‘I think it’s dead, at least I hope it is.’ he said, giving it another push with his foot. The creature didn’t move, but Glyn wasn’t taking any chances. Picking up a piece of wood from the edge of the fire, he gave it a smart blow just behind the shiny grey green head, but the only movement they could discern was from the blow. The eyes, as black and evil as they looked, were as dead as the rest of the creature.
‘Do you think we could eat it?’ someone from the back of the crowd asked, ‘if we make it hot first, I don’t fancy it raw.’
‘We can but try,’ Glyn replied, ‘we’ll cook it over the fire to make sure it is sterilized, and if the food test is passed, you can be the first to try some.’
There was no reply from the back of the crowd.
Arki removed the head, as this was the most off putting part of the creature, and then split it from end to end, emptying out the internal organs. Winding it around a thick stick proved a little more difficult than they had imagined, but it was achieved in the end, and then it was mounted just above the flames to cook.
Glyn suddenly remembered Mia, and enquired as to her whereabouts, to be informed that she was with several of the other women and had given birth to a boy. He felt ashamed not to have paid her more attention considering what was about to happen, and now it had happened, and he hadn’t been on hand to help.
And then he remembered the off hand way he had been dismissed earlier by the other two women, but he still felt bad about it.
As he approached the little knot of women on the other side of the camp fire, Mia looked up at him and smiled sweetly. ‘Look what we have got,’ she said proudly, holding up the infant in her outstretched arms, ‘aren’t I clever?’
‘You certainly are.’ was all he could think of to say, and sat down beside her in the space one of the other women had made for him.
After a few minutes of general chat to Mia and the other women, he found himself holding the new infant somewhat awkwardly in his arms, but when it began to cry Mia took it back gently and put it to her breast, and all was peace and quiet around the camp fire once again.
‘Glyn, will you come and have a look at this?’ someone from the other side of the fire called out, and relieved, he excused himself from the company of the ladies to attend to matters more befitting to his gender.
‘I think the thing is cooked,’ said Arki, ‘at least the flesh is soft when I poke it with a stick. Shall we try it?’
‘We’ve gone this far, so why not? I’ll break a little bit off and we’ll do the under the tongue test.’
It took two of them to lift the eel down from its cooking position, and the mouth-watering smell brought the others a little closer.
‘OK, where’s our friend who wanted to eat the creature?’ asked Arki, and after a bit of pushing and shoving, a rather reluctant member of the group stood before them.
‘Don’t look so worried, I’m the official tester,’ Arki said with a laugh, ‘but if it’s safe, you can have the first full portion, OK?’ By the look on the man’s face, he didn’t seem too sure if it was.
Arki did the test, and after the prescribed time, ate a small portion and sat down by the fire to join the others as they went over the day’s events.
Half an hour later, with Arki suffering no ill effects, the eel was considered fit to eat and the reluctant proposer of the idea was winkled out of the crowd once more and offered the first helping.
With all the others looking on, he had little option other than to put a brave face on it and take a bite. After a few chews on the new food, the look on his face had the others queuing up for their ration, and before long there was little left except the bones.
A helping of fruit and nuts finished off the evening meal, and everyone sat back to relax after a long hard day’s work and talk about the gargantuan water monster which had surprised them all.
Just before the night watch was posted and the others took a well earned sleep, Arki quietly took Glyn to one side.
‘Have you noticed that all the woman are pregnant? Some have bigger bumps in front than others, but I’m told they’re all with child,’ Arki said, ‘can’t think why I didn’t spot it before though.’
‘Well, I didn’t spot it,’ said Glyn, ‘but there has been a lot happening lately. Looking back on things, I think when we were on the ship there must have been something in the food or water which prevented pregnancies, and that’s how births were controlled. Now that element is missing, and so there is no control, but what I don’t understand is the speed with which Mia’s child developed and was born. It seemed to take longer on the ship, so how do you explain that?’
‘Can’t really, but then there’s a lot of things I can’t explain.’ Arki was now getting into his stride and looking at things which had been at the back of his mind for some time.
‘Did you notice that the doorway in the concrete building where we sheltered from the storm was made for people nearly twice our height? And the control panels in that strange building on the island, they were far too high for us to operate easily without sitting on very high stools.’ Arki paused for breath, Glyn didn’t say anything, so he continued.
‘I can’t quite put my finger on it, but things here seem to be a bit bigger than I would have expected somehow, and looking back on it, the ship seemed to be a bit more spacious than it needed to be. Do you think we’ve been genetically shrunk for some reason, to conserve supplies when on the ship?’
‘I wouldn’t think so, the ship was designed to cater for our needs, so there would be little point is making us smaller. But maybe something else has had that effect. Now that you mention these anomalies, I can see them too, but I can’t explain them.’
‘I don’t think we should mention these things to the others at this stage.’ Arki said, and Glyn agreed. They went their separate ways for the night, Glyn seeking out Mia and offering a few words of comfort after her birthing ordeal, although she didn’t seem to need them. She had what she had always wanted, and was therefore more content with her lot in life than any of them.
Next day, with the raft checked over for any needed repairs and a good stock of food onboard, they relaunched it, climbed aboard, and set off down the river on the next stage of their journey.
When the wind was in a favourable position, they used the jacket sail method of gaining a little extra speed, but this time people were replaced with poles cut from the forest, and with Greg in charge of positioning the sail and a crude rudder made from poles they had lashed together, they made good progress.
They stopped each evening to replenish their supplies and sleep, but finding suitable places to land the raft was getting difficult as the forest was constantly changing.
At first it just came down to the water’s edge, but as they went even further south, the trees seemed to invade the very waters they floated on, a massive tangle of roots reaching out for several hundred metres into the river.
More than once they had to spend the night on the raft, tying it to the gnarled tree roots so that it didn’t drift away as they slept.
Because of the root tangle reaching out so far into the river, getting ashore to find food was becoming increasingly difficult, and one day Glyn announced that he thought they had reached the most southerly point they were likely to reach unless there was some other means of transport.
The sun was now nearly overhead at noon, and Arki agreed that this was a sign that they had gone as far south as was necessary to comply with the instructions in the back pack so long ago.
It was now just a matter of finding a suitable place to make a permanent camp, and then develop their skills to combat whatever they found which might threaten their survival.
They found one area which at first glance looked promising, at least for landing the raft.
A vast flat expanse of sand stretched inland, the forest fringing it in a curtain of dark green in the distance. As they drew near the beach, the radiation alarm screamed, so they beat a hasty retreat, Glyn having great difficulty in convincing the others that it was dangerous to land there.
It was now blatantly obvious that all the women were with child, and a permanent home site had to be found soon.
Despite the new growth the binding creepers of the raft were putting out enabling them to keep the whole thing together, the raft itself was becoming waterlogged and some of the timbers were beginning to break up, so they now had little option other than to make landfall as soon as possible.
Fresh food supplies from the forest were becoming more difficult to obtain, so what they were able to get was supplemented by fishing, which by now had developed into a fine art. The flat stones which Brendon had suggested they kept came in useful for making the fire on in order to cook the fish, there being little chance of the raft catching fire as the wood was now almost soggy underfoot.
At long last, a dark smudge on the horizon broke the monotony of the dark green forest which so densely fringed the river bank, not that they had seen the actual bank for a very long time now.
As they drew nearer, the dark smudge took on a more definite shape, and the hopes of a safe landing increased as a series of rocks reached out into the water towards them. At this point, the river was so wide that the opposite river bank couldn’t be seen, and the feeling that they might be blown out into the ever expanding river by a vagrant wind added to their desire to set foot on terra firma again.
The raft rounded the promontory, hit a submerged rock, and the man standing at the front calling out directions toppled head first into the water. He came up spluttering and trying to spit out the water he had inadvertently swallowed. ‘What ever you do, don’t drink this stuff, it’s foul,’ he said as they hauled him aboard.
Arki knelt down to dip a finger into the water and tasted it. ‘I know what this is, I read about it in one of the books. It’s called a sea, a vast expanse of water which has salt in it. These seas can be huge, hundreds or even thousands of kilometres across, and all rivers run into them. We must have come to the end of the river and this is the beginning of the sea. You can’t drink it or you’ll be ill, so don’t try.’
On the other side of the line of rocks, a long stone slab ran from far up on the land to reach out into the sea beneath them. They turned the raft using the guiding poles, and as the sodden logs hit the sloping stone slab, several broke away, leaving them no option but to disembark for good.
‘This isn’t natural stone,’ Arki announced, ‘it’s the same as the concrete building we were in during the storm, so that means it’s man made. But just look at the size of it!’ he exclaimed.
What it had been they couldn’t even guess at, but they were glad it was there as it gave them a safe open landing place, clear of the ubiquitous forest.
T
he supplies were carried ashore together with anything else they could salvage from the now fast disintegrating raft, and they headed up the concrete ramp to make camp.
The top of the ramp gave way to a sand and pebble area with the forest some several hundred metres distant, so Glyn took out the radiation detector and waved it about over the ground to make sure it was safe. There was the gentle tick, tick which indicated the normal background count, and so the area was pronounced fit to make camp on.
A foraging party set off across the sands for the forest, to return later laden with fruit and nuts much to everyone’s delight. Meanwhile, Brendon had organized the building of a fire pit, a rectangular enclosure of rocks with a short column of carefully laid stones at each end to support a cooking pole.
Earlier that day they had caught a large fish, taking four of them to land it on the raft, and this was now skewered on a pole and left to sizzle over the hot coals of the fire.
That evening all agreed that it was the finest meal they had eaten since leaving the ship, and all they now needed was a local fresh water supply to complete their needs.
One of the men from the foraging party suggested that Glyn should come and see the trees in the forest, as they were unlike any that had been seen before. There were also some strange noises high in the canopy, but they couldn’t see what was causing them.
Glyn agreed that such things should be investigated and a party would go out in the morning to see what mysteries the new forest held. The guards were posted for the night, and everyone retired for a well earned sleep, only being disturbed once by a shrill screech from the depths of the forest.
As the sun crept lazily up over the horizon, the first meal of the day was consumed, and then the exploration party set off excitedly for the forest to see what it held.
Arki had brought his long cutting blade, and four guards with pointed poles formed the protection squad, not that they would be able to protect very much if they came across anything like a land version of the creature which had nearly overturned their raft, but no one was thinking too seriously about that possibility.
The first barrier to their progress was a thick tangle of dark green bushes intertwined with a very tough creeper. There were signs of where the foraging party the previous night had forced their way in, but most of the growth had recovered.
‘I think we should cut a way through this tangle, and when it’s dry, burn it. That way we should achieve a permanent pathway through.’ Glyn looked around for approval of his idea, but Arki had already begun hacking away with his blade. With Arki cutting and the others dragging the severed greenery out into the open to dry, it wasn’t long before they had a wide clear pathway into the main forest.
‘These are the trees I was telling you about,’ said one of the men, ‘what do you make of that?’ pointing to a branch which had obviously come from one tree and was now joined into a different trunk as though it had grown out of it.
Looking around, they could see that all the main trees were of the same kind, sharing branches one with another, forming a huge grid system of immense strength against even the most severe of gales.
Dotted amongst the joined up monsters of the forest were smaller trees, some bearing fruits, nuts or flowers, but they all seemed to be separate, growing in whatever clearing they could find amid the huge matrix of the forest giants.