A Place Called Zamora

by LB Gschwandtner

  It was slow going down to the pools at the waterfall, but they made it. At times Niko had to lean on El for support. They had never truly made peace, but in their situation, with the storm at their back and the hope of salvation ahead, they took their reliance on each other for granted in a tacit, if not specified, peace treaty. At one point El looked up to a narrow rock ledge across from the falls to see a mountain goat perfectly balanced on what looked to be three inches of rock outcropping. It watched them with steady eyes from what appeared a precarious perch but the goat seemed unconcerned for its welfare up there. El took that as another sign that they were safe, positioned as they were closer to the clouds than the plains, at least for the moment.

  They carried with them the medical kit, a towel, a mess kit, and both canteens. Also, although it was more of a burden, they had brought a knapsack with supplies that might be useful.

  “Wow.” Niko whistled as the waterfall came into sight. “Never seen anything like this.”

  “We’re headed for those pools below.” El pointed to where she had bathed and washed her clothing. “I think farther down in the quieter pools there could be fish.”

  They made their way farther down until they came to the depressions in the rock cliff. Niko sat down, worn from the descent. He let the crutch fall by his side and just sat there, watching the endless cascading water and listening to its reverberating rush. Mist clung to his face and arms, and spots of sun lit glistening droplets of water as they splashed off the rocks.

  “Come on,” said El. “You need to take off your shirt and pants.” She set about the business of a nurse, unpacked the medical kit, and found it had everything she’d need.

  Niko unbuttoned his shirt, slowly slid one arm off, and tried to do the other but winced in pain, as it was stuck to some cuts.

  “We need warm water,” said El. She opened the knapsack and, in an inside pocket, found a lighter. “We can make a fire on the rock here. We’ll just have to chance it. Take off your shoes so I can look at what’s causing you to limp.”

  Niko tried to bend his knee to reach his boot, but he couldn’t manage it and again winced with pain.

  “Let me take it off for you.” She knelt down on the flat rock and unlaced the boot, then pulled its sides as wide as she could to relieve any pressure when she pulled it off.

  “Owwww,” he breathed as she unleashed it from his foot.

  “Now the sock,” she said, and seeing the foot for the first time, she could tell something was drastically wrong. The ankle was swollen to the size of a grapefruit. “Hopefully it’s just a sprain and nothing’s broken. I can’t tell until . . .” She began to work the sock as gently as she could, trying not to put pressure on the ankle.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Just yank it off.”

  “No, I can do it this way.” Inch by careful inch she managed to slide it down until it was over the most swollen part. She stopped and grabbed the canteen, which she had filled in the icy water of a pool. Then she poured the whole thing over his ankle, soaking the sock. This made it easier to stretch over the swelling, and little by little, she worked it down past his heel until she could pull off the whole thing.

  Niko let out a long breath and closed his eyes. “How bad is it?”

  “I don’t think it’s broken. There’s no blood, nothing sticking out. Just a really bad sprain, I think. Drop your foot in that water pool and let it get cold. I’ll try to find something to bind it with.”

  Before she did that, she went about gathering stones to make the kind of circle Niko had made up at the cave. Then she gathered sticks and leaves and larger pieces of wood for a fire. She raised her face to the breeze to feel which way it was blowing and built a small fire downwind of where they had stationed themselves. She made some more leaf cups and gathered berries and found a patch of large fiddleheads that hadn’t yet opened to fronds. These she cut off at their base with the small knife from the mess kit.

  Nurtured by the shade and mist, there were also pale-gray and beige morels growing in abundance nearby. She brought all this back and laid it on the rock. Afterwards she looked for a flat rock to rest above the fire on the circle. This would make her pan. She washed this rock in a pool and then made the circle so this flat rock would balance across it. Once the sticks and kindling were in place, the larger pieces of wood rested atop and the flat rock above that. She lit the kindling with the lighter, and it sprang to life right away, so dry was the kindling and wood.

  “Here.” She handed the berry cups to Niko and kept one for herself.

  She filled the metal canteen again and secured the top firmly, then laid it flat on its side on the rock, which was already warming from the fire. It wouldn’t take long before they had warm water, but first she had to bind that ankle to get the swelling down.

  “I need your knife,” she told Niko.

  It was still in its leather sheath strapped to his leg. He looked at her for a moment, and his fingers went unconsciously to where the scar was hardening on his cheek.

  “I have to cut some vines to make a tight wrap around your ankle.” She took the flat towel out and held it up.

  Niko slid the knife out and handed it to her.

  “I’ll be back soon. But I think we can get your shirt off now with warm water.” She touched the canteen and it felt warm, so she picked it up and unscrewed the top. “Lift up your arm if you can.”

  Niko held out the arm with the sleeve stuck with caked blood. El slowly dribbled warm water over the bloodied part. As she poured with one hand, she carefully released the fabric starting at the outer edges. As she continued, the shirt did begin to release until it came to the middle where the wound was deepest.

  “This may hurt,” she told Niko.

  “I’m okay,” he said. “Go ahead. Rip it off.”

  “No. I don’t want it to start bleeding again.” She dribbled more warm water on it and painstakingly released it a tiny bit at a time until, all of a sudden, it came away, leaving the gash exposed to the air.

  “Well,” she said. “That’s it.” Putting the shirt aside, she reached for the medical kit and rummaged through it until she found peroxide and bandages. She set about tending the wound but didn’t apply a bandage yet. “I’ll wait for that,” she told Niko. “We have to get your pants off so you can bathe first. Then we’ll dress all the wounds.”

  Niko nodded. “I’ll do that while you’re cutting vines.”

  El refilled the canteen and laid it on the hot rock and added a few pieces of wood to the fire underneath. Then she disappeared into the forest.

  Niko managed to get his other shoe and sock off and slowly slid his pants off one leg at a time. He couldn’t get the last leg past his swollen ankle, so he left his pants and underwear hanging half-off and slid into the cold pool. Immediately his skin tingled, and he felt as if he’d been submerged into an iced drink. The days were still long, and the sun shone in the west above the trees.

  He rubbed the dirt off his face and neck, ducked his head below the frigid water, and came up gasping but with an exhilaration he’d never felt before. He wanted to get right under the falls, let them wash over him to wash away the taint of The Race and everything that had happened after it except for the past few days with El. Those he would always keep close, untouched. That was what mattered now. To be the man who deserved her love.

  He reached out of the water to pull his shirt in so he could wash all his clothes in the clear running water. His cuts and the gash on his arm hurt, but the frigid water had a slight numbing effect that allowed him to move more freely. Soon he felt clean and dragged himself up onto the flat rock. He laid his clothes out to dry. His one pant leg and underwear were still attached at the ankle. Then he lowered himself down on his back.

  Staring at the sky through rustling leaves, he thought back on all that El had done for him since they’d reached the cave and the falls. He would find a way to repay her, to make up for what he’d done, to show her what was truly in his heart.

/>   As these thoughts ran through his mind, he relaxed and sleep overtook him. The sleep of someone tired in mind and body. A sleep of contentment in the moment.

  When he woke, El was still not back. His underwear and pants were dry enough to struggle back into them. He left the shirt off and, for the first time, noticed that the cuts ran through one of the first tats he’d gotten when he’d joined a gang. Most of those people were dead now, and the gang had morphed long ago into something alien to him.

  He pondered these life changes, thinking about what he’d done to stay alive and how he’d come to this remote spot with nothing familiar around him. Nothing from the old life except El. And his memories.

  El didn’t have to go far to find slender, strong vines. Using Niko’s knife, she began right away. She cut them near the ground, then pulled as hard as she could to release their hold on the branches above. Some swirled down easily, while others hung up higher in the trees. These she pulled as far as she could and cut them off, then moved to others until there was a pile of curling vines all around her. Most were wild grape, but a few she couldn’t identify. After trimming the leaves off she wound them into circles like ropes, left them hanging from a low branch, and moved farther into the forest to repeat the procedure. With enough vines, she could make any number of useful items.

  After gathering all the circles and hanging them from her shoulders, she followed her path back to the falls and found Niko sitting up, tending the fire, with morels and fiddleheads cut and lined up on the rock next to the fire, ready to cook. He had propped his foot up on a large branch he’d dragged over.

  El dropped the vines and examined his ankle.

  “Can you reach that knapsack?” She pointed to the one she’d carried down from the cave.

  “What are you going to do?” Niko asked, and handed it to her.

  “You’ll see. Hopefully this will work.”

  She pulled the flat towel out of the bag. It was the thinnest piece of cloth they had except for their shirts. With the knife, she cut a long strip of the thinnest vine. She moved the log where Niko had elevated his foot so only the ball of his foot was on it, leaving the ankle with room around it. Then she wound the towel around it a couple of times so the ankle was completely covered. Holding the end of the vine at the very bottom of the wrap and on the outside of his ankle, she made a loop at the top. Then, holding the loop and starting at the top, first she threaded the other end of the piece of vine through the loop, then wound the vine over this loop as tightly as she could around the ankle, making sure the vine rings butted close against each other to almost completely cover the towel, putting pressure on the ankle as she went.

  When she reached the bottom of the towel, she slid the remaining extra vine at the bottom back up into the top loop. The last step was to pull on the bottom piece of vine she had left untouched at the beginning down under the rings to about the middle, thus letting the pressure of the rings hold the whole thing in place.

  “That should help reduce the swelling,” she told Niko, and sat back to look at it. “But I wouldn’t walk on it. Use that crutch until the swelling goes down.”

  “How did you come up with this?” Niko asked, inspecting the contraption on his ankle.

  El shrugged. It was one of the things Father Ignatius had taught them. But he’d used it to show them how sailors kept rope ends tight. “It’s called ‘whipping.’ For ropes on boats. To keep the ends from fraying.”

  She cut more vines in strips of the same length.

  “What now?” Niko asked, watching her closely.

  “We need to make some nets. To catch fish.”

  “Hand me some of those vines. I can do that if you show me how.”

  El taught him how to loop the vine ends and weave them in and out to make a slightly concave circle. When done she showed him how to weave another vine through all the end loops and pull it together so the top was a bit smaller than the rest, leaving a good length of vine as a sort of rope handle. He added two more vines as ropes to make an even three-rope system for holding the net steady.

  El made her way with the first net down to a flat rock overhanging a large pool. The afternoon sun shone on the water, and she could see a fat trout facing against the current, lulled into slumber. Carefully she lowered her vine-woven net behind and under the fish. Then, imperceptibly, she moved it directly beneath him and tilted it up at the front. The trout realized something was nearby, and as it suddenly thrashed sideways, the net was wide enough to thwart its escape and—wham!—she yanked it up. In an instant it was out of the water and the trout had been caught.

  He flopped and struggled for a short time, then stopped. She laid him out on the ground and found another rock. She repeated the process until she had four good-sized fish. These she placed in the vine net and retreated to where Niko sat next to the fire, weaving nets. She handed him the fish, and he set about scraping the scales off while El collected large leaves to wrap them in.

  She used one of the nets Niko had made as a pan, wrapped each fish with a generous amount of the morels and fiddleheads, and even threw in some berries before sealing each packet in more leaves and lining them up in the net. She placed this on the rock that was now hot from the fire beneath it. As the vine heated up and shriveled, the leaves inside began to steam. Soon the air carried an aroma so enticing that both El and Niko could hardly wait.

  “I’ve never been so hungry,” Niko said. He pulled out the mess kits and opened them up. “I guess we could have used these metal plates for pans.”

  “Probably.” El nodded. “But I think this will work.” Suddenly all she had done since the trek up the mountain, the climbing and foraging, weighed on her. With still a few hours of daylight left, she felt as if this day had lasted a week. And the last week had been a month. She looked at her hands. Callouses were starting to form, and there were scratches all over her forearms. She went to the pool again and cleaned her hands and arms, dangling them in the icy water to soothe the muscles and skin. When she turned back, Niko had arranged a place for them to eat.

  With two forks he slid what was left of the net to the edge of the rock and opened it. Steam rose in a cloud, filling the air with a sweet scent of fresh fish and a nutty aroma of cooked morels. Niko slid two of the leaves onto one plate and handed it to El. She brought the canteens over and sat down by the warm fire. They pulled the leaves apart and ate the supper they’d worked so hard to create.

  After finishing, they discarded whatever scraps were left of the meal by tossing it all as far down the waterfall as possible. Then they splashed water a number of times from their canteens to clean the area and buried the fire without wetting it. Tomorrow they would rebuild and cook again. But it was best not to encourage animals to poke around by leaving food scraps near their campsite.

  With his crutch on one side and El on the other for support, they made their way back up to the cave. It was not as daunting as the hike down, and the compression wrap El had made seemed to help. The throbbing had stopped, and after a few days, he would be able to put weight on it once again.

  The last chore before they could fall asleep was to make some sort of bed inside the shallow cave.

  El gathered sheets of thick moss and laid them out on the cave floor. She covered these with branches of hemlocks that had fine, feathery needles. Then she gathered the biggest leaves she could find and laid them over the hemlock branches. When she was done, Niko crawled over to try it out.

  “It’s perfect,” he said. Before he could say another word, his eyes closed and he was asleep.

  El stretched out next to him. Although just a few days before she had wanted to kill him, she felt no fear now. There was left only a deep, empty fatigue that sleep could fill. She breathed deeply and sighed.

  The forest was waking up outside the cave. Night sounds came to her. Katydids screeching in the trees. The rushing of wind through leaves, an owl hooting far off and dimly, the waterfall behind it all. Soon her eyelids felt heavy. One arm
twitched. Her leg muscles relaxed, and she gave in to a restful sleep that had eluded her for too long.

  El marked their days in the cave with one line for each night. She drew the lines with a sharp rock on the cave wall. There was plenty of food. She even found edible beautyberries and wild cherries. She stole eggs from birds’ nests. Niko’s ankle improved with the pressure bandage El had made, and he soaked it in the frigid waterfall as often as he could. After the swelling subsided, he began to exercise it. By the seventh day, he could put some weight on it.

  “We can’t stay here forever,” he said to El after their first week at the cave.

  “I know. I wish we could. It’s so peaceful.”

  “But the weather’s sure to change. And if it gets cold, what will we do? There won’t be berries and fronds. The fish will go deeper. And it might snow.”

  “I’ve never seen snow,” El said.

  “I haven’t either. But in the mountains, if it gets cold enough, rain becomes snow. We’d freeze.”

  “Do you think you can walk yet?”

  “I’m going to try without the crutch today. It doesn’t hurt anymore. I think I’ll be fine. And the shoulder cuts are all healing.”

  “Do you think Zamora really exists?” El asked, almost to herself.

  “I hope it does. We have to be heading somewhere.”

  They were both browned. Their legs and arms trim and firm from being outside all day, from swimming in the pool beneath the waterfall, and collecting food and wood for the fire, which had burned steadily since they’d first started it.

  Finally, after two weeks at the cave, it was time to leave. They packed what was left in their knapsacks, filled their canteens, gathered as many berries as they could pack, and rolled up cooked trout in wide leaves. They figured they could gather more food as they descended the other side of the mountain. But first they had to reach the summit. They took their walking sticks, tied their boots, finished their breakfast, buried the fire, and took off for Zamora as soft amber light spread over a new day.

  It didn’t take long to reach the summit. They followed goat and deer tracks almost the whole way up. They didn’t have to traverse any ledges or cut through branches of felled trees. At one point they stopped to rest and drink some water, and found blueberries growing in profusion, so they gobbled as many as they could hold and then sat for a while to digest.