintunde’s eyes shifted from the fire to Akhila’s lithe body and back. He was suddenly feeling very uncomfortable and unsure of himself, and he wondered if Akhila felt the same. She said nothing however, and kept her eyes glued to the small fire. Outside it quickly fell dark, while inside the tension grew. Finally Akintunde couldn’t sit still any longer, so he crawled about and began lowering the skins to close the openings. Over the years his father had kept the hut open on warm nights, but Akintunde believed they’d both feel safer if the hut was closed up tight.

  Once everything was tied down he turned back to find Akhila staring at him with those impossibly large, dark eyes of hers. He froze, caught in her gaze, and then shook his head to clear it. Suddenly he wished he’d left the hut open, for now it felt unbearably hot inside. He couldn’t say why, but Akhila was making him very nervous.


  “Mother and Father could be here anytime,” Akintunde announced out of desperation, only half hoping it was true.

  Akhila frowned, wondering what her own father would do. Her family had no sanctuary hidden up the mountains other than the large caves, northwest of the village. Suddenly visions of her mother lying in a pool of blood flooded her mind and before she knew what was happening tears welled in her eyes and spilled over onto her cheeks. She tried desperately to stop the tears, but after a moment they overwhelmed her and her small body shook and trembled as she sobbed.

  Akintunde’s eyes widened, for Akhila rarely cried. He was momentarily immobilized with shock by her emotional display, and briefly wondered again what was truly happening down the mountain. Her family could be dead. His family could be dead…or worse enslaved and marched down to the valley below.

  He scooted closer and tentatively put an arm around her. Akhila instinctively turned her face into his chest and cried all the harder. Akintunde patted her back helplessly, with little idea how to comfort her. A feeling of dread washed over him. Something had gone very wrong down below.

  The Lowlanders regularly raided up the mountains; always looking for slaves and plunder, but they rarely made it as high as their village. According to Tunde’s father they never arrived at Susa without some kind of an alarm. Usually the city of Awan, which was farther down the mountain, would send runners, calling for aid and warning against a possible attack. But as far as Akintunde knew, no runners came this time.

  “They’ll be fine,” Akintunde finally assured, mostly because he had no idea what else to do. Truth be told, throughout their childhood, Akhila had cried far less than he. She was tough and strong, but this wasn’t a physical injury, this was an emotional hurt and Akintunde was at a loss. So in the end he just held her and let her cry, and after what seemed a long time her tears abruptly dried up and stopped, just like a surprise mountain squall.