The Dove (Prophecy Series)

by Sharon Sala

  “Hold on to me!” he said, yelling to be heard above the noise as he reached around her and grabbed hold of the trunk.

  Heart pounding, she locked her hands around his waist as he dug his fingernails into the bark.

  Unable to hold onto its perch, a monkey dropped from the canopy above, falling to its death only a few feet from where they were. Shocked, she quickly looked away, but when they began dropping with sickening regularity, they became another part of the nightmare.

  It wasn’t until wild animals began racing past them that they realized there was even more at stake. The animals weren’t running downhill to get away or running amok in every direction. They were all running west. That made Yuma nervous. They’d been climbing in elevation for almost half a day, and it suddenly occurred to him that something else besides the ensuing earthquake must be imminent.

  After watching yet another monkey fall to its death at her feet, Tyhen closed her eyes, and the moment she did, there flashed a vision of earth giving way above them. She staggered as she pushed out of Yuma’s grasp and began to shout.

  “There will be a landslide. The mountain is going to give way above us.”

  Before he could speak, Tyhen took a deep breath, and when she spoke, her words were amplified a thousand fold, spilling out into the jungle for everyone to hear.

  “Landslide! Landslide! Run to the West! Follow me! Do it now!”

  Even though the earth still quaked, Tyhen began to run, leading the way through the jungle with Yuma at her side and the New Ones at their heels. There was no trail to follow, no machete to cut the growth and ease the way, just people running blindly, slipping, falling, and getting up again with a heart-pounding leap, pushing past bushes and yanking away vines with no way of knowing what waited on the other side.

  When the shaking finally stopped, they were still running at full speed, and for good reason. There was a new sound now, a rolling groan that came up from the depths of the mountain as the face of the slope above them came apart, shredding earth, rocks, and trees as it went. Torn from ancient roots, the slope came down, gaining momentum every second.

  Tyhen ran with her pack bouncing against her back and her heart in her throat. She wouldn’t look back. Her powers were no match for a landslide, and she didn’t want to witness the inevitable. Some would not survive this.

  Yuma ran with his eye on Tyhen in constant fear they would not get far enough away to keep from being caught in the slide they could not see. All they heard was a heart-stopping roar that pushed them farther, faster.

  As they ran, there were moments when he would lose sight of her, and each time a piece of him died until she popped back into view. He’d heard her say that Windwalkers did not die, but he didn’t see how anyone—even a Windwalker’s daughter—could survive a falling mountain.

  Behind them, the New Ones were in a panic. Older people were lagging behind, and others were getting their packs caught in the undergrowth and losing precious time tearing free.

  Montford Nantay was running right beside Johnston and Shirley, just as they’d run from Firewalker. Either they’d all live together or they’d die together.

  Nona, the young woman Tyhen had found crying in the woods, had a large bloody gash across her nose, but it hadn’t slowed her down. She didn’t want to die.

  Her husband was running a few feet ahead, trying to clear a path through the heavy growth impeding their escape. And despite everyone’s fear, the race for their lives was eerily silent. There was no breath for screaming.

  When the first boulder finally reached the runners, it hit the ground, bounced over one man’s head and landed forty feet away, taking out an entire family. They never saw it coming. One second they were breathing and then they were not. The landslide had arrived, greedily collecting bodies as it went.

  The horror of still being alive when the person running behind you had disappeared in mid-step would not be real to the survivors until the panic was over. After defeating Firewalker, it was a hell of a way to die.

  ****

  Despite their frantic need to keep running, it all ended with an abrupt stop at a river’s edge. Even the riverbed had been cracked by the earthquake, and they watched from the shore at the massive whirlpool forming. The water was still flowing downhill from its source up the mountain, but the huge crack in the riverbed had formed a vortex and was sucking the water back into the earth from whence it came.

  Tyhen turned around and looked up, half-expecting to see the mountain coming down upon them, but to her relief, it was still there. They could hear the rumble of the massive slide, but it was far below them now. When she realized they were actually far enough away to be safe, she threw herself into Yuma’s arms.

  “We did it! We’re still alive!” she cried and kissed him hard and fast.

  Yuma’s heart was hammering to the point he could barely breathe, but like Tyhen, momentary elation took them past the reality of what had happened.

  All those who had escaped were on the ground, too exhausted to move. Tyhen and Yuma began going from one group to another, looking for the wounded, moving them all to one area so they could be treated together while watching for the last of the stragglers as they came out of the jungle. Healers came forward without being asked and began administering medicine to stop the bleeding or helped in setting broken bones.

  Yuma worked right beside Tyhen, unwilling to leave her own her own. The area was too unsettled, and the aftershocks were constant.

  The landslide had literally cut the face from the highest point on the mountain, revealing the iron-rich earth beneath as a red, seeping wound. Many hundreds of years of tree growth, and the thousands of years it had taken to create the mountain had been destroyed in seconds. A river had been rerouted to nowhere, and precious lives had been lost.

  Once the survivors had regrouped, they began trying to figure out how many they’d lost. But they had not started out with a head count or a list of names, and Tyhen quickly realized there was no way to determine the size of the loss. The deaths would go unrecorded save for the friends and family who knew they were gone.

  The Nantay brothers were the closest tie Tyhen had left to her mother, and she had been looking for them for almost an hour when Yuma suddenly grabbed her arm and pointed.

  “There they are!”

  When she saw Shirley and the brothers alive and breathing, she clenched her teeth to keep from bursting into tears.

  Johnston saw her first and stopped what he was doing and headed toward her. Without speaking first, he just picked her up and held her, her feet dangling off the ground. Then he began to praise her.

  “We heard your voice! We heard the warning! You saved us, Tyhen. You saved us all.”

  She shook her head, still choking back tears.

  “Not all of you.”

  “We knew when we left that we would not all make it. Nature is not always kind.”

  Montford and Shirley were right behind him, and they hugged her as well while repeating what Johnston already said. It wasn’t an easy thing to live with, but Tyhen was beginning to accept that there would be things she could not prevent.

  A Windwalker’s daughter was not a god.

  Johnston grasped Yuma’s arm in a gesture of greeting, then pointed to the river.

  “The earthquake did this, I think.”

  Yuma swiped at a streak of blood that kept running down his belly from a deep scratch beneath his chin.

  “I agree, and it’s not safe to cross here,” he said. “Maybe farther downstream where the water is no more, but not here. The force of this whirlpool would pull anyone down into the belly of the earth.”

  “Is it safe to stay here until morning?” Montford asked.

  Tyhen could still feel an occasional shudder from the earth beneath their feet. When she closed her eyes, she saw a broad expanse of land at the foothills of a mountain, and knew that’s where they needed to be.

  “No. We need to get off the mountain, and the fastest way
to do that is to walk downhill along this river until we find a safe place to cross.”

  Yuma quickly agreed. “There could be an aftershock that might bring down more of the mountain. As soon as we get the injured ones bandaged, we’ll figure out a way to bring them with us.”

  “We can make a travois, like in the old days,” Montford said. “I will get some men started on them.” He hurried away.

  “What is a travois?” Tyhen asked.

  Johnston began to explain., “Two long poles with a blanket or an animal skin tied between them to form a bed. Our ancestors moved belongings, as well as the sick and injured with them in the old days. The travois was pulled behind a horse, but we do not have horses here, so people will pull them and it will work. Yuma, you and Tyhen get your packs and come back to us. Shirley has medicine for your cuts.”

  “They are nothing,” Yuma said.

  “No, in the jungle they are something,” Tyhen reminded him as she tugged on his hand. “Let’s hurry. I want to get moving as quickly as possible. This place doesn’t feel right. I don’t think it’s over.”

  Yuma nodded and broke into a jog with Tyhen right behind him.

  ****

  Naaki Chava: same day

  One of the vendors in the marketplace was setting out flat cakes baked fresh that morning. The vendor on the opposite side of the street had trays of fruits and vegetables set up for trade. Several women were walking toward the fields with baskets on their heads to gather food ready to harvest.

  Wesley Two Bears was sitting outside, watching the woman next door making new fire to cook a morning meal. He looked down at his hands, joints knotted with arthritis and wrinkled with age. He was tired of this life, but he was still here. His wife was gone and every other member of his family had gone on the long walk with Tyhen.

  He glanced up at the mountain and then stood, stretching his bare legs before grabbing a fishing pole and heading to the river. He was tired of fruit and vegetables. He wanted fresh fish.

  Little Mouse was already anxious about leaving Naaki Chava and all that was familiar. She had gone into the jungle early that morning to gather healing plants and roots to take in her pack and had no other thought in her head but her daily routine.

  Adam and Evan, accompanied by a couple of guards, were coming back from one last trip to the temple to make sure nothing valuable would be left behind. The only things they’d taken were a couple of small statues, and the Conch shell they’d left there the day Tyhen and Yuma left the city. Although the twins were uneasy, it appeared to be business as usual, just on a much smaller scale. Their sleep had been restless the night before with flashes of people running and crying, but that had not seen any volcanic eruption, and nothing else specific enough to pinpoint.

  Still, they were certain enough of impending trouble to mention it to Singing Bird, but she’d only nodded absently and walked away. In her world, everything was wrong, so their warning was no big deal.

  “Do you feel it?” Evan asked as they passed a vendor sleeping in the sun.

  Adam held up his arm. “All the hair is standing up on my arm.”

  They’d taken only a couple more steps before they heard the guards whispering behind them.

  Adam stopped and turned around. “What’s wrong?”

  “Listen,” the guard said.

  The twins listened. “We don’t hear anything,” they said.

  “And that is wrong,” the guard added. “No birds, no monkeys, no sound at all from the jungle.”

  Within seconds all the birds took to the sky. The moment that happened, Adam grabbed Evan’s arm.

  “Earthquake!”

  And to punctuate the prediction, a boom so loud that it popped the twins ears echoed within the city like a cannon shot, followed by tremors so strong it knocked them off their feet.

  Down in the city, people began screaming and crying, throwing up their hands and praying to the gods not to let them die. Some fell to their knees, while others ran back inside their homes only to have the walls collapse. Some houses fell in around the people, while others came apart, falling onto the cooking fires outside.

  Adam and Evan had dropped to their hands and knees, and when the guards got up and started to run for shelter, they stopped them with a shout.

  “Stay outside! It’s safer.”

  The guards stopped and dropped to their knees, but they were not convinced it was safe anywhere and knelt clutching their spears and shields as if they would do battle to defeat this madness.

  The twins grabbed each other for support, and the moment they touched, flashed on the day that Firewalker had finally come to Landan Prince’s island. Everything was shaking then, like it was now. The only difference between then and now was Firewalker and the heat. The twins looked toward the mountain, which was an earthly form of Firewalker, and when they did, knew this was their warning. When this earthquake was over, they had to get out of Naaki Chava. There would be another earthquake sometime within the next three days, and they had to be a long way gone when it happened.

  ****

  The palace was in the same sort of chaos. Guards ran into the halls looking to Cayetano for orders. Servants were screaming and praying to their gods to save them.

  Singing Bird was in her quarters when the shaking began. She knew the safest place during an earthquake was to get out of a building, but instead of jumping out her window to safety, she ran out into the hall shouting Cayetano’s name only seconds before things began falling in behind her.

  ****

  Cayetano was in the throne room with the map the New Ones had given him laid out on a table. He had studied them until the drawings were firmly fixed in his mind. He knew the shape of the mountain to watch for, and then to follow the coast until they came to a large, sheltered bay. That was where ships would come in, they said. That was where they needed to build a new city, they said, a place to show their unity as a people with power to stand firm against the strangers’ promises and demands, they said.

  As chief, it was hard for him to follow other people’s directions, but this was an event out of his experience, and he couldn’t make a mistake about relocating an entire city of people.

  He was rolling up the map when he heard a noise so loud it made the walls shake, and when the floor beneath him began to move, he looked down in horror. What was this magic that made rocks dance beneath his feet?

  And while he was looking down, a chunk of the ceiling came loose a short distance from where he was standing, splintering the tile floor behind him into pieces.

  At that point, guards came running.

  “Cayetano! Cayetano! The ground shakes. The gods are angry! What do we do?”

  Before he could answer, he heard Singing Bird calling his name. He pushed them aside and ran out into the hall just as she appeared at the far end of the corridor.

  “Get out! We have to get everyone out!” she yelled and began waving at the servants and guards within sight.

  Cayetano caught her on the run and headed to the nearest doorway as bits of the palace rained down upon their heads.

  Once they ran out into the sunlight, horror struck as they saw what was happening down in the city. Roofs on houses were falling in, walls were no longer standing, and because of thatched roofs and wooden walls, fires were spreading from house to house. People weren’t trying to put them out. They were just grabbing what belongings they could and running in every direction.

  Cayetano groaned. “We have to stop them. How can we stop them?”

  All of a sudden, a long, mournful bellow rang out across the valley. They looked down the road leading to the city and saw the twins. One of them was blowing the Conch shell and the other one was waving to get the people’s attention. They kept blowing and waving, and blowing and waving, until the sound superseded the earthquake’s roar, and when it did, people stopped running amok and ran toward the sound.

  “They did it!” Singing Bird cried. “They stopped the panic. Now we must get dow
n there. They need to see your face.”

  ****

  Tyhen had been helping Susie doctor the gash under Yuma’s throat and had just turned around to wash the blood from her hands when the sight before her disappeared and she was back in Naaki Chava with her mother, watching it burn.

  She moaned and then swayed on her feet, and when she did, Yuma grabbed her.

  “What? What’s happening? What’s wrong?”

  She could hear him, but now she was standing in front of the palace watching her mother and Cayetano running down the hill.

  “It’s on fire. Naaki Chava is on fire.”

  “Why?” Yuma asked.

  “The earthquake. It happened there, too,” Tyhen said.

  Shirley gasped. “The cooking fires. The wooden walls and thatched roofs probably fell into the cooking fires. I hope the people got out.”

  “Run, run,” Tyhen whispered, watching the people fleeing the chaos.

  Yuma pulled her into his arms and pressed her face against his chest. “Don’t look! You can’t stop it!”

  The moment he touched her, the image was gone. She slid out of his arms and into the dirt at his feet and hid her head on her knees.

  Shirley squatted down beside her. “Sad things happen and eventually, everybody dies.”

  Tyhen sat without moving or talking for so long Yuma began to worry. The sun was halfway toward sunset and they had yet to start walking downhill to find a crossing. He looked around for Montford or Johnston to ask if they were ready to move, and when he turned around, Tyhen was on her feet.

  He reached toward her, then stopped and let his hand fall back to his side. She had that look in her eye again, the one where she stirred up a wind to do battle, but her face and voice were devoid of emotion.

  “The twins are fine. Mother and Cayetano are okay. They are leaving the city and we need to leave, too.”