Manifest (The Darkening Trilogy) (39 page)

With his body spent through such an intense but short effort, Alex fell onto his back and nearly passed out from hyperventilation.

O
nce again, Alex came to with the taste of water in his mouth and knew that he had again survived.  But his delusions of invincibility quickly faded as he heard male voices shouting through the canyon.  Alex sat up.  He couldn’t have been out for very long, it may have only been seconds, though the blackness that clouded the edges of his vision seemed to stretch the time behind him.  To his side, the girl was still coughing.  As the voices grew louder, Alex got to his feet and looked around wildly.

Where was his mother?  She must have followed the river to the rapids.  He had to let her know that he was alive.  More shouts came in a strange language and Alex turned around to look at the girl’s reaction.  She was still coughing, her whole body shuddering with a bronchial vibrato, yet she managed to reach out her hand towards Alex.

Before anything else could be done, a group of men in animal skins, holding spears came around the corner.  They swarmed towards Alex who had yet to get to his feet.  The men, most deeply tanned with dark hair, though some fair skinned with light features, raised their spear tips towards Alex.  He held his breath until the girl rose up from the ground and stumbled towards one of the men.  Immediately, one man dropped his spear and openly embraced her with tears in his eyes.

Alex tried to steal a glance behind him – he would need to outrun them… somehow.  But they could probably throw their spears before he got very far and there wasn’t enough room on the bank to zigzag.

The father of the young girl stood and addressed Alex in a strange language.

“I don’t understand,” Alex said as everyone stared intently at him.

The man repeated his first phrase, this time with a fiercer tone, but another among the group came forward and lowered the spears.  He looked at Alex with a smile and then addressed everyone else with a long speech.  At the end of it he pointed to Alex.  There seemed to be little or no change in their opinion of him and one among the group even looked more hostile to him.

Alex assumed at this point he had been sized up and determined to be at least a full dinner and a coat for these dunomads.  Partly because of the cold, but mostly because he was petrified, Alex started shaking, his knees wiggling and his jaw loose in his head.  All of a sudden, the little girl, wrapped in a large animal skin blanket stepped forward and began scolding the men.  Everyone seemed to take this cue and
after encircling Alex, they led him through the canyon and back up stream.  Alex didn’t protest.

T
he thunderous roar of the waterfall created a soft hum for half a mile up the canyon and the spray carried on the wind for half that distance downstream.  An impressive gauntlet of rapids churned the cool clear water a frothy white.  The drop was followed by a relatively calm and deep pooling in the widening canyon beyond.  On the ledge next to the waterfall Olesianna stood and watched.  She could see nothing in the pooling at the bottom.   

A quarter mile back up the river, Olesianna searched frantically for a way down.  If she could get there fast enough
, perhaps there was a way to reach out to Alex before he arrived at the fall.  Short of driving the hover car off the cliff, though, there was little she could do to get down.  Finally, with time running out, she abandoned the car and started to climb down along the shortest route she could find.  Still, the shortest route was a hundred and fifty foot vertical climb to an incline, gradual enough to slide down.  And she was attempting this with two metacarpal fractures in her right hand.

Olesianna had just let her feet down over the edge, bracing herself on her stomach and hands when she heard Alex scream.  “Mom!”

She started to shake, knowing she was incapable of getting to him in time.  She began to think about just pushing off so she wouldn’t have to hear him scream but he called again.  “Mom, wait!  I’m okay!”

About to lose all strength in her arms, she rested her chest down on the topside and wormed her way back to safety.  Quickly afterwards she spun around to look.  On the opposite bank were Alex and
a horde of
dunomads!

Her soul went from the fires of desperation into the ice cold bath of
terror.  “Alex!” she screamed, pointing at the men around him.

Down below, Alex looked back and forth.  He had kept his mother from falling, but
, in the process had exposed her presence to the dunomads.  Still, for the moment she was safe; a great distance separated them filled with a rushing river and a vertical cliff.  The dunomads around him looked between each other and murmured gesturing to the figure on the cliff top in the distance.  One of them, the father of the girl who now clung to his side, poked cautiously at Alex with a bony finger and then motioned with his head for them to continue upriver.

Alex nodded, not sure what it meant for him to follow or resist, yet there seemed to be no malice in the man’s eyes.  Alex nodded understandingly, though briefly wondered if the gesture was a universal ‘yes’, before walking upriver with the group.  He didn’t know if he should gesture to his mother to follow or
, not draw any more attention to her and just count on her following them, as she inevitably did.  It took what seemed like forever to get back up the river to the point where Alex had jumped in and by that point he had lost track of his mother on the ridge.  He didn’t want to look too hard but had seen her occasionally stop to look over at them.  She must have been driving the hover car ahead and checking periodically.  Another ten minutes’ walk past where Alex had climbed down, and they rounded a bend in the canyon. 

Alex suddenly saw a bridge above him.  It was much like the one at Teleopolis, but instead of concrete, it was simply rock.  Natural?  No
, it couldn’t be.  How would such a thing form?  Lost in amazement for a moment Alex lost his footing on the bank and fell to one knee, his foot sliding into the water.  Quickly two of the men grabbed a hold of him while a third ran knee deep into the water to catch a discarded spear from floating out of reach.

It was a significant gesture and Alex looked at the dunomads with wide eyes. 
Yet reluctance plagued him.  A person would just as likely leap into action to keep their dinner from floating down river.  They smiled at him and he felt emotional at this too.  They
smiled
.  Was smiling a universal trait?  Babies smile before they know why.  And these people looked human enough.

Alex continued on and the men resumed their walk as naturally as if they had helped one of their own.  The canyon suddenly
felt warmed to Alex as he passed under the giant rock bridge.  All of the shadows around him disappeared into one and he could not help but
feel
that this was the will despite all of his past skepticisms.  The canyon looked different now simply by him being in the presence of other people.  There was shelter and security once again.  Things were instantly less dangerous and daunting.  He had left a state of nature and without contract or agreement or consent or knowledge of the fact.  And suddenly Alex knew that he did not want to leave this place, to go back to the wild ever again.

The men stopped briefly and set down their spears in a pile before half of them sat on the bank and the other half waded into the water and began to dismantle a net that had been submerged.  It looked as if they had piled rocks to make a channel and then netted the downstream end of it.  Alex had seen this exact example in his survival book as a way to catch fish, though this method was not used in the short term.

These people
fished
; they were civilized – and thus seemed less inclined to eat people – which would also explain why the girl had fallen in the river and the men had been so quick to pursue her.  Alex watched the men take the net down, without any fish they noted sadly. One of the men resting on the shore patted Alex on the shoulder and, once he had his attention, pointed up to the opposite side’s cliff, speaking calmly but still unintelligibly.  He made a gesture and then pointed back to the rock bridge.  Despite the language barrier, Alex understood exactly what he was talking about. 
That person on the opposite side can cross the land bridge to get to this side
.  Alex nodded again and repeated the gestures to show he understood.  The man, perhaps thirty years old with fair skin and blonde hair, nodded excitedly and then told something to the others with a certain tone of pride.

Alex knew that his mother had undoubtedly risked crossing the land bridge and not soon after the men finished retrieving their net
, did the crunching of gravel in the distance alert Alex that she was approaching.  Everyone else heard it too and redistributed spears.  Alex quickly put his hands out and down in slow pulses trying to calm them while inching towards the front of the group.  He saw the hover car coming from around a continuation of the bend they were traveling and quickly put his hands up for his mother to stop – the last thing he wanted was her trying to barrel through the group he was fairly certain now were friendly.

The hover car lurched to a halt in view of everyone and Olesianna leaned across the cabin and opened the
passenger door.  “Alex, get in now!”

Alex looked back at the men who couldn’t comprehend what they were looking at and held their spears up defensively.  The little girl seemed entranced.  Alex turned forward to his mother and in so doing had seen his choices.

T
he ravine, easing along an eastern course, opened up into a wide canyon with the river, only a knee deep stream now, hugging the southern bank.  The rest of the open and relatively flat pebbly area was filled with animal hide and clay huts, perhaps thirty all together.  Around the village encampment, a group of families went about their daily tasks, weaving baskets, washing clothing, fastening tools and so forth. 

As soon as the party came within sight of the village, the group of men raised their spears in triumph and the leader of the party put his daughter on his shoulders.  He gave some sort of brief explanation about what had happened and at that, it seemed as if half the village dropped what they were doing and ran into the stream to greet them.  Very quickly one of the men from the
expedition began shouting over the rest, waving his arms and gesturing back towards Alex and Olesianna.  A woman in the crowd nodded understandingly at him and rushed into a tent. 

The crowd’s joy for the safe return of one of the children soon subsided and was replaced by a tense quiet.  Olesianna and Alex stood back just in sight of the village with a hover car idling behind them.  Alex decided it would be best to keep it back there
, judging by the initial reactions of the group of men, but Olesianna had refused to move too far away from it.  She had found a long but safe route from the surface to the canyon floor and at the slightest sign of danger was going to take Alex and make for the pass.  He had convinced her to come this far, but upon seeing “reinforcements,” she felt like running for the car with Alex by the ear.

The villagers’ unceasing stare didn’t help.

“Look mom, they have families.”

Several of the men pointed to the hover car and whispered among the crowd and people reacted in disbelief.

Finally the tension was broken as a very old woman with long wavy gray hair accompanied by a tall, broad man came forward.  They both greeted the young girl and her father affectionately and then came towards Alex and his mother.

“Hello,” the tall man said with a strange accent.

“Uh, hi,” Alex replied, shocked.

The man and the old woman looked at one another unsurely.

“Hello,” Alex repeated, and at this, they lit up in excitement.

“I am Ope-shed,” said the
broad, dark-skinned man. “This is Kefku.”

“My name is Alex, and this is my mother Olesianna.”

“Olesianna,” said Kefku, the old woman, stumbling slightly over the pronunciation.

“Did you save my brother’s daughter?”  Ope-shed asked.

Alex shrugged.  “The little girl?  Yeah.  I mean, I guess so.”

Ope-shed took a step forward, a big grin on his face and opened his arms towards Alex.  Olesianna recoiled at this advance and Ope-shed with a clear look of embarrassment put his arms down and stepped back.  “I am sorry.  But you have made us all very happy.  Will you eat with us, please?  We wish to show our gratitude.”

Alex, who was very hungry, looked at Olesianna and then back to Ope-shed.  Before his mother could protest he nodded, yes.

I
n the largest tent in the village, Ope-shed, Kefku and Ope-shed’s brother gathered around a smoldering pit of coals for warmth.  It was evening now and as the valley grew cold, animal skin blankets were brought for Alex and his mother.  A sort of grain paste with a salted beef was given to them in wooden bowls and though not particularly tasty it was warm and much appreciated.

“Please, tell us who you are and where you come from,” Ope-shed asked with a big smile, eagerly inching closer to the coals.

“Well…” Alex was worried about mentioning so personal and sensitive a subject as their banishment so he decided to withhold those particular details.  “We came from a city very far to the west.”  Alex paused, to see their reaction.