by Mark Dame
Big, heavy bootprints crossing the creek. The orcs had passed back this way sometime during the night.
Flyn shivered and not from the chilly morning air.
“Look,” he said to Kel, pointing at the prints.
Kel gasped and clamped his hand tightly over his mouth, like he was holding in a scream.
“They’re going the same way we are. What do we do?” Kel’s voice was barely louder than a whisper behind his hand.
“I think they’re just going back to where they came from. They’re moving a lot faster than us, so I don’t think we have to worry about them, but we should be extra careful.”
They set off at a slower pace than Flyn would have liked, just to make sure they didn’t accidentally run into the orcs. As the morning drew on, the trail continued to climb higher and closer to the mountain slopes until it emerged from the forest completely. Walking between the massive trees on the right and the steep stone walls on the left, Flyn felt like they were traveling through a deep gulley. The trail twisted and turned along the cliffs and slopes, preventing them from seeing more than twenty or thirty yards ahead. Which of course meant nothing could see them beyond that distance either, but it slowed their pace as they had to stop and peer around every corner before moving on.
Around midday, the path turned toward the mountains and into a crevice in the cliff towering over them.
“Now what?” Kel asked. “We can’t follow the path into the mountains.”
“We don’t really have a choice. We know there’s no villages back the way we came.”
“We don’t know if there’s anything that way either,” Kel said, waving toward the mountains. “Besides, the path may lead to a village the other way, past where we found it.”
“Those orcs went into the mountains,” Flyn said, pointing to the large footprints leading into the fissure in the cliff. “And they were talking about humans, so there must be humans that way somewhere. We have no idea what’s in the other direction.”
“Okay,” Kel said, finally giving in. “But let’s at least eat first.”
“We better cook everything. We don’t know if we’ll be able to find wood once we get into the mountains.”
As before, they moved off the path to build their fire. The slower pace throughout the morning had given them a good chance to look for more squirrels. They had even caught a rabbit, much to Kel’s delight, and found some blackberries.
They ate the rabbit and cut the meat off the squirrel. While they were eating, they dried out some of the pelts over the fire and used them to wrap up the cooked squirrel meat. With their food packed and waterskins filled, they returned to the cleft in the cliff.
The crevice was narrow, only about two to three feet wide in most places. The cliffs on either side were too tall to see the tops. The ground, although relatively flat, was littered with pebbles and small stones that they would occasionally kick. The sound of the skittering rocks bounced off rock walls, echoing away into the distance. Every time, Flyn would freeze, listening for some reaction. Surely the orcs must hear them coming.
But no reaction ever came and they would move on. At least the flat ground made walking easier than it had been in the forest.
Ahead of them, the path was mostly straight, with only a few small turns.
While the traveling was easier, Flyn was more nervous than ever. If the orcs showed up in front of them, they had no place to hide, and he was sure the orcs could outrun them. To be on the safe side, Flyn kept their pace slow and his eyes focused on the gloom ahead, looking for any movement. He strained his ears for any small sound of the orcs.
The orcs weren’t the only thing bothering Flyn. The closeness in the crevice made him uncomfortable. The immense walls rose on either side until they seemed to almost meet high above their heads. Only a small slit of blue told him they weren’t in a cave. But even that didn’t help. The narrowness of the opening gave the feeling that the walls were closing in on them, ready to tumble down at any moment.
“It’s just in your head,” Flyn whispered to himself.
“Flyn?” Kel sounded as uncomfortable as Flyn.
“Nothing. Everything’s fine,” Flyn whispered back. He didn’t dare turn to look at his friend, to let Kel see the fear in his own face. He had to stay strong for both of them, even though he didn’t feel it.
The floor of the crevice rose slightly as they moved deeper into the mountains, but not enough to overcome the cliffs. After about an hour or so—it was hard to tell with no reference to the sun—the path came to an end, surrounded on three sides by the cliff walls.
“Now what?” Kel asked.
Flyn looked around for an opening in the cliffs, but couldn’t find anything.
“Where did the orcs go?” Kel’s voice edged on panic.
“I don’t know, but be quiet,” Flyn whispered.
“Did they climb the cliffs?” Kel asked, quieter this time.
Flyn just shook his head. He had no idea. They stood quietly for several minutes, listening and scanning the cliffs.
Then he heard the clicking of a falling pebble.
“Flyn? Where—”
“Sh!” Flyn whispered, putting his hand up. He turned his head to one side, trying to listen for the faintest sound.
“There,” he whispered. “Did you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“Voices. Up above us somewhere.”
The echo chamber created by the sheer rock walls carried the sound of deep voices from somewhere way above them. Although he couldn’t make out the words, he was sure they were voices of the orcs.
Flyn looked up, trying to find the source.
“How did they get up there?” Kel was looking up too.
“There.” Flyn pointed to what looked like a crack in the right cliff face. They hurried over and discovered it was actually a rough staircase cut into the rock. In the dim light, they had almost overlooked it.
Flyn followed the steps with his eyes, looking for the orcs. Far above them, near the top of the cliff, he saw them: four tiny figures, almost like bugs from this distance.
“How could they not have seen us?” Kel asked, his voice barely above a whisper.
“More of that luck we’ve been having, I guess. Come on.”
Flyn pulled Kel back farther into the crevice where they would be at the orcs’ backs, and against the cliff wall so they couldn’t see the orcs anymore.
“We can wait here for a while before we climb up.” He pulled off his pack and sat down.
“And then what?” Kel stayed standing, glancing between Flyn and the top of the cliff.
“And then we keep going. What choice do we have?”
“Why did I agree to go with you on that stupid boat in the first place?”
Kel sat down in a huff and refused to say anymore. Flyn shrugged and pulled an orange out of his pack. He only had a few more left, but they wouldn’t last as long as some of the other food. Kel eventually decided to eat too.
Flyn listened to the distant voices of the orcs. He supposed it was a good thing they were so loud. Otherwise they might have heard him and Kel earlier. But he was still surprised the orcs hadn’t seen them walking through the narrow ravine. After all, other than being narrow, the path was completely open with nothing to hide anyone walking through.
Not having an answer to that, he turned his thoughts to the bigger problem. They had no idea how long they would have to follow the road before finding a village. They had brought enough food for a week, assuming that they would catch fish for lunch and dinner. At the rate they were eating, the meat they had in their packs would only last them a few more days. Unless they found another food source in the mountains, they would need to cut back on how much they ate. Which would mean they probably wouldn’t have enough energy to maintain a very fast pace. Still, if they were careful, they might stretch their supplies to five or six days. After that, they would be in trouble.
He decided to wait to discuss it with K
el. He was frazzled enough. Better to let him relax before throwing another problem on him.
The orcs’ voices faded away as Flyn and Kel ate their short meal. When they were finished, Flyn crept to the stairs to look, but as far as he could tell, they were gone. He beckoned to Kel to follow him.
“Maybe we should wait a little longer,” Kel said. “So we don’t run into those orcs at the top.”
“It’ll take us over an hour to climb to up there. They’ll be long gone by the time we get there. Let’s go.”
Flyn started climbing. He didn’t bother to look back. He wanted to focus on the steps. They were uneven, many of them broken and crumbling away. The stairs were wide enough, almost four feet, but he didn’t want to take any chances on falling. Kel would follow him, even if he didn’t want to.
The climb took longer than Flyn had guessed, nearly an hour and a half. They both stumbled several times, but managed to catch themselves before they could fall. The steps were in worse condition the higher they got. In many places, the steps had eroded away completely, leaving a steep, gravel slope. In other places, small pieces of rock broke off as they stepped on them.
The steps must be ancient, Flyn thought, carved hundreds of years ago. He wondered who had built them and why. Certainly, to put so much work into it, the path must lead somewhere, though he had to admit to himself, as old as these stairs were, that wherever they led could have been destroyed or abandoned long ago.
As they climbed, they discovered why the orcs hadn’t seen them far below in the crevice. With the bright sun above, the bottom was shrouded in complete darkness. If not for the noise, an entire army could march up the crevice path, and someone near the top of the stairs would never know. While that was a comforting thought regarding their trek through the mountain fissure, knowing that there could be someone down there looking up at them and they would never see them was quite the opposite.
They hurried as fast as they dared up the final couple hundred feet, staying as close to the wall and as far from the drop-off as they could. By the time they reached the end of the stairs, they were both sweating and panting. Flyn staggered a few feet from the cliff and sat down, his back to a large boulder. Kel struggled over and collapsed next to him.
They examined their surroundings as they rested and caught their breath. The stairs had emerged only a few dozen feet from the top of the cliff. Looking down, Flyn saw where they had been standing hours earlier looking up. At the top of the stairs, the path continued, turning back along the top of the ravine and heading farther into the mountains. It appeared to be climbing to a low point between two peaks many leagues away.
The outcropping they were sitting on was only about twenty feet wide and maybe fifty feet long. The east and south sides dropped off into cliffs, the north side rose up in a steep slope that climbed up and away to the peaks farther north. The path, leading west, was the only way to go.
To the east lay the forest they had been traveling through. It ran north and south as far as they could see. Beyond the forest, the ocean with its deep blue water stretched to the hazy horizon. Flyn thought he could almost see the whitecaps on the waves.
Somewhere across that vast, blue expanse was home.
Chapter 4
Seeing the ocean, and having thoughts of home, made Flyn more anxious than ever to find help. Kel, already uneasy with their predicament, became more dejected with the news about their limited rations. Flyn tried to reassure him that they would find a village or town long before they ran out of food, but Kel knew better.
Homesick and despondent, they set off again, following the path up into the mountains. It wandered left and right as it climbed the slopes, avoiding the steeper, less passable areas. Even so, the trek was not an easy one. Some areas had been washed out from decades, if not centuries of weathering, leaving only a slight rut, overgrown with scrub grasses and weeds, to indicate its presence. In other places, the path ran along the top of steep cliffs or large fissures so deep that falling pebbles never seemed to hit the bottom. In spite of the rough going, Flyn was sure that following the ancient path was their best chance of finding help.
Flyn led the way, setting a quick but steady pace. He wanted to make it through the mountain pass before their food supply was exhausted. They found very little vegetation along their path, and nothing that looked edible. The only animal life seemed to be birds, soaring high above them on the mountain winds—larger than any they yet had seen since arriving on the strange island. If there was anything they could hunt to eat, it was well hidden.
The first part of the trek was warm and bright. With thoughts of running out of food motivating them, they made good time over the rough terrain. The end of the first day found them camping at the entrance to the mountain pass, tired and discouraged.
The next morning, they awoke to low-lying clouds that shrouded the mountain peaks above them. The chill, damp air cut through their warm-weather clothing, leaving them cold and miserable. With no wood to build a fire, they had no choice but to move on, hoping the hike through the mountains would warm them. By midday, the clouds opened and dumped a steady, drenching rain on them that lasted for the rest of the day and into the night.
The mountain pass provided no shelter to escape the constant downpour, so they decided to keep walking through the night. At least the path was much easier going than the climb up to the pass. There were no cliffs to fall off, just large boulders to navigate around and loose rock under their feet that made their footing unsteady.
But the rain brought a new hazard. Water running off the slopes on either side gathered in the ravine and flowed down along their path. What started as a simple annoyance, soaking their shoes and making their footing less sure, soon became a hazard. Small debris rushed down the growing stream, banging into their ankles and threatening to knock them off their feet. Throughout the night, the stream grew deeper and stronger, driving them up the steep slopes to avoid being washed away. By the dawn of their third day in the mountains, they were exhausted to the point of collapse.
They sat down to rest and eat the last of their fruit and a few bites of meat, too tired to be very hungry, and too wet to want to eat. Neither spoke as they ate. Even Flyn was beginning to feel they had made the wrong choice in coming into the mountains. In hindsight, if they had known the reality of their situation on that first morning on the beach, he would have suggested following the coast instead. Flyn was thankful that Kel wasn’t pointing that out to him, though from the look on his friend’s face, Kel must have been thinking it.
As the morning light grew from dark gray to light gray, they were able see their surroundings for the first time since nightfall. The valley was wider now. The slopes weren’t as steep, and the flat bottom, though still flooded with runoff, was much broader than what they had traveled through the previous day. Although they couldn’t see very far with the rain and fog, it seemed to open even more to the west. Maybe that meant the pass was coming to an end and they would be out of the mountains soon.
“Look,” Kel said.
Wiping the rain from his eyes, Flyn looked to where Kel was pointing.
Across the narrow valley, twenty or thirty feet up from the flooded bottom, was the dark opening of a cave.
Flyn smiled and clapped Kel on the back. A cave would make a fine place to get out of the deluge and catch a few hours of sleep.
With great effort, they helped each other to their feet and worked their way across the rushing flood waters. They found the water wasn’t very deep, only a few inches, and so using their spears as walking sticks to steady themselves, they managed to negotiate their way across and scramble up to the cave.
Once inside, both men collapsed on the floor, relieved to be out of the rain. For several minutes they just sat, looking out from the opening of their refuge at the dreary storm.
“It would be nice if we had some wood to start a fire,” Kel said after a bit. They were both chilled to the bone. Flyn too would have welcomed a fire to warm
up by.
With no chance for a fire, and having been awake for a whole day struggling through the mountains, they resigned to sleep. They stripped off their wet clothes and hung them from small outcroppings on the cave wall, not really expecting them to dry. Their bedrolls, fortunately, were still somewhat dry, though everything in their packs was a little damp from the moist air.
Even lying on the rock floor of the cave, both weary travelers were asleep within minutes.
It was dusk when Flyn awoke. Outside, the rain had stopped, though he could still hear water running down the slopes and into the stream in the ravine. The fog had thickened as well. He could only see a few feet beyond the mouth of the cave. Next to him, Kel was still asleep, snoring softly.
As much as he didn’t want to, Flyn stood up and stretched. He was sore from his neck to his toes, whether from hiking through the mountains or sleeping on the floor of the cave, he didn’t know. He supposed it was a combination of both, not that it much mattered. He stood in the mouth of the cave and watched the fog drift by while stretching and massaging his muscles.
Even though the rain had stopped, the air was still moist and cool. As he suspected, the clothes hanging on the wall were still wet, so he dug through his pack to find his spare clothes, thankfully dry. After dressing, he woke up Kel, who was not happy at all about it. Grumbling, he dressed in his spare clothes as well.
Dinner was light, a wheat cake each and squirrel meat. They sat on a large rock near the mouth of the cave, using their rolled-up bedrolls as cushions. Though they both liked wild game cooked over an open fire, cold squirrel was getting a little old.
“When we get home,” Kel said, picking at his meal, “I’m never eating squirrel again.”
“Well, it’s almost gone, then we can eat the ham.” They still had cured ham in their packs, but it would last longer than the squirrel meat, so they were saving it.
“And then we’ll have to eat our clothes. We better find some more food soon.”