by Inmon, Shawn
“I will never forget. I wanted you to stay on the rock—”
“—like a child”—she interrupted.
“—and you did not. You leaped into the battle and delivered the arrows that killed the second beast.”
Senta-eh smiled at the memory. Her voice softened.
“And when you fought Draka-ak?”
“You mean when you pushed me back in the room and you and Werda-ak took on his guards all by yourselves?”
“Yes, that is exactly what I mean.” She reached for Alex and pulled him down until his head was laying against her chest. “Will you ever forget that?”
“Never.”
Her voice grew softer still, until it was nearly a whisper.
“Then how can you ever lose me? I am in those memories, and a thousand more. Even if I died at this moment, you would have so many memories of me, I could never leave. You will always have me with you.”
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it. I want you here, like this. Always.”
She stroked his hair softly, “That is what everyone wants. Always. But the world is the world. It is the way.”
SENTA-EH HAD ALWAYS been among the most comely of women in Winten-ah, which was a tribe renowned for its beauty. Still, as she grew heavier with child, she became even more beautiful. She was so lovely it nearly broke Alex’s heart each time he saw her.
No matter that Senta-eh said she would always be with him, and no matter how often she said It is the way, Alex refused to accept the fact that she would die soon.
He cast about for any possible solution.
That started with Lanta-eh. He found her in her cave, working with her sisters sweeping the floor, which was an endless job.
“Can I talk with you?”
Lanta-eh looked at him as though she had been expecting him, perhaps even wondering what had taken him so long to seek her out.
“Of course. Let’s go out in the fresh air.”
They walked through the caves to the opening and out into the sunshine. Lanta-eh unselfconsciously took his hand. Over the years, she had quizzed him about how people had shown kindness and affection in his time and she had done her best to adopt those customs.
They climbed to the very top of the cliffside and sat, dangling their legs over the edge. Below them, they could see where their land was trying to recover from the damage of the zisla-ta. It was still a mostly brown landscape as far as they could see, but new buds had sprouted on the trees and soft shoots of grass poked up through the brown dustiness.
Life always finds a way.
It was the tiny life inside Senta-eh that worried Alex the most at that moment.
“Did you already know?”
“About Senta-eh? Yes. I knew long ago. Do you remember when I took the large dose of karak-ta egg and slept for days? I saw many things then, including this.”
“I wish you would have told me,” Alex said softly, his voice tinged with regret and sadness.
Lanta-eh squinted into the early brightness of the day. “Do you?”
Without thinking, Alex said, “Yes, of course.”
“Manta-ak, if I had told you then, there still would have been nothing you could have done to change it. The world is the world. All that would have done is stolen your happiness and contentment.”
Alex’s first instinct was to deny what she said, but he couldn’t. He thought back to that happy day, sitting on the grass where their little house now sat. The warm sunshine had been on their back and all had seemed right with the world, even with future pronouncements of doom.
If he had known this was approaching, would it have tinged all the intervening days with sadness?
Yes. Of course it would.
Finally, Alex said, “You’re right. But, I can’t give up.”
“I would never tell you that you have to give up, or even that you should. It is one way of showing Senta-eh how much she means to you. Although,” she added with a mischievous smile, “she already knows. I can see it every time you are together. So, railing against this fate is fine, Manta-ak. Just don’t let that effort get in the way of savoring what you have.”
Alex absorbed the wisdom of those words and realized that was true of everything. He had a strong tendency to be single-minded. He always had. When he had enlisted as an 18X Special Forces candidate and then passed selection, that had absorbed all his attention. When he had returned home, without a single focus, he felt lost and adrift. He knew he had let that aimlessness wash him away from Mindy and even Amy.
Here in Kragdon-ah, this singularity of focus had continued. Becoming accepted as a hunter, building his army to attack Denta-ah, pursuing Lanta-eh’s kidnappers. It had all been one specific goal and mission at a time, to the detriment of all else.
I don’t know if I can ever change that.
“Thank you, Lanta-eh. You are the sister I never had.”
In another of her adopted habits, she hugged him tight, then laid her head against his shoulder. They sat like that for a long time.
“Still,” Alex said, “there’s got to be something I can do. I cannot just sit here and wait for her to die.”
Lanta-eh drew a deep breath and said, “It will not do you any good, but I know of one thing you can do. It will put you in motion. It will make you feel like perhaps you are achieving something, but in the end, it will change nothing.”
To Alex’s desperate ears, that sounded like hope.
“How do you know I can’t change our future? Can you see everything?”
“Think of it like this. I am standing on a hill. Below me, there are valleys, plateaus, and other, smaller hills. As I look out, I cannot see everything that happens in the valleys, or on the other side of a plateau. But, I can see the final hill and I see that all paths lead to that result.”
Alex shrugged this off as he often did with Lanta-eh’s prognostications. He believed he could always change any path.
“What is this thing? What can I do?”
“There is a place that the holy men told me about. I have seen it in my dreams. It is a place where others from your time have lived. I do not believe there is anything there that could help, but it is possible.”
“Yes, but you believe that nothing will change Senta-eh’s fate. You believe there is nothing I can do, and nothing will help.”
“I know it will not. That is why I think you should spend your time savoring the time you have with Senta-eh.”
“Our greatest times together have been when we are on an adventure. Staying at the cliffside, raising krinta is fine, and there is goodness in that. But she and I are adventurers first. If nothing else, this could be one last adventure, one last chance to make memories I will carry forever.”
“No one is so easy to convince as he who wants to believe.”
Alex ignored her.
“Where is this place?”
“It is only a few day’s ride, but I don’t know how to tell you to get there. I can see the route in my mind, but I cannot translate it.”
Alex grunted in frustration, then turned and looked meaningfully at her.
Lanta-eh smiled, dipped her head, and said, “Yes, I suppose it could be one last adventure for the three of us.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Hidden
By noon the next day, Lanta-eh, Alex, and Senta-eh had traveled south and then east fifteen miles. This was a part of Kragdon-ah that Alex was not familiar with. They did not hunt here, simply because it was too far away.
Lanta-eh had insisted that they should bring more water skins than they normally would, as there would not be many chances to refill them.
As they headed farther east, the deep green of Winten-ah turned brown. The thought occurred to Alex that if the Zisla-ta had swarmed over this area, it might not have made any difference. There seemed to be nothing but rocks, sand, and dry riverbeds.
Senta-eh had not wanted to come on this trek. She preferred to stay in Winten-ah, where she could continue to train he
r young band of archers. Lanta-eh had told her it would only take a few days to get where they were going, though, and they both agreed Alex would feel better if he knew he had done all he could.
The first night, they camped out beside a large boulder. They didn’t bother to build a fire because they didn’t have anything to cook. No furry creature had crossed their path since they left the forest behind. They stopped at the boulder because although there was no running water nearby, they did find a brackish pond where their horses could drink.
Monda-ak drank a bit from the same source then gave Alex a baleful look. He was used to better. Alex shared his jerky with him and that mollified him. Eventually, Monda-ak found that if he would lay perfectly still for a few minutes, various skittering lizards or slithering snakes would move right in front of him. He decided this moving buffet made up for the lack of moving water.
The three of them sat with their backs against the boulder, staring up at the sky, contemplating the infinity it represented. At least, that’s what Senta-eh and Lanta-eh did. Alex would sit quietly for a few moments, then quiz Lanta-eh about where they were going. She did her best to answer his questions patiently but most of the time, her answer consisted of “We’ll see when we get there. I don’t know.”
The next day they trekked through more of the unchanging landscape until early afternoon, when Senta-eh spotted an oasis of green up ahead.
It was a small area—perhaps an acre square, surrounded by a desert on all sides. In the middle was a sulfur springs.
In the twenty-first century, this was probably quite the tourist attraction. Come take a hot bath and smell like rotten eggs! Who could resist?
Bad smell or not, the bubbling spring created a beautiful little rest stop.
Monda-ak, whose sense of smell was keen, sneezed, shook his head, and sneezed again.
“What is that smell?” Lanta-eh asked, wrinkling her nose.
“Sulfur. Not very pleasant is it?”
“No. Can you drink it?”
“If you can get past the smell, it won’t hurt you. If you drink too much of it, it might make you relieve yourself a lot, but that’s about it.”
They dismounted and led their horses to the spring. Like Monda-ak, they sneezed and twisted their head from side to side. Eventually, their thirst after half-a-day’s ride got the best of them and they tentatively drank.
“How much farther?” Alex asked, feeling like he had asked that question too many times already on this journey. He was fine, but now that he knew Senta-eh was pregnant, he worried about her constantly.
Lanta-eh walked to one edge of the little oasis of green and pointed due north. Dry, dusty hills rose up in that direction. In one spot, a canyon ran between sharp rises in elevation.
“That’s the canyon I’ve seen in my dreams.”
A minute later, they were on their horses and heading north, glad to be away from the smell.
Distances are tricky when trekking through a desert. After an hour’s ride, the canyon almost seemed farther away than when they started. Still, they kept on, and by late afternoon, they rode into the cool shadows cast by the sharp inclines on either side.
It was a box canyon, open on only one end, and not a very deep one at that. There were scrawny trees and a few areas of hearty scrub brush that had managed to live in this inhospitable climate.
Alex wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but seeing this tiny canyon with its near-vertical walls on both sides, he knew it wasn’t this.
“This is it?”
“This is it,” Lanta-eh confirmed.
Alex did a full perimeter sweep, including up and down the walls. If there was anything to see, it wasn’t obvious.
Lanta-eh pointed to the northeast corner of the canyon. It looked like a portion of the wall above had collapsed, dropping rocks of all sizes into a pile. “Behind there.”
She sounded so confident that Alex jumped down from his horse and ran to the rocks. When he got there, he saw a pile of rocks, nothing more.
“I said behind there. If this was easy to find, someone already would have, and it would have been destroyed or used up.”
Lanta-eh and Senta-eh dismounted and joined Monda-ak in the deepest shade of the canyon. This was Alex’s adventure and they had decided to let him pursue it.
Alex looked at the puzzle in front of him and saw no logical way to attack it, so he picked a spot and dug in. At first, tossing rocks away from the pile only revealed more rocks underneath. When he pulled rocks from the bottom of the pile, more rocks just slid down from above to take their place.
“This might take a while,” he called over his shoulder.
“No hurry,” Lanta-eh said. “We seem to have found the only shade within a few miles, so we’re good.”
Eventually, Alex managed to get his fingers behind a particularly large rock. It was too heavy for him to pick up, but by rocking it back and forth, he was eventually able to dislodge it. When he did, it created a small rockslide. Alex jumped back to avoid being hit. When he looked up at where the rocks had come from, he saw a small, shadowy area. He tried to clamber up to it, but found himself slipping back down with a shower of small rocks.
He stood back and examined the puzzle. There were a series of large rocks—boulders, almost—on the left side of the slide, but mostly smaller rocks on the right. He moved to the left and climbed from bigger rock to bigger rock. He managed to only slip twice, once taking a nasty gash out of his right calf.
Finally, he succeeded in getting within a few feet of the shadowy area. He stretched out flat on his stomach and crawled forward until his face was directly over the opening. He peered inside and saw only pitch blackness. The space in the rocks was big enough for him to fit his head, but not his shoulders. He pawed at the rocks around the opening, trying to push them out of the way without slipping down himself.
He was successful—until he wasn’t. Just as he started another very satisfying tumble of rocks and dirt, he found himself part of that tumble and landed in a heap on the ground. He had managed to grab onto one of the big rocks and pulled it down with him, so the opening was bigger than it was before. He stood, dusted himself off, and looked at the two women, who were pointedly looking the other way, trying to hide their smiles. Even Monda-ak seemed to be laughing at him.
He repeated the same scramble up the left side, then belly-crawled over to the opening, which was much larger now. Large enough for a twenty-first century-sized man to fit through. He put his head and shoulders through, but again, all he could see was darkness. He pawed at the rocks again until he inevitably slipped to the ground.
This time, he walked to the women and said, “It’s pitch black. Will you build a fire while I gather material for a torch?”
Senta-eh and Lanta-eh searched the area for dry wood and kindling, then set to making a fire. By the time it was going, Alex had returned with a dead branch and handfuls of dry grass. The three of them sat and wove the grass together and then around the branch.
“You don’t have to go in there,” Senta-eh said.
“I know.”
“You’re really doing this for yourself, not me.”
“I know.”
Senta-eh glanced at Lanta-eh, but said no more.
Alex took the torch, dipped it into the fire, and once again started his ascent to the shadowy hole. When he reached it, he stuck the torch inside, and peered after it.
Alex did a double-take at what he saw.
The flickering light revealed a picnic table set for a meal. There was a red-and-white checked cloth, with four place settings. An oil lamp sat on the table. Alex waved the torch around, expanding its feeble light. To the side of the table was a series of wooden boxes and an old-fashioned two-wheel cart that might have been used for hauling goods.
A human skeleton slumped over one end of the picnic table. The light of Alex’s torch glinted off the steel of a bone-handle hunting knife. There was a dark rectangle next to the knife. Alex leaned further in
to the hole, trying to see what that might be.
The rocks he leaned against gave way and he tumbled the eight feet down to the dusty floor inside the cave. He dropped the torch, but it didn’t go out, it just bounced and illuminated the small cave. Then the hole that he had started enlarged itself. A massive shadow formed above him. Monda-ak.
The dog didn’t even slow to see what he was leaping into. He hit the ground with a woof, and jumped to Alex’s side, growling and ready to take on all comers.
“It’s all right,” Alex said, laying a hand on Monda-ak’s neck.
The torch fizzled and went out, but it wasn’t necessary anymore. Monda-ak had widened the hole enough that daylight streamed into the cave.
Alex examined himself for injuries. He found more scrapes and bruises, but nothing else.
Senta-eh was next to the hole. She peered inside, a worried expression writ large across her face.
“I’m fine,” Alex said. “I’ve fallen harder than that.”
“I remember,” Senta-eh said and at that moment, they both recalled his plunge into the river and smiled. This was just another adventure in a long line they had shared.
“Do you see what you are after?” Senta-eh asked.
“What I am after is a miracle, so no, I do not see that. Lanta-eh said she thought these people were from my time. I was hoping they might have some of the medical cures we had then.” He shook his head. “I know I’m grasping at straws.”
Alex poked around the entirety of the cave. In one corner, he found a stack of what appeared to be more human bones. Stray hanks of blonde hair were still attached to the three skulls. Everything else had been picked clean by predators or simply been lost to time.
Alex poked through the boxes, but they were all empty. In the corner of the cave opposite the skeletons were empty cans. There was still writing imprinted on the cans, though it had faded.
Dr. Klinghoffer’s Canned Peaches. Brisbane Baked Beans. Tofer’s Vienna Sausages.
How can these exist here? If they were left behind in my time, they would have oxidized and been turned to dust long ago. And cans with advertising say it is from sometime close to my own era, but I don’t recognize any of the brands. And how on Earth do three people end up locked inside a cave after a cave in?