Pools of Yarah

by J Gurley

  “Tsehaaji,” he said.

  “A rock canyon,” Two Clouds translated. “Surely this was a place of power of the Ancients,” he whispered.

  Hramack could only agree. He surveyed the area. One of the standing stones near them bore carvings. Hramack traced the words with his finger, wiping the dirt from the grooves. Well-weathered and chipped in places, he could still read them.

  “Royal Gorge Bridge. Built 1929,” he read. “Yes, Gorge. That is a fitting name for this place.” The bridge, of course, had long ago fallen into the gorge, leaving only stone and twisted pieces of metal as reminders that man had ever been there. They walked along the edge of the gorge. As the sun began to creep over the horizon, casting an orange pall around them, they could see the steep granite walls plunging to a dry riverbed below.

  “It must be well over three hundred meters to the bottom,” Hramack exclaimed. “I can see two lines of metal running beside the river. They look like the rails for a train.” He was as excited as a child. He had seen such things in books, but to think that man had once been able to build rails in such difficult places was almost like magic. And the bridge. It put the small bridge over their canyon to shame. Two Clouds called out to him. He was standing beside another twisted piece of metal.

  “Look,” he said, pointing to a few words visible through the rust.

  It was a sign. It read, “Denver … 115 kilometers”

  Denver. He knew from history that Denver Dome was located south and east of the old site of the ancient city of Denver. It lay only a tantalizing 4-5 days distant, but the ruins were not their destination. He looked around. According to the old map his father had found, Pueblo had been located nearby. He saw the ruins of a building perched on the cliff opposite them, and twin rails of steel were still visible along the cliff on which they stood. Perhaps one of these railways led to Pueblo. He could simply follow the rails to see the ruins of an ancient city.

  A rustle in the brush behind them jolted him out of his daydream.

  Two Clouds pulled his bow and crept closer. Suddenly, a large deer leapt from the brush and almost landed on top of him. His arrow flew wild. Hramack just stood and stared at the magnificent, startled beast. Two long, spiraling horns rose from its skull and ended in sharp points. The deer stood and stared back at Hramack before resuming its journey. Stone Thrower had better presence of mind and let fly a large rock from his leather sling. True to his name, his throw hit the mark, and the deer fell dead at Hramack’s feet.

  “Aai! Aai! Aai! Aai! Aai!” Stone Thrower yelled as he danced with glee around the fallen animal. “One throw, and look, more meat than we can carry.”

  Hramack realized Stone Thrower was right. The sun was now well above the horizon. Loaded down by the weight of the deer, they would be hours on the return journey, and the smell would attract predators and scavengers from kilometers away.

  “We must butcher the beast here and take only the best meat and the hide. It is too large a burden to bear in the heat of the day.”

  “But the horns . . .” Stone Thrower protested.

  Two Clouds quieted him. “Hramack is right. The sun is climbing high in the morning sky. We must hurry.” He pointed to a carrion bird already beginning to circle above them. “See! Any Marauders about will know exactly where to find us. We must hurry.”

  They set about quickly removing the deer’s hide to repair boots or britches and taking the choice of meat, the heart, and the liver. Reluctantly, they left the remains for the scavengers, first dismembering the carcass to look like scavengers had done it in case Marauders should stumble upon it.

  “Look.” Stone Thrower pointed to a sign twenty meters below them on a ledge of the gorge. “What does it say?”

  Hramack stared down at it, but could not read the faded writing. “I don’t know.”

  “I bet it is important,” Stone Thrower said as he unrolled a thin rope he wore coiled around his waist.

  “We don’t have time to waste,” Two Clouds protested. “Besides, it is too dangerous.”

  “For you, perhaps,” Stone Thrower chided. He securely attached the rope around an outcropping of rock and dropped nimbly over the side of the cliff.

  Hramack watched in awe as he slid down the rope using hands and feet to slow his descent. He reached the ledge and tried to pull the sign from the tumble of rocks that held it in place, but it was wedged too tightly.

  “Come back up,” Hramack warned him. “You can’t move it.”

  Stone Thrower dismissed Hramack with a wave and let out a loud ‘whoop’. It echoed off the walls – ‘whoop-ooop-oop’. Pleased with his new discovery, Stone Thrower called out several times and laughed at the echo.

  Two Clouds looked at Hramack in mock disgust. “He is like a child with a new toy. We’ll never get him back up.”

  Hramack listened to Two Clouds with one ear. His other heard a strange, new sound coming from farther down the gorge – like the whistling of the wind. It sent shivers up his spine.

  “Stone Thrower,” he called again. “Come up. Now!”

  Stone Thrower, too, had heard the strange sound. He looked up the canyon, toward the sunrise. “I see something,” he yelled up at them.

  Dust. Hramack knew then that it was an approaching dust storm causing the whistling sound. The haboob roared down the gorge like a flash flood. There was no time for Stone Thrower to ascend the rope.

  “Hold on tightly,” he called down, and saw Stone Thrower wrap his arms and legs around the sign’s metal support. He turned to Two Clouds. “We must find shelter, too.”

  Already, the steady roar filled the gorge. He looked around and saw a metal ring embedded in the stone pillar. He pulled on it experimentally and judged it sound. He grabbed Two Clouds by the shoulder and pulled him to the ring. Grabbing the metal ring tightly with both hands, he yelled in Two Clouds’ ear.

  “Grab me around the waist.”

  The wind now swept down the gorge like a hurricane. Luckily, only the fringes reached above the lip of the gorge. Even so, Hramack fought to retain his fragile grasp on the ring and that of Two Clouds on him. Almost as quickly as it appeared, the wind was gone. Hramack wondered if it repeated this ritual each day as the rising sun heated the cooler air of the gorge. They hurried to the gorge’s edge and looked to see how Stone Thrower had fared. He was not there. The wind had scoured the ledge clean but for the boulders and the metal sign still wedged within them.

  “Stone Thrower,” Two Clouds yelled uselessly into the depths, but Hramack touched his shoulder to silence him. Stone Thrower was gone, taken by the wind.

  They stood for a few minutes as Two Clouds offered prayers for his friend. He withdrew a pinch of white cornmeal from a leather pouch around his waist and sprinkled it into the gorge. A moment later, the gorge sighed. Hramack thought it was just a gust of wind blowing through the gorge, but Two Clouds smiled and said, “Masau accepts Stone Thrower’s spirit to the underworld.”

  Hramack silently asked Yarah to accept his new companion’s soul as well. Then, in silence, they gathered their supplies, Stone Thrower’s deer, and left.

  Upon their return to camp, a great feast was in progress. The other hunting party had also been successful. They had come upon a Bighorn sheep on a small hillock of boulders. It was now roasting over the fire. Kena had seasoned it with herbs he had gathered. Two Clouds and Hramack delivered their meat.

  Grey Eagle looked at them, and then searched in the direction from which they had come, instantly alert that something was amiss. “Where is Stone Thrower?”

  “Dead,” Two Clouds replied, “taken by a foul wind.” In silence, he sat down and began to slice their meat into thin strips to dry over the fire.

  Hramack described Stone Thrower’s death in the gorge to the others. The lively feast quickly became a wake as others joined in with tales of Stone Thrower’s deeds. His death was a great loss to the tiny band of explorers. In a harsh life fraught with dangers, death was never welcome, but they understood it
. Hramack wondered how the people of Ningcha would handle death. Few of their number died except from old age and more rarely from disease. Death was a relative stranger to them. That might soon change if their journey were not successful.

  Hramack had never witnessed death until this journey. His mother, Allana had been the last death in the village, until Ethan’s murder. Now, he had seen more deaths than he had his entire village in the last twenty years. It was a harsh world the Scattered Ones had left them.

  Satiated by their meal and fortified by swigs of beer from a flask

  one companion had brought along, they sat back to rest before their return to the inky darkness of the underground river. Hramack told Kena of the gorge and the sign pointing towards Denver.

  “115 Kilometers,” Kena mused. “If we push ourselves, we could be near Denver Dome in four days.” He listened as Hramack described in detail the gorge and the wonders he had seen there. “Perhaps we should explore. You saw a lot of steel, you say. That could be very useful.”

  Two Clouds walked by and overheard. “We do not have the time, my friend. Every day is precious to us and to our villages. Perhaps later we can visit this place and salvage the steel. I would like to catch a few of those whitetail deer to bring to my people. If we could breed them, they would provide much meat. They seem to be able to graze in much wilder country than our cattle or sheep.” He lowered his gaze. “And too, I would like to look for Stone Thrower’s bones to return to Pueblo Nuevo for the death rites.”

  Reluctantly, Kena agreed with Two Cloud’s assessment. The sun was already past its zenith. Though not wasted, this day had brought them no closer to their journey’s end. The party gathered their supplies and re-entered the daunting darkness of the cavern.

  This time, though, Kena produced two lanterns from his pack and their brilliant, white light held the darkness further at bay than the torches. He confessed to Hramack that he did not know how much longer the batteries would last, but weighed the psychological benefits against saving them for later use.

  This time the men spoke, joked, and laughed with one another. Even Grey Eagle seemed more at ease. Their bellies were full, and the soothing effects of the beer had not yet worn off.

  “They act as if Stone Thrower’s death means nothing,” Hramack complained.

  “Do not be bitter. They see more death than we do in their fight with the Marauders. Because they do not mourn and wear black or sing of his death does not mean they have forgotten. This journey is dangerous and it is not good to dwell too much on death. It could come to any of us at any moment. When they have returned, I’m sure Stone Thrower will be remembered, as they did Little Otter.”

  His father was right, of course. Dwelling on death only darkened the heart. They would certainly face many dangers in the days to come. Little Otter had been the first man Hramack had seen die. He imagined there would be many ‘firsts’ for him on this journey. Attaining adulthood, he was learning, was more than learning the proper way of repairing the windmill or cleaning a solar panel or even healing a fever. Things happened that could change or harden a man’s heart if he allowed it. Perhaps this was what had happened to Chu Li. He did not think he could ever be sorry for the High Priest, but now he at least understood the penalty a man pays for losing heart.

  A week earlier, he had been concerned only for his father. Now, he and his father were betting their lives and the lives of these newfound friends that they could find the source of the water and return it to Ningcha. It sounded like an impossible task, like reaching for the moon. If they found the water, what could they do? What if a mountain had fallen in its path? Could they dig it out?

  Like many other things his father said, Hramack was learning one moved forward with the willingness and trust in Yarah to provide the means. He looked at the men in the line. They had placed their trust in him and in Kena, who were strangers to them. He would not let them down.

  The group fell silent as the familiar rhythm of the march settled in. For kilometer after kilometer, they trudged on. By Kena’s observation, they were now deep under one of the great mountains to the north. Hramack tried not to think about the thousands of meters and many tons of rock above them.

  “The mountains above us are part of the Sangre de Cristos Range, the Blood of Christ, a name derived from their red color seen at dusk,” Kena said. “I read that somewhere. Denver Dome lies just beyond them to the east.” His voice held a wistful catch at missing the opportunity to visit Denver Dome.

  For three more days, they trudged onward. They consumed the last of the smoked meat. Only bread and dried fruit remained, light fare for marching day after day. Water, too, was running low. The tunnel had become straighter and its walls smoother as they continued northward. The tunnel was now rectangular with smoothly curving corners. It was obvious the hands of man had formed at least this part of the river tunnel system. They were finally nearing their goal.

  19

  Precious Water at Last

  Since midnight, Cathi Lorst and Kal Anderson had travel northwest along the floor of a broad valley. The windswept, hardpacked earth made easier travelling than the broken lands they had been crossing, yet after seven days of walking with little water and almost no rest, each step was a chore, each kilometer an eternity. The sun was just peeking over the sharp edges of the valley wall and already the heat seared her skin. Their supplies were exhausted. The overworked portable water generator finally had failed the day before. They had devoured the last morsels of the two lizards Anderson had snared two days earlier. They were both weak from hunger and thirst.

  The previous day she had spied snow on several of the nearby peaks through her field glasses. Even if there was water there, she was certain neither of them had the strength to climb a mountain to find it. She observed with a growing sense of inexorable gloom that no water had rushed down the parched valley floor in many years, and it seemed likely none would in the foreseeable future. They could survive several days longer without nourishment, but they must find water soon or die.

  The full disk of the sun broke over the valley rim and fell upon them with all its fury, but they could not stop, for stopping would mean their deaths. Only her stubborn determination not to lose another crewmember lent her strength to place one bone-tired foot in front of the other, a single agonizing step at a time. She thought about unzipping her suffocating flight suit to cool off, but it was her only protection against the sun’s brutal rays. Her blisters had long ago broken open and drained, leaving bloody sores that chafed with each step. The pack on her back weighed heavily on her. It now contained so few useful items that she wondered why she bothered carrying it. Perhaps it was because it was one of the few things still tying her to her past aboard the Long John Baldry.

  She knew Anderson was still with her only by the occasional slow scuffle of his feet on stone, as he plodded along wearily a few paces behind her. She did not have strength to spare to turn and look at him to judge his condition, but she knew it was no better than hers. Her decision to try to reach Denver Dome would kill them both. She felt a momentary twinge of guilt at letting Captain Moore down. She had lost a ship and three good men, friends all. She hoped he would be able to find a better First Officer than she had proven to be to replace her.

  She failed to recognize it at first. The days of squinting through blistered lids had narrowed her field of vision. Centuries of weather had taken its toll on it. Slides of rock and dirt had covered most of it. If she had not looked up at precisely the moment she had trudged up a small hillock of sand, she would have missed it entirely. Yet, there it was, a huge, manmade excavation carved into the side of the valley. Barely visible inside the gargantuan opening was an expansive metal building.

  “Ha,” she cried through cracked lips as she began to trot towards it. Scrambling over loose rock and earth, unheeding of the scrapes and bruises as she repeatedly fell, she tottered up to the building’s side. There were no markings or signs. Exposure to centuries of weather
had scoured and gouged the metal sides clean. Rocks dislodged from the cavern’s roof lay in piles along the building’s boundary. It had no windows. A door six meters high and eighteen meters wide was set into the building’s massive front. The building fit snuggly into its niche with only a little open space along one side now filled with unrecognizable rusting equipment and piles of debris. She frantically examined the building and the door for some way to gain entrance. On a small panel near the right-hand side of the door, she found an indentation for an electronic key or pass card clogged with dust and dirt baked to a cement finish. She traced the edges of the panel surrounding the slot with her fingers. She tried prying it open, first with her fingers, then with her knife, but it was no good. The fit was too tight and her hands too unsteady.

  Anderson came up beside her and watched her fruitless efforts for a few minutes. In a fit of frustration and rage, he picked up a large rock and began to pound on the panel. To her astonishment, the panel popped open. Inside was a lever with two positions, ostensibly open and closed. She pulled down on the rust-covered manual override lever, but it would not budge. The rust had frozen it in place. With all her strength, she tugged on the lever again. Still nothing. So close, she moaned, choking back a sob.

  Anderson fell to the ground, too exhausted and weak to help. She beat at the lever mindlessly with her fist until her pounding dislodged a large flake of rust below it , revealing a second, smaller access panel. Using the tip of the blade of her knife, she forced the panel open. Inside, she found a crystalline wafer dotted with tiny ceramic diodes and resistors. Solid-state circuit boards blended so seamlessly with the crystal matrix they appeared to have been manufactured as one unit. An empty slot beside the wafer had once held the power cell controlling the door. She grabbed the damaged laser, which Anderson had been unable to repair, from her backpack. Feverishly, she fumbled at the clips holding the damaged laser’s power cell in place, dropping the laser in her haste.