Storms Over Open Fields

by G. Howell

  In the light I was able to see that after my collar had been locked, the guard in the wagon handed the key off to one of the others. So I couldn’t jump her and take it. These bad guys weren’t as dumb as the ones in the movies.

  There was quite a wait before the wagon began to move. I felt the wheels rolling over packed earth, then over wood, then onto something that wasn’t solid ground. We stopped but there was still a rocking sensation.

  I just sat. My guard was whittling again.

  There were voices outside, then a slight lurch and the rocking sensation increased, combined with a drifting movement. Outside there were load creaks, squeaks, water sounds.

  “This is safe?” I asked my guard.

  Her muzzle wrinkled again. “Nervous?” She looked a little amused. Fine by me.

  “Ah… I have a thing about water. Far to go?”

  She snorted and nudged the flap back with a finger to peek out. “Almost halfway.”

  Good enough. While she was distracted I looped the chain from my collar around my arm, braced my feet against the side boards below the u-bolt and hauled with everything I had.

  Perhaps my workouts helped. Perhaps if they hadn’t drilled through the plank to secure the bolt, the wood might have held. I hauled on the chain, feeling iron links digging into my skin. Straightening my legs, hauling with shoulder muscles, feeling aches twinging and stretching as the wood creaked and bowed.

  The guard said, “What…”

  Or perhaps the weather-bleached wood was weakened. Whatever the cause, the plank bowed, splintered and abruptly gave way. The u-bolt tore loose, whiplashing toward me. I slammed back into the other side of the wagon and the recoiling chain struck my arm. An inconsequential distraction. Ignoring it, I snatched up the water bottle by the neck, prayed, and knocked it hard against one of the side supports. Once and the bottle just bounced. Again, and this time it broke, just below the neck sending shards and spilled water flying and tinkling across the floor and leaving me with the neck and a small nub of glass: less than intimidating, but the sharp edge was all I needed.

  The guard was drawing her own weapon, yowling an alarm. When I deliberately grinned she retreated to the very back of the wagon, her fur bottling. I raised the jagged shard of glass and slashed down, at the canvass awning. The glass knife ripped a hole, caught, then sliced a jagged tear through the weathered material, from above my head down to the sideboards. I grabbed the edges and yanked it wider, the heavy fabric parting along the tear with an angry ripping sound. Big enough. The guard was hesitating, obviously unsure as to what I was up to. She probably thought I didn’t have any place to go.

  Outside, other Rris were reacting. Weapons were out and they were skirting around the sides of the raft heading for the back of the wagon. I didn’t bother climbing out the hole. I gathered the loose chain, took a deep breath and just dove through the tear, launching myself out over the side of the wagon, over the token rope railings along the side of the ferry and diving into the river beyond.

  Cool water that hadn’t had time to be warmed by the morning sun washed over me. I dove deep, down into a chill current, wafting waterweeds and natural debris. Sunlight filtered down, through tannin-tinted waters as I kicked out, aligning myself, following the flow downstream. The shackles and chain almost undid me. Unable to breast stroke I had to resort to an awkwardly modified dog-paddle and if it hadn’t been for the current, I probably wouldn’t have made it at all. The chain dragged me down, the shackles encumbered every stroke, but I kept going, past the clutching fractal fingers of sunken logs and trees, the skittering flashes of darting fish. For as long as my breath held.

  I surfaced, splashing and gasping, some thirty meters downstream. There were distant shouts, but I was only up long enough to gasp a fresh lungful of air, then dove again. I’d been expecting a volley of gunfire or arrows. None came, but I wasn’t going to tempt fate.

  After another thirty meters I came up again and paused just long enough to tread water while looping the chain around my waist, as out of the way as I could get it. I was shaking wildly, the adrenaline rush and a flood of everything from sheer terror to pure exultation making my muscles fight each other. My fingers fumbled the iron links as I tried to stay afloat while wrapping the links around my waist where they wouldn’t impede me.

  The ferry was still upstream, nearly all the way across the river and starting to vanish from sight around a bend in the river. They’d been smart enough to send riders across first and hold some back on the starting side so if something had happened they’d have personnel on both sides of the river. By now they’d be chasing me. But the undergrowth along the banks was thick enough that they must’ve been struggling through it and by then the current had me. I kicked along with it and with every second the ferry receded further and further until it was lost around the curve in the river.

  ------v------

  The river followed the soft land. Over the millennia it’d carved its way through the sedimentary savannah, following the path of least resistance through the softer parts of the rolling countryside. Where it did meet an upcropping of rock or something too solid to wear away quickly it simply found a way around, scoring a serpentine ribbon across the landscape. There was a spur of land that was of some harder stuff: A deposit of some tougher geological outcropping the river had worked its way around, and at the base of that the river eddied and swirled in a pocket of reeds and dark water.

  Sodden marsh and water weed sucked at my legs as I dragged myself out of the river to reach something like solid ground. It was a rock, a slab the size of a car. Chains clinked against the stone as I just collapsed onto it, utterly exhausted, and lay there in the hot sunlight, coughing. My muscles felt like overcooked pasta.

  In any movie involving river travel, there’s a waterfall. Doesn’t matter if it’s in the middle of Iowa, there’s a waterfall. It’s one of those Hollywood rules.

  Real life wasn’t that melodramatic. The worst I’d had to deal with were rapids. They weren’t white water, but they’d been bad enough. The river had seemed like a good idea. I’d managed to snag a waterlogged piece of wood that’d barely made an acceptable float to hang onto while the current carried me along. That’d worked… for a while. I’d been able to watch the passing landscape – hills, water meadows and lush forests – and try and figure out where the hell I was. Heading east, that was as best I could tell. If my captors had been taking me north, then by heading east I could hit anything from the shores of lake Huron on down. I’d passed a couple of smaller tributaries flowing into the river and that was good: they’d all help to slow my pursuers down.

  Some way further downstream the riverbanks had gotten much closer and steeper, the river much faster and much deeper, all surprisingly quickly. Before I’d really known it, the still water turned turbulent enough to make things very difficult and my makeshift float didn’t. Normally, it wouldn’t have been a problem, but with the shackles and chains it took everything I had just to stay afloat. When I finally drifted into that eddy at the bend in the river, I was more than ready to crawl out and collapse.

  Sprawled on that sun-warmed rock I lost track of time. Exhausted, I just closed my eyes and let the world spin around me while I caught my breath and slowly warmed again. It was when I found myself starting to drift off that I woke with a start. I couldn’t wait around. I didn’t know how long I had, but they’d be after me, I didn’t have any doubt about that.

  I scrambled to the top of the riverbank and then struggled through tangled bush and scrub up the small rise to the crest of the hill on the river bend. It wasn’t high, but offered a bit of a view. Facing south, with the river at my back, I could see hills rising all around. The river had carved itself a shallow depression that wasn’t really deep enough to call itself a valley, stretching east to west, the sides green with forest and meadows. Beyond those sides were hills, more
hills and scrubby grasslands and trees. Those were everywhere. How far had I come? Perhaps ten kilometers? How far did I have to go? I didn’t have the faintest idea. Perhaps from the valley edge I’d see some sign of civilization.

  It was near noon on a clear and sunny day. A breeze rippled the grasses in hillside meadows. Choruses of hidden insects rasped, birds twittered and swooped. I was hungry, naked, chained and completely lost.

  “…half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses,” I muttered to the world in general. Then sighed and set off: south, toward the hills.

  ------v------

  And from up there on the lip of the shallow valley I saw nothing but more nothing. More meadows dotted with bright spring flowers, more woods and swatches of forest: evergreen pines and oaks and beech and birch covering gentle hills. No houses, roads or even thread of smoke. Down behind me, the dark river flowed along in its little valley.

  The land wasn’t flat coastline plains; nor was it geography twisted and knurled by geology like paper crumpled up. It was scrub and meadows and forest clinging to rolling hills of loam and shale. Geography that’d been scoured and ground millennia ago by unimaginably huge sheets of ice that’d strolled south and incidentally rearranged the face of the planet.

  I stood there in my shackles and bare skin and felt utterly vulnerable and more than a little concerned as I looked around from horizon to horizon. There were options. I could head back upstream where I’d be certain to meet my captors and that would at least ensure I wouldn’t starve or freeze out in the wilderness. Or I could head south and hope to hit civilization… of some kind and not bears or something. Or I could go east, following the river, which was probably a tributary into the waterway between the lakes of Highchi’s Grief and Season’s Door. There’d be settlements there, lake traffic heading southwards and - almost certainly – Mediators. After weighing things, I deemed it a safer bet than simply aiming south.

  So, east it was.

  I started half jogging a few hundred meters, then walking. It was a pace I should have been able to keep up for hours. It was the way I’d started jogging at home. But that had been with running shoes and without a few kilos of iron weighing me down. With the shackles on I couldn’t swing my arms in time properly; the collar moved at opposites to my motion and started chafing - uncomfortably at first, then painfully. I spent an hour or so trying to get the manacles off by hammering at the end of the hinge pin with a rock to try and shear it. After an hour all I ended up with was a pile of broken rocks and a bruised thumb. Whoever had designed them hadn’t been an idiot. I’d need proper tools to get the things off.

  Giving up on that - at least until I had a better idea - I kept going. I filled time by humming, simple little cadences while I traveled. The Proclaimers kept me amused for a while, then the Great Escape theme, then a host of other little ditties remembered from a world ago. The day was warm, which was a blessing. Lack of clothing was… annoying. Not so much in a moral sense anymore: Rris don’t have so many hang-ups about it and that attitude has had some time to rub off on me. The biggest drawback with nudity around Rris is the fact that they tend to find the anatomical differences more amusing and intriguing than a shock to socially-induced mores. They aren’t shocked or offended; they’re more like to ask awkward questions. But out there in the middle of nowhere, without shoes or shirt, it’s not a matter of modesty or embarrassment, but of vulnerability. You tend to feel more than a little exposed to the elements. I especially missed shoes - stones and sticks and nettles hurt – and a pair of shorts wouldn’t have been missed.

  There were animals around, though I didn’t have close encounters with anything more threatening than a pair of squirrels that chattered furiously at me from a tree trunk as I passed. Deer grazed the tundra. The beginnings of a beaver dam were starting to block one of the streams leading down to the river, making it spill its banks and turn the ground to marsh. I took that opportunity to drink before swimming across and pushing on. And on and on. Cresting one rise to see another, and then yet another stretching away before you can be demoralizing to say the least.

  And if I’d been uncomfortable during the day, that night I really missed clothes.

  When the sun sank behind the hills, the temperature went with it. Stars came out. Multitudes upon multitudes of them smeared across the heavens in a great pale wash. The crescent of the moon climbed above the horizon: a sliver of light that could hide behind the fingernail of my pinky. And it was dark. A pale glow came from the sky, from the stars and moon, but otherwise there was nothing. No lamps or fires visible, just dark and darkness. Meadows and open spaces were vague stretches of faint luminescence under the sky, trees and woods were swatches of impenetrable blackness. I was reduced to fumbling my way across ground I couldn’t see, stumbling over stones and roots and fallen branches. And it was getting colder.

  Shivering and mostly blind I hunted for shelter. Crawling under a low tree, I broke and tore leafy branches and laid them out in a makeshift mattress. It poked and scratched and the leaves leaked sap, but it was insulation against the cold ground. Not much, but a bit.

  I huddled and shivered and felt bugs biting and yearned for a warm bed, tasting a banquet of hot meals in my mind. Some time later on the howl of a wolf rose in the distance. The howl that answered it was a lot closer.

  I really didn’t get a lot of sleep.

  ------v------

  I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to see a dawn before.

  Birdsong greeted the brightening of the sky. A mackerel sky glowed pink as the sun stroked the high clouds from beyond the horizon, leaving lower formations as grey shadow. I moved to rub my face and groaned: I was stiff and sore and covered in dew and freezing. There was nothing for me there, so as soon as I could see I started off again, limping and hobbling at first as I forced protesting muscles to just perform the simple act of walking.

  When the sun rose high enough for me to get some direct sunlight, that was pure bliss. In that moment I could see why so many human cultures had worshipped the sun. The warmth, the light, the sheer feeling of relief after the chill and fear of the night... that was something you have to experience to understand. That was also a moment that helped solidify my belief that those back-to-nature fanatics back home were a bunch of blithering cretins who should try experiencing real wilderness for a while. They could have some of my share: I had more than enough to go round.

  For another day I walked. Through bush and scrub, pushing through the tangles of trees and undergrowth that clustered into woods and forests, across broad hillside meadows alive with grass and spectacular wildflowers and darting insects. I saw moose down at the river’s edge, cropping placidly at water plants.

  And my stomach reminded me it could do with some food.

  I found berries of several kinds. Most of them were so bitter when I carefully tested them on my tongue that I had to spit them out. I did find some blueberries that were palatable, but only a small handful. They weren’t very filling. Finding more would mean spending time and energy hunting them down. I could spend hours covering just a small area looking. There were mushrooms that I broke apart and touched a bit to my tongue, and then spat at the bitter taste. I decided to press on, hoping I’d find more edibles enroute.

  As the day went on I moved further downstream. If there’d been a road or a track it’d have been easy going, but there wasn’t. Pushing through the undergrowth both slowed me down and scratched the hell out of my hide. The only consolation was that if it was that tough for me, it’d be just as hard for my pursuers. Mounted, they couldn’t get through that sort of undergrowth and on foot they couldn’t keep up the pace I could.

  But they probably had food.

  I kept going, following that meandering river.

  Midday came and went. The sun wasn’t as harsh as it’d been the previous day. In fact, I realized th
e clouds were building up. The wind was blowing in from the east, the patches of blue in the sky growing fewer and fewer as clouds scudded by overhead. Every so often the sun was lost behind cloud, the world suddenly becoming cooler. That wasn’t such a concern: I was getting enough exercise to keep me quite warm.

  As the hours went by the wind died and when it picked up again it’d changed direction, turning into a brisk and cool westerly. Trees rocked back and forth, their massed movements sounding like surf on a shingle beach. The cloud cover got heavier, turning the afternoon gloomy. It looked like rain might be lurking around, but it was only when I crested a hill that gave me a view that I cursed out loud.

  To the west and south the horizons were black with towering thunderheads.

  Perfect.

  I tried to make better time, but didn’t hold much hope. I didn’t know where I was going, so hurrying just meant I was going nowhere faster. I just tried to pick up the pace. More hours and scenery passed while I watched the world change with a sort of resigned fascination. As the clouds built up, churning across the landscape like dark ink in water, the air changed, the wind bringing that scent of rain. Late afternoon light washed over meadows and met the banks of clouds to produce glorious and unnatural colors. Purple haze shrouded the horizon; patches of sun-gold grasses turned incandescent as spears of light reached through gaps in the bruise-colored thunderheads that banked and built, roiling in incredibly slow motion. Not really slow, just on a monumental scale. Slanting columns of darkness connected the clouds to the land, following them along. Amongst those columns and clouds and along the horizon were flickers of light. Not regular, but like staccato flashbulbs under the bulk of the growing storm.