Survivors (Harmony Book 3)

by Margaret Ball

“Actually, no.”

  “Good thing you’re with us,” Kaytlin boasted. “We grew up around boats.” She pushed the half-drowned boat through wild sasena that had escaped the paddies, towards the open river. “Come on, get in. I’ll push us off with the oar.”

  She thrust vigorously against the unseen bank below the wild sasena and, with a sickening lurch, the boat moved forward and spun dizzyingly into the strong central current. Water slopped over onto Jillian’s lap.

  “Kaytlin?” Felisha whispered.

  “You needn’t whisper now. We’re free!”

  “Yes, but… hadn’t there ought to be two oars?”

  The boat whirled and turned in the current, then crunched against something that shone white in the moonlight: a fragile natural barrier of fallen trees and dead branches. They were closer to the far side of the river than to the bank where they’d started. Kaytlin jabbed downwards with the oar. “Not too deep. Come on!” She jumped out and began working her way towards the shore, clinging to the dead branches with one hand. By the time she’d gone an oar’s-length from the boat, the water swirling around her was only hip-deep. She braced herself against a fallen tree and extended the oar backwards towards the boat. “Come on, Felisha!”

  Jillian untied Tomi and refastened the wreck of her shawl into a tight sling that would hold him against her back, his head against the back of her neck. Any lower and he could drown while she was groping her way to shore. Tomi gurgled with pleasure at this new game which gave him access to Jillian’s tangled hair. She followed Felisha over the side of the boat. It wasn’t difficult; the boat was lower in the water than it had been moments ago. Dead branches danced in front of her where Felisha was pulling herself to the shore; Jillian grabbed where she could, bent to resist the pull of the current, and finally stumbled into the shallows where she fell to her knees.

  “Come on,” Kaytlin snapped again, and pulled Jillian up by one arm. “You can collapse when we’re on shore.”

  And she did, shifting Tomi to the front again so that she could lie on her side and cuddle him. He was still grinning his toothless, silly smile. “You’re a water baby,” she told him. “Any time you’re around water, you think it’s the best toy ever invented. A good thing you’re going to grow up by the river.”

  Felisha danced in the moonlight. “We did it! We did it! We’re free!”

  “Hush up!” Kaytlin snapped. “D’you want them to know where we went?”

  “They’re probably all dead by now. Nobody came after us, did they?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t see anything….”

  Kaytlin swore she’d seen movement on the other side of the river. Jillian shook her head. The moonlight was a white dazzle on the water, a continuous dance of light and shadow that made everything seem to flicker. She couldn’t pick out any non-random movement beyond that of the reflections.

  Felisha sobered. “But we’re on the wrong side. How will we get back to the cooperative?”

  “What is there to get back to?” Kaytlin seemed permanently ill-tempered now that the tension of the escape was over.

  “Somebody might have come back. Besides us, I mean.”

  Kaytlin sighed. “We’ll go upstream on this side for a while. It’s safer. When we get to the bridge, we’ll watch in daylight and see if anyone’s moving on the far side. I didn’t run this far just to deliver myself back into the hands of those bastards.”

  “Bridge?” Jillian asked.

  “This sasena cooperative had paddies both sides of the river.”

  They were all tired, and their wet rags clung to them and chafed their skin. It was a slow, painful progress through the rest of the night, but Kaytlin proved a competent guide. Instead of taking long detours around the sasena paddies, she marched right through them. “Fool bandits are allergic to water, even when there’s no soap! Come on, Felisha, a little mud won’t hurt you.”

  Tomi fell asleep as they walked, woke, grizzled for his bottle and began a tired, hopeless crying that hurt Jillian’s heart. No bottle, no more powdered milk… Had she killed him by abandoning the bottle under Kallan’s slumped body? What good was it to have brought him alive out of the bandit camp, if he was going to die now?

  Kaytlin advised her to chew sasena leaves as they walked and spit the pulp into Tomi’s mouth. “It won’t feed him, but it’ll numb the hunger pangs and calm him down.”

  “But what can I find to feed him?”

  “What is he, four months?”

  “Three.”

  “Big for his age. I don’t know. Whatever we can find to eat, you can cook it and pound it fine. Has he ever eaten from a spoon?”

  “Not yet… Isn’t he too young for that?” She knew next to nothing about babies. In a civilized world he would have been in an infants’ crêche, and they would have told Trisha how to take care of him whenever she took him out of the crêche.

  “Mmm. You’ll have to be careful not to choke him. But it’s his best chance.”

  More plodding through paddies where the fine silty mud sucked at their feet before releasing them; more feeling their way along a bankside path; then back into the paddies. Jillian thought she was beginning to sleep between steps. She remembered the exhausted doctor at the hospital, afraid to let himself lean against a wall for fear of falling asleep.

  Finally they reached a point where tall buildings stood empty. “We’ll rest in here, out of sight,” Kaytlin said, leading them into a cavernous hall housing long conveyor belts. “Come daylight…”

  Jillian was asleep on the floor before Kaytlin finished her sentence.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Jillian woke in a faint, foggy light to the sound of Tomi’s crying. Kaytlin and Felisha weren’t there. She stripped off Tomi’s diaper and took him outside to wash him – and herself – in the sasena paddies. That cheered him up; he cooed and kicked his feet in the water.

  “Water baby,” Jillian told him again. She had nothing to dry him with but her shawl, nothing to put on him but the same diaper. Thank Concord for smart diapers!

  She had nothing to feed him, either. Remembering Kaytlin’s suggestion, she stripped the tenderest blades off several stalks of sasena and chewed them. The pulp didn’t taste of anything much; at least it wasn’t bitter. She transferred the juice from her mouth to Tomi’s. “This is a very messy way to eat, kid,” she told him.

  Tomi waved his hands and managed to smear sasena pulp all over his face. “Now look at you!” But he seemed contented with the unorthodox “feeding.” She’d have to find something better today.

  “Do you have to make so much noise?” Kaytlin was back, and Jillian hadn’t even heard her splashing through the paddy.

  “Why, what’s the matter?”

  “Shhh! Something moving. Across the river. Big.”

  “A greatcat?” The animals were almost extinct.

  “Worse. I think it’s a man. Come and see.”

  Half-concealed behind an empty trolley, Jillian squinted across the river at the regular movements shaking the tall grass on the other side. The sun rose a little higher; the morning mist burned off and she could see clearly. Her heart leapt. But she stood up slowly, feeling the stiffness in her joints.

  “Get down! D’you want him to see you?”

  A tall man, with shaggy blond hair, pacing through the sasena paddies and looking about him with every step. She’d know that stride anywhere. “Yes,” Jillian said. “Yes, I do.” She cupped hands around her mouth, forgetting all her defeated musings about his deserving somebody better. “Ruven! It’s me, I’m here!”

  He stopped, looked from side to side.

  “Across the river, Ruven!” Jillian stepped into the open and waved her arms. Kaytlin tried to drag her back behind the trolley and Jillian shook her off. “Here I am, Ruven!”

  The river was too broad, here, to make conversation easy. With a great deal of waving and gesturing, Jillian conveyed that there was a bridge not too far upstream and that the
y would go there now.

  “At any rate,” Kaytlin said, somewhat sourly, “if you haven’t brought the bandits down on us with all your jumping up and down and shouting, they probably are all dead.”

  Splashing through sasena paddies was easy, this morning, what with anticipating the bridge ahead and looking across the river, every second step, to make sure Ruven was keeping pace with them. If it hadn’t been for his appearance, Jillian would have found the deserted factory too gloomy for comfort. The paddies full of unharvested sasena seemed to stretch on forever, half of them with breached walls that let the water back into the river and left the sasena as a tangle of dry, dead grasses. Rusting trolleys and harvesters dotted the fields. Empty warehouses and processing houses were repeated every few miles.

  “There must have been a lot of people working here. Where did they all go?” Jillian asked.

  Kaytlin shrugged. “You can’t eat sasena, and once they ran out of fuel to run the processors, they wouldn’t even have had extract or choof to sell – assuming they could find a customer. Most food collectives will have had enough trouble feeding their own people. We wouldn’t have made it through the winter if we hadn’t had sheep and goats to slaughter and trade. So… I suppose they died, or left, over the winter.”

  The bridge, when it finally came in view, was a severe disappointment to Jillian. It looked as though it had never been more than a temporary expedient, a narrow track arcing across the water on slender supports. And after the heavy rains of last fall and a winter’s neglect, it was barely usable. On their side of the river, the water was choked with dead trees jammed against the supports; close to the other side three supports in a row had been knocked loose, and that part of the bridge hung down in a loop that swayed sickeningly over the water.

  Jillian stared at it in hopeless frustration that turned to panic when Ruven attempted the far side of the bridge. The one remaining support on that side shook and the loop beyond it swayed even worse than before. She cupped her hands again.

  “Ruven, wait! We’ll come to you!”

  “Are you nuts?” Kaytlin demanded.

  Jillian turned on her. “What’s on this side? Beyond the sasena farm?”

  Kaytlin shook her head. “Forest again. And upstream of that… I don’t know.”

  “And as you said, we can’t eat sasena.” Jillian pointed across the river. “That side has my man, and whatever’s left of your cooperative. I’m going to him. You girls can do whatever you want.”

  The first part of the bridge wasn’t too bad. Dead branches reached over the railings and clutched at her skirts, but the span under her feet was steady. The trouble began where the bridge began its unsupported arc down to swing loose over the water.

  Jillian glanced down once at the rushing water and did not look again. Fastening Tomi in front of her with the remains of the shawl wrapped twice around them both and knotted firmly, she kilted up her skirts and got down on hands and knees.

  As soon as she rested one hand on the swaying arc beyond the last support, Tomi began screaming and thrashing.

  “That’s no way for a water baby to carry on,” Jillian scolded him. “Do you want to make me lose my balance?” She inched forward and set a second hand on the beginnings of the loop. Tomi began flinging himself back and forth until Jillian was afraid he would wriggle free of the shawl.

  “All right, you horrible child. We’ll do it your way.” As soon as she stood up Tomi relaxed.

  There were railings. It should, in theory, be perfectly possible to walk the slack loop in safety. She just had to remember not to look down at the water. Not to think about the water. Just to put her feet down one after the other, slow and gentle, with hands out at her sides for balance, and if she did fall, she only had to grab hold of the railing… until she reached the lowest portion of the loop, where the safety railings had been washed away altogether. She couldn’t stop and think, or the trembling of the bridge would get into her legs. Step, another step, and she kept her eyes fixed on Ruven. Now there were railings again. And now she had reached the far side and the one surviving support there, and the bridge was almost solid beneath her feet.

  Ruven reached up for her, swung her down from the bridge and gathered her into his arms. “Woman, I died ten times in the last five minutes. Did you have to play acrobat like that?”

  “Tomi – didn’t like it – when I tried to crawl.” Jillian half turned to give the baby room to breathe, and relaxed against Ruven’s shoulder.

  “And now those two!” Ruven shaded his eyes and peered over Jillian’s head. She turned and saw Felisha running over the swaying loop, with Kaytlin behind her.

  Felisha arrived in a sliding heap, giggling. “That was fun!”

  “Weren’t you afraid?”

  “Not after you showed us how easy it was!” Kaytlin, out of breath, joined them.

  Jillian looked up at Ruven. Their eyes met in a moment of perfect understanding. Kids.

  ***

  Kaytlin and Felisha slowed as they reached the outer sheds belonging to the wool cooperative, letting Ruven and Jillian take the lead. “You two can wait for us here,” Jillian suggested, pointing out a shady place near the path.

  Kaytlin shook her head. “We need to know.”

  Felisha had the middle two fingers of one hand in her mouth. She nodded.

  “All right.” They had to search the cooperative; she and Ruven had escaped their captors with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They desperately needed food for themselves and something she could mash up for Tomi. And Jillian was willing to take anything else the bandits might have left that could be useful: a cooking pan, a change of clothes, anything.

  The first shed they came to wasn’t really a shed; only a foundation with a few planks of wood left. Where the next one should have stood there was nothing but a large heap of ashes.

  “I hope they didn’t burn anything more,” Jillian said. She glanced at the girls, longing to ask if they remembered.

  Felisha kept sucking her fingers, but Kaytlin said, “That’s funny… I don’t remember anything burning. They just appeared in the night, killed everybody and dragged us off.”

  “Us and a couple of sheep,” Felisha said, and stuck her fingers back in her mouth.

  The main buildings of the coop were undamaged. “Living quarters,” Kaytlin said, nodding at one. “Shearing shed.” She named the other buildings by their purposes, absently, looking around her as she spoke. “Felisha, something’s wrong here.”

  Jillian tensed. She saw Ruven, out of the corner of her eye, suddenly watchful.

  Felisha nodded.

  “What happened to the bodies?”

  “Could you have been mistaken?” Jillian asked. “Maybe they didn’t kill everybody.”

  “I saw them – Felisha, why don’t you see if there’s any feed left?”

  After the younger girl was out of earshot, Kaytlin said, “I saw her father cut down right by this water trough. His head was almost off. And they cut Gran in half. The last I ever saw of this place was a heap of bodies, and none of them looked like they were about to get up and walk away.”

  “Someone has to have buried them. Or – ” Jillian remembered the burned shed. Had it been a funeral pyre?

  Kaytlin nodded as if she could read Jillian’s mind. “Or burned them.”

  Ruven moved closer to Jillian as they turned towards the living quarters. “The logical answer is that the survivors cleaned up here. But if it was survivors, why aren’t they coming to greet us? They should be happy that we’ve brought two of their girls back.”

  “Maybe they left afterwards.”

  “Or maybe somebody else has moved in. Don’t go into any buildings until I’ve checked them out, and keep your eyes open.”

  Kaytlin and Felisha went into the living quarters, holding hands and ignoring Ruven’s demand that they let him search the place first. He ran to catch up with them, leaving Jillian standing in the open yard with Tomi. She watched the spaces
between buildings. Was that a flicker of movement? Or just something caught in the intermittent breeze?

  There was an anguished wail behind her. Jillian jumped, startled Tomi into resuming his own tired grizzling, and found herself looking down at a bundle of greyish-white hair. With horns. Very long, backwards-curving, spiral horns. As she watched, the end with the horns opened up and wailed again.

  “Oh, Afsana, clever one!” Felisha rushed from the house and knelt, putting her arms round the animal’s neck. “Did you run away and hide, then? Ma told me to, but I was… too slow…” She buried her face in the long hair and wept quietly.

  “That’s your problem solved, anyway.” Kaytlin had come out more slowly.

  “What?”

  “Milk. For Tomi.”

  Jillian frowned. “But that can’t be a milk goat. He has horns!”

  Felisha’s sobs changed to watery laughter. “Oh, Jillian, you are funny! All Afguernseys have horns!”

  The two girls together regained their spirits with this chance to educate Jillian. They talked so fast, and talked over each other so much, that Jillian’s head was soon abuzz with strange phrases. Guernsey cross – milk yield – grass or grain –

  “The best thing about Afsana and her sisters,” Felisha finished, “is that she’ll eat anything!”

  Kaytlin wrinkled her nose. “Don’t remind me. I can still taste the milk from that time they got into the wild garlic!”

  She wandered around the yard, ducking in and out of various buildings, and came back with a pail, a low stool, and a length of rope. “Look, everything we need!”

  Jillian could deduce the need for the pail and stool, but what was the rope for?

  “You’re going to hold her head to keep her in place,” Kaytlin explained, expertly looping the rope around the goat’s neck. “Afsana has this habit of trying to dance off while she’s being milked. Don’t worry,” she assured Jillian, “Afguernseys are the sweetest goats in the world. See, she’s already trying to make friends with you!”

  Jillian extracted one end of her shawl from the goat’s mouth. She supposed being covered in goat slobber didn’t make the rag much worse than it was before, but she wouldn’t have classified an attempt to eat her clothes as a friendly act, exactly.